Barack Obama "passes" on renewing the Assault
Weapon Ban.... the one G.W. signed twice....What?!?.... Want to focus on
Guns being sold across the southern border instead.
The Second Amendment Stands Strong.
On March 4th the "Associated Press" reports
that the DEMOCRATS show no appetite for Gun Control Issues!
Remarks
of President Barack Obama–
As Prepared for Delivery
Signing
of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Denver,
Colorado
February
17, 2009
It
is great to be in
Denver
. I was here last summer to accept the nomination of my party and to
make a promise to people of all parties – that I would do all I
could to give every American the chance to make of their lives what
they will and see their children climb higher than they did. I am back
today to say that we have begun the difficult work of keeping that
promise. We have begun the essential work of keeping the American
dream alive in our time.
Today
does not mark the end of our economic troubles. Nor does it constitute
all of what we must do to turn our economy around. But it does mark
the beginning of the end – the beginning of what we need to do to
create jobs for Americans scrambling in the wake of layoffs; to
provide relief for families worried they won’t be able to pay next
month’s bills; and to set our economy on a firmer foundation, paving
the way to long-term growth and prosperity.
The
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that I will sign today – a
plan that meets the principles I laid out in January – is the most
sweeping economic recovery package in our history. It is the product
of broad consultations – and the recipient of broad support – from
business leaders, unions, and public interest groups, the Chamber of
Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, Democrats and
Republicans, mayors as well as governors. It is a rare thing in
Washington
for people with such different viewpoints to come together and support
the same bill, and on behalf of our nation, I thank them for it,
including your two outstanding new Senators, Michael Bennet and Mark
Udall.
I
also want to thank my Vice President Joe Biden for working behind the
scenes from the very start to make this recovery act possible. I want
to thank Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid for acting so quickly and
proving that Congress could step up to this challenge. I want to thank
Max Baucus, Chairman of the Finance Committee, without whom none of
this would have happened. And I want to thank all the Committee Chairs
and members of Congress for coming up with a plan that is both bold
and balanced enough to meet the demands of this moment. The American
people were looking to them for leadership, and that is what they
provided.
What
makes this recovery plan so important is not just that it will create
or save three and a half million jobs over the next two years,
including nearly 60,000 in
Colorado
. It’s that we are putting Americans to work doing the work that
America
needs done in critical areas that have been neglected for too long –
work that will bring real and lasting change for generations to come.
Because
we know we can’t build our economic future on the transportation and
information networks of the past, we are remaking the American
landscape with the largest new investment in our nation’s
infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in
the 1950s. Because of this investment, nearly 400,000 men and women
will go to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, repairing
our faulty dams and levees, bringing critical broadband connections to
businesses and homes in nearly every community in
America
, upgrading mass transit, and building high-speed rail lines that will
improve travel and commerce throughout the nation.
Because
we know
America
can’t outcompete the world tomorrow if our children are being
outeducated today, we are making the largest investment in education
in our nation’s history. It’s an investment that will create jobs
building 21st century classrooms, libraries, and labs for
millions of children across
America
. It will provide funds to train a new generation of math and science
teachers, while giving aid to states and school districts to stop
teachers from being laid off and education programs from being cut. In
New York City
alone, 14,000 teachers who were set to be let go may now be able to
continue pursuing their critical mission. It’s an investment that
will create a new $2,500 annual tax credit to put the dream of a
college degree within reach for middle class families and make college
affordable for seven million students, helping more of our sons and
daughters aim higher, reach farther, and fulfill their God-given
potential.
Because
we know that spiraling health care costs are crushing families and
businesses alike, we are taking the most meaningful steps in years
towards modernizing our health care system. It’s an investment that
will take the long overdue step of computerizing
America
’s medical records – to reduce the duplication and waste that
costs billions of health care dollars and the medical errors that
every year cost thousands of lives. Further, thanks to the action we
have taken, seven million Americans who lost their health care along
with their jobs will continue to get the coverage they need, and
roughly 20 million more can breathe a little easier, knowing that
their health care won’t be cut due to a state budget shortfall. And
an historic commitment to wellness initiatives will keep millions of
Americans from setting foot in the doctor’s office for purely
preventable diseases.
Taken
together with the enactment earlier this month of a long-delayed law
to extend health care to millions more children of working families,
we have done more in 30 days to advance the cause of health reform
than this country has done in a decade.
Because
we know we can’t power
America
’s future on energy that’s controlled by foreign dictators, we are
taking a big step down the road to energy independence, and laying the
groundwork for a new, green energy economy that can create countless
well-paying jobs. It’s an investment that will double the amount of
renewable energy produced over the next three years, and provide tax
credits and loan guarantees to companies like Namaste Solar, a company
that will be expanding, instead of laying people off, as a result of
the plan I am signing.
In
the process, we will transform the way we use energy. Today, the
electricity we use is carried along a grid of lines and wires that
dates back to Thomas Edison – a grid that can’t support the
demands of clean energy. This means we’re using 19th and
20th century technologies to battle 21st century
problems like climate change and energy security. It also means that
places like
North Dakota
can produce a lot of wind energy, but can’t deliver it to
communities that want it, leading to a gap between how much clean
energy we are using and how much we could be using.
The
investment we are making today will create a newer, smarter electric
grid that will allow for the broader use of alternative energy. We
will build on the work that’s being done in places like
Boulder
,
Colorado
– a community that is on pace to be the world’s first Smart Grid
city. This investment will place Smart Meters in homes to make
our energy bills lower, make outages less likely, and make it easier
to use clean energy. It’s an investment that will save taxpayers
over one billion dollars by slashing energy costs in our federal
buildings by 25% and save working families hundreds of dollars a year
on their energy bills by weatherizing over one million homes. And
it’s an investment that takes the important first step towards a
nationwide transmission superhighway that will connect our cities to
the windy plains of the
Dakotas
and the sunny deserts of the Southwest.
Even
beyond energy, from the National Institutes of Health to the National
Science Foundation, this recovery act represents the biggest increase
in basic research funding in the long history of
America
’s noble endeavor to better understand our world. Just as President
Kennedy sparked an explosion of innovation when he set
America
’s sights on the moon, I hope this investment will ignite our
imagination once more, spurring new discoveries and breakthroughs that
will make our economy stronger, our nation more secure, and our planet
safer for our children.
While
this package is mostly composed of critical investments, it also
includes aid to state and local governments to prevent layoffs of
firefighters or police recruits – recruits like the ones in
Columbus
,
Ohio
who were told that instead of being sworn-in as officers, they would
be let go. It includes help for those hardest hit by our economic
crisis like the nearly 18 million Americans who will get larger
unemployment checks in the mail. And about a third of this package
comes in the form of tax cuts – the most progressive in our history
– not only spurring job-creation, but putting money in the pockets
of 95% of all hardworking families. Unlike tax cuts we’ve seen in
recent years, the vast majority of these tax benefits will go not to
the wealthiest Americans but to the middle class – with those
workers who make the least benefiting the most. And it’s a plan that
rewards responsibility, lifting two million Americans from poverty by
ensuring that anyone who works hard does not have to raise a child
below the poverty line. As a whole, this plan will help poor and
working Americans pull themselves into the middle class in a way we
haven’t seen in nearly fifty years.
What
I am signing, then, is a balanced plan with a mix of tax cuts and
investments. It is a plan that’s been put together without earmarks
or the usual pork barrel spending. And it is a plan that will be
implemented with an unprecedented level of transparency and
accountability. With a recovery package of this scale comes a
responsibility to assure every taxpayer that we are being careful with
the money they work so hard to earn. That’s why I am assigning a
team of managers to ensure that the precious dollars we have invested
are being spent wisely and well. We will hold the governors and local
officials who receive money to the same high standards. And we expect
you, the American people, to hold us accountable for the results. That
is why we have created Recovery.gov – so every American can go
online and see how their money is being spent.
As
important as the step we take today is, this legislation represents
only the first part of the broad strategy we need to address our
economic crisis. In the coming days and weeks, I will be launching
other aspects of the plan. We will need to stabilize, repair, and
reform our banking system, and get credit flowing again to families
and businesses. We will need to end a culture where we ignore problems
until they become full-blown crises instead of recognizing that the
only way to build a thriving economy is to set and enforce firm rules
of the road. We must stem the spread of foreclosures and falling home
values for all Americans, and do everything we can to help responsible
homeowners stay in their homes, something I will talk more about
tomorrow. And while we need to do everything in the short-term to get
our economy moving again, we must recognize that having inherited a
trillion-dollar deficit, we need to begin restoring fiscal discipline
and taming our exploding deficits over the long-term.
None
of this will be easy. The road to recovery will not be straight and
true. It will demand courage and discipline, and a new sense of
responsibility that has been missing – from Wall Street to
Washington
. There will be hazards and reverses along the way. But I have every
confidence that if we are willing to continue doing the difficult work
that must be done – by each of us and by all of us – then we will
leave this struggling economy behind us, and come out on the other
side, more prosperous as a people.
For
our American story is not – and has never been – about things
coming easy. It’s about rising to the moment when the moment is
hard, converting crisis into opportunity, and seeing to it that we
emerge from whatever trials we face stronger than we were before.
It’s about rejecting the notion that our fate is somehow written for
us, and instead laying claim to a destiny of our own making. That is
what earlier generations of Americans have done, and that is what we
are doing today. Thank you.
Watch Part 1 of an interview with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC
Watch Part 2 of an interview with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC
Obama believes in Unions...
Democratic Nomination Acceptance
Everyday
Republicans Backing Obama in
Pennsylvania Republicans
and Former McCain Supporters from Across the State Show Support for Obama
PHILADELPHIA,
PA
– Republicans from across the state are increasingly backing Sen. Obama,
joining other Republicans and former Republicans who switched their party
affiliation to vote for Sen. Obama in the
Pennsylvania
primary. These supporters will spend the remaining days before Election
Day hosting canvasses and other events, talking to fellow Republicans about
why they support Senators Obama and Biden. Several of these supporters
share their sentiments below:
“Eight
years of failed George Bush policies have dragged this country down, and John
McCain was with him 90 percent of the time. We’re lifelong Republicans, but
we always put country before party. Like General Colin Powell, we’re
voting for Barack Obama because he possesses the leadership and judgment to
get our country back on track.” Larry and Phyllis Wyles,
Lebanon
County
“This
election is about looking past our self interests and looking out for what’s
best for our country,” said Erie Republican Amy Valentine. “It’s time we
come together to elect a leader with the right temperament and experience to
not just lead our country nationally, but also lead internationally. We need
more than a friend in the White House, we need somebody who will stand up for
our values, protect
Pennsylvania
families and fix our broken economy.”
