to everybody my name is mark mcdermott and i'm going to talk about the title of my talk tonight is fighting for democracy learning from our ancestors in the last two and a half years i've done one hundred forty speeches and workshops from san diego to vancouver british columbia to miami florida to pittsburgh detroit milwaukee cleveland and other places talking to audiences a lot of unions but also a lot of community based organizations and faith based organizations about the american dream being stolen from working people and our in our democracy being stolen from us how this is happened and what can we do about it so this is a continuation of that discussion why am i doing this i started out when i was twelve years old my father lost his job he was fifty second he never got another job we plunged into deep poverty i ended up living in the garage for three years when i was in high school i know what it's like to liv and sleep in a room that has no heat when it's zero degrees out and i wanted to go to college desperately and my parents had absolutely no money and unbeknownst to me my high school got more and this was not required of her she started giving my high school transcript to college recruiters that were coming through and one day out of the blue i got a letter from a small college in illinois that told me if i fill out this application they'll give me a free ride for four years to go to their college this was a public employee who did this or me this was a public school teacher who did this for me this was someone who did not have to do it and it changed my life forever and the opportunity that i was given as i've gone through life i came to understand that the financial aid that i got mainly came from federal programs that were a result of the struggles of the civil rights movement and other people who were fighting to open up higher education to poor kids regardless of the color of their skin so i stand before you as a middle aged white guy who benefited directly from the civil rights movement i never forgot it and it sort of led me to a belief but i want to make sure that every kid in this country i don't care who they are i don't care where they came from what religion they believe in or do not believe in their gay or straight native born or foreign born that every kid in this country ought to get an opportunity to be able to reach for their dreams and it for it to be real and what i see is that dream is being systematically stolen from them and i'm going to do everything i can and i'm talking to everybody i know we can't let our young people have their dreams stolen from them so that they can be who they want to be in a society that is fair and just so that's who i am but i want to find out a little bit about you before we get started i want to ask you a series of questions about you your family members that your extended family your close friends and their extended families and if the answer to the question is yes i'd like to raise your hand in the past six years do you know anybody who's worried about their job or finding a full time good paying job everybody struggling to pay the bills or paying for health care for in that extended family or the extended families of your friends firstly everybody difficulties in paying for college or large student loans just about everybody young people struggling to start good careers everybody underwater mortgage foreclosures reductions probably two thirds of you and last but not least worried about adequate income in retirement everybody just about everybody there's something profoundly wrong here sisters and brothers that in the wealthiest country in the world this is the kind of response and this is a typical response in virtually every reason to speech i do so want to ask you another question you feel like your government is more concerned about you and your welfare and that in the welfare of your family or the wealthy and the powerful ok that you're off topic but thank you so the question is then the body does anybody feel like the government cares more about you than them ok so let me ask you this question do you want to take our government back so that it's once again a government of by and for the people i can hear you ok good well let's talk about what can we what can we learn from the past that's relevant to the situation that we face because we're not the first generation that's had to deal with these kinds of situations famous quote from george santayana who once said those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it those who don't remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes so to me it is critical that we understand where we came from how what was good in america came to be and how it's being taken away from us and the reverend dr martin luther king once said the labor movement was the principle force the transformed misery and despair into hope and progress it was not the titans of industry it was people like us who built the american dream is being stolen from us and we need to figure out how to take it back so let's go back at a time machine eight hundred eighty six what used many of the slides up here but that's ok in one thousand nine hundred six the u s supreme court ruled in the southern pacific railroad versus santa clara county that corporations were legal persons and they were and they were endowed with constitutional rights ok foundational moment a lot of people notice now in eight hundred eighty eight president grover cleveland in the state of the union address is quoted as saying corporations which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and servants of the people are fast becoming the people's masters so i ask you to imagine for a second one hundred twenty six years later any president of the united states getting up in the state of the union address and saying that corporations are out of control and we need to get them back under control and make them our