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NEEDED: A NEW ENGINE OF GROWTH
2/16/2004
If you've got an old wreck of a car with a busted engine, you can put the shiniest coat of paint that there is on it, but thatold wreck still won't take you anywhere.
This reality seems to have escaped the Bushites, who keep slapping shiney new paint on their old wreck of an economic policy. The latest comes in response to the growing crisis of job losses in American manufacturing. In George W's three-year tenure, nearly three million manufacturing jobs have been lost. These are usually the best-paying jobs in town, and when they go, so do local businesses that count on those workers to be customers, and soon the town's whole middle-class future dries up.
This year, even though stock prices, corporate profits and CEO pay are on the rise, American factories continue to shed jobs, and the wages of most workers are either stagnant or falling. So the Bushite painting crew has rushed out with a bright new color they call "A Comprehensive Strategy to Address the Challenges to U.S. Manufacturers." It offers nothing but the same old corporate giveaways that this crew always puts forward: More tax breaks, less environmental protections, more nuclear power, and more limits on the ability of consumers and workers to sue corporations for wrongdoing. To add sparkle to this coat of paint, the Bushites also call for a new "President's Manufacturing Council" to – get this – give corporate leaders more say in government. More say? These guys already own the White House, most of congress and the judiciary – they need more say like Rush Limbaugh needs another dose of painkillers.
The Bushites latest paint job was revealed at a media event staged in an Ohio factory. But even as Commerce Secretary Don Evans was laying it on thick, executives at a factory in neighboring Michigan were saying adios to their 2,700 workers, notifying them that their factory was being moved to Mexico.
To get America moving, we don't need new paint, we need a new engine.
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