Friday, February 8, 2002

Thayer Blasts Bush Budget Blunders
The Bush budgetary scheme came under withering attack as GVP Bob Thayer delivered his closing remarks to the MNPL Planning Committee meeting in Savannah, GA, this week.

“Bush brags that his budget ‘can be summed up in one word: jobs,’ Thayer said, “but the reality is that his budget cuts funding for job training, cuts apprenticeship programs and cuts extended unemployment for laid-off workers.”

At the same time, Bush clings doggedly to the massive tax cuts for Corporate America and the wealthiest taxpayers, while his trade policies erode the nation’s industrial base and accelerate the export of U.S. jobs, technology and capital to overseas trading partners who welcome the White House largesse.

Thayer urged the MNPL planners to devote all available resources to picking up a half-dozen governorships and to shaping a more worker-friendly Congress. A pickup of just six seats would return the House to Democratic control and slow the anti-worker assaults from the White House.

MNPL Planners Prepare for Election Battles
Members of the MNPL National Planning Committee began developing strategies and making plans to reshape the nation’s political landscape and install worker-friendly governments at every level.

That won’t be easy, noted Charlie Cook, a respected political analyst and editor of the Cook Report. “This election could not be closer,” he said. Democrats hope to retake the House, build on their narrow Senate majority and pick up several governorships in the November elections.

Cook rates 24 House seats as “toss-ups,” and finds each party has six Senate seats at high risk in the coming election. At the state level, he says Democrats stand to gain “as many as six or seven” gubernatorial offices.

Bush Budget: Reaganomics Revisited
President Bush’s budget plan brings eerie echoes from an earlier White House tenancy that whipsawed working families and left the nation reeling. During his first year in the White House, President Ronald Reagan promised his supply-side fiscal policies could “cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget” and would achieve that goal within four years.

Instead, twelve years of Reagan-Bush saw the federal deficit soar from $35 billion when Reagan first entered the White House to a staggering $292 billion in 1992.

The current White House occupant inherited a budget surplus as well as healthy Social Security and Medicare programs. In barely 12 months, President Bush returned the nation and its working families to the bleak prospect of federal deficits for the foreseeable future. Bush broke his promises and dipped into surplus Social Security funds to finance his massive tax cuts. Now he asks huge cuts in such jobs-creating programs as highway and infrastructure projects, workplace safety, job training and help for laid-off workers.

An in-depth analysis of Bush’s proposed budget is available at the AFL-CIO’s website www.aflcio.org.

Business Leader Urges Political Alliance 
An unlikely figure drew a standing ovation from MNPL delegates after attacking “weak-kneed politicians who won’t stand up for America and its workers.” The speaker, Kevin Kearns, is president of the U.S. Business & Industry Council, which represents small business firms.

The Council stood in the forefront of the opposition to NAFTA, Fast Track and other trade policies that have wreaked havoc with America’s industrial base.

“We have to send a message to Congress,” Kearns said. “The message is simple: you take our jobs. You’re fired.”

Sioux City Machinists Notch New Contract
In less than a week’s time, members of LL 1426 working at Sioux City Brick & Tile negotiated and ratified a new contract. The four-year agreement calls for substantial increases in wages, improvements in benefits and health care, and the introduction of the IAM defined-benefit pension plan.