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Remarks as Prepared for Delivery: “To Build One America, End the Game”

Hanover, New Hampshire
August 23, 2007

This election is unlike any we have faced before. The stakes are higher. And the challenges we face as a nation are greater than at any time in memory.

We as a nation must choose whether to do what America has always done in times like these — change direction and move boldly into the future for the sake of our children, if not for ourselves, or wander in the same stale direction we have traveled in our recent past.

The choice we must make is as important as it is clear.

It is a choice between looking back and looking forward.

A choice between the way we’ve always done it and the way we could do it if we dared.

A choice between corporate power and the power of democracy.

Between a corrupt and corroded system and a government that works for us again.

It is caution versus courage. Old versus new. Calculation versus principle.

It is the establishment elites versus the American people.

It is a choice between the failed compromises of the past and the bright possibilities of our future. Between resigning ourselves to Two Americas or fighting for the One America we all believe in.

As always, at these moments, the choice we make is not for us, but for our children and our great country. And this time, like no other time, the consequences for our children are truly profound.

Will we halt global warming, protect our environment and humanity from the cataclysmic consequences of inaction and leave our children a livable world rich in the resources that were left to us?

Will we prevail against terrorism by stopping those who would harm us and winning over the minds of those who have yet to take sides so that instead of an ever more dangerous and war-torn world, our children live in a nation that is safe, strong and once again viewed throughout the world as a truly moral leader?

Will corporate greed be all we value as we move further into the global economy, or will we put workers and families first, so that all jobs pay fair wages, every American has health care and corporate profits work for democracy and not the other way around?

Will we face our future as individuals, each of us asking, “What’s in it for me?” Or will we return to the central value that makes our nation great? That we are all in this together and each of has a responsibility to the common good.

The choices we make will determine not just the quality of life our children will inherit, but the fate of the world we leave behind.

To succeed for our children where we have too often failed for ourselves, we must choose a new course. Those wedded to the policies of the 70s, 80s, or 90s are wedded to the past — ideas and policies that are tired, shop worn and obsolete. We will find no answers there.

But small thinking and outdated answers aren’t the only problems with a vision for the future that is rooted in nostalgia. The trouble with nostalgia is that you tend to remember what you liked and forget what you didn’t. It’s not just that the answers of the past aren’t up to the job today, it’s that the system that produced them was corrupt — and still is. It’s controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it’s perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. This is the game of American politics and in this game, the interests of regular Americans don’t stand a chance.

Real change starts with being honest — the system in Washington is rigged and our government is broken. It’s rigged by greedy corporate powers to protect corporate profits. It’s rigged by the very wealthy to ensure they become even wealthier. At the end of the day, it’s rigged by all those who benefit from the established order of things. For them, more of the same means more money and more power. They’ll do anything they can to keep things just the way they are — not for the country, but for themselves.

Politicians who care more about their careers than their constituents go along to get elected. They make easy promises to voters instead of challenging them to take responsibility for our country. And then they compromise even those promises to keep the lobbyists happy and the contributions coming.

Instead of serving the people and the nation, too many play the parlor game of Washington — trading favors and campaign money, influencing votes and compromising legislation. It’s a game that never ends, but every American knows — it’s time to end the game.

And it’s time for the Democratic Party — the party of the people — to end it.

The choice for our party could not be more clear. We cannot replace a group of corporate Republicans with a group of corporate Democrats, just swapping the Washington insiders of one party for the Washington insiders of the other.

The American people deserve to know that their presidency is not for sale, the Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent, and lobbyist money can no longer influence policy in the House or the Senate.

It’s time to end the game. It’s time to tell the big corporations and the lobbyists who have been running things for too long that their time is over. It’s time to challenge politicians to put the American people’s interests ahead of their own calculated political interests, to look the lobbyists in the eye and just say no.

And it’s time for the American people to take responsibility for our government — for in our democracy it is truly ours. If we have come to mistrust and question it, it is because we were not vigilant against the forces that have taken it from us. That their game has played on for so long is the fault of each of us — ending the game and returning government of the people to the people is the responsibility of all of us.

But cleaning up Washington isn’t enough. If we are going to meet the challenges we face and prevail over them, two principles must guide us — yes, we must end the Washington game, but we must also think as big as the challenges we face. Our ideas must be bold enough to succeed and our government must be free to enact them without compromising principle or sacrificing results.

One without the other isn’t good enough. All the big ideas in the world won’t make a difference if they have to go through this broken system that remains controlled by big business and their lobbyists. And if we fix the system, but aren’t honest with the American people about the scope of our challenges and what’s required of each of us to meet them, then we’ll be left with the baby steps and incremental measures that are Washington’s poor excuse for progress.

