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In public squares across the country, Occupy protesters honor Rev. Martin Luther King’s memory on this holiday devoted to him. Their tribute is more meaningful and enduring than the granite monument that President Obama dedicated to Rev. King in Washington, D.C. last year.

That’s because the Occupiers are pressing for a cause – economic justice – that Rev. King had embraced in the months before his assassination in 1968. And they’re pursuing it with the technique he advocated – nonviolent protest.

Rev. King’s final crusade, his Poor People’s Campaign, and the Occupiers’ championing the nation’s 99 percent are remarkable in their similarities. It’s tragic that in the 44 years since Rev. King launched his campaign for an economic Bill of Rights that the nation’s poor and middle class have lurched backward instead of forward. It’s hopeful, however, that a whole new generation of idealists has taken up the dream of economic justice.

In the year before Rev. King was gunned down, he persuaded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to join him in a movement devoted to securing for all citizens the basic needs that would enable them to pursue the American Dream, to pursue happiness. He believed every able-bodied person should have access to a job with a living wage. And he believed every American should have decent housing and affordable health care. Without economic security, he said, no man is free.

Rev. King’s dream has its roots in the progressive movement, containing key elements of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights. Roosevelt, the beloved president who gave the country Social Security, pushed the Economic Bill of Rights in the waning days of the war. (more…)

President Obama’s speech to Congress tonight reset the political battle lines and put Progressives back on the offensive.

The speech included provisions that Republicans in Congress may actually agree to pass — like continuing the payroll tax holiday that if allowed to lapse would affect the paychecks of virtually every American worker. But it also made the case for bold initiatives to rebuild America’s infrastructure and directly create jobs through a teacher corps and youth jobs program. These bolder proposals are critically necessary to jump start the economy, and Obama is betting — correctly — that if they fail to support them, Republicans will pay a political price next year.

What was needed was a package of proposals that were bold, projected urgency, and will create jobs now. The president delivered.

Obama explicitly rejected the dangerous, fallacious notion that the path to long-term economic growth runs through the valley of economic austerity.

He clearly defined the fundamental difference in values — and economic philosophy — between progressive Democrats and right wing Republicans. (more…)

Last month, I joined with MoveOn.org and launched the Rebuild the Dream campaign to help give a voice to the millions of Americans who aren’t being heard in Washington. This past weekend, we organized nearly 1,600 house meetings across the country — nearly double the number of protests the Tea Party held when they launched in April of 2009. The American Dream Meetings gave more than 27,000 people, from all across the country, an opportunity to come together and discuss what the American Dream means to them and their families. They talked about how the jobless crisis and foreclosure mess is impacting their communities. They put forth creative ideas for the Contract for the American Dream — a bold progressive vision to help fix the broken economy and rebuild our communities. The Contract has already received nearly 26,000 ideas submitted online alone and over 6 million ratings.

While I’m beyond inspired by the enormous outpour of ideas we’ve received thus far, it doesn’t surprise me that the American people are yearning to come up with practical solutions to our economic crisis. While so many Americans struggle with joblessness and rampant foreclosures, we keep hearing from Washington that we need to reduce the deficit, even if it means slashing Medicare or gutting vital programs families depend on. Washington appears to be operating on an entirely different planet than the rest of America.

There’s an important story that’s not being told in Washington. It’s the story of the mother or father getting the dreaded call into the office where their boss informs them that they’ve been laid off. They were already underwater on their house, and now without a steady paycheck, they start to get behind on their mortgage payments. Then comes the big bad bank. They do everything they can to keep their house but it’s no use. The bank posts that horrifying foreclosure notice on their door, and takes their home. They sell most of their belongings and move their entire family into a one-bedroom apartment. Or if they’re lucky, they move in with grandma. It’s a vicious cycle and it’s happening every single day in America. It’s the new American nightmare.

(more…)

Robert Reich connects the dots on the economy, in less than 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Who knew he could draw!?!

