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I get a lot of anti-Obama stuff these days. My response is as follows, to all of them:

I am a progressive, not a Democrat, but CERTAINLY not a Republican. My biggest problem with Obama is that he tries to pander to the right too much. 

At the end of the day, on his worst day, Obama is exponentially better for this country than George Bush was. I’ll go even further – since 1980, this country has been headed down the wrong path at breakneck speed. Worker productivity has consistently gone up, while wages have gone down. Reagan’s trickle down economic policy, moderated only slightly by Bill Clinton, has crippled our economy. While it has been very good for the very rich (about the top 0.1%), it has been a nightmare for the middle class, which has been decimated to the point that there aren’t many of us left.

I just wish that all of these naysayers, many of whom are suffering from the avalanche started by Reagan, could see that we are in the mess we’re in because of the Republicans, albeit with the complicity of the Democrats. While Democrats are less hostile to the middle class, they are still beholden to the multi-national corporations to the extent that they can give little more than lip service to the problem that they at least admit exists. 

Having said the above, why is anybody surprised that Obama hasn’t turned the Titanic around? If anybody, Democrats included, thought that ANYBODY could turn around the disaster that has been foisted upon America for the last 30 years in less than a year, they were kidding themselves. 

I just shudder to think how bad it would be if Obama had not been elected. Worse, I tremble at the thought that the electorate might consider the likes of Sarah Palin to replace him!  

Steve Walls
Vardaman, Miss. and Nashville, Tenn.

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The political pendulum of time was swinging more to the right when we ended up with George W. Bush as President. After that we got a person that was supposed to be for workers and came as a Democrat but a moderate (Blue Dog Democrat). He was none other than William Jefferson Clinton. He changed the face of the Democratic Party, which was a party that represented the working class. He made such statements as “The era of big government was over.”  That’s when I knew things were really going to the radical right wing.

I always felt government was good as long as they counteracted the power of the corporate interests in favor of the consumers and workers. Clinton brought us NAFTA and other free trade deals, and we really started losing our manufacturing base. They opened the door for those countries to flood us with foreign products, thus creating a huge trade imbalance.

Incidentally, most of the countries to which American corporations moved were paying less than subsistence wages, had no unions, no consumer rights, etc. So free trade did not lift those people out of their desperate economic and social conditions.

One good thing about Clinton, though, was he did leave a surplus on the books. After his administration, we had ended up with the most Radical Right Wing Government ever under George Bush#2. They created a policy of deregulating all business. After eight years of Bush and Carl Rove, the country was bankrupt with a huge deficit! We all know the economic collapse that Bush left – a near worldwide depression which we still are suffering from.

Michael Cmero Sr.
Carmel, N.Y.
Retired Railroad Worker

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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. 

Bill Scher

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

Speaker Nancy Pelosi addressed the America’s Future Now! conference, delivering a fierce speech over the persistent heckling from a little-known disabled rights organization, receiving strong applause from the vast majority of attendees.

After an initial day of the conference that focused on what has not been accomplished by the White House and Congress in the Obama Era, Speaker Pelosi stressed what has become law, while also praising conference attendees for their “impatience” and “dissatisfaction” recognizing that those are necessary qualities to be successful “advocates of change.”

After initially addressing the issue regarding nursing homes that the protesters sought to raise, she dismissed the continued heckling by joking, “Listen, I’m used to noise. I talk to the Democratic Caucus every single day,” and bravely pressed on despite an attempt from a member of her security detail to get her to leave for her safety.

While noting the urgency to do more so laid-off and long-term unemployed Americans can get back to work, the Speaker highlighted recent legislation passed by the House including the COMPETES Act which will create jobs by investing in science research and education, as well as the tax changes bill which closes the loophole that gives a tax break to companies that offshore jobs, and included a $1 billion summer jobs program. She also praises the robust investment in college affordability that was incorporated into the health care law signed by the President.

Pointing to the Recovery Act, which has put as many as 2.8 million Americans back to work according to the Congressional Budget Office, Speaker Pelosi heralded President Obama for creating more jobs in 18 months than President Bush did in 8 years.

She also laid the blame for the current budget deficit on President Bush, reminding the audience of the budget surplus that was frittered away on tax cuts for the wealthiest and “two unpaid for wars.” And she argued that investments education and jobs, particularly clean energy jobs, were essential components in any long-term deficit reduction strategy by increasing revenue to the Treasury.

