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Rachael Maddow with Leo Gerard
Anyone see this? It was a pretty good prospective from him.
LEO GERARD, UNITED STEEL WORKERS UNION PRESIDENT: Thanks, Rachel. Glad to be on. Hope I can talk you down.
MADDOW: Nobody ever has before. So, it would be great if you did.
GIRARD: Yes.
MADDOW: Is the auto industry getting tougher treatment from Congress than the financial industry did when it was their turn for a bailout? And if so, why?
GERARD: Absolutely. I think it's the culture we've had for a long time out of Washington. And, in fact, we haven't bailed out Washington-or Wall Street with $700 billion. We bailed them out with trillions. We've had a bailout and we've had collapses as we had Ponzi schemes, let's go back to the capital fund that was bailed out by Greenspan. We've had the corruption of Tyco, WorldCom, and Enron. We had the tech bubble. Now, the housing bubble and the bailout. We're talking about trillions of dollars. Nobody complained that these guys made not billions, but, really, hundreds of billions that they've paid themselves over the years as they've taken the whole economy down the tank. The reality is that there's more than 250,000 people in the auto industry that make their living from auto. We have steel workers that work at U.S. Steel. We have tire makers that work at Goodyear, who are reliant on the auto industry. When Wall Street collapsed, their pension funds went with them at places like U.S. Steel and Goodyear and G.M., because as the market tanked because of Wall Street, we added liability and workers lost pensions. Not just their jobs already. And let's remember one other thing. One of the problems that we have with the Big Three automakers is that they're providing healthcare to almost 1 million lives. They're providing healthcare in a society where we're competing with all the other companies that make cars in other countries whose healthcare is provided as a matter of right of citizenship. So, we shouldn't punish the auto industry for producing pretty damn good cars-in fact, let me tell you one other thing before I leave this to you. The North American auto industry, promoted by the Big Three, makes more fuel-efficient cars than all of the imports, all of the transplants. They have amongst the highest fuel efficiency rating. Sure, they made some SUVs and trucks but if you go out on the road, what you see is SUVs and trucks. People were buying them. And they were selling those cars and trucks. So in my view, yes, we've treated the people who take a shower after work much different than we we've treated the people who shower before they go to work.
MADDOW: I spoke with the president of the Auto Workers Union recently on this show about the difference in response to those other industries that have been getting assistance or asking for assistance from the federal government and the way that the auto industry has been treated. And it seems to me that there is a real political infliction to the resistance to helping out the auto industry, and that political infliction you can hear when people start complaining. Critics start complaining about auto workers being overpaid. And they start complaining about unions. Unions are being set up as if they are the reason that America can't be that competitive and that business has failed. Do you feel that as a political attack on unions as a union leader right now?
GERARD: I think it's a lot of Republican hypocrisy, Wall Street hypocrisy. It's the hypocrisy of the already rich and powerful that have kept silent, like the governors that you had on earlier, kept silent about bailouts when it was going to their friends on Wall Street. Look at the economic deregulation we've seen in this country over the last 20 years. We deregulated the financial sector. We deregulated industries like the aerospace industry, like the trucking industry, like the energy. We deregulated employment levels so that now, for the first time in the last 50 years, this generation might pass on a lower standard of living for the next generation. And we deregulated the global trade. Tell me which one of those has been good for working families. Which one of those has increased America's standing in the world? Of course, it's a phony attack. An auto worker that makes $57,000 a year, working some overtime, who produces a good car, who has a half decent pension who's now had their pension equity whacked by more corruption and calamity on Wall Street, who has some decent healthcare after working 30 or 40 years in the workplace, an employer that's trying to provide that healthcare because it's the only country on earth where society doesn't get its healthcare provided through a universal system. And all of the sudden, we're going to blame the workers? It's not the worker's fault. In fact, this calamity, as your report said today, people aren't buying cars. I was in a car lot on Saturday with my wife, I went to buy my daughter a coat just to see what was going on. There was nobody in the car lot buying any cars. You know why? Because they can't access credit. That's not the auto workers' fault, that's Wall Street's fault. That's-those who deregulated the financial sector. You know, I have this little saying, it's good (ph) chance to tell it to you. When we deregulated the financial sector, that was the economic equivalent of leaving three-year-olds alone in a candy store. You know what they're going to do. They're going to gorge themselves. And when you go and get them, they're going to throw up on your shoes. I'm just tired of having my shoes thrown up on by Wall Street.
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