The Outsource Finger-Point

Andrew Breitbart, political bomb-thrower extraordinaire, has gone to his reward, but his minions march on, to wit:

The left wants to point fingers at Romney as an outsourcing pioneer when, in fact, their own side is just as guilty of the practice. Let's look at DreamWorks Animation CEO and Obama bundler Jeffrey Katzenberg. When Katzenberg had a $125 million flop, he changed direction:

After DreamWorks Animation suffered a $125 million loss on the tradionally-animated Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, the studio switched to all computer-generated animation. Since then, DreamWorks' animated films have consistently been successful.

That change included outsourcing all of the animation jobs overseas to India. I guess they didn't have enough talent in the USA to haul halfway around the world to Bangalore, India:

Paprikaas, which formed a partnership with DreamWorks Animation, of Glendale, Calif., last year, is in the animated business, performing tasks like character modeling, set design, animation, and color correction on TV shows, video games, and movies for client studios worldwide. ...

A few small points: Mr. Katzenberg isn't running for the office of President of the United States and won't be making policy.

Mr. Katzenberg runs two large studios in California, one of them under contract to TAG. More than three thousand artists, technicians and production support staff draw paychecks in Redwood City and Glendale, California creating animated features.

That sound like "all of the animation jobs" to you? (Guess it does to the math-impaired reporters at Breitbart.com.)

And since Breitbart asks, we would be delighted if every last job at DreamWorks Animation were done under a Guild contract in sunny Glendale. But outsourcing of animation has gone on in Hollywood since the 1960s, when Jay Ward shipped Rocky and Bullwinkle to a studio in Mexico City.

Just a wild hunch, but the outsourcing probably isn't going to stop anytime soon.

We are realists and classical cynics, and long ago gave up on perfection from our captains of industry and political leaders. But since Jeffrey K. supports the political party and President pushing to eliminate tax breaks for companies that outsource to foreign lands, and Breitbart.com doesn't, we'll take Mr. Katzenberg.