From the start, President Barack Obama has shown little interest or loyalty in the issues that affect the poor, working class and people of color in the United States. For almost his entire first term he didn’t utter the words poor or poverty. Early on he reminded African Americans: ‘I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America…’

So it’s not so surprising that Obama hasn’t done much of substance or impact to ease, let alone end, the depression in the black community. He’s been on the side of the banks and Wall Street since co-signing George Bush’s and Hank Paulsen’s TARP ‘too big to fail’ bank bailout at the expense of underwater homeowners and middle-class taxpayers.

That’s because he believes more in bogus Wall Street privatization efforts that slide money to fats cats trading on Charter Schools and insurance companies poised to reap the benefits of Obamacare and social security privatization. It’s the belief in the “trickle-down” economic myth of Reaganism and the Wall Street 1 percent rather than the many people who are now close to living in the streets because they lost their homes to foreclosure and other wealth-draining schemes.

As his economic race legacy unfolds, Obama’s recovery is worse than the George W. Bush recession for blacks. Overall median household income has fallen over $4,000 since he took office but black Americans have had a decrease in real income of over 11 percent. Unemployment is officially at 14-plus percent for blacks, nearly double that of the overall economy. When Obama entered the White House in January 2009, black unemployment was 12.7 percent. The highest black unemployment rate during Obama’s time in office was 16.7 percent in August 2011. During the eight years of Bush black unemployment didn’t rise above 13 percent. The rate reached its highest point of the Bush presidency, 12.1 percent, in December 2008.

Black youth unemployment is more than likely above 50 percent with entry level drugs sales as their seemingly only viable employment option.

Yet now a lame duck Obama can’t get anything through Congress to ease the stress with either black adults or youth.

He’s even leading the charge against those working and paying into a retirement fund thinking they’d have a little security in their old age. From the very start, under the banner of his Simpson-Bowles’ Deficit Reduction Commission, he’s been on a course to betray Social Security and the foundation of the New Deal social safety net. Witness the administration’s willingness to limit cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients, which will surely have a far greater negative impact on black and Latino senior citizens and boost poverty among them. The Economic Policy Institute found that ‘after a lifetime of what are often lower wages, higher-cost borrowing and a limited ability to save, 26 percent of black seniors and 25 percent of Latino seniors depend on Social Security for 100 percent of their income, compared to about 14 percent of white retirees.’

Obama could have helped when he was first elected and his party controlled both houses of Congress. After the 2012 midterm election it was the hostile (Republican) Congress defense as to why he couldn’t do anything. That was followed by the Romney boogieman excuse and defense. Now, Obama simply has no power to help blacks.

He can limit the hurt. If he wants to so. Yet my fear, if the attack on Social Security is any indication, is that he will readily aid in the continuing and future economic destabilization of the community that voted for him in record numbers and have remained loyal and uncritical despite his political and economic ambivalence towards them.

At this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner, comedian Conan O’Brien joked: “Mr. President, your hair is so white, it could be a member of your cabinet.” Black exclusion and disparities under Obama are now reduced to a joke. And Obama walks to the podium to rap music and makes Jay-Z jokes. And those in the bubble at the top laugh. As Bruce Dixon of the Black Agenda Report wrote: “When Barack Obama leaves the White House in January 2017, what will black America, his earliest and most consistent supporters, have to show for making his political career possible. We’ll have the T-shirts and buttons and posters, the souvenirs. That will be the good news. The bad news is what else we’ll have … and not.”

At the very least, African Americans should mobilize to head off the erosion of their wealth invested in social security. They should demand that those that they send to the House and Senate protect that interest even in the face of a president all too willing to sell them out. He may be limited to two terms. They are not.

Gray is author The Decline of Black Politics: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama.

