Leo W. Gerard Archive (Page 4)

The year 2001, when I became president of the United Steelworkers union and Hillary Clinton took office as a U.S. Senator for New York, was a desperate, terrible time for steelworkers and the steel industry in this country.

I turned to her, among many others, for help. Something had to be done. Within a half dozen years, 50,000 steelworkers would lose their jobs and 30 steel companies would go bankrupt. The primary culprit was unfair trade, as it is now.

As I fought to save jobs, I found that some lawmakers were true to their word, and Sen. Hillary Clinton was one of them. When she promised me she would co-sign a bill or testify in front of the International Trade Commission, she did it. She never let workers down. American steel and aluminum producers are in crisis again. I want a President I know I can trust based on past experience to help these workers. That is Hillary Clinton. 

Republicans have conjured for Americans a monster more frightening than any Hollywood has ever produced for Halloween. It pales “The Shining.”

It is a two-headed beast Donald Trump calls voter fraud and rigged elections.  Like Hollywood creatures, though, this goblin is completely imaginary. It’s fake like the sasquatch and chupacabra. There’s no scientific evidence of its existence.

The GOP antidote for its imaginary monster is horribly real, however. It is voter suppression and intimidation. That is a tangible two-headed beast of appalling proportions. Fearing they could not win fair and square, Republicans took steps to prevent young, old, black and Hispanic people – people likely to vote Democratic – from reaching the polls. This GOP Frankenstein threatens democracy itself. 

“Make me.” That’s how Donald Trump responded during the last debate when Hillary Clinton pointed out that he failed to use American steel to construct the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas.

Trump used Chinese steel. So he created jobs for Chinese workers. Not American steelworkers. He could have done the right thing. He could have inserted a clause in the contract requiring American-made steel. But he didn’t. Similarly, he could require that his dozens of signature Trump products from shirts to eyeglasses be made in America. But he does not.  The vast majority are manufactured overseas. Creating jobs in other countries.

Trump said during the debate that it was Clinton’s fault he didn’t use American steel. Like some sort of guardian, she should have passed a law forcing him to do the right thing, he said. With that, Trump described himself as a petulant brat, not a leader. A leader envisions what would be wise economically or morally for the nation, and takes that action to set an example, then urges others to follow. The president of the United States is the leader of the free world. For that person, leadership is an essential skill.

Warren Buffett threw down the gauntlet to Donald Trump again last week. It happened after Trump lied about Buffett’s federal income tax payments on national TV.

During the second presidential debate on Oct. 9, Trump said Buffett “took a massive deduction,” suggesting it was the kind that the Republican nominee used for years to dodge income taxes.

The next morning, Buffett reported to the world that he paid federal taxes every year since 1944 when he was 13. He owed $7 then. Last year, he paid $1.8 million, about 16 percent of his $11.6 million income. He gave $2.858 billion to charity that year. Yes, that’s billion with a b.

By contrast, Trump’s “charitable” foundation is under investigation for self-dealing, and he is the first presidential candidate in 40 years to refuse to disclose any federal income tax information.

In August, Buffett, who is six times richer than Trump, challenged the Republican nominee to a tax throw down. The point of honor in that duel would be revealing their returns. Buffet pointed out that both men are under audit, so that would be no excuse to chicken out. Still, Trump begged off.

It’s not enough for a presidential candidate to boast before adoring crowds. It’s crucial that candidates both embody and demonstrate American values. Those standards don’t include lying or shirking taxes or bragging about sexual assault or creating a charity to pay a candidate’s own bills. Buffett demonstrates American values in both words and actions. Trump displays utter obliviousness to those values.  

On Sept. 2, a tarp covering part of the Liberty Bridge in Pittsburgh caught fire during repair work. The flames enveloped a steel beam that buckled and nearly caused the entire 88-year-old structure to collapse.

A town already racked by hard-to-navigate streets and limited access into downtown was then thrown into mass chaos for more than three weeks while the bridge was closed and workers frantically fixed the damage.

The reopening was delayed multiple times, and the construction company was fined $8,400 each hour the span remained closed. By the time the bridge finally opened, the penalty had reached over $5 million, not to mention the unknown cost of Yinzer (A.K.A. Pittsburgher) angst and fury.

This whole situation not only epitomizes the disaster that is America’s aging and disintegrating infrastructure, but it also symbolizes the horror of a possible Donald Trump presidency.

