Trumka Warns ‘Forces of Hate’ Fanning Flames of Workers’ Economic Anger

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/04/08/trumka-warns-forces-of-hate-fanning-flames-of-workers-economic-anger/

by Mike Hall, Apr 8, 2010

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.

http://www.iop.harvard.edu/Multimedia-Center/All-Videos/Why-Working-People-are-Angry-And-Why-Politicians-Should-Listen

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.

FULL story at link.

[BlooInBloo]

1. Loved that guy ever since the campaign...

(when I first became aware of him).