But despite the fact that lives (American, allied, and civilian) continue to be lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel is blustering about attacking Iran before the US election (in order to drag in a reluctant Obama administration), much more time will be given to domestic policy rantings then foreign policy. In the 2000 election, there was very little debate about foreign policy, though anyone who looked closely might have guessed that Bush’s foreign policy advisors (who called themselves “the vulcans,” and had complex and long-standing links to groups and think tanks pressing for war on Iraq, would undertake that project at the slightest provocation.

This year, with less excuse (given the large deficit and two ongoing military operations), we have had very little discussion in the media about Romney’s foreign policy advisors. Yet, they are a far more coherent group of militarists than the Bush team.

Most are neoconservatives associated with the Bush, and in some cases, Reagan administration. Romney’s major financial backer has little on his mind besides shoring up the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Several have been outspoken advocates of US war on Iran. One has been accused of war crimes in Lebanon, and one academic adviser has been a strong advocate of “the El Salvador Solution” to insurgencies, whereby the U.S. supports right wing militaries and informal militias to crush insurgent movements without direct combat on the U.S. part. The Romney group are pressing for greater military spending, particularly in the Navy (Reagan’s former Naval Secretary is a prominent adviser, and Romney has endorsed his proposal for substantially higher Naval spending).

Where these inclinations, and Romney’s closeness to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will lead the country is a subject well worth airing, outside, if not inside the GOP convention.

Elizabeth Sanders is a professor of government at Cornell University. Her research interests lie in American political development and popular politics. She is currently working on a book entitled Presidents, War, and Reform. See Sanders’ full analysis, co-authored by Caroline Emberton, titled ”The War Lovers (again): What the Foreign Policy Advisers of Presidential Candidates May Tell Us about Future U.S. Foreign Policy,”  on page 20 of the April 2012 issue of the Cornell International Affairs Review.

But neither the number of people killed nor the cruelty of the killings can be understood without simultaneously taking account of another pair of figures. First, Calderón has repeatedly said that more than 90 percent of those killed were involved in “the struggle of some cartels against others.” Calderón does not cite a source for this estimate. The underlying logic, however, is clear: if you’re dead, you’re guilty. The perennial official refrain is “en algo andaba,” or, they were up to something; they were in the game.

Second, according to information that the Mexican Federal Attorney General’s office submitted to the Mexican Senate in April 2010, the government investigates less than 5 percent of all the homicides presumed to be related to organized crime, and thus falling under their jurisdiction. How can Calderón claim that 90 percent of the dead were somehow involved “in the struggle of some cartels against others” if the government does not even investigate 95 percent of the killings?

Submerged in this vortex of drug-war violence and impunity, Mexico has become the world’s most dangerous country for journalists. The Mexican National Human Rights Commission has documented 66 murders and 12 disappearances of journalists and received more than 600 complaints of abuses against journalists since 2000, with more than 40 of the killings having taken place since 2006.  Four journalists have been murdered in the past few weeks.

While the Mexican state refuses or fails to investigate the killings and crimes, Mexican journalists have not surrendered to silence. Mexican reporters continue to walk the streets, dig through public records, visit crime scenes, talk to witnesses, and build sources in an effort to report and publish on the violence, the fear, the government complicity and incompetence, the horrors of organized crime killers, and the daily efforts to survive it all.

Jospeh Nevins, jonevins at vassar.edu
Nevins is the author of Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in the Age of Global Apartheid, is a compelling account of U.S. immigration and border enforcement told through the journey of one man who perished in California’s Imperial Valley while trying to reunite with his wife and child in Los Angeles. It provides a valuable perspective on the historical geography of U.S.-Mexico relations, and immigration and boundary enforcement, illustrating its profound impact on people’s lives, and deaths.

According to the White House Fact Sheet on “The American Jobs Act” the FICA tax holiday for workers will be increased to a 50% reduction, lowering it to 3.1%. Under the 2010 tax deal, the payroll tax for workers was reduced from 6.2% to 4.2%. In addition to expanding the tax cut for workers, the President proposes to extend the FICA tax holiday to employers by cutting in half the employer’s share of the payroll tax through the first $5 million in payroll.

