Help Create a New Army of Progressive Journalists
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Powerful corporate interests like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are spending millions to block real change in health care, climate change policies and workers’ rights. They are aided by the corporate-controlled media and its budget slashing for reporting and investigative staff.
Workers are fighting back against the lack of real news by looking for ways to preserve investigative journalism and get the truth out to the public. Recently, the Huffington Post launched its Investigative Fund to hire seasoned journalists who have been laid off or forced into early retirement. Bloggers and citizen journalists also are valiantly trying to fill the media vacuum.
Now, the Institute for Southern Studies (ISS) is launching the Freedom Journalism School—a pioneering program to train an army of 50 new media muckrakers across the South.
Obama Enforces Trade Laws on China Tire Imports
President Obama took decisive action yesterday to provide relief to the domestic consumer tire industry in response to surging exports of tires from China. His actions will bring relief to many workers and their families and reverse course after eight years of neglect of trade laws by the Bush administration.
In July, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled in favor of a United Steelworkers (USW) petition filed under Section 421 of the Trade Act of 1974. The ITC found that tariff relief was needed to urgently reduce the negative impact of those tire imports. Obama’s decision imposes an increased duty on tires from China for three years. The duties are 35 percent in the first year, then 30 percent and 25 percent in each of the following years.
Health Care Reform Backers Out in Force as Support for Public Option Remains High
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While TV news reports continue to focus on the loud, angry and sometimes just plain bizarre antics of health care reform opponents, union members are mobilizing to counter the big lies, at town hall meetings and forums around the country.
Just yesterday, some 100 union members brought their voices to a Clovis, N.M., town hall meeting with Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D) as did another 100 at Democratic Rep. Vic Snyder’s Little Rock, Ark., meeting. More than two dozen union members met AFSCME’s Highway to Health Care tour bus when it pulled into Shreveport, La., yesterday.
Over the weekend, hundreds of people in Rutland, Vt., carrying red placards and wearing T-shirts stating “Healthcare Is a Human Right, took part in a health care town hall, shifting the debate 180 degrees from a similar event less than two months ago. The members of the Vermont Workers’ Center/Jobs with Justice made sure lawmakers at the town hall heard their voices this time, a sharp contrast with the 200-person “Tea Party” event pushed by extremist radio shows weeks before.
Public Option Must Be Part of Health Care Reform
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If Senate and House members vote against including a public health insurance plan option in health care reform, they very well could lose the backing of working families and their unions in the next elections, says AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka.
Trumka issued the warning in an interview with Sam Stein of Huffington Post after recent news reports indicated a public option to allow working families to choose between a private plan or a public plan that offers quality care could be pulled from health care reform legislation. Trumka told Stein:
We’ll look at every one of their votes. If they’re against the Employee Free Choice Act, if they’re against health care for that reason, I think it’ll be tough for them to get support from working people.
Dionne Warwick: ‘Fair Pay for Air Play’ About Economic Justice
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Little did the public know that when they heard Dionne Warwick sing, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and other hits on the radio for the past four decades, none of the money made off the airplay found its way to her—it all went in the radio station owners’ pockets.
Now Warwick and other performers have a chance to finally get what they are due—but Big Radio CEOs are resorting to personal attacks in an effort to derail legislation that would pay performers like Warwick when their music is played on the radio.
Writing today on the Huffington Post, Warwick says the Civil Rights for Musicians Act (H.R. 848), dubbed “Fair Pay for Air Play,”
is about economic justice for African American artists. It’s about what’s right. And it’s about time.
Employee Free Choice Key to Redressing Economic Hits Against People of Color
Nothing beats getting out of a think tank long enough to find out what’s really going on. Seth Freed Wessler, a researcher at the Applied Research Center, did just that, traveling to Michigan where he talked with workers for ARC’s “Race and Recession” report.
The title of his blog today at Huffington Post sums up what he found: GM Bankruptcy Hurts People of Color Hardest. Workers Desperately Need Employee Free Choice.
Wessler reminds us that “across the labor market, workers of color are overrepresented in occupations with high unemployment rates.” The loss of auto industry jobs strikes a massive blow to the ability of workers, especially black workers, to earn middle-class incomes. Workers like those Wessler talked with across Michigan.
Civil Rights Leaders Urge Passage of Employee Free Choice
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Martin Luther King Jr. often drew the parallels and connections between the civil rights and union movements. Today, on the eve of the anniversary of King’s assassination, national civil rights leaders called for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers the choice of how to form a union.
During a telephone press conference, Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), a coalition of some 200 organizations, pointed out that unions have been one of the main vehicles for African Americans to move into the middle class.
The Employee Free Choice Act has been largely written about as a labor bill but those of us in the civil rights community know it is so much more…workers’ rights are civil rights; and that the right to organize is a civil and human rights issue of the first magnitude.
Six Republican Governors Rather Play Politics than Aid Jobless Workers
With U.S. unemployment at the highest level in more than a quarter century, six Republican governors would rather play politics with the lives of their citizens than help them make ends meet.
President Obama’s economic recovery plan provides $25 more per week and extends benefits for those who are jobless and struggling to feed their families. But as Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America, the AFL-CIO community affiliate, writes on Huffington Post:
If you live in Alabama, Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina or Texas, you are laid off and left out.
When AIG defrauded investors and the government, employees there took home millions in bonuses. Elsewhere, people are living unemployment check to unemployment check through no fault of their own, laid off because everyone is tightening their belts and job growth is nonexistent. Shoring up the unemployment insurance safety net is fundamental fairness.
