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The ‘New Isolationists' « Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11

Daily newsbrief journal for April 2007, also see http://www.usdemocrats.com/brief for a global 100-page perpetual brief and follow twitter @usdemocrats


The ‘New Isolationists' « Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11

Postby admin » Sat Jan 28, 2012 11:38 am

The ‘New Isolationists' « Thread Started on Apr 28, 2007, 11:46am » --------------------------------------------------------------------------------The ‘New Isolationists' Prepared Remarks of Senator Paul Wellstone Before the AFL-CIO COPE Convention Orlando, Florida August 1, 1998 Thank you Marilyn Lenard, for that kind introduction, and thank you, the labor leaders of Florida, for inviting me to speak with you today at this "Solidarity Session" of the AFL-CIO COPE Convention. I salute you for taking the time and giving your effort to make a better union, a better political system, and a better Nation. Let me start with a story: An old man summoned his sons to his deathbed to give them his last advice. He ordered his servant to bring him a bundle of sticks, and said to his eldest son: "Break it." The son strained and strained, but with all his strength, could not break the bundle. The other sons tried in turn, but none succeeded. "Untie the bundles," said the father, "and each of you take a stick." When they had done so, he called out: "Now, break," and each easily broke his stick. "You see my meaning," said their father: "Union gives strength." Aesop told the story five centuries before Jesus was born, but the moral still rings true today. American Labor has known that lesson from the start. We have known it since 1778, when New York City journeyman printers united to win a wage increase. Ecclesiastes teaches that "a threefold cord is not quickly broken." We have known it since 1786, when Philadelphia printers walked out together to protest a pay cut and won a $6-a-week minimum wage. The Bible instructs: "[E]very . . . house divided against itself shall not stand." We knew it when Philadelphia shoemakers formed the first local craft union for collective bargaining in 1792, disbanded, and then in 1794 formed the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers. They also became the first union tried for conspiracy in 1806, after a strike for higher wages. Moneyed interests were trying to bankrupt labor even then. The Revolutionary War Patriot John Dickinson wrote, "By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall." We knew it in 1828 when the women millworkers of Dover, New Hampshire, walked off their jobs when the company imposed new rules like a fine for tardiness and a ban on talking on the job. The mill withdrew the rules. A Madagascar proverb teaches: "Cross the river in a crowd, and the crocodile won't eat you." We knew it in the 1830s, when children under 16 made up about one-third of the New England labor force, and in 1834, when the Factory Girls' Association formed in Lowell, Massachusetts, and went on strike over working conditions and wages. The old song says: "The boss don't listen when one guy squawks. "But he's gotta listen when the union talks." We knew it in 1860, with the successful strike of 20,000 shoemakers in New England. Abraham Lincoln spoke in support of the New England shoemakers, and said, "Thank God that we have a system of labor where there can be a strike." We knew it in 1903, when Mother Jones led the March of the Mill Children, many of them victims of industrial accidents. They started in front of Philadelphia's city hall, where she cried to the city officials to look out their windows at the "little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and maimed." Then, after convincing hesitant parents, she and a small band of men, women, and children walked all the way to President Theodore Roosevelt's summer house in Oyster Bay, Long Island. The Secret Service turned them away, saying that he could not act on child-labor matters. But, within a few years, a number of states, including those through which she had walked, reacted to Jones's "children's crusade" by enacting stricter child labor laws. The Persian poet Sadi wrote, "Ants, fighting together, will vanquish the lion." We knew it during World War II, when 18.6 million Americans joined to work together in unions -- 3½ million of them women -- and President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order to create a Committee on Fair Employment Practices to eliminate war industry employment discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin -- the forerunner of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Martin Luther King said it: "We must learn to live together as brothers or we are going to perish together as fools." We knew it here in June when the IBEW beat Lucent's Orlando microchip company, Cirent Semiconductor, after an eight-day strike to get a contract addressing working conditions, job postings, promotions, and retirement. The people united will never be defeated! We knew it here a month ago when the local Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union won their case before the administrative law judge against the Grosvenor hotel right near here, and the judge ordered the hotel to reinstate the 50 workers it unlawfully fired during the 1996 strike. It's time for the Grosvenor to stop its legal foot-dragging and come around! El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido! And we knew it this past week, when the auto workers of Flint, Michigan, won their nearly eight-week strike to keep plants open and get $180 million in new equipment at