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AFGE Leader: Don’t Let Racism Distract Us from Real Issues |
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In a new radio ad, AFGE President John Gage urges union members to keep their focus on how eight years of Republican economics have slammed working people while the rich get richer—rather than become divided by divisive issues of race and gender. (Click on the audio clip to hear the entire ad.)
In the ad, which will air nationwide, Gage says he is “white enough to pick up on the code words of prejudice,” but we cannot let those words sway our vote.
In these economic times, every American worker should be hopping mad. Working families have been left behind like never before. Gender bias, racism, they’re not free. The real issues—Wall Street, health care, jobs, Iraq, gas prices, Social Security—have serious financial consequences for all of us.
Gage says he is optimistic that union members will go beyond the divisive rhetoric and focus on the real issues:
We built the middle class and we’re not giving it up. There are a hundred good reasons for how you vote this year and only one bad reason—prejudice. Let’s talk about the real issues.
In a recent column in the San Francisco Chronicle, Gage said:
Some Americans, while viewing themselves as fair-minded, will subconsciously transfer unresolved issues about race into more comfortable zones like patriotism, experience or values … This election is too important to be decided by leftover biases. It is incumbent upon federal workers, as well as other union members, to help crack through racial barriers within our families, friends and neighborhoods.AFGE represents 600,000 federal and District of Columbia government workers nationwide and overseas.
Following a stirring speech last July at the United Steelworkers (USW) convention, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka sparked a nationwide dialogue on race and the election. Trumka spoke forcefully about the need for all of us to overcome racial prejudice when voting for president and cast our ballots for our economic interests and in support of America’s future prosperity.
Citing Sen. Barack Obama’s clear record of supporting working families and Sen. John McCain’s long record of opposing anything that would help workers, Trumka told USW members:
Brothers and sisters, there’s not a single good reason for any worker—especially any union member—to vote against Barack Obama. There’s only a bad reason: because he’s not white.
I don’t think we should be out there pointing fingers in peoples’ faces and calling them racist; instead we need to educate them that if they care about holding on to their jobs, their health care, their pensions, and their homes—if they care about creating good jobs with clean energy, child care, pay equity for women workers—there’s only going to be one candidate on the ballot this fall who’s on their side—Barack Obama.
Click here to see a video excerpt of Trumka’s speech.
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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.
6 Comments
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OK since my comments yesterday were not posted they must have been to direct and to the point. So lets try again
Some union president said they were optimistic that union members will go beyond the divisive rhetoric and focus on the real issues:
I could not agree more, lets stop the divisive rhetoric. In order to do that we must stop blaming the Republicans for our economic woes. This problem belongs to BOTH parties and it began with the Clinton administration, ACORN, and The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Those are just some of the facts that you wont find on this website.
Until the Democrats, ACORN, and Obama own up to their part in this sub prime mortgage mess the divisive rhetoric will not stop and no solutions will be found.
Can we agree on that?
Yep, Door, comment didn’t go through because it didn’t meet guidelines. Thanks for resubmitting.
Here’s the deal with ACORN:
The John McCain Republicans have no issues, no substance that appeals to the vast majority of working Americans, and so they are resorting to lies, distortions and distractions in a desperate attempt to pull voters from supporting Obama.
ACORN alerted fed officials about voting problems. In nearly every state, ACORN is are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones it knows are problematic.
ACORN flags incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when they turn them in, but these warnings are often ignored by election officials. Often these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse ACORN of deliberately turning in phony cards.
More info here:
http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/601
I wasn’t referring as much to voter fraud as I was to ACORN forcing banks to make riskier mortgage loans and to stop “redlining”, and using the CRA to prevent mergers and opening new branches unless the banks made those higher risk loans.
ACORN’s voter fraud issues are a whole other can of worms.
I just joined ACORN because of these Republican based smears.
Redlining is economically unjusified and racist. It eliminates credit to entire neighborhoods or zip codes REGARDLESS of the individual credit status of potential borrowers.
ACORN is not engaged in anything that could be correctly called voter fraud. ACORN does get some fraudulent applications from persons they hire to collect registrations.
ACORN has to turn in those application by law. It is illegal not to turn them in and ACORN intentionally makes the election offices aware that these applications are fishy! ACORN does everything right to prevent any fraud.
ACORN has registered 1.3 million new voter this election. They are mostly low income or middle class and more likely to vote for Democratic or other pro-worker candidates. Republican hate that fact.
Republicans are trying to keep these voters from having their votes cast or counted. This whole issue is designed to justify voter suppression tactics or to undermine public support for reforms helping working Americans after the election.
Additionally, ACORN did not force greedy bankers and Wall Street firms to engage in predatory lending or issue irresponsible loans that they shuffled off to third parties as good loans.
The anti-ACORN comments by Door are Republican Spin and based on BS!
I recommend that Door stop watching Fox News. It will rot your brain and fill you up with nonsense. It is designed to fill you with opinion not based on real facts.
Here is some information from ACORN posted as a comment on Mid-Atlantic Labor.com:
“Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field, but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.
Fact: ACORN flags incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in, but these warnings are often ignored by election officials. Often these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards.
Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card, so there is NO incentive for them to falsify cards. ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the relatively rare cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.
Fact: No charges have ever been brought against ACORN itself. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes.
Fact: Voter fraud by individuals is extremely rare, and incredibly difficult. There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere, casting an illegal vote as a result of a phony voter registration. Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work.
Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN’s good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.
Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered and allowed to vote, so there is also NO incentive to “disrupt the system” with phony cards.
Fact: Similar accusations were made, and attacks launched, against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. These attacks were not only groundless, they have since been exposed as part of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal and revealed to be part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression.
In 2004 and 2006, ACORN and other voter registration organizations were also accused of encouraging false voter registrations. When it finally came out in Congressional hearings that ACORN was indeed the victim of fraud and not the perpetrator of “voter fraud” (which doesn’t exist), several State Attorneys General, including New Mexico’s David Iglesias, had been illegally fired and their boss, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was forced to resign. Why was Iglesias fired? Because he refused to prosecute baseless charges of “voter fraud” in a partisan attempt at systematic voter suppression.
As they were in past election years, these attempts at voter suppression are part of a “full court press” against the country’s electorate - more specifically, the more easily disenfranchised. Add these attacks against ACORN to massive illegal voter roll purging (including, in a BBC expose featuring Greg Palast and Robert Kennedy, Jr., three million voters who have been disappeared by a GOP campaign draining voter rolls of the victims of the economic collapse), other forms of obfuscation and intimidation like the anonymous flier circulating in African-American neighborhoods in North and West Philadelphia that states “that voters who are facing outstanding arrest warrants or who have unpaid traffic tickets may be arrested at the polls on Election Day,” still unresolved issues with paperless voting, and completely transparent and bogus partisan challenges to legitimately registered voters, and the game is over.”
I agree that the McCain campaign is playing the race (ethnic) card; they are trying everything they can to make Obama appear to be un-American, un-patriotic, and siding with terrorists. Intelligent people, who take the time to find out the difference between facts and fear know that these lies are just not true. However, and this makes McCain’s campaign one of the sleaziest, if you tell the same lies over and over again, without letting up, and without even acknowledging a reasonable alternative, many people begin to believe it, and they will pass it on, and the lies become bigger and uglier. McCain’s recent campaign speeches are proving this point. Even McCain realizes that he has to put the brakes on with this, or else it will be shown that he is responsible for inciting riots. This is scary stuff.