A Message from Peter Chandler, Campaign Manager, Victory 2008

Despite Congressman Tom Allen’s loss in the U.S. Senate race, he waged a positive, forceful call for change on the biggest issues affecting the people of Maine. Tom left nothing on the field, and the people of Maine have been lucky to have someone as courageous and principled as Tom serve them honorably for 12 years.

In just the last 5 days of this campaign, our staff and volunteers made over 250,000 Get Out the Vote phone calls and knocked on over 50,000 doors in what was the largest GOTV effort in Maine history. This all helped lead to Democratic victories for our state and nation that will no doubt change the course of our country and begin repairing our reputation around the world. None of this would have been possible without your generosity over the last 10 months, and for that I thank you.

As we look ahead, we must maintain our strength as a party and continue working for Democratic candidates who understand the challenges faced by Maine’s working families. Although it is important that we take time to celebrate our victories of November 4th, we must not forget that our work does not stop here. Please sign up for a recurring contribution of $10, $15, $25 or $50 so we can begin building for the challenges that lie ahead.

Change is never easy, and the powerful special interests who seek to stop it at all costs are alive and well both here in Maine and in Washington.  We must all remain committed to change in the weeks and months ahead.

Again, thank you for all you have done and will continue to do for the Maine Democratic Party. I look forward to working with you down the road.

Sincerely,

Peter Chandler
Campaign Manager, Victory 2008

P.S. Together, we made history! I can’t thank you enough for the generous support you gave over the last 10 months that fueled the largest grassroots campaign in the history of Maine. I hope you’ll take the next step with me by making a recurring contribution of $10, $15, $25 or $50 so we can continue building on our efforts of the last year. To contribute, click here: https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/medems

Lies My Senator Told Me by Arden Manning, Maine Democratic Party

These tactics are reminiscent of the lies that helped derail John Kerry’s campaign in 2004, and we can’t afford to let that happen again. Help us fight back against these lies and spread our positive message of change!

Chairman Mark Ellis and the rest of the Maine Republican Party - the group responsible for these disgusting smear tactics - answer to none other than Susan Collins, who is at the top of the ticket for the Maine GOP. Collins says, through her campaign spokesperson, that “these tactics have no place in Maine.” Yet she stands idly by while an organization she leads spreads vicious lies about Barack Obama and Tom Allen. Maine voters are yearning for change and we deserve better than this. Collins has taken no action to stop the McCain campaign or the Maine Republican Party, let alone call for accountability by asking for the resignation of the Maine GOP chairman. If we want to change the tone in Washington, we need to send a new President to Washington and elect a new U.S. Senator from Maine. Make an investment in change. Contribute $25, $50 or $100 today!

Susan Collins isn’t letting the Maine GOP do all the mudslinging though. She continues to criticize Tom Allen for missing votes due to the death of a family member, attending his daughter’s wedding, and to be by his wife’s side this year while she battled cancer. The truth is:  Tom Allen is there when it counts and has cast more than 7,500 votes in Congress while Susan Collins cast less than 4,000. Susan may show up 100% of the time, but what kind of record is that to run on when you vote the wrong way 81% of the time?

We know what the stakes are in November, and these negative attacks only serve to remind us how important this election is. People in Maine don’t want negativity; they want to hear about the economy, energy prices and health care. This is the message we want to get out and we need your help. Please contribute today and help us get our message out by clicking here: http://www.actblue.com/page/medems

NAFTA Has To Go! From testimony at the Citizen Trade Policy Commission by Ruth Mattson Taylor

Teilhard de Chardin, the great paleontologist, mystic and priest said: “We are no humans who will have a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings who are having a human experience.”

I believe that each and every person on earth is a sacred being, regardless of race, creed or color, and that we are all on thsi planet to evolve spiritually as individuals, and as societies, to produce a life on planet earth, which reflects the common good of all.

Exploitation of persons for greed and profit by corporations defies the human rights of all world citizens and shreds the moral fiber of societies throughout the world. Outsourcing jobs by U.S. Corporations under NAFTA agreements has defied any sense of moral responsibility by individual citizens and to the collective societies involved. Long term job security of American workers has been shattered as their jobs are being outsourced overseas, and millions of workers around the world are being exploited through low wages, poor working conditions, child labor, and in some instances virtual slave labor - all for the sake of greed and profit of soul-less corporate interests.

Policies of this type are already imploding on themselves and will continue to do so. A recent example is the Bush Administration’s tax rebate to try to rescue the receding economy by desperately trying to have our people infuse the economy by spending, in order to keep the corporate structures from collapsing. They forget that the producer, or worker, is also a consumer. When injustice is inflicted on workers through outsourcing and layoffs in order to boost profits, those workers can no longer be potential consumers of their products.

Many corporations have shown that treating employees with dignity, and a program of job security, makes a corporation flourish. Job satisfaction programs within an organization give all workers within the organization a sense of pride and belonging, whatever their job within the organization, whether it is the worker who cleans the restrooms, or the worker who has a repetitive job on an assembly line creating just one part of the product which is an important component for the final product, on up to the top executives of the company. Every contribution is needed and valued. Profit sharing and retirement benefits have also been contributing factors for making the work situation a fulfilling experience. And these exemplary corporations have made good profits, and prospered.

When one segment of society exploits another segment of society for its own greed or profit, the whole moral fiber rips apart, and can only generate economic collapse with dire consequences for everyone.

NAFTA is an egregarious program, and has to go.

McCain Supports Free Trade Deal with Colombia; Susan Collins Can't Make Up Her Mind

John McCain’s recent trip to Colombia to stump for free trade illustrates that he favors having American workers compete for jobs with the exploited and impoverished workers in that South American country. Sen. Olympia Snowe, Rep. Tom Allen and Rep. Mike Michaud have already voiced their opposition to the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Sen. Susan Collins, a devout supporter of McCain’s campaign for president, is the only member of Maine’s delegation who is unwilling to take a stand on this potentially disastrous trade deal.

The Colombia Free Trade Agreement contains many of the same flawed provisions that can be found in the North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal that has already cost Maine countless thousands of manufacturing jobs while causing untold harm south of the border. NAFTA and the other deals that follow its failed model have been responsible for lowered wages, environmental degradation, displacement of family farmers, and the loss of democratic principles. It is time for a new trade model.

But this trade agreement would be even worse, for it turns a blind eye to the major human rights violations that continue in Colombia to this day. Over the past 20 years, more than 2,300 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia. In spite of the Bush Administration’s claims to the contrary, little or no progress has been made in curbing the abuses. If the Colombia Free Trade Agreement were to pass, the government there would have no reason to address this violence or bring the murderers to justice. In fact, things would likely get worse.

The Colombia Free Trade Agreement might be of some small help to American agriculture, but at what cost? The dumping of subsidized crops onto the Colombian market would affect millions of Colombians who depend on farming to make a living, increasing hunger, coca cultivation, and undocumented immigration to the United States. The passage of this trade deal would be a recipe for disaster.

Not a single labor, environmental, human rights, or family farm group in Maine or in the U.S. supports this horrendous trade deal.  These deals are made by the corporate elite, for the corporate elite, while the rest of us- working families, small businesses, family farmers, and average citizens- are left behind in a race to the bottom. 

The time has come for Sen. Susan Collins take a position on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Instead of sticking by John McCain, she should stand with the rest of the Maine delegation, and stand by Maine workers and their families, by voicing her opposition once and for all.

