Americans are sending a message to Congress: Focus on creating jobs and don’t cut spending on Medicare or Social Security and don’t shut down the federal government.

Today’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Medicare was billed as an examination of how the health care reform law will impact the 45-year-old program that provides health care coverage for nearly 40 million seniors.

Barbara J. Easterling is president of the Alliance for Retired Americans. She was previously the secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America. For more information, visit www.retiredamericans.org or
call 1-800-333-7212.

I believe there are two issues retirees should pay attention to in 2011.

More than 1,000 activists, including members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU), AFSCME, Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and Common Cause, helped shine a big spotlight on a closed-door gathering of right-wing billionaires and extreme conservative leaders and politicians in Palm Springs, Calif., yesterday.

If new House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) gets everything on his budget-cutting wish list, it would be, says a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI):

a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to wealthy Americans and corporations and a wholesale dismantling of the social programs that all Americans rely on, including Medicare and Social Security.

The debate about America’s future “begins and ends concretely with the question of jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this morning in a speech outlining a working families’ vision for the nation.

Children working in factories, picking crops and hauling lumber on construction sites is a vision Mike Lee, the Republican senator from Utah, apparently wants to make a reality again in the United States. In a lecture on his YouTube channel, Lee explains in great detail why he believes U.S. child labor laws are unconstitutional.