Joe Rugola, Ohio AFL-CIO President and OAPSE/AFSCME Local 4 Executive Director, and Barb Phillips (OAPSE), Ashland-Wayne-Holmes Labor Council President. (photo by AFL-CIO)

Joe Rugola, Executive Director of OAPSE/AFSCME Local 4 and President of the Ohio AFL-CIO, has set out on a statewide walk to call attention to the costs of eight years of Bush-McCain economic policies. More than 180,000 jobs have been lost in Ohio, and nearly 1,100 plants, factories and other workplaces have been shuttered.

The “Road to Recovery” tour will stop at cities throughout the state, and will include visits to closed and downsized job sites. Rugola is telling the union voters he’ll meet along the way how important it is that we elect a president who will rebuild America’s economy and bring jobs back to our country, not one who will continue George W. Bush’s failed policies.

Our goal is to highlight and demonstrate to Ohioans that there’s a reason why we’ve lost so many jobs and why our economy’s been wrecked and so many lives devastated. Our goal is to raise awareness and let people know what’s going on and that they can change it by electing Barack Obama… somebody who will put the emphasis of the country on the middle class and advance the interest of working people for a change.

Watch video from the first day of the tour in Youngstown, and read more at the AFL-CIO Now blog.

Paid for by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees PEOPLE (1625 L St, NW, Washington, DC 20036) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

This entry by AFSCME President Gerald McEntee was originally posted on The Huffington Post.

I’m not sure what debate the editors of The Wall Street Journal were watching last night, but it sure wasn’t the one I viewed. There is something out of whack when they write this morning that “Barack Obama showed again in last night’s debate that he sure is comfortable with the status quo on health care.”

That’s absurd, as any fair-minded viewer would attest. Senator Obama spoke passionately about the need to change our health care system. He clearly summarized the plans he has set out to provide access to health care for all Americans. He effortlessly explained the choices he would give to the American people. He made a strong case that we need affordable, quality health care for all. At the same time, he rightly pointed out the flaws in John McCain’s misguided health care proposal, citing McCain’s plan to tax employer-sponsored health care benefits and leave individuals to the tender mercies of the insurance industry.

How could anyone suggest that Senator Obama was supporting the status quo? Perhaps the writer of today’s editorial was away from the television when Senator Obama said health care “should be a right for every American.” That’s not the status quo. Perhaps they missed him commenting: “In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills — for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay for her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

That’s not the only thing The Journal gets wrong. They label as “a wild distortion” the assertion that John McCain would tax employer-sponsored health benefits. Nonsense. A tax on benefits is in his plan, and he said so last night. Back in the spring when he first introduced his plan, even McCain’s staff admitted that the proposal was “radical.” Perhaps that’s why relatively conservative organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Federation of Independent Business are raising alarm bells about the McCain plan. Just yesterday, The New York Times reported that officials of those business groups predicted that the McCain plan “would accelerate the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance and do little to reduce the number of uninsured from 45 million.”

At a time when Americans are worried about their jobs, mortgages, energy costs and retirement security, the last thing they need to be doing is fending for themselves in an unregulated health care marketplace. Yet, that is what the McCain health care plan would force Americans to do. In the current issue of a magazine published by the American Academy of Actuaries, McCain explains that we need to remove restrictions and regulations in the health insurance industry. He believes in the magic of the marketplace. He writes: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

That’s not the kind of change Americans need in health care. We don’t need to tax employees for their employer-sponsored insurance. We don’t need to force individuals to go out and bargain individually with the insurance companies. We don’t need a health care plan that could eliminate current coverage for employees and make things even worse.

The Wall Street Journal’s editors have their ideological blinders on. They believe in the unfettered free market and in the elimination of regulations on the insurance industry. John McCain agrees with them. That kind of ideological purity, the kind that doesn’t bother with the facts, is exactly what led to the collapse of the economy that we’re currently struggling to fix. It’s also led to a health care system that is fundamentally broken. Unfortunately, The Journal and John McCain want the same kind of unregulated, free-market solution for health care that they promoted for banking. Their programs would be a disaster for working families and only make our health care crisis even worse.

As Wall Street suffered even more losses yesterday, the New York Daily News reported this from a top McCain strategist: "If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose." So John McCain’s trying to change the subject, hoping to distract voters with smears and distortions that Time’s Joe Klein calls a "desperate empty embarrassment."

It’s no wonder McCain doesn’t want to talk about the economy. By fighting to roll back regulations on Wall Street, he helped land us in the mess we’re in now. Maybe that’s why McCain famously insisted "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" even as the giant investment firms started to collapse. And as the situation got worse, he told 60 Minutes, "I think the deregulation was probably helpful to the growth of our economy."

But if the Bush-McCain policies have helped grow the economy, why did the U.S. lose 159,000 jobs in September? That amounts to the worst month in five years and continues a string of nine consecutive months of job losses. McCain’s top adviser Greg Strimple had this response to the bad economic news: "We are looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis."