Trump says he’s going to make America a country that makes things again and those things will be used to rebuild what he calls the nation’s “horrible, horrible third-world” infrastructure. The problem is that his infrastructure improvement plan, like his economic restoration plan and all of his other so-called plans, is a giant fail. 

And his past business practices are proof that it’s a fail.

Trump says a lot of things, and he declares them to be the best things, the greatest things, like how he’s going to bring steel back to American cities like Pittsburgh. He’s had countless chances to do this and put his money where his mouth is. Yet he hasn’t.

A Newsweek investigation by reporter Kurt Eichenwald revealed last week that in at least two of Trump’s last three projects, he chose to use Chinese steel and aluminum. Not only did Trump use foreign materials, but he also tried to conceal that fact by making the purchases through a series of shell and holding companies. Trump may have used foreign aluminum and steel in the third building as well. Eichenwald hasn’t finished that investigation yet.

The man who built his entire campaign around a proposal to erect a wall actually built a “big, beautiful wall” in Chicago at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, which opened in 2009. He constructed the Chicago wall with Chinese aluminum. Imagine all of the American workers who could have been employed forging that metal right here in the United States.

Donald Trump likes to say he has a very, very good relationship with unions.  “I have great relationships with unions,” he told Newsweek last year.

And the press is in love with saying blue-collar workers are in love with Trump. Real reporters and even fake news shows like Full Frontal with Samantha Bee have crisscrossed the rust belt interviewing blue-collar workers seeking the reason for Trump’s supposed allure.

The AFL-CIO has found, however, that only a small faction, fewer than a third, of its members are Trump supporters. That’s true in my union, the United Steelworkers (USW), as well. And the numbers are declining daily as members find out the truth about The Donald, including how he managed to lose a whopping $916 million in one year and his failure to pay federal income taxes.

Particularly important to my members is the issue of trade because we are a manufacturing union, with members making not just steel, but tires, glass, paper, cardboard, aluminum, auto parts and many other products. When Trump promises to arbitrarily slap 25 percent and 35 percent tariffs on unfairly traded commodities from China and Mexico, that sounds great.

That is, until the voter discovers a U.S. president can’t unilaterally impose tariffs. Also, until the voter discovers Trump manufactures virtually all his signature products, from suits to shirts, sweaters, belts, ties, tie pins, tie clips, and dozens of others, overseas. Not by American workers in America. Trump could have created American jobs. But he chose not to.

Here is what some members of my union had to say about the difference between The Don and Hillary Clinton:

Michael D. Snyder, 58 of Decatur, Ind., works for Bunge, which makes food oils. A union man for 39 years, he’s been president of  USW Local 15173 for 21 years.

“You need to look at the whole package and history of a candidate for president. Look at the whole package of Trump. I see someone who has done nothing but take from people in this country. There is a huge list of people who are suing him for taking from them, and that is disrespecting the American people. 

“It is a power game. He has got all the money. He knows he can do all these terrible things. He knows he may have to pay, but not until he is forced to by court. And people have to wait years to get some portion of the money owed. That is just terrible and disrespecting every American. That kind of person should not be president. It is inconceivable to put that person in charge of this country.

“In our churches, we would pray for this person because they are totally lost. It is hard to understand how a Christian would say OK to this kind of behavior.”

Donald Trump puts on a show of being rich. There’s that private jet stamped Trump. He assures everyone, ad nauseam, that he’s really, really rich. But apparently it’s all a sham.

The Washington Post revealed last week that Trump is a charity case. Over the past several years, he repeatedly turned to a non-profit organization to pay his bills for him – more than a quarter million dollars in bills. (#Sad)

If Donald Trump really is a $10 billionaire as he repeatedly claims, there would be no reason for him to beg a foundation to foot his bills. It was fine for Trump to exaggerate his personal wealth while he was nothing but a reality TV star firing contestants for fun. But now that he’s a candidate for president of the United States, he’s got real responsibilities. And one of them is to release his tax returns, like every other presidential candidate for the past 40 years.

Before voting, the American people have a right to know whether Trump is lying about his wealth. But not just that, they have the right to know whether Trump remains among Republicans’ reviled 47 percent, the group that the GOP calls “takers,” because they pay no federal income taxes. New Jersey Gaming Commission records show Trump was a taker in 1978 and 1979, paying no federal income taxes in either year. Is he still paying nothing? That would make him quite a mooch, a welfare king, taking $885 million in tax breaks to construct his gilded buildings in New York and contributing not a cent in federal taxes. The Gipper would not approve.  