As Bobby Kennedy said, “If we fail to dare, if we do not try, the next generation will harvest the fruit of our indifference; a world we did not want, a world we did not choose, but a world we could have made better by caring more for the results of our labors.”

But if we do both — if we have the courage to offer real change and the determination to change Washington — then we will be build the One America we dream of, where every man, woman and child is blessed with the same, great opportunity and held to the same, just rules.

For more than 20 years, Democrats have talked about universal health care. And for more than 20 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, because lobbyists for the big insurance companies, drug companies and HMOs spent millions to block real reform. Instead, they’ve grudgingly allowed incremental measures that do nothing but tinker around the edges — or worse, they’ve hijacked reform to improve their own bottom line. So today, more Americans go without health care than ever before. Instead of prescription drug reform that brought down the cost of drugs, the lobbyists for the big drug companies got us a prescription drug bill that boosts drug company profits but doesn’t cut patient costs.

I have a bold plan to finally guarantee true universal health care for every single American and cut health care costs for everyone. My plan will require everyone — business, government and individuals — to contribute something to reach universal coverage. And I am honest about the cost: $90 to $120 billion a year, and I’ll pay for it by repealing the Bush tax cuts for families above $200,000. If we end the game in Washington, we can finally have a health care system that treats the health of all our people with equal worth.

Dependence on foreign oil is smothering our economy and choking our environment. Everybody knows it — politicians from both parties have been calling for energy independence for 30 years. So what did the oilmen in the White House do? They handed the keys to the corridors of government over to the lobbyists for the big oil companies and let them literally write the energy bill. Now, gas prices are through the roof, carbon emissions are unchecked, and global warming is likely getting worse.

When I am president, we will cap greenhouse gas pollution and ratchet it down every year. We will avoid mistakes like nuclear power and liquid coal. We will invest in clean renewable energies generated in America and create a new era in efficient cars, made by union members here at home.

And look at our economic policies — from top to bottom, they’re a twisted reflection of American values. Instead of expanding opportunity for all and preventing special privileges for any, they hoard opportunity and protect special privileges for the very few at the very top.

Trade policy is all about corporate profits for big multinationals and not at all about lifting workers’ wages or creating American jobs. The tax code provides breaks for hedge fund managers — amazingly, even Democrats backed down from asking them to pay their fair share when Wall Street lobbyists put the pressure on. By the time a decade of corporate opposition to a minimal increase in the minimum wage is overcome, even its own supporters admit that the increase isn’t enough — so another decade of corporate opposition begins anew, and workers lose again.

It’s time we put our economy back in line with our values. Let’s restore fairness to our tax code by insisting on a simple principle — nobody in the middle class should pay higher taxes on the money they make from hard work than the wealthiest pay on the money they make from their investments. Let’s restore opportunity and responsibility to our trade policy by requiring that every new trade deal puts workers and wages first. Let’s reward work by strengthening unions, raising the minimum wage, cutting taxes on working families and with a national commitment to end poverty within a generation.

And let’s support our troops and end this war in Iraq. We should immediately withdraw 40-50,000 combat troops immediately and have the rest out in about a year. And when President Bush refuses to act, Congress should use its funding power to force him to act.

None of this will be easy, but all of it is possible.

I know. I’ve been doing it my entire life.

I am the son of Wallace and Bobbie Edwards. My father had to borrow $50 to bring me and my mother home from the hospital. I am here today because, like all the people my father worked with in the mill, my parents got up every day believing in the promise of America, and they worked hard — no matter what obstacles were thrown against them — to give me the chance for a better life.

That’s the promise at the heart of the American Dream. What matters to our generation is of little consequence — in America what has always mattered most is the consequences for our children and their children after them. And no amount of power or money gives anyone the right to break that promise with our future.

I have stood with ordinary Americans at the most difficult times in their lives, when all the power of corporate America was arrayed against them. I have walked into courtrooms alone to face an army of corporate lawyers with all the money in the world. I have walked off the Senate elevator and been besieged by an army of corporate lobbyists. And I have beaten them over and over again.

But let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience — you cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power — you have to take it from them.

We cannot triangulate our way to real change. We cannot compromise our way to real change. But we can lead to real change. And we can start today.

Nearly ten years ago, I made the decision that I would never take a dime from a Washington lobbyist — I wasn’t going to work for them, and I didn’t want their money.

