Main Street

Working America in the News

Harold Meyerson writes about Working America in the Washington Post:

In an April speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Trumka affirmed that “working people are right to be mad at what has happened to our economy and our country.” Our political leaders, he continued, need to validate that anger — and remedy its causes — if they are to keep that anger from turning into racial, religious and homophobic hatred. The roots of that anger, and of the recession, lie in our creation of what Trumka termed a “low-wage, high consumption” economy in which the manufacturing of things has been supplanted by the manufacture of debt.

Working America’s canvassers hear that anger every day — sometimes directed at Wall Street, sometimes at the president, immigrants and other right-wing bogeymen. They grapple with it by highlighting job-creation programs (improving local roads) and anti-offshoring legislation that Democrats have backed and Republicans opposed. Next week, they’ll start campaigning for actual candidates, using these criteria.

Their message is surely the right one. The question is whether congressional Democrats and Obama in particular actually measure up to progressive-populist claims that labor makes for them. That they have passed landmark progressive legislation, and mitigated the scope of the recession, is beyond question. Hampered by Republican opposition, however, they clearly haven’t done enough to turn the economy around.

Check out the whole piece.

Tags: Working America