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Robert Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America's Future

Mitt Romney opened the general election campaign last night in Manchester, New Hampshire, using his acceptance speech to unleash a fierce attack on Barack Obama’s “false promises and failed leadership.”

He said little about his own policies, preferring to contrast his free enterprise vision with what he called Obama’s government-centered vision.

And buoyed by his victory, Romney felt free to issue a clear defense of privilege.

At the heart of the contrast Romney drew with Obama was the big lie. After the absurd charge that under Obama, we will have “effectively ceased to be a free enterprise economy,” Romney made his defense of privilege:

We’ve already seen where this path leads. It erodes freedom. It deadens the entrepreneurial spirit. And it hurts the very people it’s supposed to help. Those who promise to spread the wealth around only ever succeed in spreading poverty.

What world is he living in? In America, extreme levels of inequality have led to economic calamity. The Gilded Age extremes of the 1920s — when the richest 1% owned about 44% of all private wealth — were followed by the Great Depression. The excesses of the Bush years — when the richest 1% owned nearly 40% of all private wealth — were followed by the Great Recession. (more…)

Bill Scher
Online Editor, Campaign for America's Future

Mitt Romney says that anyone who criticizes his record while CEO of Bain Capital is putting “free enterprise on trial.” But this doesn’t make any sense.

I have yet to have seen an argument from anyone on the left or the right criticizing Romney based on the notion that it should be against the law for the owner of a company to be free to try to make a profit by shrinking or closing down businesses.

What’s really on trial here is Mitt Romney. And Mitt Romney put himself on the witness stand.

He’s the one that said his primary qualification to be president is his private sector record, not his public record as governor.

In one the debates last month, Romney compared himself to one of his Republicans rivals as follows:

The real difference, I believe, is our backgrounds. I spent my life in the private sector. I understand how the economy works. And I believe that for Americans to say goodbye to President Obama and elect a Republican, they need to have confidence that the person they’re electing knows how to make this economy work again and create jobs for the American middle class.

That begs the question: what in his “life-long” private sector background tells us about his understanding of the economy?

We know he knows how to make a profit. That’s not nothing. One point for Mitt.

We know he knows how to create a job. But we don’t know he knows how to create net jobs, despite his claims, because his former company won’t tell us its overall record on the net jobs it created or lost.

Now, perhaps it’s not fair to expect him to have created net jobs while running a private equity company. Creating jobs is not their mission. And there are certainly times when a struggling company has to shed jobs to avoid an even worse outcome.

Romney has tried to defend some of the layoffs on his watch by not only making that argument, but adding that his layoffs are was no different than when President Obama laid off workers as part of its successful restructuring of the auto industry.

Putting aside the debate whether Romney is a “vulture capitalist” who aimed to loot companies and not save them, Romney’s making a fair point. But it undercuts his larger case: that he possess some unique knowledge about how the economy works, and President Obama is clueless. One point against Romney.

Furthermore, Romney argued against the initial bailout of the auto industry, which kept it afloat long enough so we wouldn’t sink into a depression, and a restructuring could take place. Seems Obama knew a little bit more about how the economy worked, without ever having run a private equity firm. Two points against Romney.

And even if Romney knows how to create a big-box store chain, we don’t know if Romney knows how to make sure job growth in one area doesn’t kill jobs in another, as what happened when Romney helped create Staples and smaller stationary stores went out of business. Three points against Romney.

Finally, Romney claimed in his New Hampshire victory speech that President Obama “wants to turn America into a European-style social welfare state” while he himself wants to “ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.”

But knowing when to lay people off in order to make a profit does not show understanding of how to provide opportunity for all. Is there something else in Romney’s private background has taught him about providing opportunity? Was he an example of corporate responsibility? Did he reach out to the people that he laid off, or whose business competitors he ran into ground, and devise ways they could keep paying the bills so they could find new opportunities? Did he offer generous severance packages that included health coverage and funds for job training? Did he reach out to bankrupted small business owners and their employees, many of whom certainly would have relevant skills, and offer them jobs in his enterprises?

Point four against.

