Kill the Bill or Stop the Train

I was at the Allied neighborhood association meeting on Saturday thinking about my kids. Then Association President Selena Pettigrew called on me. It was time for my alder report. I looked around the room, at these great and amazing people with whom I’ve grown these last four years. These people who would give the clothes off their back to help a neighbor in need. These people who live in a community socked with poverty, violence, and what often feels like an anchored cloud of hopelessness. Generations of poverty just weighing down upon themselves. I looked around and felt a wave of love for them, as I often do.

And then I got mad. “How many of you have been to the Capitol?” I asked. I knew the answer. I started in on my disgust with everything. With our attacks on the poor and the middle class. With our inability to see the injustice in poverty, in cheap jeans made by kids in China, in cheap food with no known origin, in middle class workers being pitted against each other because some get health care and some don’t. All while our schools get more crowded, our black kids get more incarcerated, and our country swells with more debt. Banks get bailed out and taxpayers get impaled. Property tax relief, which at least pretends to be progressive, gets replaced with the most regressive things possible: higher food costs and gas at four bux a gallon.

The private sector wants to drag down the public sector for their glorious benefits and we all blame the poor, who keep reaching out their grubby little fingers for Pell grant loans, energy assistance, and community action programs. All about to be cut, by the way. While the richest 1% of Americans control more wealth than over 200 million people. While CEO’s ring up 400 times the salary of the average worker. While corporations gain more and more rights.

On the other end of the spectrum, the minimum wage remains stagnant, as it has for half a century. Worker rights and protections are being eaten away. Productivity climbs higher and higher and wages stay flat. Tomato pickers fight for years to get an extra penny per pound.

I fired them up, my friends on Allied. Thirty minutes later we were planning our “Allied Fights Back” campaign. It’s coming soon…

The next day, I spoke to a national teleconference of Ethical Society members about worker rights and what’s happening in Wisconsin. They are ready to fight back too.

Here we are at ground zero. My biggest fear about this whole exercise was that we were fighting for the wrong thing. That we’d let this moment slip away, that we’d trade a victory in the battle for continued devastation in the war. And friends, I’m not trying to hyperbolize here, but we’re getting devastated. Crushed. I mean this ain’t even a fight. Until two weeks ago, in Madison, Wisconsin, I’d argue we haven’t even shown up. But now that we’re here, the question is what are we going to do about it? How far will we go? We have been on a high speed train since 1980: a train of corporate profits and privatization. But all yawl struggling to pay your mortgage? Don’t blame the wealthy. They aren’t asking for anything. They are just hanging out on their yacht, eating caviar and drinking $500 bottles of champagne while trading blood diamonds with each other. C’mon man. We know who’s to blame: those dang welfare queens down on Allied, down on Cicero, down sneaking across the Mexican border, sitting around, having kids, getting their nails done, and wanting nothing more than to take us for all we got. We’ve voted to slow the high speed train down a few times. But to stop it? Or change direction? Not for a second.

But now we have a little momentum of our own. Now we have "a thousand people in the streets, singing songs and a-carrying signs." Stomping their feet. Reminding us what democracy looks like. Are we going to win the battle for public union collective bargaining and nestle back into our materialistic, tunnel visioned slumber? Or are we going to keep it up? Demand a new direction?

Chris Rickert, in a State Journal article last week, asked why the unions aren’t out supporting the poor. That is not the question. The question is why aren’t all of us. We are going to get Allied folks to the Capitol. We are going to get more people from around the nation to join Progressives United or moveon.org. We are going to get more people listening to Democracy Now instead of “fair and balanced” that’s neither.

We’ve been asleep for too long. Its time to wake up, to show up, to stand up, to speak up. No more sneaking around democracy. No more hoodwinking the middle class into blaming each other. No more hatred for the poor. No more tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful, while everyone else crawls around with their tongues out hoping that a drop or two will trickle down.

As my good friend Eric Sundquist pined earlier this evening, “the best antidote to despair is action.”

Its not about killing the bill. Its about killing the train. 100,000 people is a great start. But we need 100 million.

It starts tomorrow, with a rally at 8 am. Wisconsin Capitol Building: Madison Wisconsin. Where it ends, is up to us.

Madison, WI: A Prelude for Economic Justice

As Bob Dylan once sang, “The battle is outside raging.” Thousands protest daily and Madison and Wisconsin have made national news once again. Wisconsin: the state that produced Fighting Bob LaFollette, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, and suffrage for women. Madison: the city that produced lasting images against the Vietnam War and in favor of civil rights.

We all struggle to conjure the vocabulary to describe tens of thousands of people – young and old, black and white, rich and poor – descending daily upon the Capitol, standing side by side, carrying signs, protesting peacefully for what they believe in, chanting and singing and dancing and refusing to back down. It is inspiring beyond words. It is historic. It is beautiful and meaningful and, hopefully, consequential.

But it is not enough. And the joy and pride I feel for the battle we are fighting remains sadly diminished by thoughts of the war we continue to ignore.

