It is easy to get cynical about politics. There are plenty of good reasons to feel cynical. Corporate special interests have a huge amount of power and influence. The mainstream media, especially cable news, seems to have little interest in actually informing us about what is going on. It feels like Ohio and much of the Midwest have been losing jobs for 30 years straight. We all feel it, and we hear plenty of it in the community each night from other Working America members and from people who aren’t members yet.
We have to fight that cynicism. It seems like it will keep us from being suckered, but cynicism actually serves the corporate agenda. They fund the think-tanks and cook up the talking points that tell us “government” (a.k.a. our democracy) can’t do anything right; then, they use their influence to try to make their prediction come true. The cynicism that they foster allows corporate lobbyists to block any effort to hold them accountable. Sure, Wall Street destroyed millions of jobs. By now, most everyone knows that the current jobs crisis was started by a blatant fraud carried out by Wall Street’s own Lehman Brothers. After Lehman fell, the rest of the house of cards fell and brought our jobs with them. But if the corporate interests can get away with blaming working families and American democracy for the mess they made, they just might manage to get themselves off the hook.
Yes, we need to be critical of our elected leaders, and yes, there is a lot of money corrupting our political system. But elected leaders are people too, and sometimes, in spite of the immense pressure from corporate lobbyists, they stand up for us.
One elected leader who has stood up for working families repeatedly over the past year is Congressman Steve Driehaus, whose district represents parts of Hamilton and Butler counties in Southwest Ohio. That’s why we held a thank-you event for him last Friday. We delivered over 290 handwritten letters that members had written in the last 2 weeks, urging him to continue to hold Wall Street accountable and continue to support job creation. Here is a run-down of a few votes he has taken for working people, against powerful corporate interest groups:
- He voted for large working family tax cuts and jobs creation measures in the recovery act. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that bill created or saved 1 to 2 million jobs .
- He voted to keep our tax dollars from going to pay bonuses for Wall St. CEOs
- He voted to start holding Wall Street accountable for the millions of jobs they have destroyed. The same bill will also create a watchdog group, called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to protect working families from deceptive rip-offs on things like credit cards and mortgages.
Are these votes going to fix everything? Nope. Wall Street blew an 11 million job hole in our economy. A couple of million jobs helps, but ultimately we are going to have to hold Wall Street accountable for cleaning up the mess they have made of our country. Still, we need to appreciate our victories when they come. It is going to be a long, hard fight to take our country back from corporate lobbyists, and we can’t let them sell us on cynicism.
After we delivered our letters to Rep. Driehaus, he asked us if he could take a large sign that we had made, displaying letters from other members and the message “Thank You for Fighting for Main Street Jobs, Not Corporate Lobbyists”. It now sits in his office, where it will remind him and his visitors who he is fighting for: working families.
Tags: financial regulation, jobs, Steve Driehaus
This is my second post on my recent trip to Egypt with the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center. For more background, take a look at the first post.
Over the last few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to thousands of workers in Ohio about the need for decent jobs. One of the topics that I’ve discussed over and over is the need for good trade deals that are designed to protect the rights of working people, helping to create decent jobs that sustain families and communities. Overwhelmingly, people understand that bad trade policy has played a role in the decline of Midwestern manufacturing. So if you’re feeling lonely, keep this in mind: you can make a lot of friends almost anywhere in Ohio by knocking on the doors of strangers and talking about jobs and trade.
I’m from Canton, located in the industrial heart of Northeast Ohio, and the issue is intensely personal for me. I’ve seen too many cities gutted by the decline in manufacturing, and talked to too many people who watched their neighborhoods collapse as work disappeared. It is easy to get fatalistic in this situation, to think that things had to be this way. But it didn’t have to happen this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way. Countless heavily-unionized countries have maintained their manufacturing communities through smart policies. In contrast, over the last few decades, our political leaders have allowed our industrial heartland to crumble.
Because of my personal experience, I was particularly moved by the stories and requests of the workers in Mahalla-el Kubra, a manufacturing city in Egypt where working people have repeatedly stood up and demanded their rights. Even though the official trade union movement in Egypt opposes their efforts, the workers in Mahalla-el Kubra have organized and mobilized effectively at the grassroots for years. Thanks to their efforts, they play a leading role in the labor movement in Egypt, and deserve to be an inspiration to working families around the world. They have won their share of victories and faced their share of setbacks, but I came away from my meeting with them with a profound feeling of confidence in the workers there. If they continue to organize and stand together, it seems very likely that they will earn the recognition of their rights and improve the quality of life for themselves, and their children.
Crammed into a small room with about a hundred workers, we heard over a dozen powerful stories from the workers in Mahalla-el Kubra. Some are dealing with unsafe work conditions, and the real fear that if they were injured at work they would be cast aside by their employer. Some are forced to sign a letter of resignation on the first day of their job, so that an employer can fire them without cause at any time. Like here, some have been fired for organizing and demanding their rights. Almost all of them are struggling with wages that barely allow them to stay above water. Many earn just a few dollars a day. Some earn even less. And foreign guest workers are brought in to undercut even these meager wages, setting them against other workers who are even more harshly exploited. Apparently, a worker earning $3 a day is simply too greedy.
