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Weekly Address: President Obama – Equipping Workers with Skills Employers Need

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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, the President discussed the importance of ensuring that the economic progress we’ve made is shared by all hardworking Americans. Through his opportunity agenda, the President is focused on creating more jobs, educating more kids, and working to make sure hard work pays off with higher wages and better benefits.

This week, the President will visit a community college in Los Angeles to highlight the need to equip our workers with the skills employers are looking for now and for the good jobs of the future, and he will continue looking for the best way to grow the economy and expand opportunity for more hardworking Americans.

Transcript: Weekly Address: Equipping Workers with Skills Employers Need Now and for the Future

Hi, everybody. Over the past 52 months, our businesses have created nearly 10 million new jobs.  The unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest point since 2008.  Across lots of areas – energy, manufacturing, technology – our businesses and workers are leading again.  In fact, for the first time in over a decade, business leaders worldwide have declared that China is no longer the world’s best place to invest – America is.

None of this is an accident.  It’s thanks to your resilience, resolve, and hard work that America has recovered faster and come farther than almost any other advanced country on Earth.

Now we have the opportunity to ensure that this growth is broadly shared.  Our economy grows best not from the top-down, but from the middle-out.  We do better when the middle class does better.  So we have to make sure that we’re not just creating more jobs, but raising middle-class wages and incomes.  We have to make sure our economy works for every working American.

My opportunity agenda does that.  It’s built on creating more jobs, training more workers, educating all our kids, and making sure your hard work pays off with higher wages and better benefits.

On Thursday, I traveled to Delaware to highlight how we’re trying to create more good, middle-class jobs rebuilding America: rebuilding roads and bridges, ports and airports, high-speed rail and internet.

This week, Vice President Biden will release a report he’s been working on to reform our job training system into a job-driven training system.  And I’ll visit a community college in L.A. that’s retraining workers for careers in the fast-growing health care sector. Because every worker deserves to know that if you lose your job, your country will help you train for an even better one.

In recent days, both parties in Congress have taken some good steps in these areas.  But we can do so much more for the middle class, and for folks working to join the middle class.  We should raise the minimum wage so that no one who works full-time has to live in poverty.  We should fight for fair pay and paid family leave.  We should pass commonsense immigration reform that strengthens our borders and our businesses, and includes a chance for long-time residents to earn their citizenship.

I want to work with Democrats and Republicans on all of these priorities.  But I will do whatever I can, whenever I can, to help families like yours.  Because nothing’s  more important to me than you — your hopes, your concerns, and making sure this country remains the place where everyone who works hard can make it if you try.  Thanks so much, and have a great weekend.

Bolding added.

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Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 17 Comments

17 comments

  1. JanF

    He will not add a religious exemption to his executive order on LGBT discrimination

    President Barack Obama plans to sign executive orders Monday prohibiting discrimination against gay and transgender workers in the federal government and its contracting agencies, without a new exemption that was requested by some religious organizations.

    Obama’s action comes on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Hobby Lobby case that allowed some religiously oriented businesses to opt out of the federal health care law’s requirement that contraception coverage be provided to workers at no extra charge.

    There had been concern in the LGBT community about the impact of Hobby Lobby on laws such as ENDA and many groups pulled their support because of the fear of gigantic loopholes that would water down the bill and render it ineffective. The president’s pull-back from the religious exemptions respects those concerns.  

  2. JanF

    Wingnut Nurse Sues Family Planning Center For Not Giving Her Job Just Because She Says She Won’t Do Job

    The ADF claims it has filed this lawsuit, for Sara wink wink, against the Tampa Family Health Centers “for refusing to consider an applicant for employment as a nurse because she is a member of a pro-life medical association and has a faith-based objection to prescribing some birth control methods that could lead to an abortion.”

    Oh, poor Sara, let us weep for her, persecuted merely for believing that birth control is sometimes abortion because she missed the class at nursing school that taught her how birth control is NOT abortion, it is like this whole other thing because it actually IS this whole other thing.

    Some bullet points from “her” lawsuit:

    – Sara “possesses beliefs against prescribing hormonal contraceptives in certain circumstances,

    which she believes have the potential to act in a manner potentially threatening the lives of embryos after their conception/fertilization.” That’s nice. It has no basis in actual scientific fact, of course, but who would even want a health care provider to rely on dumb science instead of “beliefs”?

    – The director of human resources very politely emailed Sara that because the center provides family planning services, and Sara belongs to a group that does not believe in providing family planning services, and no, sorry, there are no positions for “antepartum & laborist only,” buh-bye, good luck, f&%$ off. (Actually, he did not write “f&%$ off,” but don’t you wish he would have? I would have. So would you, come on, be honest.)

    One only hopes that this lawsuit is dismissed because it can’t be read without laughing!

    Gregory M. Lipper, senior litigation counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which is sort of the anti-Alliance Defending Freedom because it fights to preserve the actual First Amendment instead of destroying it with “Gospel,” lawsplained it like this:

       This lawsuit distorts the noble cause of religious liberty in an effort to further advance the Religious Right’s assault on birth control. The plaintiff wants to work at a federally funded women’s health center, yet refuses to prescribe any form of hormonal birth control. The lawsuit equates prescribing birth control with performing an abortion, without even the slightest scientific basis. For the Religious Right, it’s not enough that women’s bosses can strip them of coverage for contraception – now, they want to allow women’s healthcare professionals to withhold contraception too. And they want to force the government to subsidize a healthcare worker who refuses to do her job. Even after Hobby Lobby, this

    lawsuit retires the trophy for chutzpah.

