Obama Takes to Road to Push Rise in Minimum Wage
Source: NYTimes
By EMMARIE HUETTEMAN
WASHINGTON — President Obama on Monday will renew his call for Congress to act on raising the federal minimum wage as the midterm elections come into sight, a White House official said.
Mr. Obama, who is scheduled to speak in Milwaukee on Monday afternoon at a festival hosted by the local A.F.L.-C.I.O., is expected to focus on how increasing wages will encourage continued economic growth.
During his quick trip — he will be in Milwaukee for only about two hours — the president will also offer a message of restrained optimism about the nation’s economic recovery, emphasizing the progress made since the 2008 collapse, which was around the time he first spoke at this labor festival when he was a presidential candidate. He will highlight that nearly 10 million jobs have been added within the last four and a half years, and that the unemployment rate has been gradually improving.
Mr. Obama previewed his remarks during his weekly address on Saturday, saying that raising the minimum wage was “one of the best ways to give a boost to working families.”
FULL story at link.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/us/politics/obama-takes-to-road-to-push-rise-in-minimum-wage.html?partner=EXCITE&ei=5043
= new reply since forum marked as read
since CSPAN & CSPAN 2 are essentially obligated to showing those House or Senate sessions. Yet Congress is still away meaning they were free to cover his live (non-fundraising) events (and CSPAN 3 theoretically would always be available in any case, as would their website with streaming video).
Yet they didn't even bother - even with today being an important holiday. They made no attempt to get the promised stream up and running before time like they normally do (their website claimed they would air the stream at 2:55 pm ET yet he started speaking BEFORE that time). Their camera crew was sitting right there with the rest of the media including the Milwaukee station that did air the live-stream of the speech as it happened, and they saw when the President was being announced. But they sat on their asses and didn't bother until someone must have finally looked up from watching a ballgame and decided to start the stream up.
During the past 20 years, immigrants and young people have transformed the demographics of urban America. Now, they’re transforming its politics and mapping the future of liberalism.
~ Harold Meyerson
Pittsburgh is the perfect urban laboratory,” says Bill Peduto, the city’s new mayor. “We’re small enough to be able to do things and large enough for people to take notice.” More than its size, however, it’s Pittsburgh’s new government—Peduto and the five like-minded progressives who now constitute a majority on its city council—that is turning the city into a laboratory of democracy. In his first hundred days as mayor, Peduto has sought funding to establish universal pre-K education and partnered with a Swedish sustainable-technology fund to build four major developments with low carbon footprints and abundant affordable housing. Even before he became mayor, while still a council member, he steered to passage ordinances that mandated prevailing wages for employees on any project that received city funding and required local hiring for the jobs in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ new arena. He authored the city’s responsible-banking law, which directed government funds to those banks that lent in poor neighborhoods and away from those that didn’t...
Peduto, who is 49 years old, sees improving the lot of Pittsburgh’s new working class as his primary charge. In his city hall office, surrounded by such artifacts as a radio cabinet from the years when the city became home to the world’s first radio station, the new mayor outlined the task before him. “My grandfather, Sam Zarroli, came over in 1921 from Abruzzo,” he said. “He only had a second-grade education, but he was active in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in its early years, and he made a good life for himself and his family. My challenge in today’s economy is how to get good jobs for people with no PhDs but with a good work ethic and GEDs. How do I get them the same kind of opportunities my grandfather had? All the mayors elected last year are asking this question.”
They are indeed. The mayoral and council class of 2013 is one of the most progressive cohorts of elected officials in recent American history. In one major city after another, newly elected officials are planning to raise the minimum wage or enact ordinances boosting wages in developments that have received city assistance. They are drafting legislation to require inner-city hiring on major projects and foster unionization in hotels, stores, and trucking. They are seeking the funds to establish universal pre-K and other programs for infants and toddlers. They are sketching the layout of new transit lines that will bring jobs and denser development to neighborhoods both poor and middle-class and reduce traffic and pollution in the bargain. They are—if they haven’t done so already—forbidding their police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities in the deportation of undocumented immigrants not convicted of felonies and requiring their police to have video or audio records of their encounters with the public. They are, in short, enacting at the municipal level many of the major policy changes that progressives have found themselves unable to enact at the federal and state levels. They also may be charting a new course for American liberalism.
New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has dominated the national press corps’ coverage of the new urban liberalism. His battles to establish citywide pre-K (successful but not funded, as he wished, by a dedicated tax on the wealthy), expand paid sick days (also successful), raise the minimum wage (blocked by the governor and legislature), and reform the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy (by dropping an appeal of a court order) have been extensively chronicled. But de Blasio is just one of a host of mayors elected last year who campaigned and now govern with similar populist agendas. The list also includes Pittsburgh’s Peduto, Minneapolis’s Betsy Hodges, Seattle’s Ed Murray, Boston’s Martin Walsh, Santa Fe’s Javier Gonzales...“We all ran on similar platforms,” Peduto says. “There wasn’t communication among us. It just emerged organically that way. We all faced the reality of growing disparities. The population beneath the poverty line is increasing everywhere. A lot of us were underdogs, populists, reformers, and the public was ready for us.”
Much more at the link:
http://prospect.org/article/revolt-cities
to ProSense.
The thread recieved no attention, but the link details a lot of what is going and not covered by national media:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024859982#post11
Obama also went across the country to push for increasing the minimum wage last year in red states, reported on DU. The blue cities were also supported by some White House aides bringing information to use.
But people must vote for those who want this solution instead of the Koch solution, the default position, in office:
“We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.”
http://metamorphosis.democraticunderground.com/1014833821#post10
I watched as Democrats spoke to either hostile GOP or empty seats about raising the wage for years in the House and Senate. We need to take about what is right in seeking prevailing wages and worker rights again.
It's very hard to fight off the Koch's nationally and locally. They have money and organization, but those they disregard can make a difference, if they care enough to vote.
The most heartbreaking speech by Sanders was one I posted here. He said he fears people most affected by these issues will not get out to vote this year. Apathy and the purveyors of FUD always serves the status quo.
I felt watching Bernie in that speech, that this is his last effort. He has the heart of a lion but a lion knows he cannot defeat an elephant without a pack of lions interested in doing so.
JMHO.