Perhaps I could look to his public sector experience to find that he understood the value of providing opportunity for all, since he did pass universal health coverage. Except now he says: “repeal ObamaCare.” Which is the same thing as saying “repeal RomneyCare.”

Point five.

Unless Romney wants to open up more about his private sector experience, all we can know about Romney’s record is that he knows how to make a profit for himself, no matter what the cost is to the rest of the economy.

And he will have every right to continue doing that, if he can’t show the public that he knows any other part about building an economy that actually works for everybody.

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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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This piece is re-posted from the Campaign for America’s Future Blog, OurFuture.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

It’s illegal in America now to buy or sell a human being, but a recorded telephone conversation between a Republican governor and a guy he thought was a billionaire benefactor shows that it’s still possible to own a politician.

Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker didn’t have time to talk to Democratic leaders or union officials about his anti-union legislation – a proposal that has incited protests by tens of thousands for more than a week in Madison. But he jumped on the phone for 20 minutes this week when told the caller was billionaire David Koch, who was Walker’s second largest campaign contributor, who provided $1 million to a GOP fund to attack Walker’s opponent and who bankrolls radical libertarian organizations and the Tea Party.

Republicans like Walker, owned by billionaires like Koch, are fulfilling demands from corporate interests that government “free” enterprise by slashing corporate taxes and regulation. Over the past three years, America has suffered the consequences of a government under-funded after tax breaks to the rich and under-performing after years of lax regulation. The result: a growing federal deficit, the Wall Street collapse, the BP oil spill and the deaths of 29 Upper Big Branch miners. Still, Republicans want more government atrophy. That would leave only one restraint on corporate control of the economy, environment and government.

That one restraint is labor unions. A union is workers using their constitutionally-guaranteed freedom to assemble, the right to get together as a group, in this case a labor organization, to negotiate collectively with employers for better wages, benefits and working conditions.

Workers who gathered together in unions over two centuries in this country have succeeded in raising their wages, as well as the wages of non-union workers in competing industries. Union workers secured improved working conditions so fewer were killed on the job. And they achieved creation of the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration, which protects the safety of all workers. Over the decades, unions played a major role is obtaining legislation barring child labor, standardizing the 40-hour work week, and creating both Social Security and Medicare.

Similarly, studies show union successes enhance the lives of all workers in a state. In anti-union states, the average worker earns $5,333 less a year, the proportion of people without health insurance is 21 percent higher and the rate of workplace death is 51 percent higher. In addition, there’s evidence that union workers improve quality. Currently, after receiving an education from union teachers, Wisconsin youngsters collectively score second highest in the nation on the ACT/SAT college admission tests. By contrast, the five states barring teacher unions rank at the bottom of the pack: South Carolina dead last at 50^th; North Carolina, second last at 49^th; Georgia third from last at 47^th; Texas fourth from last at 47^th, and Virginia ever so slightly better at 44^th.

Still, Wisconsin Gov. Walker wants to destroy his state’s teachers unions. Two studies determined that public workers, that is those employed by governments such as teachers,  firefighters and police officers, earn less than their counterparts in the private sector when both benefits and education are factored into the calculation. It wasn’t union workers, in the public or the private sector, who caused states’ financial crises. That was gambling on Wall Street, which ravaged the economy. Still, Republican governors across the country are demanding that government workers pay.

The government workers in Wisconsin already agreed to accept Walker’s financial demands – that they pay more for their pensions and health care. This negates Walker’s contention that this dispute is about the budget. The governor is demanding more than those financial concessions. He wants the legislature to cripple the unions’ ability to bargain for improvements in the future. In his “budget repair bill,” he would strip government workers of their right to negotiate over working conditions and benefits. They’d be able to discuss wages but could never get an increase above inflation.

This is union busting. At the demand of corporate interests. And Walker is joined by Republicans in Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and others in attempting to do it, both to private and public sector workers.

This is not about money. It’s about controlling America. Corporations have bought Republicans, who now chant the corporate mantra that government coddles its citizens with the likes of mine and food safety rules.

Walker’s eagerness to talk to David Koch illustrates this. Koch and his brother Charles own the second largest privately-held company in America. Only the fortunes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates exceed the Kochs’ $35 billion. They’ve used that money to finance the supposedly-grassroots Tea Party and conservative groups like the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (APF) that have funneled money into anti-reform policies – including attempts to reverse environmental and health care legislation.

