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COMPACT WITH VETERANS
-Honoring the Men and Women Who Stand Strong for Freedom-

“The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by our nation.”
–George Washington

In keeping with the wise advice of our nation’s first General and Veteran, our first President and Commander-in-Chief, George Allen has a proven record of working on behalf of Veterans and their families to honor their service to our nation. He recognizes that America enjoys its freedoms today because there are men and women willing to stand strong for freedom.

On their behalf, George Allen makes the following compact as Virginia’s next Senator:

A committed partner and advocate for Veterans in the United States Senate. George Allen will listen to the voices of Virginia’s Veterans and their families and will use his office to work on their behalf with the Department of Defense; the Veterans Administration (VA); other members of Congress; state, local, and municipal leaders; major Veterans’ service organizations and private businesses to respond to the challenges and unique needs of our services, our military service members, our Veterans, and their families, whether it is navigating the claims process or ensuring that America keeps her promises to those who have served. He will have a member of his staff whose assigned job will be dedicated to assisting Veterans and their families.

Keeping our promises to our Veterans and their families. Our nation has built an unsurpassed, quality, all-volunteer military force by employing a carefully balanced package of incentives and earned benefits for recruitment and retention. Our serving active, guard, and reserve forces, our Veterans, and our retirees should not have to be concerned about whether their service will be recognized nor worry about whether they and their families will be afforded the benefits they have earned through their sacrifice and been guaranteed to them by our government. These promised benefits must be a priority, and George Allen will see that benefits are funded. Whether it is health care, education, retirement, or quality of life benefits for the military, retirees, Veterans and their families, George Allen will insist that our nation keep its promises to those who have served and sacrificed and those who are currently serving in the cause of freedom.

Honoring service and sacrifice. Honoring service extends beyond a warm homecoming or a moment of silence on Memorial and Veterans’ Day. It is reflected in the cemeteries that honor the fallen and the memorials that remind future generations of the sacrifices of generations past; in the care provided the wounded and the opportunities extended to returning Veterans to make a successful transition back to civilian life.

Jobs for Veterans. Unemployment among Veterans tends to be even higher than it is for their civilian counterparts, both nationwide and in Virginia, particularly among our younger troops . As Virginia’s U.S. Senator, George Allen will work to help these brave men and women continue to contribute to the nation and provide for their families. He supports efforts to help Veterans transition from the military and match their skills and experience with the needs of private-sector and public-sector employers as well as a comprehensive workforce development initiative for Veterans, with special emphasis on those with service disabilities and the scars of war. George Allen believes the federal government should lead by example in providing job opportunities for Veterans as intended by current Veterans’ preference hiring laws as well as the law requiring federal agencies to implement plans to increase business with small firms owned by service-disabled Veterans. In the Senate, he will insist that agencies proactively apply and that the Office of Personnel Management aggressively enforce Veterans’ preferences for open government positions and demand that Congress be given full information on and exercise careful oversight of these laws.

Treating our Wounded Heroes. Care for our wounded warriors is a moral obligation to those who have sacrificed so much defending our freedom. George Allen believes the Veterans’ Administration must be resourced and staffed to promptly and appropriately address the needs of wounded and service-disabled Veterans and their families. As he has in the past, George Allen will work to provide full concurrent receipt to all active duty and reserve component disabled retirees, regardless of disability rating or cause, and to support research and proper treatment and diagnosis of blast-related traumatic brain injuries. He will work to eliminate the backlog of VA claims and to streamline the application and appeals process and take full advantage of technology to make the process faster and easier and less stressful and frustrating for Veterans to navigate. In this and other areas, he will work to ensure seamless operations between State and federal offices.

Guaranteeing the Right to Vote. Nearly 12,500 military and overseas ballots requested from the Commonwealth were not sent out by Virginia election officials by the deadline in 2008, and more than 3,000 ballots that arrived after Election Day were not counted. Ensuring that the men and women who serve in our armed forces can exercise their civic responsibility through voting is very important to George Allen, who has been a leader on the issue of military voting rights for our service members, their families and Veterans living overseas. He will work to continue and expand reforms that guarantee those who are fighting to protect our fundamental freedoms the opportunity to cast their vote and have it counted.

Protecting Our Memorials, Remembering Our Heroes. Those who have served the nation – particularly those who have made the ultimate sacrifice – should be afforded a dignified burial and a resting place that appropriately expresses the gratitude of the nation for their service and stands as a permanent tribute to their memory. George Allen will ensure that issues of poor management and neglect at Arlington National Cemetery – from mislabeled remains to archaic record-keeping – are corrected and that proper steps are in place at Arlington and all 131 of our National Cemeteries to ensure appropriate care and respect for the remains of fallen heroes entrusted to their keeping. He will insist that the United States government persevere to achieve the fullest possible accounting for all U.S. military personnel missing in action from our nation’s wars.

