WIN Week In Review November 23-25, 2007
By Doug Cunningham
Catholic Charities’ Candy Hill says her group has launched a campaign to cut poverty in half by 2020.
[Hill]: “What we see happening in our agencies are more and more people, particularly working people, who are coming to our doors. And they’re hungry and they don’t have places to live or they need utility assistance. And it’s more than we’ve seen in many, many years in our agencies.”
As a country, Hill says, we’ve made economic policy choices that have created an entire class of poor working families. Hill says it’s both a crisis and a moral failure of government, and the fault doesn’t lie only with the Bush administration.
[Hill 2]: “The Congress has an opportunity even when the President picks up that veto pen to have the political will to actually override the veto. And they haven’t demonstrated the leadership that they need to demonstrate on behalf of poor people in this country, either. We have a crisis in our country and it’s not being addressed by anybody.
---
Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards has often vowed during speeches and debates that as President he will march picket lines alongside workers. Last Friday he gave a sneak peak into what that could look like as he stood side by side with striking screenwriters in Hollywood. Jesse Russell reports:
Striking Hollywood screenwriters represented by the Writers Guild of America-West found a new ally marching with them as they picketed in front of NBC Universal: former Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate, John Edwards. Edwards reiterated his campaign message that if elected he will stand in solidarity with workers as they fight for what they need to live the America dream, but on Friday he expanded that platform, suggesting that there also needs to be oversight of the vast consolidation of media into the hands of only a few:
[Edwards]: "One of the things that we have a big problem with in America is the consolidation of the media. We need to make sure that diverse voices are being heard and we don’t have that kind of consolidation. That is a big part of the problem."
---
WakeUpWalMart.com has kicked off its annual Hope For The Holidays campaign asking shoppers to think twice about the safety of the products they buy at Wal-Mart. The $1.5 milllion campaign includes radio ads and protests around the country. WakeUpWalMart.com’s Meghan Scott.
[Scott]: “We’ll have about 75 candle light vigils in cities and towns outside of Wal-Marts all over with religious and community leaders_calling on Wal-Mart to step up and take responsibility. As the world’s largest retailer they really do have a unique ability to set the bar, whether it’s wages, whether it’s health care, whether it’s product safety. And we would just ask them to take that responsibility a little more seriously.”
---
Broadway producers are trying to cut jobs from IATSE Local One and its costing tens of millions of dollars as the stagehands' strike continues. Union spokesman Bruce Cohen.
[Cohen]: “They really think that they can pay less for stage labor than they have in the past. And you really just can’t have a middle class life in the metropolitan area and then find that your employer wants to cut in the neighborhood of 38 percent from your work.”