One of the workers, after discussing an employer that had left the country to avoid compensating its workers, asked if it would be possible to have an American-Egyptian trade agreement similar to the one we have with Jordan. You are probably as surprised as I was to learn that the U.S. has a relatively good trade agreement with Jordan, but we do. Although there are still clear problems in Jordan, the agreement includes at least some protections for workers. And unlike a lot of our recent trade agreements, the agreement with Jordan was passed with strong bipartisan support in 2000, largely because it did contain these sorts of protections for workers. The agreement has clearly made enough of an impact that workers in Egypt are aware of the benefits, and want stronger trade agreements for themselves as well. When I heard this demand, I remembered a lot of the conversations I’ve had with workers in Ohio about this exact issue. I saw a hint of what the world can look like if working families on opposite sides of the planet recognize and fight for their rights and dignity together. Something that had seemed abstract, that good trade agreements can help working people here and in other countries, suddenly became very real.
Good trade agreements can and should be one of the basic demands that working families everywhere make of their political leaders. They are one of the tools that can prevent a brutal “race to the bottom”, in which employers search the world for the most vulnerable and exploitable workers; that’s a world where working families lose, and where a worker earning $3 a day is just too greedy. Such agreements are very rare and difficult to achieve; in the U.S. as in Egypt, business interests push hard against them. But they can be won when we organize for them, and they can help us win even more victories by helping all of us secure the basic rights that we need. The demand for good, fair trade agreements is one of the many things that working families in the U.S. and Egypt have in common.
Tags: Egypt, trade policy
I just came back to Ohio from a 10 day trip to Egypt with the Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO. I travelled with two other American union activists, Scott Reynolds from the National AFL-CIO and Liz McElroy from the Philadelphia AFL-CIO. During that time, we met directly with about 300 Egyptian workers and trade union activists, from Cairo in northern Egypt to Aswan, the traditional “opening” of Egypt at the southern end of the Nile. Those ten days were so packed with anger, hope and traffic jams that I feel like I lived a lifetime there. We were welcomed so warmly by the Egyptian workers that we felt like we were a part of their world almost instantly. By the third day, I caught myself feeling annoyed by all of the tourists in my newly adopted country…
Workers in Egypt are doing something truly remarkable. In the face of very tall odds, they are organizing an independent, democratic workers’ movement that has the potential to lift their families out of poverty and spur a new wave of democratic reform in Egypt. Many of the workers scrape by on just a few dollars a day, or less, and at times it seems that all of the institutions of society are stacked against them. The government colludes with corporate interests to keep their wages and benefits low, often skirting or simply ignoring the law. Even their official trade union movement is run by the same government and corporate interests that control the rest of society. Imagine Working America being run by Blanche Lincoln and the CEO of Wal-Mart and you’ve got the right idea. Then again, the idea of powerful political operatives and corporate interests working together to form groups that claim to speak for working people isn’t entirely foreign to us.
When workers attempt to form democratic and independent unions that actually fight for them, they risk arrest, harassment and sometimes torture. It was an enormous privilege to look into their eyes, hear their stories, and share organizing strategies with them. In spite of the oppressive conditions, they are organizing themselves at the grassroots, leading a huge wave of strikes and activism. There have been over 700 strikes a year for the past 2 years, and this year is on track to break 700 as well. If this remarkable surge in grassroots activism continues, we could well be witnessing the birth of a true, independent labor movement in Egypt. That, in turn, could spur broader democratization in Egyptian society and increasing quality of life for workers, as it has so often in other countries, including our own.
I was constantly impressed with the workers that we met. They are articulate, informed and brave. Although the conditions they face are far harsher than those we deal with here, the basic problems are the same: employers often refuse to obey the law, intimidating and harassing workers for attempting to exercise their basic rights. I’ll be sharing some of their stories, and how they relate directly to our own experiences here in Ohio and the U.S., in a series of upcoming posts.
Tags: Egypt, unions, workers
As we continue to fight for strong health care reform, I’ve identified a trend that I am calling the “Glenn Beck Effect”. To understand this trend, I need to summarize a bit of what we are hearing and sharing with people in communities across the country. Across the board, people feel strongly that we need to control health care costs, that insurance industry lobbyists shouldn’t determine what kind of reform we get, and that politicians need to be accountable to us and not to the health insurance companies. The overwhelming majority of people know that the status quo is not working for us. We shouldn’t have to worry that everything we’ve saved could be swept away and destroyed by medical debt. We’re concerned about having a needed treatment denied by our insurance companies…many of us because of hard personal experience. The health care reforms we are advocating are tailor-made to address these problems, and most people see that and respond to it. It is usually really easy to make the connection between the real problems we’re dealing with and the reforms we need.
