Tell Congress ‘No’ to Super Committee Cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid
The AFL-CIO is launching a campaign and gearing up its 700,000 online activists to tell Congress that the proposals by both Republicans and Democrats on the federal budget deficit “Super Committee” to slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are “simply unacceptable,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a telephone press conference this morning.
He told reporters that the union movement will:
continue to mobilize in communities to ensure that working Americans aren’t asked to bear even more of the brunt of Wall Street greed. Now is the moment to restore balance in our economy. The absolute wrong way to do that is to take a machete to the safety net that we’ve spent years building.
You can join the action to fight the proposed cuts to these essential middle-class provisions by texting DEBT to 235246 to send a message to your lawmakers.
Join the Fight to Save America’s Postal Service
The nation’s postal unions and allies are fighting back against proposals to close post offices and mail processing centers, and change USPS regulations to eliminate overnight delivery of first class mail, and change two-day delivery to three days. You can join by signing a petition to your senators and representatives to preserve the nation’s mail service. Click here or here to sign the petition.
The petition is part of the Save America’s Postal Service campaign, a joint effort of the Postal Workers (APWU), Letter Carriers (NALC), Mail Handlers, an affiliate of the Laborers (LIUNA), and the Rural Letter Carriers.
Over the next several weeks, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the “super committee,” is supposed to produce a plan to reduce the federal deficit. It may include a Read the rest of this entry »
New Database Compares Nation’s Budget with Real Needs
At a time when Congress is focusing on cutting federal spending, the National Priorities Project has launched a new interactive tool that offers people across the nation a way to understand and respond to national budget decisions.
Because federal budgets affect millions of Americans each day, the Federal Priorities Database helps users compare the way our nation spends money with the social impact of these expenditures. The database tracks both federal spending and social indicators like poverty rates, renewable energy usage and enrollment in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, as well as information at the state, county and school district level.
Jobs Plan Must Be ‘Big, Bold,’ Groups Tell Obama
In a letter to President Obama, 70 progressive groups urge the president to use tonight’s address to the nation on jobs and the economy to present a plan that is “big, bold and creates jobs directly.”
With 25 million Americans out of work, or only able to find part-time work when they want and need full-time jobs, aggressive action is needed.
They also say that “tax cuts and incentives for corporations have repeatedly failed to put Americans back to work.”
It is time to move beyond these half measures designed to appeal to a narrow ideological minority who have repeatedly shown their unwillingness to negotiate and disinterest in real solutions.
Click here for the full letter.
Meanwhile, the Strengthen Social Security coalition is calling on Obama to stand firm against cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The group is mounting an e-mail petition campaign demanding the president spare those vital programs from cuts as he and the so-called budget deficit Super Committee negotiate.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the foundations of our economic security. Social Security does not contribute a penny to the deficit. Its benefits should not be cut, including reducing the Social Security COLA. Medicare is a sacred trust. Medicaid is crucial for seniors, women, children and people with disabilities.
Click here to sign the petition.
Harkin: Republicans Fail Job Crisis Test
The only thing congressional Republicans have done about the nation’s job crisis is to make it worse by standing in the way of job creation and pushing a budget proposal—which Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) equates to ”applying leeches to a patient who needs a transfusion.”
In a column in the Des Moines Register, Harkin writes:
The Republican mantra is “government can’t create jobs.” Nonsense. Smart government can create jobs—and short-sighted government can destroy jobs. The brief shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration this summer put 70,000 private-sector construction employees out of work. Draconian cuts proposed by House Republicans to the new transportation bill would destroy an estimated 490,000 highway construction jobs and nearly 100,000 transit-related jobs.
He says Republicans are in a “mindless march to austerity,” by focusing on the budget deficit rather than the deficit that most Americans say must be closed—the jobs deficit. The Republican budget, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), would put the nation on “a course of radical disinvestment and decline.”
