From the USW International President Archive (Page 10)

Two Republican judges ceded their principles last week to Ohio Republicans intent on suppressing the African-American vote. The Ohio GOP, like their counterparts nationally, have decided that if they can’t win minority voters, they will cheat.

So over the past decade, Republicans across the country have perpetrated fraud in the form of voter ID laws, limits on early voting, restrictions on voter registration and other onerous requirements to make it difficult for minorities, young people and senior citizens to vote ­– requirements described as voter suppression in numerous lawsuits filed to overturn them.

Last week, two George W. Bush-appointed judges said Ohio Republicans could eliminate “Golden Week” when registration and voting may occur on the same day. The third judge on the panel, one appointed by President Barack Obama, dissented, writing that abolishing the week “imposes a disproportionate burden on African-Americans.”

Now along comes Donald Trump claiming he’ll lose the election only if Democrats cheat at the polls. He pointed his finger at Pennsylvania and Philadelphia in particular. The City of Brotherly Love is a filthy den of schemers and scam artists, according to Trump. Pennsylvanians living west of the city line are little better in Trump’s estimation.  

Trump besmirched Pennsylvania’s reputation despite the fact that Keystone GOP officials admitted in a lawsuit won by voting rights groups in 2014 that there was absolutely no in person voter fraud in the state. None. But that doesn’t matter because when Republicans like Trump cheat, they think everyone else cheats too.

Donald Trump has perfected the swagger and boast of a professional wrestler.

While a guy like World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Vince McMahon is full of fake bluster and brashness for the sake of TV ratings, Donald Trump is the real McCoy: A reckless bully.  

That violent, provocative behavior makes Trump far too dangerous to get anywhere near nuclear codes. For Americans who want peace and security, not war, this man is too risky to inhabit the White House.   

That’s what 50 former national security officials whose careers span more than four decades said in a letter last week. They are Republicans. They include a former director of the CIA, the first director of national intelligence, and two former secretaries of homeland security. They warned Trump would be treacherous as president.  

And that was before Trump suggested in a speech last week that “Second Amendment” supporters assassinate Hillary Clinton if she’s elected so she can’t nominate judges to the Supreme Court. 

As Hillary Clinton’s "Blue Collar Bus Tour,” travels across Pennsylvania and Ohio, I want to tell you about two angry white men I met at the Democratic National Convention last week.

The press would have you believe that all of the angry white men are Trump supporters. This is the stereotype: They are high school educated, gun-totin’, flag-wavin’, bigots who love the bragging, swaggering bully in Trump. 

But that’s an easy story. Those guys are easy to find. They fill Donald Trump’s stadiums. It’s true they’re out there. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge number of high school educated white men who don’t go to Trump rallies. They aren’t flag waving bigots. These are guys who only carry guns when they are hunting. They’re angry, all right. They’re angry at being associated with Trump.

Retired USW member Richard Ray became a shop steward six months after he began his apprenticeship at Owens-Illinois Inc., in North Carolina and held elected union offices for the next 49 years, all the way up to president of the Georgia State AFL-CIO.

In the not-so-union-friendly South, that takes a pretty strong personal commitment to the union ideal of concerted action to benefit the majority. To this day, even in retirement, Richard Ray is living out that commitment by pushing for election of labor-friendly candidates and attending the Democratic National Convention this week in Philadelphia as a super delegate because, he told me, he believes Hillary Clinton would be best for working people and labor unions.

Ray came to the USW through the American Flint Glass Workers when the two unions merged in 2003.  In his efforts as a union officer over the years, and later as president of the Atlanta Labor Council and secretary-treasurer of the Georgia State AFL-CIO before he was elected the organization’s president, he repeatedly saw the significance of workers banding together to support each other.

It was always about doing the best for the group. The most vital value to union members, he explains, is “the we.”

If you think Texas is a red state, you have not met Almeda Dent. She is a political whirlwind. She is a voting dynamo. She is 67, a retired member of USW Local 2083 in Houston, and now working 24 hours a day to ensure Texas shows what she believes are its true blue colors at the polls this fall. 

She is in Philadelphia this week as a delegate for Hillary Clinton, attending daytime meetings with the USW and working the convention floor at night because, as she explained to me, her goal is to get as many Democrats elected as possible, up and down the ticket.

Now, every TV commentator I know will tell you Texas is a red state. But Almeda, who lives there, and knows the people and the community, says that’s not so. Though it votes red now, she says the un-voting majority soul of the state is blue. So she wants to register voters and get them to the polls and change the tide in the state.

Her interest in politics goes way back, to when she was a student at Texas Southern University in 1969. She double majored in political science and computer science. She left after three years to take a job at Texas Instruments, and then moved to Reed Tools, where she joined the USW. There she was elected secretary to the local union and received training from the AFL-CIO, which furthered her political skills and activism. 

