Former U.S. Senator from North Carolina and perennial Presidential Candidate John Edwards needs to come clean to the folks in Iowa. It's just the right thing to do.
A 527 group, callling itself Working for Working Americans (www.w4wa.org) is promoting a video using the closure of the Maytag plant in Iowa and costing 1800 jobs as an example of outsourcing and the ill effects of NAFTA. More to the point, the ad then tells of how John Edwards would cure these ills.
Is that what happened? Is NAFTA, as bad as it is, to blame in this instance? Or is it a case of corporate pillage and rape by greedy, profit driven investors backed by hedge funds? Let's look at the facts:
Edwards took a job in October 2005 with the hedge fund management firm, Fortress Investment Group, that paid him $479,500 for 14 months of part-time work. Additionally, Edwards invested some $16 million in Fortress funds.
Fortress owned shares in Whirlpool when the Iowa Maytag factory was closed. On 31 March 2006, while Edwards was a consultant for Fortress Investment Group, the hedge fund owned 9,867 shares of Whirlpool stock. On that same day in 2006, Whirlpool finalized its deal to acquire Maytag. Less than two months later, Whirlpool announced that it would close the factory in Newton, laying off the workers there.
SEC filings from 31 March 2007 show that Fortress had purchased more than 74,000 additional Whirlpool shares after the deal to buy Maytag was completed – a deal which led to the loss of 1,800 Iowa jobs. Fortress was invested in Whirlpool while it was closing factories in America.
In the words of Robert Becker, Iowa Director for Richardson for President:
"This ad ignores the role played by a certain hedge fund in the closing of the Maytag facilities in Newton, IA, which cost 1,800 Iowans their jobs. John Edwards was paid nearly half a million dollars by the same hedge fund at the time the Maytag plant was shuttered, and he had $16 million of his own fortune invested there. Can John Edwards be a champion for jobs in Newton, Iowa when he works for and invests in a hedge fund that helped eliminate those same jobs? If anything, Edwards probably owes those families an explanation."
That sounds more like a greed problem than a trade agreement issue. Who benefitted? Give the money back to those working families, John.