The Speaker’s remarks, and her embrace from the vast majority of conference attendees who are dissatisfied with the pace of progress, was a reminder that honorable public servants see value in communicating with an forceful grassroots, and grassroots activists can pressure those in power and respect them at the same time.

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Bill Scher is the author of Wait! Don’t Move To Canada!: A Stay-and-Fight Strategy to Win Back America.  He is the online campaign manager at Campaign for America’s Future, a regular contributor to Bloggingheads.tv and a fellow at the Commonweal Institute.

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Originally posted at OurFuture.org

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Health care reform is necessary, and House Democrats should vote for it because it’s best for the nation.

They should also remember the political lessons of history. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. As the White House and the House Democratic leadership try to line up 216 votes to pass health care reform — and as Republicans, aided by the National Association of Manufacturers and abetted by fierce partisans like Newt Gingrich, try to kill it — I can’t help thinking back to 1994 when the lineup was much the same.

I was serving in the Clinton administration at the time. In the first months of 1993 it looked as if Clinton’s health care proposal would sail through Congress. But the process dragged on and by 1994 it bogged down. We knew health care was imperiled but none of us knew that failure to pass health care would doom much of the rest of Clinton’s agenda and wrest control of Congress out of the hands of the Democrats. In retrospect, it’s clear Republicans did know.

On February 5, 1994, the National Association of Manufacturers passed a resolution declaring its opposition to the Clinton plan. Not long after that, Michigan Democrat John Dingell, who was managing the health care bill for the House, approached the senior House Republican on the bill to seek a compromise. According to Dingell, the response was: “There’s no way you’re going to get a single vote on this [Republican] side of the aisle. You will not only not get a vote here, but we’ve been instructed that if we participate in that undertaking at all, those of us who do will lose our seniority and will not be ranking minority members within the Republican Party.”

In early March, 1994, Senate Republicans invited Newt Gingrich, then House minority leader, to caucus with them about health care. Gingrich warned against compromise, a view echoed by Senator Phil Gramm. A few months later, at a Republican meeting in Boston, Bob Dole, then Senate minority leader, promised to “filibuster and kill” any health care bill with an employer mandate.

By then Gingrich had united House Republicans against passage of health reform and told the New York Times he wanted “to use the issue as a springboard to win Republican control of the House.” Gingrich predicted Republicans would pick up thirty-four House seats in the November elections and half a dozen disaffected Democrats would switch parties to give Republicans control.

By August, it was over. It didn’t matter that Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the Senate by 56 to 44 and in the House by 257 to 176. Health care was a lost cause. Republican Senator Bob Packwood boasted to his colleagues “We’ve killed health care reform.”

In early September, William Kristol of the Project for the Republican Future spelled out the next stage of the Republican battle plan: “I think we can continue to wrap the Clinton plan around the necks of Democratic candidates.” And that’s exactly what they did. On November 8 voters repudiated President Clinton. They brought Republicans to power at every level of government. Democrats went from a controlling majority of 257 seats in the House of Representatives to a minority of 204, and lost the Senate.

I remember how shocked we were the morning after the votes were counted. I asked one of Clinton’s political advisors what had happened. “It was health care,” he said, simply. (That advisor, by the way, is now in the Obama White House.)

Today’s Republican battle plan is exactly the same as it was sixteen years ago. In fact, it’s been the same since President Obama assumed office. They never were serious about compromise. They were serious only about regaining power. From the start, Republicans have remembered the lesson of 1994. Now, as they prepare to vote, House Democrats should remember the lesson as well.

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Cross-posted from Robert Reich’s Blog

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Robert Reich served as the nation’s 22nd Secretary of Labor and now is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book, “Supercapitalism,” is out in paperback. For copies of his articles, books, and public radio commentaries, go to www.robertreich.org.

Leo W. Gerard

 By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

 Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who single-handedly delayed unemployment benefits for 400,000 desperate Americans and forced an unnecessary furlough of another 2,000, should be a figure regarded with wonderment.

The awesome power he held in his hands! The utter disregard for vulnerable Americans he exhibited while wielding it!

Bunning is a Republican Superhero. He personifies the mean-spirited, hypocritical, wealthy-serving, obstructionist Republican Party. As a result, his fellow GOP senators championed him. South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint said, “He’s my hero this week.” Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions said, “I respect him for the courage he’s shown.”  Bunning’s obstruction should be “honored” by the Senate, said Tennessee Republican Bob Corker. And Texas Republican John Cornyn said he admired Bunning’s obstructionist tactics.