Overwhelmingly, people really understand and support health care reform when someone bothers to explain it clearly. However, there’s a certain sort of conversation where people lose sight of how to fix the problems we’re all dealing with. It is not incredibly widespread, but it happens often enough that you notice it. These are often good conversations with good people. They absolutely understand the problems, and are often dealing with them too. But then they hesitate when we explain the reform plan that the President is advocating. People will say “Oh, wait, this is Obama’s plan? I hate him.” And then: “You should really watch Glenn Beck.” Not Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. Glenn Beck. That’s the Glenn Beck effect. It is what happens when good people facing hard problems stop trying to solve their problems, and are overcome by hatred and fear instead.
That’s the bad news. But like I said, we often have really good conversations with the Beckites. They get the problems. They’re living through the problems like the rest of us. And the solutions, like making sure insurance companies can’t pull away our coverage at the last minute, also make sense to them. The good news is that when someone bothers to engage with them, they are smart and receptive. The issue is that no one in the corporate media is bothering to tell them what’s really going on, how the special interests are really taking advantage of us. And so Glenn Beck fills the void with nonsense, instead of the solutions we need.
Just last week, Jenn Hoeflich, one of our Virginia organizers, was invited inside by a couple whose door she’d knocked on. They were very angry with politicians and insurance companies, and they completely understood the need to control costs and keep our politicians from being bought out. They liked the idea of the public option when Jenn explained it would help keep costs down. Then the woman balked, and asked The Question. “Wait, is this Obama’s health care plan?”
When Jenn explained that she was supportive of that type of reform, the woman said, “No, we’re not writing a letter. That guy needs to be shot. You need to watch …”
Jenn knew what was coming before the name Glenn Beck left the woman’s lips. But she didn’t give up. She continued to talk to the couple, learned that that the man of the house was on Medicare, which had covered expenses related to the loss of an eye, a kidney, and his cancer. The woman of the house had VA benefits through her husband. Jenn explained that those are government-run health care programs that they already like, that corporate health care is so expensive because people are just trying to make money off of us when we’re sick—and that Glenn Beck can get away with lying on the air because it makes money.
That couple ended up writing good letters to their representatives, supporting health care reform.
We can’t turn every single Glenn Beck viewer around to support a public option. But we’ve learned not to give up, because the answer isn’t complex. When people find out how the special interests are really trying to stop health care reform, it becomes very clear who is on our side. And that Glenn Beck, in spite of his convincing act, isn’t.
Tags: Glenn Beck, health care, health care reform
About a month ago, Ezra Klein hit on something important. The current fight over health care isn’t the end of this struggle, but the beginning. It is the first major battle in a long war to help us all get reliable care, and keep health care waste from bankrupting all of us.
The opposition to reform has been blatantly dishonest about even the most basic facts. That pattern will certainly continue. Once reforms pass, the result will be a mix of helpful changes and ongoing problems. Some positive changes will be fast, while others will slowly develop over years. Most of them won’t make for sexy media stories. Meanwhile, ideologues will suddenly blame ongoing problems with our current system on “Obamacare”, even as the reforms slowly work to correct some of those problems. Think about the economic meltdown as a model: Wall Street tanked the global economy and held it for ransom (a.k.a. bailouts). We lost our jobs because of them, and then they blamed working people for it. It worked, so now they’re inflating the next bubble. This time, it looks like life insurance is the pick. Special interests will try to do the same thing with health care. They’ll blame the problems on the people who are fixing them, in order to keep them from being fixed.
Last night, I talked to a member whose experience sheds a lot of light on where we are, and where we’re headed. She got sick and lost her coverage. Now she has a “pre-existing condition”, and can’t get insurance as a result. One provider told her she’d have to be on their highly expensive plan for 18 months before she could get any benefits. Presumably, they were betting she’d die in the meantime. She is bitterly angry at the insurance industry for what it has done to her, but she is just barely above the threshold to get public assistance. She’s trapped between the cracks of a broken machine. Some have hinted that she could get care if she divorced her husband … but she isn’t willing to do that. This is the sort of indignity and abuse that people suffer, and it seems to be coming from all sides. Forced to go to the emergency room as her only option, she hates that it is so expensive for taxpayers, and that she doesn’t get the full care she needs. She hates the way the staff looks at her with disdain, like she shouldn’t be there clogging up the emergency room. She’s just fighting for her life. Government and corporate bureaucrats seem to be colluding to humiliate her and deny her coverage…all so that they can force her to waste money in the emergency room. She strongly supports a public option, but is worried that it will still be too expensive once all the political maneuvering is done. And she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to afford her mandated coverage, or if she’ll slip through the cracks again. That would be a real problem for her, for countless people in this situation, and for the entire reform effort.
We all need to keep her in mind. A strong public option will help address these concerns, but what happens if D.C. insiders pass a weakened public option to appease the insurance lobby? Or what happens when entrenched interests decide to blame these problems on the people who are fixing them, in an effort to stop them from being fixed? We will keep advocating for real people, and keep pushing real reform forward, even after this bill. Inevitably, there will be opposition from those who are cashing in on our suffering. We’ll make it through this battle with a helpful but compromised piece of legislation that doesn’t do everything it needs to do. We will keep fighting as long as people are being humiliated and bankrupted by a system that is supposed to be making them well.
Tags: health care, health care reform
