With so much at stake for working people in the November election, union members and activists are working through the AFL-CIO My Vote, My Right voter protection project to ensure the ballot process is run fairly and that every vote is counted.
(A new website up now offers help to voters who have questions about voting, including where to register. The National Campaign for Fair Elections launched www.866ourvote.org and spotlighted a toll-free voting rights hotline 1-866-OUR-VOTE, operated by a nonpartisan coalition of groups, including the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and the AFL-CIO.)
Through broad local coalitions with union activists, lawyers, civil rights organizations, faith-based organizations and other community allies, My Vote, My Right participants are working with local election authorities to mitigate any problems that may be caused by this massive voter turnout and to clear up significant weaknesses in our election system that were spotlighted in the 2000, 2004 and 2006 elections.
By Doug Cunningham
The U.S. House this week voted for $25 billion in low-cost loans for the U.S. auto industry. the loans will allow plant modernization and some retooling. Most foreign automakers will plants in the U.S. are excluded from these loans, which are limited to plants that are at least 20 years old. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney had urged Congress to approve these loans. Sweeney says it’s one of the most important things Congress can do to stimulate the economy and create tens of thousands of good jobs. The automakers will repay the low-cost loans.
In Washington, D.C. the newly formed Main Street Coalition, which includes some organized labor, protested at the White House. Spokesman David Elliott is with USAction/True Majority.org
[Elliott]: “Within the past 72 hours we have organized approximately 220 protests across the U.S. All of these protests are happening today (Thursday) in about 35 states. We’ve been talking to SEIU, we’ve been talking to AFL-CIO, we’ve been talking to AFSCME. Labor is a key part of this coalition.”
AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee says some financial bailout action is needed or else workers will be hurt even more than they’re already hurting. She says here’s what the AFL-CIO wants to see happen.
[Lee]: “We need to make sure that we are not throwing away taxpayers’ money, that we are not rewarding the people who got us into this problem in the first place, that we are taking care of the real economy, the productive economy – that is, main street. We think it’s extremely important to do two things in the context of this. One is to pass a second economic stimulus, a jobs program. It would invest in infrastructure, create good jobs at home and would also extend unemployment insurance for those many millions of people who are about to exhaust their unemployment insurance.
By Doug Cunningham
As outrage grows over the $700 billion Wall Street bailout proposal, workers, their unions and political progressives are hitting the streets in protest nationwide. They’re demanding that if Congress spends those billions that workers are protected and jobs created. Labor rallied on Wall Street Thursday. New York City Central Labor Council Executive Director Ed Ott.
[Ott]: “They took over a government that had surpluses and a balanced budget and they’ve run it into the ground. And Congress has to now do their job and put America back. If they’re gonna do a bailout and give 700 plus billion dollars to Wall Street, we want them to repeal the Bush tax cuts and take that money and put it towards infrastructure projects, mass transit, health care, schools, roads, highways – get the economy goin’ again.”
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| No wonder John Mccain “suspended” his campaign to focus on Paulson’s bailout–he had not read the bailout text. |
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Near the New York Stock Exchange this afternoon, more than 1,000 union members and other activists rallied against giving Wall Street a blank check in a financial bailout that leaves Main Street taxpayers deserted.
Speaking at the rally, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said:
Our nation is facing a real crisis and we should move swiftly, but we cannot afford to compound our problems with bailout legislation that is hasty at the expense of thoughtfulness and common sense.
We want our tax dollars to provide a hand up for the millions of working people who live on Main Street and not a handout to a privileged band of overpaid executives on Wall Street.
Workers are paying higher premiums, deductibles and co-pays for employer-sponsored health care this year than in 2007, continuing a trend that since 1999 has seen premiums more than double, while wages fall further behind, two new studies document.
Also, these higher health care costs and the staggering economy are forcing families to go without needed prescriptions, preventive care, tests and doctors’ visits, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, as we pointed out Monday, Sen. John McCain’s answer to the health care crisis is to unleash the health care industry—just as Bush, with McCain’s backing, did with the banking and financial industries. Today, U.S. taxpayers are on the verge of spending $700 billion to bail out that failure.
Denise Bowyer, vice president of American Income Life Insurance Co. and secretary of American Income Life’s Labor Advisory Board, agrees with millions of U.S. taxpayers that Congress should not write a blank check to bail out corporations as demanded by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
The people have finally spoken!
It started as individual whispers and wheezes of desperation. Slamming doors of houses abandoned, foreclosure signs creaking in the winds of change, the clamoring exodus from subprime swamps, neighbors left ruminating on who would be the next…the rasp has finally been heard in the corridors of power.
The working families forced to evacuate neighborhoods and abandon the American Dream of homeownership have slogged squarely to the middle of Wall Street. Congressional hearings have begun.
A West Virginia mining company has come under fire for trying to drive a wedge between coal miners and Sen. Barack Obama, who won the endorsement of the Mine Workers (UMWA) for his pro-worker views.
Consol, the mining company, allowed a camera crew from the National Rifle Association (NRA) on their property at a mine in Blacksville, on the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border. Miners say the crew asked misleading questions about Obama’s record on gun ownership. UMWA President Cecil Roberts said he was disappointed that Consol allowed the NRA to twist facts about Obama’s records and proposals.
The UMWA is considering a brief work stoppage next week to protest Consol’s actions, Roberts says.
They were trying to get the miners on camera to say they would not vote for Sen. Barack Obama if indeed he was opposed to protecting their Second Amendment rights, and they tried to lead them into saying that.
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