Eighteen Republicans joined Bunning Tuesday evening in voting to oppose extending unemployment benefits for a month and providing highway funding to re-employ the furloughed 2,000.

Republicans clearly admire obstructionism that hurts average Americans. It didn’t matter that the legislation was going to pass eventually no matter what Bunning did. It didn’t matter that Bunning could have made his hypocritical point by delaying legislation that didn’t affect people’s everyday lives. What mattered to Bunning and his backers is that Republicans — the minority in the Senate — succeeded in holding up Americans.

Though Bunning blathered about blockading the bill to ensure it did not add to the federal deficit, no such high-minded intent existed. Bunning made that clear when he agreed to end his obstruction in exchange for a vote that he knew would fail on an amendment to fund the bill.  

During the six-day ordeal, Bunning bemoaned his own losses – missing the opportunity to watch a televised college basketball game because he was forced to defend his obstructionist position on the Senate floor and losing his cool on national TV as lowly reporters attempted to follow him onto an elevator exclusively for use by high-fallutin’ Senators. And he treated others with disdain – flipping the finger at a TV news man and growling, “tough sh*t,” at two fellow senators, Democrats, of course, as they pleaded with him to release the unemployment money.

In 1998, Former President Bill Clinton described Bunning as “mean-spirited.” That’s appropriate not just for Bunning, but also for the party he represents.

This is the party that has obstructed health insurance reform for a year, preventing millions of uncovered Americans from finally securing insurance while at the same time the GOP’s impeding progress allowed greedy insurance companies to continue dropping sick policy holders. This is the party that supported former President George Bush’s unfunded stimulus bill but opposed the stimulus bill proposed by President Obama to help reverse the worsening economy and rising unemployment that he inherited from Bush. Unfunded legislation, including the Medicare prescription program, was fine by Republicans when Bush was in office. But suddenly it’s not while Obama is President.

Bunning claimed he engaged in his one-man ban on the unemployment benefit extension because Congress recently passed pay-as-you-go legislation requiring that each spending bill include a funding mechanism. Of course, what he failed to mention is that he and his Party of No voted against the pay-go legislation. This was a second no on pay-go for Bunning, who did it in 2005 as well.

Bunning and the Republicans say they are just worried sick about the national debt, but they reject all proposals to deal with it. Another example is the Deficit Commission. Bunning and his Party of No also opposed creating this commission to cut the national debt. This defines the word hypocrite.

While stopping funds for the unemployed and adding 2,000 more people to the unemployment rolls, Bunning handled another constituent group – the rich – with enormously more tender care. He and his fellow Republicans cut the taxes of millionaires while Bush was in office. And like the Bush Stimulus bill, the Republicans didn’t bother providing a way to fill the revenue hole they dug when they gave rich people the break.  

Similarly, Bunning supported a farm bill that allows farmers earning up to $750,000 a year to collect government subsidies, but felt it was fine to cut off “government subsidies” to the unemployed.  

Bunning got high-level Republican support for that position. The Senate Republican whip, Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona asserted that unemployment benefits dissuade furloughed workers from seeking jobs “because people are being paid even though they’re not working.”  A total of two Republican senators, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Susan Collins of Maine, publicly asked Bunning to release the unemployment checks. The others either supported his obstruction with their silence or, like Kyl, openly backed him.

Despite Kyl’s contempt for unemployed Americans who in this Great Recession are forced to compete with five others for every job opening, the real deadbeat is Bunning. In January 2009, Bunning missed more than a week at the start of Congress and refused to explain his absence. Later that year, Bunning was the only senator to miss the Christmas Eve vote on the health insurance reform bill. Bunning skipped nearly half of all Senate floor votes in December, a total of 21, one more than ailing, 92-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd missed. Bunning gets paid $170,000 by the government, and collects top-notch government health benefits, whether he shows up for work or not. But this Republican Superhero felt it was fine to cut off paltry checks and COBRA health insurance matches for the unemployed whose average benefits would add up to $15,236 a year.

In his years in the Senate, Bunning has repeatedly voted against the health insurance program for poor children called CHIP. He opposed funding for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. He rejected additional funding for the Consumer Product Safety Commission as poisonous pet food and lead-painted toys from China flooded U.S. shores. He said no to foreclosure aid and assistance to those unable to afford winter heating bills.

