"The working class is hurting, and they're done with business as usual," Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, declared.
The Democratic Party's decades-long corporate turn and abandonment of the working class, which left a gaping void that the billionaire real estate mogul exploited in his rise to power. The result, Dimondstein argued, was "a lesser of two evils duopoly"—two dominant political parties that side with the interests of business over those of the working class. "Political parties have failed, absolutely failed, the working class," Dimondstein said. In order to defeat the corporate forces hellbent on completely eliminating workers' right to organize and bargain collectively for better wages and conditions, Dimondstein argued the working class must become as organized and political as the business elites it is combating. "Unions and the working class need to be political as hell," Dimondstein concluded. "Last time I checked, the Koch brothers are political as hell, Wall Street is political is hell... We have to be political."
To begin rebuilding the labor movement in the face of the ceaseless assault from right-wing politians and their billionaire benefactors, Good Jobs Nation Joseph Geevarghese argued that the tepid centrism and incremental solutions offered by the Democratic establishment will not cut it.
"We don't need more centrism. We don't need more half-baked economic ideas," Geevarghese said. "We need more full-throated economic populism," Geevarghese continued. "We need to make sure that we grow the American labor movement."
"Working people are the most powerful force on Earth," said RoseAnn DeMoro—former executive director of National Nurses United (NNU), the largest nurses union in the United States. "The labor movement isn't just people who are in unions, it's all of us."
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