The old plant-closing activist in me sat stunned tonight as President Obama must have set a record for the number of times the word “manufacturing” appeared in a State of The Union address.

One passage of his speech especially grabbed my attention: when the President suggested a new tax break to encourage manufacturers to retrofit and modernize to reduce their energy costs.

While I will wait to see the details on that one before opining, we at Good Jobs First believe that common state and local economic development subsidies should require that companies getting them build or retrofit to LEED standards or an equivalent (and not just manufacturers, but also retailers, office buildings, warehouses, etc.). After all, the payback period for retrofits is reportedly often quite short and the incremental cost of building new to LEED has declined (and therefore the payback period has also shrunk) as more contractors have mastered it.

In other words, attaching “green strings” to subsidies would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce corporate energy bills, reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources, and create lots of construction jobs and higher-value maintenance jobs – what’s not to like?

For more, see this article I wrote for Grist on the idea.

“Story of Stuff” phenom Annie Leonard is out this morning with a terrific new video just in time for the “Supercommittee” debate over the federal budget deficit.

Leonard is ticked off that the deficit is being used to argue that good schools, a clean energy economy, good healthcare and the whole American Dream promised by politicians is no longer possible. Pushing back with her own budget analysis, “The Story of Broke” argues that “we aren’t broke,” we are just still spending far too much on “the dinosaur economy,” subsidizing Big Oil and petrochemicals, cheap mining on federal lands, the risk of a nuclear meltdown. and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations with the most lobbyists.

Pointing out what could be done with dino-subsidies, Leonard makes it clear that subsidies for new green jobs in renewable energy—along with zero-waste production, conversion away from petrochemicals to bio-based materials, and higher recycling rates—could create lots of jobs and help restore the tax base for education, Medicare and other vital public services.

For another caffeinated dose of Annie Leonard’s inspiration—and Free Range Graphic’s tart illustrations of her argument—check it out here

Kudos to Glen Falls Post Star columnist Will Doolittle for his tart September 22 column exposing that “Water stinks… as expected” coming from a pipeline built for a microchip fabrication plant in Saratoga County, upstate New York.

This is the notorious GlobalFoundries plant that received $1.2 billion in subsidies for about 1,200 jobs – a cool $1 million per job, with no Job Quality Standards attached! (See our 2010 study on high-tech deals that includes a case study on it.)

The costly water line was built for the factory but three cities tapped into it, as “a token public face on the line’s real corporate purpose,” writes Doolittle. But they need so little that “the chlorine in the water breaks down in the pipe, making it smell like a swamp,” he explains.

Meanwhile: “The establishment of a huge plant and influx of more than 1,000 workers to staff it carries costs as well as benefits, which is why businesses and individuals pay taxes – to cover the public services they receive. But by granting GlobalFoundries enormous tax breaks, we’ve tilted the balance. Everyone else must pay more so the company can benefit,” concludes Doolittle. “Since the GlobalFoundries deal reeks it makes sense the water in the line built to supply it stinks.”

AMC Entertainment Inc. recently announced it will take a subsidy package from Kansas worth more than $40 million to run away with 450 headquarters jobs from downtown Kansas City, Missouri to the affluent Kansas suburb of Leawood (median income almost two and a half times the state average and home values more than three times the state average) in hyper-growth Johnson County.

It’s the latest episode of subsidized sprawl (the Kansas City Star did a great series on that issue 16 years ago!) and of subsidized interstate job flight across the Missouri-Kansas state line that was decried by 17 prominent business leaders there just last April.

The AMC drama has played out for a year and a half and is one of the reasons the Missouri state legislature is now holding a special session on economic development.

Who has the best title for a movie about subsidized corporate job flight from distressed cities at your local AMC theater?

Should federal economic development dollars be used to subsidize the flight of jobs from one labor market (or state) to another?

Of course not! But members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) in Brisbane, California are blowing the whistle on just such a scandal.

A total of 183 workers at VWR International are facing permanent job loss as the company plans to relocate its facility from Brisbane (just south of San Francisco) about 230 miles to Visalia, California – into an industrial park subsidized by $2 million in U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration (EDA) funds. Teamsters in Brisbane have had a contract with the company for more than 50 years, but VWR is denying them the right to follow their work.

In a September 8 letter to the Commerce Department protesting the deal, IBT General President James Hoffa is urging that it rescind the EDA grant to Visalia. Suspiciously, Hoffa’s letter points out, when Visalia applied to the EDA for the funds, it omitted the name of VWR from the list of beneficiaries—even though VWR is almost three times larger than any other listed park tenant.

In Highway Robbery: The Road from Brisbane to Visalia, How VWR is Using Taxpayer Funds to Destroy Jobs, the Environment and Communities, the report of a special investigation co-chaired by Congresswoman Jackie Speier and California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, experts estimate the total job loss in Brisbane/San Mateo County at 266 jobs. The shutdown would also cost the City of Brisbane almost a fifth of its general fund revenue.

Reform Triggered by Stimulus Controversy May Aid VWR Workers

In a related revelation this week, Good Jobs First has learned from the Teamsters that Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank is taking the Teamsters’ complaint seriously, citing an EDA policy against subsidizing job flight from one labor market to another.

Further research reveals that this EDA policy dates to the summer of 2009, when EDA got caught in a dispute involving federal stimulus dollars (funneled through EDA) for interstate job flight.

Although the EDA policy memo doesn’t name names, avid readers of Clawback will recall that in June 2009, we cited the case of NCR relocating jobs from both Ohio and South Carolina into facilities near Atlanta, Georgia. One of those relocations, involving the manufacture of ATMs, was originally slated to be subsidized by about $5 million in stimulus monies via EDA. When public officials in Ohio protested the move (although jobs from South Carolina were actually moving into the EDA-backed facility, Ohio was losing a big corporate headquarters that had been in Dayton 125 years), the White House quickly removed the stimulus funds from the deal.

Now we learn, from the EDA policy memo that opens by referring to a summer 2009 “Recovery Act grant application that resulted in significant adverse publicity because of an accusation that funding would have facilitated the relocation of jobs from one community to another,” that in response to the NCR controversy, the EDA developed a “four-pronged nonrelocation policy.” Although the policy can be waived under certain circumstances, it would appear to disqualify runaways like VWR in Visalia (caveat: I am not a lawyer).

By adopting this policy, the EDA actually rejoins the ranks of virtually all of the major federal economic development subsidy programs with anti-piracy safeguards. Indeed, an alleged violation of EDA’s former anti-relocation policy was part of a plant-closing lawsuit I worked on 20 years ago that won $24 million for dislocated workers. And the existence of anti-piracy rules in numerous federal subsidy programs convinced the U.S. Solicitor General to not intervene for the defendants in the case of Cuno v. DaimlerChrysler that the U.S. Supreme Court considered in 2005-2006.

The existence of these federal anti-piracy rules (like state and local clawback laws) are the bitter residue of numerous plant closings blowing up in the faces of public officials over the decades, revealing the abuse of taxpayer dollars. Determined to go down swinging, workers like those at Briggs & Stratton in Milwaukee (who won anti-piracy rules for HUD Community Development Block Grants by protesting runaway shops in 1994-1995) have won rules that protect us all today.

I hope that the EDA’s nonrelocation policy does indeed apply to this Visalia case and that VWR International will stay in Brisbane, where it has operated profitably for so many decades with its highly skilled workforce.

And if you suspect federal monies are subsidizing job flight, call Good Jobs First.