Daily Archives: 07/29/2013

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A Better Bargain …


The White House, Washington

Hello everybody —

The basic bargain of this country says that if you work hard, you can get ahead — you can build a secure life for your family, and know that your kids will do even better someday.

But for more than a decade, that bargain has frayed, and a devastating recession made it worse.

Over the past four and a half years, America has fought its way back, laying a new foundation for more durable economic growth.  But many of the challenges that faced the middle class before the recession remain.  And Washington has taken its eye off the ball.

Too many people in this town are focused on scoring political points or fanning phony scandals instead of finding ways to help grow our economy, create jobs, or roll back a 30-year trend of rising inequality.

It’s time for that to stop.  It’s time for all of us to focus on our top priority as a country, and that’s reigniting the engine of our prosperity: a rising, thriving middle class.

That’s what I just said while speaking at Knox College, back home in Illinois, where I kicked off a series of speeches on what truly matters to the middle class.

If building America from the middle out is an idea you share, I need you to stand with me. Add your voice to mine.

This has been my North Star for as long as I’ve been in office, and it’s what will shape the time that I have left in the White House.

In the weeks ahead, in towns across the country, I’ll be talking about my ideas for building on the cornerstones of middle-class security: Good jobs with good wages. An education that prepares our children and our workers for a new economy. A home to call  your own. Affordable health care when you get sick. A secure retirement even if you’re not rich. A better bargain for the middle class,  and for all who are striving to join it.

This is the debate we need to have.  And you can join me right now.

Let the country know that you believe that America works best not when it grows from the top down, but when it grows from the middle out:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/a-better-bargain/speak-out

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

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Singled out …


National Women's Law Center
Demand Coverage for Peace Corps Volunteers
                Tell your Senators Peace Corps Volunteers deserve equal access to health care coverage.
Take Action

Since 1961, Peace Corps Volunteers have provided an invaluable service to the U.S. and to the countries with which we partner to foster peace and development. Yet when it comes to their own health and well-being, female volunteers are singled out — and some are denied health care coverage they vitally need.
Currently, Peace Corps Volunteers are denied coverage for abortion — even when the pregnancy threatens her life, or if she is a survivor of rape or incest. But recently, the Senate Appropriations Committee took an important first step in addressing the fact that Peace Corps Volunteers do not get the same coverage for their reproductive health as employees of the Peace Corps itself and others who get their health insurance through the federal government.
We need your help to make sure this inequity ends. Tell your Senators Peace Corps Volunteers deserve equal access to health care coverage.
More than 60 percent of the more than 8,000 Peace Corps Volunteers are women. But under the current policy, these women may have to forgo life-saving medical treatment — or endure an unwanted pregnancy resulting from a sexual assault. At the same time, other women who receive health care coverage through the federal government do get abortion coverage in these cases. This is unfair.
We need you to make sure your Senators are committed to changing this policy.
Tell your Senators to end this inequity and ensure Peace Corps Volunteers get the coverage they need.
Sincerely,
Judy Waxman Judy Waxman Vice President for Health and Reproductive Rights National Women’s Law Center    

P.S. Are you a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer? Sign on to this statement of support.
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Sabotage !


CAP Action War Room

How Low Can the GOP Go?

Here’s one thing President Obama had to say during Wednesday’s big speech on the economy:

I care about one thing and one thing only, and that’s how to use every minute — the only thing I care about is how to use every minute of the remaining 1,276 days of my term to make this country work for working Americans again.  That’s all I care about.  I don’t have another election.

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans and their allies have a different goal in mind. Their strategy: sabotage. They’ve done it before and now they’re trying to do it again. They’re trying to sabotage the economy and undermine Obamacare — even if millions of Americans suffer as a result.

Sabotaging the Economy

Deficits are falling at the fastest rate in decades and we’ve already achieved more deficit reduction than we set out to at height of deficit hysteria. Nevertheless, Republicans refuse to get rid of the sequester and are now demanding  even more painful spending cuts. If they don’t get their way they are again threatening to shut down the government and, even worse, default on the nation’s obligations.

We watched this same movie back in 2011. It hurt the economy then and it threatens to hold it back now just as the recovery appears to be gaining steam.

