Stewart Acuff
Chief of Staff and Assistant to the President, Utility Workers Union of America
There is nothing like watching a $50 million-dollar-a-year radio talker like Rush Limbaugh whining and complaining about a 4 percent tax increase for the wealthy to help you realize just how greedy the leadership of the Radical Rightwing Republican Party is.
Karl Rove is very busy this week trying to explain why the hundreds of millions of dollars he collected from America’s most evil wealthy bought them no government, no president, no congress, no nothin’. One of Rove’s funds returned an estimated 1 percent. Sheldon Adelson — who spent $20 million on Newt Gingrich in the Republican primary — won nothing, nada, zilch.
The American people busted the best laid plans of mice and the Rightwing Radical Republicans–Rove and the American Legislative Exchange Council and the greedy among America’s top 1 percent. They had a plan to make 2012 their breakthrough year with state-by-state assaults on workers and unions and more money than most of us can imagine. African Americans and students and Latinos and senior citizens fought through every lousy, mean, evil effort to exact poll taxes and disenfranchisement to vote for an extraordinary leader of color.
I am so proud of you and all of us who worked hard for Barack Obama and justice in America and for the man we worked our hearts out for.
What we know now is that we–you and me–have to stay on the field of struggle, we have to take advantage of a leader who believes in a fairer and more just America. We have to fight for more equality, to fight for workers and average Americans to join collectively for better lives and healthier families and a more perfect union.
We all have to make real the hopes of millions of Americans–more and better jobs, wages high enough to allow families to spend time together, a better healthcare system, justice for LGBT people, women who own their own bodies, stronger unions, and formations of collective action that allow workers and average Americans to work together and fight for themselves, each other, and their families, and for justice for people who come to this country for a better life for themselves and their children including education and higher education for their children, and for peace with a domestic dividend that can allow us to rebuild American infrastructure and build high speed rail, sustainable energy, and put thousands of our people to work at good, union jobs.
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Prior to working for the UWUA, Stewart Acuff served as director of organizing for the AFL-CIO beginning in October, 2002. He has been a community organizer and union organizer for 25 years, except for a brief stint as a truck driver. In 1982, he joined the union movement as the organizing coordinator for the Service Employees International Union in Texas. In 1985, he became executive director of the Georgia State Employees Union/SEIU Local 1985. Acuff was elected president of the Atlanta Labor Council in 1991, where he served for nine years. In 2000, he joined the AFL-CIO staff as deputy director of field mobilization for the Midwest region. He served as deputy director of organizing from 2001 until becoming director. He is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank Advisory Council and the National Steering Committee of Jobs with Justice.
Posted November 13, 2012 at 12:00 pm, in Allied Approaches
