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.