Nine years after the Great Recession began during the tax- and regulation-slashing Bush administration, some startlingly good economic news arrived from Washington, D.C., last week.

The incomes of typical Americans rose in 2015 by 5.2 percent, the first significant boost to middle-class pay since the end of the Great Recession, and the largest, in percentage terms, ever recorded by the Census Bureau. In addition, the poverty rate fell 1.2 percentage points, the steepest decline since 1968.  Also smaller were the numbers of Americans without health insurance and suffering food insecurity.

That sounds good, right? Especially after all it took to pull out of the Bush recession. During the month Bush left office, 818,000 Americans lost their jobs. Unemployment increased to 10 percent before President Obama’s stimulus programs started ratcheting it down to the current 4.9 percent. Now, wages are beginning to rise again. It seems like an event that Ronald Reagan might call morning in America. But not the current Republican nominee. Trump says, “This country is a hellhole, and we’re going down fast.”

Donald Trump likes to brag on the campaign trail that he’s the best at bribing politicians. He said, for example, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”  But then when he got caught giving and getting exactly what the hell he wanted, he claimed that’s not what happened.

Not only that, Trump promises as president he would surround himself with the best advisers. The best! Just like he says he did as a businessman. And he claims he’s a great businessman. The greatest! Well, maybe he forgot about his four bankruptcies that left hundreds of small businessmen and craftsmen unpaid. And maybe he forgot about the fiasco surrounding his namesake foundation illegally giving a “donation” to an attorney general who then decided to drop a fraud investigation against him. The advisers in that case? Not exactly the best.

Much has been made lately about the Clinton Foundation. But Donny’s got one too. Unlike the Clinton Foundation, to which the Clintons gave $1 million last year, the Trump Foundation hasn’t seen a cent from Donny’s pocket since 2009. 

China is gorging itself on steelmaking. It is forging so much steel that the entire world doesn’t need that much steel.

Companies in the United States and Europe, and unions like mine, the United Steelworkers, have spent untold millions of dollars to secure tariffs on imports of this improperly government-subsidized steel. Still China won’t stop. Diplomats have elicited promises from Chinese officials that no new mills will be constructed. Still they are. Chinese federal officials have written repeated five-year plans in which new mills are banned. Yet they are built.

All of the dog-eared methods for dealing with this global crisis in steel have failed. So American steel executives and steelworkers and hundreds of thousands of other workers whose jobs depend on steel must hope that President Barack Obama used his private meeting with China’s President XI Jinping Saturday to press for a novel solution. Because on this Labor Day, 14,500 American steelworkers and approximately 91,000 workers whose jobs depend on steel are out of work because China won’t stop making too much steel. 

Two Republican judges ceded their principles last week to Ohio Republicans intent on suppressing the African-American vote. The Ohio GOP, like their counterparts nationally, have decided that if they can’t win minority voters, they will cheat.

So over the past decade, Republicans across the country have perpetrated fraud in the form of voter ID laws, limits on early voting, restrictions on voter registration and other onerous requirements to make it difficult for minorities, young people and senior citizens to vote ­– requirements described as voter suppression in numerous lawsuits filed to overturn them.

Last week, two George W. Bush-appointed judges said Ohio Republicans could eliminate “Golden Week” when registration and voting may occur on the same day. The third judge on the panel, one appointed by President Barack Obama, dissented, writing that abolishing the week “imposes a disproportionate burden on African-Americans.”

Now along comes Donald Trump claiming he’ll lose the election only if Democrats cheat at the polls. He pointed his finger at Pennsylvania and Philadelphia in particular. The City of Brotherly Love is a filthy den of schemers and scam artists, according to Trump. Pennsylvanians living west of the city line are little better in Trump’s estimation.  

Trump besmirched Pennsylvania’s reputation despite the fact that Keystone GOP officials admitted in a lawsuit won by voting rights groups in 2014 that there was absolutely no in person voter fraud in the state. None. But that doesn’t matter because when Republicans like Trump cheat, they think everyone else cheats too.

Donald Trump has perfected the swagger and boast of a professional wrestler.

While a guy like World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Vince McMahon is full of fake bluster and brashness for the sake of TV ratings, Donald Trump is the real McCoy: A reckless bully.  