Because in the courtroom, when you present your case to the jury, you can offer facts and evidence, you can argue your heart out — and I have — but the one thing you can’t do, is pay the jury. We call that a bribe. But in Washington when an oil lobbyist gives money to office holders to influence our energy policy, they call it politics. That’s exactly what’s wrong with this system.

Money flies like lightning between corporations, lobbyists, and politicians. We need full public financing to reform the system once and for all. But we don’t need to wait to reform our party. Two weeks ago, I called on all Democrats to reject contributions from federal lobbyists. To tell them — we know that you give money to influence politicians on behalf of your corporate clients. Well, we’re not going to take it anymore. Your money’s no good here.

I repeat that challenge today. Let’s show America exactly whose side we’re on. We can reform our party and truly be the party of the people. And we can expose for all time who the Republicans in Washington are really working for.

There are 60 lobbyists in Washington for every member of Congress. The big corporations don’t need another president that looks out for them — they’ve got all the power they need. I want to be the people’s president.

A few weeks, ago I met a man named James Lowe in Wise, Virginia. James spent the first fifty years of his life without a voice — literally without a voice — because he didn’t have health care. All he needed was a simple operation to fix a cleft palate. That a man in the richest country in the world could go unable to speak for 50 years because he couldn’t pay for a $3,000 operation is something that should outrage every American. We are better than that. America is better that that.

It’s a stark reminder of our broken political system that leaves millions of Americans without a voice in their government — a government that is supposed to work for them.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. And we can change it together.

We must think big and end the game.

It’s not about being ready to grab the reigns of establishment Washington and stand on the side of corporate elites. If it is, there are plenty who will do a better job than me at protecting the status quo, and preserving the policies and politics of the past.

It’s about being ready to lift our country up, reform our party, and remake our government in line with the values of our people. It’s about real change and a new vision that meets the challenges of the future and inspires the American people to work together for the common good.

We’re all angry at what George Bush has done to our country. But with courage and conviction, with an unblinking eye on the future we believe in and an unbending knee on the road to get there, not only can we undo the damage, we can transform the world. No matter what life has thrown at us, Elizabeth and I have always chosen to be optimistic about the future — and determined to make a difference as we strive toward it everyday.

I carry the promise of America in my heart, where my parents placed it. Because of them, I believe in people, hard work and the American Dream. I believe the future belongs to us if we only dare to seize it. And I believe to seize it, we must blaze a new path, firmly grounded in the values that first made America great. We must cast aside the established ways of Washington and replace them with the timeless values of the American people. We must end the game controlled by a privileged few and restore the promise that America owes to us all.

On that new path lies One America, where possibility is unbound and opportunity is the birthright of every American. Where the voices of the people are heard again in the halls of government, and government heeds their call. One America, where every individual takes responsibility for our common good, and the chance to reach one’s God-given potential is every individual’s common right.

I am the son of Wallace and Bobbie Edwards.

And I believe in the promise of America.

Filmmaker Michael Moore’s brilliant and uplifting new documentary, “Sicko,” deals with the failings of the U.S. healthcare system, both real and perceived. But this time around, the controversial documentarian seems to be letting the subject matter do the talking, and in the process shows a new maturity.

And here is a quote from Michael Moore:

Well, I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people. As long they’re not doing it to make a profit off it, as long as they’re not, you know, trying to make a profit off my labor. I would oppose that. But um, you know I do quite well and I um…I don’t know, I make these books and movies and TV shows because I want things to change, so the more people that get to see them the better, and um, so I’m, I’m happy when that happens, OK? Should I not be happy I don’t know? It’s like if a friend of yours has the DVD of my movie, gave it to you to watch one night, is that person doing something wrong? I’m not seeing any money from that. But he’s just handing the DVD to you so that you can watch my movie. A DVD that he bought, but you’re not buying it, yet you’re watching it without paying me any money. See I think that’s OK, and it’s always been OK, we share things with people. And I think information and art, ideas should be shared.

Enough said.

A better way might be to calculate the “employment rate”. Jerome a Paris offers us a distinction between the “unemployment rate” and the “employment rate”:

• the unemployment rate is the ratio of the unemployed active to the total active population;
• the employment rate is the ratio of the employed to the total population.

A big problem with the unemployment rate is that it is hard to define who is an “active” member of the workforce. The employment rate, on the other hand, dispenses with the need to do so. As economists John Schmitt and Dean Baker point out in their report “Old Europe Goes to Work: Rising Employment Rates in the European Union,” “the employment rate provides a better measure of an economy’s success in incorporating women into the paid workforce.” I assume that this is because many women are often not considered to be actively looking for work. The standard myth is that women “opt-out” to take care of families, but a recent report argued that women are actually “pushed out“:

“Most mothers do not opt out,” says Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings. “They are pushed out by workplace inflexibility, the lack of supports, and a workplace bias against mothers.” In one recent survey, 86 percent of women cited obstacles such as inflexible jobs as a key reason behind their decision to leave.

