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Five years ago, housing prices across the country were soaring.  Banks gave loans to homeowners who couldn’t afford them and then sold the loans as investment grade securities on the open market.  Investment bankers made billions.  Ordinary families didn’t see a huge increase in their wages, but many saw large bumps in their housing costs.  The bankers were building a house of cards and they were getting rich while the rest of us were getting left behind. 

Then in 2008, that house of cards came crashing down and crushed all of us.  The bad loans the big banks wrote started to fail and the housing market collapsed.  Millions of families lost their homes to foreclosure, and still today, millions of other families owe the bank more than their homes are worth.  As bank after bank failed, U.S. taxpayers scraped together money to bail them out.  The 1% failed and the 99% got stuck paying. 

At my company, Tesoro, we’ve got a similar story. 

At Tesoro, we refine oil and make gasoline, diesel fuels, jet fuel and other petroleum products.  Oil refining is one of the most dangerous industries on the planet and refinery workers are eight times more likely to die at work than other workers.  We saw some simple ways that companies could make our refineries safer for workers and our community.  In 2009, our union went to the oil industry to ask for improvements to health and safety in oil refineries.  But the industry refused to make any substantial changes. 

On Good Friday in 2010, there was a serious explosion at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Washington.  Three workers died on the spot and four more died at the hospital in the following days.  Workers lost their lives and the company lost more than $35 million in fines, refinery repairs and down time. 

A few months later, the company figured out a way to recoup the money they lost in Anacortes.  They decided to make workers pay for their mistakes. They slashed our pensions and retirement security benefits.  Meanwhile, the company paid our CEO, Greg Goff, an astonishing $8.8 million dollars last year.  And now we’re bargaining new labor agreements with the company at my refinery, the chemical plant here in Martinez and at three other locations across the country, and they want us to agree to contractual provisions that would allow management to cut other benefits without even bargaining with our union.  (more…)

Let’s face it, we’re living in very unusual economic times. We’re losing badly to import competition in a trade war in our own U.S. market, yet our stock indexes are hitting new highs. The United States has 12 million officially unemployed Americans and millions more with only part-time jobs. We’re running huge trade deficits of $700 + billion annually, and we borrow $2 billion every day to cover those deficits. We’ve lost much of our industrial base that’s needed for national income and security, while our stocks still perform well. What’s causing this stark disparity between the two “camps”?

On the positive side, our stock market optimism is heavily based on the success of our big multinational companies abroad and partly on the feeling that our U.S. economy is now recovering from its deep recession. Some see this as a “buy” signal to get in early on the recovery.  But on the negative side, the millions of unemployed in the United States aren’t seeing any recovery yet. It will be more gloom and doom for them until domestic industry is doing much better and the hiring rate at least doubles from its current low levels. In the end, the stock market is bound to be affected by what actually happens.

Here’s the one answer I’ve seen to get big positive results for both camps by next year.  We should enact balanced trade legislation now so we can put it into full effect by Jan.1, 2013, no matter who is elected president. Very simply, that new law would limit our total imports each year to no more than our exports. Over a two-year phase-in period, we’d reduce annual imports by 25 percent and restore $500+ billion of  annual production to U.S. companies and workers. No government funding would be needed and we’d still be the world’s biggest importer. That’s fiscal prudence, not protectionism, and it should please investors and the public. It would bring new sustainable growth and also bring real help to the U.S. industry and workers. We’d thrive in our own rich domestic market to add to the fine results of our multinationals abroad. We’d be back in the lead in global business!

Best of all, by the end of 2013, we would  be capitalizing on a golden opportunity for growth, much like what happened after World War II. All of our trade policy advocacy groups, both progressive and conservative, should support this new initiative. This isn’t the time to take a policy break until after the elections, as some are doing. We’ll risk losing this big opportunity if we waste a year of inaction. Let’s seize this moment together now!

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Kenneth Davis is a former U.S. assistant secretary of commerce/international, IBM vice president and chief financial officer, and investment banker.

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In today’s economy where plants are shutting down, millions of people across our country are losing their houses, savings and much more. Now is the time we must stand united to fight for what remains of the middle class.

Within the last few years, opponents of unionized labor have been attacking from a political standpoint and an economic standpoint, all for the entire world to see. In some cases, opponents are crushing unions because of economic worries. During any contract negotiations, corporations can and do use fear to split the struggling members and basically take what they want in the process.

Governors are signing bills that hinder union support and hinder honest, hard-working Americans. Corporations see how to take a few more dollars from the middle class, blue collar worker to line the pockets of their CEOs. For example, Goodyear’s CEO compensation rose 21 percent in 2011, and Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally was given an 11 percent compensation increase.

