Georgia GOP Senate candidate David Perdue defends business outsourcing: 'I'm proud of it'

Businessman David Perdue, Georgia's Republican nominee for Senate, is standing by his business record, in the midst of a new attack against him for having said in the past that he "spent most of my career" outsourcing jobs.

"Defend it? I'm proud of it," Perdue said in at a campaign stop on Monday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. "This is a part of American business, part of any business. Outsourcing is the procurement of products and services to help your business run. People do that all day."

Instead, Perdue pointed to government policies in America as the real culprits for job losses: "Tax policy, regulation, even compliance requirements. It puts us at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world. Even today, right now this administration has policies going on that are decimating industries today."

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Perdue's original comments, first uncovered last week by Politico, were made in a deposition that Perdue gave in a 2005 lawsuit involving the bankruptcy of Pillowtex, a North Carolina–based textile company where Perdue had become CEO in 2002. The company was already going through bankruptcy when Perdue first took charge, and it then pursued a strategy of shifting more production to overseas importers, in order to lower costs. The company ultimately failed anyway, resulting in the loss of 7,650 jobs in the United States and Canada.