    The Religious Right, which is neither religious nor right – DISCUSS! – is basically trying to infiltrate women’s health care and then refuse to provide women’s health care, so if you have the misfortune of being a woman, instead of a regular person, and you go to your women’s health care provider, your women’s health care provider can say, “Sorry, lady, I can’t actually give you women’s health care because of my religious beliefs. Here, have a lollipop and an unwanted pregnancy.”

    It is impossible to (legally!!) blockquote more of this but please do yourself a favor and click on her link. And as she says at the end of the post: Follow me on Twitter, or I will sue you.

  3. JanF

    Nuclear Negotiations With Iran Extended 4 Months

    Iran, the United States and five other countries have agreed to a four-month extension on negotiations toward a nuclear deal with Tehran.

    The negotiations had a deadline of July 20. Secretary of State John Kerry released a statement Friday saying that, two days shy of the deadline, there are still “very real gaps on issues such as enrichment capacity at the Natanz enrichment facility.” As a result, all seven nations involved have agreed that talks will continue in Vienna until Nov. 24. […]

    Under the terms of the extension, Kerry’s statement said, Iran will convert all its 20 percent-enriched uranium reserves into fuel – a step further than the terms of the original negotiation, which called for only half those reserves to be converted, and the other half diluted

  4. JanF

    Drug Sentencing Guidelines Reduced For Current Prisoners

    The U.S. Sentencing Commission on Friday voted unanimously to reduce terms for drug traffickers already in prison.

    More than 46,000 drug offenders will be eligible for early release, unless Congress makes a move to stop the plan by Nov. 1.

    On average, sentences could be reduced by more than two years

    The Sentencing Commission expanded the eligibility beyond what the Justice Department wanted, saying  “We do not believe that the date a sentence was imposed should dictate the length of imprisonment.”

    The Justice Department has sought more leniency for some non-violent drug offenders in hopes of reducing sentencing disparities dating from the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.

    The department, however, preferred a more limited approach than the Sentencing Commission has taken, arguing that only lower-level, nonviolent drug offenders without significant criminal histories should be eligible. That would have reduced the number of inmates who could petition for early release to about 20,000.

    But the commission voted to make the it adopted in April for most drug traffickers fully retroactive.

  5. Portlaw

    the crash site of the downed airliner is in chaos.  Many bodies of the murdered humans are still in the fields in summer heat. Can’t imagine how their families are feeling. Agony upon agony

    A burly gunman who called himself Grumpy stepped into the road as a convoy of international observers snaked along the bumpy country road to the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.

    “I will let none of you pass! I have an order!” he shouted. Motley gunmen in ragtag uniforms flanked out alongside him. A lanky rebel in a beekeeping suit who reeked of alcohol folded his automatic rifle in his arms

    .

    Determining what exactly downed the plane from 33,000 feet up in the air looks all the more difficult. Independent investigators were nowhere to be seen. Ragtag militiamen with no obvious leadership barred observers and reporters from the field. The plane’s black boxes have vanished. Ukraine claims rebels are forcing rescuers to hand over all evidence with the intention of transferring it to Russia, which has blamed Kiev for the disaster. The rebels claim not to have found them.

    http://www.buzzfeed.com/maxsed…

  6. Portlaw


    MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) – Boko Haram extremists have killed more than 100 people and hoisted their black and white flag over a town left undefended by Nigeria’s military, just 85 kilometers (53 miles) from the northeastern state capital of Maiduguri, a civil defense spokesman and a human rights advocate said Saturday.

    Hundreds of villagers in another northeast area, Askira Uba, are fleeing after receiving letters from the Islamic extremists threatening to attack and take over their areas, spokesman Abbas Gava of the Nigerian Vigilante Group said.

    “Nine major villages are on the run,” he said.

    Survivors said Saturday that insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades and lobbed homemade bombs into homes, and then gunned down people as they tried to escape the fires in the attack on Damboa town launched before dawn Friday. Most of the town has burned down, they said.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

  7. Diana in NoVa

    and after many years of listening to this argument, I’m not sure that I believe “retraining workers” will lead to the workers’ being able to get good jobs.

    There are plenty of fully trained workers who could perform jobs competently but who have committed the cardinal sin of being over age 50. Oops! Older workers make more money than fresh-out-of-college workers, so corporations, growing more and more evil, decide to ax the older ones.

    In this benighted country, if you lose your job after you’re 50, you’re s**t out of luck finding a comparable job, even for lower pay.

    I’ve warned my son, now in his mid-40s, that one day he will find himself hanging out a “consultant” shingle because no one will hire an over-50 worker. He knows that and is taking precautions. My younger son, who will turn 40 next year, is already looking for an avocation that may  lead to a new career in case he loses his job.

    In the old days, if one lost a job, one was never out of work for more than a couple of weeks–or perhaps a month. Not so nowadays. In many ways, life today sucks. Employee benefits seem to be disappearing completely.

  8. Portlaw

    Latest is the

    Associated Press= HRABOVE, Ukraine (AP) — Armed rebels forced emergency workers to hand over all 196 bodies recovered from the Malaysia Airlines crash site and had them loaded Sunday onto refrigerated train cars bound for a rebel-held city, Ukrainian officials and monitors said.

    The surprising, rapid-fire developments Sunday morning came after a wave of international outrage over how the bodies of plane crash victims were being handled and amid fears that the armed rebels who control the territory where the plane came down could be tampering with the evidence.

    http://www.theguardian.com/wor…

    Am not sure what this really means but it doesn’t sound good.

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