The day after Michelle Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with her inspiring speech, retired USW member Robert Avery, who is a Hillary Clinton delegate to the Democratic National Convention this week, told me that he feels he has a special obligation to go beyond the call of duty to get the nominee elected.

That is because in 2008, Avery was a Hillary Clinton supporter before a virtually unknown Illinois senator named Barack Obama went to Selma, Ala., and met with the Alabama New South Coalition at a time when Avery was the group’s president. 

The organization endorsed Obama, so, of course, Avery did too. He recounts telling the young senator, “I let him know I was with Hillary.  I said I would support him until he fell out of the race.” In the end, that’s not what happened.

“So, now,” Avery told me yesterday, “I really feel like I owe it to Hillary to help her.”

The dark and treacherous skies Donald Trump invoked at the Republican National Convention last week have lifted as Democrats begin their meeting in Philly Monday with a healthy dose of optimism.

The Hillary Clinton team sees America differently. They recognize problems like stagnant wages, unfair trade closing American factories, insufficient support for working mothers, terrorism, and conflict between cops and communities of color. And they have concrete plans to deal with those. 

The Clinton team has a unifying vision calling for Americans to work together to solve problems and build a better future for everyone. Hillary Clinton believes a good president inspires the best in Americans and motivates them to display their cherished qualities of community, fairness, and equal opportunity.

And the Clinton team believes Americans should have the choice about whether to join her team. That is why her slogan is: “I am with her.” A person who decides to support her can announce it by wearing that slogan.

The Trump clan is different. He insists, “I am with you.” That’s a shadow cast over voters whether they want it or not.

And it’s a dark, dark shadow. His convention was designed to frighten. It was stoked by hate, rancor, loathing, and condemnation. His own hour-long, yell-fest was filled with horror, venom, gloom and egotism. It is not morning in Trump’s America. It is the eve of absolute destruction.

I was with USW member Jim Savage – and about 500 other union members from across the country – at a hotel meeting room in Philadelphia last night when AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka fired us up to promote our values these next few months.

“We will work together, we will march together, and come November, we will win together,” Trumka said to cheers from the crowd.

To do that, Trumka said each person in the room had to talk to union brothers and sisters about Hillary Clinton.

The man Republicans will nominate this week as their presidential candidate sees himself as a U.S. generalissimo. Donald Trump would be, he said last week, the law-and-order president.  He’d be a tough guy at a time when crime is down. He’d strong arm at a time when reconciliation is required. 

What Trump didn’t say, because he lacks the insight to know it, is that he’d also be the nation’s most self-involved, egotistical president ever. Rather than bearing the important mantle of consoler-in-chief after tragedies like those in Orlando, Dallas and Baton Rouge, a President Trump would be Tweeter-in-chief, bragging about how he, and only he, had predicted it would happen.

Precious few Americans want a bully as a leader, someone who barks, “You’re fired,” who calls people names, ridicules the physically handicapped, and builds walls between races. They want a president who brings people together, who inspires, who offers hope and who can give solace to the nation in times of crisis. All of that was missing from Trump’s responses to national shocks like the gunning down of 49 people at the LGBT club in Orlando, the massacre of five police officers in Dallas, and the killings by police officers of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Trump’s reactions showed he’s a businessman with a heart of stone, a man who would widen the divides of this country. 

Every teacher, to their disgust, has seen it. When the birthday piñata is broken, one greedy kid elbows his way forward and grabs more than half of the candy for himself. All of the other children share what remains.

That’s exactly what is going on with income in the United States, according to an analysis released last week by Berkeley wealth researcher Emmanuel Saez. He found the richest 1 percent of families grabbed more than half of all of the nation’s income growth between 2009 and 2015.

And now, the 1 percent have their own personal presidential candidate, a rich man’s hero who will ensure they can continue taking far more than their share of wealth. That would be Donald Trump. He’s not some measly quarter billionaire like Mitt Romney. Trump is a bona fide billionaire, ten times over. And he’s no stinking nouveau riche Republican. He’s a scion, born to wealth, bred on baby bottles inlaid with gold leaf and infused with arrogance.

Trump’s tax plan, his refusal to raise the minimum wage, his insistence that American workers make too much money, his anti-union stances, all endear him to his fellow 1 percenters. With pledges like these, Trump plans to guarantee that he – and his billionaire buddies ­– can continue taking too much. 

Donald Trump stomped into my backyard just days before July 4 and claimed to be a steelworker.

That’s right. The billionaire, whose manicured little hands routinely slip into lambskin golf gloves but never once donned heavy-duty work mitts, actually claimed to be a steelworker.

