Obama Says ‘Made in America’ at Heart of U.S. Recovery - Wednesday, August 04, 2010

President Obama spoke today at the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting. Seated (from left): AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker.

President Obama today told the AFL-CIO Executive Council, “We are going to keep fighting for an economy that works for everybody, not just a privileged few.” He also said that with the help of working families and their unions,

we are going to rebuild our economy stronger than before, and at the heart of it will be three simple words: made in America.

Speaking on his 49th birthday at the Washington (D.C) Convention Center, the president told the council that this fall’s election is a choice between

polices that encourage job creation here in America or encourage jobs to go elsewhere…The choice is whether we want to go forward or we want to go backwards to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

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He spoke about the need to invest in clean technology, like solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear plants, clean coal and new car batteries.

Instead of giving tax breaks to corporations that want to ship jobs overseas, we want to give tax breaks to companies that are investing right here in the United States of America.

Obama said that after nearly a decade of failed economic policies that “drove America’s economy into a ditch….We’re on the right track.”

Instead of losing millions of jobs, we have created jobs for six straight months in the private sector.  Instead of an economy that is contracting, we’ve got an economy that is expanding.  So the last thing we would want to do is go back to what we were doing before.

Responding to a question from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Obama said “We are going to keep fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act.” Recalling Franklin D. Roosevelt’s comment that if he were a factory worker, he’d join a union, Obama said:.

Well, I tell you what.  I think that’s true for workers generally.  I think if I was a coal miner, I’d want a union representing me to make sure that I was safe and you did not have some of the tragedies that we’ve been seeing in the coal industry.  If I was a teacher, I’d want a union to make sure that the teachers’ perspective was represented as we think about shaping an education system for our future.