Richard Trumka

The following is an excerpt from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka's address to the United Steelworkers' convention on August 17, 2011. Click here for the full transcript.

How can we make sense of the spectacle that's been unfolding across the American political landscape?

Politicians in Wisconsin, Ohio and a dozen other states are trying to take away workers' right to organize and bargain for a better life.

But that's not all.  In state after state, politicians are attacking voting rights by imposing ID requirements, shortening early voting periods, blocking young people from voting because they're too "liberal" and even levying criminal penalties and fines for breaking arbitrary rules in the voter registration process.  So it will be harder for people to vote—especially the least privileged among us.

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Commission, I know my time is short, so I will limit my testimony to eight key points:

First, stabilizing the national debt is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

At this moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice — whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege. The economic elites at JP Morgan 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. If you want to fight the forces of hatred, you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger. And at this moment, the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people. We need help. We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real, sustainable economy that works for all of us.

The news is out: The Wall Street bankers we bailed out are giving themselves 2009 cash bonuses of a half million dollars on average -- not including stocks.

We've got a jobs crisis in this country, and we need to fix it—now!

To our nation’s peril, the free trade orthodoxy continues to ignore a fundamental economic fact: It matters where things are made.

Over the past decade the U.S. industrial base has suffered an unprecedented decline. The loss of more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and the closure of more than 50,000 manufacturing facilities have undermined our nation’s technical capacity to innovate and to make things, while at the same time decimating our middle class.

Flawed trade and tax policies and a financial system focused on short-term profits drove good jobs offshore, led to record trade deficits, and left the economy in ruins. With the manufacturing share of gross domestic product withering to 12 percent (from 15.9 percent in 1995) and the financial sector growing to 22 percent, the structure of the U.S. economy looks more like Monaco than Germany. This growth model of asset bubbles, low wages, credit pyramids, toxic assets and unregulated out-of-control global capital has been a recipe for disaster.

I'm going to Chicago next week for the American Bankers Association meeting. Oddly, I haven't been invited to the Roaring '20's dance party I hear they're having.

Why wouldn't they celebrate the era of wild money and hot times (which slid into the Great Depression)? After all, the bankers are doing well these days.