It’s a giant circle. Koch got Walker elected. The Koch-backed Tea Party now rallies in Madison against the public employees. The Koch-financed APF bought $320,000 in TV ads against the public workers. Other Koch-financed GOP governors are sending letters of support to Walker. In his few weeks as governor, Walker passed legislation to lower tax rates for and limit damage awards against businesses like the Kochs’. In addition, tucked into the anti-union bill is a provision that would enable Walker to sell the state’s power plants to the Kochs without bids or state agency review.

Corporations are accomplishing their goal of shriveling government to the point of ineffectiveness so “enterprise” is “free” to run rogue. Now with their purchased politicians, corporations are trying to do the same to unions – the only organization other than government that has traditionally effectively defended working Americans.

In the recorded conversation between Walker and a liberal blogger posing as Koch, Walker accepted an offer of a vacation trip from the “billionaire” if he “crushed” the public employee unions and said his effort was to get “our freedoms back.”

That’s exactly right. This is a contest between the excesses of “free” enterprise and the constitutionally-protected freedom of assembly. And getting “our freedoms back” means wresting them back from corporations.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

The Chamber of Commerce is rolling out its “jobs and economy” political initiative today. As Politico reports, the blitz is “designed to drive voters toward ’5 Questions to Ask Your Candidates,’ to be distributed by mail and online to millions of voters.”

Here are the five, accompanied by five alternatives tied to reality rather than the Chamber’s ideological phantasmagoria:

1. Do you believe that our free enterprise system is currently threatened?

Do you believe that entrenched corporate interests are blocking reforms vital to our country’s future? (more…)

Berry Craig

By Berry Craig
Author of “True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo”

The snow-softened rubble of the Continental General Tire plant at Mayfield, Ky., reminds me of a scene in “New in Town.” We rented the movie from a video store the other night.

Lucy Hill, played by Renee Zellweger, is a high-powered corporate executive from sunny Miami. She’s been sent in snowy wintertime to a small Minnesota community similar to Mayfield, my hometown, first to downsize, then close, a food processing plant that her company owns. Plant secretary Blanche Gunderson, played by Siobhan Fallon, accidentally finds a list of workers Hill plans to lay off. She gently confronts Hill.

“I made that a long time ago,” Hill protests. “I made that list before I even knew you.”

“It’s OK to pull the rug out from under folks as long as it’s nobody that you know?” Gunderson replies. “It’s OK because we’re just silly Podunk Minnesotans, right?  We talk funny and we ice fish and we scrapbook. We drag Jesus into regular conversation. We’re not cool like you, right? So we don’t matter.”

German-owned Continental finished pulling the rug out from under Mayfield three years ago. Our economy hasn’t recovered from the loss of the plant. It might not ever. Opened in 1960 by the U.S. company General Tire, the plant produced car and truck tires. Most went to auto plants in Detroit and elsewhere for new vehicles. At one time, the Mayfield factory provided jobs for some 2,200 union and 400 salaried employees.

In 1987, Continental bought General Tire, which ultimately became Continental Tire North America. In 2007, Continental shut the Mayfield factory after several months of drawing down production and laying off workers. A salvage firm bought the plant and is demolishing it for scrap.

I wonder if Continental figured Mayfield plant workers were “just silly Podunk” Kentuckians who talk funny? It doesn’t get nearly cold enough to ice fish in the Bluegrass State. But scrapbooking and talking Jesus are common in these parts.

Continental claimed it had to close the Mayfield plant. The company said the factory was too old, too outmoded and had the highest production costs of any of its North American factories.

The plant union, United Steelworkers Local 665, tried to help Continental keep the plant going, says Terry Beane, who was the last president of Local 665. The union offered to extend our labor agreement and commit to workforce restructuring, if the company would make an equal commitment to invest in the plant and this community.

Beane and Wayne Chambers, the plant’s last vice president, even met with Continental executives. Said Beane:

The Germans looked me in the eye. They looked Wayne in the eye. They said they appreciated our comments on good old Mayfield. They also said:

“We are a global company, and we are going to build our tires wherever we want and as cheaply as we can.”

