SENATE VOTED 58 TO 38 FOR "SOCIALISTIC" (SEN. NICKLES) WAGE INSURANCE PROGRAM YESTERDAY

AP via Yahoo News and CSPAN ^ | 16 May 2002

[CaptIsaacDavis]

In the struggle to pass the Andean Trade Act, which the Bush Administration wants passed because it includes fast-track trade negotiating reauthorization, important principles are at stake. The Senate, which debated various amendments to the enabling bill today, voted in one case on nothing less than the fate of our very economic system -- as Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) pointed out in the gripping debate. Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla) called it "socialistic" (the AP story quoted him incorrectly as saying it was "pre-socialistic") and said "I'm embarrassed how bad this idea is." Curiously, an updated version of the AP story (the one likely to make it into the papers) on this debate deleted the comments by Nickles!!!! Compare...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020516/ap_on_go_co/congress_trade_47

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020516/ap_on_go_co/congress_trade_46

Sen. Daschle and the Leftist clique running the Senate added provisions to the bill that would create what Sen. Daschle called a "powerful idea" -- a NEW ENTITLEMENT for WAGE INSURANCE. "Powerful idea" is right -- he got it from Marx. It's called wage controls.

Before I get to wage "insurance," the Amendment also expands coverage for training and assistance programs to workers "indirectly" affected by foreign trade. Entitlements are proposed to include coverage of 70% of health care costs -- in perpetuity post-job transition (a back door to socializing health care!!!). Daschle, et. al., know that more than half of all of private commercial activities have an "indirect" foreign trade aspect today -- from the metal stamping companies supplying parts to exporters to restaurants in Silicon Valley and PA mill towns. If this passes into law, socialism will come not in one fell swoop, but gradually over the next decade through the turnover in jobs "affected by foreign trade" and a steady Congressal and Court-driven expansion of the entitlements. We can be certain that the Courts will have a role in defining what constitutes a job affected by foreign trade.

Now for the WAGE INSURANCE bureaucracy that may be created if this monstrosity is approved. Having broadened coverage to potentially tens of millions, a new program under this bill is proposed to have the government pay -- in perpetuity as a permanent entitlement! -- up to 50% of the "income" lost when moving from a higher paying job to a lower paying one. There are NO income limits or needs tests (socialism for everyone)! So, as two opponents pointed out on the floor, even millionaire business owners would qualify to get their $5K -- the provisional "cap" for the "pilot" program. And you don't have to be laid off to qualify! Sen. Gregg cited an example of someone quitting their high tech job to become a golf pro and getting a permanent subsidy of $5k per year (under the "pilot" limit).

The "pilot program" was "funded" to the tune of $50MM -- a figure that Sen. Gregg and others scoffed at. Sen. Daschle and liberal Republican conferees came up with that absurd number by putting a temporary "cap" or max on the entitlement of $5K and estimating the total based on the numbers of people who applied under the old program. Various Republican opponents noted that this is duplicitous, because the entitlements are far "richer" than in the original program, and the base of potential applicants astronomically greater.

As Sen. Gregg pointed out, the wage insurance vote was about creating a new bureaucracy and a principle that Congress and the Courts WILL expand. Sen. Gregg (quoted by AP):"This is a brand new, major entitlement which will expand dramatically. It is not some benign little pilot program." The potential growth is not merely to a few $billion within a few years as one Senator observed, but by my estimate HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS -- when socialists in the Courts get at this.

The actual vote was on an amendment proposed by Sen. Gregg to eliminate the wage insurance program from the bill. Various Senators argued that "it was only $50MM," but Sen. Gregg correctly pointed out that if the numbers were so small why was it "key" to the compromise? Moreover, as Sen. Nickles pointed out, why was this new program literally added at the last second -- and never debated (for some Senators it was news) -- as part of a "compromise" to get the Trade Act to the floor with fast-track reauthorization included?

