Trumka: Obama Showed He Hears People Not Heard by 1%
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address tonight made clear that he hears the people who aren’t being heard by the 1 percent, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Obama’s speech showed he “listened to the single mom working two jobs to get by, to the out-of-work construction worker, to the retired factory worker, to the student serving coffee to help pay for college.”
By laying out a vision of an America that can create jobs and prosperity for all instead of wealth for the few, Trumka said the president “voiced the aspirations and concerns of those who are too often ignored.”
Obama also made clear that the era of the 1 percent getting rich by looting the economy, rather than creating jobs, is over.
“Now it’s time for Congress to stop standing in the way of rebuilding our country and act,” Trumka said.
President Obama presented Congress a choice, Trumka said, between Obama’s vision of the need to invest to achieve stable, long-term prosperity for all and the vision of presidential candidates squabbling over how much further to cut the taxes of the 1 percent.
Obama “spoke to the confidence of working people that if we are determined and committed, we can revitalize ‘Made in the USA.’ That commitment to American manufacturing, made possible in part by enhanced enforcement of trade laws being violated by China , is welcome news to the too many productive, hard working Americans sitting idle unnecessarily.”
Trumka praised the President’s powerful insistance “on a more humble Wall Street subject to a thorough investigation of the misconduct in the mortgage markets that wrecked our economy,” and applauded the creation of a new mortgage crisis unit to be co-chaired by New York’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman. Read the rest of this entry »
No Strings, No Cuts: #ExtendUI Now!
Today, starting at 11 a.m. ET, we’re joining with Working America, NELP, MomsRising, HERvotes, USAction and a slew of other organizations and bloggers to launch an #ExtendUI tweet-a-thon.
We’re sending a clear message: No Strings, No Cuts: #ExtendUI Now!
The first thing you can do to join the tweet-a-thon is visit our tweet-a-thon page and tell your friends what’s happening.
Once you’ve done that, browse our unemployment stories website and find and tweet individual stories you find compelling. Please also sign our act.ly Twitter petition to @RepDaveCamp.
Don’t use Twitter? You can still read compelling stories and share them on Facebook.
And, of course, send as many #ExtendUI tweets as you can today.
With your help, we’ll make a powerful case to #ExtendUI without cuts or preconditions that hurt the 99 percent.
Check Out Visits by Jobless Workers to Lawmakers’ Capitol Hill Offices
Jobless workers and members of the faith and labor communities visited lawmakers in Congress yesterday to urge them to extend unemployment insurance (UI) for the long-term unemployed. Hundreds gathered for a rally on Capitol Hill before fanning out to talk with individual lawmakers.
Check out these video clips of visits to lawmakers from New Hampshire, Colorado, Florida and North Carolina.
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DC Union Members Join OWS Marchers from NYC
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| AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and Don Mathis, executive director of the U.S. Community Action Partnership, rallied to support the Occupy movement in McPherson Square. |
Occupy Wall Street marchers arrived in Washington, D.C., today after walking for 10 days from New York City to deliver the message that Congress should stand with the 99 pecent, not the 1 percent.
Despite the abysmal weather, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker led a contingent of union members to McPherson Square to meet the marchers and rally in support.
Holt Baker joined Don Mathis (left), executive director of the U.S. Community Action Partnership, in sending a message to Republican presidential wannabee Newt Gingrinch, who yesterday said Occupy members should “go get a job after you take a bath.” Gingrich, who has attacked mortage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, turns out to have raked in at least $1.6 million while under contract to Freddie.
As Mathis’s sign says:
Hey, Newt! I had a bath today. When will you come clean?
Congress Responsible for 370,000 Job Cuts
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Cuts instituted by Congress for the 2011 fiscal year eliminate some 370,000 jobs, while endangering the public and delaying necessary repairs and infrastructure work that will only be more expensive to complete in the future, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP).
In “Creating Unemployment: How Congressional Budget Decisions Are Putting Americans out of Work and Increasing the Risk of a Second Recession,” CAP Senior Fellow Scott Lilly writes that the loss of these jobs will have ripple effects throughout the economy.
The jobs losses that are a direct result of those actions will have a secondary impact on a wide array of businesses ranging from automobile producers to local restaurants and dry cleaning establishments, causing the disappearance of a significant number of additional jobs.
