Economic Populism

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASAR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I am Greg Casar. I am proud to represent the heart of Texas in the United States Congress and to chair the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Before all of that, I started my career as a labor organizer, and I saw up close how corporate lobbyists and corrupt politicians would trade campaign contributions for corporate tax breaks and how they would trade lower wages for workers for fatter paychecks for CEOs and their political friends.

They thought that working people could do nothing about this. They thought their workers were too divided to push back. On construction sites, guys who spoke different languages and who came from different places were pissed off, and they were willing to put their differences aside to come together and fight back, stop the corruption, and demand a fair paycheck.

We didn't win by going on bended knees and begging big corporations for better treatment. We did it by unifying working people around some central ideas that Americans deserve good pay for a full day's work and that taxpayer dollars are meant for the common good, not for corporate welfare.

Those ideas brought workers together to win historic wage increases and better benefits in the heart of Texas. This is what we need today in America. This is what we need the Democratic Party to be all about.

The central goal of the Democratic Party should be to break the unholy alliance between corporate greed and corrupt government. We can't just beg CEOs to please bring down prices. We have to break up the giant monopolies that are screwing over consumers and small businesses alike.

We can't just beg big CEOs to please be nicer to us. No. We have to get big money out of politics so that the ultrarich don't have a bigger say in this country than the everyday person.

We cannot just beg corporations to give people a raise. We have to unionize workplaces and pass laws that protect the American worker and the American worker's wages.

To get there, we have to transform the Democratic Party into a party that fights for working people first no matter what and into a party that is willing to stand up to the powerful special interests that are screwing over working people because, if we love our country, we have to be willing to fight for the people who make it work.

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