July 22, 2005— Progressive organizations, especially unions, must re-energize the nation's debate about economic and class differences in the United States or risk becoming a permanent political minority. Delivering the keynote address to the July 21–23 International Labor Communications Association's (ILCA's) 50th Anniversary Convention, author Tom Frank said, “The conservatives have stolen our language about the problems of America's workers and turned it around to a backlash against us.”
Frank, whose recent book, What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, has become a major bestseller, spoke before some 200 delegates to the ILCA, which met in conjunction with the AFL-CIO 25th Constitutional Convention in Chicago.
Workers Support Politicians Who Don't Represent Their Interests
Despite overwhelming evidence that conservative control of government has led to an unprecedented gap between the extremely wealthy and working people in the country, Frank says workers in some of the poorest states and counties support candidates such as President George W. Bush, whose policies actually decrease their standards of living.
Although working Americans should be strongly opposed to extreme reactionary members of Congress and the Bush administration that propose issues such as privatizing Social Security and exporting jobs, the reality is they have allied with conservatives to fight what they are told is a liberal elite responsible for everything that's going wrong in their lives.
Progressives Must Force a Conversation About Workplace Issues
Rather than allowing media to focus on “red” conservative states and “blue” progressive states, Frank says, progressives should force a conversation about workplace issues and shatter the myth that the free market is a force of nature we cannot control.
Many progressives have accepted free market theory and taken economic issues off the political table, allowing conservatives to exploit cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage.
“Liberals have got to offer working people something,” Frank said. To succeed and win back the support of working people, progressives and unions must take the offensive and show working people how the free market, not “liberal elites,” destroys families by forcing parents to work longer hours to make ends meet and widening the gap between the rich and the working majority.
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