Obama: Made-in-America Jobs

President-elect Barack Obama today laid out some of the details of his economic recovery plan. While the current President focuses on giving the Medal of Freedom to the leader of a country that has the highest number of trade union murders in the world and on spending nearly $600,000 on new china for the White House days before leaving office, Obama is moving to clean up the Bush economic mess. Giving the Democratic radio address this morning, Obama said:

Our first job is to put people back to work and get our economy working again. This is an extraordinary challenge.

Obama said his plan was in part crafted by economist Jared Bernstein, an ally of the labor movement at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and now economic advisor to Vice President-elect Joe Biden.

We’ll create nearly half a million jobs by investing in clean energy–by committing to double the production of alternative energy in the next three years, and by modernizing more than 75 percent of federal buildings and improving the energy efficiency of two million American homes. These made-in-America jobs building solar panels and wind turbines, developing fuel-efficient cars and new energy technologies pay well, and they can’t be outsourced.

“Made-in-America jobs.” What sweet words after eight years of an administration bent on giving endless corporate incentives to move U.S. jobs overseas. Here’s more from Obama’s radio address:

• Put nearly 400,000 people to work by repairing our infrastructure–our crumbling roads, bridges and schools.
• Build the new infrastructure we need to succeed in this century, investing in science and technology, and laying down miles of new broadband lines so that businesses across our nation can compete with their counterparts around the world.
• Work to achieve bipartisan extensions of unemployment insurance and health care coverage; a $1,000 tax cut for 95 percent of working families; and assistance to help states avoid harmful budget cuts in essential services like police, fire, education and health care.

-- Yula Connell, AFL-CIO Now Blog