Big questions about the wisdom, efficacy, and implications of a tax-based jobs strategy need to be debated. Even bigger questions about the consequences of the payroll tax holiday in particular need to be answered. These questions are not just about the relationship between payroll tax cuts and job growth. They are about the future of Social Security.

The FICA/payroll tax goes into the Social Security Trust Fund. This is a dedicated fund currently worth $2.6 trillion, which has been built up over time through employee and employer contributions, along with accrued interest. Current and future Social Security beneficiaries receive benefits from this fund. No general revenues are involved, except for administrative and clerical costs.

Under the payroll tax cut initiated in the 2010 lame duck tax deal, the revenue loss to the Trust Fund from the payroll tax holiday is made up through compensatory payments into the Trust Fund from general revenues. The President proposes to continue this scheme — deepening a relationship between Social Security and general revenues (read deficit) that did not exist until the December 2010 tax deal. This will make Social Security increasingly vulnerable to demands for “reform.”

In the worst case, Congress could choose to enact the payroll tax cut without actually appropriating revenue compensation for the Trust Fund. This would mean that the payroll tax cut directly depletes the Trust Fund, creating financial/actuarial problems far sooner than the currently anticipated shortfall date of 2036.

But even if the Trust Fund receives full revenue compensation — for both employer and employee contributions — Social Security will be jeopardized. That’s because the resources in the Trust Fund will be increasingly comingled with general revenue funds — and, hence, increasingly connected to the deficit.

If the government can’t pay back Social Security money it has borrowed to pay for other things (through IOUs, bonds, etc), it certainly won’t be shy about cutting Social Security to pay itself back for funds it shared with Social Security to offset revenue losses from the payroll tax holiday.

Also worth worrying about here is contagious political cowardice about “raising taxes.” The payroll tax holiday is framed as just that — a holiday, ie, a short-lived break. But as we know from other tax cuts with built-in expiration dates, the planned end of a tax cut quickly becomes a “tax increase” in popular parlance. There hasn’t been much resolve to allow the years-long tax holiday for the rich to end. When the time comes, will there be greater resolve to allow an end to the 2-year tax holiday for workers and 1-year tax holiday for employers? Even when billed as a “middle class tax increase” and a “job-killing tax on business”?

Once the payroll tax basis of Social Security financing has been corrupted the future of Social Security will no longer be in doubt. It won’t have one.

Mink is co-editor of the two-volume Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics and Policy and author of Welfare’s End.

Medicaid cuts will injure women disproportionately. Women account for 70 percent of Medicaid participants.

Social Security is survival income for many older women, especially older single women. Fifty percent of women over age 65 rely on Social Security for 80 percent or more of their income. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research: Unmarried women living alone aged 65 and older are three times more likely to be living in poverty than married women aged 65 and older (16.6 percent compared with 4.8 percent). Without Social Security benefits, more than two-thirds of these unmarried women would live in poverty.

An increase in the Social Security retirement age equals a cut in benefits. The average benefit for women age 65-74 is $10,300; for men it is $13,400. Neither men nor women can afford benefit cuts.

The “Chained CPI” is a COLA cut. It is a cut in benefits seniors cannot afford. According to the National Women’s Law Center: For a woman who gets a benefit of $1,100 at age 65, replacing the current COLA with the chained CPI would mean $56 less per month and $672 less per year at age 80. That may not sound like a lot to some members of Congress—but it’s equivalent to the loss of more than a week’s worth of food per month or 13 weeks of food that year.

Stop the Cuts — sign the petition calling for Congress to RESPECT women, PROTECT Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and REJECT any budget plans that threaten the economic security of women.

Mink is co-editor of the two-volume Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics and Policy and author of Welfare’s End. Her blog is feministsocialjustice.blogspot.com.

We are not as yet very concerned about radioactive or toxic materials being caught up in the present fire because we do not see, at present, much possibility of uncontrollable fire reaching any of those hazards.  There are not many trees near some of the most conspicuous hazards, such as the main nuclear waste storage site, and these wastes are not highly combustible in their present form.  The same considerations apply to buildings that contain nuclear materials — they are not very combustible.  We assume a reasonable degree of competence on the part of highly-trained firefighters involved, and sufficiency of equipment.

