bapifar01: House progressives take jobs issue on the road

Thursday, 16 June 2011

House progressives take jobs issue on the road

The House Progressive Caucus has started their summer "listening tour," introducing it with this video:

They are diving into the jobs issue in an "attempt to push the focus away from spending reduction and toward using government resources to create jobs."

"The media and the right wing and, of course, some Democrats have been talking about intangibles like the debt ceiling or the job picture," Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) told TPM in an interview previewing the announcement. "We wanted to do a tour that really talks about what matters to people."
To Grijalva and the CPC that means discussing a government that makes "a commitment to the middle class" and pushes for an economic package that focuses on middle and working class people?"not just the wealthy and not just the CEOs," Grijalva said....

That's the kind of government Americans want, Grijalva said. He faulted the White House and other Democrats for veering away from the kind of solutions the CPC intends to highlight on the tour and driving the national agenda headlong into the Republican-friendly territory of tax decreases and spending cuts.

"I think it comes from being timid," he said. "It really does. Part of job creation, historically how we've gotten the economy back on its feet is that the federal government stepped in and supplemented job creation...and here we're sitting around, still talking about the possibility of job creation in some amorphous way."

Tuesday, members of the CPC will kickoff the tour with press conference on Capitol Hill. The first stop on the tour will come at the annual Netroots Nation conference this weekend in Minneapolis. Future stops will take the tour to major cities spanning the country, from New York to Detroit to Oakland, CA.

Tapping in to the frustrations of American workers and the middle class people that the CPC focused on with their People's Budget is, needless to say, critical to Dems. More critical is actually acting on jobs, so hopefully the work of the CPC can actually percolate up to that action.