Kim
Deachilla, Southern York County said, “John McCain says he is ‘totally’
proud of his smear tactics like robocalls and misleading fliers. Well, he’s
totally abandoned everything he once stood for. McCain may have grown to love
dirty political tricks, but I’m more fed up with them than ever before, and
that’s why I’m voting for Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the candidates who
are talking about real issues.”
“As
much I’ve admired John McCain, I am disappointed by the campaign he is
running in his name. That’s not what this election is about -- it’s
about the future and I am voting for Barack Obama because he is the kind of
patient, responsible and competent leader
America
needs.” Michel Paradis,
Allentown
Valerie
Serine-Langan of
Scranton
said, “The Republican Party has lost its way over the past eight years, and
John McCain just isn’t the maverick he used to be. We need someone in the
White House who possesses the sound judgment and steady leadership to meet the
challenges we face today, and that’s why I’m voting for Barack Obama.”
Other
prominent Republicans in
Pennsylvania
and across the country have given their support for Sen. Obama or denounced
the McCain campaign and its tactics:
Michael
Smerconish:
John McCain is an honorable man who has served his country well. But he will
not get my vote. For the first time since registering as a Republican 28 years
ago, I'm voting for a Democrat for president. I may have been an appointee in
the George H.W. Bush administration, and master of ceremonies for George W.
Bush in 2004, but last Saturday I stood amid the crowd at an Obama event in
North Philadelphia
. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/currents/31242619.html
GOP
Sen. Gordon SmithDisavowed McCain’s Robocalls
Linking Obama To Bill Ayers And His Campaign Said In A Statement, “Senator
Smith Does Not Condone These Sorts Of Calls. Negative Robocalls Are Not
Appropriate And Have No Place In Campaigns.” “
Oregon
's Gordon Smith has become the fourth Republican Senator to disavow John
McCain's robocalls linking Barack Obama to Bill Ayers. In a statement to the
Huffington Post, Smith for Senate press secretary Lindsay Gilbride said:
‘They [the Ayers calls] are not taking place in
Oregon
and Senator Smith does not condone these sort of calls. Negative robocalls are
not appropriate and have no place in campaigns.’” [Huffington
Post, 10/22/08 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/22/another-gop-senator-decri_n_136949.html]
GOP
Governor Charlie Crist Backed Away >From McCain Attacks On
Obama And Said About Their “Socialist” Accusation, “I Don’t Think It
Looks That Way To Me.” “Gov. Charlie Crist dashed around the state Monday
to stir up support for state Republicans fighting an unprecedented TV ad
barrage by the well-funded Barack Obama campaign. Amid national speculation
that Crist and the Republican Party of Florida are washing their hands of Sen.
John McCain's sluggish efforts in the state, Monday's fly-around focused on
local Republicans running for the state House and Senate. … Crist was asked
about the attacks from many McCain supporters that Obama is advancing a
‘socialist’ agenda. ‘I imagine different people have different
definitions. I don't think it looks that way to me,’ he said.”
[
Gainesville
Sun, 10/21/08 http://www.gainesville.com/article/20081020/NEWS/810212981/1002/NEWS01?Title=Governor_stumps_for_state_GOP_candidates__]
GOP
Sen. Olympia SnoweIssued A Statement Saying That McCain
Direct Mail “Are Regrettable And Inappropriate, And These Tactics Should Be
Suspended Immediately.” “Sen. Olympia Snowe, a co-chairman of
the
Arizona
senator's campaign in
Maine
, issued a statement against the calls and flier through a spokesman Monday.
‘She feels they are regrettable and inappropriate, and these tactics should
be suspended immediately,’ said John Richter, Snowe's chief of staff. He
said Snowe ‘will be in contact with the McCain campaign to express that
directly.’" [Portland Press-Herald,
10/21/08 <http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=217136&ac=PHnws>
]
GOP
Sen. Norm Coleman IssuedA Blanket Statement Condemning Negative
Phone Calls And Ads By McCain’s Campaign And The Republican
Party. “Today Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman's campaign issued a blanket
statement condemning negative ads and phone calls. ‘I call on Al Franken,
the DNC, the RNC, the DSCC, the NRSC and any other organization engaged in
negative attacks on any candidate to bring them to an immediate end,’
Coleman said in the statement. Asked if this included McCain's campaign,
Coleman spokesman Luke Friedrich replied: ‘The senator is calling on
everyone.’” [Politico, 10/18/08 <http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/1008/Two_GOP_senators_express_displeasure_in_McCainRNC_robocalls.html?showall>
]
GOP
Sen. Susan CollinsUrged McCain Stop Making Robo-Calls
Attacking Obama. “Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, facing a
tough re-election fight, urged GOP presidential contender John McCain on
Friday to stop making automated calls into her state that link Democratic
nominee Barack Obama to a 1960s radical. ‘These kind of tactics have no
place in
Maine
politics,’ said Collins spokesman Kevin Kelley. ‘Sen. Collins urges the
McCain campaign to stop these calls immediately.’ McCain traveled to
North Carolina
in advance of a rally on Saturday. His campaign did not immediately respond to
a request for comment.” [AP, <http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MCCAIN_ROBO_CALLS?SITE=NYMID&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT>
10/18/08]
Gov.
Palin Criticized Her Own Campaign’s Robocalls
And Said That People “Get A Bit Irritated With Just Being Inundated” With
Calls. "If I called all the shots, and if I could wave a magic wand,”
Palin said, “I would be sitting at a kitchen table with more and more
Americans, talking to them about our plan to get the economy back on track and
winning the war and not having to rely on the old conventional ways of
campaigning that includes those robocalls and includes spending so much money
on the television ads that, I think, is kind of draining out there in terms of
Americans' attention span. “They get a bit irritated with just being
inundated,” she continued, “and you're seeing a lot of that of course with
the huge amounts of money that Barack Obama is able to spend on his ads and
his robocalls also.” [CNN, 10/20/08 <http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/20/palin-says-voters-irritated-by-robocalls-2/>
]
Colin
Powell, In Endorsing Obama, Said He Was “Disappointed” By McCain’s
Campaign.
“Republican Colin Powell announced his support for Sen. Barack Obama,
D-Ill., Sunday in an appearance on NBC's ‘Meet the Press.’ ‘Because of
(Obama's) ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of this
campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is
and his rhetorical abilities – we have to take that into account – as well
as his substance – he has both style and substance – he has met the
standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president,’
Powell said. The retired four-star Army General gave a scathing critique of
the McCain campaign and the Republican Party, saying he was ‘disappointed’
by the approach the Republicans have taken on the issues. ‘I have some
concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years. It has
moved more to the right than I would like to see it. But that’s a choice the
party makes.’” [ABC News, 10/19/08
<http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/10/powell-voting-f.html>
]
Former
Republican Michigan Governor William MillikenAsked “Who Is John McCain?” And Said
“He’s Not The McCain I Endorsed. … His Campaign Has Become
Rather Disappointing To Me.” “But, now, who is John McCain? That's what
William Milliken, former Republican governor of
Michigan
and a supporter of McCain in the party primaries this year, is asking about a
candidate who, in Milliken's view, appears to have lost his way in this fight
for the White House. ‘He is not the McCain I endorsed,’ Milliken, reached
at his
Traverse City
home on Thursday, told the Grand Rapids Press for today's editions. ‘He
keeps saying, 'Who is Barack Obama?' I would ask the question, 'Who is John
McCain?' because his campaign has become rather disappointing to me.’ ‘I'm
disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain
campaign, when he ought to be talking about the issues.’” [Chicago
Tribune, 10/10/08 <http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/10/michigander_who_is_john_mccain.html>
]
Republican
Rep. Ray LaHood Said Palin Should Cool Her Rhetoric Toward Obama.
“Republican Rep. Ray LaHood of Illinois said Friday that Alaska Gov. Sarah
Palin should cool her rhetoric directed at Barack Obama. ‘This doesn't befit
the office that she's running for. And frankly, people don't like it,’
LaHood said during an interview on WBBM, a
Chicago
radio station. Palin has accused Obama of ‘palling around with terrorists’
and of putting ‘political ambitions in front of doing what's right for our
troops.’” [Politico, 10/10/08 <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14467.html>]
Bill
Kristol: It’s Time For McCain To Fire His Campaign. He Has Nothing To Lose.
His Campaign Is Totally Overmatched By Obama’s. “It’s time for John
McCain to fire his campaign. He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally
overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with
resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain
campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out
dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational
incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks
to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed. … McCain should stop unveiling
gimmicky proposals every couple of days that pretend to deal with the
financial crisis. He should tell the truth — we’re in uncharted waters, no
one is certain what to do, and no one knows what the situation will be on Jan.
20, 2009. But what we do know is that we could use someone as president
who’s shown in his career the kind of sound judgment and strong leadership
we’ll need to make it through the crisis.”
[Bill Kristol, New York Times, 10/13/08 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/opinion/13kristol.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin>
]
GOP
Strategist Don Sipple Said That Attacks On Obama For His Ties To Ayers Have
Been “Trite And Petty. … He’s Seeming Like a Desperate Politician.”
“John McCain unveiled a feisty new campaign speech Monday, but the talk of
change and promise of a fist-shaking fight to November failed to allay
Republican concerns that the presidential race may be slipping beyond his
grasp. With 21 days to the election, there was widespread agreement that
Wednesday night's third and final presidential debate would be a crucial
opportunity -- and perhaps the last one -- for the
Arizona
senator to change the course of a race that appears to be moving strongly in
Democrat Barack Obama's direction. … ‘This has been a very tactically
oriented campaign that responds to the previous night's evening news,’ said
David Winston, a Republican pollster who advises the GOP leadership in the
House and Senate. ‘As a result, they've gone tactical decision to tactical
decision without any strategy to tie that together.’ Republican Sen. John
Ensign of
Nevada
, head of the party's senatorial campaign committee, said that McCain had to
‘start getting a very clear, simple message on the economy. Their team has
not put that together so far.’ … Don Sipple, a GOP strategist sitting out
the campaign, said the attacks on Obama for his ties to Ayers had been
‘trite and petty’ and had diminished McCain. ‘Instead of the statesman
he seemed at one time, he's seeming like a desperate politician who's throwing
out stuff that is so irrelevant to the American people at this stage,’
Sipple said.” [
Los Angeles
Times, 10/14/08 <http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-mccain14-2008oct14,0,2824967.story>
]
Several
Republican Party Leaders Said McCain’s “Changing Day-To-Day Dialogue”
With “A Welter Of Evolving Economic Proposals” And “On-Again-Off-Again
Attacks” On Obama’s Character Were Not Breaking Through.
