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Mike Hall

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Last week,  the Obama administration outlined the actions it will take to address the United Steelworkers’ (USW) Section 301 trade case over China’s predatory and protectionist practices and policies in the clean energy technology sector.

The USW’s petition says China’s government has used hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies, performance requirements, preferential practices and other illegal trade activities to dominate the renewable energy market. USW President Leo Gerard says the White House action comes as an early note of holiday cheer for

those workers in the alternative and renewable energy sector who work hard, play by the rules and simply want a chance to compete. The administration has shown its commitment to enforcing the rules of trade by making it clear to the Chinese government that they will pursue U.S. interests.

The U.S. trade deficit with China in clean energy products more than doubled in the past two years alone and will cost more than 8,000 U.S. jobs in 2010. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analyzed trade data through August 2010 and found that the trade deficit with China soared at a time when the overall U.S. trade deficit and the U.S. clean energy deficit with other countries both fell sharply. (more…)

Instead of just handing out U.S. government cash borrowed from individuals in foreign industrial nations to the unemployed, maybe the U.S. government could build manufacturing plants to make various consumer products, in sequence, one product at a time, i.e. refrigerators, washing machines, clothing, TV’s, electronics, tires, auto parts, hand tools, power tools, machine tools, appliances, and etc., and impose import taxes to make those imported products as expensive as products made by US workers.

Maybe most all of the consumer goods that we import could eventually be made in the U.S.A. The U.S. government could impose extremely high import taxes that are high enough so that these U.S. made products are always less expensive to the consumer than the same imported product.

These plants should periodically and/or constantly be for sale based upon periodic open public competitive bidding, but at a minimum sale price at least equal to as much as the government investment, and with terms of cash only, without any creative financing. The business management should know about making the products, not creative accounting and/or creative financing.

Yes, the consumer will pay many times the price for the particular U.S. manufactured product than he would pay for an imported product made with foreign labor and foreign environmental manufacturing costs, but maybe this might avert a second bloody American revolution.

The U.S.A. must act now while we can still buy foreign made materials and foreign made equipment for the re-industrialization before title to the remaining privately-owned U.S. assets are exchanged for all of the U.S. dollars and U.S. treasury bonds owned by foreigners.

Gerald R. Spencer, P.E., President
Spencer Engineers, Inc.
Houston, Texas

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To submit a blog to Free Speech Zone, e-mail it to bstack@usw.org. Keep it to 250 words or fewer. You MUST include your full name, hometown, and state. You may attach a photograph of yourself. Please include a phone number. This WILL NOT be published. Posting any given blog is within the discretion of the USW.  No blog using foul language (this is a family site), false information (we don’t want to get sued), or unnecessary personal attacks (again, we don’t want to get sued) will be used. Wait a reasonable period of time, then blog again! This is a Free Speech Zone.

Michael Winship

By Michael Winship
Senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS

In the snows of yesteryear, far away from Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or START treaties or the War on Christmas, I see the movie house of my youth, the Playhouse Theater on Chapin Street, the only one in my small hometown — except for a nearby drive-in that closed during the winter.

In the colder months, we’d get a short ride downtown to the Playhouse or crunch along the shoveled sidewalks, stepping over or through the deeper drifts, watching out for patches of ice. Sometimes during semester breaks in high school, I’d go to a double feature and, after it was over, walk down an icy silent Main Street late in the night to where my father was closing his store and preparing to drive home.

I’ve written of the Playhouse before; its history of vaudeville and minstrel shows, the smell of antique popcorn, the black velvet darkness inside while the movies ran, the theater illuminated only by the projector’s beam and the soft neon light of a clock hanging to the right of the screen, courtesy of a local jeweler.

Because it was the only show in town, we saw some first-run films but mostly caught up with the big movies after they had played in the cities – if you wanted to be the first on your block, you had to travel to Rochester to see The Longest Day or Mary Poppins; it would be months before they came around to our theater.

