And the unions are certainly not blameless in this flushing of American jobs from the country...
Mark Gaffney, Michigan AFL-CIO President, noted that unions are going to emerge from this recession with one-quarter, or even one-third fewer members... "We're losing a helluva lot of members".
Well, no shit!
And who's fault is that?
Journalist Peter T. Kilborn wrote for the New York Times 24 October 1995:
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Whatever anger organized labor has sometimes felt toward the White House was indiscernible Monday night, when President Clinton spoke for 45 minutes to 1,020 friendly delegates of the AFL-CIO, whose four-day convention began Monday in midtown Manhattan. American labor unions were once furious with the president over his endorsement of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, and many promised to campaign against anyone in Congress, Democrat or Republican, who voted for it. Yet Monday, as the president reached the dais at the Sheraton New York Hotel, the delegates chanted "Four more years!'' and "We want Bill!'' "Whose side is Bill Clinton on?'' asked Thomas R. Donahue, the federation's president, introducing Clinton. "Make no mistake about it. He's on your side.''
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I was on a message board where there were some union participants. I was pointing out the hypocrites that voted for the free trade agreements, and mentioned the Levins, both the Senator Carl Levin, and his brother in the House of Representatives, Sander Levin. They are both Democrats. The union participants said that their unions had recommended their support in the 2008 elections, so they were going to vote for them.
After the election, I went to the message board and saw phrases like: "WE WON"; and "The recession is over!" I checked the records and found that the unions had indeed voted back in the two aforementioned hypocrites.
And then there is Senator Richard Durbin (D) and a speech he made in the Senate on 11 February 2004. The Senator talked about how he and a group of Senators had "dinner at Walter Reed Hospital with the soldiers who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom are undergoing important medical treatment and rebuilding their lives and strength to return to their families, and some to return to service to our country." He asked them about their experiences, and their injuries, and how they came about, many of them noting that they were in a Humvee when a roadside bomb, or a rocket propelled grenade, exploded. He asked what the Senators could do for them. The Senators were told that the soldiers had to find scrap metal to attach to the sides of the vehicles in an effort to support the inadequate armor.
The Senator said that he visited the Rock Island Arsenal in his State where the new armor plated doors were being assembled for the Humvees, and was told that it would be one year before they were completed.
From Congressional Record, Senate, Senator Richard Durbin (Democrat, Illinois): "I said: Why is it taking one year? He said: Because there is only one steel-fabricating plant left in America, and it is in Pennsylvania. It makes the steel that we can convert into the armor plating for these doors. We are using everything they produce as fast as they produce it. So when the issue comes up about loss of manufacturing jobs, and loss of American jobs, and loss of our industrial base, it is more than a cold discussion of statistics; it is a discussion about the reality of our economy and the reality we face. Whether you live in North Carolina, where we have lost textile jobs, or you live in Illinois, where we have lost steel jobs, the fact is, as we lose these jobs, we lose our capacity. When it comes to something as basic as steel, that capacity plays out so that our soldiers in Iraq today are more vulnerable to enemy attack because we cannot produce the steel in America."
Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat, while a Congressman in the House of Representatives, representing his constituents in Illinois, voted for the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), GATT (General Agreement on Tariff and Trade), and when he became a Senator representing the State of Illinois in the Congress, voted for the China trade agreement, the Chile free trade agreement, and the Singapore free trade agreement.
AFL ENDORSES DURBIN