“Several party leaders said Mr. McCain needed to settle on a single message
in the final weeks of the campaign and warned that his changing day-to-day
dialogue — a welter of evolving economic proposals, mixed with
on-again-off-again attacks on Mr. Obama’s character — was not breaking
through and was actually helping Mr. Obama in his effort to portray Mr. McCain
as erratic.” [
New York
Times, 10/12/08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/us/politics/12strategy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=politics&pagewanted=print]
Former
Top McCain Strategist John Weaver:“As A Party, We Should Not And Must Not
Stand By As The Small Amount Of Haters In Our Society Question Whether He Is
As American As The Rest Of Us.” “John Weaver, McCain’s former
top strategist, said top Republicans have a responsibility to temper this
behavior…’We should take that agenda on in a robust manner. As a party we
should not and must not stand by as the small amount of haters in our society
question whether he is as American as the rest of us. Shame on them and shame
on us if we allow this to take hold.’” [Politico.com,
10/10/08 http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14445.html]
GOP
Strategists Questioned Whether McCain’s Negative Tactic Would Be Successful.
“McCain made clear on Monday that he wanted to make the final month of the
race a referendum on Mr. Obama’s character, background and leadership — a
polite way of saying he intends to attack him on all fronts and create or
reinforce doubts about him among as many voters as possible. … But several
strategists, including Republicans, questioned whether this tactic would be
successful for Mr. McCain, given the lateness of the date and the economic
crisis washing over the country. ‘This is not a normal campaign. Normal
personal or character-based attacks are not going to work particularly
well,’ said Stuart Stevens, a Republican consultant who worked for President
Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004. ‘If your house is on fire, all you
care about is who can put the fire out the best.’” [
New York
Times, 10/6/08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/us/politics/07strategy.html?ref=politics]
Peggy
Noonan:Smear Tactics “Harmful” For the
Country. “The right fears they’re going to lose,
they’re getting meaner than ever. I would hate to see this descend into
this, this—“I’ll kill—I’ll tear your throat out” kind of stuff. I
think that would be harmful. I think we are at a unique and dangerous moment
in history, and it’s the last thing we need. And I don’t speak as a sissy;
I’m trying to speak as an adult… When you—you don’t want to be dark
and you don’t want to be preoccupied, but when you keep your mind on that
fact and that we may in our country face difficult days ahead, and even
immediately ahead, when you keep your mind on that, you realize, whoa, this
old partisan gamesmanship, this “tear out his throat,” all of that stuff,
it’s over, it’s yesterday. What we need now is grace. We need real
patriotism, which patriotism isn’t used as a weapon in a campaign.
Patriotism actually needs grace in order to function. We got to be our best
selves right now. We got to hit our game in a higher way. We got to be
forbearing. We got to be adults. I sometimes think one of the problems in
America is there are too many people that don’t want to embrace the role of
the simple grown-up and show the maturity and forbearance of a grown-up.” [Meet
the Press, 10/5/08]
Ed
Rollins:Personal Attacks Will “Fail” May
“Backfire.” “From what I hear, the campaign's plans are to
put John McCain back in the seat of his A-4 Skyhawk bomber and drop bomb after
bomb on Obama to try to convince voters he is unfit to lead. I think
that formula will lead to failure, just as Hillary Clinton's strategy failed.
Personal attacks won't work this late in the campaign and may backfire on
McCain.” [CNN, 10/6/08 http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/06/rollins.mccain/index.html]
Mike
Murphy: “Over The Top Negative Attacks… Suppressed Anger has Damaged
McCain’s Priceless and Hard Earned ‘Brand.’”
“Ads have attacked, McCain and Palin have attacked. This has failed. Over
the top negative attacks and a campaign message that too often seems to be
little more than sarcasm and suppressed anger has damaged McCain’s priceless
and hard earned “brand” as a different kind of Republican.” [Time,
10/5/08 http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/10/30_days_out.html]
The Washing Post report came to your homes; this report was posted by the
Chicago Times back on June 30th.
Tax
plan face off: Obama vs. McCain
The rich would pay more under Barack Obama's tax plan, and
the poor and middle-class would pay less, a nonpartisan analysis finds.
Under John McCain's plan, the rich would pay much less than they do now,
the poor and middle-class would pay a bit less, and the federal deficit
would grow, the study found.
Each individual's tax situation is different, so it's hard
to say for sure how much more or less you would pay under the presidential
candidates' ever-evolving tax proposals.
Under the tax plan of John McCain (left), the rich,
poor and middle-class would pay less. Under the plan of Barack Obama,
the rich would pay more while the poor and middle-class would pay
less. (AP)
And at this point that's all they are -- proposals that
may or may not get through Congress. They don't take into account wars,
whether the president will sign an expensive social program into law, or
the world economy.
With those caveats, here are highlights of how the
candidates' proposals to change the tax code would impact you:
Obama says he would hike several taxes on people making
more than $250,000, including the amount they pay on capital gains.
Currently, the top income tax rate is 35 percent. Under Obama, that would
go back up to 39 percent. Obama's staff told the Urban-Brookings Tax
Policy Center he would raise the rates for people in the top two brackets
-- about 2.5 million filers out of 100 million-plus. People in those high
tax brackets would see the tax rate on their capital gains hiked from the
current 15 percent to 20-28 percent.
Obama started his campaign saying his plans would not
increase taxes for people earning less than $250,000. But he found himself
in an apparent contradiction by saying he would tax all income to fund
Social Security, not just income up to $102,000, as is now the case. So
now, Obama's plan calls for no Social Security tax on income between
$102,000 and $250,000, but all income above $250,000 would be taxed for
Social Security.
The 95 percent-plus of the American population that earns
less than $250,000 would see the following tax breaks: A $500-per-worker
tax credit for people who earn less than $150,000 and do not itemize, and
a $4,000 credit per child in college. Seniors who earn less than $50,000
would pay no income tax.
The Tax Policy Center notes seniors could end up paying
more if corporations respond to Obama's proposed increase in the corporate
tax rate by passing those costs along to consumers.
McCain would make permanent most of the tax cuts President
Bush has already enacted, including those that benefit the middle class,
such as elimination of the marriage penalty and the increase in child
credits. He would also keep cuts that benefit the wealthy, such as the
elimination of the highest tax brackets. Obama would keep the breaks for
the middle class but not the ones for the wealthy.
McCain would also double the dependent exemption from
$3,500 to $7,000, benefitting big families of all incomes.
Obama would leave the top corporate tax rate at 35
percent. McCain would cut it to 25 percent.
The two candidates differ widely in their approach to the
estate tax, which the Republicans call the "death tax." McCain
would set it at 15 percent for estates above $5 million. Obama would set
it at 45 percent for estates above $3.5 million.
Both candidates favor extending a "patch" that
would keep the Alternative Minimum Tax from encroaching on middle-income
families.
Largely because his tax proposals would leave tax breaks
for the wealthy in place, McCain's plan would cost the U.S. Treasury more
than Obama's, the Tax Policy Center found.
The precise cost depends on whether you assume the current
tax breaks would be renewed or would expire.
Assuming they would have been renewed anyway, Obama's plan
would bring in an additional $700 billion in taxes over the next 10 years,
while McCain's would cost the Treasury $600 billion. Assuming legislators
would have let the tax breaks expire, Obama's plan would cost the U.S.
Treasury $2.7 trillion and McCain's $3.7 trillion.
The center uses various assumptions both campaigns quarrel
with. Each campaign also accuses the other of not being honest with the
numbers.
"Obama raises taxes in a way that's detrimental to
the economy," said McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin. "The John
McCain plan is a jobs-first plan that keeps small businesses in the
game."
Obama's Brian Deese said the $600 million deficit the
study pro- jects McCain's plan would create "doesn't count impact of
current Iraq war spending. If McCain's plan drives the deficit up and puts
upward pressure on interest rates, that increases costs for families and
could force really Draconian, across-the-board spending cuts."
New
Obama Website Anchors Campaign to Push Back on McCain’s Attacks
Radar.BarackObama.com
Allows Voters to Report, Debunk Robocalls, Mailers, and Attack Ads
CHICAGO
,
IL
– John McCain has launched a new round of false, vicious robocalls, mailers,
and attack ads – despite being warned to change his tone by a string of
Republican leaders including Colin Powell and four sitting Republican
senators. To combat his renewed effort to smear Barack Obama, the Obama
campaign today launched a fact-checking campaign centered around a new
website, Radar.BarackObama.com.
Radar.BarackObama.com
allows voters to report new attacks that pop up in their area – and get the
facts about smears they’ve heard. The site launch was announced today in an
email to Obama’s ActionWire email list.
The new site is just
one component of an expansive campaign to push back on McCain’s unceasing
negativity. Here are
some highlights:
ØMissouri: the Obama campaign
released a robocall recorded by a lifelong Republican who has supported
McCain in the past but switched to Obama after being turned off by
McCain’s attacks. The campaign held press conferences in six cities
around the state on Thursday to discuss the calls.
ØWisconsin: The campaign has released
a response robocall featuring a local former McCain supporter who switched
to Obama because of McCain’s attacks. Governor Jim Doyle and a local
veteran held a conference call to denounce McCain’s negative robocalls,
and local veterans have released an open letter condemning the attacks. A
resident of
Middleton
,
Wisconsin
quit his job at a local call center over the content of the McCain calls.
ØNorth Carolina: The Obama campaign
released a robocall recorded by a local textile worker who switched to
Obama because of McCain’s under-the-radar attacks. Obama state chair
Jerry Meek held a conference call with local press to call on Senator
Elizabeth Dole to condemn McCain’s calls, and the campaign held
a conference call with Sen. Majority Leader Tony Rand and Congressman Brad
Miller to denounce the false attacks.
ØOhio: The Obama campaign held a
press conference with Governor Ted Strickland, Senator Sherrod Brown, and
Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman denouncing McCain’s smear calls in the
Columbus
area. A similar press conference was held in Youngtown with Congressman
Tim Ryan and Mayor Jay Williams. On Thursday, local Republicans for Obama
gathered outside Governor Palin’s event in
Troy
to denounce McCain’s tactics. And today, non-partisan local faith
leaders will gather in
Chillicothe
to call on McCain to stop the attacks and focus on the issues that matter
to
Ohio
voters.
ØPennsylvania: State Auditor General Jack
Wagner and House Majority Leader Josh Shapiro held a conference call this
week to denounce McCain’s calls and set the record straight on
McCain’s false attacks.
ØIndiana: The Obama campaign held a
press conference with Indiana House Majority Leader Russ Stilwell and
Melissa Achtien, a lifelong Republican who is switching to Obama because
of the smear call she received. Obama’s state chair held a conference
call to demand that Governor Mitch Daniels denounce McCain’s attacks.