We know the sequester is causing real pain to people across the country, but yesterday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office told us how many jobs it will be killed if it’s left in place next year: up to 1.6 MILLION.

Yep, you read that right. If the Republicans force us to keep the sequester cuts for another year, as many as 1.6 MILLION fewer Americans will be working. That’s 1.6 MILLION Americans who won’t be buying the goods of businesses large and small. As we discussed yesterday, middle class consumers are the real job creators and the economy simply can’t work without them.

Sabotaging the Government

House Republicans are trying to enact their long-held goal of simply “starving the beast” so much that government simply can’t function. In order to keep the government from shutting down, they are now demanding cuts even deeper and more painful than the sequester. Here’s but a few examples of the crippling cuts they are now calling for:

Just like blocking nominees to government agencies they don’t like, the GOP is trying to starve programs they don’t care about or whose mission they disagree with. This is simply nullification by another name.

Sabotaging Obamacare

Conservatives know they are at the last chance saloon when it comes to their quest to destroy Obamacare. They lost the fight in Congress, they lost at the Supreme Court, and President Obama won and Democrats added seats in the Senate last November.

They know that millions of Americans will soon get access to quality, affordable health care for the first time. Tens of millions more already have new benefits and better coverage. And come January 1, 2014, the worst abuses of the health insurance industry, including denying coverage to those with preexisting conditions, will be history.

The only thing conservatives can do now is try to throw sand in the gears. They have spent or will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a misinformation campaign. They’re hurting some of the poorest Americans by refusing to expand Medicaid. They are threatening to shut down the government in order to defund the law. They’re intimidating private sector groups that might want to help inform the public of the law’s benefits. And, most cynically of all, they are trying to convince the uninsured to stay uninsured. All of this simply out of spite and the hopes it might benefit them in the 2014 election.

Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote a must-read column this week calling out Republicans for their appalling behavior:

What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is not treasonous—just sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing.[…]

But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one’s breath away.

BOTTOM LINE: Republicans are trying to sabotage the economy and undermine Obamacare merely out of political spite and the hopes it might help them in 2014. Instead of sabotaging the economy and trying to deny quality, affordable health care to millions of Americans, it’s time for Republicans to focus on actually governing this country and helping grow the middle class and the economy along with it.

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Standing Up for Women and Girls at Home and Abroad


whitehousebanner

Friends,

Here in the United States and across the globe, President Obama and his Administration have been working to empower women and girls.

On Wednesday, President Obama visited Knox College in Illinois to kick off a series of speeches about his vision for rebuilding an economy that puts the middle class – and those fighting to join it – front and center.

That same day , five past winners and current finalists of the annual Google Science Fair met with Todd Park, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, at the White House to discuss career paths for women in science, technology, engineering and math.

Dr. Jill Biden is traveling in India this week and focusing on issues affecting women and children. On Tuesday, Dr. Biden participated in a roundtable discussion with officials from the government of Maharashtra, USAID, UNICEF, Indian civil society and the private sector to learn about their efforts to improve nutrition across the country. Please read on for more about Dr. Biden’s important visit.

That same day, First Lady Michelle Obama addressed 1,800 people at the National Council of La Raza’s Annual Conference in New Orleans, including many mothers and grandmothers, to talk about the importance of healthy lifestyles for families – including nutrition, exercise, and regular check-ups and screenings.

In case you missed it, President Obama announced his intent to nominate Caroline Kennedy to be the next Ambassador to Japan and Carrie Hessler Radelet to be the new Director of the Peace Corps. The Senate confirmed Gina McCarthy as the next Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the President commended her as a “proven leader.”

Please read below for more, and thank you for all that you do!

White House Council on Women & Girls

President Obama Lays out a Better Bargain for the Middle Class

In his remarks on Wednesday, President Obama highlighted the progress our country has made together in the five years since the start of the recession saying,

“Thanks to the grit and resilience and determination of the American people – of folks like you – we’ve been able to clear away the rubble from the financial crisis. We started to lay a new foundation for stronger, more durable economic growth. As a country, we’ve recovered faster and gone further than most other advanced nations in the world. With new American revolutions in energy and technology and manufacturing and health care, we’re actually poised to reverse the forces that battered the middle class for so long, and start building an economy where everyone who works hard can get ahead.”

