Mobilizing 3 million union members

[demosincebirth]

Author: Mark Gruenberg
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 08/07/08 14:51

CHICAGO (PAI)--Imaging mobilizing one of every 100 Americans, a population equal to that of the entire city of Chicago, and putting them out on the campaign trail. That’s what Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeks to do. In talks August 5 to the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Chicago, Obama’s top two staffers, strategist David Axelrod and manager David Plouffe, set that as their goal for nationwide mobilization. They now have 1.2 million volunteers.

“We were impressed,” AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney said in an exclusive interview with Press Associates Union News Service and with the Bureau of National Affairs after the meeting closed. Politics, as might be expected, dominated the meeting.

Axelrod and Plouffe, joined by Obama himself on a videoconference to the council that day, again pushed for labor’s wholehearted support for the presumed Democratic presidential nominee in this fall’s election.

“I need labor’s mobilization to win,” Obama told the union leaders. They did not seek a numerical “pledges or commitments,” Sweeney said. Nevertheless, he added, the AFL-CIO and the Obama campaign are already talking about specific geographic areas” where we may be able to help in volunteers,” the AFL-CIO president added.

Full story here http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/13509/

[JohnnyRingo]

1. No union member has any reason to vote for McCain

Taxing our health care as income is one more good motivator:

To pay for the tax credit, McCain would eliminate the tax exemption for people whose employers pay a portion of their coverage, raising an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues, Holtz-Eakin said. Companies that provide coverage to workers still would get tax breaks. McCain would also cut costs by limiting health care lawsuits.

The goal is to move the health care industry away from job-based coverage toward competition among health insurance companies on the open market.

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/NewsReleases/Read.aspx?guid=f8319887-1528-40aa-971a-402f7d1adb9e

Though he's not bragging about it on the campaign trail, this union busting tax increase is hidden in plain view on his website. I don't know why he hasn't been called on it yet.

[demosincebirth]

3. I agree that no union member has any reason to vote for McCain.

but I have, in my life time, run into quite a few union men who are ill informed and one issue voters and for some reason or another do not know which side their bread is buttered on.

[NYC_SKP]

2. Yes, and before the number of union members drops.... nt

:thumbsup:

[Marrah_G]

4. wooohoo Go Unions!