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Biden: A Friend of Working Families
Sen. Barack Obama has chosen as his running mate a friend of working families in Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.). Biden earned a 100 percent voting record on working family issues in 2007 and a lifetime record of 85 percent.
In addition to working-family-friendly positions on health care, Social Security, Medicare and other critical issues, Biden is a staunch supporter of workers’ freedom to form unions and “bargain with their employers for a better life for themselves and their families.” A co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, Biden told a Fire Fighters union presidential forum last year: “There is a middle class for one reason and only one reason in America. Organized labor. That’s why it exists.”
The Bush administration, he said, has been “waging a war on labor’s house….This administration has lined up 10 deep to strip away a hundred years of labor progress.”
The AFL-CIO has endorsed Obama and launched a website, Meet Barack Obama, to educate and mobilize union members. This fall, the AFL-CIO is carrying out an unpecedented grassroots mobilization to elect champions of working families to Congress and the White House.
Watch the AFL-CIO Now blog for more about Biden’s record and positions on working family issues in the coming days.
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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.
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4 Comments
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Although most of the “progressive” Huffington Post bloggers are cheering for Biden, this post should be a “wake up call” to articles as above saying that Biden is “100%” for working people. .
Joe Biden: No True Friend of Working Men and Women
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-williams/joe-biden-true-friend-of_b_120776.html
Anyone who cares about progressive politics, or the salt of the earth,
knows that the bankruptcy bill is a disaster for average folks.
Joe Biden is a big reason why this is so. He supported it and voted
for it, many times over many years.”
Must we go through another elction, another two and four years or even eight years with the same corporate agenda of more wars, death and destruction?
More years of collapse of economy (at least for working people), destruction of public health, public schools, etc. as this country is driven into a third-world economy. (That is a relatively few milionaires and billionaires, and the rest of us increasinlgy impoverished!)
We night as well start preparing for 2012 since Obama-Biden will lose if they keep moving to the right wing, just as other republican-lite teams like Gore-Lieberman did in 2000 (OK, they won, but were afraid to challenge the vote in Florida for fear of a ‘constitutional crisis’ – which we have anyway). Biden and Obama represent the status quo, not change.
There are two progressive candidates, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney, who will capture progressive voters as Obama keeps moving toward more republican positions. If labor would have gotten behind an independent like Nader (one of the most important people in US history on labor rights and issues) then we’d be well on our way to a Labor Party that truly represents the interests of the working class over the bankers and corporations who fund the Democratic party candidates.
The only way to make Obama accountable to his professed desire for change and progress is to open the debates to include Nader and McKinney, to keep Obama honest. Nader in the debates helps Obama and hurts McCain, yet shortsighted organizations would exclude legitimate candidates out of fear of ‘spoiling’ the already rotten and undemocratic electoral system.
To Paul: Ralph Nader is the reason we have had the past seven years with George Bush. That does not make him our friend. He shows very clearly that he is a one-man band and does not care if he throws the election to the Republicans. I marked him right out of my brain when he caused the 2000 debacle.
Indeed Senator Biden has demonstrated himself as a friend of labor with votes on many issues. However, my concern is his stance on Colombia. In 2000 he was all for Plan Colombia saying, never “before in recent history has there been such an opportunity to strike at all aspects of the drug trade at the source…Helping Colombia is squarely in America’s national interest. It is the source of many of the drugs that are poisoning our people.”
Unfortunately that plan has made Colombia the largest recipient of US Taxpayer money outside the Middle East and has been called a failure by many international organizations. Even a United Nations report shows a 27% increase in cocaine crop plantings in 2007. When the operation started there were only 12 of Colombia’s 34 providences growing the product and now there are 23. In addition Colombia continues to lead the world in murders of union members with less than a 3% arrest and conviction rate.
It is obvious this has been a huge waste of American taxpayer money. Many point to the massive corruption in Colombia as the problem. Colombians state that politicians make money from both the drug trade and the fighting of it. US State Department reports on human rights abuses in Colombia always mention the massive corruption. A former paramilitary member now living in Exile in Canada said, “In Colombia there is so much corruption, so many politicians that are corrupt. If the corruption continues, so does the war and so do all of the other problems,” In late July a union delegation visited Colombia. Florida State AFL-CIO vice president Mike Williams wrote about the trip (http://www.solidaritycenter.org/content.asp?contentid=780) commenting at one point that only 18% of the money allocated actually reached the end point. Posters on this site who have visited or lived in Colombia have mentioned the massive corruption within the government and how it thwarts the laws written to protect workers.
Let’s hope that Joe Biden is paying attention and has learned in the last 8 years. Before American workers taxpayer money can have effect in Colombia and before Colombia can provide a fair FTA with the USA the South American country needs to make extreme strides on it massive corruption and protection of the rights of the workers and people.