| Feature Story
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Money Talks,
They Listen |
Al
Gore
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| Caricature
©1999 Bill Yund |
"If you want perfection, keep looking,"
presidential candidate Al Gore told some disgruntled autoworkers
in Des Moines, Iowa, back in March. Gore may have been hoping for
a rousing reception from the workers, but what he got was a tough
audience.
"We are of the opinion that NAFTA does not
work," local union president Dave Neil told the Vice
President. "I guess I’ll just stop there." Another
worker asked, "How come you didn’t twist arms on labor laws
like you do on NAFTA?"
Al Gore, the former Tennessee senator, is the son
of a Tennessee senator and grew up in a ritzy Washington, D.C.,
hotel. Since then, he has continued to surround himself with
corporate and government elites, and they have clearly shaped his
political agenda. As Bill Clinton’s Vice President, Al Gore can
claim to be part of an administration that made a few concessions
to workers, including passage of the feeble Family and Medical
Leave Act and a minor increase in the minimum wage. But the
administration’s overall legacy reflects Gore’s deeper
pro-employer stance: NAFTA, welfare reform, corporate subsidies,
and more.
Gore is a stalwart
defender of trade policies that allow corporations to trample on
workers here and abroad.
In the past seven years of the Clinton-Gore
administration, corporations have vastly increased their power to
invest, disinvest, ship jobs overseas, receive subsidies and other
favors, and escape taxes and tariffs. Many of us are familiar with
the alphabet soup of trade agreements championed by the
administration: NAFTA, GATT, MAI. The bottom line is that a new
global infrastructure is being created to protect the right of
corporations to maximize their profits in just about any way they
can. Workers have suffered as a result.
"America lost 360,000 manufacturing jobs last
year, and at the present rate, we’ll lose 600,000 more this
year," charged United Steel Workers president George Becker
not long ago. "Administration policies are flying in the face
of principled positions of the labor movement on jobs and
communities and families."
Over a hundred pissed off steelworkers got on
their motorcycles and rumbled across the country to Washington,
D.C., in June to demand that Congress pass and the administration
sign a bill to stop the dumping of cheap steel from overseas onto
the U.S. market. Imports from steel producers in the depressed
economies of Japan, Russia, Brazil, China, and elsewhere have so
far cost some 10,000 U.S. steelworkers their jobs, according to
the union. But the "free trade" Clinton-Gore
administration, united with Republicans, managed to kill the bill
in the Senate.
Al Gore has not been
kind to public-sector workers.
Al Gore likes to say that his "Reinventing
Government" initiative has reduced the size of the federal
workforce to 1930s levels. To some of us, this is not something to
brag about. Gore headed up the National Partnership for
Reinventing Government, which now claims responsibility for
eliminating 351,000 federal jobs. Under Clinton-Gore, masses of
public-sector jobs have been contracted out and privatized, a
process that has been celebrated as "the end of big
government." The real result, though, has been a loss of
public control over services we pay for with our taxes.
The members of AFGE Local 12 have had it with the
Clinton-Gore administration. And they’re practically in it. The
local, a Labor Party affiliate, represents workers at the Labor
Department. In June they rallied in Washington to protest rotten
labor relations within the department, which is headed by Gore
friend and advisor Alexis Herman. "Grievances are piling
up," they charge, and a series of employees with disabilities
have been fired by DOL management. Meanwhile, they say, Herman
"ignores the frustration and anger reaching explosive levels
within her own agency."
Leaders of the 4,000-member local connect the bad
internal situation with the administration’s wider record on
labor: "This is part of the legacy of the Clinton-Gore
administration which has used federal sector unions in downsizing
government and duping them with the [labor-management] partnership
game."
Al Gore doesn’t
support anything like Just
Health Care.
Gore has taken Clinton’s tack on health care: he
favors small, piecemeal reforms that don’t address the core
problems, such as corporate control of our health care system.
Gore says he wants "expanded access to high quality,
affordable health care to all Americans," but he isn’t
prepared to do what has to be done to get it.
Al Gore has not fought
for workers’ rights.
