Labor & Employment Law

Halter Falls Short in Arkansas; Billionaire Whitman Buys California Win

By Mike Hall

In the Arkansas Democratic Senate primary runoff yesterday, working families came within a few thousand votes of unseating a two-term incumbent. Meanwhile, in California, this fall’s governor’s race will pit Main Street vs. Wall Street following yesterday’s primary elections.

With the backing of Arkansas unions and working families, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter ran “a courageous campaign,” against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Halter forced the runoff last month before coming up short yesterday. Trumka praised Halter for:

Taking a two-term incumbent in deep red Arkansas into a runoff, and coming within a few thousand votes of her, is a virtually unprecedented achievement. If working families were able to accomplish this in Arkansas, imagine what they can achieve in other states.

It is also now abundantly clear to all politicians that if they want to get the support of working families on Election Day, they are going to need to fight for their issues every day.

Bill Halter stood up and fought for working families on jobs, trade and holding Wall Street accountable.

Arkansas working families did score several victories yesterday, winning the majority of races across the state in which the Arkansas AFL-CIO had endorsed a candidate.

Yesterday, billionaire CEO Meg Whitman won California’s Republican gubernatorial primary “after months of obscene campaign spending,” says Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Federation of Labor.

In the race for Sacramento against Attorney General Jerry Brown (D), Whitman will now “use her seemingly unlimited fortune to try to stage a hostile takeover of our state.”

She’s made clear that, if elected, she plans to bring a Wall Street agenda to California. What that means for working families is more massive tax giveaways for corporations and the wealthy and wholesale cuts to education, public safety and programs that our state’s most vulnerable rely upon.

Pulaski says the contrast between the candidates “couldn’t be starker.”

Jerry Brown shares the Main Street values that built this state’s economy into a global powerhouse and expanded our middle class. Brown has a spent a lifetime fighting for working families. He presided over the creation of nearly 2 million jobs as governor. He fought the exploitation of workers by large corporations as attorney general.

Read Pulaski’s full statement here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on June 09, 2010 (boomark / email).