Barack Obama saw this crisis coming and urged government intervention to face it head-on in a March 22, 2007 letter to Chairman Bernanke and Secretary Paulson. Obama is the leader we need now, with a plan that will to dig us out of this mess and restore the middle class. McCain’s plan? More tax cuts for the wealthy and even more deregulation.

We don’t need to change the subject, we need to change direction.

Paid for by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees PEOPLE (1625 L St, NW, Washington, DC 20036) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

The latest issue of Newsweek features an analysis of John McCain’s health care plan by Jane Bryant Quinn, an expert on personal finance. McCain’s plan would tax employer-provided insurance as income, and encourage workers to purchase individual coverage by issuing tax credits of up to $5000 – payable directly to the insurance companies.

Her take?

“Friends, there’s zero evidence that that works. In the long run, tax credits will raise your costs without changing the game. And we still won’t have helped most of the uninsured.”

McCain’s vision for health care would give the private insurance companies even more control over who gets health care, how much they pay and what is and isn’t covered. It relies on what Bryant Quinn calls the “magic of the marketplace” to improve offerings and keep costs low – but the events of the last few weeks on Wall Street have shown us what happens when corporate profits are the driving force behind our government’s policies.

Working Americans can’t afford more of that kind of “magic,” and we can’t afford to elect John McCain.

Paid for by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees PEOPLE (1625 L St, NW, Washington, DC 20036) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

This entry by AFSCME President Gerald McEntee was originally posted on The Huffington Post.

With the passage of financial rescue legislation today, Congress took an important step to pull us away from the brink of disaster. The final bill is not the blank check the Bush administration demanded two weeks ago. Rather than protecting Wall Street profits, it now protects the taxpayers and adds some needed oversight. Congress also included significant provisions AFSCME has fought for: restrictions on the immoral and excessive pay of corporate CEOs, and important new help for families facing foreclosures on their homes.

Unfortunately, strengthening credit markets and adding a few reforms is simply not enough to get our economy back on track. While we may have averted a disaster today, we still face a challenge unequaled since the Great Depression. More than 750,000 people have lost their jobs since the beginning of the year — 160,000 last month alone, the most in more than 5 years. Millions of Americans are now out of work at a time when jobs just aren’t available and their unemployment insurance is running out.

At times such as this, their families rely on state and local governments to provide a cushion for the blows of unemployment. Yet state and local governments are facing their own crisis, forcing many to make painful cuts in health care, education, public safety and other vital services. Today’s Los Angeles Times reports that California “is close to running out of cash to fund day-to-day government operations and is unable to access routine short-term loans that it typically relies on to remain solvent.”

According to the Times, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is so alarmed by the national financial crisis that he has written to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson to notify him that California might need “an emergency loan of as much as $7 billion from the federal government within weeks.”

Other states are feeling the pain as well. Stateline.org reports that “New York, along with New Jersey and Connecticut, will be hard hit by the layoffs of thousands of financial industry employees — by some estimates, the financial sector accounts for as much as one-fifth of their revenues. The tidal wave of bad news comes on the heels of an already brutal budget year that forced states to dip into rainy day funds, implement hiring freezes and put off projects to collectively plug deficits of more than $40 billion in their fiscal 2009 budgets — triple the $13 billion shortfall they weathered the previous year.”

More than 7,000 full-time state employees nationwide have been laid off already in the economic downturn, and state officials have announced layoffs for more than 26,000 other employees. Thousands more have been asked to take early retirement.

Majorities in both the House and Senate supported legislation to help the states meet citizens’ needs. The House passed a measure to assist states during this crisis, but Republican senators have blocked the bill’s progress. These same Republicans are more than willing to give Wall Street help, but not our states, cities and working families.

As a result, millions of additional American families may see this economic crisis turn into a catastrophe, as their jobs, homes and hopes are lost. The reckless Senate Republicans who stood in the way of fiscal relief for the states will bear the responsibility for blocking desperately needed help. Working families won’t soon forget these disgraceful votes. Nor will they forget on Election Day.

This entry by AFSCME President Gerald McEntee was originally posted on The Huffington Post.

Traditionally, in America, political candidates don’t hide from the press. Yet, until last week, that’s exactly what the Republican candidate for Vice President had been doing. Unlike Joe Biden, who has met with the press more than 40 times since joining the Democratic ticket, Sarah Palin had never held a press conference or sat down for a one-on-one interview. She has now emerged from the political cone-of-silence that the lobbyists who run the McCain campaign placed her in. Not surprisingly, her conversations with Charlie Gibson, Sean Hannity and Katie Couric have generated enormous interest and comment.