Gore claims to be a friend of labor, but he’s
never gone on record supporting any of the straightforward reforms
that equalize the lopsided relationship between labor and
management in this country.
During the first two years of the Clinton-Gore
administration, when Democrats controlled both the White House and
Congress (thanks in part to labor’s support), here were some
items not on the Clinton-Gore agenda: card-check recognition in
union organizing drives, mandatory arbitration to enable workers
to win their first contract, strikers’ rights legislation,
extending labor law to cover farmworkers and others... or, for
that matter, federally mandated vacations and shorter workweeks
like the Europeans have (see: Relax!
(And Uphold Global Labor Standards).
Gore is paid to fight
for corporate rights.
Thanks to data collected by the Center
for Responsive Politics, it is easy to see where Al Gore is
coming from. To date, 89 percent of the VP’s campaign funds come
from donors who gave over $200. Gore’s top supporters include
lawyers, people from investment firms, and real estate companies.
Viacom, BellSouth, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Time Warner, and a
cornucopia of Wall Street firms are filling his coffers. And Gore
indirectly draws on vast "soft-money" Democratic Party
contributions from a wide array of corporations.
And that money is not wasted. Here are some
stories you may not have heard about Al Gore.
• "We can’t
let this crucial program go by the wayside," said Vice
President Gore in 1997. That crucial program was a 5.4
percent-per-gallon gas tax subsidy for the huge corporations that
produce ethanol. (Although ethanol was considered to be good for
the environment, scientific evidence hasn’t bolstered this
thesis.) The nation’s largest producer of this corn-based fuel
is Archer Daniels Midland. Between 1991 and 1997, ADM and
affiliated donors gave $1,054,000 in soft money contributions to
the Democrats. (In case you missed it, ADM executives were
recently convicted of price fixing.)
• In early 1998,
word spread that the Environmental Protection Agency was about to
restrict the use of a class of insecticide that studies showed
could be harmful to children. Insecticide producers went on a
lobbying spree to stop the EPA. Two farm belt Democrats later
visited Gore, warning that he would face a tough time campaigning
in farm states in 2000 if he allowed that insecticide to be
outlawed. Gore subsequently ordered the EPA to slow down its
implementation of the tougher pesticide standards that had just
been passed, and told the EPA to consider the needs of
agribusiness in making policy. The EPA has yet to ban the
insecticide.
Al Gore’s friends
are not our friends.
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Dying of
AIDS in South Africa. Al Gore backed pharmaceutical company
efforts to keep South Africa from producing its own low-cost
AIDS drugs. Only after being dogged by demonstrators on the
campaign trail did Gore send a somewhat vague letter to the
Congressional Black Caucus signalling a shift in his stance.
Photo ©Ansell Horn, Impact Visuals |
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Al Gore’s top campaign aide is one-time
California congressman Tony Coelho. He was a congressman, that is,
until 1989, when he quit abruptly amid questions about how he had
financed the purchase of a $100,000 junk bond. Coelho is famous
for being able to squeeze money out of people who have a lot of
it. One of his favorite sayings is, "Money is part of
politics and it always will be."
Washington Post reporters Susan B. Glasser and
John Mintz recently did a number on some of Gore’s other good
friends. Gore’s gang, they say, "is composed of high paid
lobbyists and consultants," including:
• Peter Knight, the
Washington lobbyist who is helping to lead Gore’s crusade to
raise $55 million. In the past, Knight has been the subject of
several investigations alleging influence-peddling. Even after
becoming a fundraiser for Gore, he continued to be paid as a
lobbyist by the likes of Lockheed Martin and Bell Atlantic.
• Former Gore chief
of staff Roy Neel, who reportedly lobbies the administration on
behalf of regional Bell operating companies even as he continues
to act as Gore’s top telecommunications advisor.
• Former New York
Representative Tom Downey, whose two-man bipartisan lobbying firm
earned $1.8 million last year from a range of clients, including
Fuji Photo Film, which got into a fight with the Clinton
administration over barring Kodak from the Japanese market. Downey
also lobbies for Microsoft Corporation, home of Bill Gates, the
richest man in the world.
See also:
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