Already, the cuts to local law enforcement programs—which were cut by $2.5 billion compared to the previous year—are having a negative effect, Lilly reports. As an example, he turns to one California city: Read the rest of this entry »
White House to Cantor: Hypocrisy Unbound
Virginia Republican Rep. Eric Cantor’s depiction of Occupy Wall Street protests as “growing mobs” drew an appropriate response from White House spokesman Jay Carney today. Saying he sensed “a little hypocrisy unbound here,” Carney went on to say that
what we’re seeing on the streets of New York is a an expression of democracy. I think I remember how Mr. Cantor described protests of the tea party–I can’t understand how one man’s mob is another man’s democracy.
That is, when members of the so-called tea party shouted down anyone who opposed them in congressional townhall meetings, Cantor said nary a word about a mob gone awry. In fact, he supported them.
House Budget Attacks Job Safety for Rooftop Workers
This just in from the Center for American Progress:
HOUSE GOP BUDGET LAUNCHES FULL ON CLASS WAR – Dave Jamieson: “In addition to blocking President Obama’s health care law and slashing funding for job training, the budget plan presented by House Republicans for health and labor programs this week would scuttle several worker safety protections put forth by the Department of Labor…The budget also takes aim at an obscure but notable Labor Department rule intended to reduce the death and maiming of construction workers who toil on rooftops. The department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had planned to ramp up the enforcement of harness rules for roofers working on residential construction sites. In a move that will likely please the construction lobby, the Republican plan forbids the agency from doing so.”
Corporations Backing New Trade Deals Outsourced 18,600 Jobs
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Congress will soon consider three so-called free trade agreements (FTAs) between the United States and Korea, Colombia and Panama. Yet because these agreements do not include sufficient protections for workers, passage of these pacts would be a job-killing move at a time when more than 26 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work. The proposed Korea trade deal would cost an estimated 159,000 U.S. jobs alone, according to trade experts who have studied the deal, and its loopholes could open the doors for goods made in China or even sweatshops and North Korea, but labeled in South Korea. (Join the union movement in a national call-in day Oct. 4 to urge lawmakers to vote down these bad trade deals. Watch for more info here in coming days.)
Yet, while corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash and not creating jobs, they’re twisting the knife further into the corpse of the U.S. economy with a new ad campaign pushing for passage of these three deals. And guess what? Some of the 32 corporations backing the campaign have shipped a combined 18,600 U.S. jobs overseas since 2001.
A new searchable database at Public Citizen shows the dirty details. In one case, Whirlpool took Read the rest of this entry »
Median Income Down, Poverty Up
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More troubling news on the downward economic spiral of America’s working families. In 2010, median household income declined and the poverty rate increased, according to U.S. Census Bureau data announced this morning.
Running counter to the American tradition of ever-rising prosperity, real median household income in the United States declined by 2.3 percent from 2009 to 2010 and now stands at $49,445. Further:
The nation’s official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009—the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from 43.6 million in 2009—the fourth consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.
Behind the bad data are two factors, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). First, the unemployment rate increased from 9.3 percent in 2009 to 9.6 percent in 2010. Second, long-term unemployment, or the percent unemployed 27 weeks or more, grew from 31.2 percent in 2009 to 43.3 percent in 2010.
U.S. Senators Will Get Social Security. Why Not the Rest of Us?
Presidential wannabe Texas Gov. Rick Perry is having himself a hoot-n’-hollerin’ good time blasting Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and saying the nation’s most successful safety net will be bankrupt in years to come.
But such an assertion is flat wrong, as pointed out by the Center for Economic Policy Research, which reports that the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) show Social Security will remain fully solvent through 2038.
Even if Congress makes no further changes to the program, Social Security will be able to pay slightly more than 80 percent of scheduled benefits from 2039 on.
The center also itemizes how much each current U.S. senator will collect in Social Security when he or she retires. The center wrote to Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, one of several in that chamber crying wolf over Social Security, that he can expect to receive a benefit of $41,439 if he retires at age 67 in 2038 and at least $33,151 (both in 2011 dollars) from then on. In short, the projections show that Social Security will continue to exist and pay a substantial benefit to retirees indefinitely.
