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Weekly Address: President Obama – “America is coming back. And I want to go full speed ahead. “”

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The President’s Weekly Address post is also an Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.

 

From the White House – Weekly Address

In this week’s address, President Obama discussed the economic gains we made in 2014, which was the strongest year for job growth since the 1990s.

In the coming weeks, the President will continue to preview his State of the Union address and the agenda he’ll put forward to build on that progress. The President will showcase ways he’s working to help every American get ahead in the new year, like plans he announced this week to make community college free for two years, make mortgages more affordable and accessible for creditworthy families, and support manufacturing.

Transcript: Weekly Address: America’s Resurgence Is Real

Hi, everybody.  About a year ago, I promised that 2014 would be a breakthrough year for America.  And this week, we got more evidence to back that up.

In December, our businesses created 240,000 new jobs.  The unemployment rate fell to 5.6%.  That means that 2014 was the strongest year for job growth since the 1990s.  In 2014, unemployment fell faster than it has in three decades.

Over a 58-month streak, our businesses have created 11.2 million new jobs.  After a decade of decline, American manufacturing is in its best stretch of job growth since the ’90s. America is now the world’s number one producer of oil and gas, helping to save drivers about a buck-ten a gallon at the pump over this time last year.  Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, about 10 million Americans have gained health insurance in the past year alone.  We have cut our deficits by about two-thirds.  And after 13 long years, our war in Afghanistan has come to a responsible end, and more of our brave troops have come home.

It has been six years since the crisis.  Those years have demanded hard work and sacrifice on everybody’s part.  So as a country, we have every right to be proud of what we’ve got to show for it.  America’s resurgence is real.  And now that we’ve got some calmer waters, if we all do our part, if we all pitch in, we can make sure that tide starts lifting all boats again.  We can make sure that the middle class is the engine that powers America’s prosperity for decades to come.

That’ll be the focus of my State of the Union Address in a couple weeks – building on the progress we’ve made.  But I figured, why wait – let’s get started right now.

On Wednesday, I visited a Ford plant outside of Detroit – because the American auto industry and its home state are redefining the word “comeback.”  On Thursday, I traveled to Arizona, a state that was hit among the hardest by the housing crisis, to announce a new plan that will put hundreds of dollars in new homeowners’ pockets, and help more new families buy their first home.  And, I’m speaking with you today from Pellissippi State Community College in Tennessee, a state making big strides in education, to unveil my new plan to make two years of community college free for every responsible student.  I’m also here to establish a new hub that will attract more good-paying, high-tech manufacturing jobs to our shores.

Making homeownership easier.  Bringing a higher education within reach.  Creating more good jobs that pay good wages.  These are just some of the ways we can help every American get ahead in the new economy.  And there’s more to come.  Because America is coming back.  And I want to go full speed ahead.

Thanks, everybody, and have a great weekend.

Bolding added.

~


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 7 Comments

7 comments

  2. JanF

    Justice Department to intervene on behalf of trademark office in “redskins” dispute

    The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday intervened in the court fight over whether Washington’s football team should be able to legally trademark the name “Redskins,” saying in a brief that it will defend the government against Washington’s claim that a law preventing the trademarks is unconstitutional.

    Attorney General Eric Holder has called the team’s name “offensive,” but the Justice Department is not taking a position on whether the name should be changed. Rather, it is intervening solely “for the limited purpose of defending the constitutionality” of federal trademark laws, according to the brief it filed Friday in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia (via Zoe Tillman). […]

    The constitutionality of the law is not the only issue at hand in the case; the court is also tasked with determining whether the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board’s ruling was correct under the Lanham Act. But even if the Justice Department is not taking a position on the name itself, attorneys for the Native Americans challenging the name welcomed the government’s role arguing one of the primary issues in the case.

  3. JanF

    He is expected to unveil new initiatives on broadband access and cybersecurity

    Obama will discuss an initiative to improve consumer and student privacy on Monday, and visit the federal cybersecurity center on Tuesday. He plans to travel to Iowa on Wednesday to lay out new plans to boost access to high-speed Internet service, according to a White House official, who declined to be identified.

    Separately, Obama will meet with congressional leaders of both parties on Tuesday to discuss ways they can work together to boost the economy and national security, the official said in an e-mail.

  4. Diana in NoVa

    and affordable higher education.

    (Why do people say “good-paying” instead of “well-paid”? It’s downright ugly.)

    There’s a resurgence of feudalism in this country. Most of us are in debt prison. We’re constantly urged to stop drinking lattes and put that money in our 401(k) accounts so that we, too, can be millionaires. As if! You can’t save money when ever-increasing rents and surging food prices eat all your income. Moreover, now that my granddaughter is in kindergarten, I realize that “free” public education isn’t “free.” Her family is always being urged to cough up cash for one thing or another. If her parents weren’t employed I’d have to cough up out of my Social.

    College tuitions are in the stratosphere. Imagine borrowing $100,000 to get through college, then graduating and finding the only job you can get is at McDonald’s. And not a McDonald’s in Denmark, where you get paid $21 an hour (and the hamburgers only cost 60 cents more than here), either.

    We are like the serfs and artisans of the Middle Ages. It took the Black Death to mow down the working class, after which labor became scarce and people could get higher wages. Is it going to take an equal catastrophe here? Perhaps the entire East Coast will be underwater so the remaining pop. on higher ground can survive to demand higher wages?

  5. JanF

    The Cynic and the Lame Duck President

    This is the longer essay that Charlie had been working on in the waning months of 2014 and mentioned in several of his daily posts. It is impossible to block quote enough of this to summarize it or do it justice. The Cynic, by the way, is Charlie; but he softens his criticism of the president as he acknowledged the truly awful treatment of the man by the right-wing, their political party and their propaganda machines.

    This sets the tone:

    .. between the elections [of 2008 and 2012], and throughout his term, the country that had learned again how to hate refined its talent in that regard to a fine, pure essence. There was a transparency to the hate. It was clear and strong, the way the best moonshine is, what the old Irish hill runners call the poteen, the stuff through which you can read a newspaper, as long as you can still see well enough to read anything. The Republican party drank itself blind on the stuff, and so did the movement conservatism that is the Republican party’s only real animating force, and so did the conservative media and everyone who lived inside the information bubble that had been so carefully crafted over the previous three decades. Important legislators met in secret on the day the president was inaugurated and agreed that they would blow up centuries of legislative custom and politesse and simply refuse to allow the president to govern. The Republicans abandoned some of their own ideas-an insurance-friendly approach to health-care reform, a cap-and-trade strategy to combat climate change, comprehensive immigration reform, and infrastructure spending-simply because Barack Obama had proposed them and his name had become a conjuring word for the angry spirits of the conservative base.

    His conclusion includes this:

    There’s one thing about the president that took the cynic a long time to understand, and he didn’t truly understand it until he heard the president refer to “the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government.” Put simply, in so many areas, the president is putting the responsibility of governing-of leadership-on us, which is where it should be. […]

    That’s been the fundamental challenge of him from the outset. He’s left the hard and necessary work of self-government to a country that simply is no longer up to the job.

    I encourage you to read the entire article. Readability tells me that it will take you 17 minutes. You won’t regret the time spent.

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