Mr. President, tell working people why the country doesn't work anymore

In 1995, Mike Adams, editor of the Baltimore Sun’s Perspective section, asked a question that resonates with added poignancy today. Sparrows Point had twice the number of employees in 1995 than it does in 2006, and the retirees who lived around the Point’s fumes back then could at least count on health benefits in return for their decades of hard labor. The current jobs and retirement-benefits crisis affecting blue-collar America did not arise out of nowhere. It was not an unforeseen “act of God;” it accumulated from years of indecision and lack of attention by those in government as well as in industry, including he who, famously, “didn’t inhale.” –MR

Originally published 8/13/95; posted 4/06
By Mike Adams, © The Baltimore Sun

On Tuesday, President Clinton journeyed to South Baltimore to issue a challenge to those Republicans who want to relax federal environmental laws.

Standing on a wooden pier at Fort Armistead, a small part adjacent to the Francis Scott Key Bridge, Mr. Clinton announced he has issued an executive order reversing House-approved restrictions on the Environmental Protection Agency.

Presumably, the president chose Fort Armistead for its symbolic value. It sits on the Patapsco River near its juncture with the Chesapeake Bay. As the president spoke, whirring cameras framed his image with Bethlehem Steel’s sprawling Sparrows Point plant in the background.

It’s too bad the president failed to seize the other half of the symbolic message: Good life flourished beneath the smoke and fire he rightly hopes to extinguish.

The Sparrows Point plant once ranked as one of the nation’s worst polluters of air and water. It also employed 30,000 workers during the days when steel was the backbone of the nation’s economy.

The president’s announcement surely pleased the environmental lobby and others concerned about the nation’s flora and fauna.

But Mr. Clinton should have driven across the Key Bridge to talk with the workers at Beth Steel and the people who live in the dying communities around the plant. Before making such a visit, Mr. Clinton should read “Sparrows Point,” by former Sun reporter Mark Reutter. Here is an excerpt:

“Sparrows Point is the story of the fabulous rise and needless decline of America’s once great industry, steel. The saga begins a hundred years ago when Sparrows Point, a swamp-filled peninsula on the Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore, was selected as the site for a state-of-the-art steel plant. During the next 70 years, the Point grew to be the largest steelmaking complex in the world, forging the steel for the Golden Gate Bridge, the tail fins for Thunderbird convertibles and Chevy Bel Airs, and the tin plate for Campbell’s soup cans. Today, Sparrows Point creaks along at half capacity.”

Sparrows Point’s workforce has dwindled to some 5,000 workers. The air and water around the plant are much cleaner, but fewer families are being fed by Beth Steel.

The demise of the American steel industry cannot be blamed on the more stringent and costly regulations that grew out of the environmental movement. Industry executives bear most of the blame because they inflated prices and failed to modernize plants to stave off foreign competition.

Too bad Mr. Clinton didn’t hold a town meeting at the main gate at Beth Steel. These workers, who once voted solidly pro-labor and Democratic, deserve an explanation of where they stand in the New World Order.

The president ought to explain how the decline of the nation’s smokestack industries and manufacturing jobs factors in the Gross National Product, the trade deficit, and the rest of the economic mumbo jumbo that we hear so much about. It’s the economy, stupid. And the future of many American blue-collar workers is unclear. And the president ought to explain what, if anything, he intends to do about it.

There is a lot of talk about the U.S. moving toward a service economy. Does this mean that we’ll have a nation of lawyers suing each other, and the rest of us will work for McDonald’s or an insurance company? Does it mean the U.S. will never again have a backbone of steel?

A lot of people are suffering in America’s Rust Belt. And there’s growing prosperity in other nations that have learned how to make steel …

Forget about the partisan bickering [over environmental funding]. Do any of the presidential candidates have a plan to put America back to work? If Mr. Clinton has one, he missed a golden opportunity to unveil it.