When a friend has news to deliver to another, most use the method of giving the good news first to soften the blow of the bad news.  According to some, Kentuckians were given the bad news first Election night, when Republican Dr. Rand Paul was announced as Kentucky’s elected U.S. Senator.

Dr. Paul faces great scrutiny about his opinion of minorities and their civil rights and “bashing” the unemployed.  This summer during the debate over the extension of unemployment benefits, Lexington radio station WVLK-AM reported that Paul said:

It’s time for America’s unemployed to face facts and stop holding out for jobs similar to the ones they’ve lost…  As bad as it sounds, ultimately we do have to sometimes accept a wage that’s less than we had at our previous job in order to get back to work and allow the economy to get started again.  Nobody likes that, but it may be one of the tough love things that has to happen.

On Dr. Paul’s election website, he selects 16 issues to comment on and not one of them was about jobs

Continue reading Rand Paul wins in Kentucky, but Yarmuth and Fischer Also Prevail

Kentucky Jobs with Justice will be joining more than 10 other social justice organizations on two charter buses to Detroit to take part in the US Social Forum.  Here is a snippet from the USSF Web site:

The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF   is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sector, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.

The USSF provides spaces to learn from each other’s experiences and struggles, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, build relationships, and align with our international brothers and sisters to strategize how to reclaim our world.

The first US Social Forum was held in Atlanta in 2007 with KY JwJ taking over 40 delegates.  KY JwJ hosted the first Kentucky Social Forum in 2009

Continue reading Kentucky Jobs with Justice is Taking 100 Activists to the USSF in Detroit!