Why Working People Are Angry and Why Politicians Should Listen
演讲人：Richard L.Trumka 理查德·特拉姆卡
Good evening.Thank you，John.I will never be able to express how much I owe you and how much the American labor movement owes you.The Institute of Politics is fortunate to have you as a fellow this semester.And let me add my thanks to the Institute of Politics and Bill Purcell for inviting me to be here with you tonight.
I am going to talk tonight about anger -and specifically the anger of working people.I want to explain why working people are right to be mad about what has happened to our economy and our country，and then I want to talk about why there is a difference between anger and hatred.There are forces in our country that are working hard to convert justifiable anger about an economy that only seems to work for a few of us into racist and homophobic hate and violence directed at our President and heroes like Congressman John Lewis.Most of all，those forces of hate seek to divide working people to turn our anger against each other.
So I also want to talk to you tonight about what I believe is the only way to fight the forces of hatred-with a strong prog ressive tradition that includes working people in action，orga nizing unions a nd organizing to elect public officials committed to bold action to address economic suffering.
That progressive tradition has drawn its strength from an alliance of the poor and the middle class-everyone who works for a living.But the alliance between working people and public minded intellectuals is also crucial-it is all about standing up to entrenched economic power and the complacency of the affluent.It"s an alliance that depends on intellectuals being critics，and not the servants，of economic privilege.
I a m here ton ig ht at t he Ken nedy S chool of Government to say that if you care about defending our country against the apostles of hate，you need to be part of the fight to rebuild a sustainable，high wage economy built on good jobs the kind of economy that can only exist when working men and women have a real voice on the job.
Our republic must offer working people something other than the dead-end choice between the failed agenda of greed and the voices of hate and division and violence.Public intellectuals have a responsibility to offer a better way.
The stakes could not be higher.Mass unemployment and growing inequality threaten our democracy.We need to act-and act boldly-to strike at the roots of working people"s anger and shut down the forces of hatred and racism.
We have to begin the conversation by talking about jobs-the 11million missing jobs behind our unemployment rate of 9.7percent.
Now，you may think to yourself，that is so retro.Jobs are so twentieth century.Sweat is for gyms，not workplaces.
For a generation，our intellectual culture has suggested that in the new global age，work is something someone else does.Someone we never met far away in an export processing zone will make our clothes，immigrants with no rights in our political process or workplaces will cook our food and clean our clothes.
And for the lucky top 10percent of our society，that has been the reality of globalization-everything got cheaper and easier.
But for the rest of the country，economic reality has been something entirely different.It has meant trying to hold on to a good job in a grim game of musical chairs where every time the music stopped，there were fewer good jobs and more people trying to get and keep one.Over the last decade，we lost more than 5million manufacturing jobs-a million of them professional and design jobs.We lost 20percent of our aerospace ma nu factur ing jobs.We"re losing high-tech jobs-the jobs we were supposed to keep.
For most of us，economic reality has meant trying to pay for the ever-more-expensive education needed to pursue a good job-the cost of a college degree has gone up more than 24percent since 2000while average wages and salaries have increased less than one percent.It has meant trying to pay for exorbitant health care as employer coverage went away or got hollowed out.It has meant trying to eke out a decent retirement even as the private sector shed real pensions and long-term investment returns evaporated.Meanwhile，Wall Street middlemen raked in the bonuses.
And t hat was t he rea lity for most Amer ica ns before t he Great Recession began in 2007.Since then，we have lost 8million jobs when the economy needed to add nearly three million just to keep up with population growth.That"s 11million missing jobs.
We used the public"s money to bail out the major banks，only to see those same banks return to the behavior that got us here in the first place-aggressive risk taking in securities and derivatives markets，and handing out gigantic bonuses.Most galling of all-they used the funds we gave them-courtesy of TARP and endless cheap credit from the Federal Reserve-to fight even the most modest，common sense reforms of our financial system.
President Obama"s economic recovery program has done a lot of good for working people-creating or saving more than 2million jobs.But the reality is that 2million jobs is just 18percent of the hole in our labor market.
The jobs hole and the decades-long stagnation in real wages-are the source of the anger that echoes across our political landscape.People are incensed by the government"s inability to halt massive job loss and declining living standards，on the one hand，and the comparative ease with which government led by both parties has made the world safe again for JP Morgan，Goldman Sachs and Citigroup，on the other hand.
Rescuing the big banks hasn"t done much for Main Street.The very same financial institutions that got bailed out have not only cut way back on lending to business，they have never stopped foreclosing on American families"homes.
