CNN Catches Kaine in Misstatement on Equal Pay
February 18, 2010
by The New Agenda
|DNC Chair Tim Kaine was caught telling a bit of a tall tale yesterday morning on CNN’s America Newsroom.
CNN’s Jim Dexter caught Kaine red-handed in a CNN Fact Check. What Kaine said:
…the administration’s accomplishments include “equal pay for women, something that has been dreamed about for generations, it’s been passed and signed by this president.” A spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee tells CNN that Kaine was referring to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, signed into law by President Barack Obama on January 29, 2009.
And now, the facts:
Can the Obama administration take credit for equal pay for women?
– President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963. According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “the Equal Pay Act requires that men and women in the same workplace be given equal pay for equal work.”
– Despite that 47-year-old law, critics — including the labor organization AFL-CIO — have argued that “women are still paid less, even with similar education, skills and experience.” The U.S. Census Bureau says that as of 2007, full-time working women earned just 77.5 cents for every $1 earned by men.
– The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, officially Public Law 111-2, is named after an Alabama woman who filed a pay discrimination suit against her longtime employer, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Ledbetter, saying she should have filed her suit within 180 days of the date the pay discrimination began. Democrats argued that the ruling reversed a long-standing interpretation of existing law. They called the Lilly Ledbetter Act “a narrow fix” to “restore prior law.”
– Obama acknowledged that the Ledbetter Act was narrow in scope. In an April 28, 2009, “Equal Pay Day” proclamation, the president declared, “The first bill I signed into law as president, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, allows more women to challenge pay discrimination by extending the timeline within which complaints can be filed. This law advances the struggle for equal pay, but it is only an initial step.”
Bottom Line: The Lilly Ledbetter Act, signed into law by President Obama last year, makes it easier to file pay-discrimination suits. But it was only a limited step in a long-running effort to raise women’s pay.
Nice try Kaine! Yet another example of how little President Obama has actually done for women during his presidency. And if the DNC Chair doesn’t even understand one of the most important women’s issues, then there is little chance of making any progress on the Paycheck Fairness Act under the current regime!
Obama and his team are masters of deception. They take advantage of the fact that so many Americans are dreadfully uninformed about legislation congress has or is trying to pass. They sell complicated bills to the public in vague terms and the public buys into the concept of “health care reform,” “employee free trade act” etc. without having a clue as to what is actually in the thousands of pages of legislation. Most Obama supporters have no clue as to what the three major bills Obama is pushing actually say. Perhaps this is why the Tea Party movement is so disturbing to the Obama administration. For the first time that I can remember, Americans are paying attention to the devil in the details. They refused to be fooled or lead to believe that a bill that simply extends a statute is an equal pay bill.
Too bad president Obama. Americans can read, some of them much better than you can read a telepromter.
Oh, don’t we know that to be true!
After all, it was Obama, the Senator, who was only paying the women in his office .76 on every dollar earned by the male counterparts in his office. And it was John McCain who was paying the women $1.04 to every male counterpart in his office.
Funny how reality, facts and WALKING THE TALKING and not constant LYING just stand out.
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