KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Kansas City steel mill that shut down a decade ago is getting a new life as a political chess piece. A pro-Obama super-pac released a political ad this week attacking Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Mitt Romney founded, for shutting down the steel mill.
The pro-Obama super pac is spending four million dollars to run the ad in five states: Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The ad says Bain Capital purchased GST Steel and shut it down eight years later, in 2001.
Thursday, former workers at GST Steel picketed in front of the long closed plant. They echoed the ad’s claims that Bain Capital “sucked the company dry” and bankrupted it on purpose. They question Romney’s claims that he’s a job creator.
“Mitt Romney needs to explain why he eliminated our jobs, abandoned this community and basically robbed our pension plan,” says Jeff Jones, former GST Employee.
Senator Jim Talent (R-Missouri) is a Romney supporter, and called the ad “misleading, even by political standards.” He says Romney left Bain two years before the decision to shut down the mill.
“It’s an attempt to distract the country from the president’s failed economic policies,” says Talent, “we have 24 million people out of work or under employed and many have just given up looking.”
Romney himself addressed the ad at a campaign stop Thursday calling it “character assassination.” He said both campaigns should stay focused on the future and what can be done to get America working again.
