Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you.

The real question is, whether our little girls and boys will grow up and live in the kind of America that we believe is the best it can be. The kind of country that was good to us that gave us opportunities or whether we’re going to undermine the standard of living and the quality of life for the future generations. That’s the real question that we have to answer and that’s what the UAW has been fighting for since its existence.

I was outside and I heard my good friend Bernie Sanders. Boy can he whip you up.

But I think you get the idea that we need to fight back. We need to take our country back. It’s on the wrong track. Anybody who looks at that sees it. I am honored once again to be here.

I want to thank Elizabeth Bunn for her hard work and for her introduction. I want to thank my friend Ron the president. You know Ron, you have been a tough leader in tough times.

And I think it is not easy standing against the kind of forces that are represented by this government and the Republican majority in congress and we have to be smart. It is one thing to stand up and cheer at a CAP convention, right? But we’ve got to win. And winning in this environment is challenging. That’s why we need leaders who will keep fighting smart. I want to thank Ron and his leadership. I also want to thank Bill Wheeler, director of UAW region 9A, which covers New York.

I just want to say a personal word about Geri Ochocinska, the retiring regional director of UAW region 9. She was the first woman ever to hold that position and I don’t think she is here today, but she is retiring and I just wanted to publicly thank her and wish her well because she has been a great partner.

I want to make a few serious comments because I want to not necessarily leave you cheering, but leave you thinking and more resolved than ever to do what we have to do. You know, we are in the position we find ourselves today: where we are losing good paying jobs, where wages are stagnant, where people are losing healthcare and pension security, and where we have a government that wants to undo the work of the 20th century.

You think about it, the 20th century was the greatest period of human progress ever because of what America did. We fought wars to beat fascism and communism. We sacrificed hundreds of thousands of our young people to the cause of freedom. But we also began to build a more just and equitable, free society here at home. We all know the history starting in the 1930’s in the midst of the Great Depression that my parents lived through, yours and grandparents for many of you. And we had leadership that said to us “all we have to fear is fear itself.” And we got about the business of putting people to work. And the labor movement played an instrumental role in that. Because if you don’t have a strong labor movement in a free market economy people will take advantage of workers. People will have unsafe work conditions. They will pay you as little as they can get by with. They won’t provide benefits.

So starting in the 1930’s through the blood sweat and tears of a lot of people, the American labor movement came into its own. And the greatest period of prosperity after WWII into the 1970’s was a partnership between business and labor and government. That’s what worked. You know we had a government that was a good watchdog who put into place the rules and regulations to make sure that people were not taken advantage of. We had business leaders who understood that their obligation was not just to the bottom line but to their employees and the communities that they served and the country that made it possible for them to be successful. And we had a labor movement that fought for all these advancements in human dignity and opportunity.

Well I went up to the Senate in January of 2001. I quickly realized that the new Administration in town wanted to undo everything that my husband had done as President. And I admit I took that kind of personally.

Because I thought we had done some good work and frankly it wasn’t easy. Because we were in a huge deficit, and what does a deficit do? It shrinks investment. It prevents either national savings or personal savings from making investments that will make us richer and stronger in the future.

So during the 1990’s we dug ourselves out of that hole. And in January 2001 we had a balanced budget and a surplus. And we had created 200 million new jobs. And we had lifted more people out of poverty than any time in our history and we were on the right track.

But the new leadership in town had a very different idea of what America should look like, didn’t they? And they began, slowly and surely, to drive us back into deficits, back into debt. Dismantle – one of the very first things they did was do away with the ergonomics rule, remember that? They began to do everything in their power to turn the clock back. But I quickly realized that it wasn’t just about turning the clock back on the Clinton Administration. They wanted to turn the clock back all the way back to the Roosevelt Administration. They began going after the National Labor Relations board. They went after Social Security last year. They wanted to dismantle the structure of opportunity that has enabled most of us and our families to live better than our parents or our grandparents.

So what is the result? Well, you’re living it and you know it better than anyone. We have no economic policy in this country. We don’t have a plan to make sure we remain strong in manufacturing. We have no fiscally responsible budgetary planning. We are undermining the quality of life and the standard of living for Americans. And we are doing it deliberately vote by vote by vote in the United States Senate. Executive order by executive order in the White House.

So as I stand here before you I know that we have lot of challenges ahead of us. And my plea today is let’s be tough, let’s be strong, but let’s be smart. Let’s figure out what we’re going to do to take our country back and how each of us has a role to play. If we don’t manufacture in America, we cannot sustain our economic position now and in the future.