The reappearance of very high winds could complicate matters, however, as could the potential presence of unadmitted hazards in unknown locations.  A few laboratory areas do contain volatile soil contamination.

Much about Los Alamos is a de facto secret even whether or not the subject is classified.  This information deficit — the trust deficit that goes with it — create problems for firefighters as well as for the rest of us.

Stepping back from the immediately-unfolding drama, we need to ask some serious larger questions.

• The Obama Administration proposes to build a huge plutonium warhead core (“pit”) factory complex in Los Alamos, costing on the order of $6 billion dollars.  Is this really necessary?  Does it really contribute to national security, or is the present fire yet another reminder that the nature of national security is changing before our eyes?
• Is this remote site– prone to recurrent wildfire, on the side of a volcano, crossed by faults known to produce accelerations comparable to those recently experienced at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station — really the right place for a plutonium manufacturing center?
• What future lies ahead for Los Alamos lab, and the town?  Can the lab and its workforce shrug off a second catastrophic fire and total evacuation in just 11 years?  Surveys have shown poor morale at the lab, and Los Alamos has not been a popular residential destination.  Already an ugly town, it is now situated in a burned-out forest and more fire is expected henceforth.  Is Los Alamos even sustainable as an urban place, without strict limits on fire-prone landscaping and without new evacuation routes and procedures?
• The exceptional drought that grips the American Southwest has fueled truly explosive fire behavior in this fire, beyond all local experience.  Is this a sign of things to come?  Megafires are increasing across the west, as drought and spreading bark beetle infestations enabled by warmer winters devastate large areas of forest.  What is the real national security problem — an imagined insufficiency of nuclear weapon investment, or taking what advantage we can of the converging energy and climate crises to transform our economy and society in a sustainable direction?
• Is it ironic, or tragic, that Los Alamos, a company town which has grown conspicuously wealthy from the single industry of figuring out how to burn down other cities, is itself now subject to the risk of catastrophic fire?
• What is the appropriate size of Los Alamos laboratory?  What actually needs to be done there?

This fire brings to mind the prophetic words of Edith Warner, a quiet woman who lived from the 1920s to the 1950s at Otowi Bridge where the road to Los Alamos crosses the Rio Grande.

My friend was wrong who said that this country was so old it does not matter what we Anglos do here.  What we do anywhere matters but especially here.  It matters very much.  Mesas and mountains, rivers and trees, winds and rains are as sensitive to the actions and thought of humans as we are to their forces.  They take into themselves what we give off and give it out again. (quoted by Peggy Pond Church, The House at Otowi Bridge)

· Social Security benefits are modest by any measure and are already being cut – by raising the age of eligibility for full benefits and by deducting ever-rising Medicare premiums from benefit checks.

· The cuts already in law add up to a19 percent reduction for people born in 1960 and later, see the National Academy of Social Insurance report, “Social Security Beneficiaries Face 19 Percent Cut; New Revenue Can Restore Balance.”

· Cutting benefits further could undermine much of what Social Security has achieved and expose millions of vulnerable people – elderly and disabled – to unnecessary hardship.

· Benefits are vital to nearly all recipients: about a third of elderly recipients reply on benefits for 90 percent  or more of their income; two-thirds count on it to supply at least half their income. The program lifts nearly 20 million Americans out of poverty, including 1 million children.

· Other sources of retirement support are shrinking. Private pension plans continue to dwindle, covering only about 20 percent  of private sector workers. Home equity is far less secure, as millions of Americans are underwater with debt exceeding the value of their homes.

· In today’s increasingly risky world, Americans value Social Security and will pay to keep it strong. Across party lines, Democrats, Republicans and independents say they don’t mind paying for Social Security because they value the security and stability it provides to those who receive it. Across age groups, workers say they would rather pay for Social Security than see benefits cut.

