Working people are angry, because tens of thousands of them no longer have any work.

Working people are angry because those in the White House and on Capitol Hill have shown they are not the New Dealers of the 21st century, and have betrayed the principles of the Democratic Party, the party of the New Deal.

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO in a recent speech said: [the need for a] "strong progressive tradition that includes working people in action, organizing unions and organizing to elect public officials committed to bold action to address economic suffering. 

"Mass unemployment and growing inequality threaten our democracy.

"The jobs hole – and the decades-long stagnation in real wages -- are the source of the anger that echoes across our political landscape.  People are incensed by the government's inability to halt massive job loss and declining living standards, on the one hand, and the comparative ease with which government led by both parties has made the world safe again for JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, on the other hand.

"Rescuing the big banks hasn't done much for Main Street.  The very same financial institutions that got bailed out have not only cut way back on lending to business, they have never stopped foreclosing on American families' homes. 

"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.

"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...

"We must take action to restore workers' voices.  The systematic silencing of America's workers by denying their freedom to form unions is at the heart of the disappearance of good jobs in America. 

"But too many thought leaders have become the servants of a different kind of politics—a politics that sees middle-class Americans as overpaid and underworked.  That sees Social Security as a problem rather than the only piece of our retirement system that actually works.  A mentality that feels sorry for homeless people, but fails to see the connections between downsizing, outsourcing, inequality and homelessness.  A mentality that sees mass unemployment as something that will take care of itself, eventually.            

"We need to return to a different vision.            

"President Obama said in his inaugural address, "The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth."  Now is the time to make good on these words – for Congress, for President Obama and for the American people."

Unfortunately, this White House and this Democratic majority on Capitol Hill has been a great disappointment, not channeling the New Deal but millionaires doing Wall Street and corporations'  bidding to the detriment of regular working people.