American Anger v. American Hatred: Another Labor Speech

Hello there, The Blamers. All quiet on the Western Front, I see. They ain't no shows and they ain't no congress in session for damn near just as long. So what've we all got to talk about up in here? Well, Justice John Paul from Chicago, the liberal lion of the SCOTUS, is retiring and we'll have to discuss that soon. But now's not the time. Practice sounds good lately on account of our new good ol' boy drummer from Bourbon country. But none of y'all care about no practice seein as how that don't bring home the proverbial bacon.

Reckon now sounds like a good time for our monthly news from the world of Organized Labor. I know y'all are excited, especially Pat since he's become the biggest fan of Studs Terkel this side of Sedwick Street.



I just read this Richard Trumka speech, which he delivered at Harvard a couple days ago. Trumka is the president of the AFL-CIO and his speeches are usually pretty bad ass and always rife with the kind of economic common sense us progressives gulp down like Jay at the Secret West Side Sake Emporium of Chicago.

Since the attention span of the average citizen of Blamers Nation is about as short as God's temper in Deuteronomy, I will here supply an abridged version of the speech. (The full thing can be found at this here link.)

I am going to talk tonight about anger—and specifically the anger of working people. I want to explain why working people are right to be mad about what has happened to our economy and our country, and then I want to talk about why there is a difference between anger and hatred. There are forces in our country that are working hard to convert justifiable anger about an economy that only seems to work for a few of us into racist and homophobic hate and violence directed at our President and heroes like Congressman John Lewis. Most of all, those forces of hate seek to divide working people – to turn our anger against each other.

The fact is that for a generation we have built our economy on a lie—that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.

So now a lot of Americans are angry. And we should be angry. And just as we have seen throughout history, there are plenty of purveyors of hate and division looking to profit from our hurt and our anger.

I am a student of history, and now is the time to remember our history as a nation. Remember that when President Franklin Roosevelt said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," other voices were on the radio, voices saying that what we really needed to fear was each other – voices preaching anti-Semitism and Nazi-style racial hatred.

But in the United States, we chose to turn away from the voices of hatred at those critical moments in the twentieth century. In much of Europe, racial hatred and political violence prevailed in response to the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. And in the end, we had to rescue those countries from fascism-- from the horrible consequences of the failure of their societies to speak to the pain and anger bred by mass unemployment.

Why did our democracy endure through the Great Depression? Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe. Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred. Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.

The systematic silencing of America's workers by denying their freedom to form unions is at the heart of the disappearance of good jobs in America. We must pass the Employee Free Choice Act so that workers can have the chance to turn bad jobs into good jobs, and so we can reduce the inequality which is undermining our country's prospects for stable economic growth.

Government that acted in the interests of the majority of Americans has produced our greatest achievements. The New Deal. The Great Society and the Civil Rights
movement -- Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage and the forty-hour work
week, and the Voting Rights Act. This is what made the United States a beacon of hope in a confused and divided world. In the end, I believe the health care bill signed into law last month is an achievement on this order, one we can continue to improve upon to secure health care for all.

But too many thought leaders have become the servants of a different kind of politics—a politics that sees middle-class Americans as overpaid and underworked. That sees Social Security as a problem rather than the only piece of our retirement system that actually works. A mentality that feels sorry for homeless people, but fails to see the connections between downsizing, outsourcing, inequality and homelessness. A mentality that sees mass unemployment as something that will take care of itself, eventually.

We need to return to a different vision.

There is no excuse for racism and hatred. All Americans need to unite against it. The labor movement must be a powerful voice against it. But you cannot fight hatred with greed. Working people are angry—and we are right to be angry at the
betrayal of our economic future. Help us turn that anger into the energy to win a better country and a better world.

The Wedge

Hello brothers, and thank you for taking the time to visit our little blog. I've noticed that more fans have discovered us recently, some from as far away as Europe! Alright, Blamers nation. Keep on truckin.

Today saw the much anticipated meeting between President Obama and leaders of organized labor over the placement of taxes in the new health care bill. The current bill employs the so-called "Cadillac tax" to help pay for the coverage of millions of Americans who currently have none. Unions, progressives, and many House Democrats oppose these taxes because of the heavy burden placed on the middle class.

I wanted to bring to your attention a snippet from a speech given earlier today by Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families. This is a policy designed to benefit elites—in this case, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at the expense of the broader public. It’s the same tragic pattern that got us where we are today, and I can assure you the labor movement is fighting with everything we’ve got to win health care reform that is worthy of the support of working men and women.

[snip]

Let me be even blunter. In 1992, workers voted for Democrats who promised action on jobs, who talked about reining in corporate greed and who promised health care reform. Instead, we got NAFTA, an emboldened Wall Street – and not much more. We swallowed our disappointment and worked to preserve a Democratic majority in 1994 because we knew what the alternative was. But there was no way to persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls when they couldn’t tell the difference between the two parties. Politicians who think that working people have it too good – too much health care, too much Social Security and Medicare, too much power on the job – are inviting a repeat of 1994.

These new taxes are already firmly established in the Senate bill and it is very unlikely that they will change. Trumka - and progressives around the nation - know this; the speech serves, however, as a fierce rebuke and warning to the Democratic Party that it cannot continue to ally itself with big business without alienating large swaths of its base. In nine months a tiny fraction of Americans will vote for all 435 House Representatives and 36 Senators. Trumka's speech today may prove to be yet another harbinger of this year's upcoming election.