A glimmer of hope from our nation’s capital on steel crisis

If the first step toward resolving a problem is opening lines of communication, maybe there’s a glimmer of hope coming from Washington D.C. on our country’s steel crisis.
We’re directly impacted here in northeast Minnesota with more than 2,000 miners out of work due to the dumping of foreign steel in the United States.
But would the White House take action? If only a handful of states were impacted and the rest of the country benefitted from low cost steel, would President Obama see the big picture and act accordingly?
The president did send his Chief of Staff Denis McDonough to the Iron Range for a first hand look at the problem. But was this just a sympathetic gesture? We really didn’t know at the time.
Now Rep. Rick Nolan has heard the administration “is finalizing a plan of action to address massive illegal foreign steel dumping; a crisis that has jeopardized the very survival of our nation’s iron ore mining and steel industries and put thousands of people on Minnesota’s Iron Range and across the country out of work.”
Give credit to Nolan along with Gov. Mark Dayton and U.S. Senators Klobuchar and Franken for not giving up on this issue. This has been an uphill battle from the beginning. Giving up would’ve been easy but that hasn’t happened.
This whole situation boils down to something state Sen. Tom Bakk said months ago, Does our country want to have a steel industry? His words are the basis for going after countries that dump steel on our shores and cripple our mining industry in Minnesota.
Nolan said it will take a couple of weeks to get the administration’s plan all put together. Our hope is that the timeline is adhered to so we can get our economy back on track as soon as possible.