In this week’s address, the President thanked Congress for its strong bipartisan support for efforts to train and equip Syrian opposition forces to fight ISIL. This plan is part of the President’s comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy to degrade and destroy the terrorist group, and does not commit our troops to fighting another ground war. America, working with a broad coalition of nations, will continue to train, equip, advise, and assist our partners in the region in the battle against ISIL.

In the coming week, the President will speak at the United Nations General Assembly and continue to lead the world against terror, a fight in which all countries have a stake.

Click here to watch this week’s Weekly Address.

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It’s On Us to Stop Sexual AssaultYesterday at the White House, President Obama joined Vice President Biden and Americans across the country to launch the “It’s On Us” initiative — an awareness campaign to help put an end to sexual assault on college campuses. “It’s On Us” asks everyone — men and women across America — to make a personal commitment to step off the sidelines and be part of the solution to campus sexual assault. READ MORE What’s a Continuing Resolution and Why Does It Matter? This week, Congress passed and President Obama signed something called a Continuing Resolution, an important measure that ensures our government has the resources necessary to address key domestic and national security goals in the months ahead. Want to learn what exactly a Continuing Resolution is and what this one includes? Here’s a few answers to some key questions that many Americans may be asking. READ MORE Stepping Up Our Efforts to Help Combat the Ebola Outbreak At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta on Tuesday, President Obama discussed the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and announced a major increase in our efforts to help fight the outbreak. While reiterating that the chances of an Ebola outbreak in the United States are very unlikely, the President emphasized that the outbreak is still a national security priority, and that the government has “devoted significant resources in support of our strategy.” READ MORE

I know we spend a lot of time talking about how Republicans’ plans will hurt the middle class.

So today, I’m going to change things up a bit. There are so many reasons voters should vote Democratic in November. Here are 5 reasons that I wanted you to focus on to demonstrate why everyone should vote Democratic this November:

1. We’re trying to overturn Citizens United.
2. We’re fighting the Koch brothers.
3. We’re refusing to end Medicare as we know it.
4. We’re refusing to privatize Social Security.
5. We’re defending a woman’s right to choose.

If those sound like good reasons to you, I hope you’ll consider pitching in $5 to help my team reach our $200,000 goal before the FEC deadline at the end of the month.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is doing invaluable work to make the markets for credit cards, mortgages and other financial products and services fairer and more transparent. And once again, the financial industry is going all-out to block those efforts.

The industry’s latest threat involves a proposal to make the CFPB’s complaint system more useful and user-friendly by giving consumers the right to include the specifics of their complaints in a searchable public database.

Please join us in telling the CFPB: Don’t back down from your proposal to let consumers share their stories publicly.

Hundreds of thousands of people have used the CFPB’s complaint system, and more than 30,000 cases have already resulted in monetary relief. Complaint data also helps the CFPB detect and respond to broader patterns of industry error or misconduct. The complaint system could be far more valuable, though, if consumers had the option of publicly describing their bad experiences. That way, consumers would be able to learn about the experiences of others and make more informed choices, and financial companies would have an added incentive to compete by actually trying to satisfy their customers, not by trying to put something over on them.

But financial companies, just as they fought the creation of the CFPB in the first place, are fighting its complaint proposal tooth and nail – through the press, through lobbying, and through a highly deceptive advertising campaign in which the industry falsely claims that businesses would not have an equal right to post their responses.

That’s why we need to fight back.  Urge the CFPB to stand firm and help consumers share their experiences and hold big banks accountable.

Speak up today, because the big banks are working feverishly hard to take away our chance to speak up in the future.

Thank you for your continued support for real financial reform.

Sincerely,

Lisa Donner
Executive Director
Americans for Financial Reform

Introducing Liberia

By CAP Action War Room

America’s Disturbing And Pervasive Inequality, In Three Charts

The Census Bureau’s latest estimates of income and poverty released Tuesday reveal that, despite the economic recovery, inequality remains a massive problem in the United States. We’ve assembled three charts that demonstrate the how deeply the problem runs in our society:

1. Income inequality. Five years of economic recovery hasn’t resulted in any income growth for the vast majority of Americans. In 2013, the median income nationwide was $51,900, essentially unchanged from a year before and 8 percent lower than the median income in 2007, the year before the recession hit. The top five percent of earners made more than $196,000, while the bottom 10 percent made less than $12,400.

2. Racial inequality. Black and Hispanic Americans continue to lag far behind non-Hispanic white and Asian households in the amount that they ear. The median household headed by a black person earned $34,600 in 2013 and the median household headed by a Hispanic person earned $41,000. That’s compared to $58,300 for the median white, non-Hispanic household and $67,100 for the median Asian household.

3. Gender inequality. We wrote yesterday about how the gender wage gap hasn’t budged from last year: women earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man earns. But the poverty rate is higher for women than it is for men as well. The Census found that 15.8 percent of women live in poverty, compared to 13.1 percent of men. And as the chart below demonstrates, the poverty gap between men and women grows as the population ages.

CREDIT: U.S. Census Bureau

BOTTOM LINE: Five years into the economic recovery, middle class Americans are still struggling to make ends meet. But there is no reason to expect the economy to really hum again and inequality to decrease unless we take action to address the problems. That means supporting policies like these that help working families, not the rich, and that grow the economy from the middle-out, not the top-down.