He did it in a speech at a scrap metal processing plant in Monessen, a down-on-its-luck steel town 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, which is home to my union, the United Steelworkers.  

The guy who brags, “I am really rich,” the man who describes a million-dollar loan from his daddy as “small,” wants to climb out of his private luxury sky box now and sit in the nosebleed seats with the hard-working, blue-collar rust-belters who sweat over mortgage payments. It’s a joke. It’s a British royalist claiming to be an American colonist. 

After mouthing off in ways that had the effect of repeatedly shooting himself in the foot, Donald Trump tried to recover last week by puffing himself up as the jobs candidate.

“When I see the crumbling roads and bridges, or the dilapidated airports, or the factories moving overseas to Mexico or to other countries, I know these problems can all be fixed,” Trump told a New York audience, “Only by me.”

That would suggest Trump knows how to create infrastructure and manufacturing jobs. American jobs. Good-paying jobs. It suggests he appreciates the value of workers’ contributions to an enterprise. And that he understands the daily struggles of non-billionaires. This proposition is utterly ridiculous. The name Donald Trump is synonymous with the words “You’re fired!” He made money by brutally, publicly taking people’s jobs from them. And he clearly enjoyed it.

Using rape-and-pillage corporate practices favored by Wall Street, Donald Trump made himself billions while swindling and bankrupting untold numbers of hourly workers and small businesses.

In recounting his “deal-making” experience, Trump says the important thing is that he made a buck, that he came out rich. He ignores the father of five who lost his business when a Trump casino didn’t pay for cabinets. He discounts the minimum wage workers that a Trump resort cheated out of hundreds of dollars of overtime.

And that, Trump says, is how he’d run the country. Trump said that as president he’d treat the nation’s creditors the way he did the creditors in his repeated business bankruptcies, forcing them to accept pennies on the dollar owed. Somebody loses. But it’s never billionaire Trump. When Americans elect a president, they want a leader who will look out for the little guy, not take advantage of him. Exploiting the little guy – and everybody else – to make a buck for himself is Donald Trump’s M.O. That’s not presidential. 

Donald Trump threw a temper tantrum when labeled a small-hands man because he believes everything about him is huge: big wealth, big wall, big mouth.

There’s some evidence he thinks expansively about business because he built a billion-dollar empire out of what he called a “small” $1 million loan from his father, an inheritance of at least $40 million and repeated help from bankruptcy courts.

But to suggest he’s a big thinker would be an epic stretch. At an event last week, for example, he called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) the “PPP,”  then referred to it as the “PP.” Finally, later, he got the name right. So much for his deep knowledge of the job-killing trade proposal that manufacturing workers are so fiercely fighting.  

Donald Trump is, in fact, small minded. He recently pointed out a black audience member, a man who does not, in fact, support Trump, and called him “my African-American,” as if Trump owned him. Trump launched his campaign by calling undocumented immigrants from Mexico criminals and rapists. Trump ridiculed a physically disabled reporter.  He mocked the face of a female primary opponent.  He’s a small-tent guy. Only rich white male Christians like him fit in.  That, frankly, is un-American. And certainly unbefitting a person who is supposed to represent the best interests of all Americans. 

Way back in January, Donald Trump got himself a ton of prime publicity on the backs of veterans. He organized a benefit that he said was for them. But really he did it because he didn’t feel like debating other GOP presidential candidates that night.

At the event, he boasted that he’d raised $6 million, including $1 million that would come from his own pocket. Not too shabby, as he would say. But when reporters asked him later where the money went, including whether Donald had, indeed, donated $1 million, he told them he didn’t have to account for the funds.

This is the way Donald Trump rolls. He takes no responsibility for his actions. He refuses to be held to account. He collects donations for veterans but won't disclose the money trail. He’s so delinquent on paying his taxes, dozens of municipalities must sue him to get what’s owed. He urges supporters to beat protesters at his rallies, then denies inciting violence. Donald Trump believes he should always be praised and never held liable, no matter what he does.

And that includes pledging cash to veterans and not actually paying it. It’s great to conduct a fundraiser and promise money. It’s much better to actually fork over the donations to the veterans groups so they can help returning servicemen and women.

Donald Trump scorns traditional presidential candidate standards. The Donald doesn’t do what’s expected. And he certainly doesn’t do what he tells other candidates they must do.

If Donald doesn’t feel like debating, he stiffs his opponents and grabs attention doing something different. If he finally realizes there’s no way to force Mexico to pay for that “big, beautiful wall” he promised ad nauseam, he converts it to a virtual barrier, a mere video-game blockade.

