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Earlier this week, Republican Presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney delivered a speech framing the 2012 presidential election as a choice between an “entitlement society” and an “opportunity society.”

It really takes chutzpa for a guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth to rail against an “entitlement society.” Here is a guy who got his start in life the old-fashioned way — he inherited it.

Now I realize that you don’t get to choose your parents. He had no role in deciding that he would be born into the family of an auto executive and Michigan Governor — but at least he should have the decency not to attack “entitlements.”

This is not a guy who pulled himself up by his boot-straps. His name, his family connections and — not incidentally — his money gave him a real leg up when he decided to go into the investment banking business. And let’s not forget that when he did go into business for himself, he didn’t make money building things or inventing things — or designing new products. He made money buying companies, and often breaking them up, or firing employees.

Last Sunday’s New York Times reported that Romney continued to make money from his old firm Bain Capital through his time as Governor and his attempts to run for Senate and President. It noted that much of his income is likely taxed at only 15% — though we don’t know for sure since he refuses to release his tax returns.

He is the poster boy for the one percent — and he is talking about “entitlements”?

If you ask someone on the street which kid in high school Mitt Romney reminds him of, he is likely to tell you it’s the kid who drove to school in a Ferrari and got all the socially “in” girls. He was the smug guy who knew he was set for life. (more…)

What a year it’s been for workers! From Wisconsin to Washington, D.C., on the football field and the factory floor, we’ve seen unprecedented attacks on working families from big corporations and their friends in elected office. But what the folks behind these attacks didn’t anticipate was that their actions would ignite a movement — that the worst moments for workers in 2011 might just be the beginning of a great political awakening for the 99 percent.

The Worst

1. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker strips public employees of their collective bargaining rights — Last spring, anti-worker legislators in Wisconsin rammed through a bill that strips the state’s public employees of their right to collectively bargain. After initially using the state’s fiscal challenges as the rationale for his bill, Gov. Walker publicly admitted that the collective bargaining repeal saved the state absolutely no money. This revelation affirmed that the nationwide attacks on public employees were solely designed to hurt workers and their unions — not balance the budget.
2. SB 5 passes in Ohio — In early March, Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed Senate Bill 5 into law. The bill scaled back public employees’ ability to bargain together for better workplace conditions and improved safety, marking a major victory for the corporate-backed lawmakers playing politics at the expense of the 99 percent.
3. Income inequality soars to new heights — In September, the Census Bureau reported that one in six Americans are living in poverty. Meanwhile, CEO pay has continued to skyrocket. The result? Income inequality that puts the United States on par with countries like Cameroon and Uganda. And recent studies show that the rise in inequality here in the U.S. is directly tied to declining union membership.
4. Right-wing attacks on the NLRB endanger workers’ rights — Instead of creating jobs, GOP politicians in Congress spent the year launching more than 50 attacks on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the National Labor Relations Act — the only recourse workers have when their rights to form unions and bargain collectively are violated. These cynical political games have not only threatened employee safeguards, but the unprecedented overreach by lawmakers has jeopardized the fundamental American principle of due process.
5. Amazon workers face sweatshop conditions — This fall, an investigative report revealed that employees at Amazon.com’s Breinigsville, Pa., warehouse had been working on their hands and knees at a frantic pace in temperatures so high that the company kept ambulances parked outside. Amazon has yet to address the core problems at the warehouse, including brutal working speeds and overuse of temporary employees, for whom organizing for better working conditions is extremely difficult.

The Best

1. The 99 percent fights back — With the attacks on workers escalating from Wisconsin to Washington, D.C., everyday Americans decided it was time to fight back. Beginning this fall, the Occupy Wall Street movement has succeeded in shifting the debate — highlighting the income inequality that puts our whole economy at risk and bringing our nation’s focus back to where it belongs: on the 99 percent. (more…)

As the campaigning for the 2012 election nears, America is still in deep trouble in unemployment and ever-increasing job-killing import competition. We lost 55,000 manufacturing facilities in the last decade, and those losses continue at about 1,000 per month along with many more good jobs.

