By Jim English
International Secretary-Treasurer

Marketing Myths vs. Hard Realities
The political hucksters who market presidential candidates are shameless about the myths they create.
Ronald Reagan was pitched as a former union president who understood working Americans. Instead, he fired striking air traffic controllers and ignited a quarter century of corporate union busting.
George Bush, Sr. was sold as “kindler” and “gentler,” but kept up the attack on union workers.
His son was marketed as a regular guy. Instead he’s regularly stuck it to labor unions while doing Wall Street’s bidding.
Now John McCain is being promoted as a super straight shooter with a record of distinguished service – everything that George Bush hasn’t been.
There’s no question that John McCain suffered as a prisoner of war. But there are plenty questions about just how straight he’s being about his record as a candidate for president.

Maverick no more

Somewhere along the way in his pursuit of the Republican nomination, the wheels came off what McCain likes to call his “Straight Talk Express” as he tried to convince voters that he’s offering something more than four more years of Bush’s failed
policies.
As his voting record reveals, McCain’s claim to be a maverick was never very credible. At best, in the early years of the Bush administration, he broke ranks with Bush’s policies only 11 percent of the time. According to a Congressional Quarterly Voting Study, that meager show of independence is long gone. Ever since McCain began seeking the Republican nomination his claim of being a maverick has taken a beating as he voted in lock step with Bush a whopping 95 percent of the time.
Apparently that’s what McCain has decided is necessary for him to win the support of Bush’s well-healed backers. The question is, are four more years of Bush’s policies something that working Americans can afford?
The economy is in shambles. Bush, who inherited budget surpluses, has turned them into the largest deficits in the country’s history. The dollar is tanking, and gas prices are climbing out of sight. The prices of working people’s homes, meanwhile, are being crushed by the sub-prime mortgage crisis created by financial speculators, the very same people who Bush considers his “base,” and refuses to regulate.

McCain’s real MO

Good-paying manufacturing jobs, which built this country’s middle class, are disappearing, thanks to lousy trade deals, every one of which McCain has supported as fervently as Bush and his Wall Street backers, along with tax breaks for multinationals that export American jobs by shipping manufacturing to countries where workers are exploited with impunity.
So, while John McCain’s handlers market him as a straight talking maverick, he’s been perpetuating Bush’s anti-worker agenda. In fact, when closely examined, John McCain’s record looks like a carbon copy of Bush’s.
Although he’s now showing up at Michigan auto plants to be photographed alongside auto workers, he’s consistently voted against working people’s interests.
Worst of all, McCain voted for a bill that would allow employers to hire scabs during strikes, and he opposed collective bargaining rights for police, fire fighters and airport screeners. He voted against the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to win union representation without being intimidated or fired by employers. Not surprising, as McCain refers to union leaders as “labor bosses” on his website, and tars them as special interests in his speeches.
As for the unions that bargain to protect teachers’ pensions and health care benefits, McCain says, “It’s time to break the grip of the education monopoly that serves the union bosses at the expense of our children.”

Free trade cheerleader

 
McCain has apparently never seen a free trade agreement he doesn’t love, and his campaign for president promises more of them. He says, “If I were president, I would negotiate a free trade agreement with almost any country.”
His solution for the millions of workers here who have lost their jobs as a result is retraining at community colleges, ignoring the pain and upheaval families face when a breadwinner loses a job and health insurance. Moreover, McCain’s record reveals a blind faith, much like Bush’s, in market forces, no matter how much damage working people are suffering after the loss of 3.5 million jobs.
In addition, McCain has expressed strong support for new free trade agreements with Colombia, where more trade unionists are tortured and murdered each year than in all other countries combined, and South Korea.
The South Korean agreement is likely to exacerbate and accelerate the loss of good jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector, especially in cars, trucks, apparel and electronics. We already have an almost $14 billion trade deficit with South Korea, nearly $12 million of which is in autos and auto parts.
McCain’s carefully honed decades-old image as a reformer has been tarnished by his campaign’s ties to Washington lobbyists. Among those who have resigned or been fired from his campaign is former Texas Rep. Thomas G. Loeffler, a key McCain fundraiser who lobbied for a European aircraft manufacturer to win a lucrative Air Force contract for new refueling tankers. The deal endangers thousands of U.S. jobs.
The U.S. Department of Defense skipped over Boeing and its U.S. employees in awarding the contract to a consortium dominated by the European Aeronautics Defence and Space Co. (EADS), the parent of Airbus. McCain had prodded the Pentagon to develop procedures that included Airbus in the bidding despite the Buy American provisions of defense contracts.

Taxing health care benefits

McCain’s “solution” to the health care crisis that is killing us in bargaining and leaving 47 million other Americans uninsured is to make everyone responsible for their own health coverage – then tax them for the cost of it. Instead of employers providing health insurance, McCain is championing a consumer-driven approach to health insurance coverage that employers have been trying to shove down our throats for years in bargaining. Under his “plan,” companies will give what they now pay for health care to the worker. Then the workers will supposedly find and buy their own insurance.
McCain’s approach will:

• cut the union out of bargaining;
• undermine what little leverage we have to bargain for better pricing through group coverage, and:
• could prevent those with pre-existing conditions from getting coverage.

Adding insult to the injury of destroying our leverage in bargaining, we’ll have to pay taxes on the additional “income.” In a burst of circular logic, McCain says he will give tax credits to offset the additional income tax.
It’s a scheme designed to win big campaign contributions from powerful corporate interests. And it’s working – for them. The only thing it won’t do is fix the broken health care system.

Flip flopping on tax cuts

When Bush first pushed the massive tax cuts that have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthy, creating created huge budget deficits, McCain opposed them. But in 2006, right before he launched his campaign for the nomination and sought donations from the wealth beneficiaries of Bush’s tax giveaway, McCain reversed course and voted to keep taxes “stable” on the rich, his political double talk for flip flopping, Meanwhile McCain repeatedly opposed increasing the minimum wage – until it was attached to a bill that gave tax breaks to businesses.
If anything, McCain’s opposition to benefits for working Americans is one of the more consistent aspects of his record. He voted against protections for workers’ overtime pay. And he abstained from voting to protect steelworker jobs from illegal dumping in 1999, and against temporarily providing health insurance for employees and retirees of bankrupt steel companies.

Straight talk goes AWOL

John McCain’s talk about foreign policy hasn’t been any straighter than Bush’s.
He recently condemned critics of Bush’s failed policies on Iraq because they had called for specific timetables to withdraw our troops. After being caught on a YouTube video saying that America would be in Iraq for the next 100 years, he doubled back on his own words by promising to get virtually all troops out by 2013 – exactly what he’d condemned critics for doing. Not to mention the danger of committing America to five more years of war.
All in all, it adds up to a candidacy that’s long on marketing myths and short on credible solutions for working Americans.