But holding the town’s movie monopoly had its bizarre advantages: unusual double features like The Three Stooges in Orbit - and Gigi. And because this was a small town, where everyone knew everyone else’s business and the official motto could have been In loco parentis, if the mob of kids at a Saturday matinee got too unruly the manager would simply stop the movie, walk out on stage and threaten to call our mothers and fathers. I remember this failing only once: at a screening of a Disney movie called Tonka, the story of a wild horse tamed by a young Sioux brave named White Bull. Sal Mineo was hopelessly miscast as White Bull – who could blame us for going on the warpath?

One of the very first films I saw at the Playhouse was White Christmas. I have little memory of that initial viewing – there was a jeep in it, right? – but as the years go by I’ve grown to love its music and cozy holiday sentiment, not to mention the impossible legs of actress-dancer Vera-Ellen. (more…)

Zach Carter

By Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

Several key House Democrats are circulating a letter urging support for new regulations that would crack down on what critics say are rampant foreclosure abuses in the nation’s banking system.

The letter, authored by Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) encourages federal banking regulators to rein in practices at bank divisions called “mortgage servicers.” Servicers are responsible for collecting and processing payments, charging late fees, negotiating with troubled borrowers and implementing the foreclosure process. Servicers have been criticized for committing widespread fraud in recent months, charging improper fees and incorrectly evicting borrowers.

The three House Democrats have already signed the letter, including House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.).

The letter from lawmakers comes one day after more than fifty economists, consumer advocates and banking experts urged regulators to take action on mortgage servicers. Federal Regulators are currently divided over whether or not to use new powers to regulate mortgage securities granted by this year’s Wall Street reform bill to crack down on servicing abuses. The FDIC wants to take the opportunity to rein in servicers, but the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are resisting the new rules, although spokespeople for both agency say they support stronger standards for mortgage servicing. (more…)

Michael Brune

By Michael Brune
Author and Executive Director of the Sierra Club

San Francisco — Santa’s not leaving lumps of coal in our environmental stockings this year. In fact, there are several delicious sugar plums. First, the EPA is moving forward to clean up the air and protect the climate. The Agency settled a lawsuit (brought against the Bush administration by the Sierra Club and other groups) by agreeing to issue standards to limit carbon pollution from refineries and power plants, the two largest sources. According to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, the standards “will help American companies attract private investment to the clean-energy upgrades that make our companies more competitive and create good jobs here at home.”

The Bureau of Land Management has announced that it will overturn the Bush administration’s blanket “No More Wilderness” policy and return to considering the wilderness qualities of the lands under its stewardship. That’s especially good news for Roadless Areas that are at risk of oil and gas development.

Then there are several new studies showing that, for the first time, the rate of deforestation has dropped dramatically in the tropics. According to statistics compiled by governments, “tropical deforestation in the first decade of the 2000s was down 18% from the level of the 1990s, dropping from 11.33 million hectares per year in the 1990s to 9.34 million hectares per year in the 2000s. Furthermore, the rate dropped from the first 5 years of the decade to the second five years, principally due to a dramatic decline in Brazilian Amazon deforestation.” And other studies back up the government reporting. (more…)

The U.S. government created the “free trade” treaties and destroyed any and all patriotism in business that ever existed in the U.S.A.!

The U.S. government needs to create real jobs!

I blame our Democrat and Republican party members of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. government that created various “free trade” treaties and other laws during the past 30 years that allowed, caused or economically required our U.S. businesses to move their U.S. factories and U.S. jobs overseas and then lay off all of their U.S. employees and take advantage of lower labor and less expensive environmental manufacturing costs available in foreign countries or face bankruptcy.

I also blame President Clinton when he signed NAFTA into law, and that was the first of many treaties created by many subsequent “free trade” legislation actions! Why did he sign it into law? He did not have to.

I can only remember Ross Perot objecting to NAFTA with any force and loudness! He said that NAFTA would, “Suck the remaining jobs from the USA to Mexico.”  He was right, but the Republicans and the Democrats were both promoting NAFTA.

I want to read President Obama’s new South Korea Free Trade Agreement. Does it further cause the relocation of more existing U.S. jobs to South Korea?”

How about also creating new laws to prohibit the import of services (the same as exporting the jobs) such as accounting, telemarketing, customer assistance service, computer aided drafting, engineering, legal research, etc. that are now easily provided by workers overseas through the internet at a small fraction of the costs paid to U.S. citizens to perform those services?