“Wherever” meant low-wage countries overseas or nonunion Continental facilities stateside, Chambers said.

Nothing else in “New in Town” reminded me of what happened to the Mayfield plant. In the movie, the workers end up buying their factory and running it themselves.

The Hill character goes with the workers. She’ll be plant manager and apparently the new bride of Ted Mitchell, a union official and widower played by Harry Connick Jr. You get the idea that Lucy, Ted, Blanche and everybody else are going to live happily ever after.

I’ve never heard of a real corporate executive who had a conscience attack and sided with workers at a plant he or she was about to downsize or shut. I don’t know of any members of Local 665 who have found better jobs than the ones they had at the factory.

Chambers works part time for the Steelworkers helping former plant employees get their health benefits. Beane fills snack machines for a local vending company. The tire factory, which won awards from car manufacturers for quality tires, is fast becoming heaps of crushed concrete and snapped off steel girders. It looks like images of bombed-out World War II buildings you see on the Military Channel on TV.

Every day, cranes with red, yellow and lime-green arms knock down more of the factory, which sprawled over several acres. The crane arms bob up and down like the bald heads of buzzards picking at road kill on busy, four-lane U.S. 45 North, which runs past the plant site.

Says Chambers:

People worked at the plant from all over western Kentucky and even Tennessee. Now all those good jobs are gone. It’s just like in the Depression.

Chambers knows Mayfield is not the only town that is minus a big plant. “All across the country, people are in the same bad shape,” he said. “It’s all because of corporate greed. These big companies just want to make all the money they can. They ship our jobs out of the country and don’t care who gets hurt.”

What Continental did was legal, thanks to right-wing Republicans and to some “Blue Dog Democrats,” most of them from Southern right-to-work states. They’re always glad to keep government and unions “off the back” of Big Business.

Big corporations and their friends in politics, the pulpit and the media, call busting unions and shipping jobs and production abroad or to “right to work” for less states “free enterprise.” (The “free enterprisers” also blame “greedy unions” when they close unionized plants.) When conservatives say “free enterprise,” they mean union free. They also mean free of meaningful government regulations that do things like safeguard the lives and limbs of workers on the job, protect consumers against dangerous products and shield the environment against pollution that can make us sick or even kill us.

Heaven help the republic, “free enterprisers” declare, if government does anything significant on behalf of “silly Podunk” workers against the avarice of big corporations like Continental.

Go ahead and slam me as a “socialist.” But I’d like to see Congress slap a hefty tax on companies—foreign-owned or domestic—that move plants from the United States to low-wage countries. I’d like to see a law passed that would give workers a real say in how their companies operate, like workers have in Sweden, whose workforce is nearly 70 percent unionized. (Count me in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act, too.)

A more accurate name for “free enterprise” is “social responsibility free enterprise.” Continental didn’t feel any responsibility toward its employees or to our town, indeed to our region. Profit, not people or the communities where they live, mattered most with the company. Of course, there are dozens of other corporations like Continental, which closed another unionized ex-General Tire plant in Charlotte, N.C.

Chambers and Beane won’t have Continental tires on their vehicles. Nor will I and many others in and around Mayfield. As Chambers notes:

The tires [Continental is]…shipping to this country aren’t any cheaper to the consumer. Sometimes, they cost even more.

He cites a newspaper advertisement for a tire store in Paducah, near Mayfield.

It was in the Paducah paper. There were five different brands in the ad. Size for size, Continentals were the most expensive.

Scorn me as “naïve,” or as a “bleeding heart,” too. But I don’t see how downsizers and plant closers can live with themselves. I guess that makes me “just another Podunk” working stiff unwise in the ways of “free enterprise.”

Admittedly, I don’t “drag Jesus into everyday conversation” very often. But I thank the Good Lord that the basics of my Presbyterian upbringing have stuck with me to age 60. I try hard to live by what Christians call the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (The same principle is also found in other faiths.)

Five days a week, I drive one or the other of my American-made cars past the tire plant going to and from the community college in Paducah where I teach history. It saddens me to see less and less of the plant standing each time I go by. I know the Good Book says we’re supposed to love people who harm us. But I also get angry when I see Continental’s handiwork.