As the Schmitt-Baker report shows, using these numbers also changes how one sees the oft-reported high unemployment rates in Europe. Jerome a Paris provides us with an interesting quote from Laurent Guerby which points out that the employment rate for working-age men in France is actually higher than that in the US, even though the unemployment rate for that group is nearly double.

In the fourth quarter of 2004, the normalised unemployment rate for men aged 25 to 54 was, according to the OECD, 4.6% in the USA and 7.4% en France. At the same time, for the same group, the employment ratio was 86.3% in the USA and 86.7% in France.

We thus have an unemployment number which is 60% higher in France than in the USA even though [in France] more people [should be "a greater percentage of people"] work in the selected group, which is rather counter-intuitive if we expect the unemployment rate to reflect the situation of the labor market.

One should thus avoid hasty interpretations of unemployment numbers. In fact, the definition of unemployment is built on the – fragile – distinction between the unemployment of an potentially active worker his/her non-employment. Despite the best efforts to normalise this distinction, it remains heavily subjective and thus easily influenceable by various policies which have otherwise no real effect on the labor market.

[Emphasis and some corrections added.]

This isn’t to say that unemployment isn’t a big problem in France (I think last year’s protests and riots showed us that it is), but simply that the numbers we see most often might not be the best way to evaluate the problem. Also, all of this is important because unemployment rates are used as a stick with which impose neoliberal reforms upon various European countries. The Economist and the Wall Street Journal love to trot out these numbers, although thanks to the blogsphere they are increasingly likely to be called out on this (see here and here).

(via Kevin Drum):

Why is this important? The standard method (NLRB elections by secret ballot) are much more prone to coercion by management:

During the NLRB election, 46% of workers complained of management pressure. During card check elections, 14% complained of union pressure. Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely as workers in card check elections to report that management coerced them to oppose.

More from Kevin Drum.

From the Working Families website:

Sign the Petition: Tell Congress It’s Time to Support the Employee Free Choice Act

Today, 60 million workers in America want to join unions. But employers routinely block their efforts—and our laws are too weak to protect them. It’s time for Congress to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to make their own uncoerced decisions on whether or not to form a union. Please sign the following petition urging members of Congress to support this important legislation.

Technorati Tags: union cardcheck

Disney had a ferocious temper, especially against people he saw as left-wing. He testified enthusiastically before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and detailed what he saw as communist plots to take over Hollywood. He branded some former animators communists, said the Screen Actors Guild was a communist front and labelled a 1941 strike that hit his studio a communist plot. He even contacted the FBI about alleged communist infiltration.

When his cartoonists tried to form a union, he brought in armed guards. He fired organisers, cut wages and slashed the opening hours of the studio coffee shop. At one point, faced with a strike picket, Disney had to be physically restrained from attacking the leader of the industrial action.

This makes me happy, not because Disney was a McCarthyite, but because it finally gives me an opportunity to share with the world a picture from a book I picked up in India.

The picture is of Uncle Walt with his good buddy, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and was found in the book Eisenstein on Disney (1986). The picture was taken in 1930. I think it is fair to say that Eisenstein was a bigger fan of Disney than vice-versa, but who knows what happened to Disney between 1930 and the 1940s? He’s still pretty young in this picture.

Here is another picture which Eisenstein sent to his best friend back home:

(And yes, next time I’ll learn how to use the descreening filter on my scanner… sorry about that.)

As Tritch says:

The best-off Americans are not only winning by an extraordinary margin right now. They are the only ones who are winning at all.

Even more disturbing is this graph:

During the years that George W. Bush has been in the White House, productivity growth has been stronger than ever. But the real compensation of all but the top 20 percent of income earners has been flat or falling. Gains in wages, salaries and benefits have been increasingly concentrated at the uppermost rungs of the income ladder.

What to make of all this? William Tabb claims that virtually all spending on political campaigns in the United States comes from less than 100,000 people. There is a word for that, its called an oligarchy. Not sure that this is news. The untold part of this story is the decline of the trade unions which once provided some kind of counter balance, at least during the period between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The other Times story of note is “Study Documents ‘Ghetto Tax’ Being Paid by the Urban Poor” by Erik Eckholm, which discusses how much more it costs to be poor.