Keeping America Strong for Freedom. The highest constitutional responsibility of the federal government is to provide for the national defense. In the Senate, George Allen will support the entire military community in its mission to prepare for and fight our nation’s wars and protect our homeland from its enemies. He will work to provide our troops with the best training and most technologically advanced armaments and equipment our nation with all its resources can provide and will fight vigorously against policies that senselessly waste taxpayer dollars – such as the current in-sourcing drive and the proposed costly relocation of an aircraft carrier group to Florida. While efficiency and budgetary stringency are essential to get our nation’s staggering deficit under control and our economy moving, George Allen recognizes that dangerous cuts to defense spending risk our troops’ safety as well as our nation’s security.

Virginia is home to over 340,000 Active duty, Guard, and Reserve military members and their families. Additionally, over 823,000 Veterans and military retirees reside in the Commonwealth.

Virginia’s and America’s Veterans can depend on George Allen to steadfastly advocate keeping America strong for freedom and oppose reactionary decisions that endanger our national security, put our citizens at risk, create a hollow military force, or violate the promises made to those who have served to keep us free.

Posted: Sunday, October 2, 2016 2:15 am

The Roanoke Times

In the 1990s, when George Allen was governor, he had the idea to take some business leaders from high-tech Northern Virginia on a tour of Southwest Virginia. He hoped to persuade them to expand their operations into a part of the state that desperately needed jobs.

Nexus Communications was looking for a place to locate a call center, so Nexus executive Tony Martin seemed an obvious person to put on the list. Except Martin didn’t think so. He’d already had someone suggest Southwest Virginia as a possible location and had rejected the idea. “I was kind of arrogant about it,” he recalls. “That’s too far away. All the typical excuses.”

State officials persisted, trying to get Martin to go on Allen’s group tour of the coalfields. Again, he said no. Then one night, he got a phone call — from the governor’s secretary of commerce and trade. Martin finally gave in. “I said ‘fine, I’ll make the trip.’ I went down there, and was completely surprised.”

He liked the place. He liked the people. And the numbers added up. Before long, Nexus announced it would put the call center in Clintwood. “That experience taught me several things,” Martin says. “You’ve got to get people down in the region to see what’s there and to overcome negative stereotypes about the coalfield area.”

Our story could have had a happy ending there. Except it didn’t. Martin moved on to other ventures. A few years later, in 2000, he was reading The Washington Post when a small news item caught his eye: Nexus was closing that Clintwood call center he had opened — and moving the jobs to India. “That really rubbed me the wrong way,” Martin recalls. And that’s how Martin became an angel for economic development in Southwest Virginia. Not an angel investor, a term common in the business world, but a different kind of angel. Something of a guardian angel. Adam Smith spoke of “the invisible hand” of capitalism. Martin is perhaps the invisible hand behind a surprising number of economic development decisions in Virginia’s coalfields.

Martin — who admits only to being in his 60s — doesn’t like to call himself retired. He still has various business ventures, but says his work for Southwest Virginia has been for free. It’s simply “a passion,” he says.

The first thing he did in the early 2000s was to advise local officials to concentrate on getting federal contracts — a niche he knew from his high-tech days. “At the time there was no federal contracting done in the region, at least I could tell. They said, ‘Hey, if you want to do this, go for it.’ So I started networking around, and through a series of contacts got introduced to a company called CGI,” Martin said.

In October 2005, another Virginia governor with a keen interest in economic development in Southwest Virginia announced that CGI, a Canadian company, would open a software development center in Russell County. Mark Warner still counts the 300 jobs announced that day as one of the high points of his governorship, and rightly so — but it was Martin who made the first contact with CGI.

Last year, Warner — by now a senator — convened a roundtable for entrepreneurs in Richmond. It was the kind of wonky, networking thing that Warner revels in, but not something that generates headlines because it doesn’t fit into a partisan pigeonhole. One of the participants that day was Rick Gordon, who runs an offshoot of Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology called Mach37, which focuses on growing cybersecurity companies. Another participant that day — indeed, one of the session leaders — was Tony Martin.

Gordon and Martin are both Naval Academy grads. Both work in high-tech. Before long, Gordon was hailing Martin as “one of my mentors” and Martin was squiring Gordon on a trip to the coalfields, talking it up as a potential site for cybersecurity companies. Martin ticks off the advantages of doing business in Southwest Virginia as well as any economic development official. Costs are lower. And because there’s less competition, there’s less turnover in the workforce.

Martin also has some definite views: Politicians are often focused on the wrong thing, he says. “They’d rather have 10 low-wage jobs than one high wage job,” because the existing workforce may not be qualified for that high-wage job. However, he insists, “you need to change the economic profile of the region. You need to bring in a different type of job, and that may not be as palatable from a political standpoint.” Instead of call centers, he’s focused now on directing high-tech jobs to the coalfields.