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

If the Republicans have their way and privatize Medicare, it will put millions of seniors at the mercy of health insurance companies and force them to pay $39 trillion more for Medicare coverage than they would under existing law, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). That’s why this is a massive windfall for insurers. The GOP budget plan will also shift trillions of dollars in costs onto America’s seniors and families. When the program begins, new Medicare enrollees would have to pay at least $6,400 more each year out-of-pocket for private coverage equivalent to current Medicare benefits. And the average Medicare beneficiary’s contribution to the cost of Medicare benefits would skyrocket from 25 percent under the existing system to an astonishing 68 percent in 2030, according to CEPR and the Congressional Budget Office.

The Republican plan will enrich insurance companies at the expense of consumers and actually increase the overall net cost of health care by $34 trillion over the next 75 years, the planning period Medicare trustees are required to use. The increased costs are because of the private health insurance industry’s excessive profits, obscene CEO salaries and the costs of the bureaucracy it creates to deny care to consumers. These private plan administrative costs often eat up 20 or even 30 cents of every insurance premium dollar compared to Medicare’s roughly 3 cents. And in the past few weeks it’s become clear that the industry’s profits keep going up as consumers are being crushed by ever-rising co-payments and deductibles. (more…)

I wonder when our elected officials will get it.  Get what, you may ask.   Get the idea that our trade policies are killing us and have for many years.  Get the idea that American corporations are NOT going to create jobs here in the United States when they get huge tax breaks for giving our jobs away.  Get the idea that the American Dream is to provide a standard of living better than our forefathers gave to us. Get the message that we need good manufacturing jobs in order to turn this country around.

But NO, most of our elected officials see one thing, and that is their next election. They are so busy running for office, that they lose track of who sent them there. There is enough blame for all political parties in Washington D.C. They should be ashamed of themselves for putting us in this situation where ads run on TV about American workers working for China.  There is at least one U.S. senator who sees our views, and that is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

A message for all who serve in DC.  please do the right thing: WE NEED JOBS.

Ron Pickering
Brattleboro, Vermont
Retired Sub District Director, USW District 4

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

The Republican budget proposal released by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin would give millionaires and political campaign contributors huge tax breaks while punishing seniors and working families. Ryan’s extremist plan would decimate Medicare and Medicaid and terminate the Affordable Care Act, undermining the economic security of America’s struggling middle class.

The Republican plan isn’t based on the principle of shared sacrifice. There’s no fairness. The idea that we solve big problems in this country by working together and sharing the burden can’t be found. The super-rich and big corporations aren’t asked to pitch in. Instead the Republicans manipulate the tax code so the rich get even richer. This budget blueprint changes the rules and reshapes this country in a breathtakingly dangerous way.

The Republican budget attacks every single one of us. Health care programs that everyone in this country depends on would be eviscerated. For example, we all depend on Medicare and expect that it will be there for us. What happens if it is not? What will people really do? Many of us have friends and relatives who receive Medicaid benefits, including millions in nursing homes. What happens when states slash benefits and dump people from the program? And the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, has already made a huge difference in the lives of millions in its first year – and ultimately will directly touch 200 million of us. Affordable health care we can count on is a key to economic security. (more…)

By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist

Thanks to near-ubiquitous national media coverage, you probably know by now that Ted Williams was a homeless and jobless man who is now being offered fairly major media jobs because he had the random luck of becoming a YouTube sensation. This is certainly a heart-warming story, and we should all be genuinely happy for Williams. It’s a blessing when anyone is lifted out of such destitution.

However, there’s a dark side to all this – not about Williams, but about the phenomenon he has come to represent.

In a country whose social class mobility has now dropped below many fellow (and often “socialist”) industrialized nations, Williams is being implicitly promoted by our media as a representative example of how the American Dream still exists. I say it is implicit because, of course, none of the media promoting the story comes out and says exactly this. But the very fact that this has become such a huge national story logically implies that the media promoting it believes it represents something bigger or national. Indeed, why else would the national media cover the story of one homeless person as a national story, if not to suggest it represents something of national importance?

