Editorial

by Ron Ault, President Metal Trades Department

I promise we are not making this up, folks…

Like most ordinary Americans, I have trouble believing what is happening to our country…I have access to more detailed information than most folks do as part of my job, but still….

Millions of good paying American manufacturing jobs gone, hundreds of companies out of business, all vanished in less than three years…hundreds of millions of dollars of surplus in the US Treasury gone and now billions of dollars of deficits, with no end in sight and no way to fund any of our critical state and local government infrastructure, except by shifting those costs on to the ordinary taxpayer or eliminating the services. How did the United States go bankrupt in just three years?

In California, they blamed the governor and replaced him with an Austrian-born bodybuilder with no public service experience. Get real! Every state is facing the same problems as California…without good paying, middle-class jobs, no state has the tax base to sustain the essential government services we all take for granted.

Everyone keeps pussyfooting around the real issue…It’s the economy, stupid! And I’m not talking about the Wall Street and the stock market economy. Investment bankers make money selling and buying foreign stock as well as domestic stock. They don’t care if the money is rubles, pesos or pound sterling. They have no loyalty to any country or any government. The real US economy is you, your family and friends living in Anyplace, USA.
No one in America can live, send their kids to school, buy the necessities of life, pay health insurance, pay a home mortgage, and drive a car on minimum wage jobs. For every $20-an-hour plus fringe benefit manufacturing job America loses, guess what replaces them? Yep, low-pay, service sector jobs (mostly part-time, no benefits).

Recently, my wife, Erin, was online checking our bank balance and noticed our home mortgage check had not cleared our bank. She called our mortgage company to see what was going on. After the aggravation of going through the entire automated menu system, listening to all the options that used to be performed by human beings, she finally spoke to a person with a common American sounding name but with a heavy foreign accent. He had one of our account numbers transposed and didn’t seem to understand our financial system wouldn’t accept this. She tried to explain this to him, but he just didn’t get it. Erin said it was like talking to my three-year-old daughter! It suddenly dawned on her he wasn’t in the U.S. She asked him point blank where he was physically located and he got very confused and sounded nervous. She kept pressing the point (she can be pretty persuasive) and he finally admitted he was outside the U.S. but wouldn’t tell her where. The contracting out of American jobs has even got to this lower paid customer service center sector! And…pity poor Mexico…when the NAFTA free trade treaty was signed some 2,000 maquiladora plants opened and the flood of US jobs flowed across our southern border to cheaper labor rates, lax environmental laws, and subsidized industry…recently with China becoming a member of the WTO, some 200 Mexican maquiladora plants have closed and laid off thousands of Mexican workers due to not being competitive to the 59 cents per hour Chinese labor rate…Welcome to the new world order!

This terrible situation has a fix… It will require us to demand that all political candidates for any office put America first and to be loyal to America. Only you and I can fix this mess. As long as we allow politicians to divide us over emotional issues like guns, abortion, gay marriages, etc., we are playing their game and losing…losing our jobs, our health insurance and our financial security.

And our country is also growing weaker and weaker militarily. Over the past three years, the White House and the Pentagon have hoodwinked the media and the public with their deliberately deceptive defense budgets. Sure, they’re spending more money than ever, but it’s not making us any stronger although it is making a handful of smart lobbyists a lot richer. Today, with two shooting wars going on half a world away, the number of U.S. troops in uniform is lower than it was in 1950! Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims that expensive technology and sophisticated weaponry has reduced the military’s manpower needs. But, the truth is that our armed services are stretched to their limits.

Our U.S. Navy shipbuilding and ship repair is woefully under funded again in the President’s proposed 2005 budget. Last year’s budget did not provide enough money to build replacement ships for those being decommissioned and cut up for scrap. Our Navy is critically in need of replacement ships. The average age and condition of our active fleet is deplorable. We have stretched our naval fleet too far. We cannot maintain a 294 naval ship fleet with this budget…and that is our total naval ship fleet, not just combat ships like destroyers, aircraft carriers and submarines, but all our naval ships—including non-combatant ships. In 1987 we had 594 naval ships in the US Navy fleet. In 2003, we had 294…and the bottom is not in sight. Our merchant marine and fleet reserve is in the same sad shape, if not worse off.

The dirtiest secret in the Bush budget process is that for the past three years, military allocations have had the net effect of unilaterally disarming America while at the very same time we are in a declared war on terrorism and have conducted a preemptive military invasion in Iraq.
During the Iraq war, the U.S. deployed 70 percent of the Navy’s total surface fleet and 50 percent of its submarine fleet—the highest deployment rate since World War II. The Navy needed even more vessels, but the remaining ships were unavailable because they were either being repaired, deployed in other troubled waters or being used for training purposes. If we had been fighting a real war for a prolonged period against a strong adversary instead of a small third-world country, the Navy’s deployment requirements would not have been sustainable.

I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little crying “the sky is falling…the sky is falling…” but the sky in America really is falling and…. it is up to you and I to stop it!