Leo W. Gerard Archive (Page 5)

I went to Washington, D.C., last week to ask trade experts and lawmakers to stop the relentless, lawless, callous dumping of Chinese steel, aluminum, paper, rubber, glass, chemicals and other products, which has closed mills, killed jobs, destroyed lives, devastated American communities and imperiled national security.

American steel is made in the most efficient, cost-effective mills in the world by the most skilled, productive workers anywhere. That’s a fact. It’s a fact that steel executives testified to last week in hearings conducted by members of Congress and trade law enforcers. We want the trade enforcers and Congress to stop the dumping and to force China to dramatically cut its steel production because China has kept none of its promises over the past seven years to voluntarily do so. In fact, it has continuously increased production.

Grandma skips meals. Her house is always cold. She barely skimps by, subsisting on just Social Security because of a bunch of pension-killing CEOs and self-dealing financial “advisers.”

The U.S. Labor Department offered some rules last week to help grandma with half the reason she’s got no pension or 401(k) retirement account to help pay those heating bills. The regulations will require financial advisers to put their clients’ interests first, instead of their own.

That’s good, but working people wouldn’t be messing with flimflam financial advisers if corporations hadn’t squirmed out of providing traditional pensions and stuffed all of the money instead into the pockets of CEOs. Over the past three decades, corporations virtually eliminated secure pensions, forced workers into risky, self-pay plans and handed hundreds of millions in tax-free retirement benefits to the top dogs. Pensions aren’t dead; they’re just exclusive now. 

For years, Republicans have kept a gambit going where they gin up hate for political gain.

They condemn marriage equality. They throw a hissy fit about what bathroom transgender people use. They try every dirty trick in the book to prevent black people from voting. They blame undocumented immigrants for crime and unemployment. They actually suggest armed patrols of American Muslim communities.

And then something unexpected happened. Corporations started getting squeamish about all that hate. Big, burly, traditionally GOP-donating corporations! Corporations warned some governors that they’d withdraw investment if the states didn’t reverse gay-bashing legislation. And now corporations are telling Republicans they’re not so sure they’ll pony up for the 2016 GOP convention because they don’t want to be associated with the Republican candidates’ hate mongering. Hate may have brought the GOP a load of publicity but it lost the party a bushel of bucks. 

Senate Republicans are flipping off the President of the United States by refusing to conduct a confirmation hearing for his nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

By doing this, the majority party in the Senate is saying it doesn’t acknowledge that Barack Obama is the legitimate, twice-elected U.S. President with the right and duty under the U.S. Constitution to nominate justices to fill vacancies on the high court.

Just as significantly, by doing this, Republicans are refusing to accept the decision of 65 million Americans who went to the polls in November of 2012 and re-elected Barack Obama as U.S. President. President Obama is the first commander in chief since 1956 to win 51 percent of the vote twice. Republicans are thumbing their noses at those citizens, the majority, who voted for President Obama. The GOP is expressing deep derision for the American democratic process by obstructing the duly elected President of the United States from fulfilling his Constitutional obligations. 

Last year, free trade hammered Michigan’s 11^th Congressional District, located between Detroit and Flint, killing manufacturing, costing jobs and crushing dreams.

It’s not over, either. Another 11^th District company, ViSalus Inc., told the state it would eliminate 87 jobs as of last Saturday, slicing its staff by nearly 400 since 2013 when ViSalus was the second-largest direct sales firm in the state.

The numbers are staggering. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a report last week showing that America’s $177.9 billion trade deficit in 2015 with the 11 other countries in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal caused 2 million job losses nationwide.

This trade deficit reduced jobs in every U.S. congressional district except two, EPI said, but Michigan’s 11th had the ignoble distinction of suffering more as a share of total employment than any other district in the country. It was 26,200 jobs. Just in 2015. It was tech workers in January and teachers in July and tool makers in August and auto parts builders in October.

Manipulation of money killed those jobs. It works like this: Foreign countries spend billions buying American treasury bonds. That strengthens the value of the dollar and weakens foreign currencies. When a country’s currency value drops, it acts like a big fat discount coupon on all of its exports to the United States. And it serves simultaneously as an obscene tax on all U.S. exports to that country.   

