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It wasn’t so much a vote as a proclamation of ideology last Thursday when Republicans filibustered Obama’s nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The rebuff had nothing to do with the person, Richard Cordary, who even Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said appeared well qualified.  Rather, it was part of the GOP campaign to hobble the agency created to safeguard borrowers from dodgy payday lenders and predatory mortgage salesmen.

The GOP thwarts regulatory agencies in order to enforce its “you’re on your own” philosophy. That is, each citizen, like an island, fends for himself in a world where the invisible hand of the market serves as regulator. Democrats believe something very different. They espouse the principles set out by President Teddy Roosevelt in his 1910 speech in Osawatomie, Kan., and echoed by President Obama in his address there last week. That is America and Americans are better when citizens work together and watch out for each other, that cooperating invigorates the individual, the economy and the nation, and that primacy is in people and profit is subordinate.

The late Senator Paul Wellstone expressed the essential sentiment most succinctly:

 “We all do better when we all do better.”

Republicans don’t ascribe to that. They want to set up a country where every person is responsible for every aspect of daily life, from ensuring drinking water is safe to reducing workplace hazards. The GOP wants to shred regulations that protect citizens, even eliminate the federal agencies that enforce them. Congressional Republicans have worked to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, a move that would “empower” each citizen to persuade big industrial polluters to limit the particulates, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and lead belching from smokestacks. (more…)

Who is more effective at job creation, Republicans or Democrats?  Republicans like to talk as though they are the experts, but are they?

Here’s a link to a Politifact article detailing which party is better.

Politifact went all the way back to the Truman administration to see which presidents, Republican or Democrat, were better at
creating jobs.  Besides the fact that under the Obama administration job growth has been 300 times that of the Bush administration, jobs
have increased substanially more under Democrat administrations than under Republican ones.

Read and remember.  Then vote for job growth in November.

Leo Toribio
Pittsburgh, PA

Leo Toribio

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Organized Labor is the infrastructure to build the Labor Party tent. It needs to man up to the fact that the tent may have pro-labor but also anti-union people in it while serving the pro-all-working people middle.

The working class would stand together against the two pro-business parties we have now.

Many non-union voter interests now are compatible with organized labor.

It is time.

David Heffelfinger (aka Ben Franklin)

David Heffelfinger
Wichita, Kan.

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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.

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.

Jared Bernstein

By Jared Bernstein

Director of the Living Standards Program, Economic Policy Institute

Most Congressional hearings are not that scintillating. The ones you see on TV, with Roger Clemens testifying about steroids, Ben Bernanke, or some general back from the field, are the exceptions (and let’s face it: they’re pretty predictable too, with important people working hard to not say anything important). Mostly, it’s a group of policy wonks or industry reps talking to members of Congress about some minutiae in a bill that may or may not go anywhere. At their worst, these hearings are scripted events where actors trot out their lines in order to move (or block) some legislation valuable (or hurtful) to their constituents.

At their best, however, a hearing can be a great example of good government in action, and as someone whose been testifying for years, let me tell you about one from last week that struck me as uniquely positive. My point is not simply to report on an unusually useful couple of hours in the halls of government. At the risk of over-extrapolating, I thought I saw a glimpse of what our political future might look like if we make the right choice on Nov. 4. And it provided a glimmer of hope.

The hearing was before the House Committee on Education and Labor, chaired by Rep. George Miller (D-CA). The topic was how to best craft a recovery package to accomplish two things: help those hurt by the troubled economy, and stimulate that economy back to life. The majority party gets to choose most of the witnesses, so this panel featured only one Republican witness and, uncharacteristically, not one Republican member of the committee showed up.

This sounds like glib snark, but I can tell you based on personal experience, that’s one reason why this hearing worked well. Like I said, I’ve done these for years, and ever since Reagan, Republican witnesses in economic hearings almost always have one, and only one, theme: supply-side tax cuts (okay, lately they’ve added “drill, baby, drill,” but that’s a newcomer, and it’s just about as compelling as their tax plan; oh yes, and “deregulation” shows up a lot too, though this is a bit of a non-starter right now, to put it mildly).

