Campaign ’12
Trouble Lurking Offshore for
By John McCormick
VERY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE HAS POLITICAL BAG- gage. Much of Jon Huntsman’s is made in China. It’s not just the two years he spent as President Barack Obama’s ambassador in Beijing, which some fellow Republicans are using to question whether he’s suffi ciently conservative. As he launches his campaign, Huntsman will likely fi nd himself having to answer a much tougher question from recession-weary voters: Why is the boom- ing family business that made him rich creat- ing thousands of jobs in Asia and the rest of the world instead of in the U.S.?
E
PATRIARCH Billionaire Jon Huntsman Sr. founded the
family’s chemical business in 1970.
The former Utah governor chose to declare his candidacy in June from a park in New Jersey, where the cameras could cap- ture the Statue of Liberty behind him. Not in the picture was the red and blue logo of Huntsman Corp., started by his father, billionaire Jon Huntsman Sr., a stalwart Republican who once worked in the Nixon White House. Jon Jr.’s powerful name and his success as a young executive in the family business eased his path to public offi ce. Now 51, Huntsman has a presidential pitch grounded in his years as a business-minded politician with global experience. “We must reignite the powerful job-creating engine of our economy — the industry, innovation, reli- ability, and trailblazing genius of Americans and their enterprises,” he said in his speech. Huntsman can make a convincing case that he knows something about putting people to work. One of the world’s largest chemical makers, the company he once
36 NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011
helped run employs 12,000 people and had revenues of $9.25 billion in 2010.
That would be a killer applause line, except by the company’s own fi gures just 2,174 of those employees are in the U.S. The rest work around the world. The company declined to provide country-by-country details, though it did say that Huntsman Corp. has 1,151 workers in China. “We now employ more people between China and India than we do in North America, which is really quite phenomenal when you consider that about 90 percent of our associates 10 years ago were in North America,” Chief Executive Offi cer Peter Huntsman, 48, a younger brother of the candidate, told an industry conference this month. Like other chemical companies, Huntsman Corp. sees an increasing share of its business coming from China. DuPont’s China and Hong Kong revenue increased
Jon Huntsman
The Republican presidential candidate’s successful family company has created lots of jobs. Unfortunately, most of them are overseas.
HUNSTMAN/STAN HONDA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES / ZUSHAN/AP IMAGES HUNTSMAN SR./KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES
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