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Weekly Address: President Obama – Making 2014 a Year of Action to Expand Opportunities

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From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, President Obama said 2014 will be a year of action, and called on both parties to help make this a breakthrough year for the United States by bringing back more good jobs and expanding opportunities for the middle class.

Transcript: Making 2014 a Year of Action to Expand Opportunities for the Middle Class

Hi, everybody.  This week, I visited a company in Raleigh, North Carolina that helps make electric motors that save businesses money on energy costs and cut harmful carbon pollution.

And I stopped by N.C. State University, where engineers are set to develop the new technology that will make those motors even better.

It’s part of my push not only to make America home to more high-tech manufacturing – but to make America more attractive for the good jobs that a growing middle class requires.

And increasingly, we are.  Thanks in part to our all-of-the-above strategy for American energy, for the first time in nearly two decades, we produce more oil here at home than we buy from the rest of the world.  We generate more renewable energy than ever, and more natural gas than anybody.  Health care costs are growing at their slowest rate in 50 years – due in part to the Affordable Care Act.  And since I took office, we’ve cut our deficits by more than half.

So we are primed to bring back more of the good jobs claimed by the recession, and lost to overseas competition in recent decades.  But that requires a year of action.  And I want to work with Congress this year on proven ways to create jobs, like building infrastructure and fixing our broken immigration system.

Where Congress isn’t acting, I’ll act on my own to put opportunity within reach for anyone who’s willing to work for it. That’s what I did in Raleigh by launching America’s second “manufacturing innovation institute.”  It’s a partnership between companies, colleges, and the federal government focused on making sure American businesses and American workers win the race for high-tech manufacturing and the jobs that come with it – jobs that can help people and communities willing to work hard punch their ticket into the middle class.

I firmly believe that this can be a breakthrough year for America.  But to make that happen, we’re gonna have to act – to create good jobs that pay good wages, and to offer more Americans a fair shot to get ahead.  That’s what I’m focused on every day that I have the privilege of serving as your president. That’s what I’m going to be focused on every single day of this year.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.

Bolding added.

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Bonus Videos: Remarks by the President and First Lady at College Opportunity Summit. Transcript

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Editor’s Note: The President’s Weekly Address diary is also the weekend open news thread. Feel free to leave links to other news items in the comment threads.


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8 comments

  1. JanF

    Where Congress isn’t acting, I’ll act on my own to put opportunity within reach for anyone who’s willing to work for it.

    This will be the theme of the 2014 campaign to take back Congress.

  2. JanF

    As expected, Freedom Industries has filed for bankruptcy:

    CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Freedom Industries, the company that fouled thousands of West Virginians’ water with a chemical leak into the Elk River last week, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday.

    Freedom owes $3.6 million to its top 20 unsecured creditors, according to bankruptcy documents. The company also owes more than $2.4 million in unpaid taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, and the IRS has placed at least three liens on Freedom’s property, demanding payment.

    The unpaid taxes date back to at least 2000, according to a lien filed in 2010.

    Under the bankruptcy code, Chapter 11 permits a company to reorganize and continue operating.



    The filing also puts a hold on all of the lawsuits filed against Freedom Industries. Since the leak last week, about a mile and a half upriver from West Virginia Water American’s plant in Charleston, about 25 lawsuits have been filed against Freedom in Kanawha Circuit Court. The company also faces a federal lawsuit.

    So the losses will indeed be socialized, with the people of West Virginia (and probably the federal government) picking up the tab for cleanup and for health care for those poisoned by the leak.

    MSNBC has more on the convoluted mess that is Freedom Industries corporate past present and future here.

    I am struck by the disconnect of many West Virginians who declare that regulations are job killers and destroyers of “freedom”. It appears that even when a state gives industries complete license to do whatever the hell they want they STILL can’t make money. Or maybe they have every incentive to skim all the profits into their pockets so that there are no assets left when they have to pay the price for their negligence.

    The wheels are coming off the Republican meme of shoveling beneficence to “job makers” at the cost of safety and the health of the people.

  3. JanF

    Christie camp held Sandy relief money hostage, mayor alleges

    Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration warned a New Jersey mayor earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor, according to the mayor and emails and personal notes she shared with msnbc.

    The mayor, Dawn Zimmer, hasn’t approved the project, but she did request $127 million in hurricane relief for her city of Hoboken – 80% of which was underwater after Sandy hit in October 2012. What she got was $142,000 to defray the cost of a single back-up generator plus an additional $200,000 in recovery grants.

    Yikes! Weren’t Sandy funds from the federal government? How does Chris Christie’s minions get to dole out the cash?

  4. JanF

    Members of Congress Introduce a New Fix for the Voting Rights Act

    Representatives Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and John Conyers (D-MI) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced legislation to strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last June invalidating a critical section of the VRA. The legislation, known as “The Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014,” represents the first attempt by a bipartisan group in Congress to reinstate the vital protections of the VRA that the Supreme Court took away.

    Key provisions:

    1: The legislation draws a new coverage formula for Section 4, thereby resurrecting Section 5. States with five violations of federal law to their voting changes over the past fifteen years will have to submit future election changes for federal approval. This new formula would currently apply to Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Local jurisdictions would be covered if they commit three or more violations or have one violation and “persistent, extremely low minority turnout” over the past fifteen years.

    2: The legislation strengthens Section 3 of the VRA, which has been described as the Act’s “secret weapon.” Under Section 3, jurisdictions not covered by Section 4 could be “bailed-in” to federal supervision, but plaintiffs had to show evidence of intentional voting discrimination, which is very difficult to do in court. Under the new Section 3 proposal, any violation of the VRA or federal voting rights law-whether intentional or not-can be grounds for a bail-in.

    4: The legislation makes it easier to seek a preliminary injunction against a potentially discriminatory voting law. Plaintiffs will now only have to show that the hardship to them outweighs the hardship to the state if a law is blocked in court pending a full trial. There will be a preliminary injunction hearing on North Carolina’s voting law in July 2014, before the full trial takes place July 2015.

    5: The legislation reaffirms that the attorney general can send federal observers to monitor elections in states subject to Section 4 and expands the AG’s authority to send observers to jurisdictions with a history of discriminating against language minority groups, which includes parts of twenty-five states.

  5. JanF

    Democracy needs dogged local journalism

    While the Christie appointees at the Port Authority asserted “no response” over and over to reporters’ requests for information, the governor publicly belittled journalists who had the temerity to ask him about the scandal. “I worked the cones, actually,” Christie scoffed in December, referring to the purported traffic study. “Unbeknownst to everybody, I was actually the guy out there. … You really are not serious with that question.”

    Even in his ostensibly conciliatory news conference last week, Christie chided the media, telling a reporter who asked whether he had considered resigning, “That’s a crazy question, man.”

    In fact, a Rasmussen poll out this week found that a majority of New Jersey residents would want the governor to resign if he had advance knowledge of the bridge plot.

    If it weren’t for the dogged local press corps, Christie would still be ridiculing this story, attacking the legislators investigating it and persuading most of the national press to dismiss it.

    She leaves us with this:

    But if you don’t subscribe to your local paper or pony up to get behind its online paywall, who’s going to pay reporters to cover the news where you live? A free press isn’t that kind of “free.” An accountable democracy doesn’t work without real information, gathered from the ground up, about people in power, everywhere. Be inspired by the beleaguered but unintimidated reporters of Chris Christie’s New Jersey: Whatever your partisan affiliation, or lack thereof, subscribe to your local paper today. It’s an act of civic virtue.

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