If you don’t believe me, read the testimony at the above link by the R witness, William Beach from the conservative Heritage Foundation: high-end tax cuts (extend the Bush cuts, cut the capital gains rate, lower the corporate tax), find more oil, avoid “burdensome regulations.”

That’s almost all they bring to the table, regardless of the evidence, the topic, or outside circumstances. Case in point, this hearing was about a stimulus package that needs to move quickly off the mark, and Beach was pushing tax changes (extending the Bush cuts) that come into play at the end of 2010. It’s the same supply-side agenda the Heritage folks push in good times and bad. Their only tool is a hammer, so it all looks like nails to them. Same with the oil thing. Does Beach not recognize that the price of gas is down well over a dollar nation-wide, yet we’re still mired in recession?

As I wrote last week in this space, ideology that’s impervious to facts is the last thing we need right now, and the fact that such thinking was vastly under-represented was one reason why this hearing worked.

The hearing began with testimony by Dana Stevens, a woman from New Jersey who’s been unemployed since July. Since then she’s applied for 143 jobs and gotten only seven interviews. She’s an extremely impressive, articulate person, and she’s even willing to take a pay cut, within reason given her financial needs.

But there’s just no work out there. Hiring freezes are pervasive. Back in January of last year there were 1.5 job seekers per available job. Now that ratio has doubled–it’s 3 to 1. Add in the six million people who are working fewer hours than they desire, and one in nine persons is un- or underemployed.

Economist Ron Blackwell and I presented facts like these, along with our views re the magnitude and composition of a recovery package. In order to offset a recession that is likely to drive unemployment to at least 8% by the end of next year (it’s about 6% now), I think we need to spend roughly $50 billion to help strapped states, $50 billion on infrastructure (more on that below), and $50 billion on extending both unemployment insurance and food stamps. Beyond that, it might be useful to boost household incomes with direct payments, but that was the exclusive thrust of the last round of stimulus, and we should deemphasize such payments this round. Checks can help for awhile, no question, but people need jobs, and that’s why many of us are bullish on infrastructure investment right now.

Here’s where Professor Robert Pollin’s testimony comes in. Do yourself a favor, and give this one a read (same link as above). It’s a detailed road map of a vital public investment agenda, with an emphasis on green technologies. There are the usual candidates–schools, water management, roads, bridges–as well as building retrofits, smart grid electrical systems, and renewable energy. Moreover, Pollin shows that in terms of jobs, these investments get you a bigger bang for the buck than tax cuts, military spending, or “drill, baby, drill” (see his figure 1).

In a similar vein, Chris Hansen made a solid case for including the expansion of high speed broadband networks in an infrastructure agenda, providing access to areas that are still off this grid, a serious economic and social disadvantage in today’s world.

(A related point in my testimony is that infrastructure investment has often been dismissed in the context of stimulus as having too long a lead time. Not so. There are tons of productive projects in all of these areas ready to go, if not already underway but starved for resources.)

But beyond the good information exchange, what stood out in this hearing was the discussion between the members of Congress and the panelists. These exchanges can too often reduce to partisans getting “experts” to confirm their biases: “Mr. X, you noted in your testimony that 2+2=5. Could you elaborate?”

In this case, members were genuinely seeking our insights into how to structure a recovery package, and providing their own amplification as to what parts made most sense to them. Reps. George Miller and Lynn Woolsey, clearly motivated by the deteriorating economy and rising unemployment, wanted to hear about ways we might extend unemployment insurance benefits to meet the needs of people like Ms. Stevens, including upping the “replacement rate”–the share of salary replaced by UI benefits (it rarely breaks 50%; I think now’s a good time to go up to 70%, at least temporarily).

John Sarbanes (D-MD) picked up on a great Pollin point about “crowding in”–how sometimes government investment creates untapped markets that later draws in private investment. The internet is, of course, a classic example, and green technologies create the same possibilities, with even greater potential benefits.

