It’s Time for Protection Against Deadly Silica Dust
More than 300 scientists, doctors and workplace safety experts are asking President Obama to step in to speed much-needed protections against worker exposure to crystalline silica.
They signed a letter to the president today, urging him to direct the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to complete its review of a proposed rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on silica dust.
Some 1.7 million workers are exposed to crystalline silica, which kills some 200 workers each year and causes new cases of silicosis in as many as 7,300 workers, mostly in the construction field. Silicosis is incurable but preventable.
Says Leonard Serafin, a former railroad worker from California:
Every day I struggle to do activities because of my condition. I want to see that other people are protected from this dust—it’s not fair to expose people to something this dangerous when they can be protected. Read the rest of this entry »
Indiana’s Daniels: Opponent of Working People
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Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels, who gave the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, represents all too well the sad decline of the national Republican Party. As suggested by the Twitter hashtag #MitchFail, Daniels was an improbably bad choice to represent a party already facing questions about its commitment to the 99 percent. (Feel free to post a message to Daniels at his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/mymanmitchfans .)
In his rebuttal, Daniels had the audacity to claim the mantle of people’s champion—this from the man who said he was against the “right to work” for less before he was pushing it armed with lies and ruthlessly anti-democratic tactics. This from the political party fighting Obama’s plan to address the deficit by raising taxes on retired financiers like Mitt Romney, who pay less in taxes than most firefighters, bricklayers, teachers and nurses.
Inconsistency and numbers not adding up is nothing new for Daniels, who failed miserably as George W. Bush’s budget director for the first 2.5 years of Bush’s presidency, which had massive tax cuts for the rich as its No. 1 domestic priority. And Daniels’ concern for working people is more than a little bit ironic in light of his record as governor of Indiana, which has included taking away the right in 2005 of public employees to collectively bargain.
Today, Daniels has entered the national stage as an angry opponent of workers acting collectively. He may have seemed mild-mannered in a speech well-received by right-wing pundits, but that manner is belied by his efforts to shut down the basic institutions of democracy in Indiana. Daniels, a lame-duck governor who seems to be spending a lot more time thinking about Washington than about getting Hoosiers back to work, ought to follow the lead of President Obama and listen to working people rather than CEOs.
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 »
White House: Insource Jobs, Decrease Inequality
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Is it patriotic to ship America’s jobs overseas? President Obama doesn’t think so. He’s right, of course. We live in a globally connected world, but let’s face it: Home-grown corporations must first focus on their own back yards—a novel concept all to many, it seems.
Obama implicitly raised the question yesterday during his Insourcing American Jobs Forum, which featured representatives from more than a dozen large and small businesses that have made decisions to bring jobs to the United States and to increase their investments here.
Pointing to the CEOs in the room, Obama said they ”take pride in hiring people here in America, not just because it’s increasingly the right thing to do for their bottom line, but also because it’s the right thing to do for their workers and for our communities and for our country.
I don’t want America to be a nation that’s primarily known for financial speculation and racking up debt buying stuff from other nations. I want us to be known for making and selling products all over the world stamped with three proud words: “Made in America.” And we can make that happen.
GOP Plan Offers Cash Bait to Forgo Social Security
If this new Republican idea weren’t so scary, we would be laughing…hysterically.
Asreported by the Washington Post 2chambers blog yesterday, Rep. Jeffrey Landry (R-La.) is proposing that working Americans—already battered bloody by the recession—be forced to give up some of their Social Security benefits if they “opt in” to receive a payroll tax cut. (So much for the Republican mantra that tax cuts pay for themselves.)
Landry’s idea, introduced as H.R. 3551, would cut the payroll tax rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent—and allow workers to decide each year whether to receive the tax break.
The catch? Workers who chose to take advantage of the tax break in a given year would be forced to have their Social Security retirement age extended by one month, effectively cutting their own retirement benefits. Really? Read the rest of this entry »
AFL-CIO President Trumka Visits Occupy Wall Street
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More than 800 Occupy Wall Street protests have sprung up across the nation, from Washington, D.C., to yes, Occupy Missoula (Mont.). While Republican Rep. Eric Cantor has called the protestors “mobs,” President Obama said yesterday the protests show a “broad-based frustration” among Americans about the U.S. financial system. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is in New York City today to meet with Occupy Wall Street protestors. He brought along bagels and water for the protestors, and since he’s a big reader, he first stopped by the ”library” at Occupy Wall Street (see video).
Eric Cantor: Job Creation Dead on Arrival
Last week, we had a great Twitter campaign pointing out how House Speaker John Boehner is failing to create jobs.
