Editor's note: Here's another in series examining the challenges organized labor faces as it contemplates historic changes to reinvigorate itself.

By Barbara Kucera and Michael Kuchta
Workday Minnesota and the St. Paul Union Advocate

ST. PAUL, Minn. (PAI) - The real divide in the United States is not between so-called "Red" and "Blue" states, but between the wealthy corporations who control our lives and the rest of us, author Thomas Frank says.

Frank, who wrote the best-seller "What's the Matter with Kansas?" was the featured speaker at the annual Jobs Now Coalition meeting on Dec. 9 in St. Paul. He also was one of five recipients of its "Working Class Hero" award.

Frank dissected the way wealthy corporations use a conservative social message to advance their economic agenda, causing people to vote against their own economic self-interests. "Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends," he asserted.

The Republican Party and the Right Wing have very effectively used issues like abortion, gay rights and prayer in the schools to capitalize on people's frustrations and turn them out to support GOP candidates, Frank said.

At the same time, the GOP and its allies are silent on economic issues, like the impact on the middle class and workers of George W. Bush's massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

This cynical approach is all about winning elections and advancing a pro-corporate economic agenda, Frank said. "It'll never bring prayer back to the public schools but it has managed to roll back the economic reforms of the 1960s and the New Deal," he pointed out.

But the GOP also stepped through a door Democrats left open for them, Frank added. He explained the Democrats no longer make workers' issues a priority. Instead, they try to make themselves "safe for corporate campaign contributions."

By abandoning working- and middle-class families in that way, Frank said, the Democrats let the GOP and its right wing allies to charge in and appeal to those voters on social issues, while ignoring those voters' economic concerns in favor of a pro-corporate agenda.

The result is that "It's as if what people want is more power to General Electric and Citibank... It's a working-class movement" created by the GOP and Radical Right "that has done irreparable harm to the working class."

Frank also noted the cultural "decline" the GOP decries still remains to upset the voters it courts. But emphasizing such social issues "is a way of thinking about class that is not based on wealth. It stands the traditional notion of class on its head," he explained.

Frank challenged progressive organizations to expose the "fake populism" of the Right and talk about the hidden corporate agenda. "Today the U.S. has achieved levels of wealth inequality unique among industrialized nations and (levels that) we haven't seen in the United States since the 1920s," he said.

In 1980, the average American CEO made about 40 times the salary of the average worker, Frank noted. Today, CEOs take home more than 500 times what their workers earn.