Surprise: Obama invests in companies which outsource jobs

If President Obama insists on continuing his attacks on Mitt Romney and his time spent working with Bain Capital, he should prepare himself for critiques of his own business practices.

In addition to spending taxpayer dollars on companies which ship jobs overseas, President Obama's personal investments also go to support such outsourcing companies. According to his most recent financial disclosures, the president and Mrs. Obama currently have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in companies famous for outsourcing. The Washington Examiner's Philip Klein notes:

In his most recent financial disclosure from 2011, Obama and his wife reported having between $200,000 and $450,000 in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which invests in the largest U.S. corporations. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as of Sept. 30, 2011, the fund’s biggest holding was 8,272,039 shares of Apple Inc., then valued at $3.2 billion. ...

The mutual fund that the Obamas have invested in also held 94,582,281 million shares of General Electric, valued at $1.4 billion, as of the SEC filing. The multinational conglomorate has a long history of outsourcing – according to a new book  cited by the New York Times, in 1989, “G.E. became the first U.S. company to outsource software work to India.” Obama also has close ties to GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, who was appointed as chairman of his outside panel of economic advisers last year.

In addition to Apple and GE, the Obamas’ fund listed 10,655,961 shares of International Business Machines, valued at $1.9 billion. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2009, “The technology giant has been steadily building its work force in India and other locations while reducing the number of workers based in the U.S. Foreign workers accounted for 71% of Big Blue’s nearly 400,000 employees at the start of the year, up from about 65% in 2006.”

Like I've said in the past, outsourcing isn't necessarily a bad thing.  But if President Obama insists on claiming it is, he should be willing to acknowledge his own.