Chamber Pot of Commerce
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The day after Barack Obama was elected president, we at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., draped the front of our building with a massive banner: “We’re Turning Around America.” In January, we added another banner supporting passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
The AFL-CIO building is just around the corner from the Chamber of Commerce. So apparently after stewing lo these many months, the Chamber decided to drape itself in its own banner, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.
The banner proclaims the ludicrous—yet at an estimated $100 million, massively funded—campaign the Chamber announced yesterday to shore up free enterprise and create jobs. Or, as Politics Daily puts it:
Chamber of Commerce Relaunches Capitalism.
Chamber President Tom Donohue, who last week was battling Apple Inc. and other corporations about their decisions to leave the Chamber over its antediluvian climate change stance, had this to say about the campaign:
The free enterprise system, which has done so much for so many, is facing great challenges.
The Chamber of Commerce’s Jobs Deception Campaign
Unions are popularly known as “the folks who brought you the weekend.” In contrast, the Chamber of Commerce schemes to take away employees’ weekend—along with overtime pay, the minimum wage, Buy America rules, employee’ freedom to form unions, child labor standard protections….The list is long and ugly.
So it’s farcical that today the Chamber launched a campaign estimated to run in the tens of millions of dollars to promote job creation.
The Chamber’s campaign originally started out as an attack against financial regulation—until the Chamber found out how strongly U.S. taxpayers support reining in Big Banks and the financial industry’s widespread shady practices. So the Chamber changed the packaging to purportedly focus on jobs, which in fact the American people desperately need.
Working America Takes Us to Main Street
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Take a stroll down Working America’s new Main Street…Main Street Blog that is.
The just-launched blog by the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate for workers who don’t have a union, features news and information about the issues that Working America’s 2.5 million members say they are most concerned about—the economy, health care, jobs, education, retirement security, the mortgage and housing crisis and other issues.
Educating Timothy Geithner: The Congressional Review Panel on Capitol Hill
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The American people worry about how their $590 billion in taxpayer money is being spent in the big bank bailout—and, on Capitol Hill today, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was told why. In his first appearance before the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), which has spent nearly six months reviewing the expenditures of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), COP chairwoman Elizabeth Warren told Geithner:
People are angry that even if they have paid their bills on time consistently and never missed a payment, their TARP-assisted banks are unilaterally raising their interest rates or slashing their credit lines….People are angry when they read headlines of record foreclosures because even if they aren’t personally facing trouble with their mortgages, they see their own property worth less and their communities declining as a result of the foreclosures all around them.
I appreciate your repeatedly stated commitment to transparency and accountability…but more remains to be done. People need to understand why you are making the choices you are making.
Obama Housing Plan ‘Aims Straight at the Heartland’
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As many as 9 million homeowners who are facing foreclosure or struggling with skyrocketing monthly mortgage payments could save their homes under the terms of a home rescue plan President Obama unveiled yesterday.
When the Bush economy began to tank more than a year ago with banks failing and jobs vanishing, foreclosure signs and abandoned houses began sprouting in working and middle class and even up-scale neighborhoods around the nation. The AFL-CIO first called for a homeowners’ lifeline in late 2007. But the Bush administration preferred to bailout Wall Street instead of throwing a lifeline to Main Street. Says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney:
The swift action by the Obama administration to address the housing crisis is a welcome and refreshing change.
For more than a year, the Bush administration ignored calls from the AFL-CIO and others to address a coming foreclosure tsunami. Tragically, in the months that followed, the deepening housing debacle turned millions of families’ lives upside down and strengthened its chokehold on our economy