This, then, is a microcosm of a media that has become far more a manufacturer of false establishment-serving storylines than a documenter of genuine everyday reality. The idea that the American Dream still exists and that everyone can “make it” like Ted Williams is, by all objective economic measures, demonstrably false. But that idea is nonetheless incessantly promoted by politicians, corporate leaders and their media servants because it convinces large swaths of the put-upon general public to refrain from asking fundamental questions about inequality, poverty and the punitive structure of our economy – ie. questions that corporate-backed politicians, pundits and media institutions do not want asked. (more…)

 

Throughout last year, they were far more likely than other age groups to have reported unemployment in their households. Labor force participation for those ages 16-24 has decreased to its lowest levels since WWII as a Pew report on the graying work force notes that the recession has tilted the job market towards older workers and those with degrees.

Those college costs are usually financed instead by loans which are currently not eligible for bankruptcy protection. Loan repayment therefore eats up larger percentages of future earnings which have been plummeting for 8 years for those under 55. Bad timing for anyone who’s taken out student loans in recent years in the hopes that the job market would catch up to their education expenditures, and worse luck if their parents’ declining wages reduce the possibility for family assistance.

A third of adults under 27 also lack health coverage, with nearly half of those young adults earning less than $14,000 per year. Since wages for most people have been effectively stagnant, they have not kept pace with health coverage increases, and the lower you go down the economic ladder, the truer that is. Especially because there’s been an ongoing decline in employer-based coverage that has disproportionately affected low-income workers and the small businesses that create the most jobs.

For another worrying indicator, an AARP poll earlier this year indicated that around a quarter of adults 18 and over are living with parents or in-laws. Another 15 percent were worried they might have to do so soon, while one in seven lived with a sibling.

I don’t know about you, but the American Dream I was sold didn’t include worse buying power and relative wealth than my blue-collar, high school-educated parents for myself , my peers and those who came after me.

The United States’ lack of an industrial policy has been cherished for its ability to bring us ever cheaper consumer goods by steadily outsourcing manufacturing work to other countries. It’s been great for people who already had money, it’s destroyed opportunities for entry-level blue collar work that leads to a reasonable degree of financial security.

You can see the results in the balance sheets of young adults’ households and the narrowing of their prospects. They’re being pressured to take on the increasingly bad investment of the typical college education to go after a declining pool of jobs that provide dwindling levels of wage and health benefit compensation.

Maybe we don’t have to make all the same things we used to make, but our current and future workforce needs the upward pressure on wages and benefits that entry-level and longstanding manufacturing careers used to create. The United States can’t continue to support export-led growth elsewhere in the world if our upcoming workforce continues losing the ability to sell their labor in return for a reasonable standard of living. It stands to reason that if financial capital isn’t invested in the American workforce producing things that others want to buy, these trends will only continue as the US spends down the accumulated gains of previous productivity.

If Americans want a better future for their children, there needs to be a concerted effort to make more things in America.

***

This piece was first published on the Campaign for America’s Future Blog

In looking back on growing up, I always remember 1957 and 1958 at “the two good years,” They were the only years my working class redneck family ever caught a real break in their working lives, and that break came because of organized labor. After working as a farm hand, driving a hick town taxi part ti me, and a dozen catch as catchcan jobs, my father found himself owning a used semi-truck and hauling produce for a Teamster unionized trucking company called Blue Goose.

Daddy was making more money than he’d ever made in his life, about $4,000 a year. The median national household income at the time was $5,000, mostly thanks to America’s unions. After years of moving from one rented dump to another, we bought a modest home, ($8,000) and felt like we might at last be getting some traction in achieving the so-called “American Dream.” Yup, Daddy was doing pretty good for a backwoods boy who’d quit school in the sixth or seventh grade — he was never sure, which gives some idea how seriously the farm boy took his attendance at the one-room school we both attended in our lifetimes.

This was the golden age of both trucking and of unions. Thirty-five percent of American labor, 17 million working folks, were union members, and it was during this period the American middle class was created. The American middle class has never been as big as advertised, but if it means the middle third income-wise, then we actually had one at the time. But whatever it means, one third of working folks, the people who busted their asses day in and day out making the nation function, were living better than they ever had. Or at least had the opportunity to do so.

From the Depression through World War II the Teamsters Union became a powerful entity, and a popular one too because of such things as its pledge never to strike during the war or a national emergency. President Roosevelt even had a special designated liaison to the Teamsters. But power and money eventually drew the usual assortment of lizards, and by the mid-fifties the Teamsters Union had become one corrupt pile of s$&* at the top level. So rotten even the mob enjoyed a piece of the action. The membership, ordinary guys like my dad, was outraged and ashamed, but rendered powerless by the crooked union bosses in the big cities.

