The President did a great job last night making the case to the nation of the need for health care reform. He made the moral case, and every metric indicates that people were overwhelmingly moved to support his plan. That’s the good news for the White House.
Pittsburgh, PA. More than seventy labor organizations have submitted resolutions to the AFL-CIO Convention calling for the labor federation to endorse HR 676, single payer healthcare legislation introduced by Congressman John Conyers (D-MI).
Resolutions were submitted by five national and international unions including the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), the International Alliance of Theatrical & Stage Employees (IATSE), the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), California School Employees Association (CSEA), and the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers (IFPTE).
(note: Progressive Democrats of America continues to fight for national healthcare proposed in HR 676 as the only fair and affordable solution to the nation’s healthcare crisis.)
Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva released the following statement this evening, concerning the President’s address to Congress on health care reform:
“I am pleased that President Obama made the right choice to recognize the importance of a public option as part of the health care reform legislation.
“A public option is the most effective way to achieve our goals of controlling costs, eliminating abuses of patients by insurance company abuses, and providing quality health care to all.
“However, the President needs to be more direct on what the public option means and what it will do for the American people.
Noting that “it has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for healthcare reform,” the president told skeptical legislators from both sides of the political aisle. “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”
That was one of several takeaway lines of the night.
Another, delivered to members of the House and Senate who have just returned to Washington after an August of brutal town hall meetings, was: “The time for bickering has passed. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action. Now is the time when we must bring the best ideas of both parties together… Now is the time to deliver on healthcare.”
Pittsburgh’s Labor Day:
Showing Our Solidarity,
Organizing New Forces
By Carl Davidson Beaver County Blue
If you want to get a good picture of the hard core of the Western Pennsylvania working class and its concerns, one of the best ways to do it is to take part in the annual Labor Day Parade on a gray and rainy Pittsburgh morning.
Pittsburgh is known as a town that takes its Labor Day parades seriously, with turnouts of upwards of 50,000, rivaled only by Detroit and New York City. This year’s Sept 7 event, which featured an appearance by Vice President Joseph Biden, was only a fraction of that, but still numbered in the thousands, with high spirits and an array of contingents.
The main political concerns of the day were passing the Employee Free Choice Act as a spur to unionization, along with health care reform leading to universal coverage. Many of the unions favored HR676 ‘Single Payer’ Medicare for All as the most effective solution. The purpose of it all? “Solidarity and bringing in new members,” said Teamster Carl Paullet, 75, of Ligonier, PA, to a local news reporter. Continue reading Beaver County Steelworkers at Labor Parade→
Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.
The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.
When G-20 government leaders met in London last April, thousands of trade unionists marched in protest. Labor organizations from over 100 countries – including the AFL-CIO – issued a “London Declaration” that criticized the G-20’s policies for favoring multinational corporations and banks, and demanded new economic priorities that “put people first.”
Unions are the strongest and most consistent voices for working people. Pittsburgh union members need to take a prominent place in the peaceful protests and educational events planned when the G-20 Summit comes to Pittsburgh. Continue reading Week of Actions for Jobs, Peace and Prosperity→
Seats are available on the SOAR (Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees) bus to the Labor Day Parade in Pittsburgh. There is no charge.
The bus will leave from Maratta Road and Washington Rd. (behind the Fez) at 7:30 am on Monday September 7. Parking is available. The bus will drop people off at the staging area.
After the parade, the USW will provide a snack at the USW building and the bus will leave from the USW building around 2:30pm.
The Pittsburgh Labor Day parade is one of the largest in the USA. Join us to demonstrate for jobs, healthcare, and the rights of workers to organize.
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 