Where Things Are Made
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AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is a key speaker at tomorrow’s Building the New Economy conference here in Washington, D.C. United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard and economist Jeff Madrick also are among the keynote speakers.
To our nation’s peril, the free trade orthodoxy continues to ignore a fundamental economic fact: It matters where things are made. Over the past decade, the U.S. industrial base has suffered an unprecedented decline. The loss of more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and the closure of over 50,000 manufacturing facilities have undermined our nation’s technical capacity to innovate and to make things, while at the same time decimating our middle class.
Anti-Worker Group Pays Rove $100,000 to Fight Employee Free Choice
Here we go again. Yet another misleadingly named, corporate-funded front group has been created to block the freedom to form unions and bargain and scare people away from the Employee Free Choice Act. And where there are big corporate dollars and smear campaigns, you can bet that repudiated and disgraced political hacks like Karl Rove can’t be far behind.
This time, reports Think Progress, the “Economic Freedom Alliance” (EFA) is paying the checks to Rove. The EFA, a new corporate front organization “partnering with a number of Midwestern statewide employer organizations,” has paid Rove, George W. Bush’s sometime top political operative, $100,000 this year for his services as a high-priced consultant to their disinformation campaign.
The EFA, with Rove’s assistance, is using websites, billboards and other tactics to try and pressure U.S. senators to vote against the Employee Free Choice Act. It’s another desperate attempt, fueled by a big bankroll, to block real change for working people. (Sounds familiar, huh?) The corporations who fund the EFA and line Rove’s pockets know the Employee Free Choice Act would give workers—not their bosses—the choice about how to form a union and bargain for their fair share.
Bad, Bad, Bad Jobs Report: Unemployment at 8.1 Percent
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Stunningly bad news on the nation’s jobless rate today: Unemployment worsened to 8.1 percent in February, from 7.6 percent in January, the highest level in more than a quarter century, according to Labor Department data released today.
We’re now looking at historical comparisons of joblessness not to the bad recession of the Reagan years but to the Depression era. This from Bloomberg:
Employers eliminated 651,000 jobs, the third straight month that losses surpassed 600,000—the first time that’s happened since the data began in 1939.
