The President’s Weekly Address post is also the Weekend 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 underscores the importance of ensuring equal pay for equal work and highlights the steps his Administration has taken to expand opportunity and narrow the pay gap that exists between men and women.
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 linkhere]
blurb from blog
The President’s Weekly Address post is also the Weekend Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.
In this week’s address, the President highlighted the important differences between the budget he’s put forward – built on opportunity for all – and the budget House Republicans are advocating for, which stacks the deck against the middle class.
While the President is focused on building lasting economic security and ensuring that hard-working Americans have the opportunity to get ahead, Republicans are advancing the same old top-down approach of cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans and slashing important investments in education, infrastructure, and research and development.
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From the White House – Weekly Address
In this week’s address, Vice President Biden discusses the importance of raising the federal minimum wage. It’s good for workers, it’s good for business, and it would help close the gender pay gap, as women make up more than half of the workers who stand to benefit from a raise. And as the Vice President highlights, Congress should boost the federal minimum wage because it is what a majority of the American people want.
President Obama spoke to the youth of Europe at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Belgium.
President Barack Obama:
Your Majesties, Mr. Prime Minister, and the people of Belgium — on behalf of the American people, we are grateful for your friendship. We stand together as inseparable allies, and I thank you for your wonderful hospitality. I have to admit it is easy to love a country famous for chocolate and beer. […]Throughout human history, societies have grappled with fundamental questions of how to organize themselves, the proper relationship between the individual and the state, the best means to resolve inevitable conflicts between states. And it was here in Europe, through centuries of struggle — through war and Enlightenment, repression and revolution — that a particular set of ideals began to emerge: The belief that through conscience and free will, each of us has the right to live as we choose. The belief that power is derived from the consent of the governed, and that laws and institutions should be established to protect that understanding. And those ideas eventually inspired a band of colonialists across an ocean, and they wrote them into the founding documents that still guide America today, including the simple truth that all men — and women — are created equal.[…]
So I come here today to insist that we must never take for granted the progress that has been won here in Europe and advanced around the world, because the contest of ideas continues for your generation. […]
There will always be voices who say that what happens in the wider world is not our concern, nor our responsibility. But we must never forget that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. Our democracy, our individual opportunity only exists because those who came before us had the wisdom and the courage to recognize that our ideals will only endure if we see our self-interest in the success of other peoples and other nations. […]
To be honest, if we defined our interests narrowly, if we applied a cold-hearted calculus, we might decide to look the other way. Our economy is not deeply integrated with Ukraine’s. Our people and our homeland face no direct threat from the invasion of Crimea. Our own borders are not threatened by Russia’s annexation. But that kind of casual indifference would ignore the lessons that are written in the cemeteries of this continent. It would allow the old way of doing things to regain a foothold in this young century. And that message would be heard not just in Europe, but in Asia and the Americas, in Africa and the Middle East. […]
In the end, the success of our ideals comes down to us — including the example of our own lives, our own societies. We know that there will always be intolerance. But instead of fearing the immigrant, we can welcome him. We can insist on policies that benefit the many, not just the few; that an age of globalization and dizzying change opens the door of opportunity to the marginalized, and not just a privileged few.
Full transcript below the fold …
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From the White House – Weekly Address
In this week’s address, President Obama highlights the importance of making sure our economy rewards the hard work of every American – including America’s women.
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From the White House – Weekly Address
In this week’s address, President Obama highlighted the action he took this week to reward hard work by strengthening overtime pay protections. As part of this year of action, the President has ordered the Secretary of Labor to modernize our country’s overtime rules to ensure that millions of American workers are paid a fair wage for a hard day’s work.
While our economy is moving forward, the middle class and those fighting to get into it are still struggling and too many Americans are working harder than ever just to keep up, let alone get ahead. So, in consultation with workers and business, the Obama administration will update and simplify the rules to reward hard work and responsibility.
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From the White House – Weekly Address
In this week’s address, President Obama highlighted the momentum building across the country to give Americans a raise and reiterated his call for Congress to increase the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10. The President has already signed an executive order to raise the minimum wage for people working under new federal contracts. Companies large and small are choosing to give workers a raise because they know it’s good business. And Governors across the country are answering the President’s call by working to raise their states’ minimum wages. Now, it’s time for Congress to get the job done and restore opportunity for all Americans by raising the minimum wage to “ten-ten.”
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From the White House – Weekly Address
In his weekly address, President Obama said he took action this week to launch new manufacturing hubs and expand a competition to fund transformative infrastructure projects. Both are policies aimed at expanding economic opportunity for all by creating jobs and ensuring the long-term strength of the American economy. Congress can boost this effort by passing a bipartisan proposal to create a nationwide network of high-tech manufacturing hubs and taking steps to invest in our nation’s infrastructure – rebuilding our transportation system, creating new construction jobs, and better connecting Americans to economic opportunities.
The President’s Weekly Address post is also the Weekend Open News Thread. Feel free to share other news stories in the comment threads.
From the White House – Weekly Address
In this week’s address, President Obama says this is a year of action, and he will do everything he can to restore opportunity for all. The President already lifted the wages for federal contract workers, and he calls on the American people to tell Congress to finish the job by boosting the federal minimum wage for all workers to $10.10 and give America a raise.