Days Before the Elections, Bush Announces New Job Training Program

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/10/27/days-before-the-elections-bush-announces-new-job-training-program/

Days Before the Elections, Bush Announces New Job Training Program

by Mike Hall, Oct 27, 2006

After years of cutting job training funds and promoting trade deals that kill U.S. jobs, yesterday, with great fanfare, and just a little more than a week before an election where job security is a top issue on voters’ minds, the Bush administration announced a new eight-state job training initiative.

Several of the states, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, are battleground states where Bush-backed candidates are in trouble. The announcement also came the same day President Bush was campaigning in Michigan—heart of the auto industry and home to thousands of laid-off industry workers.

Just a coincidence, right?

But, at best, by the U.S. Department of Labor’s own estimates, the new so-called Career Advancement Accounts (CAAs) will reach just 500 people in each of the eight states that have agreed to participate in the program, and those states have agreed to foot half of the bill.

In the five hotly contested battleground states, the new program will reach just 2,500 workers, but those states have seen more than 195,000 jobs disappear just due to NAFTA. The job losses, according to the AFL-CIO’s Facts and Stats website, are: Michigan, 63,148; Minnesota, 19,278; Missouri, 18,566; Pennsylvania, 44,173; and Ohio, 49,866.

Labor Secretary Elaine Chao touted the program as an “empowerment” experience for workers. While jobless workers are more concerned about finding their next job, Chao really said the following about the CAA program. (We are not making this up.)

Workers are empowered to take control of their own training experience.

Most likely though, workers would rather be empowered to pay the overdue mortgage or next car payment.

FULL story at link above.

[MichiganVote]

1. Yeah, thanks for the crumb *. We'll be sure to eat it and call it a meal

[applegrove]

2. lipstick on a pig.

[LiberalEsto]

3. What are they being trained FOR?

To clean house for all the Indian computer people who are here on H1-B visas, taking away American's jobs, perchance?

[partylessinOhio]

4. What about the rest of the states? Are they chopped liver?

Training to be wallbuilders?

Voters won't be impressed.

[Applepie]

5. Michigan is hurting

It is so bad here, I can't see how we are ever going to recover. I get more depressed each day. I know that I Will have to cut out cable very soon. I am not happy about it because I don't know where I will get the real news without DU and KO. If DeVos wins it will be the last straw for me. I will have to find a different state to call home.

[acmejack]

6. Everyone his initiatives are window dressing.

Desperation politics, nothing more. They are meant to do nothing to promote the public welfare.

[madrchsod]

7. big deal.....

same shit i heard in 1979,1987,and the early nineties. what an insult to the american worker