The Lesson of Pittsburgh for G-20: Manufacturing Matters
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The revival of Pittsburgh, site of the G-20 summit this week, can provide valuable lessons for the world’s leaders. Among them: Manufacturing matters and poor trade policies hurt everyone.
“Pittsburgh, G-20 and the New Economy: Lessons to Learn, Choices to Make,” a report released today by the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), makes clear that the renaissance of Pittsburgh after the collapse of the steel industry was cut short because of the lack of a national industrial policy and the nation’s trade policies.
During a telephone news conference, CAF Co-Director Robert Borosage said some manufacturing jobs in Pittsburgh were replaced by high-end jobs in education or medicine.
But many were replaced by jobs in hotels and food services—jobs that never paid as well and proved even more vulnerable in the recent downturn. Some manufacturing jobs were never replaced at all. That helps explain why the city’s population is declining, especially among youth, who seek opportunity elsewhere.
ILCA Reports the Hidden Truth About Pittsburgh’s Revival
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When the G-20 summit meets in Pittsburgh in two weeks, the world leaders will hear how the city has rebounded after the demise of the steel industry and made itself into a center for higher education and medical research. But the hidden truth is that the ed-med revolution has passed many Pittsburghers by and only benefits the Steel City’s wealthy and highly educated citizens, said United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard.
At the same time, Gerard warned, the problems in Pittsburgh are representative of what’s happening across the nation as policymakers cling to policies that continue to send jobs overseas, decimating working families’ communities.
Speaking to the biennial convention of the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), meeting Sept. 10-12 in Pittsburgh, Gerard said our trade policies reward companies that move jobs overseas and our trade deficit with China has made us the world’s biggest debtor nation. (See a video clip of Gerard’s remarks on our AFL-CIO Convention 2009 site.)
Health Care ‘Co-Ops’: Strategy for Killing Real Health Care Reform
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U.S. House and Senate health care reform bills that have won committee approval contain a public health insurance option as a vital component and that, says a new report released this morning, “is considerable cause for celebration.”
The report’s author, Yale University professor Jacob S. Hacker, also warns that efforts to push health care cooperatives, which recently have been floated as an alternative to a public option, are meant
“to kill the public plan and, with it, the prospect of an effective competitor to consolidated insurance companies that have too often failed to provide affordable health security.”
The report, commissioned by the Institute for America’s Future, details how a strong public health insurance plan is critical to successfully achieving the goals of health reform—lower costs, higher quality and guaranteed health security for all Americans.
Economists Back Health Care Reform, Two Reports Highlight Need for Public Option
Reforming the nation’s health care system to cover everyone “is essential to economic recovery,” say more than 300 leading economists and health care experts in a statement released this morning.
In addition to the statement by the economists, two new reports were released today at a news conference by the Institute for America’s Future (IAF). The reports show a health care reform plan that includes a public plan option and also requires employers to provide health coverage for their workers or pay into a fund—known as play or pay—that will likely create jobs.
New Project to Combat Unconscious Racism
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While the election of President Obama shows that overt racism is less acceptable in America, a new project launched last month by the Institute for America’s Future explores the large role unconscious racial bias still plays in our politics and society.
The Americans for American Values (AAV) project will research the effects of unconscious racial bias on decision-making and develop strategies to support decision-making based on consciously held American values rather than on racial anxiety and stereotypes. The project began with the release of a series of educational videos and a set of research studies. View the new videos and learn more about AAV here.
john powell, the project’s founder and executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, said racial equality and fairness are values widely supported by Americans, but hidden biases often undermine these values.
As society tries to move beyond racial discrimination, a better understanding of implicit bias is needed. Our two-fold goal with this study is to help the American public better understand implicit bias and to give them ways to avoid triggering these biases.
Time to Think Big, Push for Progressive Government Action
President Obama’s economic stimulus package is just the beginning of a long-overdue public investment in rebuilding our nation’s economy. And now is the time to seek broad solutions—to think big about what can be done.
Today at the Thinking Big/Thinking Forward conference, hundreds of progressives took the first steps to building a movement to coalesce public support for a more activist, progressive government to rebuild our nation’s economy.
The one-day conference in Washington, D.C., was co-sponsored by The American Prospect, Institute for America’s Future, Demos, and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Thinking Big About a New Economy
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Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) will headline an array of economic experts and progressive leaders as they gather in Washington, D.C., tomorrow to discuss strategies for rebuilding a new and more sustainable economy.
More than 800 people are expected to attend the Thinking Big/Thinking Forward conference, co-sponsored by The American Prospect, Institute for America’s Future, Demos, and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). In a joint statement, the conference organizers say the current economic crisis requires far more than a short-term stimulus.
The current recovery plan must be understood as a down-payment on a sustained expansion of public investment vital to building this new economy. It is time to discard the scorn for effective government that contributed to our current travails and commit to making the investments critical for our future as a centerpiece of a new economics of shared prosperity.