Among the TPP countries, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan are known currency manipulators, and Vietnam appears to be following their example. EPI found that currency manipulation is the most important cause of America’s massive trade deficits with TPP countries. Trade deficits mean products are shipped to the United States rather than made in the United States. The math is simple. A drop in Asian currency means a drop in U.S. jobs.

It’s lights out in Lorain on March 31. The town’s steel mill, site of a new electric arc furnace and $120 million investment, had given 1,200 Ohioans good middle-class jobs this time last year.  

But by April, a relentless avalanche of underpriced Chinese steel will have shoved all but a few of those workers into the street.

The same is true of steelworkers in Granite City, Ill., Lone Star, Texas, and Gary, Ind., and aluminum workers in New Madrid, Mo., Hannibal, Ohio, and Hawesville, Ky. It’s true of glass workers and paper workers in small towns across America.

The same catastrophe is slamming small towns across Europe. ArcelorMittal cited the Chinese avalanche when it closed its steel mill near Bilbao in northern Spain last month. Tata Steel cut 1,050 jobs earlier this month from its Port Talbot plant in South Wales. Two weeks ago, 5,000 steel and other workers and managers from 17 European nations gathered in Brussels to protest overwhelming, underpriced Chinese imports.

China makes too much steel. And many other commodities. By providing government subsidies and other supports like currency manipulation that are illegal under international trade regulations, China sells those products overseas at prices below production cost, undercutting fair market manufacturers like U.S. Steel and Republic Steel in Lorain. Too much has been good for China until now. Now it wants “market economy” status in the World Trade Organization. So, suddenly, it has announced it will reduce its excessive steel production. That will cost 400,000 Chinese steelworkers their jobs. It turns out that too much is terrible for Chinese workers and Chinese towns as well. 

One percenters have it all, extra houses, extra cars, even an exclusive legal defense if they kill, “affluenza,” to keep them out of jail.

But until last week, they felt unfairly denied access to the benefits of social welfare organizations, United Way, Habitat for Humanity and the like. Now, these are rich people, so they wanted special social welfare groups, ones that would solely benefit rich people. And that’s exactly what they got.  

The Internal Revenue Service gave it to them. The IRS declared that an association called Crossroads GPS is a nonprofit social welfare group. That makes Crossroads GPS a sibling to agencies like Little Sisters of the Poor, the American Red Cross, and the Humane Society. Except that Crossroads, spawned by Republican strategist Karl Rove, spends every clandestine million dollars it collects to benefit the rich, not to help hurricane victims or homeless veterans or abandoned puppies. 

A century ago, Carl Sandburg dubbed Chicago the City of Big Shoulders: “hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler; stormy, husky brawling.”

All of this was true of America itself as well: Nation of big shoulders. The United States was a brawny country that would intervene to help win World War I and later quickly retool factories to serve as munitions mills to win World War II.  Now, though, as America’s tool makers and freight car builders are furloughed, their factories shuttered and offshored, America is wasting. Ill-conceived free trade deals are reducing it to a nation of stooped shoulders.

The newest proposed deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), signed in New Zealand last week by representatives of its 12 member states, would further enfeeble American manufacturing. The first of the ilk, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), devastated U.S. manufacturing. Allowing China into the World Trade Organization and the bad trade deals that followed NAFTA all pummeled American manufacturing when it was already down.

From cookies to car parts, factories fled America for places like China and Mexico. There, corporations pay workers a pittance and pollute virtually penalty-free. CEOs and shareholders roll in the resulting royal-sized profits. Meanwhile, formerly middle-class American workers and their families suffer. Communities bereft of sustaining mills collapse. And the United States atrophies, losing more and more of those once-bulky industrial shoulders.

Donald Trump dares to say out loud what many people secretly think.

It’s a dark secret some people never share because they know it’s so offensive. Sometimes they say it only when they feel safe, when they’re among like-minded family members or with friends trying to drown financial fear in mugs of beer.

Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, talked to white workers in hardscrabble communities in Pennsylvania and Ohio over the past two months and found “huge,” as Donald Trump would put it, support for the Republican frontrunner, even among Democrats. Backers said they admired Trump for speaking his mind. What they really meant was that Trump spoke their minds. As one woman put it, “He says what most of us are thinking.” 