Any changes in trade policy to correct this grievous situation and thereby help President Obama’s re-election will have to start in the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate. Who’s doing the most to sponsor new trade policy legislation ? He’s Ohio’s senior Sen. Sherrod Brown. He’s also up for re-election in a crucial race that will have much  national attention. Who wins in Ohio may well decide which party will control the Senate and who wins the presidency!

Sen. Brown is a priority  target for Republicans, who oppose his leadership on trade reform to correct the disastrous one-sided U.S. free trade policies of Wall Street, big banks, and major multinational companies.

Sen. Brown needs the help of all like-minded organizations. I urge USW to raise its strong voice to make trade reform a major election issue for voters and a big boost for an Obama victory as well as for Ohio’s Sen. Brown.

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Kenneth N, Davis, Jr. also is a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce/International and former IBM vice president and chief financial officer.

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USW Staff Member Randy Johnson explains what it was like for workers at AMPAD when Romney’s Bain Capital bought it and drove it into bankruptcy, killing jobs.

David Brancaccio’s Marketplace story Tuesday, Decline of Kodak offers lessons for U.S. business traced the decline of Kodak and the loss of Rochester, NY’s good, middle-class jobs to Kodak’s failure to tend its “industrial commons.” This is a national problem. For 2012 let’s resolve to restore our industrial commons and bring manufacturing back to the U.S.

Kodak on Marketplace

Listen to Tuesday’s Marketplace story, Decline of Kodak offers lessons for U.S. business.

Click to listen.

Story summary: Kodak didn’t tend its “industrial commons,” the local concentration of expertise in making the things that go into a camera.

You make your money by selling cameras. And you now needed to make components. You needed to make lenses; you needed to make shutters — all kinds of things that the skills for which no longer existed in Rochester.

This is what we have done in our country, too. We have been dismantling our “industrial commons.” By sending manufacturing out of the country we have been taking apart the supply chains and abandoning the expertise and skills and culture that go with it.

Other Warnings

Last year, former Intel CEO Andy Grove sounded a warning about this problem. In How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late. Grove wrote that we are not just losing jobs to China, we are losing the “chain of experience” that enables new companies and industries to form and to create new jobs and argues for a national economic strategy to preserve our manufacturing and technology base. He lays out a plan: “rebuild our industrial commons,”

The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations. Such a system would be a daily reminder that while pursuing our company goals, all of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability—and stability—we may have taken for granted.

(more…)

Those of us ensconced in debates in support of U.S. manufacturing often hear opponents claiming that the over-regulated U.S. labor market and unionized heavy industry render us uncompetitive in global markets.

That may sound convincing given competition from emerging markets, but there are lots of advanced economies with long records of positive net exports, while we continue to run large deficits in manufactured goods, year after year.

If you’re thinking the difference must be prices, you’re thinking like an economist… and you’re pretty much wrong.

This new BLS report (including a link to their rockin’ new dashboard — go BLS!) provides the data in the form of manufacturing compensation costs across countries, with conversions to dollars using market exchange rates.

First, as shown in the first figure, in the most recent year for which they have complete data, we’re toward the low end of the advanced economies in terms of compensation costs. Second, in dollar terms, manufacturing compensation costs have increased much faster elsewhere over the past decade (figure two; these summary measures use trade-weighted currencies, based on each countries relative share of U.S. trade; you can use the dashboard link above (open the Excel file) to view individual countries).

*OECD, Eastern Europe, East Asia

Source: BLS (more…)

Have you ever been to Bryce Canyon National Park? I still remember standing at Sunset Point on my first visit as a teenager, hoping to sneak away to climb the hoodoos in the valley below. It’s one of the most beautiful, inspiring places in the country, which is why when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced a public meeting in Salt Lake City to gather public comments on its proposal to approve a giant coal strip-mine next to Bryce Canyon National Park, it wasn’t hard to find citizens ready to object. More than 200 showed up at the Salt Lake City Library to speak their minds.

What they found when they got there, though, was that this particular “hearing” would be like a silent film — only written comments allowed.

When asked why there would be no opportunity for public testimony, BLM officials said they were required to hold only one public meeting and it had already happened the week before in Cedar City, where testimony was gathered from mine employees and other mine boosters.