Commentary by Matthew Beck, SoPo Dems Vice Chair

We, who are about to drive, salute you . . . Losing the Carbon 350

Yesterday a local forester and I trudged through acres of woodland. The young forest was leafing out, new foliage deploying to begin its seasonal work: The strange and wonderful alchemy of turning sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugar and fiber. In the early afternoon sun we paused at a woodlot’s corner. Joel sat on the large granite rock which anchored an iron pin.

That boulder, like many we’d trekked past in these hours, had fallen from retreating glaciers which long ago scoured this ground. Squatting sixty feet above current sea level, our conversation briefly touched on climate change. I summarized NASA scientist James Hansen’s recent warning that, “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385 ppm (parts per million) to, at most, 350 ppm.”

In their most recent study, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” Hansen and other climate scientists caution that, based on what we now know of the planet’s climate history, failure to radically reduce fossil carbon emissions --and soon—virtually guarantees “passing tipping points that spiral out of control, such as disintegration of ice sheets, rapid sea level rise [perhaps over 200 feet] and extermination of countless species.”

Hansen notes that we don’t have the luxury of time: “We must be on a new path within several years, or reducing CO2 levels this century becomes implausible.” Today I sit clumsily pecking computer keys and, thanks to strip-mined coal and “free” trade with China, describe yesterday’s sylvan slog. But based on a recent “first reading” of our local municipal budget and other similarly sad proceedings currently stinking up Maine’s political landscape, any rational person would have to conclude that, in the race back to 350 ppm, we’re not competing. We’re at home in the sprawl-scape watching Celebrity Flouncing on our new energy-hog plasma TVs, or perhaps motoring to the mega-mall.

The local political class’ conventional wisdom is that (Biddeford’s) mill-rate cannot be raised because “the people” need money to pay for oil and gas. So, the future is clear: An ever more austere warehousing of the young inside “consolidated” and ever larger institutional efficiency “units.” (Biddeford) councilors warned the rascal audience that they had been in contact with a chronically absent and publicly silent faction that privately favors restricting municipal revenues. Officials bemoaned the “tough choices” seemingly forced on them by the curse of their political power.

Yes. It was pathetic—all the more so because many in the anti-cut cohort seemed to agree that, well yes, some “cuts” were necessary given the narco-petroleum habits of the consuming public. Having to choose between fewer staff supervising the containment units or fewer petro-units pumped, the nod went pro-petro. It wasn’t close.

This is what we’ve come to. In a time when former oil company executives like BP’s once senior risk manager Jan-Peter Onstwedder are cautioning that even exploiting known fossil carbon reserves (never mind looking for new ones) will likely tip Earth’s delicate balance into “dangerous climate change,” we insist on more, cheaper.

According to NOAA, lately releases of greenhouse gasses —CO2, and its more powerful climate altering cousin, methane—have been escalating. Current CO2 concentrations (385 ppm) are roughly 38 percent higher than pre-industrial levels, and the rate of carbon dioxide increase has been climbing steadily since the 1980s at about 1.5 ppm each year. Last year however, that rate almost doubled to 2.4 percent, and methane levels climbed by 27 million tons after nearly a decade of relative stability. NOAA cautioned that the methane surge might stem in part from the defrosting of Arctic peatlands—one of the six “irreversible tipping points” referred to by Hansen and his colleagues.

NOAA’s Ed Dlugokencky noted, “We’re on the lookout for the first sign of a methane release from thawing Arctic permafrost… It’s too soon to tell whether last year’s spike in emissions includes the start of such a trend.”

But while worry-monger scientists urge caution, on the political front it’s all about reducing fiscal strain on American petro junkies, all strung out after decades of subsidized substance abuse. Political soul-mates Hillary Clinton, John McCain and now, Tom Allen all proclaim their support for a “gas tax holiday,” as a spur to consumption.

Some crazed fringe-dwellers have suggested that a more appropriate policy might be to hike gas taxes to something like European levels as a disincentive to current consumption patterns. These marginal figures whisper that funds raised by such a tax might also underwrite public transportation systems, rational land use initiatives and sustainable energy development. Such outrages against the established order are, of course never suggested in polite company among the politically astute.

Richard “Dick” Cheney spoke for the entire political class when heannounced just after changing everything on 9-11-01 that, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.” That “way of life” is, of
course, based on artificially cheap gas and oil, and the carefully structured use of withering violence against the world’s weakest people.

Chirpy optimists like James Hansen still harbor some small hope that American addicts might kick their habit and keep the climate change genie in the bottle. But it’s pretty clear that at this point, public officials favor only continued subsidies to corporate pushers and the petro-junkies. (That would be us.)

If Hansen’s right about the urgency of this race to get atmospheric carbon back to 350 ppm (and evidence suggests that he is), the odds are long.

I wouldn’t bet the farm, or that Water World wood lot.

Richard Rhames, 5/14/08

"Hey Eaters! The Latest Downer: The High Cost of Cheap Food" by Richard Rhames

It turns out that more than half of Maine’s public schools were tied into the national beef recall story this week. The coverage has been a bit deeper and more prolonged than is typical partly because the meat recall is a record-setter. But the hook on this one was the “compelling video” captured by a secret camera guy working for the Humane Society of the United States. The unidentified “worker” went undercover and managed to gather footage of so-called “downer cows” being “encouraged” to stand by fork lifts, prods, broom handles thrust into eyes, shocks, and water torture. One cow bellowed as she was rolled by a skid-steer. Others were silent as they were dragged with a chain over the manured concrete pad to the stun gun and the knife.

Meat industry spokesman Bo Reagan protested, “The welfare of our animals—that’s the heart and soul of our operations.” Cattle are supposed to be able to walk to slaughter. He regretted that these animals were “harvested out of compliance.”

Industry spin is that the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company was sort of a bad apple. But anyone who knows anything about the industrialization of our food supply ought to know better. The Humane Society has been very clear: This plant was selected at random. After years of cutting back on USDA inspectors, speeding up operations on the killing floor, de-skilling workers and union-busting, this is what mass-meat looks like. It’s not pretty, but it’s cheap.

Americans now spend less than ten percent of their household budgets for food. In the 1950s it was around 30 percent. In Europe today it’s still around 30 percent. We used to have a relatively prosperous rural America based on farmers being paid a fair price for their output-- a system that continues in Europe and civilized countries generally to this day. But not here.

We have, agri-tourist theme park fantasies aside, turned animal husbandry and dirt farming into a hulking factory system, based on constantly lowering the cost of units produced, beggaring the
laborer, and devastating the resource. This tragic folly represents nothing less than a decades-long sprint to a wasteland fueled by savagery, profligate energy consumption and debt accumulation. It will likely not end well.

Every now and then however, American eaters are offered a quick peak at what we’ve come to: Now we glimpse the waterboarding of sick cows. Now the slickster liar-for-hire from MeatCorp. Now back to Jamie-Lynn and Britney. Pain and flesh, flesh and pain. Say, would you like fries with that?

Media treatment of the Hallmark slaughterhouse story has been rather light on the downer cow/mad cow angle. That’s too bad. Eaters ought to know more about this issue. It could be a matter of life and death. But as co-author of the 2004 Mad Cow USA, Sheldon Rampton told me today, this is the usual though shocking pattern: “The meat industry and government collude in treating food safety as a PR problem.”

Most people have by now heard of so-called mad cow disease. Otherwise referred to as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE), the disease is “incurable, horrible in its effects, and inevitably, unremittingly fatal” (Rampton, Stauber). Its infective agent is apparently malformed protein or “prion” which is unaffected by cooking and can only be destroyed by incineration at temperatures above 2,000 degrees.