Americans are cash-strapped and fearful. They’ve been working hard, following the rules and falling behind. They’re looking for someone to blame. That’s when they think of “the other,” the black guy, the brown guy, the woman, the Muslim, the gay, the person they don’t really know, the person a little different from them who they suspect must have taken their job or promotion or opportunity.

Like a preacher of prejudice, Trump validates cursing the nation’s marginalized and accusing them of emptying workers’ bank accounts. Trump tells workers to point a finger at undocumented immigrants. He sermonizes excluding desperate refugees based on religion. This high priest of hate urged “Trumpeters” to stomp a Black Lives Matter activist seeking equal rights.

Fight among yourselves! Fight among yourselves, he urges. 

The people of Michigan hired themselves a GOP businessman to be governor in 2011. And what they got was children poisoned by public water in Flint.

That is, what they got was a government run based on GOP business values. 

To line the pockets of CEOs and shareholders, corporations cut corners in ways that frequently end up injuring workers and the public. Think of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster where safety violations killed 29 workers or the Takata airbag fatalities that occurred despite workers voicing safety concerns or the nine deaths and 714 illnesses caused by salmonella-contaminated peanut butter knowingly sold by Peanut Corporation of America.  

So, really, the lead poisoning of Flint children by a government based on Republican business values is no surprise.

Last week, in his state of the state address, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder, formerly a venture capitalist, apologized to the people of Flint who have been drinking water tainted with a known, potent neurotoxin since April of 2014. And then Snyder said, “I will fix it.”  

Lead poisoning is irreversible. It can’t be fixed. In addition, now, two outbreaks of Legionnaires Disease that sickened 87 and killed 10 have been linked to the foul water. There’s no fixing dead people.

The GOP businessman-governor also said in his state of the state address last week: “Government failed you.” That’s exactly what Republicans want. They want government to fail so that they can justify crushing it, eliminating much of what it does for people and turning over the rest to private business, which profits by cutting corners the way Peanut Corporation of America did. 

Then, when it all falls apart like it did in Flint, it’s amazing how quick those Republicans put their hands out for a federal bailout. That’s what Snyder did. He’s a venture capitalist, after all. That’s the Wall Street way. 

By Fred Redmond, International Vice President for Human Affairs 

The GOP debate last week featured more immigrant bashing with the party’s front-runner, Donald Trump, reasserting his plan to construct a wall – this one a religious barrier preventing Muslims from getting into the country.

Trump has mocked a disabled journalist and Asian speech patterns, demonized undocumented immigrants as rapists and approved violence against a Black Lives Matter protester.  And he’s no outlier in the GOP. Chris Christie said he’d block even five-year-old orphaned Muslims from entering the United States. Ted Cruz denigrated gay people, urging states to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality.

Since Nixon, this hate mongering has been GOP strategy to secure the vote of white workers. It’s a scam to get workers to fight among themselves. Republicans persuade white workers that blacks are taking their jobs through affirmative action. The GOP tells black workers that undocumented immigrants are taking their jobs. And now, the GOP warns, everyone should be afraid, be very, very afraid of Muslims. 

The grandest and most majestic first act of 2016 by the Republican majority in Congress was to take a meat clever and sever 17 million Americans from their Affordable Care Act health insurance.   

No chemo for you, cancer patients, the GOP declared. No plaster or slings for you, bone fracture victims, they sneered.

Precious few of the 17 million Americans whose health the GOP imperiled with this hard-hearted deed heard any panicked news about it, however. This made Republicans very, very sad because last week’s measure was the first in their 50 attempts to gut the Affordable Care Act to actually pass both the U.S. House and Senate. All of their other failed attempts had died in Congress. But this one, this one special bill, died Friday at the tip of President Obama’s veto pen. Still, it’s just as dead as the others. The bad, old insurance days won’t return.

In those bad, old, pre-Affordable Care Act days, health insurance was not working. Remember insurance companies throwing people off their plans when they got sick? Recall insurance companies denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions like diabetes and acne? There was that Medicare prescription plan donut hole that cost senior citizens thousands of dollars every year. And more and more employers were ditching health coverage for workers.