ØWest Virginia: Weston resident Chaylee
Cole, a college student, quit her job at a local call center after being
disciplined for refusing to make smear calls about William Ayers. Ms. Cole
spoke to local press about her experience.
The Two Faces of McCain
By Jim English
International Secretary-Treasurer
Marketing Myths vs.
Hard Realities
The political hucksters who market presidential
candidates are shameless about the myths they create.
Ronald Reagan was pitched as a former union president
who understood working Americans. Instead, he fired striking air traffic
controllers and ignited a quarter century of corporate union busting.
George Bush, Sr. was sold as “kindler” and
“gentler,” but kept up the attack on union workers.
His son was marketed as a regular guy. Instead
he’s regularly stuck it to labor unions while doing Wall Street’s bidding.
Now John McCain is being promoted as a super straight
shooter with a record of distinguished service – everything that George Bush
hasn’t been.
There’s no question that John McCain suffered as a
prisoner of war. But there are plenty questions about just how straight
he’s being about his record as a candidate for president.
Maverick no more
Somewhere
along the way in his pursuit of the Republican nomination, the wheels came off
what McCain likes to call his “Straight Talk Express” as he tried to
convince voters that he’s offering something more than four more years of
Bush’s failed
policies.
As his voting record reveals, McCain’s claim to be
a maverick was never very credible. At best, in the early years of the Bush
administration, he broke ranks with Bush’s policies only 11 percent of the
time. According to a Congressional Quarterly Voting Study, that meager show of
independence is long gone. Ever since McCain began seeking the Republican
nomination his claim of being a maverick has taken a beating as he voted in
lock step with Bush a whopping 95 percent of the time.
Apparently that’s what McCain has decided is
necessary for him to win the support of Bush’s well-healed backers.
The question is, are four more years of Bush’s policies something that
working Americans can afford?
The economy is in shambles. Bush, who inherited budget
surpluses, has turned them into the largest deficits in the country’s
history. The dollar is tanking, and gas prices are climbing out of sight.
The prices of working people’s homes, meanwhile, are being crushed by the
sub-prime mortgage crisis created by financial speculators, the very same
people who Bush considers his “base,” and refuses to regulate.
McCain’s real MO
Good-paying manufacturing jobs, which built this country’s middle class, are
disappearing, thanks to lousy trade deals, every one of which McCain has
supported as fervently as Bush and his Wall Street backers, along with tax
breaks for multinationals that export American jobs by shipping manufacturing
to countries where workers are exploited with impunity.
So, while John McCain’s handlers market him as a
straight talking maverick, he’s been perpetuating Bush’s anti-worker
agenda. In fact, when closely examined, John McCain’s record looks like a
carbon copy of Bush’s.
Although he’s now showing up at Michigan auto
plants to be photographed alongside auto workers, he’s consistently voted
against working people’s interests.
Worst of all, McCain voted for a bill that would allow employers to hire scabs
during strikes, and he opposed collective bargaining rights for police, fire
fighters and airport screeners. He voted against the Employee Free
Choice Act, which would allow workers to win union representation without
being intimidated or fired by employers. Not surprising, as McCain
refers to union leaders as “labor bosses” on his website, and tars them as
special interests in his speeches.
As for the unions that bargain to protect teachers’
pensions and health care benefits, McCain says, “It’s time to break the
grip of the education monopoly that serves the union bosses at the expense of
our children.”
Free trade cheerleader
McCain has apparently never seen a free trade
agreement he doesn’t love, and his campaign for president promises more of
them. He says, “If I were president, I would negotiate a free trade
agreement with almost any country.”
His solution for the millions of workers here who
have lost their jobs as a result is retraining at community colleges, ignoring
the pain and upheaval families face when a breadwinner loses a job and health
insurance. Moreover, McCain’s record reveals a blind faith, much like
Bush’s, in market forces, no matter how much damage working people are
suffering after the loss of 3.5 million jobs.
In addition, McCain has expressed strong support for new free trade agreements
with Colombia, where more trade unionists are tortured and murdered each year
than in all other countries combined, and South Korea.
The South Korean agreement is likely to exacerbate
and accelerate the loss of good jobs in the U.S. manufacturing sector,
especially in cars, trucks, apparel and electronics. We already have an almost
$14 billion trade deficit with South Korea, nearly $12 million of which is in
autos and auto parts.
McCain’s carefully honed decades-old image as a reformer has been
tarnished by his campaign’s ties to Washington lobbyists. Among those who
have resigned or been fired from his campaign is former Texas Rep. Thomas G.
Loeffler, a key McCain fundraiser who lobbied for a European aircraft
manufacturer to win a lucrative Air Force contract for new refueling tankers.
The deal endangers thousands of U.S. jobs.
The U.S. Department of Defense skipped over
Boeing and its U.S. employees in awarding the contract to a consortium
dominated by the European Aeronautics Defence and Space Co. (EADS), the parent
of Airbus. McCain had prodded the Pentagon to develop procedures that included
Airbus in the bidding despite the Buy American provisions of defense
contracts.
Taxing health care
benefits
McCain’s “solution” to the health care crisis that is killing us in
bargaining and leaving 47 million other Americans uninsured is to make
everyone responsible for their own health coverage – then tax them for the
cost of it. Instead of employers providing health insurance, McCain is
championing a consumer-driven approach to health insurance coverage that
employers have been trying to shove down our throats for years in bargaining.
Under his “plan,” companies will give what they now pay for health care to
the worker. Then the workers will supposedly find and buy their own insurance.
McCain’s approach will:
• cut the union out
of bargaining;
• undermine what little leverage we have to bargain for better pricing
through group coverage, and:
• could prevent those with pre-existing conditions from getting
coverage.
Adding insult to the injury of destroying our leverage in bargaining, we’ll
have to pay taxes on the additional “income.” In a burst of circular
logic, McCain says he will give tax credits to offset the additional income
tax.
It’s a scheme designed to win big campaign
contributions from powerful corporate interests. And it’s working – for
them. The only thing it won’t do is fix the broken health care system.
Flip flopping on tax
cuts
When
Bush first pushed the massive tax cuts that have gone overwhelmingly to the
wealthy, creating created huge budget deficits, McCain opposed them. But
in 2006, right before he launched his campaign for the nomination and sought
donations from the wealth beneficiaries of Bush’s tax giveaway, McCain
reversed course and voted to keep taxes “stable” on the rich, his
political double talk for flip flopping, Meanwhile McCain repeatedly
opposed increasing the minimum wage – until it was attached to a bill that
gave tax breaks to businesses.
If anything, McCain’s opposition to benefits for
working Americans is one of the more consistent aspects of his record.
He voted against protections for workers’ overtime pay. And he abstained
from voting to protect steelworker jobs from illegal dumping in 1999, and
against temporarily providing health insurance for employees and retirees of
bankrupt steel companies.
Straight talk goes AWOL
John
McCain’s talk about foreign policy hasn’t been any straighter than
Bush’s.
He recently condemned critics of Bush’s failed policies on Iraq because they
had called for specific timetables to withdraw our troops. After being caught
on a YouTube video saying that America would be in Iraq for the next 100
years, he doubled back on his own words by promising to get virtually all
troops out by 2013 – exactly what he’d condemned critics for doing.
Not to mention the danger of committing America to five more years of war.
All in all, it adds up to a candidacy that’s long
on marketing myths and short on credible solutions for working Americans.
May
12, 2008
A
Special Message from
Pittsburgh
on the 2008 Presidential Election Campaigns
In
a recent meeting of the International Executive Board, concerns were
raised about the media’s ongoing attempts to sensationalize and
mischaracterize the contest between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton to become the Democratic Party presidential nominee. Most
disturbing have been attempts to define working people’s voting
decisions in this contest as somehow racially based, while completely
ignoring the fact that for years Senator McCain and many of his
Republican colleagues have treated all working people with complete
disdain, whether those workers are white, Black, Hispanic or
otherwise. Shouldn’t that be the issue for 2008, and not this
absurd and unfair focus on race and sometimes on religion?
There
is a lot of talk that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now fated to
lose the Democratic nomination and should pull out of the race. We
believe it is her right to stay in the fight and challenge Senator
Barack Obama as long as she has the desire and the means to do so.
That is the essence of democracy, and of the Democratic Party process.
But
we believe just as strongly that Mrs. Clinton will be making a
terrible mistake — for herself, her Party and for the nation — if
she continues to press her candidacy through negative campaigning with
disturbing racial undertones.
America needs a clean
break from eight catastrophic years of George W. Bush, and it needs it
now. And so far, Senator John McCain is shaping up as simply the
“Bush Sequel” – with more war in Iraq, even more tax cuts for
the rich while the middle class struggles mightily, and courts packed
with even more right-wing activists intent on undoing decades of
progress in civil rights, civil liberties and other vital areas. The
Democratic Party must field the most effective and vibrant candidate
it possibly can. And more attack ads and squabbling will not help
achieve that goal.
The
IEB feels, therefore, that we need to make it absolutely clear to our
staff and local leadership that both Democratic candidates would be
far superior advocates for the rights of working people and their
families than Senator McCain, and to make it equally clear that
neither Democrat should urge a choice based on the race or the age of
working-class voters. All workers have a common need to be
represented better than they have been by George Bush or will be by
John McCain, whether he or she is a retiree, a worker in one of our
facilities, or one of the fine young men and women fighting right now
to protect our nation.
It’s
bad enough that John McCain’s supporters are already engaged in the
politics of divide and conquer, especially if Senator Obama is the
Nominee, which now seems likely. These destructive Republican
tactics are deeply troubling and completely unfair, as Senator
Obama’s grandparents, who raised him during much of his youth,
fought in World War II and worked honorably in manufacturing jobs to
support their family. And they are deeply troubling because the
Senator has pledged his own undying allegiance to our country and to
working-class Americans, and because of his outspoken commitment to a
vibrant middle class which grows from the bottom up and which
recognizes that when it comes to economic policies and trade, American
workers must come first.
Dividing
working people along racial and ethnic lines is the oldest and meanest
game in the book, and it is the one the Republicans are already using
to distract attention from the fact that Senator McCain has made it
abundantly clear that he offers nothing more than a continuation of
the Bush administration’s sorry record of relentlessly assaulting
the well-being and interests of working people and of our nation’s
unions.
John
McCain is proposing a health care “plan,” for example, that is a
health care industry-driven rehash of the approach that employers have
been trying to shove down our throats for years in bargaining – and
he is doing it with the full support of Bush and their Republican
cronies in Congress and the insurance industry. John McCain has
never seen a free trade deal that he doesn’t love – and as a
candidate he’s already cheerleading for even more of them. He
is calling for more Bush-type tax cuts for the wealthy that are
creating the worst income inequality the country has seen since 1928.