This transmissible brain wasting disease was the focus of researchers in Papua, New Guinea during the 1950s and 60s. The affliction was called “kuru” by the natives, who thought it the product of spells. It involved tremors, paralysis, and death and seemed to effect many women and young children. A theory began to evolve when scientists finally linked the disease to a “ritual cannibalism” practiced there. In these rites enemies and even family members would be consumed, with the “Big Men” of the tribe getting the choicer cuts while the women and children got the organs and the brains. The symptoms resembled those of a wasting disease in sheep called scrapie and a rare human disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). In both diseases the “spongy"brains of the victims developed holes where tissue should have been and “strange plaques.”

When tissue from kuru sufferers was injected into monkeys, the monkeys developed symptoms and died, their brains riddled and plaqued. There was a multi-year latency period where the primates seemed healthy but from onset, the disease progressed swiftly. Here was a plague that could “jump the species barrier” and was 100 percent fatal. But once New Guinea’s government outlawed cannibalism, the malady was quickly eliminated among the young. More ominously however, it appeared that this TSE could have a very long incubation period in people. “New cases...would continue to emerge more than 40 years after the victims had eaten human flesh.” (Rampton...)

Sadly for American eaters, cannibalism is still legal in the USA when it comes to animals, meat and otherwise. Much of the waste from slaughter houses, and dead or downer cows (animals unable to stand) typically goes to “rendering plants” where the material is processed, heated, and turned into what’s called “by-pass protein.” It’s then added to the grain ration fed to meat animals and often included in pet food. It’s a cheap way to increase protein content in feed, thus holding down the price of mass-meat: Supposedly a win-win situation. It’s officially “out of compliance” here to put cattle exhibiting symptoms consistent with TSE (i.e. downer cows) directly into the human food system. But as the Hallmark hidden-cam episode shows, it happens.

What will be the health impacts of such profit questing? We’ll know better in 40 years.

Richard Rhames, 2/21/08

"The Best Victory That Money Can Buy" by Richard Rhames

On December 30, 2006, President Saddam Hussein (for so, under international law, he was) died at the end of a rope in the formerly sovereign nation of Iraq. The American public, which paid for the event, was encouraged to look past the tawdry pageant’s obvious object lessons, inconveniently captured by a trophy-hunting participant’s cell phone camera. Even the cruel US dictatorial Decider George Bush was soon forced to admit that the creepy snuff-job looked like what it was: A “revenge killing.”

Here in Pentagonia, network TV preferred the silent video provided by Iraqi pseudo-State television. It showed only the dignified president, bound hand-and-foot, shuffling onto the gallows’ trap door, and having the giant noose placed around his neck by a hooded retainer, wearing a nifty leather jacket.

The grainy cellphone video revealed more. Amid the catcalls, the taunting and the chants for the hit squad’s favorite mullah, the president remained calm. The 69 year-old questioned the manhood of that nervous and furtive crew. For the record, he stated, “The nation will be victorious. Palestine is Arab.”

News accounts report that he was praying as the trap door opened. After the neck-snapping and the residual twitching, some of the “twenty or so” celebrants “began to dance around the body.” (see Telegraph UK, 12/30/06) As the presidential corpse cooled it was rushed north for a quick nighttime burial. No State funeral for this guy. No State.

One year later, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on a commemorative ceremony outside Mr. Hussein’s tomb in Awja. In an accompanying picture, children held flowers, before a carefully lettered sign reading, “We will never forget you, Sheik of Mujaheddin.” Hussein was remembered there “for his role in ‘maintaining the dignity’ of the Iraqi people.” (SMH, 12/31/07)

Former UN Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, speaking at the University of New England’s Biddeford campus a few years ago, pointed out to the small crowd that if Iraqis had enjoyed perhaps fewer “political rights” than some might have wished, they had more economic and social rights than many/most US citizens possessed. Prior to its being bombed by the US “back into the stone age” in 1991, Iraq’s governing party used the country’s oil wealth to provide free post-secondary education, universal health care, and the basics of a civilized, secularized standard of living to its citizens. Women could walk the streets unveiled and unguarded. The main childhood health problem was an increasing obesity rate.

But in 1990, when Hussein’s image went from useful ally/Reagan’s buddy to a beret-topped Satan in our cartoonish media system, all that had to end. Iraq had supposedly been nothing other than a prison camp full of squalid natives and “So Damn Insane” was the jailer/executioner in chief. That was the official story and few who mattered have disputed it to this day. With that as the cover story, our bipartisan political class set about the long-term and grisly project of genocide, infanticide, military and economic warfare designed to bring down the modern nation state of Iraq. That work is quite well along.

But few in the US paying public have any idea what’s been done in their name. In mid-December a few stories broke on an announcement by the US-backed Iraqi puppet regime. It was about to radically cut back the very efficient State food ration/distribution system implemented during the murderous Anglo-American “sanctions” period (1990-2003). Press accounts cited the Green Zone bureaucrats’ explanations. The program would need to be halved, they said, because of “insufficient funds and spiraling inflation.” The “nation” which contains the world’s second (or perhaps first) largest oil reserves (most of it light, sweet, and under pressure) seemingly could no longer afford its “deteriorating ration system,” thus increasing “hardships for the majority of Iraqis who
depend heavily on the Saddam Hussein-era programme.”

The stuff about “spiraling inflation” sent me back to my dusty filing cabinet. I remembered a wire service story or two clipped from local papers in the early 90’s. Item one was buried on a yellowing page 9A. Headline, “Bush launched anti-Saddam tactics last fall,” date 2/9/92. It reported a GHW Bush “finding” that authorized and funded the CIA’s “undermining” of Iraq’s sovereign government. In other words, acts of war.

A few months later (5/27/92), a local reprint of a New York Times story headlined, “Officials: U.S. flooding Iraq with fake money.” It began, “Iraq’s economy is the target of an American-led destabilization campaign to pour vast amounts of counterfeit currency into the country, Arab and Western officials...say.” According to these highly placed sources, “the countries behind the separate counterfeiting operations included Western nations, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel.” The aim was to “weaken the economy to the point where the local currency could become worthless.” This, in the face of government efforts to “respond with an intensified reconstruction program to curtail shortages and restore basic services.”

Yes, dear reader, after we’d blown up Iraq’s sewage treatment facilities, bridges, water purification plants, electrical generating facilities, dams, communications networks, and other civilian infrastructure, official American policy was to prevent a rebuilding: To make the economy scream and the people whimper. Things are even worse now. Mission accomplished.

Those odious aims were not lost on the world or on the Iraqis themselves. Unlike the US paying public the bombed, embargoed, and beleaguered Mesopotamians had few comforting illusions. The ‘92 counterfeiting story featured this short paragraph: “...the measures buttressed the assertion, shared by a rising number of Iraqi nationalists including Sunni Muslims and Christians, that the West and its allies will not be content with the removal of Saddam Hussein, but only with partitioning and destroying the country.”

The Iraq national project appears to be largely finished, thanks to almost 20 years of American criminality. Still, they sometimes at least, remember dignity.

Richard Rhames, 1/3/07

A Tale of Two City Inaugurations: South Portland and Biddeford

On Monday afternoon, December 9, in the midst of an impressive pre-winter snowstorm, South Portland Mayor James Soule, appointed to serve a one-year term by our city council, gave his inauguration speech. He used his speech to refer to the State a Maine as “a repressive regime” and call on our city to secede from the state, joining surrounding communities in forming a 51st state. The following evening in Biddeford, newly-elected Mayor Joanne Twomey chose to honor the people of her city and highlight the importance of working people to its success.