The spirit of the season is generosity. Eight toys for Hanukkah. A partridge in a pear tree and 11 other quirky presents. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Giving Tuesday.

It’s the thought that counts. And the thought is good-hearted. That’s why the season works so well.

To keep it all rolling happily along, however, workers need to earn enough money so that they can afford gifts and charitable donations. With wages stagnant for decades, that’s increasingly difficult.

In keeping with the figgy-pudding and potato latke traditions of the holidays, here’s a recipe for delivering joy to workers so that they can spread holiday merriment:

Ingredients

1 measure outlawing scabs
1 measure banning lockouts
1 measure raising minimum wage to $15 an hour
Knead in trade law enforcement
Filter out currency manipulation
Top it all with campaign finance reform 

Middle America is smoldering. For too long, average citizens worked harder and produced more, yet corporations cut pay and benefits, off-shored community-sustaining factories, killed family-supporting jobs and crushed opportunity. 

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump stokes that fire by urging Americans to blame anyone but corporations and corporate honchos like himself. One-percenter Trump and his fellow GOP candidates exhort average Americans to hate and fear Muslims, Syrian refugees, Black Lives Matter activists and undocumented immigrants.

This is a divisionary tactic. The intent is to split workers into small sub-groups so they lose strength in numbers. And it’s a diversionary tactic. The ungodly wealthy like Trump, who have taken for themselves all the economic gains from increased worker productivity, finger someone other than one-percenters as the culprit for middle-class wage stagnation and provoke workers to fight among themselves.

Division and diversion help the one percent capture government, securing policies that further enrich the rich, like trickle-down economics under which no benefits ever actually descend, bailouts for Wall Street but not Main Street and job-destroying trade deals like NAFTA and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In a real democracy, one where government serves the 99 percent, the smoldering in America would be piles of discarded TPP texts.

By Leo Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers; James P. Hoffa, General President, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and Dennis Williams, President, United Auto Workers

We serve as representatives of American organized workers on the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations (ACTPN) and together have stated that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a bum deal we cannot support.

By registering our dissent to the ACTPN report that endorses the agreement, the Teamsters, the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers are letting Congress and the public know this deal fails everyday Americans and must be rejected by our elected representatives. The TPP is simply the latest in a long line of terrible trade pacts that ship jobs overseas and lower wages at home. At a time of outrageous economic inequality and stagnate wages, TPP is the last thing we should do.

Despite the efforts of supporters to frame this 12-nation Pacific Rim agreement as the gold standard and one that would stick up for the interests of millions of workers in the U.S. and abroad, the TPP fails on all accounts. Now that the text is no longer secret, many are seeing the agreement does not hold up under scrutiny.

This Thanksgiving, in dining rooms across America, the turkey will be smaller, the stuffing more meager, the pumpkin pie sliced thinner. Gratitude will be given. But roiling just below the surface, for far too many families, will be economic anxiety.

The vast majority of working Americans haven’t seen a real raise in 35 years. Meanwhile, every year, their health care costs rise. Their employers eliminate pensions. And their kids struggle with rising college or technical school tuition and debt. Workers worry whether they will ever be able to pay the bills.

By contrast, on the other side of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the richest 1 percent are supersizing their feasts. For example, three families will spend $45,000 – each – for Marie Antoinette-style meals, gold flakes and all, at the Old Homestead Steakhouse in New York City. That’s up by $10,000 from the restaurant’s Thanksgiving fare for eight last year. It’s more, for one meal, than the average American worker earns in a year.

The 1 percent can spend $45,000 for a Thanksgiving supper because they’re gobbling up virtually all of the income from workers’ productivity increases. And now they’ve launched a new assault on workers. It’s a lawsuit called Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA). The 1 percent hopes it will prevent public service workers like teachers from joining together to collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions. If the $45,000-Thanksgiving-dinner crew wins the case, they’ll go after private-sector labor organizations next. They intend to gorge themselves until there’s nothing left for workers.

Over the past several weeks, as Alcoa and Century cut aluminum production nationwide, James Markus, a 23-year-veteran aluminum worker, acutely felt the pain of those laid off.

