(To the right, Barack Obama at the 2005 AFL-CIO national convention in Chicago)
I remember being very impressed with the young senator from Illinois as
he spoke at the 2005 AFL-CIO national convention in Chicago about the dignity
of the worker and the bold history of the labor movement in this country.
“They could have accepted their lot in life or waited for someone else to
save them,” Barack Obama told the crowd of thousands. “Through their actions
they risked life and living. They chose to act. In time, they won. … It started
with hope, and it ended with the fulfillment of a long-held ideal. A humble
band of laborers against an industrial giant – an unlikely triumph against the
greatest odds – a story as American as any.”
A few years later, as Obama became president, he saw those promises and
dreams plunge into the abyss of the Great Recession as countless workers lost
their homes and their livelihood. So what did the nation’s first African
American president do? He assembled an all-star Wall Street insider group of
advisers—Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Rahm Emanuel--to help him guide
American Business back to safe harbor. Banks were too big to fail, and
corporate bailouts were the order of the day.
As for those laborers whose praises Obama sang in Chicago, they got no
bailouts and they struggled as best they could to survive.
Working class people in America today really have no safe harbor, even in
a pandemic that has real unemployment hovering around 20 percent, the highest
since the Great Depression. The Republican Party, as always, looks at them with
deep suspicion that they’re all either freeloaders or potential freeloaders who
want an easy ride on the back of the billionaire class that funds the GOP and
the journalists and preachers who use their podiums to teach obedience.
In the White House is a renegade Republican who talked the talk to
working people on the campaign trail but who never walked the walk. He serves
the bosses, not the people who work under them. He orders meatpackers and
poultry workers back to work but says nothing to the owners to make sure the
workplace is safe. He has even promised owners protection from liability. Like your typical cookie cutter Republican, he is
contemptuous of government oversight and safety regulations.
During the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson,
workers could turn to the Democratic Party as a loyal ally. However, the party
largely abandoned the working class after the 1960s and became the party of
identity politics where one’s race, gender, and sexual orientation, not class,
are paramount to one’s identity.
Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, who now will lead the party in this year’s presidential election (among his likely advisers is Obama’s old hand Larry Summers), liked to boast their credentials as men of the people, but they led a party too beholden to its corporate donors and too bereft of a true uniting vision to speak to regular folks any more. That’s why many of those folks, out of desperation, turned to the empty promises of the demagogue who now occupies the White House. At least he offered them the illusion of a promise, certainly more than what Bill and Hillary Clinton ever offered.
Bernie Sanders was a ray of hope to working people, but he has largely
joined the party machinery since his abdication. Perhaps he tired of being an
outsider in the millionaires club that the U.S. Senate still is.
The current pandemic has exposed the ugliness of the American economy,
where workers depend on the management class for their health insurance, which
those workers lose when they lose their jobs.
Income inequality is at a 50-year high in the United States, which
Donald Trump loved to boast as the world’s greatest economy before the
coronavirus landed on our shores.
This is a nation where the prison system has become the world’s largest
gulag, and struggling minorities and immigrants sit in its barbaric cells for
months, even years, before they can receive a semblance of justice. Watch as
those prisoners become an increasingly popular source of cheap labor. That’s
what happened when sanitation workers in New Orleans went on strike earlier
this month to protest their $10.25-an-hour average wages and unsafe working
conditions during the pandemic. They were fired and replaced by prison inmates
making $1.33 an hour.
Still more and more workers are rising up. Teamsters are once again
revolting against the Hoffa dynasty that has compromised the union’s mission as
a voice for laboring people. Smithfield Foods workers have protested the lack
of safety measures in their jobs.
“At the edge of despair, in the shadow of hopelessness,
ordinary people make the extraordinary decision that if we stand together, we
rise together,” Obama told the crowd that day in Chicago in 2005. “And we do.”
He was right. Obama was always good at speeches. He told the
truth, a lived truth and the only hope for American workers, and they don’t
need a politician to tell them that it is true.