Much has already been written about Mayor Soule’s apparent grandstanding on his first day as Mayor. Let it suffice to say that while most South Portlanders would agree that we need to change the state’s revenue sharing formula and increase the State’s contribution to our city’s education budget, Mayor Soule’s comments only succeeded in making South Portland the brunt of jokes throughout Maine and around the country.

A markedly different tone and direction was taken by Mayor Twomey in Biddeford. Richard Rhames, a Biddeford Democrat, shares his thoughts and observations in the following commentary:
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Madison predicts labor movement and FOX TV.... but you knew that....

A Historic Inauguration

“...The rising of the women means the rising of the race,
No more the drudge and idler---ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and roses!
Bread and roses!”
James Oppenheim, 1912

On Tuesday evening (December 4, 2007), it was my privilege to play a small role in an unusual inauguration ceremony. There was little of the usual pomp(osity) and circumstance that usually infects such dreary events. The political class, past and present/ local, state, and national, in this alleged democracy has much to answer for. Theirs is a record of largely unrelieved assaults on the economic interests of the majority, endlessly siding with the rich and the powerful against the workers and the weak. All, supposedly, in the name of “development” and “jobs.” As the US population has staggered through more than three decades of downward mobility, rampaging inequality, increasingly brutal industrial relations, a haughty march to environmental crisis, desperate imperial crusades, and a perpetual warfare state, elected officials engage in a shadow play of empty gesture, distraction, and an increasingly overt and cynical cruelty toward those they pretend to “serve.” The US political class stands alone now in the industrial world in its obstinate refusal to confront climate change, and the steadily rising body count generated each year by the profit-based private health insurance regime.

As we spend more than half of each federal tax dollar on armaments and force projection, our schools fall into disrepair, our bridges collapse, and our feces often flow untreated to the sea. All the while elected officials mumble about the “tough choices” they are forced to make. Thus, when a new crop of corporate servants and reactionary zealots take office amid paramilitary flourish and self-congratulation the ceremonies are scarcely occasions for celebration. If you’ve been paying attention, that is.

The design of Biddeford’s recent inaugural affair was breathtakingly different and much more modest than most. New mayor Joanne Twomey’s intention was to acknowledge the recent election results, but more importantly, to honor the city’s population and its handiwork. Officeholders were seated on the same level as the citizenry. But, on that night a former millworker, Doris Couture, shared with the mayor and the public her memories of decades spent turning cotton into textiles (and creating corporate profits). Mrs. Couture recalled her leaving school and coming to millwork as a teenager to support her family and her conversations with mayor Twomey’s grandmother, a CIO union organizer.

Monica Graybin delivered a short history lesson on the efforts of Lawrence, Massachusetts factory girls to bring a little dignity and civilization to that mill city’s industrial relations in the Bread and Roses strike. Then she sang the anthem that memorialized that historic and, yes, heroic event when 20,000 women went out for 8 weeks on New Year’s Day 1912. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer “Big Bill” Haywood recalled later, “It was a wonderful strike, the most significant strike, the greatest strike that has ever been carried on in this country or any other country. And the most significant part of that strike was that it was a democracy. The strikers had a committee of 56, representing 27 different languages...”

As in Lawrence, in Biddeford textile mill owners preferred young women and girls as “operatives.” They were more “docile” than men, had no right to vote, and were used to being pushed around and exploited. Remember that Founding Father Alexander Hamilton had strongly promoted industrial development for precisely this reason. In his report on manufactures Hamilton lauded the coming dark satanic mills and their machinery since, through their introduction, “women and children are rendered more useful and the latter more early useful, by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be.” Noting approvingly that of those employed in Great Britain’s “cotton manufactories” of the time, “... four-sevenths, nearly are women and children, of whom the greatest proportion are children, many of them of a very tender age,” he gushed, thus would “the husbandman” discover “a new source of profit and support, from the increased industry of his wife and daughters.”

Soon enough of course, as industrial methods took hold on agriculture, “the husbandman” too joined the wife and kids in manufactories, himself rendered a “source of profit and support” to the mill owner and the owner’s brutal political system. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution sagely warned that document’s framers, “In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without land..., but any other sort of property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case the rights of property and the public liberty will not be safe in their hands, or, which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence and ambition; in which case there will be an equal danger...”

In his prediction of the eventual birthing of both the labor movement and Fox TV Madison and his fellow slave-lashing, class warrior cronies were ahead of their time. They set up a system where the levers of power rested firmly in the hands of Exploiters and Accumulators, where the power of the “majority faction” would be endlessly checked and balanced against itself---where that power might never be, as they putit, “discovered.”

And at inaugurations across this land to this day, incoming officials swear, in the name of the defacto State religion’s jealous sky-god, to support and defend that Madisonian document. Yet in the beauty and elegant simplicity of Tuesday’s event our new mayor allowed another historical perspective to intrude. There, in that huge machine built up by the muscle and bone of 19th
century workers---a machine that turned falling water into power, power into money, and money into continuing control, memory of democratic struggle flickered. Unlike the usual rites of officialdom, this one called up another narrative, one based on (Yes, she said it!) love, where women and children and men might someday be more than sources of profit.

Richard Rhames, December 6, 2007

Meet Miss Shirley 9.11.07

Shirley is a senior in high school.

Last night, her bright smile dimmed as I asked her how she was. “I’m sick” she said in a strong South American accent.
“You look it; why don’t you go home, Shirley?” She shook her head.

“I can’t. Even sick, I have to work.” She smiled defeatedly and walked out of my office.

A senior in high school, Shirley probably makes the same as the rest of her family who join her on the office rounds, $6.25. While she dreams of going to college - and gets decent grades, her father is intent on her following a more realistic path: work.

Though she will graduate from a United States high school, Shirley will likely be forced to pay international tuition to most of the universities and/or community colleges she applies. A bright, smart young woman, Shirley will probably be pushing vacuums for people like me who try not to leave random pennies or the remnants of a three-hole punch war on the floor for her to clean up.
In an area like ours, she’ll watch countless interns come and go on their excursions through their collegiate experience. For her, it will be an internship in the school of hard knocks.

How can someone achieve high academic marks if they are unable to begin their homework until 9:30 or 10:00 at night? How can a student learn if they are exhausted from staying up late the night before? And how is it that we live in a society where a 17-year old high school student can be forced to work with a fever from the flu, simply so that her family can put food on the table?

We have an obligation to do more than talk about raising the minimum wage; we have an obligation to look people in the eye and see them as the human beings they are. For most of the people in our building, Shirley is invisible. Her smile is looked over with glazed eyes, returned by a polite smile and a glance back to work. If she’s looked at to begin with.

Most don’t know that she has dreams of going to college, or that she wants her cousin to come here from South America. They don’t realize that she had a burning fever last night; they’ll just notice that she missed a spot on the floor, or a trash can.

When I asked her if she was a US Citizen, she was quick to point out that she lived here legally. “I have my papers.” I couldn’t help but realize that I would never have to offer up proof of my place here in the US; I would never have family or friends who had to choose between living in an Amnesty City like Takoma Park, MD, or be subject to racial profiling.

When I’m sick, I can take the day off without losing my pay. When I have a headache or just don’t want to go to the office, I can opt to work from home. And despite my relative online anonymity, when people see me, they look at me. People I meet don’t brush me off as “the help” when their eyes first glance at me. And in a city like DC where “the help” is everywhere, it becomes easier and easier to push peopleaside in your mind, to refuse to understand the trials and tribulations of their lives. Or, to think people have hopes and dreams that are often cut short because of archaic, systemic roadblocks designed to keep the poor uneducated and the wealthy, well, rich.