I was up in Rochester two weeks ago and I met with UAW from the Delphi plant there and they were so impressive. I don’t know if any of the people I met with are here today. They gave a great presentation. I wish it had been filmed. I wish I could have put it on national television because I would have wanted our country to see UAW leaders and members speaking about the global competition that we’re in. They weren’t whining, they weren’t complaining, they were saying, “give us a chance to compete. Don’t pull the rug out from under us. Look at what we’ve done in this one plant in moving from less sophisticated machinery to some of the most sophisticated made in the world.”

And it just reinforced, for me, that whatever is wrong with American manufacturing can be fixed by doing what is right with American manufacturing and putting people in charge who know how to do that.

We have competitive advantages that nobody in the world has. We have a strong, flexible, hard-working, experienced workforce. We just have to unleash you to be able to be competitive. We have a real commitment to innovation, but we don’t get any support from our government on that front. We have elected officials who are willing to stand up and form a consensus about how to enhance manufacturing.

We have an edge, but we’re giving it away. We’re not standing up for it and doing what is necessary to advance it. And the UAW has been instrumental in creating and maintaining that edge. But now we’ve got to ask ourselves, what are the challenges we have to meet right now? You know them as well as I do: pensions frozen, healthcare costs skyrocketing.

This is the center of the struggle between management and labor, isn’t it? It’s not just in auto and related industries in that sector, it’s across the board.

We have a smaller, more connected world. Some call it a flat world, but we compete with countries in Europe and Japan who have high standards of living, universal pensions and healthcare costs. And we compete with companies in countries like China, increasingly India, and elsewhere who pay low wages and have few, if any, benefits, and even use labor that is coerced. In China in particular.

We know we’ve got to figure out a way to have a level playing field if we are going to compete with that kind of double whammy. You know as well as I do that some of your brothers and sisters across the border in Canada – they’re getting new jobs because healthcare isn’t that big as an issue over there. Why? Why are we letting that happen to us?

We also know that people are being laid off. Delphi filed for bankruptcy. And if we don’t figure out how to deal with it, we’ll see the unraveling of the American automobile manufacturing sector.

There are some in our country, and frankly some up on the Hill, and some in the White House who say, “Well, that’s just the way it goes.”

That has never been the philosophy of America. America has always said, “Show us the challenge. We’ll get ready to compete and we’ll win.”

Why on earth are we now living in a kind of fatalistic vision where “We just can’t compete anymore. We’re just going to have to lose those jobs.” I reject that, I want you to reject it; I want to start electing people who will stand against it and say “Not in my America. Not in the twenty-first century.”

How do we go forward and not back? Let’s start with healthcare. I tried to do something about this and the UAW was one of my greatest partners. I still have the scars to show for how difficult it was, but I’m not giving up, we need to fix our healthcare system, and give people quality affordable healthcare.

You know the statistics. We were driving down the number of uninsured in the 1990’s, now it’s back up. More than 45 million of your fellow Americans are uninsured. We are spending 16 percent of our entire national income on health care. I’ll give you a little inside information: we don’t even get as good healthcare as people who spend less than we do.

Here we are spending all this money. We’ve got 45 million uninsured. 50 million people, mostly working people and their children who get their healthcare from Medicaid. And we don’t even get the best quality healthcare by spending all that money because we spend so much of it on intermediaries.

I’ve been in six pharmacies in the last month. It’s heartbreaking to see people trying to get their prescriptions filled. Most of them poor people, sick people, people with disabilities. They’ve been assigned to some insurance company. They’re not even getting the drugs that their doctors prescribed and we’re taking billions of your hard earned tax dollars and giving it to insurance companies to get them to provide prescription drugs to our elderly and people with disabilities. That’s not efficient, that not cost-effective, that’s wasteful.

And that’s the kind of direction that this Administration wants to take us in healthcare. And the rising costs are making it harder and harder for employers to afford healthcare. And what are some doing? You know very well. They’re cutting it back, they’re requiring more pay, and even worse, they are moving jobs offshore.

If we don’t get a consensus about what to do about healthcare, we are going to lose our competitive battle in the global economy. We need to, first, do everything possible to stand against the President’s budget which came out Monday. As bad as things are now, this budget is unbelievably bad. You will see the proposed budget slashes $36 billion for Medicare. It cuts $500 million from veterans’ healthcare, increasing enrollment fees and drug costs for veterans. This really gets me. I don’t know how many veterans are out here, and I don’t know how many of you go to the VA system, but the VA system is the most efficient, highest quality institution in our healthcare system because starting in the 1990’s, we began to push it forward into the future.

Electronic medical records, giving the government the right to negotiate for drug prices. Now the Administration wants to make it too expensive for veterans to use. We’re going to stand against that. Anybody who has served this country deserves to have access to a VA system that takes care of them for life.