That violent, provocative behavior makes Trump far too dangerous to get anywhere near nuclear codes. For Americans who want peace and security, not war, this man is too risky to inhabit the White House.   

That’s what 50 former national security officials whose careers span more than four decades said in a letter last week. They are Republicans. They include a former director of the CIA, the first director of national intelligence, and two former secretaries of homeland security. They warned Trump would be treacherous as president.  

And that was before Trump suggested in a speech last week that “Second Amendment” supporters assassinate Hillary Clinton if she’s elected so she can’t nominate judges to the Supreme Court. 

As Hillary Clinton’s "Blue Collar Bus Tour,” travels across Pennsylvania and Ohio, I want to tell you about two angry white men I met at the Democratic National Convention last week.

The press would have you believe that all of the angry white men are Trump supporters. This is the stereotype: They are high school educated, gun-totin’, flag-wavin’, bigots who love the bragging, swaggering bully in Trump. 

But that’s an easy story. Those guys are easy to find. They fill Donald Trump’s stadiums. It’s true they’re out there. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge number of high school educated white men who don’t go to Trump rallies. They aren’t flag waving bigots. These are guys who only carry guns when they are hunting. They’re angry, all right. They’re angry at being associated with Trump.

Retired USW member Richard Ray became a shop steward six months after he began his apprenticeship at Owens-Illinois Inc., in North Carolina and held elected union offices for the next 49 years, all the way up to president of the Georgia State AFL-CIO.

In the not-so-union-friendly South, that takes a pretty strong personal commitment to the union ideal of concerted action to benefit the majority. To this day, even in retirement, Richard Ray is living out that commitment by pushing for election of labor-friendly candidates and attending the Democratic National Convention this week in Philadelphia as a super delegate because, he told me, he believes Hillary Clinton would be best for working people and labor unions.

Ray came to the USW through the American Flint Glass Workers when the two unions merged in 2003.  In his efforts as a union officer over the years, and later as president of the Atlanta Labor Council and secretary-treasurer of the Georgia State AFL-CIO before he was elected the organization’s president, he repeatedly saw the significance of workers banding together to support each other.

It was always about doing the best for the group. The most vital value to union members, he explains, is “the we.”

If you think Texas is a red state, you have not met Almeda Dent. She is a political whirlwind. She is a voting dynamo. She is 67, a retired member of USW Local 2083 in Houston, and now working 24 hours a day to ensure Texas shows what she believes are its true blue colors at the polls this fall. 

She is in Philadelphia this week as a delegate for Hillary Clinton, attending daytime meetings with the USW and working the convention floor at night because, as she explained to me, her goal is to get as many Democrats elected as possible, up and down the ticket.

Now, every TV commentator I know will tell you Texas is a red state. But Almeda, who lives there, and knows the people and the community, says that’s not so. Though it votes red now, she says the un-voting majority soul of the state is blue. So she wants to register voters and get them to the polls and change the tide in the state.

Her interest in politics goes way back, to when she was a student at Texas Southern University in 1969. She double majored in political science and computer science. She left after three years to take a job at Texas Instruments, and then moved to Reed Tools, where she joined the USW. There she was elected secretary to the local union and received training from the AFL-CIO, which furthered her political skills and activism. 

The day after Michelle Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with her inspiring speech, retired USW member Robert Avery, who is a Hillary Clinton delegate to the Democratic National Convention this week, told me that he feels he has a special obligation to go beyond the call of duty to get the nominee elected.

That is because in 2008, Avery was a Hillary Clinton supporter before a virtually unknown Illinois senator named Barack Obama went to Selma, Ala., and met with the Alabama New South Coalition at a time when Avery was the group’s president. 

The organization endorsed Obama, so, of course, Avery did too. He recounts telling the young senator, “I let him know I was with Hillary.  I said I would support him until he fell out of the race.” In the end, that’s not what happened.

“So, now,” Avery told me yesterday, “I really feel like I owe it to Hillary to help her.”

The dark and treacherous skies Donald Trump invoked at the Republican National Convention last week have lifted as Democrats begin their meeting in Philly Monday with a healthy dose of optimism.

The Hillary Clinton team sees America differently. They recognize problems like stagnant wages, unfair trade closing American factories, insufficient support for working mothers, terrorism, and conflict between cops and communities of color. And they have concrete plans to deal with those. 