The basic right to a fair wage for hard work, the right to medical care, the right to a paid sick day off and the right to an education, all lead to empowerment. All ships float better on a rising seas of
opportunity and empowerment.

Right now, people like Shirley are drowning under the weight of bills and fevers.

Reprinted with the kind permission of http://www.MissDem.com,

Rally & March for Peace & Justice

Join Congressman Dennis Kucinich, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and many peace and labor activists for this rally and march to the Bush family compound. It is high time that the people in power start to feel the power of the people! More information is at http://www.kportprotest.org.

Maine Tax Reform and Relief Plan: Q & A

Q: Is this all just a tax shift? 

A: The tax package does shift taxes, and that is a good thing. For instance, by using sales taxes to lower income taxes, we are helping spur Maine’s economy (encouraging entrepreneurship and business expansions). We are also creating a more predictable revenue stream (which helps prevent unsustainable spending). And by relying more on taxes that are partially paid by non-residents, a revenue neutral shift also helps lower the tax burden on Maine residents.

Q: Why aren’t you cutting spending?

A: The Legislature is cutting spending. The recently passed budget included over $270 million in cuts, at the same time that it increased state aid to education (to slow increases in local property taxes) - and the state budget is $240 million below the Legislature’s spending cap! 

Tax reform to achieve a more fair distribution of taxes, and cutting spending are two separate things.  The tax package is a companion to the budget - it’s more appropriate to make spending cuts through the budget, not the tax plan. The tax plan (in of itself) is revenue neutral, meaning it brings in the same amount of revenue as the current tax system. It still provides relief, by requiring that more revenue is brought in from non-residents - which reduces the tax burden on Mainers.

Q: Why cut the income tax?

A: First and foremost, it is guaranteed money back in the hands of Maine people with every paycheck.

But Maine’s high income tax is also a barrier to business growth. Most economists will tell you that taxing consumption makes much more sense than taxing income. We want to encourage people to build businesses and create jobs.

The vast majority of businesses in Maine are small businesses, and most of them pay the individual income tax rate - so cutting the income tax would also provide a major tax cut to small businesses, encouraging them to hire more people, invest in equipment and grow their operations.

Q: How do people who don’t pay income taxes benefit from this new system?

A: A portion of the new tax credit is “refundable,” meaning that it will be paid back as cash to Maine residents even if they do not pay income taxes. But the new tax plan isn’t only about income taxes. It also provides eligible persons with relief from property taxes or rent. 

Q: Why a flat tax? Isn’t that regressive?

A: A flat tax by itself wouldn’t be fair, because it potentially hurts people with lower incomes. But the tax plan modifies this effect by providing a new “resident credit” that helps low and middle income persons. (The overall “progressivity” is slightly greater than Maine’s current system.). A flat tax was chosen because it is easy to understand and because it appeals to many people. With the new credit, there are no downsides to a flat tax.

Q: What does the plan do to the home mortgage deductions?

A: Home mortgage deductions will not be eliminated. In fact, many middle class tax filers will have a chance to write-off a greater portion of their itemized deductions under the new system, through a new “itemized credit.” Only about 2% of Maine’s tax filers are in a situation where they currently itemize but make too much money to take advantage of the new credit. But most of these people (9 out of 10) will benefit so much from the lower tax rate that they will still get an income tax cut.

Q: What does the plan do for local property taxes?

A: This plan provides additional property tax relief by expanding the existing Circuit Breaker program and the Homestead Exemption. The plan also establishes a tax deferral program that will allow elderly residents to defer property taxes under they sell their home or die. Finally, the plan earmarks a portion of revenue growth to communities for the purpose of further property tax reductions. 

Q: Why tax services?

A: Taxes on services are often more stable and more exportable than taxes on goods. As the economy turns to rely more on services, most states have modernized their tax system accordingly. But not Maine. Maine taxes only 24 out of the 168 categories of items, avoiding most services. By comparison, Connecticut taxes 80 items. 

Q: How did you decide what new services to tax? 

A: There is logic to what new services will be taxed. Almost all of the focus is on services used by consumers, as opposed to business-to-business services that could restrain economic growth.  Beyond this, we purposely avoided new taxes on certain consumer services (including accounting, engineering, and legal services), because these kinds of services involve intellectual property that is entirely portable. Increasingly, people are obtaining such services remotely from professionals in other states, where Maine cannot impose its own taxes. So by imposing a tax on the Maine firms that provide these services, we put these firms at a competitive disadvantage. It is not surprising that these kinds of services are taxed in very few states.

Q: Is this plan unfair to tourists?

A: The plan is not unfair to tourists. At present, tourists visiting Maine get a good deal. Because we tax so few services (compared to many states), visitors to Maine get tax cuts here they don’t get in their home state (when they get their hair cut or go to the movies). The most obvious tax that tourists pay (the “meals & lodging” tax) will be set at only 8%, the same rate as New Hampshire. Many tourist destinations with far less appeal than Maine have much higher taxes. 

Q: A lot of Maine people go out to eat.  How does increasing the meals tax export tax burden?

A: A lot has been made of the fact that about 65-70% of Maine meals are purchased by Maine residents. But if you increase the meals tax in order to reduce income taxes, you are exporting a great deal of tax burden, because about 95% of income taxes are paid by Maine residents.  As long as the percentage of Mainers who pay income taxes is higher, a shift from one to the other will reduce Mainers’ overall tax burden.

Q: Will it be difficult for businesses to set up the process to begin collecting taxes?

A: Most of the businesses that will need to apply new taxes to services (like a beauty parlor) already collect taxes on the products they sell. So for many of these businesses, the difficulties are minimal. There will be some businesses that will be collecting taxes for the first time, but is that a good reason to avoid modernizing our tax system to keep pace with the times? 

Q: What about claims that an increased real estate transfer tax discourages home ownership?

A: The increase in the real estate transfer tax is very modest for primary residences owned by Mainers. The increased tax on a $200,000 home will be only $320. (For the vast majority of Mainers, this tax will be completely offset by the other tax savings in less than a year.)

Maine’s rates for non-residential real estate remain competitive at 1%. By comparison, New Hampshire’s rate is 50% higher.

Q: I want tax relief, not tax reform. Why should I like this plan?

A: This plan provides BOTH tax reform and tax relief. And BOTH are important. Tax reform lays a foundation for the future. We stabilize revenues and spur economic development. Meanwhile, tax relief puts money in your pocket. We need BOTH.

A Time For Anger, A Call To Action

By Bill Moyers

The following is a transcript of a speech given on February 7, 2007 at Occidental College in Los Angeles:

I am grateful to you for this opportunity and to President Prager for the hospitality of this evening, to Diana Akiyama, Director of the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, whose idea it was to invite me and with whom you can have an accounting after I’ve left. And to the Lilly Endowment for funding the Values and Vocations project to encourage students at Occidental to explore how their beliefs and values shape their choices in life, how to make choices for meaningful work and how to make a contribution to the common good. It’s a recognition of a unique venture: to demonstrate that the life of the mind and the longing of the spirit are mirror images of the human organism. I’m grateful to be here under their auspices.

I have come across the continent to talk to you about two subjects close to my heart. I care about them as a journalist, a citizen and a grandfather who looks at the pictures next to my computer of my five young grandchildren who do not have a vote, a lobbyist in Washington, or the means to contribute to a presidential candidate. If I don’t act in their behalf, who will?