Bunning embodies the Party of Obstruction. No unemployment benefits. No health insurance reform. Not even health insurance for impoverished children. No. No. No for working folks.

 The GOP is, however, the Party of Obliging corporate and wealthy interests: Yes. Yes. Yes for the rich.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Bill Clinton saw it clearly when he was running for President against Bush I. It became his mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Clinton wanted to reform health insurance too. But he understood that during a recession, the first priority is jobs.

Politicians and commentators continue to blather obtusely about the meaning of Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley’s loss to a Republican in a heavily Democratic state. Like Coakley and her advisors, they’ve failed to see the obvious, failed to learn from Clinton’s victory:

It’s the economy, stupid.

Poll results show that Massachusetts voters punished Coakley – and Democrats — for neglecting the issue most vital to them: jobs. If politicians had studied earlier polls or attempted to actually get in touch with mainstream, Main Street Americans, or just listened to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s Jan. 11 address at the Washington Press Club, they’d have known to focus on jobs. The message of Massachusetts should be clear: If Democrats want to save their own jobs in the mid-term elections this fall, they must create jobs now.

A poll taken as far back as the first week in December exposed voters’ anger over the economy. The bipartisan Battleground Poll showed this: A huge majority of those surveyed ranked improving the economy and jobs as the most important tasks for Congress. It was 40 percent, compared to healthcare reform, at just 15 percent.

Here’s what pollster Celinda Lake said about the results:

“The number one thing Democrats have to do is prove they really have a jobs program and an economic program that is going to sell on Main Street.”

That was a month before the Massachusetts vote. In the meantime, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced unemployment numbers for December – and they were worse in 43 states than they had been in November. Joblessness in Michigan, a high population heartland state, was the highest in the country at 14.6 percent. Only the rates in two other states, Rhode Island – 12.9 percent — and South Carolina — 12.6 percent, beat that in one of the dozen largest economies in the world – California. There it was 12.4, significantly higher than the U.S. average of 10 percent.

People are hurting. Pay attention, politicians. Pay attention.

They didn’t. In the Massachusetts race, they were talking about terrorism and baseball.

In a Research 2000 poll done for MoveOn.org, 95 percent of Massachusetts residents surveyed ranked the economy as either important or very important to their candidate choice. Research 2000 questioned 1,000 registered voters – half of whom voted for Republican Scott Brown and half of whom did not vote at all.

Among those who voted for Obama in 2008 but Brown in 2010, 51 percent said they believed Democratic policies helped Wall Street more than Main Street.

It’s the economy, stupid. The Main Street economy.

Similary, in a Hart Research Associates poll conducted on election night in Massachusetts, 79 percent of voters said electing a candidate who would strengthen the economy and create more good jobs was the single most important factor in their decision. The most crucial quality for a candidate, they said: Someone who would fix the economy.

The Bush II Great Recession is more than two years old now. Workers are frightened and angry. They see bailouts for Wall Street, big bonuses for bankers and unemployment continuing to rise.

They will vent their frustration on politicians. Massachusetts showed it. Trumka warned about it earlier this month in his talk at the Press Club:

“At this moment, the voices of America’s working women and men must be heard in Washington – not the voices of bankers and speculators for whom it always seems to be the best of times, but the voices of those for whom the New Year brings pink slips and givebacks, hollowed-out health care, foreclosures and pension freezes – the roll call of an economy that long ago stopped working for most of us.”

He went on: “Working people want an American economy that works for them – that creates good jobs, where wealth is fairly shared. . .”

He recommended immediate implementation of the AFL-CIO’s five-point jobs creation program – a plan that would produce 4 million jobs and includes dramatically increasing federal infrastructure and green jobs investments and direct lending of the refunded bank bailout money to small and medium sized businesses that can’t get credit because of the financial crisis.

Just as important is implementation of the recommendations in the Framework for Revitalizing American Manufacturing report issued by the White House manufacturing task force in December. That report contains concrete measures to revive manufacturing in the U.S. to generate real wealth, not the illusory paper assets counterfeited on Wall Street.

Trumka called for immediate action, not going slow, not taking half steps. Those who seek delay are “harming millions of unemployed Americans and their families,” he said, and jeopardizing economic recovery.

