End the Denial. Label China a Currency Manipulator
America and China are publicly in denial about currency manipulation. Both officially state that China is not devaluing its currency.
In mid-March, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flatly denied that China deliberately suppresses the value of its currency against the dollar, a practice that decreases the price of its exports and increases the cost of American goods imported into China. Similarly, the U.S. Treasury Department, which is required by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 to name foreign currency manipulators in biannual reports, has not in the past decade and a half called out China—including in the past two reports submitted during the Obama administration.
China and America decline to acknowledge what everyone else knows: China suppresses the value of its currency to gain a trade advantage over America. The New York Times reported on the practice in a story published March 14, describing how currency manipulation has worked wonders for Chinese industry while killing American manufacturing. (Click here to tell the Treasury Department to stop denying that China is manipulating its currency.)
Don’t Listen to Sarkozy: U.S. Tanker Contract Should Create U.S. Jobs
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Today French President Sarkozy reportedly is lobbying President Obama to delay the U.S. government’s decision to award its $35 billion contract for the Air Force’s new refueling tanker. Sarkozy wants the contract for Northrop-EADS, a heavily subsidized French defense firm that recently pulled its proposal from the bidding process. Northrup-EADS now is mounting a huge public relations campaign to get the U.S. government to reverse what it regards as an unfair advantage for Boeing, which says the competition is fair.
If Northrup-EADS won the contract, most of the jobs would be in Europe. The few thousand jobs created here under an EADS contract would be low-paid assembly jobs with no union representation. Meanwhile, there are some 17 million jobless workers in this nation, and as leaders of two AFL-CIO constituency groups point out, granting the contract to Boeing would create at least 50,000 family-supporting jobs, save taxpayer dollars and protect fair trade laws.
Beware of the Big Lie Bill
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Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress made their Big Lie into a bill Wednesday, when Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Enzi (Wyo.) introduced the so-called Secret Ballot Protection Act.
Before we go further, let’s clear up the bill’s false implication right now:
The Employee Free Choice Act would not—repeat after me—would not, take away the secret ballot National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process if workers seeking to form a union wanted to use it. The Employee Free Choice would ensure workers made the decision of whether to select a union via majority sign-up (card-check) or via ballot process. Choice is good. That’s one reason why we called it Employee Free Choice—because it would enable employees, not management, to make the decision of how to form a union.
The alleged goal of S. 478 is to:
amend the National Labor Relations Act to ensure the right of employees to a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.