One of my obsessions is democracy, and there is no campus in the country more attuned than Occidental to what it will take to save democracy. Because of your record of activism for social justice, I know we agree that democracy is more than what we were taught in high school civics - more than the two-party system, the checks-and-balances, the debate over whether the Electoral College is a good idea. Those are important matters that warrant our attention, but democracy involves something more fundamental. I want to talk about what democracy bestows on us?the revolutionary idea that democracy is not just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency. “I believe in democracy because it releases the energies of every human being” - those are the words of our 28th president, Woodrow Wilson.

I’ve been spending time with Woodrow Wilson and others of his era because my colleagues and I are producing a documentary series on the momentous struggles that gripped America a century or so years ago at the birth of modern politics. Woodrow Wilson clearly understood the nature of power. In his now-forgotten political testament called The New Freedom, Wilson described his reformism in plain English no one could fail to understand: “The laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the week.” He wrote: “Don’t deceive yourselves for a moment as to the power of great interests which now dominate our development… There are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States. They are going to own it if they can.” And he warned: “There is no salvation in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters… prosperity guaranteed by trustees has no prospect of endurance.”

Now Wilson took his stand at the center of power - the presidency itself - and from his stand came progressive income taxation, the federal estate tax, tariff reform, the challenge to great monopolies and trusts, and, most important, a resolute spirit “to deal with the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts.”

How we need that spirit today! When Woodrow Wilson spoke of democracy releasing the energies of every human being, he was declaring that we cannot leave our destiny to politicians, elites, and experts; either we take democracy into our own hands, or others will take democracy from us.

We do not have much time. Our political system is melting down, right here where you live.

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that only 20% of voters last November believe your state will be a better place to live in the year 2025; 51% say it will be worse. Another poll by the New American Foundation - summed up in an article by Steven Hill in the January 28th San Francisco Chronicle - found that for the first time in modern California history, a majority of adults are not registered with either of the two major parties. Furthermore, writes Hill, “There is a widening breach between most of the 39 million people residing in California and the fewer than 9 million who actually vote.” Here we are getting to the heart of the crisis today - the great divide that has opened in American life.

According to that New American Foundation study, frequent voters [in California] tend to be 45 and older, have household incomes of $60,000 or more, are homeowners, and have college degrees. In contrast, the 12 million nonvoters (7 million of whom are eligible to vote but are not registered) tend to be younger than 45, rent instead of own, have not been to College, and have incomes less than $60,000.

In other words, “Considering that California often has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the nation - in some elections only a little more that 1/3 of eligible voters participate - a small group of frequent voters, who are richer, whiter, and older than their nonvoting neighbors, form the majority that decides which candidates win and which ballot measures pass.” The author of that report (Mark Baldassare) concludes: “Only about 15% of adult people make the decisions and that 15% doesn’t look much life California overall.”

We should not be surprised by the consequences: “Two Californias have emerged. One that votes and one that does not. Both sides inhabit the same state and must share the same resources, but only one side is electing the political leaders who divide up the pie.”

You’ve got a big problem here. But don’t feel alone. Across the country our 18th political system is failing to deal with basic realities. Despite Thomas Jefferson’s counsel that we would need a revolution every 25 years to enable our governance to serve new generations, our structure - practically deified for 225 years - has essentially stayed the same while science and technology have raced ahead. A young writer I know, named Jan Frel, one of the most thoughtful practitioners of the emerging world of Web journalism, wrote me the other day to say: “We’ve gone way past ourselves. I see the unfathomable numbers in the national debt and deficit, and the way that the Federal government was physically unable to respond to Hurricane Katrina. I look at Iraq; where 50% of the question is how to get out, and the other 50% is how did so few people have the power to start the invasion in the first place. If the Republic were functioning, they would have never had that power.”

Yet the inertia of the political process seems virtually unstoppable. Frel reminds me that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee can shepherd a $2.8 trillion dollar budget through the Senate and then admit: “It’s hard to understand what a trillion is. I don’t know what it is.” Is it fair to expect anyone to understand what a trillion is, my young friend asks, or how to behave with it in any democratic fashion?” He goes on: “But the political system and culture are forcing 535 members of Congress and a President who are often thousands of miles away from their 300 million constituents to do so. It is frightening to watch the American media culture from progressive to hard right being totally sold on the idea of one President for 300 million people, as though the Presidency is still fit to human scale. I’m at a point where the idea of a political savior in the guise of a Presidential candidate or congressional majority sounds downright scary, and at the same time, with very few exceptions, the writers and journalists across the slate are completely sold on it.”

Our political system is promiscuous as well as primitive. The first modern fundraiser in American politics - Mark Hanna, who shook down the corporations to make William McKinley President of the United States in 1896 - once said there are two important things in politics. “One is money, and I can’t remember the other one.” Because our system feeds on campaign contributions, the powerful and the privileged shape it to their will. Only 12% of American households had incomes over $100,000 in 2000, but they made up 95% of the substantial donors to campaigns and have been the big winners in Washington ever since.

I saw early on the consequences of political and social inequality. I got my first job in journalism at the age of 16. I quickly had one of those strokes of luck that can determine a career. Some of the old timers were on vacation or out sick and I was assigned to cover what came to be known as the ‘Housewives Rebellion.’ Fifteen women in my home town decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. They argued that social security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that - here’s my favorite part - “requiring us to collect (the tax) is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.”

They hired themselves a lawyer - none other than Martin Dies, the former Congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 30s and 40s. He was no more effective at defending rebellious women than he had been protecting against Communist subversives, and eventually the women wound up holding their noses and paying the tax. The stories I wrote for my local paper were picked up and moved on by the Associated Press wire to Newspapers all over the country. One day, the managing editor called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing one “Bill Moyers” and the News Messenger for the reporting we had done on the rebellion.

That hooked me. In one way or another - after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government for a spell - I’ve been covering politics ever since.

By “politics” I mean when people get together to influence government, change their own lives, and change society. Sometimes those people are powerful corporate lobby groups like the drug companies and the oil industry, and sometimes they are ordinary people fighting to protect their communities from toxic chemicals, workers fighting for a living wage, or college students organizing to put an end to sweatshops.

Those women in Marshall, Texas - who didn’t want to pay Social Security taxes for their maids - were not bad people. They were regulars at church, their children were my friends, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all.

So it took me awhile to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary rebellion. It came to me one day, much later. They simply couldn’t see beyond their own prerogatives. Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations - fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind - they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like them. The women who washed and ironed their laundry, wiped their children’s bottoms, made their husbands’ beds, and cooked their families meals - these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show from their years of labor but the creases in their brow and the knots on their knuckles.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “We, the People” is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

We seem to be holding our breath today, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be. But in this state of suspension, powerful interests are making off with the booty. They remind me of the card shark in Texas who said to his competitor in the poker game: “Now play the cards fairly Reuben. I know what I dealt you.”

For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering a larger and larger concentration of wealth and income, while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented power over who wins and who loses. Inequality in America is greater than it’s been in 50 years. In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Today it’s more than 75 fold.

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionally. But that is not the case. Throughout our industrial history incomes grew at 30% to 50% or more every quarter, and in the quarter century after WWII, gains reached more than 100% for all income categories. Since the late 1970s, only the top 1% of households increased their income by 100%.

Once upon a time, according to Isabel Sawhill and Sara McLanahan in The Future of Children, the American ideal of classless society was ‘one in which all children have roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they were born. That’s changing fast. The Economist Jeffrey Madrick writes that just a couple of decades ago, only 20% of one’s future income was determined by the income of one’s father. New research suggests that today 60% of a son’s income is determined by the level of his father’s income. In other words, children no longer have a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they are born. Their chances of success are greatly improved if they are born on third base and their father has been tipping the umpire.

