This is a crazy story, in a season of crazy stories.
To set the stage, someone inside the Kirk operation leaked a mid-May report on Kirk's fundraising efforts.
Pay close attention to the May 27th event: Bejing FR. “FR” is a standard campaign abbreviation for “fundraiser.”
* The Kirk campaign says that the candidate held a “Skype” fundraising meeting with American businesspeople in Bejing, China. I’m told that 12 people participated in the event.
FEC records show that Geoffrey Enck contributed $1,000 to Kirk that day. Enck is the CEO of ITI China Holdings. One of the things the company does is investment banking for Chinese manufacturing plants.
* And then the next day, Kirk voted “No” on a bill to close a tax loopholes that would prevent companies from “using current U.S. foreign tax credit rules to subsidize their foreign activities.”
Yeah, this isn't sexy in the way that the latest Sharron Angle or Rand Paul gaffe is. It isn't funny in the way that anything having to do with Christine O'Donnell is funny. This is serious and cuts to the core of what the Wall Street Republicans want from their government -- carte blanche to pillage the American economy as they eliminate all regulatory controls and ship jobs overseas. As Alexi Giannoulias likes to say, "When you hear Congressman Kirk talk about job creation, he’s talking about jobs he created in China." A clearer connection couldn't be found.
In a diary on the topic, our very own Georgia (on sabbatical from Daily Kos as she works as Giannoulias' new media director) writes:
This cannot be overstated enough: the very next day after his self-labeled "Beijing fundraiser," Mark Kirk voted against closing the tax loopholes that encourage corporations to ship American jobs overseas to countries like China.
There's a reason Kirk is funded by those who want to see jobs shipped overseas. There's a reason the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has dropped $2 million (and counting) into Illinois, trying to take out Alexi. They want to make it easier for U.S. corporations to outsource jobs to China and other lower-cost countries at the expense of American workers.
Alexi Giannoulias for Senate