factories that make auto parts. Momentous as the strike was, it was just one battle in the continuing struggle over whether the world's largest company will remain committed to investing in America or simply pursue fatter profits overseas in Argentina, Brazil, China, Poland, and Thailand. United, we must fight on! The great UAW President Walter Reuther once said, "There's a direct relationship between the bread box and the ballot box, and what the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls." These days, the legislative halls are filled with those who would take away from labor's bread box! We must unite to oppose them. And we must unite to win back a Democratic Congress! This Republican Congress has been avowedly anti-union. In part, we can't be entirely surprised, when the campaign finance system invites Members of Congress to spend time with, and get to know, people with money. These days, many laws simply reflect the concerns of the moneyed interests that the current Congressional majority has come to know and like. Fundamentally, we need real campaign finance reform! But more than that, the Congressional Republicans are philosophically anti-union. They oppose unions in the sense of fighting the interests of the working person. But they also oppose union in the sense of resisting community and national solutions to problems. They would call themselves "individualistic." I call them the "new isolationists." They are isolationist not in terms of international affairs, but in terms of human affairs. As analysts like Jeff Faux and Stan Greenberg have observed, these new isolationist Republicans believe in aloneness as a kind of virtue. They see what we decide as a society only as an impediment to what the individual can do. The credo of the new isolationist may as well be: "Buddy, you're on your own!" The new isolationists believe that, unfettered, the talented individual can rise above. As much as that may often prove true, they neglect how, unsupported by each other, the working person, the young, the poor, the old, the disabled, and the victim of discrimination can be left behind. They believe that those who have, deserve. They neglect the random chance of life that sometimes means that those who do not have, may deserve, as well. The new isolationists believe in the adage: "sink or swim." They are the kind of Republicans about which a reader once wrote Washington Post columnist Bob Levey, saying: "A Democrat will plunge into a raging water to save a victim in distress. A Republican will stay on shore and explain that it's really in the victim's best interest to save himself." Ever since that August, 17 years ago, when President Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers and decertified their union, the new isolationists have been openly fighting unions and fighting union. Their solution to labor issues is to curb unions and unleash corporations. They sought to gut OSHA and wipe out federal workplace safety rules. They sought to scale back the rights of workers to organize. With their so-called "TEAM Act," they sought to let employers pick the representatives of the workers they would deal with on wages, hours, and working conditions. With their version of comp-time legislation, they sought to abolish the 40-hour week. They cheered when their candidate Bob Dole singled out the National Education Association for attack in his Republican convention acceptance speech. They love to berate what they call "big labor" and "union bosses," while they organize corporate political contributions on a scale unseen in the history of the Country. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, corporations outspent unions in 1996 campaign donations by a ratio of 11 to 1. They spawned California's Prop 226 and a series of its offspring in half the states in a less-than-veiled attempt to silence anyone who would tell the worker's side of the story. They cynically named it the "Paycheck Protection Act" in one of the greatest distortions of the English language since George Orwell imagined a political party whose slogans were: "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," and "Ignorance is strength"! Plainly, they really believe that "ignorance is strength," for the only place their ideas will prevail is where the voices of the workers have been silenced! I salute the workers and voters of California who decisively rejected Prop 226 by a 54-to-46 vote June second. And I salute the Florida AFL-CIO for keeping this so-called "paycheck protection" off of the agenda entirely in the state legislature! The new isolationists pushed through NAFTA with insufficient worker protections, they destroyed health care reform, they did nothing to advance a hike in the minimum wage, and they boasted of laying off federal workers. Sadly, there are a few in the Democratic party who talk like new isolationists, too. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If a man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar!" And I say to you today, that if a man says he's a Democrat, and votes against labor, he is a fraud! But the antipathy of the new isolationists toward union goes beyond their opposition to organized labor. To them, solving problems together on a national level is a sin. And they miss no opportunity to attack government, even at its most successful. Their solution for retirement security: privatize Social Security. Their solution for health care: private medical savings accounts. Their solution for education: vouchers for private education. Wherever our American society has come together to solve a problem, the new isolationists want to shatter the solution into thousands and millions of private pieces. They have come full circle to the ideas of Coolidge and Hoover. Now they attack Social Security, the single most successful government program in history. They exhibit a faith in the stock market unmatched since before the Crash of 1929. Dazed by the jackpots that many are winning on Wall Street, they seek a system where the elderly place their bets and take their chances. They seek a system where the rich will be free to compound their wealth. But the odds of their system providing a secure future for the average retiree are about the same as those the average Powerball ticket buyer has of winning a quarter billion dollars. They dress up their anti-government attack on Social Security with the clothing of crisis. But Social Security is not in crisis. The program is sound without changes through 2032. It will take only a modest infusion of funds to guarantee all current benefits for 75 years. Small changes now will preserve the Social Security program without making any benefit cuts. The dirty little secret of the new isolationists who would privatize Social security is that they seek to cut its benefits below existing levels to pay for their private accounts. Everyone knows that, as it is, people can't pay their bills with their Social Security benefits alone. We must fight these privatization efforts that will rob needed benefits from the elderly and leave many in poverty. The new isolationists' solution to health care is medical savings accounts. Once again, their solution would leave the rich free to get richer. But since the Republicans and their insurance company friends beat back health care reform in 1994, they have frozen a social response to a growing national problem. Patients face a health care system that is increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized. Forty million uninsured Americans still need help getting coverage. Everyone in America deserves quality, affordable, and comprehensive health care coverage. This health care system has got to change! The new isolationists' solution for education is to take money from the local public school and divert it to vouchers for private schools. Once again, their solution works just fine for the rich, but would it reduce class sizes in the public school so students don't have to sit on a radiator? No. Would it help repair the roofs and the broken air-conditioning in our schools? No. Would it train teachers to use technology in the classroom? No. Would it help with early childhood development, so that children could reach kindergarten ready to learn? No. Would it do anything to make schools safe and drug-free? No. The new isolationist solution wouldn't be a step forward for education for children; it would be a great leap backward. I salute the workers of Florida for fighting down the misguided voucher proposal here in the state legislature! The new isolationists believe that the absence of social union cures all evils. They believe with Anatole France that "[t]he law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." But just look at what we accomplished, working together. Working together, we won: Child labor laws, The 40-hour week and the eight-hour day, Social Security, The minimum wage, Civil rights, Job safety laws, and Time off to care for sick family members and new babies. And there is so much more that we can accomplish, working together. Just this past week, I introduced new legislation that would expand and protect the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively. You're fighting here to organize farm workers and nursing home workers. Given a fair fight, you will prevail. We must ensure that Federal labor law ensures a fair fight for labor. I have also introduced what I call "the Healthy Americans Act," legislation that will move us toward a system of universal health care and end the crisis of under-insurance. It would set the national goal of quality, affordable, comprehensive, universal coverage, but it would leave it up to the states to decide how to get there. It's a new, innovative, flexible approach. By introducing this bill, I am saying that we are not giving up on the goal of humane, affordable, dignified health care for each and every citizen in our country. The economy is strong -- if we cannot make this commitment now, when can we do it? And thirdly, I introduced this week a child care bill that would take a bold first step by making child care assistance available for the parents of 5 million children who need help but don't get it. I take these stands because, to paraphrase the great railroad union leader, Eugene V. Debs: While there is one retiree in poverty, I am in it; While there is one worker on strike, I walk the picket line; While there is one family without health care, I am not secure; While children come to school not ready to learn, I strive for knowledge; And while there is still discrimination, I am not free. For we must fight together. We must learn the basic truth that children learn in kindergarten: that if we can't get there together, we cannot get anywhere at all. Come, let us join hands together and work toward an America that is a community and not just 270 million isolated individuals! Then, we will be as strong as a threefold cord, and we will not be broken! Then, we will work together as brothers and sisters! Then, the boss will have to listen, when the union talks! Then, we shall cross the river to the other side, and the crocodile will not eat us! Then, fighting together, we will vanquish any beast, whether it's a lion, or even an elephant! Then, we will never be defeated! Come, let's join hands today!
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