Channel: Working Families Vote
Mitt Romney Earns More by 6 a.m. Than Many Seniors Do in a Year
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Alliance for Retired Americans President Barbara Easterling wrote this at Huffington Post.
In 2010 Mitt Romney made $21.7 million, while that same year the average senior citizen received $14,000 in Social Security benefits.
Put another way, Mitt Romney made more by 6:00 a.m. on January 1 than many retirees did the entire year. His daily income was over four times greater than many seniors’ annual income.
Why does this matter? Shouldn’t his finances be none of our business? To me, it matters because of how sharply it contrasts with his plans to increase the Social Security retirement age, lower benefits for some seniors, and let Wall Street gamble away—and profit from—a privatized Social Security system. It reflects a cold indifference to those less fortunate.
Working Family Candidate Wins Special Election in Oregon
Oregon working families helped propel former state Sen. Suzanne Bonamici (D) to victory yesterday in a special election for the U.S. House in the state’s northwestern First Congressional District. Bonamici, who defeated Republican businessman Rob Cornilles, replaces David Wu who resigned last year.
Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain says not only did union volunteers make more than 10,000 phone calls and 5,000 home visits to union families in support of Bonamici, but turned out to vote at a higher rate than the general public.
During the campaign, Bonamici called for the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes, job creation through infrastructure investment and protection of Social Security and Medicare. She will fill out Wu’s remaining term and be on the ballot for a full two-year term in November.
Trumka: Newt’s Right, for Once
Newt Gingrich has said some pretty outlandish things over the years—the most recent was his proposal to put poor kids to work cleaning inner-city schools. But as a friend of mine was fond of saying—“sometimes even a blind squirrel can find an acorn.” Newt has an acorn.
During the New Hampshire primary when Gingrich was talking to voters about Mitt Romney’s days as a vulture capitalist—shortly after Romney said he “likes being able to fire people”—Gingrich said Romney “looted” companies and left behind “broken families and broken neighborhoods.” Then he added something that could have been uttered by any progressive or Occupier.
You have to ask the question: Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and walk off with the money, or is that in fact a little bit of a flawed system?
That got AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s attention who says:
Here are words you won’t hear from me very often: I agree with Newt Gingrich. Read the rest of this entry »
Play Match Game 2012, Republican Candidates Edition
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We all know politicians will say just about anything to get elected. But sometimes what they say is so outrageous or strange, even seasoned political junkies are left scratching their heads.
In a takeoff on the classic TV game show Match Game, our friends at AFSCME have assembled some of the more out-there statements about working family issues uttered by Republican presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.
Click here to play Match Game 2012: Presidential Primary Edition. Pick a candidate and then from a multiple choice list, pick the correct answer to what he had to say. To give you a little hint, none of the answers involve the Kardashians.
Time for Media to Scrutinize Romney’s Jobs Claims
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent has question for his media colleagues that a whole lot of the rest of us would also like to ask: When the heck are reporters going to demand that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney start backing up his claims that he created 100,000 jobs when he ran the hedge fund Bain Capital?
Romney says his job creation record shows that he has the business acumen to turn around the economy. But as Sargent writes today:
As far as I can tell, only two lonely fact checking operations—one at the Post, the other at FactCheck.org—have scrutinized it. They have found that the assertion is at best unsubstantiated and that there may have been more layoffs than jobs created by Bain…When will reporters push Romney on this?
Sargent also notes that reporters have failed to grill Romney on his assertions about Read the rest of this entry »
Recall Walker Signatures Pass 500,000 Mark
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United Wisconsin, the coalition spearheading the movement to recall Gov. Scott Walker (R), announced today that volunteers have collected more than 500,000 signatures on petitions to put the recall on the ballot.
Working families need 540,000 signatures by Jan, 17, but are aiming to gather another 250,000 to offset expected dirty tricks and challenges from Walker’s supporters. This Saturday, volunteers across the state are holding a massive petition drive to collect recall signatures.
Wisconsinites began mobilizing against Walker after he rammed through legislation that eliminated collective bargaining rights for public employees and made huge budget cuts to education, health care and other vital working family services. He’s also attacked voting rights and cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. A new study this week showed his policies have cost the state 18,000 jobs.
Report: Walker Costing Wisconsin More than 18,000 Jobs a Year
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This is a cross-post by Karen Hickey, communications director at the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.
A report released by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future entitled “The Price of Extremism” clearly and systematically outlines that Gov. Scott Walker’s policies are not working. In fact, the indirect, ripple affects of Gov. Walker’s actions are costing Wisconsin more than 18,000 full-time, private-sector jobs during the first year of Walker’s budget.
The report focuses on four ways Walker’s policies are hurting Wisconsin and attaches private-sector job loss estimates to each of the policies. The four areas and estimated job loss include:
1. Cuts to education and health care, which will cost Wisconsin 5,400 jobs.
2. Cuts in aid to low-income families, which will cost Wisconsin 1,200 jobs.
3. The economic impact of Act 10, which will cost Wisconsin 6,900 jobs.
4. The rejection of federal aid funds, which has cost 4,700 jobs.
HERvotes Turns Focus to Top Issues for Women in 2012: Health Care and Economy
Listen to the conventional wisdom, and you’ll hear that women have fared better than men in the recent recession. In reality, women are not only shouldering the burden of being the sole breadwinner in more families than ever before, they also account for the majority of public-sector layoffs. Single mothers and women in communities of color continue to suffer rising unemployment of more than 12 percent.
Against that backdrop, the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), as part of a coalition of 40 national organizations, is launching HERvotes, a nonpartisan campaign to mobilize women around the pressing issues of health and economic rights.
While it’s true that the initial rounds of layoffs after the housing bubble burst in 2007 and the stock market crash in 2008 hit men harder than women, men have now benefited significantly from the jobs added to the economy in the ensuing years. As CLUW Executive Director Carol Rosenblatt notes in a post on the HERvotes blog:
According to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center, women lost 46,000 jobs from December 2007 – June 2009 while men gained 1.26 million.
She also notes that women comprise nearly 64 percent of laid-off public-sector Read the rest of this entry »
Dec. 10: NYC March for Voting Rights Begins at Koch Industries
Voting rights are human rights. To bring that point home, a coalition of labor, civil rights and community organizations will celebrate Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, with a Stand for Freedom march and rally, beginning at the Manhattan headquarters of Koch Industries, and ending at the United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjold Plaza.
Where and when:
Saturday, Dec. 10
10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.: Assemble 61st Street and Madison Avenue, Koch Industries New York City office.
11:30 a.m.: March from 61st Street and Madison Avenue to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at 47th Street and 2nd Avenue
12:30 p.m.: Rally at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, across from the United Nations building
Earlier this year, as anti-labor laws swept state legislatures dominated by Republicans backed by the billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch (who together own most of Koch Industries), some of these same legislatures passed laws designed to suppress voter turnout, especially targeting African Americans and immigrants. Read the rest of this entry »
Gingrich: Poor Kids Only Work at Illegal Jobs
It wasn’t enough for presidential wanna-be Newt Gingrich to push child labor by proposing that poor kids clean schools. Now he says children from low-income families only work when the “job” is illegal. This from CBS News:
“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” the former House speaker said at a campaign event at the Nationwide Insurance offices. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”
As talk show host Stephanie Miller said last night on ”The Ed Schultz Show,” the corporate media has focused a lot on Gingrich’s odious personal behavior. But what hasn’t been given enough attention—and what clearly needs to be—is Gingrich’s extremist policy agenda, one that includes child labor.
