What kind of country are we? A country of isolated individuals fending for themselves or a country with shared values and a shared vision? A country with scant resources, fading glory and no choices? Or a blessed nation with the potential to do right by its people and be a leader in the world?
Those are the questions that confront our nation's leaders, whether they acknowledge it or not. And while they wrestle with the questions, America's working people already know the answer. We are a nation that still has choices. We don't need to settle for stagnation and ever-spiraling inequality. We don't need to hunker down, dial back our expectations and surrender our children's hope for a great education, our parents' right to a comfortable retirement, our own health and economic security, our nation's aspiration to make things again -- or our human right to advance our situation by forming a union if we want one. All these things are within the reach of the great country we live in.
But here in Washington, we live in an Alice-in-Wonderland political climate. We have a jobs crisis that after three years is still raging -- squeezing families, devastating our poorest communities and stunting the futures of young adults. Yet politicians of both parties tell us that we can -- and should -- do nothing. And the Republican leaders in the House are instead using their first days in office to take away health care gains from 30 million families.
In this topsy-turvy world, the same leaders who fought so valiantly to cut taxes for the wealthy turn right around and lecture us about the imminent bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare. So let me get this straight -- we need to slash retirement and health benefits for the elderly because we are on the brink of fiscal crisis, but we can afford to squander hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the super-rich. Only at the Mad Hatter's tea party does this make sense.
When we compete to cut spending instead of deciding how to compete in the world economy and secure our future, then we are having the wrong conversation. We are governing from fear, not from confidence.
And we have let our transnational business titans convince our politicians that our national strength lies in their profits, not our jobs. We are failing to invest in the good-wage growth path that is essential to our survival.
This misguided and shortsighted approach is not just a Washington problem. In state capital after state capital, politicians elected to take on the jobs crisis are instead attacking the very idea of the American middle class, the idea that, in America, economic security -- health care, a real pension, a wage that can pay for college -- is not something for a privileged few, but rather what all of us can earn in exchange for a hard day's work.
We have just been through one lost decade -- when America's standard of living fell, when our wealth shrank, when millions lost their homes, when young people could not find work. America cannot afford another lost decade. China is not having a lost decade. Germany is not having a lost decade. Because those countries have acted decisively on jobs and public investment, their economies are prosperous.
Last year's election was fundamentally about jobs, and I believe the 2012 election will be, too. America wants to work. People who live in Wonderland may not have noticed, but there is a lot of work to be done here. While one in five construction workers is looking for work, we have a $2.2 trillion old-school infrastructure deficit. We need to invest trillions more to build the 21st-century infrastructure necessary for our nation's and our planet's future -- high-speed mass transit, smart utilities and universal high-speed broadband.
We need to start funding a serious and sustained public investment in infrastructure now, as President Obama called for last Labor Day.
Next week the president of the United States will give his State of the Union address. The labor movement is ready for a call to action, a call to invest in our future, to create jobs, to be the country we can and must be.
We are ready for vision, and we believe in President Obama's vision of a nation that is strong because we are just and true to our values, a vision of a national future founded on the profound truth that social justice and material prosperity are not competing values -- but are necessary to each other.
In a globalized, high-tech world, when it often seems that change is the one constant in our lives, the real American dream is that if we work hard and do our part for each other, each of us can enjoy the economic security that allows us to live our lives with dignity and have hope for our future and for our children's future. This dream must be a reality in our time, and in our children's and grandchildren's time.
Adapted from a speech at the National Press Club, Jan. 19, 2011.
Richard, I am part of this movement. I would think not about the virtues of jobs and the role of government. I would focus like a laser on the assertion:
"unions have become the very problem they set out to solve."
We have arrived to the Washington "Alice and Wonderland" and intend to clean the deck.
This country needs so much more than what Obama can give us. 30 years of corporatist, trickle-down economic policies have destroyed this country. Obama will only give us more of the same. He's not on our side.
Please run in 2012.
If it is the right of workers to Unionize, then it is ALSO the right of American's (90%+ who DON'T choose to belong to a Union) to Not overpay for Union labor in their public contracting.
Stay on topic.
Not so now.
I have many acquaintances that are Union workers. Some good friends. The huge multi-billion dollar corporations they work for have been recently empowered by this bad economy. Unions have been out-lawyer-ed by the corporations and I can tell you these Union workers are getting down right abused by their employers. Sure they could just quit, but why should they have to be treated so poorly by the company many have worked for for over 20 years.
I can assure you the people I know and speak of are both devoted family men and women and hard working conscientious employees who all do an honest days work.
Loss of retirement benefits, reduction in health care benefits, and daily browbeating to work harder and faster are what they are faced with these days. These guys once enjoyed their jobs. Now they can't wait to retire.
Remember, Corporate America has shown us time and again they care nothing about the little guy, the employee that actually does the daily dirty work. Profits at all costs is the new (what was old is new again) mantra. Ethics do not seem to exist and turning an unsympathetic cold shoulder to the employee is regarded as "good business".
You wouldn't understand because you want a collective where we hold everyone down to the lowest common denominator.