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2008 in Review: McCain Revealed and McCain Reviled |
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Here’s the second part in our series taking a look back at 2008. Check out Part 1 here.
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March-April
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The job loss hits kept coming—63,000 in February and 83,000 in March. But President Bush and congressional Republicans kept up their fight against extending unemployment insurance benefits to workers who run out of benefits before finding new work in a crumbling economy.
In April, more than 400 central labor councils begin dedicating their monthly meetings to educating and mobilizing their members around health care reform for the coming elections. Most saw huge turnouts.
Union members continued making endorsements in the primaries, many selecting Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) or Barack Obama (D-Ill). But they were unified in their opposition to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and showed up at campaign stop after campaign stop urging him to meet with workers. He never did.
Meanwhile the AFL-CIO launched McCain Revealed, a website detailing McCain’s long anti-working family career and dangerous policy proposals.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed to the Employee Free Choice Act as a vital part of restoring the nation’s economy. The AFL-CIO Executive Council launched a Million-Member Mobilization to pass the Employee Free Choice Act., with affiliated unions committing to securing a million pledges from their members for the fight to pass the workers’ rights bill.
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The violence against trade union members in Colombia claimed more than 2,500 lives since 1986, but the Bush administration made passage of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement a top priority. The labor movement’s campaign to block the deal that AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said would “reward murder” was the catalyst in taking Bush’s deadly trade deal off the Fast Track.
In a Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, Harvard University economics professor Richard Freeman wrote that Working America is one the labor movement’s “greatest successes.”
The day after Equal Pay Day, a minority of primarily Republican senators once again made it harder for women workers to overcome pay discrimination by blocking a vote on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
Other headlines from March and April:
20,000 Pennsylvania Child Care Workers Get a Union
1,000 New York Day Care Providers Join CWA
Workers Win Union with ILWU Despite Rite Aid Anti-Union Drive
Six NEA Local Associations Affiliate with AFL-CIO
IBEW Building New Partnerships to Meet Utility Industry Challenges
OSHA’s Four-Year Delay on Crane Safety Standard Highlighted in Wake of N.Y. Crane Deaths
Hearings Spotlight OSHA’s Inaction in Setting Combustible Dust Standards to Save Lives
Student Labor Week of Action Spotlights Tomato Workers Struggle for Fair Wages
Chavez-Thompson Honored as Beloved Champion of All Workers
GAO Says Bush Administration Violated Law on SCHIP Program
Blue Green Alliance Teams With Gore to Create Green Jobs and Solve Climate Crisis
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About a third of the fuel Brazilians use in their vehicles is ethanol, known in Brazil as “alcohol.” That compares with 3 percent in the United States. All gasoline sold in Brazil contains at least 26 percent ethanol, but motorists driving flexible-fuel cars have the option of filling up with pure ethanol, or E100, which currently is selling for about half the price of the blend.
Use of pure ethanol will rise sharply as carmakers in Brazil such as General Motors and Volkswagen make more flexible-fuel cars. Half the new vehicles sold this year will be able to use either pure ethanol or the blend, according to the Sao Paulo Sugar Cane Industry Union.
In the United States, the sugar-cane industry has had little incentive to diversify into ethanol production because import quotas support U.S. sugar prices far above world levels. Expansion of sugar cane acreage beyond Hawaii, Florida and the Gulf Coast is limited by the need for a long, frost-free growing season. The House-passed energy bill would authorize a three-year demonstration program for producing ethanol from sugar cane.
Most U.S.-produced ethanol is now made from ground corn in a process that has been faulted as inefficient. Corn yields less sugar per acre than sugar cane, and the refining uses substantial amounts of energy. To keep ethanol competitive with gasoline, major refiners such as Archer Daniels Midland Co. have relied since the 1970s on a tax subsidy, now 51 cents a gallon.
Where are the Unions? Not one word on cutting the CEO’s spending and also the monitoring of spending by them!!
Did they look into the cars in Brazil and the biofuel engines?
What’s going on? Also another Union crossing the Laborers And Teamsters blacklisting people if they are the adversary to their spouses legal aide by using corrupt methods by influencing activists and lobbyists to use race and religious to replace the top off theoriginal motive in otherword the obstruction of justice.
Upson Judge in Ct and the Teamsters Laborers into both political parties went to far on this one. They need to promote all human rights and races not just Black Brazilian rights. This is what they promoting when they were planning on running the extremist candidate disgracing a family by removing their Freedom of Speech here in the Democratic country of the United States to speak on their race religion which is their right to not theirs without disputing blacklisting.
Standing there and not stopping the racism of David Duke and Thomas Moose former 219 Quinn ST Naugatuck, CT resident and former “positive thinking dynamics follower of Louisiana and their cult to continue to disgrace and remove our constitutional rights and set off Jesse Jackson and the gays on my family.