The plan, also backed by MoveOn.org and the Center for Community Change, is to confront lawmakers with the people whom the Great Recession has trashed, and force action on job creation legislation.
“We decided to take back the Capitol. We want them to stare the unemployed workers in the face” during the event, scheduled for Dec. 6-9, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry told a telephone press conference. “We’ll set up a people’s camp.”
Tentative plans call for tents representing jobless workers from each state, with the number of unemployed listed on a sign, news reports said. Particular targets would be congressional Republicans, whose Senate filibusters and House opposition have killed job-creation legislation so far this year.
“Occupy Congress” would be the third “Occupy” camp in the Nation’s Capitol, but the first to focus on jobs as the #1 issue. The others, starting with Occupy Wall Street, focus on yawning income inequality – “We are the 99%” campers chant – and opposition to subsidies to Wall Street, not Main Street, and rampant corporate clout.
Occupy Congress will focus on the demands of the 99%, Henry and others said in the telephone press conference. Prominent among them, she said, is passage of legislation that advocates say could put the jobless back to work by January.
The legislation includes measures to rebuild crumbling infrastructure and to tax financial trading to help provide money to pay for fixing the employment damage the financiers caused when they drove the U.S. into the Great Recession.
It also includes “protecting middle class wages through a rise in the minimum wage and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act” according to a fact sheet distributed by the Center for American Progress, which hosted the press conference, and which issued “The 9 Demands of the 99%” just before Thanksgiving.
This article was written by Press Associates, Inc., news service.
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The plan, also backed by MoveOn.org and the Center for Community Change, is to confront lawmakers with the people whom the Great Recession has trashed, and force action on job creation legislation.
“We decided to take back the Capitol. We want them to stare the unemployed workers in the face” during the event, scheduled for Dec. 6-9, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry told a telephone press conference. “We’ll set up a people’s camp.”
Tentative plans call for tents representing jobless workers from each state, with the number of unemployed listed on a sign, news reports said. Particular targets would be congressional Republicans, whose Senate filibusters and House opposition have killed job-creation legislation so far this year.
“Occupy Congress” would be the third “Occupy” camp in the Nation’s Capitol, but the first to focus on jobs as the #1 issue. The others, starting with Occupy Wall Street, focus on yawning income inequality – “We are the 99%” campers chant – and opposition to subsidies to Wall Street, not Main Street, and rampant corporate clout.
Occupy Congress will focus on the demands of the 99%, Henry and others said in the telephone press conference. Prominent among them, she said, is passage of legislation that advocates say could put the jobless back to work by January.
The legislation includes measures to rebuild crumbling infrastructure and to tax financial trading to help provide money to pay for fixing the employment damage the financiers caused when they drove the U.S. into the Great Recession.
It also includes “protecting middle class wages through a rise in the minimum wage and passage of the Employee Free Choice Act” according to a fact sheet distributed by the Center for American Progress, which hosted the press conference, and which issued “The 9 Demands of the 99%” just before Thanksgiving.
This article was written by Press Associates, Inc., news service.