No Jobs in Budget Deal
Where are the jobs? Not in the budget agreement reached over the weekend and passed 269-161 last night by the House. The budget deal, which the Senate passed moments ago, is bad for our country and especially bad for working people. It undermines the nation’s ability to solve the real crisis—America’s jobs crisis.
The deal hurts working families by:
- Not making the smart public investments we desperately need to restore America’s place in the world.
- Cutting programs that are helping working families keep a toehold on the ladder to the middle class while refusing to hold hedge fund managers and other millionaires and billionaires responsible for paying their fair share.
- Virtually ensuring that Congress will spend another four months focused on budget-cutting instead of jobs and investment in the future. This means the fight to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has just begun.
Unemployed Workers Need Not Apply
Outside the navel-gazing world that has become Washington politics, where deficit-cutting is king and jobless workers ignored (with a few notable exceptions), 25 million are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work, and wages are essentially flat. Workers are struggling to get work that, in many cases, just doesn’t exist (there are 4.7 workers for every ONE job).
And when they apply for the jobs that do exist, they are facing a new type of discrimination. As the New York Times points out today, many of the nation’s employers are essentially telling applicants:
The unemployed need not apply.
The Times recently reviewed job vacancy postings on popular sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist and found they:
revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.
Chris Owens, National Employment Law Project (NELP) executive director, testifed on this trend in February, and the organization released a report earlier this month that found:
employers and staffing firms continue to expressly deny job opportunities to those workers hardest hit by the economic downturn, despite increased scrutiny and strong public opposition to the practice.
Tell Congress and White House: Don’t Balance Deficit Deal on Backs of Working Families
If you’ve been following the news on the various proposals to reduce national spending as part of a deal to raise the national debt ceiling, you’ll have heard politicians from both parties bandy about phrases like “tough choices” and “shared sacrifice” and “taking on sacred cows.”
But as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this week:
So far, the only sacred cows being gored by budget proposals coming out of Washington are working people, the middle class, seniors and the poor.
Click here to tell Congress and the White House:
No deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. No deal that destroys more jobs while making the rich richer.
Budget Talk Table Must Have Place Setting for Revenue Increases
More than 100 House Democrats told House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that his refusal to put possible revenue increases “on the table” during budget talks is not “an acceptable answer” and it puts at risk any chance of reaching a bipartisan solution. In a June 6 letter to Boehner they wrote:
Revenues must be a component of addressing our deficit and debt problems. Solving our fiscal problems with spending cuts alone would be devastating to our economy, to the middle class, and to vulnerable populations like seniors and low-income families.
They also tell Boehner most Americans, by “wide margins support raising tax rates on millionaires and billionaires, ending subsidies for the oil and gas industries and eliminating tax breaks for companies that ship American jobs overseas. We agree.”
In order to address our deficit problems while protecting the economy, the middle class and those who aspire to it, those options need to be on the table.
Click here for the full letter.
Not a Happy Anniversary: 10 Years of Bush Tax Cuts
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Today is the 10-year anniversary of President Bush’s tax cuts that went mostly to very rich individuals and big corporations. According to the rosy economic scenario Bush and the Republicans painted, the nation today should be figuring out to what to do with a $5.6 trillion budget surplus and just how to fill the tens of millions of new jobs that were supposed to generate new wealth for all of us.
How’s that worked out? There’s no trace of the $5.6 trillion surplus. Instead we have a record budget deficit.
Jobs? Job creation under Bush, even when the economy was expanding between 2002 – 2007, was dismal, barely keeping pace with population growth and the worst performance in the post-World War II era, says the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
We’re not sharing the wealth either. In fact, the top 1 percent of earners pocketed 65 percent of the income growth during those years, widening even further the income gap between the rich and the rest of us.
Even scarier: Despite all the evidence that the tax cuts not only didn’t work and the outcome was even worse than opponents predicted, congressional Republicans and presidential candidates want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. That would be a terrible blow to the economy, says the new EPI Policy memo, “Tenth Anniversary of the Bush-Era Tax Cuts: A decade later, the Bush tax cuts remain expensive, ineffective, and unfair.” Read the rest of this entry »