My old man was no great follower of the news or current events, but he tried to keep up with and understand Teamster developments. Which was impossible since his reading consisted of anti-union Southern newspapers, and the television coverage of Teamster criminality, including murders, and the ongoing courtroom trials.

All this left him conflicted. His Appalachian Christian upbringing defined the world in black and white, with no gray areas. Inside he felt he should not be even remotely connected with such vile things as the Teamsters were associated with. And he sometimes prayed for guidance in the matter. On the other hand, there was the pride and satisfaction in providing for his family in ways previously impossible. He’d built a reasonable working class security for those times and that place in West Virginia. Being a Teamster certainly made that possible. But for damned sure no one had handed it to him. He drove his guts out to get what he had.

There were rules, and log books and all the other crap that were supposed to assure drivers got enough rest, and ensure road safety and fairness for the truckers. Rural heartland drivers saw it for the bull it was, but it was much better paying bull. For a little guy hauling produce from Podunk USA  to the big cities, it still came down to heartburn, hemorrhoids, and longer hauls and longer hours than most driver’s falsified log books showed. And sometimes way too much Benzedrine, or “bennies.”

Bennies were a type of speed commonly used by truckers back then because of the grueling hauls. As a former doper who has done bennies, I can avow they are some gritty nerve jagging s$%*. Their only virtue is making you wide awake and jumpy, and after you’ve been awake on them a couple days, which many drivers were, crazier than a s&%*house rat.  Nearly every truck stop sold bennies under the counter. Once while hallucinating on bennies Daddy nearly wiped out a roadside joint. He recalled “layin’ on the jake brake, down shifting, and watching hundreds of the witches like in The Wizard of Oz come down out of the sky in the dark.” Somehow he got 30,000 pounds back onto the road while several folks inside the diner were pissing themselves in the window-side booths.

My daddy ran the eastern seaboard in a 12-wheeler — there were no 18 wheelers yet. It had polished chrome and bold letters that read, “BLUE GOOSE LINE”. Parked alongside our little asbestos sided house, I’d marvel at the magic of those bold words, the golden diamond and sturdy goose. And dream of someday “burning up Route 50″ like my dad.

Old U.S. Route 50 ran near the house and was the stuff of legend if your daddy happened to be a truck driver who sometimes took you with him on the shorter hauls: “OK boy, now scrunch down and look into the side mirror. I’m gonna turn the top of them side stacks red hot.” And he would pop the clutch and strike sparks on the anvil of the night, downshifting toward Pinkerton, Coolville and Hanging Rock. It never once occurred to me that his ebullience and our camaraderie might be due to a handful of bennies.

Yessir, Old 50 was a mighty thing, a howling black slash through the Blue Ridge Mountain fog. A place where famed and treacherous curves made widows and truck stops and cafes bloomed in the tractor trailers’ smoky wakes. A road map will tell you it eventually reaches Columbus and Saint Louis, places I imagined had floodlights raking the skies heralding the arrival of heroic Teamster truckers like my father. Guys who’d fought in Germany and Italy and the Solomon Islands and were still wearing their service caps these years later, but now pinned with the gold steering wheel of the Teamsters Union. Such are a working class boy’s dreams.

I have two parched photos from that time. One is of me and my brother and sister, ages ten, eight and six. We are standing in the front yard, three little redneck kids with bad haircuts squinting for some faint clue as to whether there was really a world out there, somewhere beyond West Virginia. The other photo is of my mother and the three of us on the porch of that house on route 50. On the day my father was slated to return from any given run we’d all stand on the porch listening for the sound of air brakes, the deep roar as he came down off the mountain. Each time my mother would step onto the porch blotting her lipstick, Betty Grable style hair rustling in the breeze, and say, “Stand close, your daddy’s home.”

And that was about as good as it ever got for our family. Daddy’s heart later gave way from a congenital defect and he lost everything. He was so scrupulously honest about debts he could never recover financially. Unable to borrow money, uneducated and weakened for life, he set to working in car washes and garages. After his union trucking days were over, we were assigned to the margins of America, a million miles from the American Dream, joining those people never seen on television, represented by no politician and never heard from in halls of power.

