On September 15th, Van Jones addressed his friends and supporters about his recent resignation with the following e-mail message.
Dear Friends:
My family and I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love and support that we have received over the past week or so. I resigned from the White House on Sept. 6, and I have remained silent since then–in keeping with my promise not to be a distraction during a key moment in the Obama Presidency.
Over the past several days, however, many people have been asking how they can help and what they can do.
The main thing is this: please do everything you can to support both President Obama and the green jobs movement. Winning real change is ultimately the best response to these kinds of smear campaigns. Source
Insurers’ delays are ‘almost … like murder,’ Sutton said
The woman whose life inspired the 1979 film Norma Rae has died of cancer after struggling with her health insurance company, which had delayed her treatment.
Crystal Lee Sutton was 68. She had struggled for several years with meningioma, a form of brain cancer.
She became a hero to the labor movement in the 1970s, when she took on her employer, a North Carolina textile plant, and unionized the factory floor. Her story became famous nationwide in 1975 after New York Times reporter Hank Leiferman wrote Crystal Lee: A Woman of Inheritance. Source
President Obama will abandon a controversial immigration crackdown, sought by his predecessor, to pressure U.S. companies to fire 9 million workers with suspect Social Security numbers, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced yesterday.
Instead, Obama will mandate that federal contractors confirm the identities of 4 million workers against federal databases beginning in September, pushing ahead under pressure from Senate Republicans with another long-stalled Bush administration initiative. Source Article
(CNN)—In the face of growing economic concerns, the AFL-CIO will being sending out a new mailer Monday taking direct aim at Sen. John McCain’s recent comment that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are “strong.”
“John McCain says the economy is fundamentally strong,” the mailer reads. “John McCain is fundamentally wrong.”
McCain made the comments at a campaign event in Florida hours after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy last Monday. Source Article
Joe Biden spoke to LIUNA Local 894 in Akron, Ohio. He said that one of the most defining things between the Obama-Biden ticket and the McCain-Palin ticket is how they view labor. John McCain and the Bush Administration have declared a war on labors house. Joe went on to say that Labor Unions are the only thing that has protected the middle class from being trampled. He concluded that the right to work is about more than a paycheck. It is about dignity, respect and pride.
There was a fascinating exchange the other day between Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton (D) and former Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Margaret Farrow (R) on John McCain’s position on equal pay for women. ThinkProgress posted this great clip, and it’s well worth watching.
Farrow, a member of McCain’s “Palin Truth Squad” and a campaign surrogate, repeatedly emphasized the notion that McCain supports “the concept” of equal pay, regardless of what he does in practice.
I have no idea what this defense is supposed to mean. Adam Jentleson recently explained, “In April, McCain opposed a major Senate bill seeking equal pay for women…. In 2000, McCain opposed an amendment that aimed to ‘provide more effective remedies to victims of discrimination in the payment of wages on the basis of sex.’ In 1985, McCain voted against a study to investigate pay differences among federal employees, and determine whether they were the result of discrimination.”
Indeed, after the ridiculous Supreme Court ruling in Ledbetter, McCain “dismissed the importance of equal pay, saying that women simply need ‘education and training‘” — as if employers who discriminate against women will stop if women have better credentials. Source Article
Senator Barack Obama, trying to build on his show of strength at the Democratic National Convention, is targeting one of his biggest weaknesses: his standing with white, blue-collar voters.
While Republicans convened in St. Paul to anoint Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as their nominees, Obama this week zeroed in on the Rust Belt communities where he struggled during the primaries – courting rural voters at a farm in Dillonvale, Ohio (population 800), holding a barbecue with labor leaders in Monroe, Mich. (population 22,000), and leading an economic discussion in York, Pa. (population 41,000). Source Article
