Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Remember the line from the iconic movie, Dirty Dancing – “nobody puts baby in a corner”? That basically sums up the President’s game plan for 2014 that he will unveil tonight in his State of the Union address.
The key elements of the plan have been leaking over the past two days. Yesterday at a White House press briefing, in answer to a question about the State of the Union speech, Press Secretary Jay Carney said:
“I think restoring security and economic vitality to the middle class is a very ambitious goal. Restoring opportunity for all and expanding opportunity for all, those are very ambitious goals. And those are the goals the President has identified…mindful of Congress’s reluctance to be cooperative at times, the President is going to exercise his authority. He’s going to use his pen and his phone…And it would be the wrong thing to do for this President or any President to judge the progress we make as a nation, in Washington — both in Washington and beyond, only by the number of bills we get passed through Congress, because the opportunity for advancing the agenda that the President has through other means is broad and deep, and he’ll explore it.” (The italic emphasis on pen and phone and broad and deep is our own.)
Today, the President has fired his first salvo to show the obstructionists in Congress that his pen can sometimes be just as mighty, and a lot faster, than legislation. The White House released news this morning that the President will sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers on new contracts to $10.10 per hour from the current $7.25. According to the announcement, the raise will affect a broad range of workers from janitors to construction workers to “military base workers who wash dishes, serve food and do laundry.”
White House Graph Showing Middle Class Jobs Created from Infrastructure Investment
The President is also expected to speak tonight about the country’s infrastructure and how investment in building new bridges, roads and schools leads to improved job opportunities for the middle class. In an email sent out to the press highlighting the fact that graphs will be available to buttress points being made by the President in tonight’s speech, one graph illustrated that 90 percent of the jobs created from infrastructure investment go to the middle class, as opposed to, let’s say, the millionaire owners of the companies contracted to do the work.
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