Obama Housing Plan ‘Aims Straight at the Heartland’
 |
|
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
Obama Reaffirms Support for Employee Free Choice Act
In an Oval Office interview with major newspapers yesterday, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his strong support for the freedom to form unions and bargain.
The Detroit Free Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer were among the papers that got a chance to talk to Obama about the challenges facing our economy, and Obama once again offered his support for the Employee Free Choice Act.
According to the Inquirer, Obama discounted the corporate community’s argument that workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain would be bad for the economy. The president said that, indeed, workers’ freedom to bargain was good for the long-term health of the economy.
Reich: Enact Employee Free Choice Quickly to Help the Economy
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has some advice for those looking for answers about how to make our economy work for everyone: restore the freedom to form unions, and give workers the bargaining power they need to improve their own lives.
In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, “The Union Way Up,” Reich says the nation can get out of our economic slump and on the road to a sustainable economy by passing the Employee Free Choice Act:
The sooner it’s enacted, the better—for U.S. workers and for the U.S. economy…making it easier for all Americans to form unions would give the middle class the bargaining power it needs for better wages and benefits. And a strong and prosperous middle class is necessary if our economy is to succeed.