He ended with this warning:

“the reality is that when unemployment is 10 percent and rising, working people will not stand for tokenism. We will not vote for politicians who think they can push a few crumbs our way and then continue the failed economic policies of the last 30 years.”

Workers executed that warning in Massachusetts.

What Americans want is jobs.

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Newspaper columnist, radio host, bestselling author 

 Washington’s favorite term these days is “moral hazard.” Though this buzz-phrase may seem like a complex and even intimidating idea, most of us, whether consciously or not, understand the principle because it’s basic common sense.

Applaud your kid for punching another kid — rather than grounding him — and you’ve created a moral hazard that means he’ll probably punch other kids in the future. Give your dog a treat — rather than a scolding — after he urinates in the house, and the moral hazard you’ve engineered makes it likely you’ll soon be cleaning up even more sallow stains on your rug.

In short, without consequences — or worse, with rewards — for wrongdoing, there is an incentive to do wrong. That’s moral hazard.

To date, the national discussion about this concept has revolved specifically around financial moral hazard. And, as evidenced by trillions of dollars in public loans, guarantees and subsidies given to speculators to cover their massive losses, leaders in both political parties have no interest in preventing financial moral hazard — despite stern press releases insisting the contrary.

By rewarding rather than punishing Wall Street for losing irresponsibly risky bets and by holding out the promise of similar bailout rewards in the future, politicians have incentivized even more irresponsible risk-taking for years to come.

But financial moral hazard is only half the story. The other half is political moral hazard — the mother of all other moral hazards. Consider, for instance, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He’s the top regulator who not only sowed financial moral hazard with the Fed’s post-meltdown bailouts, but openly admits that as the crisis developed, his Federal Reserve “should have done more — we should have required more capital, more liquidity (and) we should have required tougher risk-management controls.” 

Firing Bernanke would tell other regulators that there are consequences for negligence. Instead, President Barack Obama rewarded Bernanke with re-nomination and thus manufactured a pernicious problem. 

As economist Dean Baker says, just as bailouts create a financial moral hazard giving speculators no incentive to avoid excessive risk, Bernanke’s re-nomination creates a political moral hazard whereby regulators “will not have an incentive to do their jobs properly (because) there are no consequences” for failure. The Democratic Congress, of course, could reject Bernanke’s nomination for being “the definition of moral hazard,” as Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky correctly noted.

But that seems unlikely, considering how many Democrats have been aggressively embracing moral hazard. 

When Senate Democrats ratified Obama’s nomination of New York Fed chief Tim Geithner as treasury secretary, they rewarded yet another shill who also fell down on the regulatory job. When those same Senate Democrats considered the nomination of Gary Gensler to head the agency regulating derivatives, they could have rejected him for championing derivatives deregulation as a Clinton official and then cashing in as a Goldman Sachs executive.

 Instead, Democrats backed his nomination and effectively told every other Gary Gensler-like parasite that misguided actions and corruption don’t prevent future promotion.

And let’s be fair — it’s not just Democratic politicians who are creating political moral hazard. Many Democratic pundits, activists and voters continued cheering on Obama while he stuffed his administration full of Wall Streeters — and many of these rank-and-file voices attacked as disloyal those progressives who raised questions. 

That told Obama he faces few consequences — and even defense — from his own base for promoting those who engineered the economic meltdown. 

The only open question is whether the public at large becomes complicit, too. Come election day, if there are no consequences at the ballot box for the politicians — Democrat or Republican — who legislated bailouts, supported these appointments and are now working to undermine proposed Wall Street reforms, then America will have created the biggest moral hazard of all.

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David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books “Hostile Takeover” and “The Uprising.” He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.

Fred Redmond

By Fred Redmond
USW International Vice President for Human Affairs

Today I issued a call to arms to the civil rights activists of the United Steelworkers union.

This was no summons to warfare, though.

To the contrary, I challenged USW civil rights committee members to shield the downtrodden in society, to aid those felled by the current economic crisis, to serve as their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, not just for labor union companions, but for all fellow community members.

This is a call to arms because it will involve heavy lifting, I warned the USW committees at their 15^th International Civil and Human Rights Conference in Pittsburgh.

We’ll get a feel for it this week as 85 of us lug books and movies to be donated to Pittsburgh’s Children’s Hospital, unpack boxes of food and stock shelves at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank in Duquesne, and distribute recyclable bags containing fruit to residents of Pittsburgh Housing Authority’s 10 senior citizen communities.

