REMARKS OF SENATOR BARACK OBAMA TO THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE UNITED FOOD AND COMMERCIAL WORKERS (UFCW)
APRIL 24, 2008, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

As all of you know, I’ve been spending a little time in Pennsylvania lately, a little time in Indiana, a little time in North Carolina, so it’s great to be back home. And I would like to say that it’s great to be among all of you at UFCW again, but the fact is that wherever I go, I see you!

Wherever this campaign has taken me, you have been there at my side. So the main reason I wanted to come by and see you today was to say thank you. Thank you for your support, your endorsement, thank you for your hard work. You are fighting with me in Wisconsin, you are fighting with me in Indiana, and I understand some of you just came back from Pennsylvania — I know that because I see those yellow t-shirts in every town hall meeting, and every rally that we have.

So I just want you to know how much I appreciate you being there for me. And you know that I will be there for you.

You know, you and I share a vision for this country. We believe that every American should have a fair shot at life.  That your family should have health care when they get sick. That you should be able to put your kids through college, even if you’re not wealthy. That you shouldn’t have to worry about getting injured on the job, and that after a lifetime of hard work you should be able to retire with dignity and respect.

It’s a vision deeply rooted in a fundamental truth — that we all have mutual obligations towards each other, that I am my brother’s keeper, that I am my sister’s keeper, and that all this country is bound together; that we rise and fall together.

And nobody understands that better than the union movement. That’s why we call it a “union” — because there’s a sense that what we can’t accompish individually, we can accomplish together.

But we know that for the last seven and a half years, we’ve had a whole different philosophy in the White House. They call it the “ownership society”, but what it really means is, you’re on your own. Lose your job? You’re on your own. Don’t have health care? You’re on your own. You’re a child who was born into poverty? Pick yourself up by your bootstraps! You’re on your own. You’re a senior whose pension gets dumped? Tough luck. You’re on your own.

It’s not just that this administration hasn’t been fighting for you; in fact, they’ve actually tried to stop you from fighting for yourselves. This is the most anti-labor administration in our memory; they don’t believe in unions, they don’t believe in organizing, they packed the [National] Labor Relations Board with their corporate buddies. But we are here to say that it is not the Department of Management, it is the Department of Labor, and we intend to take it back when I am President of the United States of America.

Now, I respect John McCain, I honor his service to this country, but he hasn’t offered any meaningful change from George W. Bush. He said that Bush economic policies had led to — and I’m quoting here — “great progress over the last seven years.” So he’s promising four more years of tax cuts for CEOs and corporations who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them; tax cuts that he once voted against as offending his conscience.

Well, they may have stopped offending John McCain’s conscience somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, but George Bush’s economic policies still offend my conscience. And they still offend your conscience, because I don’t think that the 232,000 Americans who lost their jobs this year are seeing “great progress” under George W. Bush. I don’t think the millions who’ve lost their homes, or the workers without pensions, or the families without health care see this “great progress” that John McCain sees. I don’t think the future generations who are going to be saddled with debt because of the irresponsible fiscal policies of George W. Bush are going to see “great progress” ten, twenty, thirty years from now.

So we already know that John McCain is offering more of the same. The question is not which party’s going to offer change in Washington; we know they won’t. The question is, will we? The question is, are we going to bring about change in Washington? Because the truth is the challenges that we face aren’t just the fault of one party, or one man.

Think about it. How many years — how many decades — have we been talking about health care reform? How many decades have we been talking about having a decent energy policy? How many decades — the 70s, the 80s, the 90s — have we seen jobs shipped overseas, and unions weakened? And we haven’t done anything about it.

And we know why. In every election, politicians come and tell you that they’ve got all these big promises and big plans. Then they go back to Washington, and somehow the lobbyists spend their millions to get their way and the status quo sets in, and instead of fighting for health care or jobs, Washington ends up fighting over the latest distraction of the week.

It happens year after year after year. Except this year. This is your chance to say “Not this year.” This is your chance to say “Not this time.”

We have a choice in this election. We can be the party that says “no” to taking money from Washington lobbyists, and we can recognize that you can’t be a champion of working Americans if you’re funded by lobbyists who drown out their voices.  

That’s why at the beginning of this campaign we said we wouldn’t take money from big Washington lobbyists. You funded my campaign — the American people have funded my campaign. And what that means is because they haven’t funded my campaign, they will not run our White House and they will not drown out the voices of the people when I am President of the United States of America.

We can take this country back.

We need to be a party that actually solves problems instead of trying to exploit the divisions in this country. We know the kind of politics that the other side will play when we go into the general election, but we don’t have the time to keep on being distracted.

This is the election where we can stand up and say that we are going to bring people together to make sure that every single American has high quality health care — we’re going to stop seeing premiums going up and up and up, so unions can negotiate for better wages, and not just better health care. And we won’t do it twenty years from now, or ten years from now; we can do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States of America if we’ve got your help.

