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Government still ruining livelihoods

To the editor:

For more than a hundred years, the Ohio Valley was prosperous in a work force, population and economy due in large part of our manufacturing base, and the heart of that was steel. This industry brought to this area rails and truck traffic to move the product, slag from the furnace that was used for roads and even nails that were made from scraps. The use of coke for fuel to run the furnaces smokeless also added to employment.

The tax base and major life blood to the community were euthanized by our then-President Bill Clinton, our government and steel union leadership. Clinton and his treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, believed the U.S. could do without American steel jobs because at the time the industry only made up 7 percent of the gross national product. So from 1998 to 2002, they managed to decimate the steel industry, causing the downsizing or closing of more than 70 plants.

So, why this history lesson? In a newsletter dated May 27, the president of AK Steel, James Wainscott, wrote in a piece titled “Unfair Imports Are Focus of Industry Attention in Washington, D.C.,” “AK Steel and the domestic steel industry continue to face a tidal wave of what we believe are unfairly dumped and subsidized steel imports coming into this country at record levels.”

This is to let you know that nothing in our government’s way of ruining Americans livelihoods has changed.

Merica Petrella

Steubenville

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