This economic downturn mangled the budgets of our food pantries, churches, schools, charities, even our local governments. The Great Recession has left them under-resourced and under-staffed. And that is hurting our children, our elderly parents, our fragile relatives and our communities’ health.

We hear their plea. It is our communities calling us to arms. And we will reach out in response to them.

That does not diminish our civil rights committees’ traditional duties. These are crucial and will continue. They will investigate civil rights complaints and explain the value of diversity.

These functions simply can’t be set aside. That is what happened in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department during the long, dark Bush years. A Government Accountability Office audit of the division’s activity showed a significant drop in litigation in several major anti-discrimination and voting rights areas during the Bush years. The Bush department pursued fewer cases when compared to enforcement during the Clinton years, according to the report released early in December.

This, of course, was deliberate by the Bush administration, which did not believe in enforcing civil rights law. We will not allow our new duties in the community to distract us from vigilantly pursuing civil rights complaints filed with our committees. Instead, we will assume this new function as an additional role.

It is a role that is basic to unions, which have always struggled to improve conditions for their members and their families.

At this moment, it’s vital that labor union civil rights activists everywhere – not just at the USW — take inspiration from the Dr. Martin Luther King Day of Service and intercede for the sake of their communities so hobbled by the effects of Wall Street recklessness.

Families are suffering under the highest unemployment in a quarter century. For every single job opening available, 6.3 unemployed job seekers are desperate to take it. Those who lose out are forfeiting their homes. Every month, banks file another 330,000 new foreclosure notices and seize another 75,000 homes.

Those lucky enough to have jobs have been pinched by pay and benefit cuts, furloughs and shortened hours. The average work week is 33.2, nearly 7 hours short of 40, costing many workers nearly a whole day’s wages. The Center for Economic and Policy Research calculates that workers haven’t endured the worst of it yet. In its report,

Families that can’t make mortgage payments also can’t meet tax obligations. Then local governments and school districts are caught short. Low tax revenues meant

So I propose that union civil rights activists volunteer to do whatever they can to fill those gaps in community service. Like workers across this country, our civil rights activists have suffered layoffs and furloughs and work week reductions. So stepping forward as cash cows is unrealistic. But we can step up as volunteers, in our church groups, community organizations and schools. Our hands can help hold it together during these trying times.

We can link arms to help our communities. That is my call to arms.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Judge Sonia Sotomayor would help provide balance to a U.S. Supreme Court that remains all too white and all too male.

Dismissing the effect of life experiences on decision-making is to treat judges like Vulcan characters. Some jurists may claim to be Dr. Spock clones, but they’re not. Spock was fiction. 

The Party-of-No began opposing Sotomayor even before President Obama nominated her for the Supreme Court, citing a 2001 speech she made acknowledging that the paths people walk through life may affect their accumulation of wisdom.

Here is what she said in that talk entitled “A Latina Judge’s Voice”:  “Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases…I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

It makes you wonder how the infamous Dred Scott case would have been decided if three or four black justices had sat on the Supreme Court in 1857. An all-white panel decided in that case that black human beings imported from Africa as slaves and their descendents were not legally people and could not, as a result, be U.S. citizens. All-male panels of justices never saw gender discrimination in a Supreme Court case until 1972.

Here’s what Judge Sotomayor also, wisely, said in that speech, “Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

To do justice in a diverse society, the justices themselves must be diverse. President Obama has nominated for the Supreme Court a judge who was valedictorian of her high school class, who won a scholarship to Princeton University and who served as editor of the Yale Law Review while earning her law degree from Yale University. She was first appointed to the federal bench by former President George H.W. Bush and to her current seat on the federal appeals bench by former President Bill Clinton. She has more judicial experience than anyone currently serving on the court when appointed. In addition to all of that, she is wise and thoughtful. She acknowledges and celebrates the fact that her path to this place may affect the future.

That is telling the truth. It is also the truth that Chief Justice John Roberts’  background as a wealthy white male affects his thinking. For the workers in this country, the people of color, the women, for everyone who is not wealthy, white and male, to provide balance on the court is to improve justice.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

The sky is falling.

For the average Working Joe or Jane in America, it is anyway. Unemployment is at 7.6 percent and rising. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that there are 4.1 job seekers now for every opening. The mortgage delinquency rate set another record last quarter, and foreclosures are predicted to top 1 million this year. Because of reckless speculation by Wall Street financiers, the stock market is plummeting, taking with it a third of the value of the retirement accounts of hard-working Americans.