The Clinton team has a unifying vision calling for Americans to work together to solve problems and build a better future for everyone. Hillary Clinton believes a good president inspires the best in Americans and motivates them to display their cherished qualities of community, fairness, and equal opportunity.

And the Clinton team believes Americans should have the choice about whether to join her team. That is why her slogan is: “I am with her.” A person who decides to support her can announce it by wearing that slogan.

The Trump clan is different. He insists, “I am with you.” That’s a shadow cast over voters whether they want it or not.

And it’s a dark, dark shadow. His convention was designed to frighten. It was stoked by hate, rancor, loathing, and condemnation. His own hour-long, yell-fest was filled with horror, venom, gloom and egotism. It is not morning in Trump’s America. It is the eve of absolute destruction.

I was with USW member Jim Savage – and about 500 other union members from across the country – at a hotel meeting room in Philadelphia last night when AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka fired us up to promote our values these next few months.

“We will work together, we will march together, and come November, we will win together,” Trumka said to cheers from the crowd.

To do that, Trumka said each person in the room had to talk to union brothers and sisters about Hillary Clinton.

The man Republicans will nominate this week as their presidential candidate sees himself as a U.S. generalissimo. Donald Trump would be, he said last week, the law-and-order president.  He’d be a tough guy at a time when crime is down. He’d strong arm at a time when reconciliation is required. 

What Trump didn’t say, because he lacks the insight to know it, is that he’d also be the nation’s most self-involved, egotistical president ever. Rather than bearing the important mantle of consoler-in-chief after tragedies like those in Orlando, Dallas and Baton Rouge, a President Trump would be Tweeter-in-chief, bragging about how he, and only he, had predicted it would happen.

Precious few Americans want a bully as a leader, someone who barks, “You’re fired,” who calls people names, ridicules the physically handicapped, and builds walls between races. They want a president who brings people together, who inspires, who offers hope and who can give solace to the nation in times of crisis. All of that was missing from Trump’s responses to national shocks like the gunning down of 49 people at the LGBT club in Orlando, the massacre of five police officers in Dallas, and the killings by police officers of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Trump’s reactions showed he’s a businessman with a heart of stone, a man who would widen the divides of this country. 

Every teacher, to their disgust, has seen it. When the birthday piñata is broken, one greedy kid elbows his way forward and grabs more than half of the candy for himself. All of the other children share what remains.

That’s exactly what is going on with income in the United States, according to an analysis released last week by Berkeley wealth researcher Emmanuel Saez. He found the richest 1 percent of families grabbed more than half of all of the nation’s income growth between 2009 and 2015.

And now, the 1 percent have their own personal presidential candidate, a rich man’s hero who will ensure they can continue taking far more than their share of wealth. That would be Donald Trump. He’s not some measly quarter billionaire like Mitt Romney. Trump is a bona fide billionaire, ten times over. And he’s no stinking nouveau riche Republican. He’s a scion, born to wealth, bred on baby bottles inlaid with gold leaf and infused with arrogance.

Trump’s tax plan, his refusal to raise the minimum wage, his insistence that American workers make too much money, his anti-union stances, all endear him to his fellow 1 percenters. With pledges like these, Trump plans to guarantee that he – and his billionaire buddies ­– can continue taking too much. 

Donald Trump stomped into my backyard just days before July 4 and claimed to be a steelworker.

That’s right. The billionaire, whose manicured little hands routinely slip into lambskin golf gloves but never once donned heavy-duty work mitts, actually claimed to be a steelworker.

He did it in a speech at a scrap metal processing plant in Monessen, a down-on-its-luck steel town 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, which is home to my union, the United Steelworkers.  

The guy who brags, “I am really rich,” the man who describes a million-dollar loan from his daddy as “small,” wants to climb out of his private luxury sky box now and sit in the nosebleed seats with the hard-working, blue-collar rust-belters who sweat over mortgage payments. It’s a joke. It’s a British royalist claiming to be an American colonist. 

After mouthing off in ways that had the effect of repeatedly shooting himself in the foot, Donald Trump tried to recover last week by puffing himself up as the jobs candidate.

“When I see the crumbling roads and bridges, or the dilapidated airports, or the factories moving overseas to Mexico or to other countries, I know these problems can all be fixed,” Trump told a New York audience, “Only by me.”