Reno is vice president for income security policy for the National Academy of Social Insurance

In her 2002 book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Power called for greater U.S. intervention to prevent major human rights violations and genocide. She never suggests that this might require LESS intervention (e.g., Vietnam; the “sanctions of mass destruction” in Iraq) or reduced support for killers (e.g., Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Israel). She also finds that we inappropriately “just stood by” and failed to intervene in cases where we actually gave positive support to the mass murderers (e.g., Indonesia in East Timor; Kagame and Musaveni in Rwanda and the Congo)

But while ignoring U.S. and client state bloodbaths Power did focus with great passion on genocides or alleged genocides carried out by U.S. targets. This huge bias carried her to the Carr Center for Human Rights and a professorship at Harvard, a Pulitzer Prize, generous media access, and now to a high level position in the administration of the Nobel Peace Prize president. It all fits!

For more information see the following piece, an excerpt of an article which originally appeared  ZNET

The cruise missile left also adheres closely to the party line on genocide, which is why its members thrive in the New York Times and other establishment vehicles. This is true of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff and David Rieff, but I will focus here on Power, who is currently the expert of choice on the subject in the mainstream media (and even in The Nation and on the Bill Moyers show).

Power never departs from the selectivity dictated by the establishment party line. That requires, first and foremost, simply ignoring cases of direct U.S. or U.S.-sponsored (or otherwise approved) genocide. Thus the Vietnam War, in which millions were directly killed by U.S. forces, does not show up in Power’s index or text. Guatemala, where there was a mass killing of as many as 100,000 Mayan Indians between 1978 and 1985, in what Amnesty International called “A Government Program of Political Murder,” but by a government installed and supported by the United States, also does not show up in Power’s index. Cambodia is of course included, but only for the second phase of the genocide—the first phase, from 1969-1975, in which the United States dropped some 500,000 tons of bombs on the Cambodian countryside and killed vast numbers, she fails to mention. On the Khmer Rouge genocide, Power says they killed 2 million, a figure widely cited after Jean Lacouture gave that number; his subsequent admission that this number was invented had no effect on its use, and it suits Power’s purpose.

A major U.S.-encouraged and supported genocide occurred in Indonesia in 1965-66 in which over 700,000 people were murdered. This genocide is not mentioned by Power and the names Indonesia and Suharto do not appear in her index. She also fails to mention West Papua, where Indonesia’s 40 years of murderous occupation would constitute genocide under her criteria, if carried out under different auspices. Power does refer to East Timor, with extreme brevity, saying that, “In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away” (146-7). That exhausts her treatment of the subject, although the killings in East Timor involved a larger fraction of the population than in Cambodia, and the numbers killed were probably larger than the grand total for Bosnia and Kosovo, to which she devotes a large fraction of her book. She also misrepresents the U.S. role—it did not “look away,” it gave its approval, protected the aggression from any effective UN response (in his autobiography, then U.S. Ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged about his effectiveness in protecting Indonesia from any UN action), and greatly increased its arms aid to Indonesia, thereby facilitating the genocide.

Power engages in a similar suppression and failure to recognize the U.S. role in her treatment of genocide in Iraq. She attends carefully and at length to Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical warfare and killing of Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere, and she does discuss the U.S. failure to oppose and take any action against Saddam Hussein at this juncture. But she does not mention the diplomatic rapprochement with Saddam in the midst of his war with Iran in 1983, the active U.S. logistical support of Saddam during that war, and the U.S. approval of sales and transfers of chemical and biological weapons during the period in which he was using chemical weapons against the Kurds. She also doesn’t mention the active efforts by the United States and Britain to block UN actions that might have obstructed Saddam’s killings.