As all of you know, a college education today is practically a necessity if you are to hold your own, much less climb the next rung. More than 40% of all new jobs now require a college degree. There are real world consequences to this, and Madrick drives them home. Since the 1970s, median wages of men with college degrees have risen about 14%. But median wages for high school graduates have fallen about 15%. Not surprisingly, nearly 24% of American workers with only a high school diploma have no health insurance, compared with less than 10% of those with college degrees.

Such statistics can bring glaze to the eyes, but Oscar Wilde once said that it is the mark of truly educated people to be deeply moved by statistics. All of you are educated, and I know you can envision the stress these economic realities are putting on working people and on family life. As incomes have stagnated, higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes, so that life, says Jeffrey Madrick, “has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means.”

Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns, two families who live in Milwaukee. One is black, the other white. The breadwinners in both were laid off in the first wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and then out of the country. In a documentary series my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts over the next decade to cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and to find a place for themselves in the new global economy. They’re the kind of Americans my mother would have called “the salt of the earth”. They love their kids, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week.

To make ends meet after the layoffs, both mothers took full-time jobs. Both fathers became seriously ill. When one father had to stay in the hospital two months the family went $30,000 in debt because they didn’t have adequate health care. We were there with our cameras when the bank started to foreclose on the modest home of one family that couldn’t make mortgage payments. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping further behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that while they are indeed patriotic, they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. They simply do not think their concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up our dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them.

“Things have reached such a state of affairs,” the journalist George Orwell once wrote, “that the first duty of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious.” The editors of The Economist have done just that. The pro-business magazine considered by many to be the most influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can get to the top. A growing body of evidence - some of it I have already cited - led the editors to conclude that with “income inequality growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.” The editors point to an “education system increasingly stratified by social class” in which poor children “attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries” and great universities that are “increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities.” They conclude that America’s great companies have made it harder than ever “for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement.”

It is eerie to read assessments like that and then read the anthropologist Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail He describes an America society in which elites cocoon themselves “in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools.” Gradually, they lose the motivation “to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public schools.” Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, warns Jared Diamond, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.

So it is that in a study of its own, The American Political Science Association found that “increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed.”

This is a marked turn of events for a country whose mythology embraces “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as part of our creed. America was not supposed to be a country of “winner take all.” Through our system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a healthy equilibrium in how power works - and for whom. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, we made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors, especially the relatively poor, were protected by state laws against their rich creditors. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters’ rights. In my time, the hope of equal opportunity became reality for millions of us. Although my parents were knocked down and almost out by the Great Depression, and were poor all their lives, my brother and I went to good public schools. The GI Bill made it possible for him to go to college. When I bought my first car with a loan of $450 I drove to a public school on a public highway and stopped to rest in a public park. America as a shared project was becoming the engine of our national experience.

Not now. Beginning a quarter of a century ago a movement of corporate, political, and religious fundamentalists gained ascendancy over politics and made inequality their goal. They launched a crusade to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have held private power. And they had the money to back up their ambition.

Let me read you something:

When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I’m not quoting from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or Mao’s Little Red Book. I’m quoting Time Magazine. From the heart of America’s media establishment comes the judgment that America now has “government for the few at the expense of the many.”

We are talking about nothing less that a class war declared a generation ago, in a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger, William Simon, who had been Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury. In it he declared that “funds generated by business… must rush by the multimillions” to conservative causes. The trumpet was sounded for the financial and business class to take back the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Great Depression and the New Deal. They got the message and were soon waging a well-orchestrated, lavishly-financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: “Some people will obviously have to do with less… .It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.” The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call “the animal spirits of business.”

Looking backwards, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs at the time. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious literalism opposed to any civil and human right that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, they funded conservative think tanks that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.

To put muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class, Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post, reported that “During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area.” Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right - Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition - who gleefully contrived a cultural holy war that became a smokescreen behind which the economic assault on the middle and working classes would occur.

From land, water, and other resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medial breakthroughs, a broad range of America’s public resources have been undergoing a powerful shift toward elite control, contributing substantially to those economic pressures on ordinary Americans that “deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation and civic life.”

What’s to be done?

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

Again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

And again:

The only answer to organized money is organized people.

I came to Occidental because your campus has a reputation for believing in a political system where ordinary people have a voice in making the decisions that shape their lives, not just at the ballot box every two or four years in November, but in their workplaces, their neighborhoods and communities, and on their college campuses. In a real democracy, ordinary people at every level hold their elected officials accountable for the big decisions, about whether or not to go to war and put young men and women in harm’s way, about the pollution of the environment, global warming, and the health and safety of our workplaces, our communities, our food and our air and our water, the quality of our public schools, and the distribution of economic resources. It’s the spirit of fighting back throughout American history that brought an end to sweatshops, won the eight-hour working day and a minimum wage, delivered suffrage to women and blacks from slavery, inspired the Gay Rights movement, the consumer and environmental movements, and more recently stopped Congress from enacting repressive legislation against immigrants.

I believe a new wave of social reform is about to break across America. We see it in the struggle for a ‘living wage’ for America’s working people. Last November, voters in six states approved ballot measures to raise their states’ minimum wage above the federal level; 28 states now have such laws. Since 1994, more than 100 cities have passed local living wage laws that require employers who do business with the government - who get taxpayer subsidies, in other words - to pay workers enough to lift their families out of poverty.

Los Angeles has led the way, passing one of the nation’s strongest ‘living wage’ laws in 1997. And just the other day the LA City Council voted to extend that “living wage” law to the thirty-five hundred hotel workers around the Los Angeles Airport - the first living wage law in the country to target a specific industry and a specific geographic area. But it took last fall’s march down Century Boulevard - organized people! - to finally bring it about and it took the arrest of hundreds of college students, including several dozen from Occidental.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Those who profess freedom, yet fail to act - they are “men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters… power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.”

What America needs is a broad bi-partisan movement for democracy. It’s happened before: In 1800, with the Jeffersonian Democrats; in 1860, with Radical Republicans; in 1892, with the Populists; in 1912, with Bull Moose Progressives; in 1932, with the New Deal; in l964, with Civil Rights activists - each moment a breaking point after long, hard struggles, each with small beginnings in transcendent faith.

Faith! That’s the other subject close to my heart that I have come talk about. Almost every great social movement in America has contained a flame of faith at its core - the belief that all human beings bear traces of the divine spark, however defined. I myself believe that within the religious quest - in the deeper realm of spirituality that may well be the primal origin of all religion - lies what Gregg Easterbrook calls “an essential aspect of the human prospect.” It is here we wrestle with questions of life and purpose, with the meaning of loss, yearning and hope, above all of love.

I am grateful to have first been exposed to those qualities in my own Christian tradition. T.S. Eliot believed that “no man [or woman] has ever climbed to the higher stages of the spiritual life who has not been a believer in a particular religion, or at least a particular philosophy.” As we dig deeper into our own religion, we are likely to break through to someone else digging deeper toward us from their own tradition, and on some metaphysical level, we converge, like the images inside a kaleidoscope, into new patterns of meaning that illuminate our own journey.