Without extremely high (several hundred percent) USA import tariffs, U.S. workers and businesses must compete with international foreign workers at very low foreign wage scales and very low foreign environmental manufacturing process costs.

Gerald R. Spencer, P.E., President
Spencer Engineers, Inc.
Houston, Texas

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To submit a blog to Free Speech Zone, e-mail it to bstack@usw.org. Keep it to 250 words or fewer. You MUST include your full name, hometown, and state. You may attach a photograph of yourself. Please include a phone number. This WILL NOT be published. Posting any given blog is within the discretion of the USW.  No blog using foul language (this is a family site), false information (we don’t want to get sued), or unnecessary personal attacks (again, we don’t want to get sued) will be used. Wait a reasonable period of time, then blog again! This is a Free Speech Zone.

Use This Graphic on Your Site

Honeywell officials admitted yesterday that toxic hydrofluoric acid leaked for approximately two hours Tuesday from its Metropolis uranium conversion facility, where Honeywell locked out  228 members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 7-669 on June 28.

Since the lock out began six months ago, members of USW Local 7-669 have repeatedly warned that Honeywell is endangering the community by replacing trained and experienced steelworkers with inexpert and green workers to run the nation’s only site for refining uranium for eventual use in nuclear power plants.

Here’s what Honeywell admitted:

“At around 3 p.m. this afternoon, the Metropolis plant experienced a leak of hydrofluoric acid at its tank farm. The plant sounded its emergency siren and activated its emergency response procedures as a precaution. The release was immediately contained by the plant’s water mitigation system and a team immediately began working to stop the leak. The leak was stopped before 5 p.m. local time.”

Here’s what experienced workers who are members of Local 7669 reported about the event :

“At approximately 3 p.m., picketers outside the Honeywell Metropolis uranium conversion facility noticed a large plume from the Hydrofluoric Acid (HF) Storage area.  The plant’s mitigation towers, which spray water to knock down any escaping gas, were turned on and sirens were heard.  The siren was turned on, then immediately off, and then later on again. The towers sprayed for approximately an hour and a half.

“Honeywell has been running the plant with replacement workers since locking out the union workforce on June 28, 2010.  .  .United Steelworkers Local 7-669 President, Darrell Lillie, said “We have been warning everyone for months that there is the possibility of a fatality and major breach of public safety at this plant,” and added, “The workers in the plant do not have the experience it takes to safely run this facility.”

“The plant has been recently cited for violations by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and is under and EPA investigation concerning improper storage of Potassium Hydroxide (KOH).  Honeywell has played down the seriousness of the events that have taken place during the six-month-long lockout.

“The community should be outraged at the way the facility is being operated and their safety at risk, and demand that someone take action before this becomes the present day Katrina,” Lillie said.

“Honeywell put out a statement that this was a “small release” of HF, however, the experienced workers of the plant, who could do nothing but watch from the picket line, know that a “small” release doesn’t require the mitigation towers to run for over an hour.

“Gary Lewis, a 14 year veteran of the plant was on the picket line when the event happened and said, “I heard the sirens and saw a large cloud of HF over the tank farm,” and added, “HF is nothing to play with, it can kill you.”

“The storage tank that failed was full and holds approximately 150,000 pounds of HF.  The site typically has close to 500,000 pounds on site.  Studies show that if even 10% of the HF onsite is released, it could travel up to a 25 mile radius and affect as many as 175,000 people.

“Darrell Lillie added, “If they continue to have ‘fender benders’ like they had today, it is a matter of when not if there is a ‘head on collision.’”

Concerned about the community’s safety, the locked out steelworkers have offered to train local fire departments on how to tackle fires at the Metropolis plant.

Members of the local will conduct a training program Jan. 24 at their health and safety department. They say the training will highlight chemical-specific hazards and measures to deal with a large scale fire at the plant.

Lillie issued a statement saying:

“Honeywell has not provided the training necessary to our local firefighters to be prepared to respond to such a fire.  It would not have been responsible of us to recognize this gap and do nothing.”

Zach Carter

Ryan Grim

By Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

And

By Ryan Grim
Senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — Despite mounting evidence of big banks committing serious fraud in the foreclosure process, the U.S. Senate eliminated $35 million in legal aid to homeowners trying to keep their homes.