That answer didn’t sit well with disgruntled participants who had come to voice their objections to the strip mine. What happened next was citizen democracy at its most inspired.

Borrowing a tactic from Occupy Salt Lake City (where some of the participants had come from) a group of protesters started a “human microphone” and began reading their testimony in short tight phrases that were then repeated by the crowd around the room. The stunned BLM officials watched nervously as the actual public took over their “public” meeting. (more…)

“America’s trade policies often force domestic industries to compete on an unfair playing field with foreign competitors, and it’s costing us jobs. To help address this problem, we have introduced H.R. 1749, The Reciprocal Market Access Act.”

Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY)
Congressman Walter B. Jones (R-NC)

Right now, three fundamental premises underpin America’s overall global economic and trade policy. Each is deeply flawed, especially as it relates to our single most important trade relationship, which is that with China.

1) The first premise is that advancing the interests of America’s multinational corporations always benefits American workers and in turn the American economy.

The reality, however, is that the disconnect between the interests of America’s multinational corporations and the best interests of employees and the country has never been greater. Significant consequences have been the consequences-be-damned offshoring of millions of American manufacturing jobs and a failure to tie the fruits of domestic R&D and innovation into corresponding production in the U.S.

2) The second premise is that the rules-based, free trading system favored by U.S. multinationals, combined with the overall rule of “Country Comparative Advantage”, will result in balanced globalization for all trading partners, to the advantage of American workers and the American economy.

This premise works well when all nations play by the same rules. However, we know that China especially continues to pursue mercantilist policies that are at best anti-competitive and often illegal.

Many of us have written often about how China has gained unfair trade advantages through its abysmally low direct labor costs, its lack of meaningful environmental and labor standards, and its currency manipulation. Less appreciated, however, are the other measures China uses to game the system, the two most extreme of which are China’s “Indigenous Innovation Production Accreditation Program” and its related unceasing demands that U.S. companies seeking to do business in China make massive transfers to it of their intellectual property that took decades to develop with internal investment and often with support from U.S. government-funded research laboratories. Because of their perpetual ripple effects throughout our economy, these IP transfers will ultimately be an even bigger drain on our economy than the direct offshoring of millions of American jobs over the last 15 years.

3) The third premise is that the U.S. can make up for the millions of manufacturing jobs being lost overseas with exports of “software, movies, medicine, university degrees, management consulting and legal work” plus new employment by the high technology companies of Silicon Valley.

This first conclusion is simply absurd on its face. And as for the high-tech companies and their plans and capabilities, Silicon Valley is mostly a jobs-exporting juggernaut and not a jobs-creating one. Our own Bureau of Labor Statistics has concluded that U.S. employment in “information technology” will actually be lower in 2018 than it was as far back as 1998.

In the face of these three very flawed premises and actions by certain of our major trading partners which are particularly counterproductive to American interests, we can pursue one of two strategies:

I. We can continue to try to resolve our problems through lengthy bilateral and international discussions over the next several years, which our recent history in this arena ought to discourage; or

II. We can adopt a realistic, hard-headed approach to leveling the playing field, in order to straighten out our trade deficit and help U.S. companies be more competitive.
Both strategies, of course, would be intended to create American jobs, especially manufacturing jobs. The first strategy, however, smacks of timidity and belies the urgency of the problems and the lack of past success in patiently trying to resolve these problems through lengthy bilateral and international discussions. By contrast, the second strategy is all about quickly restoring U.S. self-determination and adopting a more urgent, hard-headed approach.

We need to do three things to successfully put into place the second strategy.

First, we need to enact the Reciprocal Market Access Act, the bipartisan legislation sponsored by Representatives Slaughter and Jones. This Act was first introduced in 2007, and reintroduced in this Congress. Its companion bill, S. 1766, has been introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Kay R. Hagan (D-NC). Here is why this legislation is critical.

Right now, U.S. industry faces significant non-tariff barriers (“NTBs”) in key markets, preventing fair market access. These NTBs deny U.S. manufacturers current and future export opportunities. As the Members of Congress have noted, “eliminating the U.S. tariffs without securing elimination of NTBs is equivalent to unilateral disarmament – giving full advantage to our competitors, while allowing them to protect their home markets.”

