And their attacks come at the same time when American CEOs are getting Cadillac healthcare for life and they're retiring with golden pensions of 2 and 4 and 6 and 8, 10, even 20 and in some cases over $100 million a year. The attacks come at a time when our nation is wealthier than during any other period in our history. Think about that. We are, right now, the wealthiest nation on the face of the earth at its wealthiest point, but poverty and wage inequality are higher than they have been in 85 years.

The wealthiest nation on the face of the earth, millions of children living in poverty, millions of workers not having the dignity of healthcare and retirement. The wealthiest nation; think about that, at its wealthiest point in time.

And those attacks come at a time when profits and productivity are sky high, yet employers are stepping up their efforts to weaken and to destroy everything that we've won and we've built for ourselves over the last 100 years.

You see, the top 20 percent of wage earners are making more money than ever before, but salaries, wages, everything for the bottom 80 percent are stagnant, and our wage and our wealth gap is wider than any industrialized nation in the world.

Now, I want you to think about those contradictions, about how stark they are, about the damage that's happening to working families and how deep it's felt. When I think about that, I sit back and I'm sort of ashamed of our generation.

My son brought 14 of his teammates home and spent a weekend with me. I got up on Saturday morning to make some -- well, to make a lot of food for them. They came down and I looked at them, their faces full of excitement, their whole life in front of them. Bright kids, every last one of them; good hard-working kids with good values and good families. And I thought for a while that our generation, we failed them. We're giving them an America that isn't anywhere as open and full and rewarding as the America that we got from our parents and our grandparents. And I thought for a minute, and I made a pact with myself, Newt, that I would work every last minute of every day until the day that the last breath of warm air goes out of my lungs to right this country, to give them an America that welcomes them, that welcomes workers and that we can be proud of. I won't stop that.

You see, Brothers and Sisters, these atrocities didn't just happen accidentally. Neither God nor the mysterious hand of the marketplace is responsible. Every time a worker needs help, they say we can't do that, the market won't allow us. Every time the rich need help, they find a way to do it, and the market doesn't stop it from happening.

You see, it's not God or the marketplace, but the result of a corporate war on working families, and it's been going on for 25 years, and the wounds are pretty raw and the wounds are more and more visible every day, and they're festering. And each and every new attack, it's like pouring salt in those wounds, because the burns for workers just heat up again.

You see, before all of this started, Dr. Martin Luther King saw it coming when he said the following. He said, "The means by which we live have outdistanced the needs for which we live." Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

See, those misguided men and some misguided women are now in control of our lives. Corporations decided to compete in the global marketplace by cheapening work and by downgrading and denigrating workers rather than through innovation and ingenuity. And now they're determined to trap us permanently in a corporate policy box where they can squeeze, squeeze more out of us, holding down wages by permitting cheap foreign competition that violates all the rules and not enforcing those rules. Deregulating entire industries, privatizing vital government programs, deunionizing our workplaces.