This election is our opportunity to start putting people back to work. Even before the latest recession hit, our economic policies were out of balance; the first economic expansion since World War II in which the average family income actually went down by a thousand dollars. Never happened before.

So look, I believe in the free market, I believe in capitalism; but when a CEO is making more in a day than the worker is making in an entire year, and it’s the CEO that’s getting the tax break and the worker’s getting nothing; and when the company goes belly-up, somehow the CEO walks away with a million-dollar bonus, and the worker loses his pension, something’s wrong. Things aren’t working.

And that’s why I’ve already said that we’re going to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas; we’re going to give tax breaks to companies that invest right here in the United States of America. We’re going to roll back those Bush tax cuts, and we are going to give them to ordinary, middle-class families — people making $75,000, people making $50,000 — give them some tax relief so they can deal with these rising gas prices, so they can deal with rising home heating bills, so they can deal with rising medical costs.

We are going to invest in infrastructure again, rebuilding our roads and our bridges, our docks, our locks and dams. Because that’s how we will make America competitive, and put Americans back to work. And if people tell you that we cannot afford it, you just remind them that we are spending ten billion dollars a month in Iraq, and if we can spend ten billion dollars in Iraq in a month, we can spend ten billion dollars a month right here in the United States of America.

This election is a chance to finally get an energy policy that makes sense for America. We send a billion dollars every day overseas, and meanwhile, we’re paying $3.50 at the pump, and ExxonMobil made $11 billion last quarter. Oh, and I forgot to mention that we’re melting the polar ice caps.

That doesn’t make sense. So here’s what we’re going to do; we’re going to invest in an Apollo Project, a moon project, in energy independence. We’re going to invest $150 billion over ten years. We’re going to invest in solar, and wind, and bio-diesel. We’re going to go after any price-gouging that’s going on at the pump; we’re going to go after the windfall profits of those oil companies, make sure they’re being reinvested in alternative fuels and alternative energy. We can not only drive down gas prices, we can improve our environment and we can decrease our dependence on countries that don’t like us, and that we are funding because of our addiction to foreign oil. And in the meantime, we can create five million new jobs in green technologies all across the country.

What’s needed is not the know-how. It’s the lack of urgency in the White House. We’ve got to have a President who is thinking about how we’re going to improve this country each and every year, so that when our children look back, they can say “You know what? This generation made a difference. This generation had big dreams.” That’s what we’ve been missing for way too long.

And we’ve also been missing a President who doesn’t choke on the word “union”. We need to strengthen our unions by letting them do what they do best, which is organize our workers so that they’ve got a chance at a decent life. If a majority of workers want a union, then doggone it, they should get a union. That’s why I’ve been fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act, and that’s why I will sign it and make it the law of the land when I am President of the United States of America. That’s why we’ll have a National Labor Relations Board that actually believes in the union movement.

And this is an election where we can finally stop playing politics on an issue as important as immigration reform, and fix that system once and for all. I know that you guys have called for a legal path to citizenship for the undocumented and an end to an enforcement-only strategy that produces nothing but scattershot immigration raids at meatpacking plants all across the country. I join you in that call, because we know that enforcement alone is not enough; we also need to fix the system as a whole. And that does not mean new guest-worker systems that legalize worker exploitation; it means instituting a process of earned citizenship for the undocumented. That will be part of a comprehensive immigration reform policy that I will pass when I am President of the United States of America, and you will be standing alongside me when we put comprehensive reform in place.

So we know what’s at stake in this election, and we know what the choice is. Because we can talk about our broken health care system or our broken immigration system all we want, but unless we change the broken political system in Washington, nothing else is going to change. 

That’s why this campaign is so important. And that’s why what you’re doing is so important. That’s why I’m so proud that today, our campaign announced a massive volunteer-led voter registration drive in all fifty states, to help ensure that every single eligible voter takes part in this election, so we can take back Washington for the American people; take it back for working families all across America.

Because you’re the ones who have the power to change this country. You can make this election about how we’re going to make our workforce more competitive in a global economy; you can make this election about how we’re going to make health care affordable and help those families sitting around the kitchen table tonight pay their bills and stay in their homes; you can make this election about we plan to leave our children a planet that’s safer and a world that sees America the same way that my father saw it when he looked across an ocean — as a beacon of all that was good and all that was possible in America.

That’s also what this union has been about. Each generation making sure that we are laying the groundwork, the foundation, for a better life for our children and our grandchildren. So I want to thank you all for your hard work on this campaign, but I also want to thank you for the work I know you’re going to be doing in the future. I have to ask you to keep on working and keep on fighting and keep on organizing; keep making those phone calls, keep knocking on those doors; keep showing up in those yellow t-shirts everywhere I go, because I promise you this, if I’ve got UFCW behind me, if I’ve got working families behind me, then we will not just win this nomination; we will win this general election, and then you and I, together, we are going to change this country and we are going to change the world.

Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you.