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Trumka Named to Obama Economic Advisory Panel |
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AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka has been named to the new economic advisory panel that will serve as President Obama’s team of experts.
In announcing creation of the panel last year, Obama said the group will prevent policy from being made in an echo chamber in Washington.
Trumka will join a who’s who list of top economists, corporate executives and academics. The White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which is modeled after the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board used by President Eisenhower in the 1950s, will be chaired by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker.
The economic advisory board is part of an overall push by the Obama White House to ensure that repairing—and strengthening—the nation’s economy remains at the top of the administration’s agenda. In December, Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) was named economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. Bernstein is a passionate advocate for raising the incomes of America’s working middle class.
Trumka, who was re-elected to a fourth term as Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO in 2005, led the creation of the AFL-CIO Capital Stewardship Program in 1997 to promote the retirement security of America’s working families. AFL-CIO member unions sponsor pension and benefit plans with more than $400 billion in assets and are a major force in the global capital markets.
Under Trumka’s leadership, the AFL-CIO Capital Stewardship Program promotes corporate governance reform, investment manager accountability, pro-worker investment strategies, international pension fund cooperation and trustee education and support.
In recent days, Obama also announced creation of a White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families to develop and coordinate policies to rebuild the nation’s middle class and lift the poor out of poverty. Workers can submit stories and ideas about how the economy has affected them and ideas on changing it. (The task force website is: www.strongmiddleclass.gov/ )
Other members of the 15-member economic advisory board include:
- Laura D’Andrea Tyson, dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley.
- Roger Ferguson Jr., president and chief executive of TIAA-CREF and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
- Robert Wolf, chairman and chief executive of UBS Group.
- Charles Phillips, president of Oracle Corp.
- David Swensen, chief investment officer at Yale University.
- Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric.
- Penny Pritzker, chairman and founder of Pritzker Realty Group.
See the full list here.
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Wednesday’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer had a segment on the “Buy American” provision in the stimulus bill. Mr. Trumka forcefully and eloquently refuted the European Union’s Ambassador to the U.S. on this measure.
You can go to the PBS website and view the segment — it’s a concise primer on global trade.
It was great to see a labor leader not only go toe-to-toe with a trade cheerleader on a national platform, but win the debate convincingly (brought me off the couch for a fist pump, which set the dog off.)
Please carry this same tone into your new appointment, Mr. Trumka. Thanks.
Obama also announced creation of a White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families to develop and coordinate policies to rebuild the nation’s middle class and lift the poor out of poverty.http://www.ilmainenvakuutustarjous.com
Right on Bluegrass Dave! Well said!
Now we have to get “Blue Dog Democrats” to start acting like real Democrats.
Remember the phone banking we did during the presidential campaign? Well, we need to do a whole lot more of it now. Members of Congress need to hear from us by the thousands.
Our unified message? We voted for Obama in November and by doing so we voted for change. We now demand that Congress – and especially Democrats – listen to us and thereafter live up to the promises they made on the campaign trail. They just can’t “love” us during the election cycle, they have to “love” us all the time.
Many of them just don’t get it! We have to help them “get it”!
Only one Labor person out of 15 on this task force??!!? Obama is president because Labor worked hard to get him elected, yet he has already signaled he has more allegiance to Corporate America than the working class. So far he has given us a few crumbs. He met with a group of overpaid corporate execs recently; when will he convene a meeting with rank and file union members?
A few of the crumbs essential for working people have been stripped away from the “stimulus” bill. The corporate funded Democratic Party has turned a deaf ear to the needs of working people. Trumka is window dressing. The labor movement, without an independent media or political party, remains importent for another four years, despite all the effort and money given to Obama’s election.
Obama’s economic “stimulus” paves way for multi-trillion-dollar handout to the banks
9 February 2009
Barry Grey
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/feb2009/pers-f09.shtml
“…
The deal strips from the House of Representatives’ version of the stimulus plan some $40 billion in aid to states and localities and $19.5 billion in federal aid for school construction, reduces proposed health care subsidies for the unemployed, slashes new aid for the Head Start pre-school program, lowers a proposed increase in food stamps and scales back Obama’s middle-class tax cut, while adding a $70 billion tax break for upper-income families.”
We also need to make sure that E-Verify is part of any stimulus package. E-Verify is highly accurate and must be used to protect US workers from having unscrupulous businesses hire people not authorized to work in the US. Their lie that they need to import millions of cheap foreign workers was never right but now it rings even more hollow.
It takes from the necessary (school construction, health care, help for those who are falling through the cracks in this terrible economic climate) and gives another tax break for the wealthy.
What do unions do when they are offered a stinky contract? Tell Congress and the House: TAKE IT BACK TO THE TABLE AND DO IT RIGHT FOR AMERICA, NOT FAVORS FOR THE RICH AND CORPORATE AMERICA!!!!
It needs some serious de-porking surgery……It’s a bill that only puts 12 cents of each dollar into programs that will really restart the economy, the rest is just tossing money at everything hoping that some of it will eventually trickle down to help a stagnant economy. Yes, we need economic stimulus, but not this bill and not at this price.
Take it back to the table and do it right!!!!
The working American Families who built this nation must keep alert for politicians who bear gifts.
Trumka is an excellent pick for this Economic Advisory panel. I, too, would like to see more strong union representation. I hope Solis gets appointed soon as Secretary of Labor. Picking Biden to chair the Middle Class Task Force is also an excellent choice by Obama. The Republicans should do as they have always done for the working class in America - NOTHING. They should sit back, twiddle their thumbs, keep their mouths shut, and let the Democrats make the changes that are necessary without any interference. More will get done, and there may actually be something good happening with the economy.
In a perfect world Trumka would use his influence to persuade Obama that E-Verify is good for the American worker. The LEGAL American worker, that is. And in a perfect world he would also use that influence to persuasde Obama that E-Verify be made permanent and mandatory for ALL US employers. If only we lived in a perfect world!
Mr. Trumka should press for federal elimination of the telecommuter tax.
Right now, states can tax the wages nonresidents earn when telecommuting from their homes to in-state employers - even though the workers’ home states can tax that income, also. The threat of double taxation for telecommuting makes this work option too expensive for many Americans.
The tax frustrates workers trying to use telework to:
• Reduce commute and child-care costs;
• Ease the physical strain of daily commuting when lost pensions force them to work past their expected retirement dates;
• Widen the geographic area in which they can look for work after they have been laid off.
By discouraging workers from telecommuting, the tax also thwarts employers trying to use decentralization to reduce costs and avoid job cuts.
Federal legislation introduced in the last Congress called the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act would have prohibited the tax penalty for telecommuting across state lines. This legislation needs to become law.