Yet the workers who break their backs to earn a decent living are asked to give up more. Spread the profits to those that helped get you there. We all need to wake up and stand united from the attacks from all sides.

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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.

 Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

But the research fails to take into account that authoritarian thinkers are often heard to utter things like, “Do as I say, not as I do.”  If one attempts to guess how such a person thinks the way we often judge people – i.e., by their actions – it is easy to see why people whose behaviour is more consistent with the way they think would have difficulty understanding those afflicted with cognitive dissonance.

 The only question is: “Why aren’t academic researchers able to see that?”

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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.

For the decade ended 12/31/2011, the U.S.  total trade deficit with all nations totaled $6.3 trillion, by far the most in our history, and no doubt the biggest such loss of national wealth by any nation in world history! American taxpayers must pick up the tab, though it’s not their fault at all.

Why is this figure important? Answer: it’s the best single measure of how well American business is competing in our own domestic market, by far the largest and richest in the world. The huge, ever-growing trade deficit says we’re losing badly in that competition. Every day, the U.S. must borrow $2 billion abroad to cover it. How did this happen? Who benefits and who’s hurt by it? Most important, can it be stopped and turned around to our advantage? Who from business should take the lead? 

First, our trade deficits needn’t have happened at all!  Who’s to blame? Our own multi-national companies must bear heavy responsibility. America’s demise has already begun with the trade debt we’ve taken on,the extensive damage to our biggest industrial cities, and  the  ongoing dismantling of our productive capacity.  Fifty-five thousand U.S. manufacturers closed their doors in the past decade, while we became the world’s biggest debtor, much of it to China. We’re headed toward failed-nation status. Who should take the lead to stop this national tragedy? Answer: Our multi-nationals must step up! They have the money, and with it the needed political clout! (more…)

Every so often an outrage happens that lights up the sky, like when lighting strikes at night, and all of a sudden everything previously hidden in darkness and shadow stands out in sharp, bright relief.

The murder of Trayvon Martin was such an event, even though it took a while for the rolling thunder of its full impact to spread across the country. Slowly at first, and then in greater leaps, the news media, after being nudged, picked it up.

I have one quarrel with most of the reports and statements. This was not so much a tragedy as a crime. It was an old-fashioned lynching dressed up with modern-day ‘gun rights’ being exercised in today’s gated communities.

But put that to the side. Most everyone now has dutifully called it a tragedy, called for an impartial investigation to ‘get to the bottom’ of it and see that ‘justice is served.’ Even President Obama finally spoke up, with the proper caveats against prejudging “current investigations,’ but adding that if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon, a point he made to show empathy with the Martin family.

Then we have our former House Speaker and GOP presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, who, after deploring the tragedy, came up with this attack on Obama in an interview with Sean Hannity: (more…)

On March 26, the U.S. Supreme court will begin to decide whether it’s constitutional to require everyone to have medical insurance or pay a fine.

With 50 million people in our country not having any medical insurance, it will be a real shame if the court would rule the Affordable Care Act (AFA) unconstitutional because without the mandate requiring everyone to help fund the AFA, I’m afraid the whole thing will fall apart.

The Republicans who called it unconstitutional during the time that President Obama was trying to get the law passed are the same people who at one time wanted the mandate. Go figure.

The court will probably hand down their ruling in June and the mandate would go into effect in March of 2014.

On top of this, the U.S. House of Representatives has just offered their budget in the form of the Ryan plan that would, if enacted, harm our retirees on Medicare by giving them a voucher and make them purchase medical insurance on their own. Can you imagine how many seniors would be taken advantage of by unscrupulous insurance companies?

Fortunately, the Democrats in the Senate will not allow this to happen.

I heard it said once that Republicans will vote for anything that causes human pain, misery, suffering or death. I believe it.

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Florida’s less than warm and cuddly cyborg-like governor has done it again. It seems that the incorrigible Robo-Fuhrer Rick Scott took some time out of writing his memoirs, titled “Mein Kampf Redux,” to put together a sweetheart tax break package (HB 7087) for the big corporations. The package is a $121.1 million dollar a year fruit basket for billionaire businesses, one of which is a local race track/casino that has nine of its very own lobbyists in Tallahassee, the state’s capitol (Those $121.1 million might be surplus loot from when Scott slashed the state’s education budget.)

