And about the contrast between Solis and Obama's trade representative-no punches pulled:
BILL MOYERS:What does it say to you that Obama names Congresswoman Solis, a real advocate of labor, and then he appoints as his nominates for his trade representative the former mayor of Dallas, who was a lobbyist for many of the companies that benefit from NAFTA? Seems to me that he has put two contradictory personalities and philosophies next to each other.
LEO GERARD:To be a bit facetious, I think he made one good decision and one bad decision. But it I think it goes to what he's always told us. He wants counter-views. He wants to be able to see people debate in front of him. Then he'll make the choice.
BILL MOYERS:And you're not worried about this
LEO GERARD:Absolutely I'm worried about that.
BILL MOYERS:You are worried.
LEO GERARD:I am worried about that. I think that there is no way that the current global agenda of America can be sustained for America. It's simple as that. And we've got to find a way to move into the kind of trade that brings in balanced trade. I've been panicked almost, to tell you the truth. And some people are tired of hearing my mouth run about it. We're accumulating now roughly $700 billion to $800 billion a year of trade deficit. And if you continue on the same curve during President Obama's first term, we'll hit a trillion dollar a year trade deficit. How do you sustain an economy like that? The accumulated trade debt that America has is in excess of $5 trillion. The interest on that debt or the asset sales that we have to make to protect that debt are almost $600 billion a year. Do you know what we could do with $600 billion? We could have national healthcare. We could make sure every kid that wanted to go to college could afford to go to college. So we've got to start reducing that. It took us 25 years to get there. It's going to take us a long time to get back. But that means we got to change direction.
It's truly remarkable how 25 years ago Ronald Reagan presided over the rapid transition of America from the world's leading creditor nation to the world's leading debtor nation, and barely a word is ever said about it. Yet, it is one of the most fundamental economic facts of life in America today, and for the last quarter century. If a liberal Democrat had been in charge when that happened, I somehow think that quite a ruckus would have been raised on the right. Instead, virtual silence then, and habitual disregard and neglect ever since. This imbalance never was sustainable, and it's now quite possible that the current economic crisis could bring about a day of reckoning. But it's not the financial types who are talking about this. It's a union leader. Someone concerned about those who work for a living.
On the "free market":
LEO GERARD: .... We've got 25 years of this ideology that says don't interfere in the free market. And people never understood there is no such thing as a free market. All markets are regulated. If you took that and you put it out on the street, I'm sure that if I had a big, big powerful vehicle I could plow through New York without stoplights. But we put stoplights in so that the big trucks don't run over the small trucks, you know? And so we need to go back to the kind of meaningful regulation of the workplace, of collective bargaining,
What was striking here, to me, was the utter naturalness with which Gerard dismissed free market BS. You don't run a traffic system without regulations, why in the world would you think you could run a market system that way? This is a perfectly natural sort of analogy to make, and it is, more than anything, a matter of class and sociology that such an analogy is so seldom heard on tv.
Ordinary people cannot live their lives without rules and regulations. They cannot cross the street safely without them. One of the first responsibilities they have as parents is teaching their children about how to be safe, about abiding by these rules and regulations. This is not a matter of freely choosing one or another political ideology. This is about something as fundamental as breathing to stay alive. Oh, and speaking of breathing, here's something else Gerard said....
LEO GERARD: The way I grew up. Growing up in my hometown, it's where I became an environmentalist. When I grew up in my hometown it was the pollution capital of North America.
BILL MOYERS: Where is that?
LEO GERARD: Celebrity, Ontario, Canada. And there were days where I ran track. I was 17 years old before I understood you could actually run without sucking in sulfur in the air. I grew up three miles from a smelter. And I didn't know any better And when I became an adult I said to myself it doesn't have to be this way. And for all my years growing up, the mining company would say, well, you got to have a choice between these good jobs and a little bit of pollution. The reality is we didn't have to have a choice. We either are going to have both a clean environment, or good jobs, in the long run, we'll have neither.