He opposes the Employee Free Choice Act, which Senator Obama supports
for all workers, including for part-time and contract employees. John
McCain will keep doling out subsidies to big oil. And he (along
with Senator Clinton, unfortunately) has pandered to working
people’s struggle to pay for rising gasoline prices by calling for a
microscopic “gas tax holiday” that will only save working people
pennies while robbing our country of the funds needed to rebuild our
failing infrastructure – which is just one of the job-creating
functions that our government should be investing in instead.
Given
these troubling circumstances, the IEB urges all staff and local
leadership to share Senator McCain’s vicious anti-worker record with
our members, and to encourage them to understand that media attempts
to sensationalize differences among working people based on race,
ethnicity or religion will only distract us from the real need to
change our nation’s policies on health care, trade, workers’
rights, energy and foreign affairs. Getting that message out
immediately to all our members and supporters is crucial, and we must
not let either the last few days of the Democratic primary process or
the everyday McCain lies rob us of the chance to end the Bush assault
on us, our union and our families.
Make
Sure
Your
Vote Counts.
If
you have a problem casting your ballot on Election Day, call
Rapid Response toll-free at:
866-311-1889
Keep the following in mind when you go to the polls:
1. Verify where
you vote. Locations may have changed, and a vote cast at the
wrong place might not get counted. Call your local elections office to
verify your voting location.
2. Bring
identification. A government-issued photo ID with your name and
registered street address is best.
3. Ask for help
from a poll worker if needed.
4. Make sure you
cast a vote. If you are in line when the polls close, stay there.
You are entitled to vote.
5. If you are
offered a provisional ballot, ask if you can cast a regular ballot by providing
additional ID or by going to another polling place. If no
alternative is available or practical, cast a provisional ballot.
6. If you are
having a voting rights problem, ask to speak with the chief election official or
a voting rights volunteer at the polls. Also, call the toll free
number for assistance: 866-311-1889.
Rapid
Response considers retirement security a key issue for both active and retired
members. We’ve taken action on multiple issues including the following:
Obama
McCain
The Medicare
Improvements for Patients and Providers Act of 2008
This past
summer Rapid Response urged Senators to support this bill (HR 6331)
which contained a number of fixes and improvements in Medicare,
including help for low-income seniors, better rural and other hospital
care, improving outpatient services, improving the Medicare drug benefit
program, and enacting a provision that would stop a payment cut to
doctors (some doctors were threatening that they would not take on new
patients if the payment cut stood). The bill passed the House and
Senate and survived a veto by the President to become law.
Right
Voted in support of the bill.
Only
Senator to skip the vote.
Privatizing
Social Security
In early 2005,
President Bush embarked on a nationwide campaign to shift money out of
Social Security’s guaranteed benefits and into the stock market.
Rapid Response carried out a national action in opposition to this
risk-filled plan. The president backed off and Social Security
remained in tact.
Right
Opposes privatizing Social Security.
Blueprint for Change document; Roll Call Vote 68,
3/16/06; Speech at the National Press Club, 4/26/05
Wrong
Supports privatizing Social Security.
Wall Street Journal interview, 3/3/08; Roll Call Vote 68,
3/16/06; Roll Call Vote 56, 4/1/98; Roll Call Vote 77, 4/2/98
Right = Supports the USW Position
Wrong = Opposes the USW Position
This
comparison concludes the Rapid Response series of Presidential Comparisons.
To view copies of the previous
comparisons, click on the following:
Are
you worried that we will wake up November 5th to find that, once again, election
results in key races are in question? Here's what you can do.
These
recommendations from the staff at YES!
Magazine are simple ways you can protect your own
vote—and the fairness of the system, based on the recommendations of leading
voting integrity advocates.
Please
forward
this checklist to others to help make our election system work.
BEFORE
ELECTION DAY
{Nov
3rd}
1.
Check your registration.
Even if you think you're registered, you may not be. Check online at www.CanIVote.org.
2. Vote now. Check if early
voting is possible in your state. If you’re voting by mail,
check carefully where you need to sign, how to seal the envelope, and how to
mark the ballot. And note: Some ballots require extra postage.
3. Practice your vote. Electronic
voting machines can be difficult to use. Verifiedvoting.org
is preparing links to video demos of how to vote on the machine you will find at
your polling station. If you'll be using a paper ballot, check out the sample
included in your voter pamphlet.
4. Find out who’s in charge.
Make a phone list of your county and state election
officials—it may save valuable time on Election Day if you
need to get registration verification or other information.
ON
ELECTION DAY
{Nov
4th}
5.
Vote early.
Avoid the frustration of long lines. Also, if you encounter problems, you'll
have time to sort them out and may be able to help others.
6. Take your government-issued ID and your
cell phone, if you have one. If you have problems, or see problems,
call a hotline immediately (see point #9). You may not need ID to vote, but it's
best to have it.
7. Avoid Straight Party Voting, if
it's an option in your state. Vote for each race individually, even if it takes
a little longer.
8. Verify your vote. If you’re
voting on an electronic voting machine, check the review screen to make sure it
reflects your vote. If the machine produces a paper record, check as you go
along that everything is working correctly. If not, speak to a polling
attendant—don’t leave until you’re sure your vote has been properly
recorded.
9. Document and report. If you
encounter difficulties, or see others experiencing difficulties (excessive
lines, voter harassment, malfunctioning machines, etc.), make a detailed record.
Get all the facts you can—location, names, specific problem.
The best way to report problems is to call 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683),
which has volunteer lawyers in 15 locations standing by to provide
rapid-response assistance. You can also contact your party of choice. We have
more suggestions here.
AFTER
ELECTION DAY
{Nov
5th}
10.
Call your candidate.
If there are questions about an election result, urge your candidate to ask for
an audit. Ask how you can help.
11. Call your election officials.
If you have concerns, let your county and state election officials know, and
monitor their response. Ask them not to certify the election before all
challenges and recounts are finished. And send a copy of your message to your
local newspaper editor. If you're confident about the election result, thank the
officials for a difficult job well done.
INTO
THE FUTURE
{the
future}
12.
Work for fair, transparent elections.
66% of Americans don't trust the electronic voting machines many of us will be
voting on this November. Join the movement for election reform in between
elections. Use our YES!
Tools to find out how.
Yours
for democracy,
Fran Korten
Publisher, YES! Magazine www.yesmagazine.org
Economic
Outlook
American Workforce Faces Economic Stress
On Many Fronts, Economists Tell House Panel
American
workers are facing
stagnating wages, rising gasoline and food prices, and higher unemployment
rates, according to witnesses testifying Sept. 11 before a House subcommittee,
but lawmakers and panelists at the hearing disagreed on what measures should be
taken to resolve current economic woes.
Economists
and researchers from several think tanks testified before the House Subcommittee
on Income Security and Family Support of the Ways and Means Committee. While
Democratic subcommittee members and some of the panelists argued in favor of
social programs and government support for workers such as extending
unemployment insurance benefits, Republican members emphasized the economic
importance of rising gasoline prices and said energy policy should be one of
Congress's top priorities.
In
opening the hearing, Subcommittee Chairman Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) referred to
the growing wage gap between low- and higher-wage workers, the decline in
employer-sponsored health care coverage, and rising productivity.
"In
short, many Americans are working harder for less," he said. "Less
income, less job security, less health and pension coverage less time at home,
and less opportunity. Left unchecked, this trend will strike at the very core of
the American dream."
On
the other hand, Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.), the ranking Republican member of the
subcommittee, said rising gasoline prices were having a disproportionate effect
on Americans' economic hardships, and cited a recent poll that found that five
times as many people cited rising energy prices as their top economic concern
than losing a job.
"The
hardship doesn't stop with pain at the pump," Weller said. "It's also
felt at the dinner table, where energy prices are driving up food prices, making
families poorer .... And this is all before fall and winter set in, driving up
home heating costs to previously unseen, and some might say obscene,
levels."
'Challenges
Predate Rise in Gas Prices.'
Jared
Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an informal adviser
on economic policy to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.),
told the subcommittee that the economic health of the American workforce had
been declining for some time.
"We
must recognize that the challenges [workers] face ... certainly predate the rise
in gas prices," Bernstein said. Between the mid-1940s and mid-1970s, he
said, inflation-adjusted compensation doubled for most American workers, but
between 1979 and 2007, there has only been 7 percent growth in
inflation-adjusted wages. Over that same period, Bernstein said, productivity,
or output per hour, has grown 70 percent. "We've had uniquely weak job
growth," he said.
In
addition, Bernstein pointed to statistics showing that the inflation-adjusted
wages of college graduates have failed to grow in the 2000s, and that workers'
diminished collective bargaining power has contributed to income inequality.
Bernstein
recommended a number of measures to improve economic conditions. He said it was
necessary to "first do no harm" in terms of worsening current economic
conditions, and argued that changes in the federal tax code since 2001
"have worsened distributional outcomes by disproportionately lowering the
tax liabilities of the wealthiest families."
"Such
regressive tax policies hurt most families both directly and indirectly,"
Bernstein said. "While the direct impact of the regressive tax cuts has
been extensively measured and is well-appreciated, [the] indirect effect--the
defunding of public services that boost economic security of the least
advantaged--is also important and problematic."
Bernstein
also favors passing the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800, S. 1041), which he
said would "level the playing field" when workers are seeking to
organize. The proposed law would allow a union to be recognized in a workplace
if a majority of workers signed authorization cards. "The law also puts
much needed teeth back into labor law by ratcheting up the penalties for those
who violate the rights of workers trying to organize or negotiate a
contract," he said.
Energy
Prices Also Important
Meanwhile,
another witness testified to the effect of energy prices on American workers'
economic security. William W. Beach, the director of the Center for Data
Analysis at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the recent
economic stimulus package that Congress approved earlier this year had
temporarily boosted the economy, but had not had any lasting effect. Instead of
considering a second stimulus package, Beach said, Congress should look at other
solutions, especially those centered on energy.
Beach
cited Heritage Foundation research that showed that a $2.00 per gallon increase
in retail gasoline would cause total employment to fall by 586,000 jobs and
after-tax personal income to fall by $532 billion. Beach also said such an
increase would cause Americans to spend "significant personal savings"
on gasoline.
"On
energy, [Congress's] actions to increase supplies in the short and long run
could do some good, particularly for workers looking for jobs and families
hoping to keep their children in violin lessons and little league
baseball," he said, pointing out that some families had been forced to cut
back on such activities due to gas prices making transportation difficult.
Beach
described himself as a "free trader who believes imports are central to our
economic vitality and future economic strength," but he emphasized the need
for domestic energy production.