The fund was wiped out in order to meet government spending caps advocated by Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), but will likely end up costing taxpayers much more in the long run, as wrongful foreclosures burn through the balance sheets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The slashing of the foreclosure-assistance fund is just one casualty of Washington’s increasing bipartisan push to cut spending across the board.

The $35 million fund was created by the Wall Street reform bill signed into law by President Barack Obama in July, but the Senate never took the additional necessary step of appropriating the money. Even if it had been appropriated, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) last week gave up on passing a budget for next year in the face of Republican opposition to earmarks.

Although the dollar amount is tiny in comparison with other federal housing programs, legal aid funding is a critical to the foreclosure relief effort. Without hiring a good lawyer, it is extremely difficult for borrowers to successfully defend their homes against banks — even when banks are committing clear-cut violations.

Recent reports suggest severe, nationwide problems with the mortgage system. A survey of 96 attorneys found that banks started foreclosure proceedings on 2,500 borrowers who were negotiating a loan modification. The survey was conducted by the National Association of Consumer Advocates and the National Consumer Law Center. (more…)

Dave Johnson

By Dave Johnson
Fellow with Campaign for America’s Future

The country’s huge debt was caused by tax cuts for the rich and increases in military spending. But debt-cutting recommendations from the D.C. Elite never suggest restoring taxes on the rich and cutting military spending. Go figure. Instead they suggest cutting the things government does for We, the People. The D.C. Elite is not We, the People. Let’s stop this in its tracks.

Just a week after the Senate voted to give a big tax cut to the rich, increasing the deficit by more than $800 billion, a few senators have gotten together to push the deficit-cutting recommendations of … two guys.

According to The Washington Post, Senators Mark Warner and Saxby Chambliss are leading a group of senators gearing up to push deficit-cutting recommendations made by Senator “Milk cow with 300 million tits” Alan Simpson and Senator “On the Board of Morgan Stanley” Erskine Bowles. They will push this as the recommendations of the full deficit commission, even though the deficit commission specifically did not recommend this. This is just a plan that two guys came up with. Or, as they described themselves, “just two clowns from Wyoming and North Carolina.”

From Reuters, Warner, misrepresenting the source of the deficit plan,

“Taking the commission’s report … we’ll be introducing that as legislation, a legislative vehicle, next year, recognizing in the process that a lot of that would be subject to change,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner said.

Wrong! Not the deficit commission, just two guys. (more…)

By Robert Kuttner
Co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect

On signing the tax-cut deal December 17, President Obama jubilantly declared “We are here with some good news for the American people this holiday season. This is progress and that’s what they sent us here to achieve.” So how have Republicans repaid Obama’s willingness to meet them three-quarters of the way?

Bipartisanship evidently lasted about as long as the signing ceremony.

First Republicans refused to approve the routine stop-gap bill to keep the government funded at current levels pending the budget resolution and next round of appropriations. They killed the DREAM Act, for decent treatment of well-behaved children of undocumented immigrants. Repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell squeaked through the senate with the votes of a few socially moderate Republicans defying their leadership.

The Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in a massive denial of reality, issued their own separate report, denying that the financial collapse had anything to do with deregulation or speculation. Coming along next is a set of Republican demands in the budget resolution for much deeper cutting of public outlay.

So it’s clear that “bipartisanship,” even on heavily Republican terms, produces no follow-through and no reciprocity. This is bipartisanship in the spirit of Neville Chamberlain. You give, and immediately they are after you for more.

It is astonishing how the Beltway echo-chamber, most egregiously the editorial page and news columns of the Washington Post (hard to tell the difference), thinks this deal is good for the Republic. The Post has become a cheerleader for policies that fail to cure the economy and show off Obama as a weakling waiting to be rolled again.

The tax deal, re-branded as a stimulus program, is paltry and ineffective as economic tonic. What hardly anyone seems to have grasped is that the deal basically continues the status quo with almost no stimulus.

If the tax rates on the books in 2010 did not produce a recovery, why should we expect that the very same rates will change the economy in 2011?

The deal not only continues 2010 income tax rates into 2011 and 2012. It actually increases estate taxes slightly, since estate taxes lapsed entirely for one year in 2010.

