Targeting What's Important

Citizens for Economic Opportunity has four mains areas of focus:

Health Care Reform

CEO has worked vigilantly on both state and federal health care reform.  The coalition working on health care reform in CT is known as healthcare4every1 and the coalition working on federal reform is known as Health Care for America Now (HCAN).  Both have had major legislative victories recently – healthcare4every1 helped pass SustiNet in July 2009 and HCAN helped pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010.  The fight is not over (at least in CT) for health care reform efforts as we continue to push into the 2011 legislative session.

Corporate Responsibility

Corporate responsibility is one of the biggest issues CEO has worked on since our inception in 1995.  We continually are on the lookout for ways to increase transparency and accountability among corporations, and to ensure workers are being treated fairly.  Some ways in which we do this are through working on corporate tax and disclosure issues, fighting for executive pay legislation, maintaining a merger watch and monitoring activities of behemoths such as Wal-Mart.

Economic Development & Job Growth

Our work on Corporate Responsibility goes hand in hand with our work on Economic Development and Job Growth.  During the 2010 legislative session, CEO worked on a bill to bring green jobs to the state.  Aside from helping to preserve and restore a high level of environmental quality, we would be creating jobs in a young and growing industry that will help CT during the recession.  CEO is also a strong supporter of labor unions.  We want to ensure that jobs being created in CT have representation and are high quality in terms of pay and benefits.

State Budget

Since 2008, CEO decided to start taking on state budget issues in the wake of our crippling recession and increasing budget deficits.  Essentially, we are fighting to ensure that the burden of resolving our state deficit is not put on the backs of the middle class and working people.  CEO is an active member of Better Choices for Connecticut, which is a community coalition working to help Connecticut make smarter choices on ways to improve the state’s imbalanced revenue system.