Actually, it was yesterday, but I was asleep at the wheel…apologies to all.
25 June 1938
The Wages and Hours (later Fair Labor Standards) Act is passed, banning child labor and setting the 40-hour work week. The Act went into effect in October 1940, and was upheld in the Supreme Court on 3 February 1941.
I will be posting as often as I can find info on the day’s labor history. Hopefully, it will be informative.
Recently, Bill Clinton made and offer to help Obama on the campaign trail, but it came through a surrogate and was at best a half-hearted announcement.
Is Bill still pouting that his wife lost to a black guy? He is no longer the “Big Dog” in the DNC and he is trying to save his position and legacy. He appears to be envious of the popularity of Obama.
Clinton could be of service to Obama in the small towns and cities where his popularity is still fairly strong. He is an expert at playing a crowd. But will he play it enthusiastically?
As the only two term Democratic president, he does have his pluses, but is his offer just a way to help his wife in any future endeavor or is he seriously wanting to help elect Obama as president? The Clintons have always had an agenda for themselves, so what is it this time?
This is one way to make global warming a prime program for funding–looks like an extension of the well used fear card.
Global warming is likely to increase illegal immigration, create humanitarian disasters and destabilize precarious governments and could add to terrorism, all of which could threaten U.S. national security, according to an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies.
“Logic suggests the conditions exacerbated (by climate change) would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism,” said Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, who testified before a joint House committee hearing Wednesday.
Climate change alone would not topple governments, but it could worsen problems like poverty, disease, migration, and hunger that could destabilize already vulnerable areas, Fingar told the committee.
But he warned that efforts to reduce global warming by changing energy policies “may affect U.S. national security interests even more than the physical impacts of climate change itself,” he stated.
“The operative word there is ‘may,’ we don’t know,” Fingar said.
“Climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror,” stated Adm. T. Joseph Lopez, who commanded U.S. and allied peacekeeping forces in Bosnia in 1996.
“Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflicts, extremism and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies,” the previous report said. “The U.S. will be drawn more frequently into these situations,” stated the report, which drew on 11 retired generals and admirals.
California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa said Congress’ call for the intelligence agencies’ report was “a dangerous diversion of intelligence assets.” He said the issue should be studied by climate scientists, not intelligence agencies.
Republicans on the committee used the hearing to argue for domestic oil drilling and nuclear power to reduce reliance on foreign energy.
Amazing how they trot out this after the calls for more offshore drilling. I ask, if the proposal had not been made, would this report have been released?
Today the AFL-CIO is scheduled to officially endorse Sen. Barak Obama for president.
The AFL-CIO’s endorsement will unite all of labor’s support behind Sen. Obama. The group of unions that left the AFL-CIO three years ago, known as the Change to Win federation, endorsed the Illinois senator in late February. Unions across the labor movement have said they will spend a record $300 million to help elect Democrats to the White House and Congress this fall.
Unions are expected to focus on shoring up support for Sen. Obama among white working-class voters. “Organized labor can play an important role to bring those voters over to Barack Obama, and that could be decisive,” said Peter Francia, a professor of political science at East Carolina University.
Labor’s support for Sen. Obama has evolved significantly over the past six months, tracking the arc of his campaign. Sen. Hillary Clinton won early support from influential labor leaders, partly as a result of longtime ties to them. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards also initially attracted more labor backers than Sen. Obama. Some union officials were unsure at the outset about Sen. Obama’s stands on labor’s legislative priorities, from union organizing to trade.
The AFL-CIO hopes to influence numerous races in the 2008 election, from state battles to the presidential race. It says it will deploy 250,000 volunteers to reach out to 13 million voters in 23 priority states, with a focus on Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, where union membership rates are among the highest in the country. It expects one in four voters in November to come from a household where at least one person is a union member.
This could give Obama a needed boost in the “Rust Belt” where he did pitifully in the primaries. He will need support from white, working class voters if he is to win in November. But will this endorsement and promise of assistance put him in the White house. That is the question.
Both the presumptive party candidates were busy telling the voters that they were all about change in Washington and how has that worked out so far? Is it just me or does this campaign season look like any other campaign season?
Dan Balz of the Washington Post has made an excellent observation:
A campaign between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain once offered enormous possibilities for something new. Instead, the two presumptive nominees have opened their campaigns for the White House with what looks and sounds like a repeat of the kind of politics both have promised to leave behind.
