AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued the following statement concerning Hostess Brands' announcement that it will liquidate its holdings and cease operations, costing 18,000 workers their jobs.

What’s happening with Hostess Brands is a microcosm of what’s wrong with America, as Bain-style Wall Street vultures make themselves rich by making America poor. Crony capitalism and consistently poor management drove Hostess into the ground, but its workers are paying the price. These workers, who consistently make great products Americans love and have offered multiple concessions, want their company to succeed. They have bravely taken a stand against the corporate race-to-the-bottom. And now they and their communities are suffering the tragedy of a needless layoff. This is wrong. It has to stop. It’s wrecking America.

The workers at Sensata Technologies, who’ve established the tent city “Bainport” across the street from the Bain Capital majority-owned plant that is shutting down and shipping the 170 U.S. jobs to China, filed unfair labor practice charges Wednesday against Sensata.

The workers charge that the company has threatened to shut down the plant before its end-of-the-year scheduled closure if the workers continue to organize to stop the outsourcing of their jobs to China.

Mitt Romney won’t come to “Bainport” and meet with the workers whose jobs are being shipped overseas by Sensata Technologies. Sensata is owned by outsourcing pioneer Bain Capital, where Romney was a founder and former CEO.

But Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) visited the tent city set up across the street from the Freeport, Ill., Sensata plant that will shut down as soon as the rest of the equipment follows the 170 middle-class jobs on the way to China—where Sensata workers earn about 99 cents an hour.

What's at stake for working families in the November elections? Try health care, retirement security and jobs, to name a few. Just ask Travis Turner's mom, who is so grateful for the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act made it possible for her son Travis, who has a rare form of liver cancer, to get back on his father's health insurance after he was kicked off for exceeding a lifetime limit. Mitt Romney plans to overturn the health care law, which helped the Turner family and millions of others receive health care. 

Watch the video, "AFL-CIO: What's at Stake in the November 2012 Elections?" and click here to share on Facebook. 

This new video from the United Steelworkers (USW) exposes how Mitt Romney and Bain Capital are profiting by selling out America's workers and shipping U.S. jobs to China.

In 2010, the Bain Capital-controlled Sensata Technologies bought Honeywell’s automotive onboard sensor business, including a Freeport, Ill., plant, where 170 workers were making a middle-class living. Says Tom Gaulrapp:

They came in and introduced the transition team, and the next bullet in the meeting was, “By the way, by the end of 2012 all the jobs in this plant will be moved to China.” 

Looking for little reading over the long Labor Day weekend? Then check out online or pick up the latest copy of Rolling Stone with Matt Taibbi’s cover story on Mitt Romney’s days at Bain Capital. Taibbi writes:

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution….He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR—and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.

Mitt Romney likes to cite his experience as a businessman as qualifying him to be president.

A new website takes a close look at Romney’s participation in the corporate world—his many years as CEO of the hedge fund Bain Capital. The closer you look, the uglier it gets.

Although Mitt Romney continues to try and distance himself from his record of offshoring U.S. jobs overseas during his tenure at Bain Capital, a new report by the Financial Times’ Robin Harding shows there were even more anti-worker tactics occurring under Romney’s watch at the company. Now we might understand more about why he boasted earlier this year that he’s “taken on union bosses before.”

According to U.S. District Court and federal documents, Key Airlines, controlled by Bain Capital at the time, ran an unlawful campaign to stop the organization of a union in the 1980s. Mitt Romney was a director of the airline, according to regulatory filings, and a shareholder in the company. The Financial Times put together this report with documents from the National Mediation Board in 1986 and a 1992 judgment in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada.

The business model on which Mitt Romney built his private-equity, outsourcing career and fortune at  Bain Capital “has made our economy weaker and our society more unequal; it has hollowed out our tax base, and it has wreaked havoc on our communities,” said the AFL-CIO Executive Council in a statement from its August meeting this week in Washington, D.C.

Last week we launched our Meet Mr. 1% website with shareable infographics on Mitt Romney’s record as a state governor, his overseas bank accounts and his economic attack plan that would harm working families. The graphics also highlight, with Romney at its helm, that Bain killed and outsourced jobs and pushed companies into bankruptcy.

Here are some of the “greatest hits” remarks from our commenters. John DeRosier writes: