Labor working to block four more years of Bush

(Rocchester Business Journal)

According to U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige, the National Education Association is a terrorist organization. Paige made the reference on Monday, February 23 at a White House meeting with Governors.   NEA is one of the nation’s largest teacher’s unions.  I am known to associate with Unions and with teachers.  Therefore, according to the Bush Administration – I associate with terrorists.

Aside from associating with terrorists, I write this column, serve as President of the Rochester and Genesee Valley Area  Labor Federation, the Rochester Labor Council, and Local 215 of the American Postal Workers Union.  I also serve on the board of directors for Lifespan and the United Way of Greater Rochester.

But don’t let that fool you.

I regularly associate with Unions, Teachers, Workers, Activists, Politicians and other people who are unhappy with the current leadership of our country and we are planning to do everything we can to get a new president elected in November. 

That’s right.  I said we are planning to unseat the President and I don’t care who knows it.

The people I associate with – the Unions labeled terrorists by Secretary Paige are fed up with George Bush, his cronies, his antics and his assault on the working people of this nation.  If that means that the FBI and CIA are planning to comb through my dental and library records – so be it.

It’s bad enough that the Bush Administration has destroyed the Medicare program, stripped working families of their overtime protections, and has squeezed budgets so tightly that local schools and communities are on the verge of bankruptcy, but now they have lost sight of anything resembling the truth.

I’m not talking about those mysterious and non-existent weapons of mass destruction that led us into a tragic and unending confrontation half way across the globe, or for that matter that the billions of dollars and hundreds of lives wasted in Iraq which could have been used in Afganistan and Pakistan to bring real terrorists like Osama Bin Laden and Al Quida to justice –

I’m talking about the 2.6 million new jobs President Bush promised to deliver in 2004 via his the annual Economic Report of the President—signed by the president and delivered to Congress.  In 2003, Bush said his economic policies would create some 1.8 million jobs. That prediction fell 1.6 million short. Since Bush took office, 2.9 million private-sector jobs have disappeared, including 2.8 million manufacturing jobs.  You don’t have to take my word for it, just ask any former Tyco, Case Hoyt, Carrier or Kodak worker.  This is real, and it’s happening right in our own back yard. 

In the weeks since this report was delivered, President Bush and administration officials acknowledged previous job growth claims are unrealistic, sighting the fact that the report was prepared by a group of White House economists and said Bush is not “a statistician” capable of checking the figures for accuracy. Bush has long noted he is the first president to hold an M.B.A. from Harvard University and has experience running businesses.  Apparently, however – we are not supposed to hold Bush accountable for his actions, misrepresentations, bad math or any White House reports bearing his signature. 

I could fill column inches of this editorial with the laundry list of attacks the Bush administration has committed on the working families and poor in this nation, including  the circumvention of the Senate in approving new federal judges, under funding the “no child left behind” initiative, outlawing project labor agreements, open trade policies that export American jobs, restricting beyond reason the freedoms afforded us by the U.S. constitution in the name of “patriotism” (including the removal of freedom of association and collective bargaining from 175,000 government workers in the Dept. of Homeland Security).   

I could go on about the personal impact on my brothers and sisters who work in the Post Office of Bush’s failure to alert postal employees in a timely fashion they may have handled a package of the deadly poison ricin last November. News reports revealed in February a letter was mailed to the White House from a Chattanooga, Tenn., post office. The letter was intercepted at an offsite White House mail sorting facility in the Washington, D.C., area and contained a powdery substance that tests indicated was ricin. The November incident came to light in February only after it was discovered ricin had been sent to the office of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).. According to The Washington Post, the Secret Service did not notify the FBI, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service or other federal agencies about the November ricin discovery until six days after the letter was intercepted. In 2001, after a series of anthrax mailings led to the deaths of five people, including two Postal Workers members, unions and other groups said the Bush administration was not forthcoming or timely with information about the attacks, the health risks and the cleanup of postal facilities. 

I would rather use this space to make clear the fact that the working families of this nation can not survive another four years of Bush Administration foolishness.  We can’t stand idly by while Bush makes banning same sex marriage a top priority but completely ignores the mass suffering caused by his economic policies.  I personally can not stand for my associates in organized labor being labeled terrorists, while Bush turns inside out the freedoms upon which this nation was founded.

My associates and I are not terrorists.  We are activists who plan to use every legal means at our disposal to change our nation’s leadership this November.