Don’t blame the media for this. The campaigns have deliberately adopted postures of hyperaggressiveness to set the early tone. The testosterone levels appear extremely high. No charge, however small or incidental, can go unanswered. No proposal, no matter how innocuous or provocative, can be discussed calmly or intelligently.
That led a McCain surrogate to respond to Obama’s comments on the rights of terrorist detainees, a topic on which reasonable people can differ, as “delusional.” It led to an Obama surrogate to describe as “stupid” the positions McCain has taken on the Iraq war, though it is clearly possible to argue that the “surge” strategy has helped to reduce violence and U.S. casualties.
Both candidates have contributed to this. Obama tarnished his reputation as a new-style politician by deciding not to take public funds for the fall campaign, despite a pledge to do so if his Republican opponent would do the same. He had promised to sit down with McCain to discuss the whole issue of money before making any decision.
McCain has hurt himself and his reputation as an independent thinker by reversing course on past positions, whether Bush tax cuts — which he did long ago — or opening up coastal areas to offshore oil drilling. His campaign, in the view of some of his own supporters, has allowed itself to show an angry and resentful face that they believe is contrary to McCain at his best.
On a host of issues, the differences between the candidates are profound and should provoke a vigorous debate. Both candidates once promised that such a debate would be civil and respectful. But right now the presidential campaign appears to be more a rerun of the kind of polarized battles of the recent past than something that heralds something new.
From the beginning I was skeptical of the change thing. In my many years of observations into the political mindset, I have found very little change.
When it comes to a coherent energy policy neither candidate has really levelled with the US public about what is facing them in the future. Most of the debate is couched in terms of “energy security” – about the need for America to wean itself off Middle Eastern oil.
There are some generalised promises from both sides about efficiency standards for vehicles, investment in renewables and biofuels – which was a big component of the US answer to energy security and climate change – until food prices started spiralling upwards, thanks to the policy of turning corn into fuel. But there is almost no talk about demand management, conservation and making lifestyle changes, which will be essential if America is going to have any chance of meeting either candidate’s promises of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Obama makes a big deal about how he unveiled his new fuel efficiency standards for vehicles in Detroit in front of the car makers “and the room went really quiet”. What he does not say is that Americans are going to need to make personal changes too, including moving to smaller cars, more public transport and a much bigger commitment to energy efficiency.
Obama’s energy policy promises to tackle building codes and to mandate low-energy lightbulbs throughout America by 2014, to save 88 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year. This idea is not that good either,read my posts on the new light bulbs. They also will be a ticking time bomb that will bite the world in the butt.
But what he is not telling the people is that his plan for a carbon price to make renewables more competitive and to subsidise their development is going to see electricity costs rise sharply. The other part of the energy equation that is still a sleeper is nuclear power. Obama and McCain say they will allow new nuclear reactors to be built. Neither is saying where.
The big difference between them is that McCain has said he will proceed with plans to store nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, a repository that has been 10 years in the approval process.
Obama, who is hoping to win Nevada, has ruled out storing waste in Yucca Mountain, instead offering “to lead federal efforts to look for a safe long-term disposal solution”.
Meanwhile, McCain’s buses bearing the slogan Straight Talk Express and Obama’s with Change We Can Believe In rumble through America. The candidates are not levelling with the public, while the energy industry continues to paint a sunny picture of the future.
America’s coal industry is running a campaign promising “clean coal, America’s future”; the petroleum industry promises blue skies with its cleaner diesel fuels for trucks, and the energy companies insist that they are doing their bit on renewables.
Just thought I would let you know just what you will be getting if either candidate is elected.
It has been a great week for dumbass, bonehead statements by political insiders. First, Charlie Black makes his now infamous terror attack comment and now the permanent presidential candidate Ralph Nader has joined into the fray.
Speaking with Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News, Nader accused Obama of attempting to “talk white” and appealing to “white guilt” in his quest to win the White House.
“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American,” Nader told the paper in comments published Tuesday.
“Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards,” Nader added.
Please, that is just mental masturbation or as some pundit called it “verbal vomit”. Since his present campaign has about as much steam as snail in a hurry, he is looking to press. Nader has just shot himself in the foot. While he, Nader, does have some planks in his independent platform that could have made him a bit more appealing to voters, crap like this will help drive the final nail in the coffin that is his campaign.
I can say that I agree that Obama has moved to the conservative side of the party since he became the presumptive nominee, but that is nothing unusual for a politician. Sour grapes is not becoming. Did not look good on Clinton; does not look good on Nader.