Thank you, Bridgette [Carruth] and Jennie [Cardona], for those kind words and for inviting me to be with you this morning . . . you are an inspiration to us all — I’m delighted to be with you and to bring you a message on behalf of the 53 affiliates of the AFL-CIO and the 9 million union members our unions represent.

The AFL-CIO is proud to be a partner with acorn in communities across our country, and we’re proud of the work we’re doing together.

Thanks to all of you and to our union members, we’re raising the minimum wage and passing living wage laws in state after state, we’re making real headway in rebuilding the city of New Orleans, and we’re fighting hard for immigration reform that is just.

And thanks to the leadership of your great president Maude Hurd, your other officers, and your staff headed by Steve Kest, ACORN has established itself as one of the most powerful non-partisan political forces in our country.

For the past 36 years, ACORN has been at the forefront of social change in America, stopping the big banks from destroying our neighborhoods, registering, educating and mobilizing millions of voters in inner city communities, taking on the big-box stores that are victimizing workers and that are putting neighborhood businesses out of business.

And ACORN just keeps making things happen -- helping get the minimum wage on the ballot in Arizona, supporting the big-box ordinance in Chicago, helping child care workers in New York form unions, lobbying the Massachusetts House of Representatives to raise the minimum wage to $8.00 an hour.

I can’t think of another organization in our country that has done so much for so many people in so short a time, and every one of you deserves credit for an incredible job.

You are terrific, and I want you to know the AFL-CIO will be fighting at your side until we raise the minimum wage in every state, until the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region are rebuilt in every way, until every immigrant family in our country has full rights and benefits and a guaranteed path to citizenship . . . every immigrant family.

Let me add that I think it’s especially important that you are holding your convention here in Ohio, where the last presidential election was either decided or stolen; and I want you to know the AFL-CIO is going to be standing with you, and fighting alongside of you, until every citizen of this state has the absolute right to vote, and the right to have their vote counted … every citizen of Ohio!

Sisters and brothers, this is an important year for ACORN as well as for the AFL-CIO, because we are the only truly national organizations that represent working families ... poor families ... minority families ... immigrant families.

As we’ve so often said, “America works, because we do,” and together, the families we represent have built the strongest democracy and the most productive economy in the history of the world.

Because of the hard work of our families, our country is getting richer and richer — corporate profits are up, the stock market is up, CEO salaries are up, way up, the top 20 percent of wage earners in our country are making more money than they’ve ever made.

But for all the families we represent, things aren’t very good — workers’ wages haven’t improved for the last 25 years, the number of people living in poverty, and the number of people without health insurance in our country have increased dramatically, the number of good jobs with good benefits has decreased, and for millions of our citizens who are young, or old, or sick, or unemployed, the situation is even worse — programs like Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, AFDC, Unemployment Insurance, child care, rent and fuel assistance, have been cut to the bone.

Our country is at a tipping point — the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the gap between rich and poor is wider than in any industrialized country in the world.

That, brothers and sisters, means the United States of America is “United” in name only, and it is a national disgrace. What we now have are two Americas -- one rich and one poor, and our speaker after lunch, Senator John Edwards, will have more to say about this awful division and what it means to all of our families and to the strength and character of our country.

It is equally important that we understand who put us into this awful situation and how we get ourselves out.

For the past 25 years, conservative politicians have been working hand-in-hand with big business to divide America against itself.

Why?

More profits for corporations, more wealth for the wealthy, more control over those who do the work, fewer safety nets for those who cannot work or who cannot find work.

With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the conservatives and their corporate supporters finally gained control of all three branches of our federal government — the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court.

And they’ve wasted no time trying to destroy all the things we’ve created over the past 50 years to make sure every worker has a good job, every child has a free public education, every family has affordable health care, every senior citizen has retirement security.

With the re-election of President Bush two years ago, they increased their attacks on working families, poor families, immigrant families, our organizations, our unions.

Back before all this started, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw it all coming when he said, “The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

Today, those misguided men — and some misguided women — are beginning to succeed, and our job this year is to stop their attacks and reverse the decisions that have taken poor and hard-working families from the front of the line and put them in the back of the line.

We have a chance to do that in November when all of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives, one-third of the members of the U.S. Senate, and state and local officials from Maine to New Mexico are up for re-election.

We can’t turn back the clock on the attacks of the Bush Administration. But we can certainly reset the alarm, and wind it up so every working family in our nation can hear it go off on November 7th.

We have to work harder than we’ve ever worked to let our members, and the voting members of their families know -- and our allies and neighbors know -- that we have no time to waste. The future of our country is up to us!

We have to let voters know that the seeds of bigotry have been re-planted in thousands of our communities, and their ugly blooms are flourishing.

We have to remind voters that the sick …the elderly … the young … the poor … our minorities … the middle class ... have all been abandoned by a government as uncaring as it is incompetent.

We also have to join together to elect members of Congress who will vote for the Employee Free Choice Act to guarantee the freedom of every worker to join a union to lift up their lives!

Because our labor laws are very weak and our employers are very strong, it has become all but impossible for workers to join or form unions — employers are now free to intimidate and discriminate against workers who want to form unions, even terminate them for supporting a union.

We have to change that so labor can grow and become an even stronger partner with ACORN in all the things we need to do together.

Our job between now and November 7th is to register and educate our members and their families, and get them to the polls with the belief that together we can elect candidates from both parties who will fight for good jobs and good health care for every single person. Candidates who want to help turn our country around, and put our members and our neighbors and our loved ones back up in the front of the line!

Sisters and brothers, someone once said, “There are two things we must give our children: one is roots … and the other is wings.”

When I was growing up in the Bronx, our family and our church provided the roots, and my dad’s union provided the wings — in the form of a good job with decent benefits so he and my mom could move my sisters and brother and me up into a better life.

Today, our churches and our unions and ACORN are the wings of hope for our families and our communities and our entire way of life, and this year we must join those wings and spread them wider than ever so we can guarantee every worker a decent job, every child a good education, every senior citizen a secure retirement, and every American good, affordable health care from birth.

Thank you and God bless all of you . . . and God bless America.