In a last minute act of reprisal against Democrats who were seeking to place limitations on who would qualify for these breaks, House GOP leaders slipped the bill a mickey. An amendment to the bill materialized at the eleventh hour requiring that all businesses who were receiving the tax breaks had to certify that they only employed non-union workers. Isn’t that, like, unconstitutional? It seems to me that the popular right-wing pastime in the Florida House of Representatives has become using the Constitution as a snot rag. It’s almost certain that the pre-programmed Republican justification for the bill and its anti-union language is [in android tone]: “It causes incentives for job creators and boosts the economy.” But somehow, a guy who turned down $2.4 billion dollars in federal money to build a high speed railway doesn’t strike me as someone too deeply concerned with job creation in the blue collar sector, let alone boosting state economy. Not to mention that here in Florida, we’re still waiting for the 700,000 jobs that the Gubernatorial Decepticon had promised back during his campaigning. The writing on the wall is clear: Scott is adept at subliminal union busting.

Technically, Scott kept his cross-fingered promise to not take away workers’ rights to collectively bargain. Instead, he and his right-wing cronies have created a bonus for big business to open up exclusively non-union shops, a strategic move that could put Florida labor unions on an endangered species list at best. How do you like that for undermining, passive-aggressive tactics? It’s almost as if he had said [again in an android tone]: “Sure, you can collectively bargain, just good luck finding a workplace that won’t toss your ass out if you even utter the word ‘union’… suckers.”  Truth be told, we’ve seen these tactics from him before. He ran on a platform to create the aforementioned 700,000 jobs, only to later sign what became known as the “Pink Slip” budget, which ended up creating significant job losses, not to mention dropping Florida’s unemployment benefits to a maximum of $275 a week, the nation’s fourth lowest. (more…)

George Lakoff, author of Political Mind and Don’t Think of An Elephant, argues that when liberals attack extreme conservative proposals like denying reimbursement for birth control, they actually help convince people that the position is right, not wrong. He says that repetition of a position makes human minds affirm it and work harder to defend it.

That may be going on when progressives attack so-called “free trade.” It just affirms the idea of “free trade” as legitimate and makes “free traders” fight harder to defend their position. The free traders persuade by repeating the appealing sounding term “free trade” and asking, “How can you be against anything that makes the market more free and brings us less expensive things? What’s free is always good!”

By contrast, other trade experts and professionals and I have been trying to convince progressives that our trade issue is now mostly a matter of patriotism – that there’s a trade war going on and we’re losing it badly! Our trillions of dollars of trade deficits and borrowing, plus lost U.S. manufacturers and jobs is proof we’re losing badly.

In a war, we must defend America as our highest priority. In this trade war, we haven’t fought back to assure our nation’s economic security!

I was just given a key new statistic yesterday. The trade data company, PIERS, tracks imports into the United States by companies and individuals. Their database  now lists 3 million foreign entities that export to the U.S. That’s 3 million exporters fighting for a part of our market – the world’s biggest and richest.

Is it any wonder that our trade deficits keep increasing and the number of U.S. producers and jobs keeps dropping? And there are many more foreign suppliers entering this trade war from India, Brazil, South. Korea, etc.

There’s an answer: The U.S. must return to a policy of total balanced trade with the rest of the world. That would mean a cut of 25% in annual imports during a phase-in period. We’d still be the world’s biggest importer – so that’s not protectionism at all! We should enact the legislation now and be ready for full adoption and enforcement as of Jan. 1, 2013.

The place where the decision must be made is first at the U.S. Jobs and Competitiveness Council and then by the President. He’ll be a very tough “sell” in an election year and Wall Street and  big  banks will resist despite their past bail-outs.

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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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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.

Since the fall of 2007, when the sub-prime mortgage crisis began, I’d been wondering how the fraud was perpetrated. To be successful, everyone responsible for mortgage processing, from origination to the securitization of mortgage products (CDO’s), would have to be complicit.

In other words, if the next step in the process were disallowed, the crisis never happens.

On Jan. 17, 2008, there appeared an article in the Wall Street Journal that provided me the insight on how and why the fraud was accomplished. “Deal Fees Under Fire Amid Mortgage Crisis” provided a mortgage activity flow chart that detailed the step-by-step picture of who the actors were and also revealed that up front commissions and fees were paid in excess of 10% of the property value.

It all begins with the mortgage originator, interviewing the prospective home buyer, filling out the application and collecting the pertinent documentation. The ultimate justification for approval is the mortgage ratio, the maximum amount the buyer can afford to pay on a monthly basis. The current FHA ratio is approximately 31%. This is unequivocal.

I perceive the loan officer/home buyer relationship as a doctor to a patient, where the loan officer determines the buyer’s long term financial health. If this quality standard is compromised, then the successful long term completion of mortgage payments will never happen. This is where the fraud began. Continuing the process: mortgage lender approval, investment banker approval and credit rating approval to package the CDO; these default-ready mortgages will be unsuspectingly purchased by the duped investor. Prior to 2000, the CDO normally had a default rate of 2%, in 2007 that rate was 30%. The world investment community was doomed to fail.

Warren Nystrom
Swisshelm Park