The debate about America’s future “begins and ends concretely with the question of jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said this morning in a speech outlining a working families’ vision for the nation.

In the address at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Trumka urged President Obama to make next week’s State of the Union address a “call to action, a call to invest in our future, to create jobs, to be the country we can and must be.”

We have just been through one lost decade—when America’s standard of living fell, when our wealth shrank, when millions lost their homes, when young people could not find work America cannot afford another lost decade.

Click here for the full video from the address.

Joined by a New York City firefighter veteran of the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing and an Ohio child care worker who will lose her freedom to have a union if Gov. John Kasich (R) has his way, Trumka said Stan Trojanowski and Ella Hopkins are examples of “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….Working people know we can build that future only if we act together to put America back to work—to educate our children, to build a clean energy future, to build a 21st century America.

Trumka slammed the “conventional wisdom in Washington and in statehouses around the nation that we cannot afford to be the country we want to be. That could not be more wrong.”

But here in Washington, we live in an Alice-in-Wonderland political climate. We have a jobs crisis that after three years is still raging, squeezing families, devastating our poorest communities and stunting the futures of young adults.
Yet politicians of both parties tell us that we can—and should—do nothing. That is giving up on America. And as we meet here today, the Republican leaders in the House, who campaigned on the promise of jobs, are instead using their first days in office to take away health care gains from 30 million families.

He pointed to the hypocrisy of lawmakers who held Congress hostage last year as they fought to cut taxes for the wealthy and now:

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.

Trumka said America is falling behind in the global economy, “not because we lack the skills or resources the innovative drive or the entrepreneurial spirit to succeed….We have failed to invest in the good-wage growth path that is essential to our survival.”

We have let our transnational business titans convince our politicians that our national strength lies in their profits, not our jobs.

Stressing that America remains a major player in the world economy, Trumka said the nation’s leaders have a choice of what kind of path America will take in the coming years.

We live in a world in which there are two kinds of successful big countries: big, poor countries with low wages that organize themselves for low-cost exports, like China and India, and big developed countries with high-skilled workforces that invest in their infrastructure and in their people, that protect their people’s rights on the job and have strong social protections, like Germany and Japan.

On the domestic front, Trumka said the November elections “unleashed a coordinated effort to block the path to the middle class with an attack on workers’ rights.”

When I say an attack on workers’ rights, I am not talking about demands for concessions in tough times by employers. Wise or not, such demands are a normal part of collective bargaining. I am talking about the campaigns in state after state, funded by shadowy committees created in the wake of Citizens United, aimed at depriving all workers—public and private sector—of the basic human right to form strong unions and bargain collectively to lift their lives.

State-level attacks on public employees are “based on the proposition that firefighters and nurses and medical orderlies are overpaid”–a claim that has been fueled and financed, Trumka said, by people like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire publisher behind Fox News.

It’s a funny thing, when the firefighters arrived at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and started that long climb up the stairs to rescue the bond traders trapped on the upper floors, it didn’t occur to any of them to call up and ask, “What’s it worth to you for us to come and get you?” So how did we come to the point where our country’s ruling class thinks that firefighters like Stan and teachers and nurses are the problem, and people like Lloyd Blankfein and Rupert Murdoch are the solution?

Trumka said Americans want to work, especially with one in three households having someone unemployed in the past year. But:

the biggest and wealthiest American companies are sitting on trillions of dollars in assets—not investing, not creating jobs, not taking risks.…People who live in Wonderland may not have noticed, but there is a lot of work to be done here.

While one in five construction workers is looking for work, he said, we have a $2.2 trillion old-school infrastructure deficit, along with a desperate need to build the 21st century infrastructure necessary for the nation’s and the planet’s future—high-speed mass transit, smart utilities and universal high-speed broadband. Trumka said:

To join the 21st Century, we need to start funding a serious and sustained public investment in infrastructure now, as President Obama called for last Labor Day.

A large portion of the jobs investment can be paid for, Trumka said, by eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and enacting a .05% financial speculation tax—“so small to be of no concern to any real investor, but enough to raise more than $100 billion in revenue a year.”

When President Obama gives his State of the Union message next week, Trumka urged that the message be “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.

Click here to read the full speech.