Other members, like Dave Loebsack (D-IA) stressed how the recession is cutting into their state’s revenues, and wanted to learn more about the actions states were taking. Unlike the Feds, states have to balance their budgets, and they’re actively cutting services (and jobs), as well as raising fees and taxes, actions that will only serve to deepen the recession. Thus, unlike the earlier stimulus package, this one must include state fiscal relief.

Like I said, I don’t want to get all starry-eyed here, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the dynamics of this hearing–creative, open-minded thinking about solving problems in a progressive, even green, way–might be a tiny harbinger of a new era, where government actually works to solve problems, not create them. Is this, I asked myself, the way things might operate in an Obama era?

I know, this election is by no means over, and despite the favorable polls, I’m not one iota complacent about the outcome. It’s just that this hearing revealed what may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Unless that’s the headlights of the Straight-talk Express headed right for us.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

When presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his intended vice presidential running mate, those of us in the lower 48 learned that her husband, Todd Palin, not only was a champion snowmobiler and commercial fisherman but also a steelworker.
At the press conference, Palin trotted him out, stressing his steelworker credentials. Here’s a good union man, she emphasized.
But his United Steelworker card doesn’t include an automatic auxiliary membership for her. Or her running mate at the top of the Republican ticket, McCain, whose record on labor issues would require some serious penance before he could ever earn a union card.
John McCain opposes the Employee Free Choice Act, which would enable workers to collectively bargain and secure contracts with corporations more easily, like the employment contracts CEOs demand to have with corporations. McCain has jeopardized retirement by championing Bush’s privatization scheme for social security. McCain has voted for every American-job-killing free trade deal, without regard to human rights or environmental standards. And he has proposed, instead of providing health insurance for all Americans, a plan to tax the insurance of those lucky enough to still have employer-provided coveraage.

Soul mate
McCain has characterized Palin, 44, as his political soul mate. How he determined that is unclear since he met her only twice before selecting her, and her resume for VP is paltry, at best. She served two terms on Wasilla City Council and two terms as Wasilla Mayor. At that time, Wasilla had about 5,000 residents. She also served as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a job she quit in less than a year. She ran for lieutenant governor and lost. While seeking the governor’s post, she said she supported the bridge-to-nowhere, a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska to an island of approximately 50 residents across the Tongass Narrows.
Then, after Congress squelched the bridge, she said, as she put it, “No thanks,” to the “earmark.”  Despite all that, when Congress offered Alaska about half the money from that “earmark” that John McCain claims to have so opposed, Palin took it and spent it on other road projects.
While mayor, she lowered property taxes, before she raised sales taxes. She hired a Washington lobbyist to secure some of those McCain-dreaded “earmarks” for little Wasilla, a task it succeeded in doing. She left the town with millions in debt and a dispute that ultimately cost it $1.3 million to settle over ownership of land on which she wanted its $15 million sports complex built.