One more thing: I have fought, for the last three years, to make sure we gave healthcare to National Guard and Reserve members. We’re getting there, we’ve finally got it passed. But that’s another issue I care deeply about. I don’t know if many of you knew this, but when National Guard and Reserve members started being called up, 25 percent of them did not have health insurance. That’s the country we’re living in, folks.

Where is the money going? Well, you know what choices are in this budget. Cut Medicaid, raise costs for veterans, but don’t mess with their tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans.

This budget has half a trillion dollars in tax cuts aimed at the wealthiest of Americans. Its embarrassing, isn’t it. We’re cutting not only veterans benefits, we’re cutting childcare, healthcare for children, we’re cutting law enforcement, we’re cutting everything. Just so millionaires can have their tax cuts.

When Bill and I left the White House, and he started making some money for the first time in our lives, we had no idea George Bush would be so good to us.

We have said, we don’t want it, we don’t need it, let’s use it for people who do. Let’s not be shifting all that money to the wealthiest, already the most blessed financially of Americans.

What are we going to do? Let’s come up with a uniquely American system. Let’s make sure it is automated like we’ve done with the VA system. Let’s give people electronic medical records that are safe and secure, so when you go to a doctor’s, the doctor with a touch of the button, can see what X-ray you had at the hospital. That will save billions of dollars, it’ll reduce medical error.

It will automate our system, instead of doctors writing it out, nobody being able to read their handwriting. Let’s make sure we do in this sector what needs to be done in order to make us more efficient and modern.

Let’s work on prevention. One the biggest healthcare crises we’re facing is increasing diabetes. Now it’s not just older folks, its young people getting diabetes. People in their teens getting diabetes. But most insurance policies don’t do anything with prevention. They wait until you have to have your leg amputated. They won’t send you to the podiatrist. We have to change the whole system and emphasize prevention. All of us have to take more personal responsibility. It’s hard when there’s so much food around and I’m old enough to remember when the very first McDonalds came into a neighborhood near where I was growing up outside of Chicago. It was a big deal and a treat. We never saw such a thing before.

But now it’s like a way of life and we’re all guilty of it. So we all have to take more personal responsibility but we need a system that works to provide healthcare for everybody and we’re not going to get it unless we have presidential leadership and congressional leadership that stands up against the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies and says “we’re going to have a healthcare system that takes care of Americans not takes care of their bottom line.”

And we should also say to the auto industry, “we will strike a grand bargain with you.” We want to relieve you of these burdens you are carrying because you did the responsible thing. You offered healthcare to your people, you worked cooperatively with your union, and now you’re being put at a disadvantage because you provide healthcare and you take care of retirees. We need to say we’re going to help you meet that burden. We need to help Ron and his negotiating. We need to stand and say we want an automobile manufacturing industry in America.

I wrote to the President, a letter last August. I said, Mr. President, call a summit. Bring together everybody. You know, I remember when New York City was flat broke in the 1970s. Remember that? And people came together and we worked our way out of that. There are solutions to our problems but without leadership we can’t get everybody to the table. You know, I haven’t gotten an answer to that letter. But I’m still waiting, just for the record.

Because if we can get everybody at the table, we can put healthcare on the table, we can put pensions on the table and we can lift some of the burdens and make sure people who are contractually obligated to provide healthcare and pensions get the funds to do so. And then we can begin to innovate our way into a new auto future. And we can do that because we’re the most innovative nation in the world, but we’re not doing it right now.

And we’ve got to do something about energy independence or we will never be successful in our economy or in the auto industry. If we don’t begin to move to a new energy future, our economy is going to be dead in the water.

Now when we think about energy we see all these problems and we see the oil companies with the biggest profits in history; a hundred billion dollars last year. So here we have manufacturing, which is the heart and soul of any economy, being just pushed to the breaking point and we have oil companies with a hundred billion dollars in profits. I think they should be required to invest a portion of their profits in making it possible for us to have new means of energy efficiency, energy conservation and new sources of energy. They need to start being part of the solution and not part of the problem of energy in America.

And you know this is the country that had the Manhattan project that created the atomic bomb during World War II. This is the country that had the Apollo project. You know when President Kennedy said we’re going to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade in the 1960s, most people thought it couldn’t be done. But we did it because we got all of our best minds together. That’s what we need to do now and I have recommended that we have a special agency in the government that’s modeled on something called DARPA, which is called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

When Sputnik went up in 1957 - many of you weren’t around then, but I was - when Sputnik went up Americans were shocked. No one thought the Soviet Union could beat us into space. So what did we do? Sit around and let the market take care of it? I don’t think so. We created an agency within the defense department, poured billions of dollars in it and began to win the race for space. We need to do the same thing in energy. We can, but we need leadership to do it. And a few lines in the State of the Union speech about how we need to be energy independent from an Administration that has basically done everything it could to stand in the way of energy independence is not going to get the job done. We need leadership and legislation and incentives to begin to move us in that direction.

