Labor & Employment Law

Trumka Warns ?Forces of Hate? Fanning Flames of Workers? Economic Anger

By Mike Hall

An economy that seems to work for just a privileged few, 11 million vanished jobs and a bailout for banks and Wall Street?but not working families?is fueling justified anger in workers. Speaking last night at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told an audience about the “forces of hate” and “radio voices” that are frantically fanning the flames of that justified anger to divide working people.

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.

Trumka said a progressive movement that includes mobilizing union members and electing public officials “committed to bold action to address economic suffering” and can fight back against the forces of hatred. But he told the Harvard audience that an “alliance between working people and public minded intellectuals is also crucial.”

It is all about standing up to entrenched economic power and the complacency of the affluent. It’s an alliance that depends on intellectuals being critics, and not the servants, of economic privilege.

The code words of hate and overheated rhetoric spewed against President Obama and lawmakers have been heard before, Trumka said.

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.

When President John F. Kennedy stepped off the plane in Dallas on November 22, 1963, radio voices were calling for violence against the President of the United States. And the violence came?and took John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and so many others.

In fact, just yesterday, a California mother said Fox News commentators’ hate speech drove her son to make death threats against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The nation survived the 1930s Depression, Trumka said, because working people discovered they could elect leaders “who would fight for them, not the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe.”

This is a similar moment. Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia.

I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard. The economic elites at JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites, the more the forces of hatred?of anti-intellectualism?will grow.

He warned that massive unemployment and growing inequality threaten our democracy and that “the stakes couldn’t be any higher.”

If you care about defending our country against the apostles of hate, you need to be part of the fight to rebuild a sustainable, high wage economy built on good jobs?the kind of economy that can only exist when working men and women have a real voice on the job

Click here for Trumka’s full speech.

Also yesterday, CNN tapped Trumka as one of the day’s “Most Intriguing People.” Click here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on April 08, 2010 (boomark / email).