That’s because just two years ago, in October of 2013, Markus and 750 fellow aluminum workers lost their jobs at Ormet when the Hannibal, Ohio, smelter closed. He struggled for a year to retrain and get new work and witnessed friends and acquaintances foundering. Now he’s confronted with the images of thousands more aluminum workers and their families facing those same hard times.

What makes it all worse is that it’s unnecessary. The shutdowns, production curtailments and layoffs could have been averted. The American aluminum industry needed help, which it didn’t get. The industry is desperate for relief from a flood of illegally subsidized aluminum imports from China. Many American aluminum workers like Markus would still be employed if the United States proactively enforced international trade regulations and if U.S. law permitted trade sanctions before companies and workers suffer terrible losses. 

Americans who once earned family-supporting wages working in factories, foundries and mills across this country began destroying themselves at a shocking rate five years after implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

That’s because such deals – schemes exactly like the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement released last week – encouraged corporations to offshore manufacturing, decimating decent American jobs and the lives of decent American workers.

Unemployed, desperate and despairing, these once-middle-class workers are killing themselves at unconscionable rates with guns, heroin and alcohol-induced cirrhosis. To such workers, the TPP would mean more tragedy, more death. The opposite is true for CEOs, shareholders and Wall Street financiers. To them, the TPP would mean even more luxury, more wealth. Trade schemes like the TPP further rig the economy in favor of the already-rich and against the hard-working rest.

Purple dashed line shows rising death rate for white men aged 45 to 54 with high school diplomas or less education. Red line is black mortality rate for same age group; green line is Hispanic; teal is caucasian.

Workers received a terrifying message last week, one far more bone-chilling than Halloween ghouls or Freddie Krueger. It was this: Retirement security is only for CEOs, not for workers. 

Two sources delivered this frightening news. One was a dozen Republican presidential candidates insisting during last week’s debate that Social Security be slashed. The other was a new report detailing how corporations killed worker pension plans while simultaneously gilding CEO retirement accounts.

There’s a simple explanation for this ill-treatment of the vast majority. It results from the persistent demand by CEOs and other 1 percenters that all wealth get deposited in their pockets. That means grotesquely fat paychecks, perks and pensions for them and no raises and no retirement for workers whose labor creates corporate profits. That means CEOs and 1 percenters paying Social Security taxes at a much lower rate than workers do, hobbling the program. The uber-wealthy get away with this because politicians, particularly Republicans, are their indentured servants. Billionaires bankroll their campaigns and get exactly what they want in return.  

As Vice President Joe Biden announced his decision last week not to run for President, he talked about dreams denied, possibilities foreclosed.

He wasn’t speaking of his own aspirations, though. He conveyed absolutely no bitterness about relinquishing the potential to serve as President.

Instead, he voiced deep concern about an America where too many believe, based on experience, that hard work does not pay, that dreams are delusions likely to be dashed.

For the next President, building the economy and protecting the homeland are vital, of course. But just as crucial is restoring the belief that America is a place where work is justly rewarded and everyone who works hard can attain – without back-breaking debt – a middle-class life that includes home ownership, health insurance, a reasonable retirement and higher education for the kids. 

Some terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 12-nation trade proposal completed last week, are so repulsive that the New Zealand trade minister who helped negotiate the scheme described accepting them as swallowing dead rats.

Here’s what New Zealand Minister Tim Groser said: “On the hardest core issues, there are some ugly compromises out there. And when we say ugly, we mean ugly from each perspective – it doesn't mean ‘I've got to swallow a dead rat and you're swallowing foie gras.’ It means both of us are swallowing dead rats on three or four issues to get this deal across the line.”

There’s no reason for the United States to swallow a trade deal filled with rotten rodent terms. Previous so-called free trade deals have killed American factories and hundreds of thousands of family-supporting manufacturing jobs. Based on that terrible experience, American workers know for sure that if the scheme contains any foie gras, it’ll be served on silver platters to corporations while workers are force-fed rats.  

Republicans and the rich guys who imposed on American workers 35 years of stagnant wages now offer a prescription for easing this pain!