The vote was about "PRINCIPLE" (Gregg) and setting the stage for the explosive growth of a new entitlement bureaucracy. The vote itself -- to "table" or kill the amendment -- was positioned by defenders of the "compromise," including REPUBLICAN Senators Phil Gramm (R-Tex) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) as necessary to keep fast-track reauthorization alive. Gramm and Grassley were among the 58 who voted to KILL the Gregg amendment. Bizarre and curious, since it was the same Sen. Gramm who said in the course of the debate that if a larger (current "funding") entitlement to workers of defunct and bankrupt companies driven out of business because of trade (the $179MM so-called "steel workers amendment" proposed by John D. Rockefeller (D.W.Va)) was added, he was "off this bill."

Sen. Gramm compared wage insurance as a compromise akin to deciding it was better to "kiss a pig on the mouth" instead of somewhere else. What he failed to distinguish was that a pig is a PIG, no matter what end you're looking at.

The entire point of the exercise by Daschle, et. al., is to get the Bush Administration to back away from this bill by making the "compromise" so unpalatable that even a doctrinaire free trader like President Bush has to retreat and come at this again some other day (post-November). White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was quoted in the AP story arguing that Sen. Rockefeller's "steelworkers' amendment" sent a "troubling signal that the Senate is seeking to undermine the possibility of passage of free trade." No kidding.

What is more disturbing is that the WH and Gramm aren't ready to take a stand on WAGE INSURANCE. Daschle has given the Republican leaders in the Senate and the WH an issue to DESTROY Democrats with in the Fall!!!! "Vote against Wage Insurance and Socialism!"

But, Nooo!!!! They would rather stage manage this fight over the "somewhere else" on the PIG than publicly -- and loudly -- walk away from this despicable "compromise" with socialism out of PRINCIPLE.

If the White House signs off on this swinish "compromise," a transition from social democracy to democratic socialism will be inevitable (The Republic was usurped long ago!). All in the name of so-called "free trade" and the dislocating effects it causes when one is determined to promote pseudo-"free" trade with socialist governments. It takes one to trade with one!

Laissez-faire "free trade" of the sort our current president appears to hold dear is a concept and world view much broader than foreign trade conducted with national interests at heart -- that is, in the latter case, with select partners intended to accumulate wealth and access to necessary resources. Indeed, I would argue that there are two schools of thought among "free traders" -- nationalist (rooted in Adam Smith's original thinking and 200 years of American prosperity) and globalist. Globalist "free" trade promotes a vision of open and broad-based commerce intended to create "interdependence" with almost any country not at war with us or with voting blocks of expats within the US determined to prevent it. The more pernicious and tyrannical zealots of globalist free trade dare to advance the notion that sovereign choices about how and who we trade with should be "regulated" by international organizations. However, "free" trade can only be truly "free" when it is with similarly free peoples with shared values and interests, and committed to fair and open competition. Doctrinaire "globalist" free-traders, who love their junkets to communist China and socialist Mexico, talk constantly about promoting "free market" values in places like China through trade. However, some are so zealous or selfish that they are intellectually blind to the reality that in order to achieve marginal ideological advances overseas they must also create sometimes severe economic dislocations at home -- which work to PROMOTE socialism in the United States (from subsidies to farmers to this welfare program for "trade affected" workers). In the Andean Trade Act, that relationship is, as one Senator put it, the "key" to the "compromise." Trade with socialists and compromise with socialism.

Article by James F. Burke

[sultan88]

..."I'm way to close to a coronary."

And they keep pouring it on...trying to "break" us.

[bybybill]

Understand the debate reguarding the whole bill, its the "wage insurance program" that baffles me.

[davidosborne]

For those who did not catch Sen. Gramm (TX) speech from the senate floor it is printed in the senate record on page S4311

Link to senate record..

well worth the read... I wish Sen. Gramm would move to Florida !!

[sultan88]

Did our two Virginia senators vote the "wrong" way?

[davidosborne]

me too.. I was only making the point that it was one of MANY concessions to the left in exchange for the fast track trade promotion... and yet we don't even get that... a MUST VETO IMHO

[davidosborne]

On this particular amdmt.. they should have voted to kill AMDMT 3408 and they did not.. Senate vote #110

[PeteF]

called it "socialistic"

Source?