Now it was only a little house by the side of the road with not enough closets and ugly asbestos shingle siding. But it was ours, just like the truck and the chance to get ahead that it offered. And we had felt like we were some small part of America as it was advertised. All because of a union job during the heyday of unions in this nation.

It was also a period of Teamsters Union corruption, replete with criminal moguls such as Dave Beck, George Meany and Jimmy Hoffa. Yet the history of the few top lizards on the national rock of greed is not the history of the people.

If a few pricks and gangsters have occasionally seized power over the dignity of labor, countless more calculating, bloodless and malevolent pricks — the capitalist elites — have always held most of the card — which is why in 1886 railroad and financial baron Jay Gould could sneer, “I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” And why a speaker at the U.S. Business Conference Board in 1974 could arrogantly declare, “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II.”  And why that same year Business Week magazine said, “It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow — the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. Nothing in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept this new reality.”

The new reality is here, and has been since 1973, the last year American workers made a wage gain in real dollars. Hell, it’s been here so long we accept it as part of America’s cultural furniture. Only about 12% of American workers are unionized and even with a supposedly union friendly Democratic Congress, unions are still fighting to exist (although government employees are unionized at 36%, because the Empire allows some leeway for its commissars ). In fact, things are worse than ever. Employers can now force employees to attend anti-union presentations during the workday, at captive audience meetings in which union supporters are forbidden to speak under threat of insubordination. Back in 1978 when I was working to organize the local newspaper, the management was not even allowed to speak to the workers on the matter until after the union vote results were in.

Then there’s President Obama, the guy soft headed liberals think is going to turn this dreadful scenario around. He talks a good game about unions, when he is forced to. But Obama is working on the things that will “create a legacy,” such as health care (which is simply a new way to pay the insurance industry’s blackmail) or the economy (by appointing the same damned people who fucked it up to fix it), and immigration reform, a nicely nebulous term that can mean whatever either side of the issue wants it to mean. Obama’s not going to publicly ignore the unions. But he’s not going to sink much political capital into this corporatized nation’s most radio-active issue either. For him, union legislation is just a distraction from the “legacy building” of a very charming, savvy, and ambitious politician. That is the assessment of Glenn Spencer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most anti-union institutions in America. (Many thanks to Washington writer Ken Silverstein for publishing Spencer’s astute observations).

Things are changing though. Union membership climbed 12 percent last year. Twelve percent of twelve percent ain’t s&$*, but at least it’s forward motion. At that rate it will only take us 21 years to get back to the 1956 level of union membership. We can expect no miracles, top union leaders are still among the Empire’s elites. And they are still technically accountable to whatever membership will still have jobs when the 2012 elections roll around. The least they could do is make it harder for Obama to lick off those millions of hard earned union support dollars from the top of the campaign contribution ice cream cone as he did in ’08.

But who can be sure? Because the new union elites and their minions are lawyers and marketing professionals. They’ve never come down off the mountain with both stacks red hot, or gathered on the porch of a crappy but new roadside bungalow, proud because they owned it, and stood up straight because, “Boys, your daddy is coming home.”

I’m not going into the current brouhaha about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) or the “card check” bulls%&* here. Because what it’s gonna take to restore dignity to laboring America, ain’t gonna be more legislative wrangling. What it takes won’t be pretty, maybe not even legal in this new police state, and sure as hell won’t be “within the system.” Because the system is the problem.

So it will be up to us, just like it always has been … the writer, the Nicaraguan janitor, the forty year old family man forced to bag groceries at Walmart, the pizza delivery guy, the welder and the certified nurse … the long haul trucker and the short order cook. And they will snicker at us from their gilded roosts on Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

Some people are bound to get hurt in the necessary fight. In fact, people need to be willing to get hurt in the fight. That’s the way we once gained worker rights, and that’s the way we will get them back. The only way to get rid of the robbers’ roost is to burn the f*#$er down.

Anyone got a match?

***

For more of Joe Bageant’s thoughts, visit his web site: http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/06/worker-rights-no-balls-no-gains.html