Plucking Palin
Even the New York Times in an editorial Wednesday questioned McCain’s judgment in plucking Palin from a state with a population (670,053) roughly the same as the twin cities’ where the Republicans are meeting: “If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov Sarah Palin of Alaska.”
The workers of America cannot afford bad judgment after eight years of economy-crushing, debt-creating, Bush-Cheney. Unemployment, the national debt, inflation, home foreclosures and gas prices are all rising at demoralizing rates, while Bush and McCain continue to proclaim the economy is basically strong and any recession is all in workers’ heads, just some sort of psychological problem. Maybe that’s true — if you’re a multimillionaire like Bush and McCain. Or if you’ve got seven homes in which to hide from the reality of everyday American life like McCain.
Ms. Palin needs to stop trotting out her husband as an exhibit until she explains her positions on workers’ issues. Just exactly where does she stand on the Employee Free Choice Act?
Her family has benefitted from her husband’s ability to be part of a labor union. Workers in labor organizations earn higher wages and are more likely to have pensions and health insurance. Because he works for BP and is a member of the USW, which collectively bargained a good contract for workers at BP, Todd Palin earns a good wage and has good health insurance. The Employee Free Choice Act would make it easier for other Americans to join unions and earn better money and obtain health insurance. Polling shows that 70 percent of Americans support for the Employee Free Choice Act.
Inquiring minds want to know, Ms. Palin. Where do you stand on Employee Free Choice? Where do you stand on privatization of social security? Where do you stand on job-killing free trade?
Are you with McCain – and against workers – on these issues? If so, you need to stop using your husband’s membership in the USW as a prop, because then his union card cannot possibly cover up your or John McCain’s worker-savaging positions.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Presidential race
While some want to paint this year’s presidential race in black and white, for middle class America, it’s all about the green.
Greenbacks.
Team colors are clearly visible: The Republicans’ – green and gold. That’s obvious when their nominee, John McCain, is one of the richest men in the Senate. He’s so wealthy that when recently asked by a reporter how many homes he owned, he just couldn’t recall.
Seven, Senator, seven.
When schlepping around Arizona on the campaign trail got tough, his wife surprised him with the gift of a private jet to ease the sojourn. When asked to define wealthy, he said, for him, a guy whose worth has been estimated at $100 million, rich is $5 million.
Team colors for the chosen Democratic candidates, by contrast, are basic red, white and blue. Presumptive nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s boyhood family struggled on food stamps for a time. His chosen vice president, Sen. Joe Biden, grew up in hard scrapple Scranton and his family shared quarters with in-laws during tough times. Biden has long been ranked as one of the least wealthy members of the senate.

Kitchen tables

Biden, long a personal friend of McCain’s, noted the economic difference in his speech in Illinois Saturday after Obama introduced him as his selection for vice president. While many Americans sit down at their kitchen tables to worry over bills, Biden said, John McCain, by contrast, would just have to worry over which of his seven kitchen tables to sit down at – not over an actual bill.
Ah, the frets of the rich. And for them — and himself — John McCain wants to preserve Bush’s tax cuts.
Those tax cuts are a considerable part of the budget deficit, and the budget deficit – along with the trade deficit — is a considerable part of the declining confidence in Wall Street.
The Republicans, George Bush, VP Dick Cheney, and McCain, the self-styled “maverick” who voted with Bush-Cheny 95 percent of the time last year and 100 percent this year, took the budget surplus that Democrat Bill Clinton bequeathed them and converted it into a behemoth debt.

$4 gasoline

They took rising employment and sent it down and a burgeoning housing market sent it to bankruptcy. They took a low consumer price index and bought us the highest rate of wholesale inflation in nearly 30 years – 9.8 percent. Think $4-a-gallon gasoline.
Then, just to smack middle class America in the face, they gave the rich tax breaks. ‘Cause multi-millionaires like John and Cindy McCain, with their seven homes and private plane, need a break today.
Greenbacks. Republicans Bush and Cheney put us here, with McCain agreeing all the way. Electing McSame would result in four more years of greenbacks draining out of our wallets.
Obama and Biden didn’t come from the world of wealth that Bush, Cheney and McCain luxuriate in. They have lived the life and felt the feelings of middle class Americans. They know what it is to pay off college and car loans.

Riding the train

Biden rode a train back and forth from Washington to his district home in Delaware, chatting with conductors, never buying a second home and living in pricey D.C. He crawls on the floor to play with his grandkids.
Obama declined top dollar job offers when he graduated Harvard Law School to return to Chicago to become a civil rights lawyer and organize voter registration drives. When he was campaigning in Pennsylvania earlier this year, he wanted pictures of himself feeding a bottle to a calf at a Penn State University dairy so he would have something interesting to tell his little daughters about in their evening telephone call.
Greenbacks. Obama and Biden will help the middle class keep them in their pockets. Because they understand from firsthand experience how difficult it is to get a few there in the first place.