And finally, let me say a word about trade, because one of the reasons I voted against CAFTA is that it retreated from advances we were beginning to make at the end of the 1990s. We should never ever enter into a labor agreement in the 21st century that does not have labor and environmental standards in trade. Because if we don’t have trade agreements that lift the bottom up, we will see a race to the bottom.

And that means we’ve got to enforce the trade agreements that are already on the books, something that this administration refuses to do. That is why we cannot grant Thailand access to the US auto market. That would be just like admitting that we’re dying and would just speed the suicide.

This makes no sense at all. I believe in trade. But I believe in trade where it’s not only on a level playing field but where we are lifting up the world not driving the American worker and the American standard of living down. So when we are talking about trade we need to be smart about trade. I believe in smart trade. And the deficit that we currently have, estimated at $782 billion last year, is more than a wake up call. It’s like a jet engine with a big sign - Made in China - in your living room. And if we don’t pay attention we’re going to wake up in ten or fifteen years and we’re going to be behind the eight ball even more than we are now.

And why is this happening? Because number one, our deep deficit. People around upstate New York are always asking me, “Senator why can’t we get tough on China?” I say, well, every month we have to borrow $60 billion, to feed the interest on our debt and deficit. Who do we borrow from? China, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia. So how do you get tough on your banker? Think about it, every month we have to hope the Chinese don’t go invest in something else. That is unacceptable. I’m not about to cede America’s fiscal sovereignty to the government of Beijing and the only way to get it back is to get competitive and get back to fiscal responsibility.

There’s a lot to be done. It’s not easy. I’m not standing here saying Rah Rah we can do this tomorrow. We can’t do it tomorrow. We were making progress in the 90’s, we were turning it around. We’ve lost a lot of ground. And we have lost a lot of ground because we haven’t won elections. In a Democracy you’ve got to win in order to set the agenda. We’ve lost two elections and we have lost them on the issue of security.

I represent New York. I take very seriously that there are people right now in the world and probably in our country, not just wishing us harm but actively planning and plotting to deliver it. I take a back seat to nobody when it comes to fighting terrorism and standing up for national and homeland security. But even there we could have done a better job than we have done.

You cannot explain to me why we have not captured or killed the tallest man in Afghanistan. So don’t take this security argument, they are doing it to us again. If you’re paying attention you saw two weeks ago, Karl Rove, in a room like this, telling the National Republican Committee ‘here’s your game plan folks. Here’s how we’re going to win.’ We’re going to win by getting everybody scared again. Contrary to Franklin Roosevelt who had nothing to fear but fear itself, this crowd is all we got is fear and we’re going to keep playing the fear card.

And it’s time for us to say, you can be a member of a labor movement, you can be a Democrat, you can be a patriot, and you can believe that we can actually do better on security then were doing now. But don’t come in and try to impugn people’s patriotism because they ask you hard questions. Don’t come around any longer and say that, you know, if you wonder why we’re not more successful in Afghanistan or Iraq that some how you’re giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Since when has it been part of American patriotism to keep our mouths shut and not raise questions about what our government is doing? That has always been a tradition of America.

So let’s get ready. I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, Independent or Republican we can do better than we are doing now. That should be obvious to anybody. And the only way we can is by getting again people in government who will listen. When I founded the Senate Manufacturing Caucus with my Republican colleague Senator Graham I did it because I believe in bringing people together to find solutions. After Delphi filed for bankruptcy and I asked for that summit I was more than happy for other people to take the lead. I just think it’s time to start being honest about the problem we are facing. We can’t solve our problems if we are not willing to look at the evidence and the facts in front of our noses.

When I think about how we in this country have overcome every obstacle and every challenge that we have faced we can do it again. We can give incentives to retool plants and make more advanced and cleaner cars like hybrids and everything else. We can offer healthcare relief and pension relief and a return to our commitment to be fair to workers and to boost productivity and provide more training. We can have a real debate about how to fix the healthcare system. And an honest conversation about how to protect our workers from unfair trading practices by other countries. We can map out a plan for us to get the auto industry back on its feet.

You know the manufacturers and the UAW have called for a Marshall Plan. Well let’s marshal our resources and get it done. And let make sure that we send a message that this is not just about the labor movement. It’s not even just about the auto industry and all of the other people who have been organized by the UAW. This is truly about the future of America.

We are at a crossroads and we need everybody, everybody, to put their best thinking and ideas forward. And we need new leadership that will listen. But I’m an optimist, I am confident we can fight our way through this if we have the right team on the field.

And as far as I’m concerned I always want the UAW on my side of that fight. Thank you all very much.