American Jobs Act Dies in Senate Vote, L.A. to March & Rally

Photo by David Freid via the LAist Featured Photos pool

The U.S. Senate voted against the American Jobs Act on Tuesday evening, and as promised, Good Jobs LA is unleashing more aggressive actions against Corporate America today. The coalition of community members and organizations, whose mission is to hold corporations accountable for fixing the economy and foster investments in struggling communities to create jobs, feels that the Senate "stood for corporate greed over desperately needed good jobs," per today's release.

On Monday, Good Jobs LA joined forces with Occupy L.A. activists, residents from struggling L.A. communities, unemployed workers, community groups, clergy and labor organizations in a candlelight vigil to pray that corporate greed would not kill good jobs. Per yesterday's Senate vote, it did.

According to the American Jobs Act website, the purpose of the act was simple: put more people back to work and put more money in the pockets of working Americans - without adding a dime to the deficit. The Act would save or create 125,400 California jobs, including 51,500 jobs building CA roads, highways, bridges and mass-transit, 37,300 jobs preventing layoffs of CA teachers, police and firefighters plus 36,600 jobs fixing CA's crumbling schools. President Obama prepared for the worst and said prior to Tuesday's vote, "If they don’t pass the whole package, we’re going to break it up into different parts," reports Politic365.

Today the same activists who participated in Monday's candlelight vigil will march and rally against the greed that killed the Act. Participants will meet at the corner of Broadway and Aliso Street at 12pm then march to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in DTLA.

Armed with signs, banners, noisemakers and hope, protestors will continue to call on Congress to tax corporations, those of which are sitting on $2 trillion in cash but failing to invest in jobs.

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By Lauren Lloyd in News on October 12, 2011 10:00 AM 0 Comments

Comments [rss]

steve001968

Yeah, we are closing on 15 Trillion in debt. Now that the 447 boondoggle has totally failed to garner even complete democrat support, Obama is trying to get little boondoggles through by spending billions more that we don't have on public sector jobs that we can do without. The purpose of government is govern as cheaply and efficiently as possible NOT to provide people with government jobs.

steve001968

The purpose of this act is to save Obama's job and spend another 447 Billion we don't have and that's about it. Obama couldn't even get his full senate majority behind a cloture vote that everyone knew would fail and Joe Manchin, Jim Webb and Joe Lieberman who voted for cloture said they would vote against the underlying bill if it were brought to a vote. The result, the bill would have failed because even democrats would not unite in support of it.

Guest

I have no problem with the actions in this proposed Act, in fact, I would fully endorse it, if the economy wasn't in such bad shape right now. The proposed spending for this bill is 10 billion dollars, dollars we can't afford to spend.

James Bean

Oh I know! I mean why should we spend money on human needs, jobs, education etc. when we can spend it killing people in foreign countries.

http://costofwar.com/en/

steve001968

I hate to break the bad news to you but killing people in foreign countries creates jobs in the defense sector. w/o the war the economy you are whining about would be worse than it is.

Guest

Plus, the government shouldn't be the one creating jobs, that's what capitalism is all about. People create businesses that create jobs, and if you weren't aware that's still going on all throughout America today no matter how badly the shape of the economy is.

Guest

Yeah, sorry, war is bad. War is bad. I've heard your liberal mantra a million times. The fact is, that war was voted for by Congress and has served a purpose so show the terrorists that they can't mess with us. But you know, terrible. We should just let them come get us.