Learn more about President Obama’s plan here.

President Obama 7.24 Knox College

President Barack Obama delivers a speech on the economy at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., July 24, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

All-Star Female Students Come to the White House to Discuss Women in STEM

On Wednesday, at a meeting in the West Wing of the White House, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Jen Pahlka, and other senior Obama Administration officials specializing in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), met with five inspiring young women to discuss academic and career pathways in STEM fields. The students were past winners and current finalists of the annual Google Science Fair—an online science competition open to high-school-aged students that solicits “ideas that will change the world.”

Read more about the impressive accomplishments of nominees and finalists Brittany Wenger, Valerie Ding, Naomi Shah, Lizzie Zhao and Lauren Hodge.

Dr. Biden’s Trip to India

This week, Dr. Biden has been traveling in India visiting with non-profits and members of the private sector to discuss issues affecting women and children, including life-threatening malnutrition. On Tuesday, Dr. Biden attended a roundtable discussion with Government of Maharashtra Officials, USAID, UNICEF, Indian civil society and private sector representatives to learn about their efforts to improve nutrition across the country and to make available other proven health interventions to prevent child deaths, such as immunizations, clean water, and treatment of pneumonia and diarrhea.

After the roundtable discussion Dr. Biden continued on to The Dilaasa Crisis Intervention Department for Women in Bandra, an area in Mumbai. The center is the first hospital-based crisis center in India for female survivors of domestic violence and came out of a partnership between the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, a public entity, and the Center for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes, a private trust. This relationship illustrates how dedicated both the people and the government are to creating a safe space for the victims of gender based violence and to ensuring that this nightmare ends for so many women.

Read more about Dr. Biden’s visit to India here.

Dr. Biden Meets with Community Leaders NGOs

Dr. Biden meets with community leaders, US and India agency officials, and NGOS to discuss joint efforts to end childhood malnutrition. (Photo Credit: Carrie Levay)

Michelle Obama Empowers Latino Community at Nation Council of La Raza Conference

Speaking to over 1,800 attendees at the Annual Conference of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) on Tuesday, First Lady Michelle Obama celebrated the NCLR’s accomplishments in reducing obesity through its Comer Bien (Eat Well) program. She emphasized, however, that there is still much more work to be done since nearly 40 percent of Hispanic children in the U.S. are overweight or obese and Hispanic kids ages nine to 13 are only half as likely to participate in organized physical activity outside school.

The First Lady urged the audience to use their purchasing decisions to make change. She said, “Today, the Latino community’s buying power is more than one trillion dollars…and it’s expected to increase to $1.5 trillion by 2015. So make no mistake about it, with the choices that you make, you all could completely transform the marketplace… So when companies step up and provide healthy choices…we all need to step up and actually take advantage of those choices.”

Read the First Lady’s full remarks here and learn more about the First Lady’s efforts to fight childhood obesity with her Let’s Move initiative.

In Case You Missed It: Confirmations & Nominations

On Tuesday, President Obama announced his intent to nominate Caroline Kennedy as Ambassador to Japan. Caroline Kennedy is President of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and Chair of the Senior Advisory Committee of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. She is the editor of several New York Times best-selling books on topics including constitutional law, American history, politics, and poetry. She received a B.A. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.

Last week, the U.S. Senate confirmed Gina McCarthy as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. As President Obama noted: “With years of experience at the state and local level, Gina is a proven leader who knows how to build bipartisan support for commonsense environmental solutions that protect the health and safety of our kids while promoting economic growth.”

The President also announced his intent to nominate Carolyn “Carrie” Hessler Radelet as Director of the Peace Corps saying, “As Deputy Director of the Peace Corps, Carrie has been instrumental in recruiting and training thousands of Peace Corps volunteers who work to promote social and economic development around the world. I’m delighted to nominate her as Director, so this program can continue to benefit from her vision and commitment.” Currently Ms. Hessler Radelet is Deputy Director of the Peace Corps, a position she has held since 2010. Read her biography here.

President Obama Moniz McCarthy Burwell East Room Nomination 3.4.13

President Barack Obama announces the nominations of, from left, Ernest Moniz as Energy Secretary, Gina McCarthy as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, and Sylvia Mathews Burwell as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, in the East Room of the White House, March 4, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)