The Continental bosses, who make big money, live in big houses and drive big cars, probably don’t give Mayfield a thought. But they ought to visit our town, drive out Highway 45 and watch the rubble rise. They also could tool around town and see the empty store buildings and the open spaces on our court square where other stores have been torn down.

The “Conti” brass could bring publicists from the PR division of Continental Tire North America, which is headquartered, not coincidentally, in South Carolina, a “right to work” state.

The flaks could take pictures of the ruins of the Mayfield plant for one of their glossy-paged annual reports for stockholders. After all, what happened where I live was good old American “free enterprise.”

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Berry Craig is a member of AFT Local 6010

Richard Trumka

 By Richard Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

Unions are popularly known as “the folks who brought you the weekend.” In contrast, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has the distinction of trying to take away the weekend–along with overtime pay, the minimum wage, Buy America rules, workers’ freedom to form unions, child labor standards….The list is long and ugly.

So it’s farcical that today the Chamber launched a campaign estimated to run in the tens of millions of dollars to promote job creation.

The Chamber’s campaign originally started out as an attack against financial regulation–until the Chamber found out how strongly U.S. taxpayers support reigning in Big Banks and the financial industry’s widespread shady practices. So the Chamber conveniently changed the packaging to purportedly focus on jobs, which in fact the American people desperately need.

Look at who accompanied the Chamber suits while they were announcing their Orweillian-named “free enterprise campaign.” As Sam Stein reported here:

Many of the individuals featured on Wednesday are long-standing donors to Republican candidates and groups that have fought efforts to enhance regulation. And, in one case, the business leader appearing alongside [Thomas] Donohue to decry the interference of government in the market place received business through the benefit of government contracts.

Yet, while millions of America’s workers struggle to find jobs in an economy where there are more than six workers searching for every one job, the Chamber repeatedly opposed extending unemployment insurance. Can’t have government interference in the marketplace, after all. Or aid to jobless workers. The same workers the Chamber’s smoke-and-mirrors campaign is supposed to be all about.

The Chamber also is joining with Big Banks and financial giants to try and kill a proposed agency that would protect U.S. consumers from being preyed upon by unscrupulous banks, mortgage lenders and many of the same financial institutions that helped create our nation’s economic disaster. The Obama administration’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which this week is being considered in the House Financial Services Committee, would regulate products such as credit cards and home loans, while ensuring the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission oversaw the $450 trillion “derivatives” market that sunk the world economy.

The Chamber is spending $2 million in attack ads, claiming that the new agency would hamstring even your local butcher from extending you credit for a week. It’s the same sorry effort at deception and outright lies that the health insurance industry now is trying to pull in the debate over health care reform. Tell enough lies and hope someone believes you.

As President Obama said in response to the Chamber’s distortion:

“We’ve made clear that only businesses that offer financial services would be affected by this agency. I don’t know how many of your butchers are offering financial services,” Obama said to laughter.

The Chamber is so twisted up in deception it seems unable to even provide accurate membership numbers. Writing in Mother Jones this week, David Corn points to a big discrepancy between the Chamber’s public membership numbers and reality.

In testimony before Congress, statements to the press, and on its website, the Chamber claims to represent “3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.” In reality, the number is probably closer to 200,000.

Not sure if the 200,000 includes Apple Inc., Pacific Gas & Electric and the other giant corporations that recently have pulled their membership from the Chamber because of its draconian stand on climate change.

The Chamber’s so-called “free enterprise” campaign has been tried before. After World War II, the National Association of Manufacturers led a similar such effort. That campaign to sell capitalism to U.S. consumers incurred the derision of no less than the editors of Fortune magazine, who found similar sentiments among business executives represented on the boards of the business associations that supposedly represented them.

In dismissing the campaign as ludicrous, one such executive described it this way:

The best way we can demonstrate the importance of Free Enterprise is to make it work.

It’s clearly not working now. And although the Chamber may try to wrap itself in the shiny trappings of a feel-good campaign, its repeated attacks on consumers and workers demonstrate who the Chamber stands for: Wall Street not Main Street.