International President R. Thomas Buffenbarger, Executive Assistant Diane Babineaux, and Headquarters General Vice President Robert V. Thayer.

Like a string of mid-summer storms, these tornadoes destroyed individual lives, devastated entire communities and transformed the North American landscape. The breadth, depth and duration of the destruction distinguished them from their natural counterparts. These storms were never acts of nature, but rather the acts of mendacious and malevolent men intent on destroying the work of decades.

Even as the IAM met in San Francisco in September of 2000, the plans, policies and plots that would turn our lives upside down and our institutions inside out were already in play. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had already started to raise interest rates. Osama bin Laden was training the suicide pilots that would fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The U.S. Congress was preparing for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. In Canada, the Liberal government was preparing for the federal election that would be Jean Chretien’s last hurrah before he passed power, and a legacy of corruption and scandal, to Paul Martin.

And then Governor George W. Bush was touting massive tax cuts for the wealthiest, an all out assault on organized labor and the privatization of Social Security.

If the rest was history, we might be reading about it in a very different book. But we in the IAM experienced that vortex of events up close and personal.