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Acuff: We Can’t Wait for Change—We Have to Make It Happen
America is ready for change—but the interests that benefit from the status quo are fighting with all of their ample resources to prevent the change we demanded, fought for and voted for in 2008. The closer we get to the policies working families need, the more these interests are threatened—and the harder we need to fight.
At Huffington Post, the AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff looks at the opportunities and challenges of this unique moment, and why we need to step up and be “warriors for justice”:
Those who’ve prosecuted and benefited from the 30-year financial assault on America’s working families refuse to let go, to give up what they’ve come to see as theirs—the insurance companies, the union busters, the ABC, the Comcasts, the Wal-Marts, Wall St., and manipulators of our finances, the Radical Rightwing, including Cheney and Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove and Dick Armey and the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.
It is clear that if we are to win the change we voted for last fall and many of us have worked for years, we are gonna have to fight, fight hard, and fight outside the normal Washington lobbying box.
Washington politics and lobbying does not work for workers and working families.
We won’t win by waiting for Congress to act on priorities like jobs, health care, financial regulation and the Employee Free Choice Act. Union members, their allies and supporters of working families across the country need to write, call and rally if we’re going to win, Acuff says:
America today needs warriors—warriors to organize and struggle, to fight for change, to fight the Radical Right and corporate domination, to organize and struggle, to dare the rat bastards to stop us, to refuse to lose, to challenge the status quo, to tell those who’ve run our country and too many lives into the ditch that change is now, that we will fight in Washington but that we will also fight all across America.
The future is ours. Let’s take it.
Read the whole thing here.
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5 Comments
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Is the AFL-CIO leadership just now starting to realize there is something profoundly wrong?
The entire paragraph starting with “America today needs warriors….” is pure empty rhetoric. No critical analysis of past and present economic conditions of working people. No critical analysis of past and present policies and perspectives of the AFL-CIO, and this just after a major convention in Pittsburgh!
This rhetoric would be a great speech in a bar, with clenched fists, with empty threats “to dare the rat bastards to stop us,” .
Looking at the public speeches of the past month or so, one finds
this kind empty and demagogic rhetoric as a substitute for critical thinking. There is no economic or political analysis or any resulting proposals with goals or strategies that the labor movement or working people must develop during this period of deepening economic crises.
No critical knowledge of what has gone down in the past 30 years for working people with stagnant wages, with the loss
of millions of jobs to globalization, and with now the collapse
of the capitalist economy.
No critical political analysis that would easily see the necessity to break with the corporate controlled Democratic Party and call for the formation of a new political party dedicated to the interests of working people, an essential tool “to fight in Washington but that we will also fight all across America.”
Not a word from this speaker that proclaims that the AFL-CIO supports “Medicare for All” and opposes the gangster corporate control of health care. No demands on the Democrats to support “Medicare for All” with consequences for the Democrats, no “drawing a line”.
No wonder that this miserable piece of rhetoric was posted in the Huffington Post. This is the home of about a thousand blog babblers who call themselves “Progressives”. Progressives are forever talking about “reforming” the Democratic Party and reforming the entire capitalist system. Reform is not possible.
For years, in 2004 election, the cry was “anyone but Bush”
Some great “individual” would save us! Perhaps Nader, or Kucinich, or most recently Obama. Then, all we need is to get
a Democratic Party majority, and a Democratic President and
THEN, all would be well!
The AFL-CIO spent huge amounts of precious dues money and provided thousands of volunteer man-hours to get these
Democrats elected. All this effort is a complete waste!
There is an old saying: A definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again, but to expect a different result
each time. Is the AFL-CIO leadership completely insane?
Has anyone besides me noticed that the ‘fall’ of the working man in this country directly coincides with the ‘rise’ of the salaries of the ‘few’ at the top? I began working in 1970 and retired in 2001. A thirty year union employee with the same company. When I started working there the CEO made approximately ten times per year what I did. By the time I retired his salary had ballooned to nearly five hundred times what mine was. And I had ‘risen’ slightly in the company. Just not to ‘upper’ management. My pay in those thirty years rose just under ten times the rate at which I started. I don’t know about the rest of you but I see something drastically wrong with that picture.
When the outrageous salaries of CEOs and other upper management started kicking in jobs began to go away. Companies realized there would have to be some changes if they were to please their stockholders while still paying those bloated salaries of the chosen few. It started with layoffs. For some businesses that meant less customer service but, hey, what the heck, the ‘big guy’ had to get his, right? When the layoffs no longer produced the needed results jobs began to simply go away. Overseas. Where people would work for pennies on the dollar. And that’s when the American dream began to die! And, oh yes, we ‘overpaid’ union employees got the blame!
I don’t think people realize just how far reaching the impact of sending jobs overseas is. I’m certainly no expert but I would think that by cutting jobs we also cut our tax base. And people who are unemployed or underemployed need ‘help’. Where does that help come from? From our tax base. No jobs or low paying jobs = a low tax base.
If we want to see real change we need to see good paying jobs brought back to this country. And we need to see employers who are willing to pay the ‘workers’ a true living wage. And if that means cutting back on upper management salaries so be it! It’s time the pampered few realize that their ‘demands’ for those obscene salaries are hurting not only the ‘working people’ of this country but the entire country itself!
We’re losing our standing in the world for many reasons. I only hope it isn’t too late to correct the problems! Common sense seems to have abandoned us. Let us all pray it soon makes a comeback!
Is Acuff advocating street heat? Get in their faces actions? Hell yeah, I will gladly be a part of that.
To put all of our eggs in the electoral system is pointless. We cannot match the legal bribes of the corporate monsters! Therefore we must do what is done in France, England, Italy and Germany; TAKE IT TO THE STREETS!
Bosses and politicians understand one thing and one thing only; loss of profits! When we can shut the nation down then and only then will the bosses respect us as well as their puppets in Congress!
To Brother Wells i send a salute. Like he said without understanding what what down we can’t make any plans for the future. Without breaking entirely from the all the capitalist parties and forging a workers’ party that will struggle for a workers’ government will we have health care, jobs and housing for all. Is the present AFL-CIO leadership insane? Well i’d say know they are defenders, supporters and beneficinarys of capitalism and doing all in their power to keep the ranks in the dark and in the house. Until we dump them we are worse then leadersless we are betrayed!
Totally agree with brother Jerry. The rank and file have heard the same old rhetoric over and over, year after year, but few of our labor leaders dare confront the elephant in the room… Capitalism.
That our interests are diametrically opposed to the bosses we work for is completely glossed over. So writers like Acuff talk in vague terms of “fighting” or joining with our “allies” and fighting, “allies” is usually code for Democratic Party politicians. But the real fight is against capital and with that it’s political representatives. Labor and capital are adversaries but somehow over the years it’s been downplayed and the idea softened. We’re not even working class anymore we’re “middle class”, putting us closer to the “upper classes”. You can’t build a labor movement without class consciousness.