The war has been around since the beginning of humanity, but one could argue that it became full fledged at the beginning of the industrial revolution. 130 years ago, partially in response to the Pullman strike to organize the railway industry (and partially to buy back some domestic capital after calling out troops to suppress the strike), President Grover Cleveland took a New York City workers rights parade and turned it into the first Labor Day.

Fast forward to the 1930s. The National Labor Relations Act was passed to encourage collective bargaining and protect the rights of both employers and employees. The Fair Labor Standards Act was also passed, establishing a minimum wage and a 40 hour work week, prohibiting child labor, and guaranteeing overtime for certain occupations. There are strong arguments that these laws, along with Social Security and other New Deal protections, helped pull America out of the Great Depression, cement the middle class, and initiate the greatest period of sustained economic growth in our nation’s history. This led to the 1940s, where 35% of the American labor force was unionized.

Many have forgotten the details of the 1981 air traffic controllers strike. Thirteen thousand walked off the job to protest long shifts and mandatory overtime. Two days later, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 of them, imprisoned union leaders, abolished their union, and hired permanent replacement workers. And, I would argue, set off a chain reaction that continues to unravel the progress of the last hundred years.

There is a battle raging right now in Madison, Wisconsin. But what is the goal? How do we define victory? Imagine the following: Governor Walker backs down and allows collective bargaining to continue in the public sector. The crowds diminish, victory is declared, and America settles back into the comfortable slumber to which we’ve become accustomed.

But guess what else happens?

• Minimum wage remains at a 50 year low.
• A full century after Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, occupational health and safety standards are weak and growing weaker.
• Union membership hasn’t been lower in three generations.
• Almost all worker protections of the last half century have been dissolved.
• As Salon.com reported last year, the “gap between rich and poor last year grew to the widest amount on record (14.5:1, double that of 1968).
• 12 million Americans, mostly unskilled single mothers, were pushed into the labor market by welfare reform. Most continue to make minimum wage, like low income workers throughout the nation, working two or three jobs just to meet ends meet.

For the first half of the last 50 years, there was a basic bargain: work harder and become more productive and your wages will increase. Starting in the 1970’s, this bargain went haywire. Had the trend continued as it had through the 50s and 60s, some estimate that the current minimum wage would be $19 an hour. Call it class warfare. Call it wage warfare. But make no mistake: this is the war. And if we don’t fight for better wages for all workers, public and private sector, blue and white collar, skilled and unskilled, then there are a few guarantees we can count on:

• The gap between rich and poor will continue to grow. The only way to address this chasm is to raise wages.
• The economy may keep improving but not for the poor or the middle class. Don’t believe me? The stock market is back to pre-recession levels with high unemployment, low wages, and decreased benefits. If the stock market can succeed under those conditions, there will be no incentive for those conditions to change.

Economic justice is, arguably, THE modern day battle for civil rights. Martin Luther King, Jr, remember, was assassinated not during a rally for racial justice. He was assassinated while participating in a strike of sanitation workers. And as MLK said, “In a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

I was listening to the radio today, on my way home from another day of protesting, and heard an angry caller bemoaning the support middle class public sector employees are receiving while he toils in unemployment. “These are my taxpayer dollars,” he screamed into the phone, “and I can’t afford to pay them more.”

And in the end, that sums it up. We have been hoodwinked. In one of the greatest scams in American history, middle class American’s fight against each other and vilify the poor, while corporations grow stronger and the income gap grows wider. Middle class tea partiers rally with the Koch brothers because they believe government is the problem, instead of the billionaire oil barons with whom they unite. Don’t believe it? Then why would President Obama propose a budget that cuts community service block grants, energy assistance for the poor, food stamps, and Pell Grants? Because we blame the poor for our economic problems. If we didn’t, these proposals would never have even been entertained by a sadly desperate President.

We are in the midst of something incredible and astonishing. An opportunity that is both historic and tragic, if we let it pass. Where are you, low income workers? Minimum wage earners? Unemployed? Private sector employees working harder than ever, without raises, so that corporate profits can go up and the stock market soar?

Because if we don’t let this battle become the defining moment in the war, we will have let an historic opportunity pass us by. And while we might have a chance in this battle, we are losing the war. We are being bamboozled. Its time to wake up and realize that helping the poor is not what’s killing the middle class. Remember, it wasn’t teachers, nurses, 911 dispatchers, fire fighters, police, home health aids, migrant laborers, immigrants, or welfare moms who caused the Great Recession. It is time for a Fair Labor Standards Act, Part II. A time for us to remember: everyone in America making less than $100,000 a year has far more in common with each other than with those who do. Workers do not gain wages, benefits, or rights at our expense. A gain by one is a gain for all.

This is the time for all workers to unite. We number in the millions. We are the backbone of the nation, of the economy, of the electorate. We have an opportunity to stand up strong, build on the momentum that is underway, and renew the path of a half century ago, the one that built an American middle class, rewarded hard work with dignity, and created the strongest economy on earth. May this battle awaken us from our three decade long slumber. May the protests currently underway serve as the momentum for something bigger than their origins: a real victory in this real war.