Ohio gets to start voting today; hope they remember McCain’s visit in April 2008. Hope they understand what he was telling them:

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio 4/22/08 AP-- Republican John McCain made a risky argument in a hard-hit Ohio steel town Tuesday, telling residents that free trade can help solve their problems.
That is a tough sell in communities that have hemorrhaged jobs as manufacturing moved overseas and cheap imports flooded the market. But McCain insisted that free trade is the solution and not the cause.
"The biggest problem is not so much what's happened with free trade, but our inability to adjust to a new world economy," McCain said during a town hall-style meeting at Youngstown State University.
"I think the answer is to understand that, free trade or not, we are in an information and technology revolution," he said. "So we want people to be part of that revolution, and we've got to be part of that new economy, rather than try to cling to an old economy."

McCain, on a weeklong tour of "forgotten" places where people are struggling with poverty and job losses, made a stop at a shuttered steel fabricating plant in Youngstown with broken-out windows and a crumbling, weed-strewn parking lot.
There he criticized Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama for saying, when they campaigned in the Ohio primary last month, that they would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA.
NAFTA expanded trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, eliminating most tariffs on a wide range of products from agriculture to cars to computers. Clinton and Obama said they would insist on renegotiating NAFTA and would threaten to opt out of the agreement unless Canada and Mexico come to the negotiating table.
"Protectionism and isolationism have never worked in American history," McCain said. [McCain is saying he is going to allow jobs to go overseas.]

McCain said the benefits of NAFTA outweighed the costs.
"I understand how emotional that issue and that agreement is, and those letters are," he said. "There have been inadequacies, there has been dumping in our markets and there have been unequal wages. ...
"I believe the overall result of NAFTA has been an increase in economic benefits to our country," he said.
McCain argued that job training and government assistance program are inadequate and need an overhaul. "Right now, many of these displaced worker programs have no relation to where the jobs are."
"I can't look you in the eye and tell you that I believe those jobs are coming back," McCain said. "What we've got to do is provide them with education and training programs that work." (Full story at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2008-04-22-2824987828_x.htm)


In other words McCain is saying that America just needs to adjust to the fact that the middle class is gone and that if we want jobs we need to work for $1 and hour so that businesses will bring jobs back to Americans. That or “get a white-collar job”, as if everyone can be employed as a manager to oversee the jobs sent overseas. What a joke! and the polls show Ohioans are buying it! Government regulations are needed on business for there to be a middle class. If government doesn’t help the people, we will all be poor like other third world nations. Thanks to American jobs being outsourced to India, India is starting to get a middle class.

Following is from author Thom Hartmann talking about our “Free-Market System” and how it will destroy the middle-class of America and with it the American way of life: "Democracy - Not "The Free Market" - Will Save America's Middle Class":

Any sports fan can tell you that football, baseball, or hockey without rules and referees would be a mess. Similarly, business without rules won't work. Which explains why conservative economics wiped out the middle class during the period from 1880 to 1932, and why, when Reagan again began applying conservative economics, the middle class again began to vanish in America in the 1980s - a process that has dramatically picked up steam under George W. Bush.
The conservative mantra is "let the market decide." But there is no market independent of government, so what they're really saying is, "Stop corporations from defending workers and [from] building a middle class, and let the corporations decide how much to pay for labor and how to trade." This is, at best, destructive to national and international economies, and, at worst, destructive to democracy itself.

Markets are a creation of government, just as corporations exist only by authorization of government. Governments set the rules of the market. And, since our government is of, by, and for We The People, those rules have historically been set to first maximize the public good resulting from people doing business. If you want to play the game of business, we've said in the US since 1784 (when Tench Coxe got the first tariffs passed "to protect domestic industries") then you have to play in a way that both makes you money AND serves the public interest. Which requires us to puncture the second balloon of popular belief.

The "middle class" is not the natural result of freeing business to do whatever it wants, of "free and open markets," or of "free trade." The "middle class" is not a normal result of "free markets." Those policies will produce a small but powerful wealthy class, a small "middle" mercantilist class, and a huge and terrified worker class which have traditionally been called "serfs." [Remind you of what’s been happening under conservative rule?]

The middle class is a new invention of liberal democracies, the direct result of governments defining the rules of the game of business. It is, quite simply, an artifact of government regulation of markets and tax laws. When government sets the rules of the game of business in such a way that working people must receive a living wage, labor has the power to organize into unions just as capital can organize into corporations, and domestic industries are protected from overseas competition, a middle class will emerge.

When government gives up these functions, the middle class vanishes and we return to the Dickens-era "normal" form of totally free market conservative economics where the rich get richer while the working poor are kept in a constant state of fear and anxiety so the cost of their labor will always be cheap [This is exactly what McCain is saying we need to accept as the “new economy”. Accept that you are a “serf” in a government of, by and for the corporations; and give up that silly dream of the 1950’s middle class society.]
View Thom Hartmann’s full article at: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0312-08.htm

-Samuel Worcester