The fact is that for a generation we have built our economy on a lie that we can have a low-wage，high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.
So now a lot of Americans are angry.And we should be angry.And just as we have seen throughout history，there are plenty of purveyors of hate and division looking to profit from our hurt and our anger.
I am a student of history，and now is the time to remember our history as a nation.Remember that when President Franklin Roosevelt said，"We have nothing to fear but fear itself，"other voices were on the radio，voices saying that what we really needed to fear was each other voices preaching anti-semitism and Nazi-style racial hatred.
Remember that when President John F.Kennedy stepped off the plane in Dallas on November 22，1963，radio voices were calling for violence against the President of the United States.And the violence came-and took John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and so many others.
But in the United States，we chose to turn away from the voices of hatred at those critical moments in the twentieth century.In much of Europe，racial hatred and political violence prevailed in response to the mass unemployment of the Great Depression.And in the end，we had to rescue those countries from fascism-from the horrible consequences of the failure of their societies to speak to the pain and anger bred by mass unemployment.
W hy did our democracy endure through the Great Depression？Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe.Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred.Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.
This is a similar moment.Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation.Now，amid the wreckage that came from that experiment，we hear the voices of hatred，of racism and homophobia.
At this moment of economic pain and anger，political intellectuals face a g reat choice -whether to be ser vants or cr itics of economic privilege.And I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard.
The economic elites at JP Morgan Chase，Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectualser vants wherever they can find them.But the st ronger the a lliance between intellectua ls a nd economic elites，the more the for cesofhatred -of anti-intellectualism-will grow.If you want to fight the forces of hatred，you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger.
And at this moment，the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people.We need help.We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real，sustainable economy that works for all of us.
Working people want an American economy that creates good jobs，where wealth is fairly shared，and where the economic life of our nation is about solving big problems like the threat of climate change rather than creating big problems like the foreclosure crisis.We know that growing inequality undermines our ability to grow as a nation by squandering the talents and the contributions of our people and consigning entire communities to stagnation and failure.But despite our best efforts，we have endured a generation of stagnant wages and collapsing benefits-a generation where the labor movement has been much more about defense than about offense.
We in the labor movement have to challenge ourselves to make our institutions into a voice for all working people.And we need to begin with jobs.Eleven million missing jobs is not tolerable.That"s why we are fighting for the AFL-CIO"s five point jobs program-extending unemployment benefits，including COBRA health benefits for unemployed workers；expanding federal infrastructure and green jobs investments；dramatically increasing federal aid to state and local governments facing fiscal disaster；creating jobs direct ly，especia lly in dist ressed communities；and finally，lending TARP money to small and medium sized businesses that can"t get credit because of the financial crisis.
As we meet tonight，organizers working for the AFL-CIO"s 3million-member community affiliate Working America are knocking on doors across our country talking jobs.We are organizing support for George Miller"s Local Jobs for America Act that would target 100billion in job creation dollars toward our country"s hardest hit communities-to keep teachers in the classroom and first responders on the job，and to create new jobs where Wall Street destroyed them.We are organizing support for financial reform and accountability for Wall Street.We are working to counter the Glenn Beck effect and turn anger into action for real change.
But we are not just talking about how to create jobs，we are talking about how to pay for them.Wall Street should pay to clean up the mess they made，and we are supporting four ways for the big banks to pay-President Obama"s bank tax，a special tax on bank bonuses，closing the carried interest tax loophole for hedge funds and private equity，and most important，a financial speculation tax levied on all financial transactions-including derivatives-that would raise over 150billion a year，according to the Congressional Budget Office.The financial speculation tax would have negligible impact on long-term investors，but would discourage the short termism in the capital markets that led to so much destruction over the last decade.
