SEARCH
‘Too Much at Stake in This Election to Stay Home’
Trent McNutt and Laura Jackson are hitting the streets and going door to door to make sure that candidates who will create real jobs are elected this fall—and they say every worker should join them because there’s too much at stake to stay home.
McNutt, an unemployed member of the Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), and Jackson, a Communications Workers of America (CWA) member, told a press conference at the AFL-CIO yesterday that working people have a lot at stake in this election to stay at home.
McNutt lost his job last November when the company in Toledo, Ohio, where he had worked for 11 years went out of business. Now the married father of two young children has to make due working occasionally with a local contractor.
This year I’m on pace to make a third of what I’ve made in years past. You never really expect something as drastic as what we’re going through—we’ve worked so hard for everything we have. But we know a lot of other families are worse off. Over the past few months work has started to pick up, but I’m fearful it will taper off again.
He says he is motivated to get out and work for candidates who support working family issues like job creation because of people like his father, a retired sheet metal worker, who taught him a strong work ethic and spirit of volunteerism.
I’m not sure what we’ll do if things don’t turn around and we don’t put the right people in office. That’s why I’m going to do everything I can with my union brothers and sisters to make a difference this election because there’s just too much at stake.
At the press conference, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka outlined plans for an aggressive and massive mobilization of working people beginning this Labor Day weekend for the fall election. Trumka also announced the AFL-CIO will run TV and radio ads Labor Day weekend in key markets around Major League Baseball games, NASCAR and college football games.
For Jackson, a social services worker in Moberly, Mo., this election comes down to making sure America’s working families can make ends meet.
That’s why this election is even more important than the last election. We want to continue the progress we’ve made and elect candidates that will put workers at the center. The number one issue is jobs, so we definitely need to make sure that the people making the decisions make that their top priority. I’m going to do all I can to make sure that happens, including getting the message out to my family, union members and anyone who will listen.
 |
Become a Fan on Facebook |  |
Follow Us on Twitter |  |
Subscribe to YouTube |  |
Subscribe to Blog RSS | ||||
5 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
For over one hundred and fifty years, this country has been run exclusively by the two parties of big business, the Democrats and Republicans. I would suggest that 150 years is enough to ascertain whether or not their “two” party system is adequately representing the interests of working people, although I am sure some would say that we need another 150 years of the same. These two parties pretend to be as different as night and day, while in reality they share the same principles of organizing society in such a way as to constanly enhance the wealth and power of the rich. In fact, they share back and forth the same positions and even often the same public faces. Somehow they have prevented us from standing up and forming our own political party of Labor. I don’t know why we failed to come up with that back in the 1880s, or the 1930s, but if we don’t wake up and do it now, we are digging our own grave.
The Republican Party was once a third party and look how they turned out. The real source of the problem is the scandolous influence of big money in politics. You do not look any further than the influence of big money in the stimulus bill in which not only was the amount too small to address the seriousness of the economic downturn, but a third of it went towards tax cuts at the insistence of a few influential conservative senators from both parties. The problem with the progressive movement is that we pulled all the stops to get Obama elected and basically decided it was mission accomplished. Did anyone naivly think that the opposition was going to just give up after running the country into the ground for so many years??? We need to be involved all the time not only on election time.
Obama inspired many with his flowery speeches, but it turns out that you can’t eat flowery speeches when there is no work. Many who voted for him won’t vote this time. They naively thought that just electing someone would make a difference. The system is so rigged in favor of the rich and powerful that it takes a mass movement like the civil rights movement to ever achieve even a significant reform which benefits workers. Obama is not Martin Luther King – he is Booker T. Washington. If his policies are ‘Marxist’, then Joe Lieberman is Che Guevara.
Prez Status Quobama is another gutless acamaditian that can’t do the right thing and lead. Most dem office holders are chickenshit weenies that do not stand for anything and most dem party officials support that same weenie standard. However the entire Repugnican party are sociopath elitist corporate fascist power trippers and if they get into power we will be totally screwed so please hold your nose and vote for the weenie Dems but let them know you’re holding your nose.
I refuse to hold my nose and vote at the same time. If I can not vote for a candidate that represents my class interest, then I am effectively disenfranchised by this fake democracy. I refuse to vote for candidates who waste no time in making me feel embarassed about voting for them. I refuse to validate a rigged, rich-man’s charade. I will vote Labor, or socialist, even if I have to write in, and I will leave the voting booth feeling clean and ready for battle, because I know that whoever wins this or the next election, things will get worse for workers until we organize the general strikes and man the barricades in the street battles which we will be forced to fight if we are to survive.
The only way these nuts can call Obama ‘marxist’ (Marx was great!), or socialist, is because real socialists, unlike the rest of the world except dictatorships, are never allowed to get their views out to the public through election campaigns, because of undemocratic election laws and the vast stolen wealth of the rich. If Obama is a marxist, Joe Lieberman is Castro and Dwight Eisenhower was Lenin.
Recently, Obama got criticised for using the term ‘lipstick on a pig’. Once again, our leaders are putting lipstick on a pig, and encouraging us to drink enough beer until that pig looks ok.