[davidosborne]

Don't feel bad, I am sure that your Senators in VA are just as scared as my Senators from FL to vote no when they mean no, and stand up and make an argument, rather than cave into the the "pressure" of the special interest groups telling you to vote yes....sigh.. this ammendment should have been called the "popularity contest over the best interest of America protection amdmt" or "incumbant protection ammendment"

[davidosborne]

BTTT - Now if I can just get more signatures on my petition...

VETO HR.3009

[Mudboy Slim]

"...there's a lot more to a name than ya might think at first glance."

Yep...MUD

[Mudboy Slim]

"...what are you, some kind of troublemaker or somthing?"

Hey, my FRiend, they started it!!

LOL...MUD

[CaptIsaacDavis]

CSPAN -- I watched it live.

[blueriver]

What in hexxxxx is this about?

Why be so surprised? This fits in perfectly to the "Free Trade Global Economy" agenda. First you take the jobs away from Americans and give them to third world countries, then you complete the transaction by making American's dependent on the government. The end result is that the American middle class gets destroyed and America becomes just another third world country. The Republicans and the Democrats are working together to bring an end to the American middle class.

[CaptIsaacDavis]

In a number of cases sitting Congressmen do not even care to hide their Marxist sympathies. A number participate in programs run by the Democratic Socialists of America -- the American party affiliate of the Second International (now called the Socialist International). In fact, during the Clinton era the Democratic Party youth org established informal ties with the SI youth org. Clinton's advisers played a key role in coordinating political campaigns of key SI members -- the Christian Socialist and Laborite Tony Blair among others. See dsausa.org and www.socialistinternational.org

[Tauzero]

Et tu Gramm?

[lowbridge]

bump

[dalebert]

Daschle is past far left. He is commie

[dalebert]

Why would any republican vote for this?

[freekitty]

I think what we are called are worker bees.

[CaptIsaacDavis]

Or maybe we could mobilize the one resource that real republicans in the Western world own the overwhelming majority of -- capital!!! Marxists around the world rail against us for throwing money around with a purpose when, in fact, we choose not to even exercise any real governance over it. Lenin was right -- we have sold them, or more precisely lent them the money to finance the purchase of, the rope to hang us with. Middle America just hands it over like lemmings to institutional money managers running 401ks and IRAs who care nothing about how earnings are made (sell missile systems to China -- sure, how many more shares can I buy?) and funnel hundreds of billions into high-risk investments overseas. The left seeks to promote "socially-conscious" investing and wages open warfare in corporate Board rooms. And what of the true Republicans? Nowhere to be found!!!, except as a disorganized network in the shrinking number of large and mid-sized corporate Boardrooms left still dominated by men and women committed to liberty and American civilization. Flyover America's true republicans own the overwhelming majority of the world's wealth creating enterprises (as every major brokerage house targeting high net worth individuals knows) -- we are the largest shareholder/stakeholder!!!!! And yet we are SILENT! The fault is with real Republicans for failing to demand responsibility on the part of those who manage their money for them (and thereby exercise proper influence to ensure that decisions in the boardrooms have American national interests at heart). Up until the 1980s, the corporate management leadership throughout the United States consisted almost exclusively of conservative American men committed to a Western idea and republican values. There was no need to mobilize capital in this way, because we could accept on faith that the managers of our economic destiny had the interests of the American people -- their neighbors and relatives -- at heart. Today, we are in a struggle with new breeds of corporate "managers" consisting of two distinct groups -- legions of foreign nationals who seek only selfish profit who have infiltrated under the pretext of egalitarianism and a more pernicious force of managers promoting a vision of globalization. One can see the difference between the traditional -- national capitalist -- and the new globalist in management style differences between Caterpillar, which bills itself as a "global company," and Deere, which takes pride in its middle American roots. Guess which company treats its employees better and invests more as a % of sales in various good-will projects?