That would suggest Trump knows how to create infrastructure and manufacturing jobs. American jobs. Good-paying jobs. It suggests he appreciates the value of workers’ contributions to an enterprise. And that he understands the daily struggles of non-billionaires. This proposition is utterly ridiculous. The name Donald Trump is synonymous with the words “You’re fired!” He made money by brutally, publicly taking people’s jobs from them. And he clearly enjoyed it.

Using rape-and-pillage corporate practices favored by Wall Street, Donald Trump made himself billions while swindling and bankrupting untold numbers of hourly workers and small businesses.

In recounting his “deal-making” experience, Trump says the important thing is that he made a buck, that he came out rich. He ignores the father of five who lost his business when a Trump casino didn’t pay for cabinets. He discounts the minimum wage workers that a Trump resort cheated out of hundreds of dollars of overtime.

And that, Trump says, is how he’d run the country. Trump said that as president he’d treat the nation’s creditors the way he did the creditors in his repeated business bankruptcies, forcing them to accept pennies on the dollar owed. Somebody loses. But it’s never billionaire Trump. When Americans elect a president, they want a leader who will look out for the little guy, not take advantage of him. Exploiting the little guy – and everybody else – to make a buck for himself is Donald Trump’s M.O. That’s not presidential. 

Donald Trump threw a temper tantrum when labeled a small-hands man because he believes everything about him is huge: big wealth, big wall, big mouth.

There’s some evidence he thinks expansively about business because he built a billion-dollar empire out of what he called a “small” $1 million loan from his father, an inheritance of at least $40 million and repeated help from bankruptcy courts.

But to suggest he’s a big thinker would be an epic stretch. At an event last week, for example, he called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) the “PPP,”  then referred to it as the “PP.” Finally, later, he got the name right. So much for his deep knowledge of the job-killing trade proposal that manufacturing workers are so fiercely fighting.  

Donald Trump is, in fact, small minded. He recently pointed out a black audience member, a man who does not, in fact, support Trump, and called him “my African-American,” as if Trump owned him. Trump launched his campaign by calling undocumented immigrants from Mexico criminals and rapists. Trump ridiculed a physically disabled reporter.  He mocked the face of a female primary opponent.  He’s a small-tent guy. Only rich white male Christians like him fit in.  That, frankly, is un-American. And certainly unbefitting a person who is supposed to represent the best interests of all Americans. 

Way back in January, Donald Trump got himself a ton of prime publicity on the backs of veterans. He organized a benefit that he said was for them. But really he did it because he didn’t feel like debating other GOP presidential candidates that night.

At the event, he boasted that he’d raised $6 million, including $1 million that would come from his own pocket. Not too shabby, as he would say. But when reporters asked him later where the money went, including whether Donald had, indeed, donated $1 million, he told them he didn’t have to account for the funds.

This is the way Donald Trump rolls. He takes no responsibility for his actions. He refuses to be held to account. He collects donations for veterans but won't disclose the money trail. He’s so delinquent on paying his taxes, dozens of municipalities must sue him to get what’s owed. He urges supporters to beat protesters at his rallies, then denies inciting violence. Donald Trump believes he should always be praised and never held liable, no matter what he does.

And that includes pledging cash to veterans and not actually paying it. It’s great to conduct a fundraiser and promise money. It’s much better to actually fork over the donations to the veterans groups so they can help returning servicemen and women.

Donald Trump scorns traditional presidential candidate standards. The Donald doesn’t do what’s expected. And he certainly doesn’t do what he tells other candidates they must do.

If Donald doesn’t feel like debating, he stiffs his opponents and grabs attention doing something different. If he finally realizes there’s no way to force Mexico to pay for that “big, beautiful wall” he promised ad nauseam, he converts it to a virtual barrier, a mere video-game blockade.

And when he pledges to release his tax returns, then changes his mind, he simply comes up with an excuse not to do it. That’s Dodgin’ Donald.  Donald Trump is a rich guy, a billionaire 10 times over, or so he claims. And rich guys in America don’t follow the rules that working guys must. In fact, fat cats like Donald celebrate breaking the rules. And that’s why he won’t release his income tax returns. What Dodgin’ Donald doesn’t want workers to find out from those forms is that while they paid the IRS every week, he paid nothing. Or next to nothing.

Dodgin’ Donald knows a legitimate presidential candidate must release tax returns. Every major party candidate since 1976 has done it. Richard Nixon even did it while under IRS audit. Hillary Clinton released forms for every year back to 1977 – 39 of them.  