Looks like Rep. Eric Cantor has now joined the Republican jobs fail crowd, saying President Obama’s American Jobs Act is “dead on arrival.” As AFSCME President Gerald McEntee put it:
Rep. Cantor just doesn’t get it. The country needs jobs, not another out-of-touch politician.
Enough with the grandstanding, Rep. Cantor needs to get to work. Get his party to work, to do the job they were elected to do, stand up for their constituents. It is time for politicians in Washington to come together and rebuild our economy and pass the American Jobs Act now.
Yesterday, the Republican Majority Leader in Congress, Eric Cantor, said that right now, he won’t even let the jobs bill have a vote in the House of Representatives. He won’t even give it a vote.
Challenging Cantor’s statement, President Obama said today in Dallas:
Well I’d like Mr. Cantor to come down here to Dallas and explain what in this jobs bill he doesn’t believe in. Does he not believe in rebuilding America’s roads and bridges? Does he not believe in tax breaks for small businesses, or efforts to help veterans?
Come tell Dallas construction workers why they should be sitting home instead of fixing our bridges and our schools.
Come tell the small business owners and workers in this community why you’d rather defend tax breaks for millionaires than tax cuts for the middle class.
Take action and tell Cantor—America Wants to Work. Tweet this:
Another #jobsfail. @EricCantor wants to kill American #Jobs Act. Tell him we #want2work.
Shuler: Fresh Generation of Activists Needed to Turn America Around
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The economic and social problems, the hate and the fear we see around us today can only be solved by a fresh generation of committed, smart, tireless and creative activists, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler told the nearly 800 young workers, activists and student at the Next Up Young Workers Summit today.
“And—I’m going to go out on a limb here—but I think you are those people,” she said.
In her keynote address to the conference, which opened today in Minneapolis, Shuler said the situation in the global economy is dire. Massive change is needed to turn it around. Young workers are being told to “suck it up” and live in a world without jobs, she said.
We’re being told that America can’t afford teachers—but we can afford CEO tax cuts. We’re being asked to accept a society that rewards wealth and punishes work. A society that makes it harder for young people to go to college. A society where hate is growing and targeting people of color, people of different faiths, people who are LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer], immigrants–it’s shameful.
Shuler urged the participants to create coalitions back home to build a movement to take back the American Dream. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s How to Make Wall Street Pay for Wrecking the Economy
Three years into the nation’s brutal recession, America’s workers continue to suffer from massive joblessness, skyrocketing foreclosures and weak buying power. But Wall Street—with corporations sitting on $2 trillion in cash—hasn’t paid for its role in causing the near-collapse of the U.S. economy.
The European Union (EU) this week moved to change that, with the EU formally adopting plans for a financial speculation tax that would raise 57 billion euros a year. The tax could generate billions in revenue to help our ailing economy, stimulate job growth and discourage the reckless, high-volume/short-term profit, computer-driven Wall Street gambling that led to our current economic crisis.
While the EU proposal still needs unanimous approval from EU states, there has been no legislative movement to do the same in this country. As economist Dean Baker notes, “the intensity with which the country’s leading deficit hawks continue to ignore financial speculation taxes (FST) is getting ever more entertaining.”
Who Opposes American Jobs, Kids?
Yesterday, President Obama was in Colorado highlighting his plan to put Americans back to work modernizing the nation’s aging schools and to make sure there are plenty of teachers to fill those schools. The plan involves $30 billion to put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work modernizing at least 35,000 schools across the country, and $35 billion to save the jobs of 280,000 teachers, police, firefighters and other first responders. American Progress puts the Republican opposition to the president’s plan in perspective.
THIS OR THAT:
We can put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work, keep 280,000 more Americans like teachers and cops in their jobs and modernize one-third of our nation’s schools for less than what keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will cost us each year.
WHAT THE PRESIDENT SAYS:
From President Obama’s speech in Denver earlier this afternoon:
Every child deserves a great school—and we can give it to them. We can rebuild our schools for the 21st century, with faster Internet, smarter labs and cutting-edge technology. And that won’t just create a better, safer learning environment for the students—it’ll create good jobs for local construction workers right here in Denver, across Colorado and throughout the country. There are schools all throughout Colorado that need this kind of renovation. Last week, I visited a bridge in Cincinnati connecting Ohio to Kentucky that needs this kind of renovation. There are construction projects like these all across this country just waiting to get started. And there are millions of unemployed construction workers who are looking for jobs.