It also basically continues current unemployment benefits. Even the temporary 2-point tax break on Social Security taxes is a substitute for a more progressive and effective Obama tax break from the original stimulus of February 2009 that the Republicans refused to extend — the Making Work Pay tax credit.

About the only new stimulus in the bill is a business tax break that increases the value of tax write-offs for new investment, valued at about $55 billion.

Does anyone seriously believe that a $55 billion net tax cut in a $15 trillion economy will have more than trivial effect?

Using Congressional Budget Office estimates of GDP growth, the deal might produce as many as two million jobs if businesses respond by investing more and consumers feel more confident about increasing their spending. Lovely, but the economy is currently short at least fifteen million jobs.

The small stimulus effect will soon be undermined by the spending cuts that are already the Republicans’ next demand. Even the stopgap spending measure to continue spending next year at this year’s levels, which Republicans just blocked, is already a cut when you factor in inflation. Deeper spending cuts, about to be imposed by incoming Republican House leaders, will overwhelm any stimulus effect of the tax deal.

Obama, according to well-placed sources, plans to introduce a “tax-simplification” scheme in the State of the Union address — get rid of tax preferences and lower tax rates, as proposed by the Bowles-Simpson commission, with no net stimulative effect. This is a classic case of trying to change the subject. This might or might not be sensible policy depending on the specifics. But what ails the economy has little to do with the particulars of the tax code.

I don’t understand how Obama’s political advisers think this formula can produce his re-election. The tax deal was popular at a superficial level. Voters, when asked about the deal in a vacuum, apart from other economic issues, approve of bipartisan cooperation and they like tax relief when nothing else is on offer. (In that context, it’s noteworthy that the one part of the tax deal that respondents to the ABC-Washington Post poll did not like was the temporary cut in payroll taxes. The vast majority of Americans don’t want to weaken Social Security, even when the bait is tax relief.)

But such polls tell us nothing about the President’s prospects for 2012. The 2010 off-year election was the second largest swing away from the incumbent party in the past 130 years (1930 produced a slightly worse swing against the Republicans), according to the political scientist Walter Dean Burnham. It was the worst mid-year swing against the Democrats ever.

Ground Zero of this disastrous defeat was the Midwest. This is hardly surprising, because the working middle class in the industrial heartland, which provisionally voted for Obama in 2008, is facing devastation in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The 2010 swing there was huge. Without carrying the heartland of the Midwest, Obama does not stand a prayer of re-election, even if the broad public says it approves of his bipartisanship.

But bipartisanship to what end? There is simply no way that the combination of upwardly tilted and puny tax breaks, spending cuts, and a re-jiggering of tax rates and loopholes is going to make a serious dent in either unemployment rates or underwater housing values in the Midwest.

Joblessness and losses of household assets in these states will continue at depression levels, even if the national unemployment comes down modestly.

Obama and his advisers are left with the vain hope that Republicans will nominate someone so lunatic that Obama will somehow squeak through. But be careful what you wish for. I vividly remember 1980, when some Democrats cheered the nomination of Ronald Reagan because he was too rightwing to get elected.

The watershed year 2008 was a political moment when an incoming Democratic president had all the raw material for a dramatic break with the old order — when Republicans, Wall Street, and laissez-faire ideology were primed to take a richly deserved fall for the economic collapse.

Obama chose not to pursue that course. Instead, he identified himself with reviving Wall Street and pursued a feckless bipartisanship and a feeble recovery program.

Last spring, Obama and his aides were on the road assuring everyone that the administration’s economic program would produce a “Recovery Summer,” which never came. Now, Obama is repeating the mistake. Adviser Larry Summers’ valedictory message is that the even weaker tonic of the tax deal will somehow restore economic jobs and growth. Crying recovery, when recovery doesn’t come, is even riskier than crying wolf.

Six months from now, when the economy is still in the doldrums, either Obama or some other Democrat had better stand up for a real economic recovery program — or no Republican will be too grizzly to be elected president in 2012.

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Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His best-selling book is Obama’s Challenge. His new book is “A Presidency in Peril.“

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This piece is re-published from The Huffington Post.