Some on the right, however, wish she had been kept under wraps. Conservative columnists and pundits are competing to see who can say the pithiest disparaging thing about the fast-fading star from Alaska. They have been stunned not only by what she’s said in the interviews, but also by the overarching sense that she is not a deep thinker on issues of policy, she lacks curiosity and she turns each question she can’t answer into an opportunity to portray herself as a victim of East Coast elitists who reject the candidacy of someone who represents “Joe Six-pack.”

At the same time, the brilliant writer/actress/comedian Tina Fey has dominated the cable news programs and entertainment television programs with her masterful impersonation of Palin, most recently satirizing the candidate’s nearly incoherent interview with Katie Couric. What makes the Tina Fey skits so funny — beside the wonderful contribution made by her fellow Saturday Night Live castmate Amy Poehler — is that Fey nails her impersonation with a splendid but subtle comedic touch, and she salts her satire with verbatim Palin quotes.

Like many, I’m appalled that so much of what Palin says makes no sense. However, by focusing on the comedy, we may be missing a deeper truth about Palin. She is a remarkably successful politician, and she clearly knows how to communicate. She’s a skilled and smart debater who’s won every debate she’s had to participate in, including successful televised debates with prior Alaska governors who she went on to defeat. When prepared, she is able to hone her language to take advantage of opportunities to define herself as a candidate who represents working people, who opposes the status quo.

This was on perfect display earlier this week when Palin spoke by phone with conservative talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt. When asked about working people struggling during hard times, Palin’s response was as powerful as anything I’ve heard recently from any politician:

“There’s been a lot of times that Todd and I have had to figure out how we were going to pay for health insurance. We’ve gone through periods of our life here with paying out of pocket for health coverage until Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs. Early on in our marriage, we didn’t have health insurance, and we had to either make the choice of paying out of pocket for catastrophic coverage or just crossing our fingers, hoping that nobody would get hurt, nobody would get sick. So I know what Americans are going through there.”

She pulls a powerful emotional chord and aligns herself with the working families who are struggling today to deal with rising health care costs. She makes you think that she supports efforts to restrain those costs. She makes you think that she’ll fight for you. She even makes you think that she’s a supporter of unions.

But none of these things are true. If the policies promoted in the Republican Party platform are ever enacted into law, every couple will have to white knuckle their way through their early years with no health insurance and lots of tough choices. Plus there won’t be many union jobs for them to land.

Palin’s powerful presentation raises real questions: Does she know that John McCain’s plan for health care is the opposite for health care for all? Does she support taxing employer-provided health benefits that come with millions of union jobs? Does she want to leave people to fend for themselves in a hostile, private health insurance market, purchasing health care for their families without the expertise and bargaining power that comes with employer-sponsored health care benefits?

Sarah Palin is plenty articulate when talking about the struggles she and her family have faced, and when she was talking to Hugh Hewitt she summed up perfectly the experience that so many young couples face with health care. I’d like to hear what she’s going to DO about it: What exactly will Palin do to help families get the health insurance they need? What will she and John McCain do to help ensure that there are union jobs that provide the kind of health care security the Palins received when they “landed a couple of good union jobs”?

In what must have come as a shock to the McCain campaign yesterday, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has credited “good union jobs” for helping her family get the health care they otherwise would have been unable to afford. Jonathan Martin at Politico.com has the details:

“We’ve gone through periods of our life here with paying out of pocket for health coverage until Todd and I both landed a couple of good union jobs,” Palin explained to conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt. “Early on in our marriage, we didn’t have health insurance, and we had to either make the choice of paying out of pocket for catastrophic coverage or just crossing our fingers, hoping that nobody would get hurt, nobody would get sick.”

Maybe Palin should tell her running mate, because in addition to opposing the Employee Free Choice Act, making Americans pay out of pocket for health care is exactly what John McCain wants to do.

According to the Economic Policy Institute report “Obama health plan outperforms McCain plain in coverage and efficiency,” McCain’s plan would tax employer health care benefits and shift the burden of finding health coverage to individuals. The report finds that roughly 20 million fewer people would have employer-sponsored insurance by 2018.

Hotline On Call posted yesterday about a new AFL-CIO mailer (215k PDF) being sent to over 1 million voters in swing states. It spells out the risks to our health care under McCain’s plan:

• Taxing employer health care benefits would put 158 million Americans at risk of losing their coverage. [CAP, 4/29/08]
• Already weak protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions would be gutted, and insurance companies would be able to deny coverage and procedures even more easily than they do now. [CAP, 4/29/08]
• McCain also wants to privatize Medicare – just like the plan he proposed for Social Security. [Columbia Journalism Review, 4/18/08]

In other words, when it comes to health care under a McCain administration, you’re on your own.

The McCain campaign will no doubt try to tell us Palin didn’t mean what she said about good union jobs and health care, but the truth is this is just one more example of John McCain being out of touch with the American people.

Find more details in a recent report available for free download from the EPI Policy Center.