"I
believe that increasing domestic production of petroleum and refined oil
products would have a positive effect on our domestic economy, largely through
more jobs and income," Beach said. He added that another analysis had found
that if domestically sourced petroleum increased by 2 million barrels per day,
the nation's gross domestic product would increase by $164 billion, and
employment would increase by 270,000 jobs.
"Congress
exercises enormous authority over petroleum mining, largely through its
regulation of off-shore and federal land oil reserves. Authorizing more oil
mining in these reserves today would begin to wean the
U.S.
from the economically harmful reliance on so much foreign petroleum," he
said.
Other
witnesses at the hearing testified about other challenges faced by American
workers, including inflexibility in work-life programs, access to
employer-sponsored health care, and the need to support low-wage workers.
So much for the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. Clearly, once the
bailout passed, investors took a good look at the real economy and went to the
mattresses. We’re headed into a great reckoning. And at the heart of that,
as illustrated in the new Institute for America’s Future op ad in the New
York Times - “Even the Rope we’re Hanging Ourselves with is made in
China”: — is this country’s unsustainable global strategy. To see the ad
and supporting charts go here.
This is a result, as Barack Obama has stated, of a failed economic philosophy
- the “market fundamentalism” that dominated Washington over the last
thirty years, the notion that markets are efficient and self-correcting and,
as Sarah Palin repeated in the last debate, governments should just get out of
the way.
What that meant in practice was the worst forms of crony capitalism. Abroad,
global corporations and banks essentially wrote the constitution of the new
global economy, protecting property rights but not workers, consumers or the
environment. Financial flows were deregulated opening the casino up for
business. Banks were favored; the military industries protected; agribusiness
subsidized.
At home, Reagan launched the war on unions, and rolled back government and
regulation. The minimum wage was frozen for a decade. Undocumented workers
exploited to undermine wages and standards. Banks got rid of the protections
built during the Great Depression. Companies used globalization as a club
against workers. Pensions and health care benefits were rolled back… Over
the last eight years, productivity and profits rose, but wages lost ground. We
lost one in five manufacturing jobs. Now some 15 million service jobs are at
risk of off-shoring.
Global economy
Yet this global economy depends on American consumers as the buyers of last
resort. Sustaining a low wage, high consumption economy is no mean trick. The
gulf was bridged by mountains of debt and successive asset bubbles. Household
debt soared to unprecedented levels, as Americans loaded up on credit cards
and cashed out their homes. And the US is now the world’s largest debtor,
having added over $4.4 trillion in foreign debt since 2001. We must borrow or
sell off assets with $2 billion a day simply to cover our trade deficits. We
now run a high tech trade deficit with China. Mexico exports 50% more cars to
the US than the US exports to the rest of the world.
What can’t go on indefinitely, won’t. And with the bursting of the housing
bubble, the reckoning is here.
Clearly we need to change course. We need a national economic strategy for a
global economy, a strategy for the nation, not for the multinationals that
have very different interests.
Yet our political debate is still frozen into a silly spit ball fight about
“free trade” and “protectionism.” Barack Obama questions NAFTA-type
accords and is charged with “protectionism” in editorials across the
country. John McCain, a stalwart of the failed policies of the last two
decades, still intones the old “free trade” mantras, denouncing critics as
lacking “faith in the American worker.”
This mindless debate has been going on for three decades, as the country has
sunk deeper and deeper in debt. Surely in the wake of the current crisis, it
is time for an adult conversation about a strategy that would sustain a
prosperous middle class in a global economy.
That means deciding if America will remain a center of innovative manufacture.
A concerted drive for energy independence will not only reduce the half of our
trade deficits that go to oil, but could capture the green technologies that
will drive the markets of the future.
Broad middle class
It means deciding if we are going to sustain a broad middle class. That
would require forcing business to compete within the framework of a high wage
economy - not by tearing that framework down. Empower workers to organize,
raise the minimum wage, and build a public social contract starting with
health care and pensions to replace the promises the corporations are
shredding.
Then we’ve got to change our federal priorities from policing the globe and
top end tax cuts to making the vital investments here at home — in education
and life long learning, in R and D, in the most efficient infrastructure.
Finally we’ll need to dispel the myth that the mercantilist nations like
China are playing by the same set of rules. With China now our leading
creditor, this won’t be easy. But we must find ways to bring our trade with
that country into balance - either by currency adjustment, by managing our
trade, or by a surcharge on imports that will force the change.
These aren’t the only answers; they may not be the best ones. But surely the
question of our national strategy in the global economy can’t be put off.
That’s why McCain’s decision to turn his campaign over to the Karl
Rove’s protégés in character assassination is so dishonorable. We deserve
a debate worthy of a great nation in trouble. Brickbats about Bill Ayers or
Palin’s Alaskan separatist husband are simply insults. Americans deserve
better. And McCain and Palin may find out that they just may demand it.
History was made yesterday. The American people demanded an
economic bailout strategy that helped Main Street as well as Wall Street. When
congressional leaders came up short, fierce public pressure forced the House to
vote “No.”
But, with the financial crisis deepening, saying “no” is not enough.
It’s time to act.
Tremendous pressure is already mounting from the White House and Wall Street
to exploit people’s anxiety, dress up the same weak bill and ram it through
this week! Congress needs to hear from you NOW, to resist this pressure and take
a stand to rebuild Main Street and reign in Wall Street. Tell Congress: Resist
Wall Street. Stand up for Main Street. Deliver a new “New Deal.” The defeated bailout package promised more failed trickle-down logic —
bailout the financiers at the top and prosperity would trickle-down. To get the
economy back on track, we need a new “New Deal” that rebuilds the
economy from the bottom up.
• Invest In Main Street: On Main Street, jobs are
disappearing, infrastructure is crumbling and local budgets are straining. A
$200 billion economic rescue package for Main Street would generate clean
American energy, extend unemployment benefits, aid states and localities to
avoid debilitating cuts and modernize our crumbling infrastructure.
• Save The Homeowners: Defaulting mortgages are at the
heart of the crisis. Keeping deserving people in their homes is critical to
shore up Main Street and Wall Street. The bankruptcy courts need to have the
power to renegotiate mortgages and reduce foreclosures.
• Hold Wall Street Accountable: Instead of simply
propping up reckless firms, we should establish a Reconstruction Finance
Corporation that can take over financial firms, sort out the solvent from the
insolvent, close down some and merge others. We also need modern regulation that
cracks down on the abuse. And taxpayers deserve preferred shares in any bank or
investment house that we are forced to rescue.
This sort of new “New Deal” economic rescue plan puts Main St. first. It’s
what Congress should have done from the start. Tell Congress now:
Resist
Wall Street. Stand up for Main Street. Deliver a new “New Deal.” Make no mistake, the financial crisis is serious and severe. Big problems
require bold solutions. And problems caused by conservative policies
need progressive answers.
Conservatives are regrouping now. They’ll try to put progressives on
their heels, and pander to Wall Street with more deregulation and top end tax
cuts — the same conservative policies that derailed the economy and ravaged
the markets in the first place.
You beat back Wall Street once, but their pressure will not let up. Congress
needs to hear your voice again NOW to build on this stunning victory. Your
voice already stopped a bad bill, now it can pass a good one. Tell Congress: Resist
Wall Street. Stand up for Main Street. Deliver a new “New Deal.”
Call it extortion. Every American is now being told to ante up $2000
- an estimated $700 billion in all - to bail out the banks from their bad
bets, or they’ll bring down the entire economy.
In the speculative frenzy that allowed the Masters of the Universe to
pocket millions personally, the banks filled their coffers with toxic paper
that no one wants to buy. Now they sensibly don’t want to lend money to each
other, since no one knows if the other is solvent. So they go on strike, and
threaten to trigger a global depression, if they don’t get rescued. (for
more details go here.)
The bail out will take place simply to avoid that depression. But
depressions have some salutary effects - the scoundrels go belly up, the
weakest get purged. And, in the wake of the disaster, people demand strict
regulation of the money lenders to keep their greed in check, and government
spends money on the real economy to put people back to work.
So if we’re going to ask Americans to pay to avoid the depression, we
better demand the accounting that wouldn’t otherwise take place.
We need a citizens’ plan on the crisis. Here’s a first draft, derived
from discussions with a range of independent experts.
No bail out should go forward without the following minimal conditions:
1. Taxpayer money; taxpayer accountability.
The Treasury wants unlimited authority to spend $700 billion in a revolving
fund with no rules beyond its own discretion. We can’t trust the most
spectacularly corrupt administration in memory to decide how they’ll cut the
deals with the banks. We’d get fleeced. Instead, the law must require an
independent entity, with consumers and workers having a majority of the seats
on a board with authority to create rules that will prohibit gaming of the
bailout. And the Congress - itself sadly compromised by Wall Street money -
should be empowered to name independent monitors and to approve all board
members.2. Taxpayers share in the upside.
The Treasury bill would buy the bad paper of firms without taking any
equity in the firm. That’s an invitation to larceny. If a firm decides to
auction off its toxic paper to the US agency, taxpayers should get equity in
that firm, in proportion to the assets we buy. That will deter profitable
firms from using the agency as a dump for their toxic paper. And it will
insure that if the bailout works and the firms become profitable, taxpayers,
not simply bankers, benefit from the upside. 3. Shut down the casino.
No bailout of the predators can go forward without new regulation for the
financial system - capital requirements, leverage limits, bans on exotic
instruments, transparency, limits on compensation schemes. The shadow banking
system - hedge funds, private equity firms - must be brought under the glare
of regulators. The Federal Reserve should be directed to police asset bubbles.
Over the counter trades - like the credit default swaps - should be brought
into public exchanges. Some details should be written into the law; Treasury
can be mandated to issue more comprehensive regulations by a date certain,
with fast track rules for consideration by the Congress. One thing is clear:
any promise to do the bail out now and the regulation later is simply a lie. 4.
Curb excessive CEO pay.
Wall Street fatcats shouldn’t be pocketing millions taxpayers are forced
to bail them out. Any firm that applies for relief must agree to limit the
compensation of any executive - pay, bonuses and perks - to no more than the
highest pay offered a senior federal official. Future compensation should be
linked to profitability.5. Invest in the real economy.
Ending the bankers strike is not sufficient to avoid a serious recession,
as consumers tighten their belts. A major public investment agenda - $200
billion or more - for developing new energy and conservation, rebuilding
schools and infrastructure, extending unemployment and food stamps, helping
states avoid crippling cuts in police and health services - is vital to get
the real economy moving and put people back to work. If we don’t do this,
the coming recession will raise the cost of the Wall Street bailout
dramatically, as credit card, auto and home loan defaults rise.6. Aid
the victims, not just the predators.