Working people have always been the most environmentally exploited and oppressed. They are the most natural environmental leaders. And the more that this is reflected in labor leaders like Leo Gerard, the better off all of us will be.
Is it too late for a change of direction? Gerard is no defeatist, but he's not really sure:
LEO GERARD: Well, look it, I'm almost sorry to be able to say this to you. But a week ago I got up for the first time in my adult lifetime and I said to my wife, I said, I don't know if we can save this thing.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
LEO GERARD: There's so many problems. And the other side is so resentful of any change that President Obama and his team have to be strong. And they can't let themselves get pushed off their agenda. If they do, if he compromises too much, the economy won't recover quick enough. And we're going to continue to spiral down. We now got a whole generation of people that may not be able to afford to send their kids to college. One of my best friends in our in our building...
BILL MOYERS: In Pittsburgh?
LEO GERARD:In our building in Pittsburgh, he went to college and came out of college owing no money by working in a mill during the summertime. Now if he got his son to work in the mill in the summertime and his son graduated, he'd still owe $50,000. That's twice my first mortgage, you know? So that the time to act is now. It has to be bold. It has to be job creating. It has to be focused on putting America back to work. And we need it to be done.
Think of that: the difference between one generation and the next: The father works his way through college by working in the mill during summertime. The son, doing the same, would end up owing $50,000-twice Leo Gerard's first mortgage. That's just a stupendous shift of financial burden onto the working class in just one generation's time. And in that one generation, the national GDP has more than doubled since 1983 ($5.4 trillion in 2000 dollars in 1983 to $11.5 trillion in 2007). There was nothing natural or inevitable in that stupendous shift of financial burden onto the shoulders of the working class while total economic activity doubled. Yet, it almost never even gets mentioned, even though the vast majority of people live with that reality every single day of their lives.
Can you spell "disconnect"?
Gerard also had a great deal to say about the Employee Free Choice Act, and the corporate lobbying campaign against it. But you should check the whole thing out for yourselves. Here's just one thing he said to whet your appetite:
LEO GERARD: ....Almost every country in the world has a higher rate of unionization than America. And 70 countries in the world, you can join the union by what would be the equivalent of card check.
But you shouldn't just check him out on Bill Moyers Journal. You should also check him out at Huffington Post. Here's a taste of just a few of them.
"Congress Bails out Those Who Shower Before Work, but not Those who Shower After Work":
Congress drove the Big Three CEOs out of Washington, D.C. last week, ordering them not to return with their tin cups until they could guarantee their companies would be viable after a $25 billion bailout.
Just days later, Citigroup, a bank that had already received a $25 billion bailout in October, held its hands out for more. Within 48 hours, federal officials approved giving the bank another $20 billion and providing backing for $306 billion in its risky loans and securities. Even though Citigroup was failing just weeks after getting its first government bailout, Congress didn't subject its CEO to the public lecturing and demands for business plans that it did the Big Three.
The message here could not be more clear: Washington will bailout out those who shower before work but not those who shower afterwards.
"America's Choice: Destruction or Construction":
From sea to shining sea, America is suffering.
She is, however, afflicted with an avoidable condition she brought on herself, like a hangover. Only this one's interminable and internationally contagious.
She did it by choosing over the past 30 years to establish an economy that worshiped avarice. That decision has destroyed her financial system and taken down with it much of the world's.
Now America must decide whether to be swayed by the greedy urging her to continue basing her economy on the destructive policies of deregulation, de-unionization, globalization and privatization or to construct a new financial system focused on industry and profit shared by the workers who produce it.
....
In the song "America the Beautiful," from which the lines "from sea to shining sea, come, lyricist Katharine Lee Bates counseled in the second verse, "America! America! God mend thine every flaw."
Clearly, this greed-based economy is a flaw. It was created by covetous humans. It must be mended by Americans of better grace, people Katharine Lee Bates described as those, "Who more than self their country loved."
