AFL-CIO  Media Center

June 18, 2010

Thank you, President Roller [City Club Board President Jan Roller].

Good afternoon.  I am delighted to be here with you in the great city of Cleveland.  I want to talk to you about the grave economic challenges we face today – and the labor movement’s vision for where we need to go.

There is no better place to have a discussion about our economic challenges than Cleveland—where business and labor built the American middle class.  Cleveland embodies both the consequences of our failed economic policies of the last three decades – and our hope for a different future.

The economic crisis has hit hard here—116,000 lost jobs in the last decade in Cuyahoga County.  Eighty-six thousand home foreclosures last year alone.  A self-defeating attempt to address budget shortfalls by attacking school budgets and teachers.

But we can also see a glimpse of a better future in the Lake Erie wind turbine project—with turbines built here in Ohio, in the OneCommunity Project fiber optic network, and in Cleveland’s role as a global center of fuel cell development.

We’re at a turning point today.  The economic course our nation started on in 1980—the effort to have a low-wage, high-consumption society that imports more and more of what it consumes—has hit the wall.  We cannot afford to stay this course– of letting the private sector and the financial markets run amok, of outsourcing everything that’s not nailed to the floor, and of pushing down workers every chance we get.  And last night’s vote by Republicans in the United States Senate to block a simple extension of unemployment benefits for the most hard-pressed people without jobs is just the latest shame.  At some point, there is nobody left to buy the junk that we import from everywhere but here.

We now face a future of prolonged high unemployment and stagnant or falling wages—unless we do something different.

Today I am going to talk about doing something different.

We need a new national economic strategy for a global economy.

At the heart of our strategy must be a workforce with world class skills and world class rights and trade policies that serve the interests of the American people.  But today I also want to talk to you about what may seem like a strange subject–immigration–because it is patently clear that we cannot talk about our national workforce strategy unless we face head-on our own contradictions, hypocrisy and history on immigration.  Source Article

HuffingtonPost

Lucia Graves

Huffington Post

May 13, 2010

The state of Hawaii can now rejoice because they can ignore repeated requests for President Obama’s birth certificate.  It’s about time!  The best thing to do with these birthers is to laugh at them.  Therefore, thanks to the posters on the Huffington Post blog, here are some laughs!  Source Article

Ghost Dance 2010

===================

Q: How do Birthers car pool?

A: They meet at work.

Q: What does a Birther have in common with a beer bottle?

A: They’re both empty from the neck up.

Q: Did you hear about the Birther that locked his keys in his car?

A: He had to use a coat hanger to get his family out.

Q. Why did the Birther stare at the Orange Juice carton?

A. Because it said, “CONCENTRATE”.

Q. Why did the prostitute refuse the Birther?

A. She didn’t do small jobs.

Q. Where do Birthers find dates?

A. Family Reunions.

Q. Why didn’t Birthers play hide and seek as children?

A. Because no one would look for them.

Q. What’s the difference between a Birther and a speed bump?

A. You slow down for the speed bump.

Q. What’s long, hard, and takes three years for a Birther?

A. Third  grade.

Q: How do you tell whom the Groom is at a Birther wedding?

A: He’s the guy wearing the CLEAN wifebeater.

“Q: What do Birthers and_sperm have in common?

A: Only one in a million succeed.”

“Q. How could the Birther who just got a vasectomy afford a new hunting rifle?

A. Crime Stoppers sent him a check for 500 dollars.”

“Q: What’s the difference between a bag of_sh*t and a Birther?

A: The bag.”

“Q. What do republicans call White_Supremacists convicted of_Terrorism?

A. Their base.”

“Q: How do you hide something from a Birther?

A: Put it in a textbook.”

“Q: What’s the difference between UFOs and a Birther with a college degree?

A: UFOs have been spotted.”

“Q. Why wouldn’t the Birther Dad let his twelve year old daughter smoke at the table?

A. It would set a bad example for their kids.”

“Q. What do Birthers call Sheep Ranchers?

A._Pimps.”

“Q. What do you get when you cross a Birther with a gorilla?

A. A dumb gorilla.”

“Q. Why are there only two Pall Bearers at a Birther’s funeral?

A. There are only two handles on a garbage can.”

iconoclast6
============

Q: “How do you get a beer out of a birther?

A: Stick your finger down his throat!”

Q: Why do Birthers wear no pants?

A: So they can count to “11!”

blingbling65943
================

Q: How do you get a one armed Birther out of a tree?

A: Wave.

BlackDynamite
==============

Q: How do you keep a Birther busy?

A: Put him in the Oval Office and tell him Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate is

hidden in the corner.

NY Times
April 26, 2010, 8:44 pm

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

And in case the phrase “lawful contact” makes it appear as if the police are authorized to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime, another section strips the statute of even that fig leaf of reassurance. “A person is guilty of trespassing,” the law provides, by being “present on any public or private land in this state” while lacking authorization to be in the United States — a new crime of breathing while undocumented. The intent, according to the State Legislature, is “attrition through enforcement.”  Source Article

As the Prophet Isaiah queried: “What will you do on the Day of Reckoning, when evil comes from afar?”

Click on the image to buy the book.

Having just completed my first reading of Jeff Biggers’ masterfully crafted, meticulously researched “Reckoning At Eagle Creek,” I am left feeling nigh-breathless at the scope of the evil that came from afar and visited a nigh-Biblical plague upon people in the form of the heartache, sickness and grim Death that always serves as the handmaiden of coal. Such a sensation is fitting, I suppose, for a book that recounts the history of the thousands of human beings rendered breathlessly mute by the ravages of Black Lung, slate falls, mine explosions, poisoned waters, blasted hills, choked valleys, murdered workers and whole communities literally blown off the map in the merciless, ceaseless quest for the Holy Profit of Coal.

Jeff Biggers has crafted out of family history and regional history an honest, unblinking reckoning of the costs paid by a nation and, indeed, a world for what we have been assured by the industry for more than a century is “cheap” coal. Mr. Biggers proves in the pages of “Reckoning At Eagle Creek” that the only way to see coal as “cheap” is to view the lives, history and heritage consumed in its acquisition as being even cheaper still.

“Reckoning At Eagle Creek” is the manifestation of one man’s quest for understanding of where our dependence on the nastiest fuel form on the planet has taken us and where that path ultimately leads. That quest is neither fanciful nor mythical. It is rock-hard and bone-real. With its publication, “Reckoning At Eagle Creek” becomes an immediately necessary resource for anyone who seeks to understand the ever-increasing toll we all pay for “cheap” coal, for “cheap” electricity, for “cheap” heat. In his “reckoning” of accounts within the scope of his family’s southern Illinois homeland, Jeff Biggers honestly reveals coal mineshafts and stripmine pits for what they are: the abbatoirs of the American Dream.

Read this book. Own this book. “
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