The Reciprocal Market Access Act would immediately break down the ‘barrier’ (i.e., the Chinese Wall) which, under the current Doha negotiation process, exists between tariff and non-tariff barriers. Currently, so-called “tradeoffs” are almost strictly tariff-for-tariff and non-tariff-for-non-tariff.

This Act, according to its legislative write-up, would, in addition:

• Tie the authority to reduce or eliminate tariffs in trade agreements to achieving meaningful market access for U.S. domestic producers that have identified and worked with the U.S. government to address those barriers.

• Require that the President provide a certification to the Congress, in advance of agreeing to a modification of any existing duty on any product, that sectoral reciprocal market access has been obtained. This will also greatly enhance the vital trade ‘partnership’ with Congress.

• Give our government – triggered by either a private sector or a Congressional request – the automatic negotiated right (or “snap back authority”) to revoke concessions to cut tariffs if our trading partners don’t implement the commitments they made in order to open up their markets.
Second, for economic, employment, competitiveness and national security reasons, the administration and Congress should continuously test their views of our international trading environment against the following realities:

1. The now-desperate need for a Manufacturing & Industrial Policy for the U.S. that balances the mercantilist policies of our major trading partners, especially China’s, whose overall trade surplus in manufactured goods matches almost dollar for dollar America’s trade deficit in such goods. Nineteen members of the G-20 have defined Manufacturing Policies. America alone does not, even though there is not a responsible economist who believes that an economy as large and complex as ours can prosper with less than 20-25% of its workers being in manufacturing and without the sector contributing a like percentage of GDP. As it is, however, only 8 to 9% of Americans now work in manufacturing, and as a percent of our GDP, the sector provides just 11.2% of the total.

2. The obvious challenge to America’s interests from China’s non-WTO-compliant “Indigenous Innovation Production Accreditation Program” and from China’s illegal subsidies and currency manipulation. Many of China’s practices provide its companies with a clear-cut “counter-available subsidy” and they need to be treated as such, including China’s abysmal environmental practices.

3. The outright theft every day of America’s hard-gained, valuable intellectual property, especially by China, which enervates our economy as much as any other trade tactic employed by China or any other country. The U.S. International Trade Commission estimated in May that “up to 2.1 million new direct private-sector jobs would be created in the U.S. in total if China [alone] raised its IP protection to U.S. levels.”
Third, we need to stop international intellectual property theft.

When it comes to finding solutions to the daily theft of America’s invaluable IP, a single anecdote brings this imperative home. Microsoft, one of the real gems of American ingenuity and also one of the most patriotic major companies headquartered in the U.S., recently sold to a large commercial customer in China one (1) unit of its advanced business software, for several hundred dollars. However, when it sent out an upgrade to the software, the upgrade was downloaded thirty million (30,000,000!!) times. This egregious theft of Microsoft’s IP – and the millions of other thefts in China of the company’s intellectual property – is why Microsoft’s profits from sales in China, with its 1.3 billion population, are no greater than its profits from sales in The Netherlands, with its population of only 16.7 million.

The best immediate solution to the theft of American intellectual property would be to adopt former U.S. Senator Slade Gorton’s (R-WA) recent recommendation to the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission that the U.S. impose tariffs which would generate revenues equivalent to 150% of the estimated annual IP losses suffered by American companies.

The best solution into the long-term would be for the administration and Congress to make IP theft a trade agreement priority, which is a priority sadly lacking today in an urgent, encompassing way.

Following the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue meetings held in mid-May 2011, Commerce Deputy Assistant Secretary Craig Allen declared: “In all of these cases – indigenous innovation, intellectual property enforcement, transparency – we would have preferred much more explicit detail in terms of timeline, in terms of coverage, and in terms of implementation. But we are pleased at the same time that the Chinese did commit those previously verbal assurances in writing. That is progress.”