This summer, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise signed a deal with Mach37 to bring its entrepreneur partners on regular tours of the coalfields — and the college announced the development of a “business accelerator” to house potential start-ups.

“I think I’ve now brought down 10-12 early stage companies,” Martin says. Many of those have yet to commit. But some have. Bird Dog Distributors in Clintwood makes medical kits. Micronic Technologies in Wise County is in the research-and-development phase of developing a new wastewater treatment technology.

Karen Sorber, Micronic’s founder and CEO, had been in Northern Virginia. However, she says, “it was very difficult to get investors up there to invest in an industrial project.” Software, they know. Something industrial, not so much. And manufacturing an industrial product in Northern Virginia? Forget it. Then Martin suggested Southwest Virginia.

By locating in Wise County, her company qualified for a grant from the state’s tobacco commission — which administers an endowment intended to create a new economy in tobacco-growing counties. She’s also been able to partner with researchers at UVa-Wise — and hire four of its graduates for her 11-person workforce. This fall, she’s getting ready to deploy field tests of her equipment. “We couldn’t have gotten there in Northern Virginia,” she says.

Martin says that’s another advantage of doing business in the coalfields. In Southwest Virginia, even a small company is a big deal — and government officials are eager to help. In Northern Virginia, he says, small start-ups can’t get that kind of attention.

None of that would have happened, though, if Martin hadn’t suggested the coalfields in the first place. Sorber sums up Martin’s role this way: “He’s one of Southwest Virginia’s most unsung heroes.”

With the Port of Virginia in Hampton Roads being the third-busiest port on the East Coast, Virginia plays an integral role in our country’s exporting economy. Our Virginia ports are valuable assets that enable exporters in a variety of industries from across the commonwealth and Mid-Atlantic to ship goods to overseas buyers competing in the global marketplace. Just as our ports facilitate the physical transfer of goods from the United States abroad, the U.S. Export-Import Bank facilitates the financing necessary for domestic and Virginia firms to succeed abroad.

For our commonwealth, the Ex-Im Bank has facilitated nearly $1.4 billion in export sales since 2007, according to publicly available data from the bank; sustaining close to 8,900 jobs and bolstering Virginia’s economic growth. The agency’s positive effects are felt far and wide in our state. However, if Congress fails to reauthorize the bank’s charter by Sept. 30, the employees of Virginia exporters who have used the Bank — like Bristol Compressors International Inc. and Orbital Sciences Corp., as well as their supply chain partners — stand to lose future opportunities in overseas markets.

As a longtime champion of Virginia’s economy, I can attest to the value the Ex-Im Bank provides to our business owners and their capable working men and women. Every day, firms and suppliers — both small and large — across Virginia use the bank’s financing tools to compete and thrive in the global arena and sell their products into some of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

With more than 60 other foreign Ex-Im Banks around the world supporting their own domestic industries, it’s vital that our home-grown companies be able to turn to our Ex-Im Bank when they need financing support. Otherwise, they will find themselves at a disadvantage, competing in a world with one hand tied behind their back.

Exports are crucial to Virginia’s economy and were a vital part of our recovery from the recent recession. According to the National Association of Manufacturers, from 2009 to 2013, manufactured exports in Virginia grew 28 percent. Why would our public servants paralyze a tool that supports exports, competitiveness and jobs?

Virginia’s elected officials have a long history of working in a bipartisan manner to promote jobs and economic growth. Both U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine have shown this commitment to Virginia and both co-sponsored much-needed bipartisan legislation that would reauthorize the bank for five years before the charter’s expiration.

As a society, we shouldn’t let political infighting jeopardize the competitiveness of American business and our economic growth. The fact is, every Congress has supported the bank during its 80 year existence and the bank was most recently reauthorized with more than 75 percent of Congressional support in 2012.

The divisive politics surrounding the 2014 election should not be the catalyst to shuttering an agency that has withstood the test of decades of leadership changes and is supporting jobs in our neighborhoods. Indeed, last year after paying its own operating expenses, the Ex-Im Bank returned a $1 billion profit for the U.S. Treasury from fees and interest.

The future of the Export-Import Bank does not deserve to be fought along the lines of political ploys or entrenched into the political gamesmanship that accompanies the campaign seasons.

Running out the clock on the charter of the Ex-Im Bank hurts our businesses and jobs at home, and provides no benefit to the U.S. taxpayers. The stakes are too high and too serious.

If public servants truly care about American jobs and competitiveness, then stop posturing and dawdling: Reauthorize the Ex-Im Bank. It’s just common sense.

George Allen served as Virginia’s governor from 1994-98 and in the U.S. Senate from 2001-07. He is co-chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers’ Manufacturing Competitiveness Initiative.

http://www.timesdispatch.com/opinion/their-opinion/columnists-blogs/guest-columnists/allen-the-export-import-bank-is-virginia-s-economic-growth/article_e149401f-bc3b-5542-bd21-a4163cd681fa.html