by Tula Connell, Mar 20, 2008

As we watch the Federal Reserve hand over billions of dollars to tanking Wall Street firms to stave off a nationwide Titanic, the words of author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich especially resonate:

The rich are a burden to the rest of us.

Ehrenreich, appropriately enough, was speaking at “Challenging the Second Gilded Age,” a session at this week’s Take Back America Conference, where she was joined by Bill Gates Sr., a working families’ activist in his own right.

Ehrenreich’s point is that the growing wealth gap in this country matters. It matters because when a lot of people are impoverished, it creates societal problems—like the poor’s inability to consume at a level our economy requires to stay in equilibrium.

It matters because when the extremely wealthy compete with the rest of us for land, housing and education, their deep pockets drive up the cost of these fundamental goods for the rest of us. It matters because:

When you have so many people who can barely afford to buy groceries and other people who are buying congressmen, that’s plutocracy, not democracy.

Thousands of progressive activists gathered in Washington, D.C., for the three-day event, which has become an annual gathering for all of us to strategize about how to literally take back America from the plutocrats who have hijacked our country.

Amid sessions on political mobilization, health care reform and the role of the media, several focused on the economy, including the need to create green jobs. Our own Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka discussed the long-term structural shifts  in the economy that have helped create the disaster unfolding around us. In fact, in a poll of Take Back America participants, 30 percent identified the economy and jobs as the nation’s top priority—topping any other issue. Last year, 34 percent said the war in Iraq was the top issue.

Early in the conference, economist Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the American Prospect magazine, joined Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen and several other speakers at a packed lunch event, “Out of the Hole: An Economy that Works for Working People.”

Describing himself as “very pessimistic about the economy” but optimistic about the potential for political change, Kuttner bluntly summed up our current situation:

Our economy is facing most serious crisis since Great Depression.

Politics is behind this failed economy, Kuttner said. The ruling elites gutted the financial regulatory system, asserting that markets could regulate themselves, but

[Federal Reserve Chairman] Ben Bernanke doesn’t think so now.

The growing income gap and the increasing precariousness of jobs, plus a trade policy that serves the wealthy, has furthered the nation’s slide into financial quicksand. As Kuttner sees it, fixing the economy requires a return to market regulation and spending federal money where it’s needed to create jobs, fix infrastructure and more. In fact, he said, we need to

spend so much more federal money than any presidential candidate is willing to talk about.

But they better start talking fast—because

if we don’t have a transformative presidency, we won’t have what we need to fix the economy.

The lunchtime session on economics got a bit of cross-border solidarity with speaker Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s progressive New Democratic Party. He described how people there are working 250 more hours per year than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, Kuttner responded, America’s workers are putting in 500 more hours—the equivalent of 10 weeks—just to stay in place.

Cohen gave a rousing speech about the need for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act that, in helping to level the playing field for workers to form unions, would boost the numbers of workers in family-supporting jobs and stabilize the financial erosion of the nation’s middle class.

Cohen highlighted the union movement’s nationwide drive to get at least 1 million signatures in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. Four hundred CWA members already have signed postcards to tell the new president and Congress that working families across America want them to immediately enact the legislation. We’ll let you know more about our Million-Member Mobilization drive in coming weeks.