Obama flays Romney for shipping jobs to India

Washington: Seizing a news report that a company founded by Mitt Romney shipped American jobs to countries like India and China, President Barack Obama went into attack mode against his likely Republican rival.

"Today it was reported in the Washington Post that the companies his firm owned were pioneers in the outsourcing of American jobs to places like China and India. Pioneers!" he said on Friday at a campaign rally in Tampa, Florida.

"We do not need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval Office. We need a president who will fight for American jobs and fight for American manufacturing. That's what my plan will do," Obama said in the town where the Republican Party is set to meet in August to pick up its presidential candidate.

"The challenge that we have faced for over a decade is that bigger profits haven't led to better jobs, bigger profits haven't led to higher incomes," said Obama, who has time and again made outsourcing of jobs from 'Boston to Bangalore and Beijing' a campaign issue.

Sharpening his election campaign's attack against Romney after the Post report, Obama said that his Republican rival, who touts his corporate experience on the campaign trail, has the wrong ideas about how to turn the economy around.

Obama's comments came hours after the Post reported that "Romney's financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialised in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India."

"During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centres and factories making computer components," the Post said citing filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Romney's campaign, however, called the Post report a "fundamentally flawed story," arguing it fails to point out the difference between "domestic outsourcing versus offshoring."

"Mitt Romney spent 25 years in the real world economy so he understands why jobs come and they go," CNN cited Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul as saying in a statement. "As president, he will implement policies that make it easier and more attractive for companies to create jobs here at home."