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Mike Elk

 By Mike Elk
Of Campaign for America’s Future

GOP Chairman Michael Steele blasted the Obama administration in a fund-raising email earlier this week for allowing stimulus money designated for clean energy solutions to be spent on overseas companies. Which is interesting, because stimulus money going to overseas firms was the direct result of conservative opposition to attempts to keep that money in America.

Steele wrote:

Obama Promised Recovery Act “Will Create Good Jobs That Pay Well And Can’t Be Shipped Overseas.” (The White House, “Remarks By the President and the Vice President on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” 4/13/09)

REALITY: Recently Distributed Stimulus Funds Going To Foreign Corporations Creating Jobs Overseas. “Nearly half of the $2.4 billion in federal grant money awarded Wednesday to stimulate the U.S. economy and boost the production of hybrid and electric vehicles went to six companies with ties to places as far away as Russia, China, South Korea and France. … But because so few American companies have the necessary technology, much of the money will initially go toward manufacturing electric vehicle batteries overseas.” (Jerry Seper, “Obama Sends Stimulus Aid To Foreign Firms,” The Washington Times, 8/6/09)

Steele is pointing out a fact that United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard noted months ago on CAF’s website:

Of the $1.05 billion in clean energy grants awarded by D.C., $849 million — 84 percent — went to foreign wind companies, according to an analysis by Russ Choma of the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

Gerard, who as president of the nation’s largest industrial union in the country was intimately involved in the negotiations, said :

A strong, broad Buy-American clause in the stimulus bill could have prevented the off-shoring of U.S. tax dollars intended to create jobs for unemployed Americans. My union, the United Steelworkers, and the AFL-CIO pushed hard for that language, and polls showed 86 percent of Americans supported it. Republicans and lobbyists for multinational corporations that wanted to spend U.S. tax money overseas opposed Buy American provisions.
Congress adopted weak, limited Buy American language. Now D.C. exports stimulus dollars to create jobs in foreign countries.

Republicans went all out attacking Buy America as “bad for America”. Republican presidential candidate John McCain went on CBS’s Face the Nation on February 8, 2009:

“I think it has policy changes in it which are fundamentally bad for America. For example, their ‘Buy America’ provision: that’s protectionism, and that did not work in any time in our history.”

As recently as October 2009, GOP Congressional leaders held an event to call for the rollback of Buy America provisions claiming that Buy America provisions were “costing American jobs.”

The truth is, as studies show, infrastructure investment can create by up to 33 percent more jobs when strong Buy America provisions are included.

It’s ironic that Republicans who make a point of using strong rhetoric against Islamo-fascist terrorists go mute as Wall Street economic terrorists attack our country’s manufacturing base by shipping jobs overseas.

Buy America provisions are supported by 86 percent of the American public who thinks American taxpayer money should go to create American jobs. Furthermore, as a recent Gallup/USA Today poll shows, Americans think the best way to create jobs is through protecting manufacturing from foreign threats.

Meanwhile, Steele issues another smoke-and-mirrors press release, hoping that voters won’t recognize that his conservative party is opposed to a policy that is essential to allowing American manufacturing to revive.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele appears to be suffering philosophical identity confusion, you know, like some people experience sexual identity confusion.

He’s got an organization named United STEELE Workers Union, white hardhat emblem and all, collecting members for him on Facebook. It had 255 worldwide as of June 19.

This is disconcerting on so many levels, least of which is that I head the original, authentic United Steelworkers Union (USW). It has, by the way, 1.2 million retired and active members in North America.

Far more importantly, Steele historically has expressed hostility toward unions. When President Obama agreed to help General Motors restructure in bankruptcy, for example, Steele said it was “another handout to the union cronies who helped bankroll his presidential campaign.” Now that there’s a union created in his own image, if Steele slams labor organizations, is he criticizing himself? Has he become a “union crony?”

Steele can perch that white hard hat atop his head, but he’s going to have to labor at learning some hard philosophical lessons before becoming a real steelworker, a true union man.

A union brother or sister knows it’s all for one and one for all. Our union brothers and sisters don’t see themselves as “ownership society” islands. That’s because they know when the sun stops shining, it’s nice to have union siblings to help clean up after the hurricane.

To join, Steele must learn that a union man has his brother’s back; he doesn’t stab him in the back. This may be a tough lesson for the Republican. Consider, for example, what Mark Bergeron, the STEELE Worker Union Facebook group administrator, says on his blog about the party’s 2008 nominee for president:

“How far to the left do we as Conservatives go to satisfy some of our Moderate ( Liberal ) Republicans? What sacrifices will we make to the Moderates? Abortion? Illegal Immiration [sic], a little more Socialism? Less Fiscal Responsibility? My point is that we have already made concessions to these softies and we got John McCain.”

In addition to insulting McCain, that smacks of exclusion. It is the Republican Party wringing itself out, shedding diversity at the insistence of its most conservative, self-appointed, over-amplified leader, Rush Limbaugh. So it has been reduced to little more than wealthy white protestant males — and wannabes. A union, by contrast, is a collective. By nature, then, it is inclusive. This may be a tough one for Steele to accept, considering he refused to stand up to Limbaugh earlier this year when the talk show host insisted he, not Steele, headed the Republican Party.

The STEELE Worker Union Facebook site says the group is interested in organizing. That’s a great first step in the correct direction. An important function of an international union, like the United Steelworkers, is to help employees at individual workplaces organize their local unions. Those efforts in recent years, however, have been thwarted by corporate campaigns of intimidation against union organizers and sympathizers. This is documented in a study called, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organization,” released in May by Cornell University professor, Kate Bronfenbrenner.