Their solution for robber-baron-level income inequality is not the obvious: Give workers raises. They don’t want to increase the minimum wage, which would eventually push up pay for everyone else as well. They don’t intend to provide paid sick leave or decent pensions or fewer unstable contract jobs. They have no intention of strengthening unions so workers can collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.

Instead of any of those straightforward measures, rich guys and corporate-owned Republicans assert that the solution is more free stuff for corporations!  The government, they say, should provide that free stuff. The government, the very organization they deride and despise and denounce as incompetent and deserving of nothing but cutting and shrinking and destroying! Yes, they actually contend that very same government should take the taxes paid by workers and give that money to corporations to improve worker wages and working conditions!

Last week, Scott Walker one-upped the gang of GOP presidential candidates all jostling for the coveted Republican title of Best Billionaire Bootlicker.

He accomplished that by announcing with pomp and fanfare that, unlike those other Republican pansies, a President Walker wouldn’t stop at crushing labor unions. No. That wouldn’t hamstring the middle class sufficiently for Walker. He’d also deny workers paid sick leave and compensation for overtime. Now those are some real anti-worker, middle-class-hatin’ chops!

In a GOP field filthy with candidates who kiss up to corporate bosses and systematically suppress workers’ wages, Walker was a standout – was because his low poll numbers forced him to drop out of the race yesterday. But the remaining motley GOP crew is just as determined as he was to do whatever it takes to deny workers and their children economic mobility.  Workers organize themselves into unions to obtain the clout they know is essential to persuade powerful multinational corporations to provide decent wages, benefits and working conditions. Unions are a method workers use to pull themselves and their families up economically. Walker and his GOP buddies want to deny workers and their children that bootstrap.

Jeff Smisek, the guy forced by scandal to resign last week as CEO of the world’s fourth-largest airline, is a major reason American workers can’t get a raise.

Smisek and his overpaid boardroom buddies nationwide have swindled American workers and American communities in a scam to amass wealth for themselves and well-heeled stockholders. They’ve extracted value from corporations and put it in their pockets and shareholders’ purses almost to the complete exclusion of investing in their corporations to create new wealth and prosperity.

CEOs like Smisek began sucking the financial lifeblood out of corporations in the 1970s. That’s when corporations stopped raising worker wages in tandem with rises in productivity and curbed research and development. Instead, corporations spent increasing portions of profit on dividends and stock buybacks. This goosed CEO compensation while squashing worker pay. Over four decades, it has degraded corporations and produced the worst income inequality since the Great Depression. 

Instead of picnicking, Steelworkers in six states spent this Labor Day picketing the gates of a dozen Allegheny Technologies Inc. (ATI) specialty mills.

These 2,200 Steelworkers are not on strike. They never even took a strike vote to threaten a walkout.

ATI locked them out of their jobs.

ATI threw them out of the mills on Aug. 15 even though the Steelworkers clearly told the corporation that they were willing to work – that they wanted to work – while negotiating a new labor agreement.

A lockout like this is a weapon increasingly deployed by corporations to injure workers, families and communities. And corporations are doing it even as workers engage in significantly fewer strikes. The growing use of lockouts to force workers to accept corporate demands demonstrates that the already powerful – corporations – have secured even more might in their relationship with workers. Corporations’ lopsided hold on power in the United States has suppressed labor unions and contributed significantly to wage stagnation and income inequality.

Specialty metals manufacturer ATI reinvented itself in recent years. Instead of serving as a vital organ in the dozen communities where it operates mills, it decided to be a boil, blight - a bane upon civic life in six states.

Communities once cherished their ATI specialty mills and the feeling was reciprocated. Managers knew mill workers by name, lived in the same towns and fulfilled civic responsibilities. The mills contributed to scout troops and fire departments. Townspeople referred to the plants as Uncle AL, for Allegheny Ludlum, the name before its Aug. 15, 1996 merger with Teledyne that created ATI.

But now ATI is butchering that time-honored relationship.  It has demanded tax abatements and special electrical rates and forced excessive overtime on weary workers. Its disdain for civic engagement is most clearly demonstrated by its decision to unlawfully lock its 2,200 skilled union workers out of their jobs on Aug. 15 despite the Steelworkers’ willingness to continue working. By wasting untold millions on security guards and highly paid, but inexperienced replacement workers, ATI has finished converting itself from a pillar of the community into a pariah.