The killing of over a million Iraqis via the “sanctions of mass destruction,” more than were killed by all the weapons of mass destruction in history, according to John and Karl Mueller (“Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999), was one of major genocides of the post-World War 2 era. It is unmentioned by Power. Again, the correlation between exclusion, U.S. responsibility, and the view that such killings were, in Madeleine Albright’s words, “worth it” from the standpoint of U.S. interests, is clear. There is a similar political basis for Power’s failure to include Israel’s low-intensity genocide of the Palestinians and South Africa’s “destructive engagement” with the frontline states in the 1980s, the latter with a death toll greatly exceeding all the deaths in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Neither Israel nor South Africa, both “constructively engaged” by the United States, show up in Power’s index.

Power’s conclusion is that the U.S. policy toward genocide has been very imperfect and needs reorientation, less opportunism, and greater vigor. For Power, the United States is the solution, not the problem. These conclusions and policy recommendations rest heavily on her spectacular bias in case selection: She simply bypasses those that are ideologically inconvenient, where the United States has arguably committed genocide (Vietnam, Cambodia 1969-75, Iraq 1991-2003), or has given genocidal processes positive support (Indonesia, West Papua, East Timor, Guatemala, Israel, and South Africa). Incorporating them into an analysis would lead to sharply different conclusions and policy agendas, such as calling upon the United States to simply stop doing it, or urging stronger global opposition to U.S. aggression and support of genocide, and proposing a much needed revolutionary change within the United States to remove the roots of its imperialistic and genocidal thrust. But the actual huge bias, nicely leavened by admissions of imperfections and need for improvement in U.S. policy, readily explains why Power is loved by the New York Times and won a Pulitzer prize for her masterpiece of evasion and apologetics for “our” genocides and call for a more aggressive pursuit of “theirs.”

Edward Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He’s written on economics, political economy, foreign policy, and media analysis in such books as The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader and Manufacturing Consent (with Noam Chomsky).

Despite the prolonged recession, income assistance to low-income families has shriveled over the past decade, providing help to less than 40 percent of families who meet TANF criteria and to an even smaller fraction (27 percent) of all families in actual need. For those who do receive benefits, the cash value has eroded so badly that TANF cash assistance does not bring a family up to the poverty line in any state.

For low-income women and families who have fallen through the shredded TANF safety net, Food Stamps are a lifeline. But the Budget passed by the House in April slashes Food Stamps by 20 percent and caps spending. This would reduce the availability of Food Stamps to less than 40 percent of families who are eligible to receive it.

Efforts to weaken and roll back Social Security put low-income older women – especially older single women – at similar risk of economic insecurity. After a lifetime of low and unequal wages, half of all older women rely on Social Security for at least 80 percent of their incomes. For older single women – divorced, widowed, and never-married – the poverty rate is 20 percent. Without Social Security, the poverty rate would be even higher. Without Social Security, some 58 percent of all women over age 75 would be living in poverty.

The economic precariousness of life in a shredded safety net needs to be a core part of deliberations to reduce the deficit. Women need to be at the table and in the conversation to foreground the impacts of deficit reduction decisions on economically vulnerable women.

Mink is co-editor of the two-volume Poverty in the United States: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics and Policy and author of Welfare’s End. Her blog is feministsocialjustice.blogspot.com.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, stopped by the National Press Club this afternoon. Trumka underlined the need for economic equality in a 30 minute address before fielding questions submitted by the audience and selected by NPC President Mark Hamrick.

Hamrick asked variations of three questions submitted by IPA. Here’s a transcript of those exchanges:

Building on Wisconsin:
Hamrick: So back to your speech, someone asked, “What is your game plan to spread the spirit of the Wisconsin protest to other parts of the country?’”
Trumka: We’re out there every day, educating and mobilizing. And it’s not just in Wisconsin. We have cross-pollinated Wisconsin people with Ohio people, with Missouri, with Tennessee, with Indiana. We’ve gone all over the country. And people are mobilized. And it’s not just union people, it’s working people in general. Small business people are out there supporting us. Non-union workers are out there supporting us because they think these people have gone too far in trying to pay back their rich donors by destroying the rights of workers out there. So we’re taking that message everywhere. We’re seeing it take effect. And apparently, we’re doing something right, because guys like Scott Walker, his ratings in his own state have fallen like a big rock in a small pond. They think he’s going too far.

