Main Street

Rep. Boehner: Stop Stringing Us Along

By Dan Heck — Ohio

On Tuesday, a group of Working America activists gathered to deliver thousands of petitions urging Congressman Boehner to invest in our communities and create jobs. We strung the petitions across two blocks in front of his office, chanting “Boehner don’t do us wrong, stop stringing us along” and “Jobs for Main Street, Not for Wall Street,” and then delivered the petitions to Boehner’s aide. Our immediate requests were simple: we wanted Boehner to support an extension in unemployment benefits instead of more tax cuts for his rich donors. Unemployment benefits help jobless workers find work, and they create jobs by boosting sales for businesses. Without this extension, hundreds of thousands of jobless workers will have benefits cut off just in time for Christmas.

We ran the petitions along the sidewalk, past a large law office and a house. In the house, the residents saw the petitions and came out to see what we were up to. They were incredibly excited to see us standing up to Boehner, helped us string the petitions along their trees, and joined in the action. They even gave us a union shirt from the IAM. We were happy to see them join in, and that’s the kind of spontaneous support that we find from working families in communities all around Ohio every day.

The lawyers from the law firm also saw the petitions. Now, before this story makes you hate lawyers, I should note that a lot of lawyers recognize that they are working people, and they join and support our work because they recognize that we are fighting for their rights, too. Unfortunately, these weren’t that kind of lawyer. They insulted us, waved a newspaper and and shouted, “There’s plenty of jobs in here” and even brandished a broom sarcastically shouting, “I’ve got a job for you right here if you want one.” They didn’t bother to ask Marvin, a member who used his unemployment benefits to find work, why he would still want others who are jobless to have benefits too. We would’ve been happy to explain that most working families in America believe in helping each other out. Of course, these highly educated lawyers must be aware that there are 5 job seekers for every job opening in America right now, so they were probably just acting up for the TV crews.

We are enormously grateful that they did. It is hard to find a better illustration of what is happening in this country than a group of well-heeled lawyers shouting insults at other working people, simply because we have the gall to stand up and speak out. Our hope for both Congressman Boehner and his supporters is the same: we want them to stand with working families instead of the corporate elite. But if they insist on standing against working families, we request that they continue to openly display their arrogance and contempt for the rest of us; it really helps clarify where things stand.

We aren’t naïve about how much Boehner would have to change for him to become a friend of working families. He has been an important figure in the corporate takeover of government since he came to office in the early 90’s. He distinguished himself early on by handing out checks from the tobacco lobby on the floor of Congress . He continues to raise a fortune from special interests.

Given his record, it isn’t surprising that Boehner’s first priority since he was swept into power is doling out $700 Billion dollars of tax cuts to the super-rich. On the other hand, this summer he voted against extending unemployment benefits that would have cost less than a 10th as much as these tax cuts. No expense is too great when it comes to serving wealthy donors, but Boehner pinches every penny when it comes to paying out unemployment insurance benefits that we have already paid into as working families.

It is important to understand that Boehner’s stance on tax cuts for the rich is part of a pattern that has dramatically reshaped our country over the last 30 years. A long string of similar redistributive decisions have facilitated a remarkable transfer of wealth from working families to the corporate elite. While working people have become more and more productive, generating more and more wealth, almost all of that wealth has gone to a tiny sliver of people at the top of the ladder. This process wasn’t natural; it was engineered through government and corporate policies that changed the tax code to favor the rich, eroded opportunity for the rest of us, and systematically dismantled democratic rights and unions in the workplace.

This process has fundamentally changed our country from a relatively fair place to one where corporate elites dominate, where more and more people are shut out from the ever-growing wealth of our nation, and where our politics is increasingly polarized. The corporate elite, including Boehner, argue that the way to create jobs is to have even more redistribution of wealth to the rich. This theory doesn’t stand up to common sense or economic analysis, but its remarkable staying power is easy to understand: it justifies the transfer of wealth from working families to well-connected, wealthy political donors. Those donors are then able to further consolidate their wealth and political position, providing generous campaign contributions that pay for ever-more obnoxious (but effective) attack ads.

As working families, we will organize and eventually take back our democracy, however long it takes. If John Boehner would abandon his insider dealing and join us in returning America to working families, we’d be happy to welcome him to our side. If not, we’ll continue to hold him and his supporters accountable for standing against working families, corrupting our democracy and degrading our political discourse.

Tags: John Boehner, unemployment, unemployment benefits extension