National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) Challenged Again by Irate Members
By Jim Capo
Published: 2007-01-11 14:56
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ARTICLE SYNOPSIS:

The 74-year-old Michigan Tooling Association, now organized to go national as the Tooling, Manufacturing & Technologies Association, is the lastest to warn smaller scale manufacturing companies they need to wake up about where NAM is taking them.

Follow this link to the source article: "Michigan toolmakers fight trade group over China"

COMMENTARY:

More and more smaller members of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) are figuring out that there is a considerable gap between their interests and those of NAM members like GE, GM, Toyota and Boeing.

Current NAM President, former Republican Governor of Michigan, John Engler, like NAM's first President Samuel Bush, carries the water for the elites of international manufacturing -- not the tool and die shop down the street.

By going national as the Tooling, Manufacturing & Technologies Association, the leadership of the former Michigan Tooling Association is looking to give less than globally sized manufacturers a voice in our national trade policy. As it was put it in a recent Detroit News article, a paper covering an area that knows the result of "free" trade agreements too well:

"Many members of NAM feel they have been betrayed by John Engler," said Brian Sullivan, spokesman for the new association, based in Farmington Hills. "It's time to get noisy. Domestic manufacturers have been sold down the river..."

NAM officials downplayed the rift... "There is not a difference over objectives," said Franklin Vargo, NAM's vice president for International Economic Affairs. "We have a difference over tactics."

We have to call Frank Vargo out for being less than genuine in his perspective there. But, we will acknowledge that during the CAFTA battle, in the interest of full disclosure, he at least let us know that NAM's hearty support of CAFTA had absolutely nothing to do with his wife being at the time a US Trade Rep official working on the agreement.

The Michigan Tooling Association is not the first to figure out where NAM's true loyalties lie. A few years ago, textile manufacturer Roger Milliken, a name that should be familiar to Birchers and New American readers alike, was the major force in establishing the American Trade Action Coalition (AMTAC), a competing association to NAM.

Though the successors to Samuel Bush at NAM were unsuccessful in keeping out the likes of Robert Welch from their leadership ranks, NAM has in the main been thoroughly purged of officials anywhere close to Welch's Americanist philosophy. It's a safe bet that a dollar spent on NAM membership these days is a dollar wasted if you seek to preserve our country and its Constitution.

Jim Capo

Jim Capo is the John Birch Society's National Spokesman on Trade Policy, and a coordinator for North and South Carolina.

http://www.jbs.org/node/2323