A SOTU for a Reality-Based Economy

Via Crooks and Liars, the State of the Union address President Obama should give Tuesday night:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka made a speech this week at the National Press Club, aimed at what is expected to be an austerity plan in Obama's State of the Union address:

The question of how our political system treated our 9-11 heroes like Stan resonates still in this new year: 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?

The conventional wisdom in Washington and in statehouses around the nation is that we cannot afford to be the country we want to be. That could not be more wrong.

We can and should be building up the American middle class – not tearing it down. We should be honoring the heroes of 9-11, not turning them into scapegoats for a partisan political messaging operation. We should act like the wealthy, compassionate, imaginative country we are – not try to turn ourselves into a third-rate, impoverished "has-been." The labor movement hasn't given up on America – and we don't expect our leaders to either.

Last Friday in Cincinnati, Ella Hopkins and a group of her co-workers went out on a frigid night to stand in front of City Hall. Ella is a child care worker and I'm so glad that she is here today. She takes care of young children when their parents are at work. She nurtures our youth so they have the support they need and are in a safe environment to learn and grow. And for doing that job, the important job of caring for our children, the state of Ohio pays her, after taxes, about $450 a week. She stood in the cold last Friday to ask her new governor, John Kasich, to respect her freedom to have a union to improve her life and those of her co-workers. Here's what Kasich said: State workers like her are "toast."

You see, in the same week that he increased the salaries of his senior staff by more than 30 percent, the governor has made cracking down on Ella and other home care and child care workers his first priority.

Stan and Ella are my American heroes, the hard-working everyday champions who make America great, and their lives illuminate the choices facing our nation as we enter a fourth year of economic crisis. The choice between coming together as a nation or turning on each other. The choice, as Dr. Martin Luther King once said, between chaos and community. The choice between greed and solidarity.

But most of all, Stan and Ella remind us that while our political leaders wrestle with these 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 this great country.

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We have a tax system that everyone knows is grossly unfair—allowing private equity billionaires like Pete Peterson to pay 15 percent rates while middle-class Americans pay 25 percent. We just agreed to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the rich. Yet Washington behaves as if record economic inequality is a force of nature, and says we cannot fund the basic functions of government—let alone invest to build the infrastructure of the future.

We are still a wealthy country, with per capita income that puts us in the very top tier internationally. But in the last 20 years, 56 percent of all income gains went to the top 1 percent of Americans, and more than a third went to the top one-tenth of one percent. That is one person out of every thousand taking a third of all income gains here in the United States. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent made do with only 16 percent of income gains. That is why we all feel so poor – because too much of our national income went to too few people.

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.

The truth is Social Security is financially one of the healthiest institutions in American life, and the most essential to our families' economic security.

When we are reduced to competing to cut spending instead of deciding how to compete in the world economy and secure our future, then we are having the wrong conversation.

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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 the President's vision of a nation that is strong because we are just and true to our values. A vision for a national future founded on the profound truth that social justice and material prosperity are not competing values--they are necessary to each other. A truth that we have ignored as a country for a generation at a terrible cost.

And what is that future? Just this: 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.

Read the whole wonderful, inspiring thing.