No bail out of the banks can take place without a freeze on foreclosures
and renegotiation of bad mortgages so people can stay in their homes. Bankers
and home owners both made a foolish bet that home prices would keep rising.
Many homeowners were misled by predatory lenders to taking mortgages that they
didn’t understand and couldn’t afford. It would be simply obscene to help
the predators and not those that they preyed on.7. Curb the political
corruption.
No contributions from Wall Street PACs or executives should accepted by any
legislator or candidate for national office. Paid lobbyists of Wall Street
firms should be banned from any legislative contacts. Any meeting with
representatives of Wall Street - and many will be needed to understand what is
happening - should be posted immediately by legislators in a central place on
the web. All those employed over the past five years by troubled firms seeking
relief should be prohibited from profiting from the bailout. Without this ban,
legions of executives from Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers will create
consulting firms to profit from cleaning up the mess that they made.
These demands will be met with howls of outrage, a renting of pinstripes.
It will require a Congress, lathered with Wall Street contributions, to demand
a deal that makes sense. This won’t be easy, particularly with Republicans
apparently lining up en mass to rubber stamp the Bush administration
proposals. But trusting this administration to decide without conditions on
how to bailout the banks with $700 billion in taxpayers money is simple
lunacy.
These banksters have brought the global economy to the brink of the abyss.
They want to use that crisis to give the Treasury a virtual blank check to
bail them out. Counting the money already spent, more than a trillion dollars
will be spent rescuing them from the mess that they have made. Before agreeing
to that, Congress has to demand common sense conditions that insure the
taxpayers won’t get fleeced, and this won’t be done to us again.
Make your voice heard. Add your comments below. Write Senate Majority
Leader Harry
Reid, House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi and demand that they stand up. Write Senate Republican
Leader Mike McConnell
and House Minority Leader John Boehner
and tell them that saluting the Bush administration is not
sufficient. Tell the Committee Chairs Senator Chris Dodd
and Rep. Barney Frank
that the Treasury proposal is unacceptable. Finance is too
important to be left to the bankers. And the bailout is too costly to be left
to the Bush administration.
It’s time for citizens to demand common sense.
Maximizing McCain’s Flip-Flop on Financial Regulation
Posted September 17, 2008 at 5:57 pm, in From
the News
By David Sirota
Author of “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring
Wall Street & Washington”
Last night on MSNBC,
Rachel Maddow and I discussed John McCain’s new rhetoric claiming he
supports better financial regulation.
But instead of focusing only on McCain’s words, we tried to follow in the
spirit of the Institute for America’s Future’s call for a substantive
debate by examining the Arizona senator’s career as a public official - one
who’s formative regulatory experience was being a member of the Keating Five
pressing federal financial regulators to stop doing their job in advance of
the S&L crisis (ie. the most analogous crisis to today’s Wall Street
meltdown). You can watch the
conversation here:
McCain, as the S&L scandal first suggested, is no run-of-the-mill
free-market fundamentalist. Yes, he voted for the ill-advised
repeal of the key Depression-era law that might have prevented the rampant
consolidation and speculation that brought on today’s emergency.
But, then again, Bill Clinton and his DLC Democrats supported it too. Yes,
McCain’s top economic adviser is Phil Gramm, the UBS investment banker who
pushed through so much deregulatory legislation as a senator. But then again,
Barack Obama’s top economic adviser is Robert Wolf, Gramm’s UBS boss.
Where McCain really leaps to the fringe and differentiates his extremism
from others is in his use of the deregulatory label to publicly define
himself. That’s how you can really tell what a politician believes in.
This is not a guy who just votes for the corrupt legislation his Wall
Street friends tell him to vote for - this is a guy who has staked his name on
being “fundamentally a deregulator,” as he recently described himself.
On 11/19/93, McCain took to the Senate floor to support an early financial
deregulation bill and decry what he called “the tremendous regulatory burden
imposed on financial institutions.” The guy who now claims to be the
trustbusting Teddy Roosevelt back then lamented “the rapidly increasing
regulatory burden imposed on banks is to cause them to devote substantial
time, energy and money to compliance rather than meeting the credit needs of
the community.”
Ten years later, McCain was bragging to the Associated
Press that “I have a long voting record in support of deregulation,”
and to CNN
that “I am a deregulator. I believe in deregulation.”
And, during this year’s presidential campaign taking place in the shadow of
financial meltdown, McCain was only months ago insisting on PBS that “we
need less government [and] less regulation” and that “I’m
always for less regulation.”
Of course, there’s plenty of good news for both Democratic partisans and
ideological progressives about McCain’s about-face.
For partisans concerned only about Obama winning the election, McCain’s
180 on regulation opens up an obvious chance for Democrats to label him a
against-it-before-I-was-for-it, say-anything-to-get-elected hypocrite - and
Obama is (finally) moving
to seize that opportunity.
For ideological progressives long fighting the good fight to resurrect the
common-good regulatory agenda of the New Deal, McCain’s shift reflects a
broader shift in the public debate. Suddenly, regulation isn’t a four-letter
word anymore. Suddenly, even John “I’m always for less regulation”
McCain is for regulation. That rhetorical shift could help create an election
mandate forcing whoever wins the presidential contest to actually move away
from Reagan-style extremism for the first time since, well, Reagan.
But as I told Maddow (and as I will examine further in my upcoming
newspaper column on Friday), we have to all follow the money and the actions.
Both Obama and McCain have taken huge sums of cash from the industries that
caused this crisis. Both Obama and McCain continue to rely on Wall Streeters
who engineered the meltdown as their top economic advisers (though only McCain
employs lobbyists intimately involved in the crisis). That kind of influence
doesn’t just slink away with a boom-bust crisis - it fights hard to make
sure nothing concrete comes out of the situation (think the weak
Sarbanes-Oxley after Enron).
Whether we get the kind of populist reforms will be decided by how much
grassroots pressure is put on either of these potential presidents when they
reach the Oval Office. The talk right now from both candidates may be good -
and Obama is smart to point out McCain’s absurdly dishonest rhetoric. But
talk is cheap when it comes time to write legislation.
McCain chooses VP based on cynical calculations, not qualifications
Presumptive Republican
Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, on his 72nd birthday,
announced a selection that revealed the depths of his cynicism and the
shallowness of his judgment – and his disregard for women’s intelligence.
After looking into a pool of
vice president candidates deep with qualification, he plucked out the least
experienced person.
This follows four months in which he and his surrogates
continually blathered that Democratic nominee Barack Obama was unqualified.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani just got done giving that GOP talking
point to TV commentators during the Democratic Convention, contending
repeatedly that Sen. Obama’s credentials made him unfit to be
commander-in-chief – an accusation Sen. Obama effectively refuted in his
nomination acceptance speech Thursday night.
That speech was so effective, the McCain campaign had to
do something – anything – to steal the spotlight away from a defining
moment in American history.
The very next day the McCain campaign played their trump
card - McCain announced that he’d selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his
running mate.
Although a dedicated public servant, wife and mother,
here’s the sum total of Palin’s experience: not quite two years as
governor; two terms as mayor of the Alaskan town of Wasilla, population,
8,000; two terms on Wasilla city council; chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas
Conservation Commission; TV sports reporter; small business owner for three
years; mother of five; bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the
University of Idaho, and Miss Alaska runner-up.
If McCain, who has suffered melanoma, were elected, Palin
would be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Palin’s competition for the VP slot included Minnesota
Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, and
former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Every one of them has at least one
advanced degree; Romney has two, both from Harvard. Every one has
substantially more years of experience in governing than Palin.
The least experienced might be Pawlenty. But even he has,
in addition to that city council experience, a dozen years in the state
legislature. And he’s serving his second term as governor, not his second
year.
With Palin at his side, McCain now is open for the same
ridicule he’s heaped on Obama. And the reason he opened himself up for that
mock-fest is clear: He believes women are stupid.
Put a woman on the ticket, he cynically figured, and
he’d garner disgruntled supporters of unsuccessful Democratic candidate Sen.
Hillary Clinton.
The strategy of selecting Palin shows he believes women,
who supported Sen. Clinton, an abortion rights advocate, are so Stepfordesque
that they’ll just follow the Republican ticket now that there’s a woman
attached to it.
Palin, unlike Sen. Clinton, is anti-choice. She is a
member of an anti-abortion group called Feminists for Life. In 2002, when she
ran for lieutenant governor in Alaska, she sent an e-mail to the anti-abortion
Alaska Right to Life Board saying she has “adamantly supported our cause
since I first understood, as a child, the atrocity of abortion.”
She’s a member of the National Rifle Association and
backs drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (McCain picked her,
though he does not support drilling there.)
But McCain doesn’t think Clinton’s supporters will
notice any of that. He figures they’ll blindly accept any female –
whether she has a strong record on the issues that affect working families or
not. There is no doubt that Palin’s a successful woman. But what
we know of her record does not qualify her to be one heartbeat away from the
Presidency. McCain has so little respect for women’s intelligence that
he thinks we will make a choice based solely on gender.
When Obama was in the process of vetting vice
presidential candidates, he told reporters he couldn’t make a hasty
decision. The reason, he said, was the selection of a running mate was “the
most important decision that I will make before I am president.”
In choosing Palin, McCain has clearly shown he lacks the
judgment to be president. In this most important decision, he made his choice
based on cynicism and politics instead of choosing a leader qualified to
govern this country should something dreadful befall the president.
WASHINGTON - More major labor organizations, including
the National Education Association and the AFL-CIO, are poised to support
Democratic Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., in his campaign for the White House.
By a unanimous vote, the AFSCME Executive Board voted June 18 to
endorse Obama, union President Gerald McEntee said. In a telephone press
conference, McEntee said his union expects to mobilize at least 40,000 of its
1.4 million members as activists for Obama in the fall campaign. It also expects
to spend "close to $50 million on the campaign," including
advertising.
McEntee, who chairs the AFL-CIO's Political Committee, added he expects a
federation-wide endorsement of the Illinoisan "within the next two
weeks."
Delegates to the upcoming convention of the National Education Association, the
nation's largest union, will vote on whether to endorse Obama, NEA President Reg
Weaver said.
The vote by the 9,000 delegates, meeting July 2-4 in Washington, comes after the
union thoroughly evaluated the positions of both Obama and the presumed GOP
nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on issues key to teachers, students and
schools. Two months ago, the 3.2-million-member union issued a blistering
critique of McCain's economic proposals. NEA said they would produce a spending
freeze that would harm public schools and 3.6 million students.
The NEA endorsement is important because it has politically active members in
every state and because NEA has led successful campaigns on education-related
issues by convincing other voters of their importance.