For most of our history this country’s religious discourse was dominated by white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage - people like me. Dissenting voices of America, alternative visions of faith, or race, of women, rarely reached the mainstream. The cartoonist Jeff McNally summed it up with two weirdoes talking in a California diner. One weirdo says to the other. “Have you ever delved into the mysteries of Eastern Religion?” And the second weirdo answers: “Yes, I was once a Methodist in Philadelphia.” Once upon a time that was about the extent of our exposure to the varieties of Religious experience. No longer. Our nation is being re-created right before our eyes, with mosques and Hindu Temples, Sikh communities and Buddhist retreat centers. And we all have so much to teach each other. Buddhists can teach us about the delight of contemplation and ‘the infinite within.’ From Muslims we can learn about the nature of surrender; from Jews, the power of the prophetic conscience; from Hindus, the “realms of gold” hidden in the depths of our hearts,” from Confucians the empathy necessary to sustain the fragile web of civilization. Nothing I take from these traditions has come at the expense of the Christian story. I respect that story - my story ?even more for having come to see that all the great religious grapple with things that matter, although each may come out at a different place; that each arises from within and experiences a lived human experience; and each and every one of them offers a unique insight into human nature. I reject the notion that faith is acquired in the same way one chooses a meal in a cafeteria, but I confess there is something liberating about no longer being quite so deaf to what others have to report from their experience.

So let me share with you what I treasure most about the faith that has informed my journey. You will find it in the New Testament, in the gospel of Matthew, where the story of Jesus of Nazareth unfolds chapter by chapter: The birth at Bethlehem. The baptism in the River Jordan. The temptation in the wilderness. The Sermon on the Mount. The healing of the sick and the feeding of the hungry. The Parables. The calling of the Disciples. The journey to Jerusalem. And always, embedded like pearls throughout the story, the teachings of compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation:

Love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.
Whoever strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also… and whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.
If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer our gift.
Judge not, lest ye be judged.

In these pages we are in the presence of one who clearly understands the power of love, mercy, and kindness - the ‘gentle Jesus’ so familiar in art, song, and Sunday School.

But then the tale turns. Jesus’ demeanor changes; the tone and temper of the narrative shift, and the Prince of Peace becomes a disturber of the peace:

Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers… and he said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer but you have made it a den of thieves.’”

His message grew more threatening, amid growing crowds right on the Temple grounds. In his parable of the wicked tenants, he predicted the imminent destruction of the Jerusalem elites, setting in motion the events that led to his crucifixion a short time later.

No cheek turned there. No second mile traveled. On the contrary, Jesus grows angry. He passes judgment. His message becomes more threatening. And he takes action.

Over the past few years as we witnessed the growing concentration of wealth and privilege in our country, prophetic religion lost its voice, drowned out by the corporate, political, and religious right who hijacked Jesus.

That’s right: They hijacked Jesus. The very Jesus who stood in Nazareth and proclaimed, “The Lord has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor” - this Jesus, hijacked by a philosophy of greed. The very Jesus who fed 5000 hungry people - and not just those in the skyboxes; the very Jesus who offered kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast; who raised the status of women and treated even the hated tax collector as a citizen of the Kingdom. The indignant Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple - this Jesus was hijacked and turned from a friend of the dispossessed into a guardian of privilege, the ally of oil barons, banking tycoons, media moguls and weapons builders.

Yet it was this same Jesus who inspired a Methodist ship-caulker named Edward Rogers to crusade across New England for an eight hour work day; called Frances William to rise up against the sweatshop; sent Dorothy Day to march alongside striking auto workers in Michigan, fishermen and textile workers in Massachusetts, brewery workers in New York, and marble cutters in Vermont; who roused E.B. McKinney and Owen Whitfield to stand against a Mississippi oligarchy that held sharecroppers in servitude, challenged a young priest named John Ryan to champion child labor laws a decade before the New Deal, and summoned Martin Luther King to Memphis to join sanitation workers in their struggle for a decent wage.

This Jesus was there on Century Boulevard last September, speaking Spanish. And it is this resurrected Jesus, in the company of the morally indignant of every faith, who will be there wherever Americans are angry enough to rise up and drive the money changers from the temples of democracy.
To you students at Occidental, let me say: I have been a journalist too long to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. I believe the only way to be in the world is to see it as it really is and then to take it on despite the frightening things you see. The Italian philosopher Gramschi spoke of the “the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.” With this philosophy your generation can bring about the Third American Revolution. The first won independence from the Crown. The second won equal rights for women and for the sons and daughters of slavery. This third - the revolution of the 21st Century - will bring about a democracy that leaves no one out. The simple truth is we cannot build a political society or a nation across the vast divides that mark our country today. We must bridge that divide and make society whole, sharing the fruits of freedom and prosperity with the least among us. I have crossed the continent to tell you the Dream is not done, the work is not over, and your time has come to take it on.

American workers need help - and there's something you can do about it!

And these fights don’t only make a difference in the workplace: They are critical to providing economic security for families, strengthening our communities and rebuilding America’s middle class. Every day, millions of Americans work hard and play by the rules but are still struggling to get by. Democrats understand the important role that labor unions play to fix this crisis.

The House of Representatives is set to debate and pass a bill that will restore American workers’ right to freely choose whether or not to form a union. Join the Democratic majority in the House and show your support for the Employee Free Choice Act:
http://www.democrats.org/FightForWorkers

Research shows union members earn 30% more than nonunion workers. What’s more, union workers are 63% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and are four times more likely to have a guaranteed pension.

The benefits of union membership are clear. That’s why nearly half of American workers who are not currently represented by unions—60 million people—say that they’d join one if they had the chance. But every year since 1981, union membership has declined. And a major reason for that fall-off is the many obstacles workers face when they try to form a union or negotiate a union contract.

The Employee Free Choice Act is a simple, effective solution to restore the right of workers to form unions and bargain for better wages and benefits for themselves and their families. It has three key provisions:

1. Require employers to recognize a union if a majority of workers sign authorization cards saying they want union representation.
2. Provide mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes.
3. Strengthen penalties for companies that illegally intimidate employees to prevent them from forming a union.

No management coercion, no waiting period, no stacked deck—just the freedom for workers to stand up for their rights.

Democratic leaders in the House overwhelmingly support the Employee Free Choice Act. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called it a “top priority.” House Labor Committee Chairman George Miller called it “an important step towards strengthening America’s middle class.” Now you can join the leadership in calling on Congress to pass this critical legislation:
http://www.democrats.org/FightForWorkers

Big business is scared of the Employee Free Choice Act—and that’s why they’re doing everything in their power to stop it.

75% of companies hire consultants or union-busters to fight organizing campaigns. And their tactics work: every 23 minutes, a worker is fired or discriminated against for supporting a union. All in all, over 22,000 workers each year are illegally fired, demoted, laid off, suspended without pay, or denied work by their employers as a result of union activity.

Why have our leaders in Washington allowed this to happen? Follow the money trail.

The public opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act is funded in large part by GOP-allied corporate lobbyists and interest groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Conservative Union, and Americans for Tax Reform. The dozens of groups that make up the “Coalition for a Democratic Workplace” spend big bucks each election cycle buying Republicans’ votes on bills like this one.

This is nothing new. Big Business always gets what it wants from the Republicans-- from an energy bill written by Cheney’s oil industry pals to a prescription drug bill full of giveaways to Big Pharma. This time, though, the Democrats in Congress can stop them. Show the House that you will stand with America’s workers:
http://www.democrats.org/FightForWorkers

Do you believe in the right to demand a raise? Health care coverage? A pension? Do you believe workers should have a voice in their workplaces?
The fate of the Employee Free Choice Act depends on your work. Help score an important victory for worker’s rights and for rebuilding America’s middle class.

In Solidarity,
Governor Howard Dean, M.D.