This may be deemed “progress” by some, but I, for one, am not satisfied that this is the kind of progress that we should ever accept. We need to take a much more pro-active stance in trade in order to better balance the nationalistic economic policies and mercantilist practices of our trading partners with our own trading rights as a nation.

Within the last week, the recently confirmed new Secretary of Commerce, John Bryson, declared in a speech that we must reshape our trade policies toward China. One important way to meaningfully do that would be for him to get the administration to support the important trade legislation being sponsored by Senators Brown and Hagan in the Senate and Representatives Slaughter and Jones in the House. As they have implored us: “We must ensure that our trade negotiators do not give away our domestic markets in future trade agreements without gaining meaningful market access for American manufacturers in exchange. Unless other governments play by the rules and remove barriers to our exports, the U.S. should not acquiesce to their demands by further opening our market – already the most open market in the global economy.”

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Leo Hindery Jr. is chair of the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation, co-chair (with USW President Leo Gerard) of The Task Force on Jobs Creation, founder of Jobs First 2012, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the former CEO of AT&T Broadband and its predecessors, Tele-Communications, Inc. and Liberty Media, and is currently an investor in media companies.

Follow Leo Hindery, Jr. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/leohindery

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This is republished from The Huffington Post.

In the iconic Christmas film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an angel offers the beleaguered main character, George Bailey, the stark choice between a hometown named for a cruel banker or one created by and for the middle class.

The banker’s town, Pottersville, is filled with bars, gambling dens and despair.  The people’s town of Bedford Falls is made of hope, hard working middle class families, and their homes financed by the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan.

The film’s happy ending is the people of Bedford Falls banding together to rescue George Bailey and the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan that had given so many of them a leg up over the years. Republicans seek a different conclusion.  They find middle class cooperation and community intolerable. They want the banker, Henry Potter, with his “every man for himself” philosophy to triumph. In the spirit of their self-centered mentor Ayn Rand, Republicans are trying to disfigure America so she resembles Pottersville.

A building and loan association, like the Bailey Brothers’, uses the savings of its members to provide mortgages to the depositors. Members essentially pool their money to give each other the opportunity to buy cars and homes. At one point in the film, George Bailey explains this concept to frightened depositors who are trying to withdraw their savings during the panic that led to bank runs in 1929.

Bailey urges the townspeople who had crowded into the building and loan office to withdraw only what they need, not empty their accounts. “We have got to stick together,” he tells them, “We have to do this together.” A building and loan doesn’t function without trust and cooperation.

It works well for Bedford Falls. The mortgages it provides help working people move out of the Potters Field slums and into Bailey Park, where homes well kept by their owners increase in value.  Despite the success, Potter condemned this practice, saying it was based on “high ideals without common sense.” He criticized the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan for granting a taxi driver a mortgage after Potter’s bank had rejected his application. Potter scoffed at such practices, asking if the building and loan was a “business or a charity ward.”

This is exactly what Republicans do. They describe beloved American programs like Medicare and Social Security as charities – using the euphemism “entitlements.” Like mortgages from the Bailey Building & Loan, Medicare and Social Security are not charities. They’re the American people depositing and pooling their money for the benefit of the American community.

The GOP tries to destroy programs like these that aid the middle class, the vast majority of Americans – the 99 percent – while Republicans protect tax breaks and special perks for the rich – the one percent, the Henry Potters. (more…)

The Department of Justice must “go up Massey’s chain of command as far as possible” and hold accountable those individuals responsible for the deaths of 29 coals miners at Massey Energy’s Big Branch (W.Va.) mine in 2010, a group of lawmakers urged Attorney General Eric Holder.

In a letter to Holder from Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and 15 other House members, they say that although the recent settlement between the federal government and Alpha minerals—which took over Massey several months after the deadly disaster—includes a non-prosecution agreement with Alpha in exchange for $210 million in investments in mine safety and research, civil penalties and restitution to families,

It does not prevent the Department of Justice from investigating or bringing criminal charges against the individual’s responsible for the April 5, 2010 disaster.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) investigation of the blast found that individuals acting both alone and in concert were responsible for the unsafe mining practices and conditions that led directly to the explosion.

Though these individuals stood at the head of the disaster, they have thus far escaped justice. (more…)