Where Are The Jobs?

If you've been busy for the last two years and unable to follow the ebb and flow of the political discussion, you may not be aware that the Republican Party's strategy for regaining power has been to sabotage the American economy. The video above sums it up nicely. And, as you probably know, due to the end of the census, the economy shed 95,000 jobs in September. The unemployment rate, 9.6%, remained the same because the private sector, responding to Obama's stimulus efforts, created 64,000 new jobs.

Boehner, predictably, was crowing about GOP success is holding back growth and predicting voters would reward his party at the ballot box in November. In his first semi-public event in his own congressional district in as long as anyone can remember, Boehner flew into Cincinnati to use what he termed a “small family business" as a prop for his speech. Jackie Kucinich at Roll Call reported that United Group Services could be best described with other words than "small family business."

[T]he executives of the company are also major political donors, both personally and through their leadership of a trade association political action committee that gives hundreds of thousands of dollars almost exclusively to Republican candidates.

A Boehner aide said it is a campaign speech, and the company that is hosting the Minority Leader, United Group Services, is a small industrial firm that could be harmed if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.

“We asked UGS to host it because a major theme in the speech is that family-owned and family-run small businesses like them are the engine of job growth in America, and the Obama tax hike will hit hundreds of thousands of them, including potentially UGS,” the GOP source said.

But the business’s top executives are not political neophytes.

Mark Mosley, Daniel Freese and Kevin Sell, three top executives at the Cincinnati-based firm, have contributed thousands to Boehner as well as other Republican candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Sell, a vice president at United Group Services, has also served in several local and national leadership positions at the Associated Builders and Contractors’ political action committee, according to a “member spotlight” profiled on ABC’s website.

ABC’s PAC gave more than $1.1 million to Republican House candidates in the 2008 election cycle. In 2010, the PAC has donated $572,500 to Republicans. Rep. Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK) was the sole Democrat supported by the PAC in both cycles.

Sell, described in ABC’s profile as “a semi-professional political junkie,” also ran an unsuccessful bid for judge-executive in Campbell County, Ky., earlier this year. According to the biography on his campaign website, Sell “recently served as Trustee and Northern Kentucky PAC Coordinator for the Ohio Valley Chapter, and served for seven years as Trustee/Vice-Chairman of ABC National PAC.”

ThinkProgress is making a mighty effort to track the foreign money flooding into Republican and Blue Dog coffers from self-interested rivals like China and Russia. I find it especially interesting that Boehner and many of the 78 allies who stuck with him against America when the House voted to stop China's currency manipulations, are the very ones getting so much of the illegal foreign campaign contributions. So who sold out America for a handful of yuan and rubles? On the House side, first and foremost was Boehner, of course, but others of the worst traitors to this country's working families included Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), Paul Broun (R-GA), John Campbell (R-CA), David Dreier (R-CA), Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Steve King (R-IA), Leonard Lance (R-NJ), Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Mike Pence (R-IN), Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH), Pete Sessions (R-TX) and Adrian Smith (R-NE), the last of whom may also be subject to foreign blackmail.