And when he pledges to release his tax returns, then changes his mind, he simply comes up with an excuse not to do it. That’s Dodgin’ Donald.  Donald Trump is a rich guy, a billionaire 10 times over, or so he claims. And rich guys in America don’t follow the rules that working guys must. In fact, fat cats like Donald celebrate breaking the rules. And that’s why he won’t release his income tax returns. What Dodgin’ Donald doesn’t want workers to find out from those forms is that while they paid the IRS every week, he paid nothing. Or next to nothing.

Dodgin’ Donald knows a legitimate presidential candidate must release tax returns. Every major party candidate since 1976 has done it. Richard Nixon even did it while under IRS audit. Hillary Clinton released forms for every year back to 1977 – 39 of them.  

When the last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, dragged his feet, probably because he knew his returns would expose him to be a quarter-billionaire paying an unacceptably paltry 14 percent, Donald Trump went on Fox News to prod him. “Mitt has to get those tax returns out,” Trump said.

Presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee Donald  “I am really, really rich” Trump is, according to Forbes, the 121st richest person in America. So, yes, he is really, really rich.

He loves the perks of being really, really rich, like flying to campaign events in one of his own private jets, which means he blithely skips those annoying airport security lines that non-billionaires must endure. He enjoys kicking back in one of his five houses, including the 58-bedroom Mar-A-Lago mansion, where the $600,000 annual property taxes are three times the entire cost of an average American home. And, of course, Trump relishes the power he has to tell workers, “You’re fired.”

Born into wealth, Trump attended private schools and inherited $40 million when he was just 28 years old. He didn’t spend summers volunteering for Habitat for Humanity in Appalachia. He didn’t take a gap year to put that fancy private school education to use tutoring inner city kids. So, frankly, it’s easy to understand why he opposes raising the minimum wage. This guy who was born with a really, really silver spoon in his mouth doesn’t have a clue what living on $7.25 an hour means. 

On the fourth anniversary of the Korean trade deal, its lofty promises have been revealed as putrid pie in the sky:  More jobs lost. No exports gained.

Just like NAFTA, just like China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), free traders swore that the Korean deal would shower jobs and economic prosperity down on America. 

It didn’t happen. Actually, the exact opposite did. In all three cases, the schemes enticed corporations to close American factories and offshore work. That enriched CEOs and shareholders. But it impoverished millions of American workers and bankrupted communities.

Now, a backlash is evident in the groundswell of support for insurgent presidential candidates on both the left and right who denounce these failed free trade policies. This is an uprising against a quarter century of Washington, D.C., based free-trade boosterism. Its first victim should be the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive scheme between the United States and 11 Pacific Rim countries.  

EPI chart

Forged with the despicable dividend of stolen trade secrets, priced with monopoly collusion, then traded with fraudulent labeling to dodge U.S. duties, steel from China violates every principle of capitalism. That’s in addition to defying both U.S. and international trade laws.

It’s outlaw steel. And last week, U.S. Steel Corp. asked the U.S. government to outlaw its import.

U.S. Steel requested this unusual intervention after China hacked into its computers, ripped off trade secrets, then used those secrets to directly compete with U.S. Steel in the American market. China is flooding the international market with excess, government-subsidized steel. That is closing mills and killing jobs from South Africa to Great Britain to North America. The United States can choose to ignore this. It can become a weakling, reliant on other nations for steel, including some, like China, that clearly are not allies. Or, the United States can act now, as U.S. Steel demands, to secure America’s industrial strength and independence. 

Alan White couldn’t shout jubilation from the rooftop on March 25 when he heard that the U.S. Department of Labor, after decades of trying, had finally issued a stricter rule to limit exposure to potentially deadly silica dust in workplaces.

He was happy, all right. After all, he’d worked with the United Steelworkers (USW) to get the rule adopted. It’s just that he knew shouting would induce his silicosis coughing.

Within days, though, indignation replaced his jubilation. White, who’d been sickened by the debilitating, irreversible and often fatal disease at work in a foundry, watched in disgust as Republicans attempted to overturn the rule that the Labor Department said could save more than 600 lives and prevent more than 900 new cases of silicosis annually.

Last week, GOP House members conducted a hearing to further their case against saving those lives. They did that just days before Workers Memorial Day, April 28, when organized labor renews its solemn pledge to strive for workplace safety rules and formally commemorates those who have died on the job in the previous year.

The totals aren’t in for 2015 yet, but the year before, 4,679 workers died on the job. That’s nearly 90 a week, 13 a day, seven days a week. Twenty-eight members of my own union, the USW, died on the job since Workers Memorial Day 2015.

But the GOP position is clear. Republicans will do whatever it takes to ensure that corporations can sicken and kill workers with impunity. If the argument is that workers’ lives and lungs must be sacrificed to ensure that foundries and fracking operations and construction companies can make bigger profits by releasing silica particles under 40-year-old standards now considered dangerous, then the GOP will take the side of CEOs who value workers as trivial.

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.