If the average Jane and Joe have not lost their jobs, they’ve seen a big chunk of their retirement savings slip away. Or their kid can’t find work. Or a neighbor’s been foreclosed on.

Still, Republicans in Congress couldn’t find it in their hearts to vote for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly called the stimulus bill. They just can’t vote to support the American people – they’re “Republicants.”

An official description of the act the Republicants rejected says it:  “Makes supplemental appropriations for FY2009: (1) for job preservation and creation; (2) to promote economic recovery; (3) to assist those most impacted by the recession; (4) to provide investments needed to increase economic efficiency by spurring technological advances in science and health; (5) to invest in transportation, environmental protection, and other infrastructure that will provide long-term economic benefits; and (6) to stabilize state and local government budgets, in order to minimize and avoid reductions in essential services and counterproductive state and local tax increases.”

In the House, not a single Republicant voted for this bill to create jobs and restore economic growth. In the Senate, three brave members of the GOP stood up to the Republicants gang to pass the Recovery Act and aid suffering Americans – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

The GOP made it malevolently clear during their majority years in the Bush administration that they opposed anything that would strengthen America’s middle class, but its votes this week were based on deep, and frankly justified, fear of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

New York Times Columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman explained it earlier this week at the Thinking Big Thinking Forward conference conducted in Washington D. C. by EPI, Institute for America’s Future, The American Prospect and Demos.

Republicans are terrified of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act because if it works, if it creates jobs and helps stimulate the economy, then Americans will think good thoughts about government action and spending.

And that could lead to new public support for government payments for important social safety net programs like health care.

Republicans have invested decades, untold millions of dollars and countless hours on Sunday morning blathering-head shows persuading Americans that government is too big. They’ve contended that taxes should be cut to force curtailment of government. Bush supporter Grover Norquist, who is president of Americans for Tax Reform and a director of the American Conservative Union, expressed it best for the group: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

They did cut taxes – for the rich. And they cut services – crucial ones, like inspection of toys so that millions of toxic trinkets imported from China got into the hands – and mouths — of American toddlers. And inspection of food and the factories producing it, so it’s possible that salmonella-tainted peanut butter has sickened 500 and killed eight.

And they placed bunglers in charge of important government agencies. This, of course, was deliberate, to make government look incompetent — an entity deserving of drowning in a bathtub. One of them was the infamous “Brownie,” Michael P. Brown, who headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which, in fact, drowned when called to respond to Hurricane Katrina. Brownie’s qualification to head FEMA was his service as commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association. By contrast, he replaced James Lee Witt, former President Bill Clinton’s FEMA director. Witt won acclaim for good performance in office. His qualification to head FEMA was his tenure as director of the Arkansas Office of Emergency Services.

In addition to cutting service, conservatives eliminated government regulation. The result for America was the subprime mortgage crisis and credit default swaps, an unregulated risky transaction that helped push the nation’s financial institutions to the brink.

Americans put up $700 billion to bail out those bankers last fall. But the Republicants don’t talk about that when they say, as Republicant Congressman Jerry Lewis of California did on Friday, that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009  is a recipe for bloated government programs that will saddle taxpayers with debt “well, well into the future.”

“Facts are stubborn things,” Mr. Lewis said.

Fact is, Mr. Lewis voted to indebt Americans for $700 billion to bail out banks.

So, clearly, spending American taxpayers’ money is not a problem for him.

Spending it on taxpayers is.

The Recovery and Reinvestment Act contains about $50 billion for shovel-ready road, airport, bridge and other infrastructure projects nationwide that will create construction and manufacturing jobs. The nation’s electricity grid is to be upgraded with $11 billion, creating similar jobs. States will get $54 billion, which will help out Mr. Lewis’ California, now $42 billion in debt. That money can go for highway and school building as well as to prevent layoffs of teachers, firefighters and other state workers.

Altogether, the $790 billion Recovery and Reinvestment bill is designed to create or preserve between 3.5 and 4 million jobs.

When the sky is falling, that’s some shelter for America’s little guys. If President Obama is right and this act succeeds in creating jobs and stimulating the economy, he will have performed a great service for struggling and suffering workers.

He will also have revived what Norquist and Brownie, Carl Rove and Bush tried so hard to waterboard: the concept that government can do good.