Bronfenbrenner, who has researched labor issues for a quarter century, documents employers obstructing unionization by firing union organizers, threatening to close down the shop, cutting wages and benefits, and forcing workers to meet one-on-one with supervisors who interrogate them to determine whether they support the union. Bronfenbrenner found employers conducted these coercive tactics, many of which are illegal, in the run-up to union elections more frequently than in the past to dissuade workers from voting for unionization.

The upshot is that organizers and union sympathizers risk their livelihoods and corporations are increasingly killing unions. The Employee Free Choice Act now before Congress would significantly reduce that. It would allow workers — rather than the employer — to decide how to form the union. It would give workers the right to choose whether to form their union by collecting signatures from a majority of the workers or by conducting a secret ballot election. The threat-filled period before balloting could be eliminated, if the workers wanted.

The United Steelworkers union actively and vociferously supports the Employee Free Choice Act. If Michael Steele wants to be a real union man, he must do so as well. I will be waiting to hear from him. If I do, I will be glad to take him under my wing and mentor him. I will make him an Associate Member of the real United Steelworkers union. We will embrace him. Of course, I will warn my male members to be careful not to actually hug him because this is a guy, so touchy about unions, that he even used the word “crazy” to describe civil unions.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

“He’s a real nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody.”

These lyrics to “Nowhere Man,” written and recorded in 1965 by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, describe the Republican Party of 2009. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter rejected that party and returned to his Democratic roots because, even at the age of 79, he’s got plans that go somewhere.

The GOP’s leaders and their inactions have placed the party at the corner of Unpopular and Nowhere. GOP voter registration fell in every western state in 2008, including Colorado where it dropped a whopping 9 percent. That year, the Pew Research Center found that voters calling themselves Republicans declined six points over four years, for the lowest percentage of self-identified Republican voters in 16 years of Pew polling.

Pennsylvania voters, not always in step, were this time. More than 200,000 Republicans switched registration to Democrat in 2008. Arlen Specter, who was a Democrat the first 16 years of his adult life, this spring joined those fellow Pennsylvania Republicans and returned to his Democratic roots.

The Republican response typifies why voters continue to convert the GOP to D on their party membership cards. The Republican National Committee posted on its web site nasty automatic e-mails to Specter that can be sent with the click of a mouse. Mean spirited is bad enough, but these lack a certain introspection.

One is supposed to be the White House teleprompter welcoming Specter to the Democratic Party. The text says, “Welcome to the Democrats. I look forward to working together to borrow more money from China.” Another is supposed to be a welcome from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, saying, “You’ll love how much we can spend taxpayer money.” Both are blind to a fact that taxpayers clearly see – Republican majorities during the Bush administration spent so much that they created the largest budget deficits known to man or nation, compelling excessive borrowing from China.

He’s as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all? – Nowhere Man

The leader of Specter’s new party – President Barack Obama – stood before the American people on his 100^th day in office, assessing progress and promising to press forward to aid people in need during the worst recession since the Great Depression.

He spoke of accomplishments, such as the stimulus bill that will create or save 3.5 million jobs, the extension of health insurance for 11 million children whose parents work full-time, and a measure to help homeowners refinance their mortgages. He talked of changing the tone of foreign policy from threats to diplomacy, forbidding torture and closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

This Democrat has his sights set on the next hundreds and hundreds of days and pledged to continue working on priorities he established during his campaign, including health care reform and clean energy development.

Even those who disagree with him know he’s got plans. He’s going places.  This guy’s definitely not at the corner of Unpopular and Nowhere.

He has offered to bring Republicans along with him, to negotiate with them, to include them in the process. But they’ve smacked him down at every turn. They’re not just fighting with him, either. They’re also bickering among themselves. And it isn’t pretty.

There was the infamous back and forth between GOP mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh who is calling for the president of his country to fail, and GOP chairman Michael Steele, who made himself famous by promising an “off the hook” public relations blitz “to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.”  After Obama’s chief of staff said Limbaugh was the representative of the GOP, Steele shot back saying he was the head of the party, adding that Limbaugh was incendiary and “ugly.” Limbaugh responded with a rant on radio that Steele was unfit to lead, to which Steele responded by crawling on his belly to apologize to the “ugly” one.  There’s some inspiring leaders for you!

Now a group of Republicans has split from the RNC, calling itself the National Council for a New America. They contend they are upset that the GOP has failed to provide alternatives to the Democrats’ plans. The group includes former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. “It’s no secret that we’re in a seriously troubling time for the Republicans,” said Mike Murphy, a strategist who has advised Romney and Sen. John McCain.

It’s also seriously troubling that this new cabal, supposedly trying to solve the old group’s problems, called itself National Council for a New America. Clearly they are not satisfied with the current America, the America that is rejecting Republicans. So their plan is to remake America rather than to remake themselves.  Good luck with that.

Actually, there’s a much easier option. Obama described it to Republicans during the press conference on his 100^th day in office. Even with Specter in the Democratic fold and the potential of a 60-vote supermajority for Democrats in the Senate, the President said he would like to work with Republicans. He said the majority will likely rule on core issues. But there are many matters on which Republicans could exert influence if they would come to the table and negotiate in good faith.

Republicans can continue to simply vote NO on everything. They can bicker among themselves and look ridiculous to the American people. They can get nothing done and be the party of “I’m-in-control-NO-I’m-in-control” nonsense. They can continue to lose members and statesmen like Specter. Obama suggested that would be an unwise strategy.

That would be a nowhere strategy.