When the last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, dragged his feet, probably because he knew his returns would expose him to be a quarter-billionaire paying an unacceptably paltry 14 percent, Donald Trump went on Fox News to prod him. “Mitt has to get those tax returns out,” Trump said.

Presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee Donald  “I am really, really rich” Trump is, according to Forbes, the 121st richest person in America. So, yes, he is really, really rich.

He loves the perks of being really, really rich, like flying to campaign events in one of his own private jets, which means he blithely skips those annoying airport security lines that non-billionaires must endure. He enjoys kicking back in one of his five houses, including the 58-bedroom Mar-A-Lago mansion, where the $600,000 annual property taxes are three times the entire cost of an average American home. And, of course, Trump relishes the power he has to tell workers, “You’re fired.”

Born into wealth, Trump attended private schools and inherited $40 million when he was just 28 years old. He didn’t spend summers volunteering for Habitat for Humanity in Appalachia. He didn’t take a gap year to put that fancy private school education to use tutoring inner city kids. So, frankly, it’s easy to understand why he opposes raising the minimum wage. This guy who was born with a really, really silver spoon in his mouth doesn’t have a clue what living on $7.25 an hour means. 

On the fourth anniversary of the Korean trade deal, its lofty promises have been revealed as putrid pie in the sky:  More jobs lost. No exports gained.

Just like NAFTA, just like China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), free traders swore that the Korean deal would shower jobs and economic prosperity down on America. 

It didn’t happen. Actually, the exact opposite did. In all three cases, the schemes enticed corporations to close American factories and offshore work. That enriched CEOs and shareholders. But it impoverished millions of American workers and bankrupted communities.

Now, a backlash is evident in the groundswell of support for insurgent presidential candidates on both the left and right who denounce these failed free trade policies. This is an uprising against a quarter century of Washington, D.C., based free-trade boosterism. Its first victim should be the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive scheme between the United States and 11 Pacific Rim countries.  

EPI chart

Forged with the despicable dividend of stolen trade secrets, priced with monopoly collusion, then traded with fraudulent labeling to dodge U.S. duties, steel from China violates every principle of capitalism. That’s in addition to defying both U.S. and international trade laws.

It’s outlaw steel. And last week, U.S. Steel Corp. asked the U.S. government to outlaw its import.

U.S. Steel requested this unusual intervention after China hacked into its computers, ripped off trade secrets, then used those secrets to directly compete with U.S. Steel in the American market. China is flooding the international market with excess, government-subsidized steel. That is closing mills and killing jobs from South Africa to Great Britain to North America. The United States can choose to ignore this. It can become a weakling, reliant on other nations for steel, including some, like China, that clearly are not allies. Or, the United States can act now, as U.S. Steel demands, to secure America’s industrial strength and independence. 

Alan White couldn’t shout jubilation from the rooftop on March 25 when he heard that the U.S. Department of Labor, after decades of trying, had finally issued a stricter rule to limit exposure to potentially deadly silica dust in workplaces.

He was happy, all right. After all, he’d worked with the United Steelworkers (USW) to get the rule adopted. It’s just that he knew shouting would induce his silicosis coughing.

Within days, though, indignation replaced his jubilation. White, who’d been sickened by the debilitating, irreversible and often fatal disease at work in a foundry, watched in disgust as Republicans attempted to overturn the rule that the Labor Department said could save more than 600 lives and prevent more than 900 new cases of silicosis annually.

Last week, GOP House members conducted a hearing to further their case against saving those lives. They did that just days before Workers Memorial Day, April 28, when organized labor renews its solemn pledge to strive for workplace safety rules and formally commemorates those who have died on the job in the previous year.

The totals aren’t in for 2015 yet, but the year before, 4,679 workers died on the job. That’s nearly 90 a week, 13 a day, seven days a week. Twenty-eight members of my own union, the USW, died on the job since Workers Memorial Day 2015.

But the GOP position is clear. Republicans will do whatever it takes to ensure that corporations can sicken and kill workers with impunity. If the argument is that workers’ lives and lungs must be sacrificed to ensure that foundries and fracking operations and construction companies can make bigger profits by releasing silica particles under 40-year-old standards now considered dangerous, then the GOP will take the side of CEOs who value workers as trivial.