"Ideally, NEA would have endorsed a candidate during the primaries, but our
members were like voters everywhere," split between Obama and Sen. Hillary
Clinton, D-N.Y., Weaver said. Now that Obama has enough Democratic delegates to
be the nominee, and with "such a clear picture of what Obama will do for
public education and his commitment to partner with NEA on issues that affect
our members across the country, every public school employee needs to get
squarely behind" him, Weaver said.
AFSCME campaigned hard during the primary season for Clinton, whom its board
strongly -- though not unanimously -- endorsed. Its pro-Clinton campaign
included criticism of Obama's health care plans as incomplete and of Obama as
inexperienced. But McEntee said conditions changed and that union leaders were
particularly satisfied by intensive meetings on June 17-18 with Obama, where
they quizzed him and exchanged views on education, trade, health care and other
issues.
To get the AFL-CIO's endorsement, Obama needs votes of unions representing
two-thirds of the federation's 9 million members. That endorsement
would not come from the federation's Executive Council, but from its larger
General Board. McEntee said he expects AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to convene
a telephone conference call among that board's members to make the decision.
Obama has already been endorsed by the Change to Win labor federation, which
includes the Teamsters, Service Employees International Union, Laborers and
United Food & Commercial Workers. The United Steelworkers, the nation's
largest industrial union, also recently announced its support of Obama.
This article is adapted from reports by Press Associates, Inc., news
service.
Labor unions command renewed power in presidential race
updated 4:00 p.m. PT,Sun.,
Jan. 27, 2008
If the national news media had been right, the
culinary workers' union would have swept Sen. Barack Obama to victory in
Nevada's Democratic presidential primary.
That, of course, is not what happened; Sen. Hillary
Clinton won the popular vote -- though not the most delegates to the party's
national convention -- in the Silver State. But the attention paid to the
culinary workers' endorsement of Obama suggests labor unions will play a
more prominent role in this year's presidential election.
Pennsylvania's presidential primary isn't until
April, but the lack of a clear front-runner in either party leading up to
Super Tuesday -- on Feb. 5, when 24 states will vote -- could keep it on
candidates' radar. Union endorsements could be key for presidential
contenders seeking Pennsylvania's 21 electoral votes.
Gov. Ed Rendell announced his endorsement of
Clinton on Wednesday. Political analyst G. Terry Madonna said Rendell's
endorsement is significant because if the races stay as muddy as they are
right now, despite the late primary, Pennsylvania could still be a key
player in the election, much like it was in 2004.
"We will be a battleground state, no
question," said James Kunz, business manager of the International Union
of Operating Engineers Local 66. "The 2004 election went Democrat in
large part because of the efforts of organized labor going door to door. Our
impact comes from our grassroots work."
With Pittsburgh's designation as the birthplace of
the modern labor unions -- it was home to the first conventions of both
the AFL and the CIO -- and the state's above-average union representation,
it's not a leap to expect labor to play a major role in the upcoming
election.
Nearly 14 percent of Pennsylvania workers --
745,000 people -- are union members, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
Union members don't vote in lock step, said Jack
Shea, president of the Allegheny County Labor Council, but the figures are
pretty high. About 70 percent of union workers vote how their union advises
them, Shea said.
"Our program is very simple; we want to touch
you anywhere from eight to 12 times, whether it's literature, on the phone,
in person or on the job," he said. "All we try to do is make
people aware. You can talk to some folks who don't realize what's going
on."
At their zenith 50 years ago, labor unions had
about a third of the work force organized in this country, said James Craft,
professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh's
Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. It is around 12 percent today.
"They've lost a lot of potential clout in
terms of numbers," Craft said.
Unions have adapted by using more sophisticated
strategies to influence the outcome of elections.
First, despite the restrictions of campaign finance
laws, labor unions still make sizable contributions to political candidates,
Craft said. "It's about half the amount that business contributes, but
we're still talking hundreds of millions of dollars," he said.
Unions have extremely active programs to get their
workers to the polls, Craft said. They call members personally, they go door
to door, they even register people to vote and then make sure they do vote,
he said.
And that on-the-ground effort includes members of
different unions, Shea said: "It may be a transit worker visiting a
Teamster, or a Teamster visiting a steel worker."
United Steelworkers International President Leo
Gerard was surprised at the attention received by the 60,000-member culinary
workers union in Nevada. "I think it was impossible to think you would
see a unanimous consensus from a membership that diverse," Gerard said.
They made the mistake of not identifying their
issues until late in the game, he said, unlike the steel workers, who
decided early on they wanted a candidate who would work for change. Gerard
said his union has endorsed John Edwards. Kunz's and Shea's unions haven't
decided whom to endorse yet, but both said it will almost certainly be a
Democrat.
Madonna, a professor of public affairs and director
of the Center for Political and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall
College in Lancaster, said labor unions in Pennsylvania typically play
little to no role in Republican primaries, but are extremely active on the
Democratic side.
Labor activists are usually well-represented among
Pennsylvania's convention delegates, Madonna said, to the tune of about 35
percent.
And if the Democratic nominee is still undecided by
March 4, Pennsylvania and its labor unions will play a huge part in the
process, he said.
"There's no other primaries between March 4
and April 22, and no one bigger than us after April," Madonna said.
"Labor could end up being a major element in this campaign."
As Congress Talks Stimulus, Labor Leaders Worry They Won't Have a Voice
Labor leaders say senators are paying too much attention to
"Wall Street Democrats" such as Lawrence Summers, left,
and Robert Rubin. (Bill O'leary - Twp)
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Organized labor, a fundamental constituency of the Democratic
Party, is unhappy about lots of things these days, even though Democrats
are in the majority in Congress.
Its latest disappointment involves the economic stimulus package that
soon will start moving on Capitol
Hill. Some union leaders are worried that they are not being heard,
particularly in the Senate, and that a group of Wall
Street Democrats led by former Treasury secretary Robert
Rubin is getting more attention.
Case in point, labor leaders say, are the two initial hearings by the Senate
Finance Committee on the stimulus bill. One will feature Jason Furman,
director of the Brookings
Institution's Hamilton Project, a group heavy with Wall Street backers
such as Rubin. The other will feature Peter
R. Orszag, the head of the Congressional
Budget Office, who is a former director of the Hamilton Project.
"The Finance Committee is a bit more of a challenge for labor and
progressives," said Bill Samuel, legislative director of the AFL-CIO.
Richard L. Trumka, AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, said the labor
federation is "working on" the finance panel's chairman, Sen. Max
Baucus (D-Mont.), to persuade him to include labor's voice in later
sessions.
But Leo W. Gerard, president of United
Steelworkers International, said organized labor's concerns go well
beyond a couple of hearings. "We have a problem in the Democratic
Party," he said. "There's way too much influence from K Street
lobbyists and Rubinistas" -- his term for Wall Street Democrats.
"These aren't the guys you ought to be listening to. These are the
guys who brought the economic insanity we're dealing with now," Gerard
said. "This is the same crowd that helped engineer the credit crunch
and the collapse of mortgages."
On substance, labor economists such as those at the left-leaning Economic
Policy Institute like the idea of pouring money into infrastructure,
such as road and bridge construction, as a way to create jobs and spur
growth. Hamilton Project economists disagree, asserting that kind of
spending takes too long to help the economy.
On broader issues, Hamilton Project folks prefer free trade and abhor
budget deficits; labor economists tend to think the opposite way.
"On a lot of issues, they are definitely at odds," said Dean
Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. At
the moment among Democrats, he added, "the Hamilton
people have the upper hand."
Labor officials are boiling over the prominence given by Democrats to
Rubin and his successor at Treasury, Lawrence
H. Summers. "If the agenda that Max [Baucus] pushes forward
represents the interest of the Hamilton Project, it will be a terrible
disservice to the middle class," Gerard said.
But at least labor might get its say in the Senate. A day after The Post
asked the Finance Committee about labor's complaints, the AFL-CIO's Samuel
e-mailed to say that the committee had agreed to invite a labor person to
testify -- eventually.
Another
Union Complaint . . .
Democrats are holding their presidential nominating convention in Denver
this summer. You would think, then, that there would be plenty of unionized
hotels there to accommodate the delegates and please the party's union
friends.
In fact, local officials say Denver has only one unionized hotel, a Hyatt
at the convention center -- and organized labor is unhappy about the shortage.
Stay tuned.
The capital's most famous party spot for members of Congress is not the
Capital Grille or any other restaurant. It's the private, 70-seat theater two
blocks from the White
House at the headquarters of the Motion
Picture Association of America.
When Congress is in session, lawmakers, staffers and other D.C. notables
regularly show up there for a free movie, a meal and drinks. The events have
served as a way for Hollywood
to spread goodwill for decades.
Now, the spoilsports at Public
Citizen, the liberal advocacy group, have complained to the House and
Senate ethics committees that the events violate the new ethics law, which
prohibits lobbyists from giving gifts to lawmakers, and say they want the
parties shut down.
"Voters are fed up with lobbyists giving our lawmakers gifts, free
dinners, lavish parties and golfing trips -- and Congress finally responded by
banning these things," said David Arkush, director of Public
Citizen's Congress Watch division. "But that hasn't stopped the motion
picture industry from hosting free movie nights for officials and their
staffs."
The association says its program complies with the rules: It is a
"widely attended" event that also has an informational component --
sometimes a lecture, or a five-minute educational trailer that runs before the
feature -- and meets the rules for people who work in Congress.
"The MPAA has worked over the years to ensure that all of our events
are in compliance with the applicable government ethics rules, and we are
confident that they are," said association spokeswoman Angela Belden
Martinez.
The movie lobby plans to fight to keep its institution alive. In the
meantime, lawmakers will still be allowed to pass the popcorn or, more
important, the lamb chops.
Coincidence?
If anyone ever doubted that money matters in lobbying, the good people at
MAPLight.org can put the naysayers to rest.
Last week, the House passed a mine safety bill backed by unions and opposed
by mining companies.
According to MAPLight, the unions gave an average of nine times as much to
legislators who voted yes on the bill as they did to lawmakers who voted no.
The companies gave an average of three times as much to lawmakers who voted no
as to those who voted yes.
In other words, "lawmakers' votes aligned closely with campaign
dollars," said Dan Newman, MAPLight's executive director.
The Business
Software Alliance named veteran congressional aide Katherine McGuire,
43, as vice president of government relations.
McGuire will oversee lobbying teams in D.C. and Brussels
that deal with high-tech issues, including intellectual-property protection,
patent reform and cyber-security.
She replaces Karen Knutso n, who left to become chief of staff for
Sen. Lisa
Murkowski (R-Alaska).
McGuire was a Republican staff director for several Senate panels. Most
recently, she served as the GOP
staff chief for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
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