Drivers from low-income neighborhoods of New York, Hartford and Baltimore, insuring identical cars and with the same driving records as those from middle-class neighborhoods, paid $400 more on average for a year’s insurance.

The poor are also the main customers for appliances and furniture at “rent to own” stores, where payments are stretched out at very high interest rates; in Wisconsin, a $200 television can end up costing $700.

In the William Tabb article he talks about the unbelievable success Senators have had in the stock market (12% above the market vs. 6% for corporate leaders and -1.4% for the rest of us). Too bad poor people can’t give senators stock tips!

That organized crime controls New York and New Jersey’s waterfront is not news. Elia Kazan’s classic 1954 film On the Waterfront (filmed around Hoboken, where I grew up) depicts the (true) story of one man who took on the mob, but as William Finnegan’s excellent New Yorker story “Watching the Waterfront” (print only) shows, little has changed since then. Finnegan’s story focuses on the new attention being paid to organized crime’s grip on New York Harbor in light of recent security concerns. Of course, the fact that the longshoreman’s union is one of the strongest unions in the country might be motivating the department of Homeland Security (which has been involved in union busting since its creation), so I am somewhat dubious of their sudden interest in securing US ports. Still, Finnegan’s story is well written and full of details that feel as if they were taken from an episode of The Sopranos.

For instance, this scene where he goes into a Brooklyn deli with J. Kevin McGowan, the assistant police chief of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor:

McGowan, who is red-faced and white-haired, was wearing a sharp gray suit that day. We went to lunch at an Italian deli near his office, on the Brooklyn waterfront. He said, “This is a Gambino place, so we should maybe get our food to go. The former owner, we got him on conspiracy to distribute cocaine. He’s doing twenty.” As we approached the deli, an extremely large man in a brown velour tracksuit came out and passed us without looking our way. “That’s the new owner,” McGowan said. Inside, McGowan told the counterman, “I’m doing the chicken parm.” The counterman asked me, “What did he say? Did he say he was retiring?” McGowan patiently repeated his order, and the counterman said to me, “He thinks he’s saving the world.” Nobody smiled.

The legacy of Kazan’s film is so strong that a major police operation was code-named “Operation Brando”! Later, visiting one of the dockyards, Finnegan meets Tom Hanley, a crane operator and union leader who McGowan says “Must be one of the good guys.” McGowan grew up in Hoboken back before it was gentrified, when it was more like “On the Waterfront.” In fact, Hanley was in the movie!

As a kid, Hanley had a role in “On the Waterfront.” He played Tommy, the boy who looks after Terry Malloy’s beloved pigeons in their rooftop coop in Hoboken, and then, devastated by the news that Malloy has begun coöperating with a crime commission, kills the birds.

“They were building pigeon coops on the roof of my tenement, so the movie company hired me, kind of like you hire a kid to watch your car when you’re in Harlem. I guess they thought I was going to burn the coops down or something,” he said. “Anyway, I was feeding the pigeons, and I got sent to the Actors Studio, on West Fifty-seventh Street, where Ella Kazan and Budd Schulberg were doing auditions.” Kazan was the film’s director, and Schulberg was the screenwriter. “They deliberately enraged me,” Hanley said. “They said, ‘We heard your father was a squealer.’ So I went nuts, started throwing chairs at them, and that’s what they wanted, because there’s that scene where I throw a pigeon at Brando. At the time, I didn’t really know who Brando was. But the girls in my neighborhood knew who he was.”

The movie company offered Hanley two hundred and fifty dollars a week. “That was like half a million dollars to us,” he said. “My mom and I were starving. We were eight months behind on our rent, which was fourteen dollars a month. It lasted only two weeks, but still.” The work itself was easy. “Ella Kazan walked me through it. He just kept saying, ‘You can do it.’ I’d never had attention like that before.” He paused. “I was on TV once after that, on ‘The Red Buttons Show,’” he said. Then, with impeccable timing, he added, “I pursued my acting career on the waterfront, where I pretended to be a tough guy.”

But the best anecdote in the story goes to another union leader at Hanley’s dock, Tony Perlstein, “a longshoreman at Global, who has worked as a labor organizer in other industries, and is a graduate of Brown University”:

Perlstein says that he has been threatened, both subtly and otherwise. After one union-local meeting in New Jersey, he was confronted by a group of workers aligned with the Old Guard. “Hey, Tone, you think we’re stupid?” one of them asked. He put a finger in Perlstein’s face and bellowed, “I Googled you!”

The New Yorker isn’t online unless you have access through your university, but the website does have this interview with William Finnegan about writing this story.