| Virginia AFL-CIO |
 The national Republican party has selected Indiana Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels to respond to President Obama’s State of the Union address next week–sending a clear signal the party is making attacks on working people a top priority in the 2012 elections. Daniels is a key backer of right to work for less (RTW) legislation which state Republican lawmakers, in a stunning display of arrogance, have repeatedly tried to ram through, while thumbing their noses at working Hoosiers–not to mention democracy. Read more >>>  First, multimillionaire Mitt Romney told a group of jobless workers he’s also “unemployed.” Next, Romney thought there was no problem in stating publicly that he likes to “fire people.” Now, the Republican presidential wannabee proved yet again how out of touch he is with mainstream Americans by showing the extent to which he’s a member of the elite 1 percent. In South Carolina yesterday, Romney admitted he pays “around” a 15 percent tax rate, while earning $374,000 a year in speaker’s fees alone—an income he described as “not very much.” Read more >>> Viewers in Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh are getting the first public look at a new AFL-CIO television spot, “Work Connects Us All: America’s Unions.” The evocative ad features members of many unions, from virtually every industry, and is part of a broad campaign that aims to “fly above the tactics and controversies of the day” and connects with people around the values associated with work, according to AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler. Read more >>>
Boucher: Bridging rural America to the economic mainstream
From Richmond Times Dispatch OP-ED For rural America, broadband is the bridge to our nation's economic mainstream, but of today's 20 percent of the national population that lacks broadband access, the vast majority live in rural areas. Bringing high-speed Internet access to rural-broadband have-nots is today's greatest telecommunications policy challenge. Now a single means of meeting that challenge is at hand. AT&T has pledged that its merger with T-Mobile will result in broadband reaching more than 97 percent of the population within six years, connecting 55 million Americans who lack the service today. President Obama has set a national goal of universal broadband deployment, defined as reaching 98 percent of our population, within five years. Now one company alone, with approval of the pending merger, will almost enable that goal to be met, leaving a far smaller gap to be filled with government grants and loans and other private investment. It's the promise of far broader rural economic opportunity achieved with private investment that leads me to support the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. With the merger, wireless broadband with 4G LTE service will arrive in our rural regions, and it will arrive at speeds rivaling today's fastest wired connections. The achievement of bringing broadband service to communities that are the hardest to reach — whether in the mountains of Southwest Virginia or other remote areas of our country — will meet our greatest telecommunications challenge and bring new economic opportunity to millions of rural residents. Rick Boucher, honorary chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, represented Virginia's 9th District in the U.S. House of Representatives for 28 years. Contact him at rick@internetinnovation.org.
A poll released this week finds that likely voters in Virginia’s 2012 election oppose cutting social security benefits in order to reduce the federal deficit. “Social Security does not contribute a penny to the deficit, in fact it has a huge surplus. This is money that belongs to all of us who contributed our entire working lives so that we could retire with dignity. Voters want politicians in Washington to keep their hands off Social Security,” said Barbara Easterling, a Virginian and President of the Alliance for Retired Americans, which has 50,000 members in the state. More than 1.2 million Virginians receive Social Security and nearly half of them are lifted out of poverty by the program’s modest benefits. |
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