America's workers must seize back control of their country and wrest back determination of its priorities. They must re-regulate the financial markets and remove the onerous restrictions placed on unions to prevent organization of new workplaces and bargaining of new contracts to raise worker salaries and benefits.
But, most immediately, America's workers must insist Congress immediately pass an economic renewal package that will reinvigorate Main Streets across the nation. This is essential to prevent a prolonged and excessively painful deep recession resulting from the housing bubble collapsing.
This public investment has two purposes. It will stimulate the economy by providing jobs. In addition, it will strengthen America's manufacturing competitiveness in the international marketplace...
But let's work for realization of Katharine Lee Bates' final verses:
"America! America" God shed his grace on thee Till selfish gain no longer stain The banner of the free!"
"Toyota Republicans Should Cut Their Own Pay":
President Bush took to the TV Friday to announce that he wouldn't walk past the financial crash of America's Big Three automakers and do nothing to save their lives.
Refusing resuscitation, Bush said, would be irresponsible during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
A week earlier, 31 GOP Senators, mostly from Southern states, voted to avert their eyes and allow American auto companies to die. They opposed $14 billion in federal loans for GM and Chrysler, revealing that their loyalty lies not with America, not even with their own states, but with South Korea and Germany and Japan.
They are Toyota Republicans.
Toyota has non-union manufacturing plants in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Texas - states whose senators led the GOP quest to slay the Big Three American auto manufacturers - Richard Shelby, R-Ala.; Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, and John Cornyn, R-Tx. Here's the Republican from Mississippi, Sen. Thad Cochran, explaining why he'd vote against the loans, "Things have changed. It's not just the Big Three anymore," he said, pointing out that Nissan and Toyota employ more Mississippians than General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. But, he said, the foreign companies would not share "in the benefits of that automobile bailout program."
No. But Mississippi did give Nissan and Toyota more than $650 million to entice them to locate in the state. GM, Ford and Chrysler didn't share in those benefits, Sen. Cochran.
The Toyota Republicans are all for helping the rich with tax breaks and shelters, and they're all for aiding foreign auto manufacturers with billions worth of tax forgiveness and government-paid infrastructure improvements.
But their disdain for the working class couldn't be clearer as they organized defeat of loans to the Big Three under this command: "Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor."
....
Sen. Cochran just didn't think it was right for the U.S. government to aid its auto industry. But apparently he's fine with foreign governments providing subsidies to the transplant automakers in his state. And, apparently, he's okay with spending state and federal money to help foreign automakers locate manufacturing plants in the U.S....
The Toyota Republicans want the wages of American workers pulled down. To them, UAW members making an average of $28 an hour, accounting for less than 10 percent of the cost of a car, are earning just too much money.
The Toyota Republicans did not, however, make that claim about the white collar workers on Wall Street who got this country into the financial fiasco that led to the dire circumstances for automakers. And not just for American ones. Domestic car sales declined by 40 percent last month, but Asian producers' sales dropped too - by 35 percent.
The average salary of white collar, Wall Street employees -- workers in "securities, commodity contracts and investments" -- is four times that of those laboring in the rest of the economy. Remember, these are the guys who are so smart that they took down Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, AIG and Lehman Brothers - in less than a year - and ultimately required $700 billion from taxpayers to bail them out....
And at no time did those Toyota Republicans suggest that they should cut their own salary or top-notch, government-paid health benefits or pensions. Like the reckless speculators on Wall Street, Congress bears responsibility for the crisis condition of the American economy because it deregulated financial markets.
In 2002, during a downturn in Japan, the House of Councillors reduced the pay of Diet lawmakers by 10 percent, and ended the transportation allowance, portrait-painting and pension given senior lawmakers.
If the Toyota Republicans believe the Japanese way of pay is so great for autoworkers, they should first impose it on themselves.
That's a voice that America needs to hear a whole lot more of.
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