Beyond the Two Party System:
Hamrick: So people want to know how far you’re willing to go. You’ve mentioned the need for independence from Democrats before. Could this manifest itself in support for third parties, such as the Green and Labor Parties?
Trumka: Was there a question there?
Hamrick: In other words, are you willing to look beyond the two-party
structure? Absolutely.
Trumka: Here is what we’re looking at doing. We’re looking at training workers, too, and recruiting workers to be candidates. So that, in primaries, we have real choice. We’re going to give that a real whirl to see what happens.
Hamrick: So is that an answer, that you’d look at third-party candidates? Absolutely?
Trumka: If they were supporting working people, we would look at third party candidates. We would look at all the candidates that are out there. That’s what we’re paid to do. And we decide which one is the best for our members. And we would support the one that’s the best for our workers.
Hamrick: Do you need to look to alternative solutions outside the traditional structure? Is the current structure getting the job done?
Trumka: No. How much time do we have left here? [laughter] That’s a longer conversation.
Hamrick: You’re a very succinct speakers.
Trumka: Because if you want to look at the system, the system is broken. The Supreme Court helped break it even more with Citizens United. The system needs to be changed so that average, ordinary Americans can have as strong a voice as Exxon Mobil does in the Congress. It needs to be changed…

Labor-Backed Journalism:
Hamrick: And then the questioner says: “We have lots of corporate business-owned media. Other than specialty magazines, why aren’t there labor union-backed news organizations doing reporting, investigative reporting, with beat reporters?” So I guess that gets to the ownership of a news media properties.
Trumka: Well, first of all, it comes down to resources. in order to do a news media, whether faceted, whether it’s print media, written, radio, whatever it is, it takes a lot of resources. And, at the time, we don’t have the resources to be able to spread them around in all those different directions.
But let me ask you this question. Let’s assume that we owned a network, the Labor Network. What would be the first shot you guys took at us? And what would be the first shot that most conservatives do? ‘You can’t listen to those guys. That’s labor.’ An independent press is a good thing. An independent press that is a watchdog on those that are out there, with responsibility to workers, whether it’s at the federal level, the state level, or anywhere else is a good thing. Pack journalism is not a good thing. And the fact that you guys are getting squeezed with money and can’t do the type of investigative stuff that you used to do is a tragedy for the country. And networks like Fox are really entertainment. They’re not actually networks, because their perspective is so slanted towards things.
Now, I don’t say that about every one of the journalists on Fox, because I think they have some real independent journalists that I think do a credible job. But, by and large, the network and the programming is awfully slanted away from working people. And that’s a tragedy.

In addition to those exchanges, Trumka also answered one of our other questions following a separate question from Hamrick. We wanted to know how he’d assess the Obama administration’s commitment to protecting worker health and safety. Trumka provided something of a report card for the president, saying:

Grading Obama:
Trumka: Well, there’s a lot of subjects, whenever I got report cards, anyway. Most of my grades were the same in each subject, so it didn’t much matter. But, you know, it all depends on what you’re doing. If you look at enforcing health and safety laws, I think the President gets an A. I think if you’re talking about enforcing trade laws, he gets an A. Negotiating trade laws, he’s down on the scale there. He’s not going to get on the honor roll with that one. [laughter]
For direction, I think an A. For execution, well, he doesn’t make the honor roll again with that one. But there is a lot of variables there, some of which are way beyond his control. I mean, you got a determined opposition that says no to any taxes and things of that sort. And that’s not his fault. But I hope that– and we all fight a little harder to create jobs in this country. And I think you’ll see him, over the next several months, making jobs the centerpiece of what he tries to accomplish.
Hamrick: So he’d make your Deans List? No C’s?
Trumka: Well, I’d say it’s finals week. We’ll see. [laughter]

Text based on transcript provided by NPC.