Confronted with a dire situation, a world power last week took strong action to secure its domestic jobs and manufacturing.

That was China. Not the United States.

China diminished the value of its currency.  This gave its exporting industries a boost while simultaneously blocking imports. The move protected the Asian giant’s manufacturers and its workers’ jobs.

Currency manipulation violates free market principles, but for China, doing it makes sense. The nation’s economy is cooling. Its stock market just crashed, and its economic powerhouse – exports – declined a substantial 8.3 percent in July ­– down to $195 billion from $213 billion the previous July. This potent action by a major economic competitor raises the question of when the United States government is going to stop pretending currency manipulation doesn’t exist. When will the United States take the necessary action to protect its industry, including manufacturing essential to national defense, as well as the good, family-supporting jobs of millions of manufacturing workers?

Lacie Little won back last week everything Indiana University Health Inc. took from her – except her job. Her beloved nursing job.

She got back wages and a formal public statement by the hospital corporation saying that it removed the firing from her work record. So she’s un-fired.

But she’s not rehired. The hospital behemoth refused to consider restoring Lacie to her nursing job for seven years, long enough, it hopes, to prevent her from helping form a union there. Despite everything that has happened to her, Lacie hasn’t given up that goal. Now, she’s working for my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), trying to organize nurses.

Indiana University (IU) Health fired Lacie on March 30, three days after she began trying to persuade her fellow nurses to unionize. Lacie wanted her co-workers to join together to collectively bargain with IU Health for the same reason many nurses want to negotiate with their hospitals. They love their profession; they’re devoted to their patients, and they want to help their hospitals be the best that they can be.

IU Health Inc. believed it knew what was best for the bottom line of the hospital system – and that wasn’t a nurses union. So like many employers, it took action to squash the nascent effort by employees to gain a voice at work by organizing. Firing workers for trying to form a union is illegal. But institutions – even ones supposedly dedicated to restoring health or to Catholic theology – do it all the time anyway because the penalties are so very paltry and the fear instilled is so very profound. 

Oil honchos and their legion of lobbyists petitioned Congress last week to pad corporate profits at the expense of American energy independence and national security.

And Republicans on a Senate committee voted to comply.

On the demand of oilmen, the committee agreed to end America’s 40-year ban on exporting crude. They did it because oil corporations think they can make a couple more bucks on each barrel by selling American crude on the international market.

Never mind that America doesn’t produce sufficient crude to meet its needs and still imports 44 percent of what is refined in the United States.  Never mind that exporting American crude makes the United States more dependent on belligerent Russia and hostile Arab nations. Never mind that complying with oil corporations’ demands for potentially higher profits hands oil-rich Middle Eastern countries additional power to crush the U.S. economy with another oil embargo. Instead, what was important to the GOP majority on this Senate committee was bowing and scraping before multinational oil corporations that pledge allegiance to no country.

Donald Trump says exactly what the GOP believes. It’s a simple axiom: personal wealth accumulation is everything. Republican Party officials believe individuals like The Donald attain riches through their own guts, glory and gumption with not an iota of aid from community, country or, frankly, inherited wealth. 

It’s just that when The Donald expresses their credo, he ignores the shinola and emphasizes the crass. Instead of going with the slick 2012 GOP convention theme, “I built that,” to aggrandize individual capitalist conquest, The Donald slammed a group of his primary competitors for serving their nation instead of themselves.

What The Donald failed to acknowledge is that some of them, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, serve themselves through their so-called public service. This year, for example, Walker took a quarter billion dollars from Wisconsin higher education, gave it instead to a project by billionaire sports team owners to construct a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, and now one of those rich guys, Jon Hammes, co-chairs Walker’s national campaign fund raising.

It’s a brilliant scam. The Donald, master of bankruptcies with four under his belt, really should be impressed. Walker is forcing the great majority of Wisconsin workers to pay taxes, not for projects they prize like schools or highways, but instead to further enrich millionaires who, in turn, fill Walker’s campaign pockets!