servants rather than our masters it's almost inconceivable that this would happen but that was being said back in the old days so i want to introduce you to my grandparents my irish american grandfather went to work when he was ten years old got pulled out of third grade my german american grandfather got pulled out of sixth grade went to work at h well it was a nonunion america wages extremely low and their parents could not make enough money to put a roof over their head and put enough food on the table without their children being forced to go to work their childhoods were stolen from them and their dreams for what they were hoping in their lives were going to be much smaller because they couldn't make enough to support themselves there's a famous quote from the founder of coca cola and every time you drink a can of coca cola i urge you to remember this quote the most beautiful sight that we see is a child at labor as early as he may get it labor the more beautiful the more useful does his life get to be i'm not making up this quote this is what mr camber now mr cantor wasn't talking about his kids the children of the super wealthy he's talking about the working class kids and the poor kids and that as soon as you can put them to work in a miner a mill or a smelter or picking cotton that's what you should have them do so that what is going to happen to them their future is going to be much more limited and there was an enormous fight in the country over whether or not we should ban child labor which it was a foundational fight that went on for decades but the problem was if you're making so little money and you say i'm not going to send my kids to work you may not have enough money to put food on the table and a roof over your head so working people tens of millions of them were literally caught in a trap we want our kids to get an education but we need money and we need food and we need a rough over our head so let's go to the depression of eighteen of the eight hundred ninety s it's the worst depression in american history and workers are desperately fighting back as wages are being cut in some cases twenty twenty five percent from wages that were like thirty thirty five cents an hour and the army and the national guard was repeatedly repeatedly brought in to break strikes and continue to beat workers down and working working class people and the communities in which they lived it was a desperate desperate situation there's no unemployment insurance there's no public assistance there's no food stamps there's no medicaid there's no medicare there is nothing except being on the edge of starvation hunger and cold so but the people didn't take this lying down so all sorts of organizing is going on across the country they start hammering on congress and they demand that congress pass a federal income tax and the revenues can be used to help the struggling people so in eight hundred ninety four there was enough pressure on congress that they actually passed a federal income tax it was a two percent flat tax it only applied to the richest ten percent of families and it's this huge victory for working people it's like oh my god there's actually going to be more revenues and maybe we're going to get some help to survive this desperate depression so what happens the corporate dominated supreme court steps in and declares the income tax unconstitutional bang and the story ok so we're back to ground zero so the elections of eight hundred ninety six approach and on the one hand you have a guy named william mckinley who is the advocate and tool of the robber barons of the super wealthy and the corporate elites and on the other hand you have a guy named william jennings bryan who is a champion of working people and the farmers and the poor folks and this is a titanic  money men as they were called in those days are strangling the country and we're living in true desperation so the election approaches and in the corporate elites in court and the super wealthy say we have got to win  this election and we're going to win it with money there they are mckinley outspends brian eleven to one eleven to one if you think we've had trouble in the current elections with too much money imagine your side being out spent eleven to one mckinley wins the popular vote fifty three to forty six percent it's a relatively narrow win if he had only had twice as much money as bryan or three times as much money as brian the people's champion might have won ok but they went all out and said how much money do you need we're going to give you everything that you need and of course this is completely legal because there are no federal laws that limit camping contributions or maximum contributions or anything corporations can give money anybody can give money and you can pull a million or half a million dollars out of your wallet and just hand it over and say here we go ok so we lose this election so the president in congress remains in a stranglehold of corporate power and at the same time there are strikes going out all over the country fighting against child labor among other things and trying to shorten the work week one of them was in and three in philadelphia one hundred thousand workers go on strike they want a fifty five hour work week they're working sixty hours a week and once one sixth of all the people on strike are children and in the picket signs that they had is we want to go to school well their parents are making so little money that they parents can't let them go to school because they need to be put money on the table for a roof over their head and for food the strike is broken after eight weeks they have no strike from their starved into submission there is a children's march from philadelphia to long island to the summer home of president teddy roosevelt saying do something and he basically told him to go home and get back into li ok another bitter defeat and there were many are bitter defeat but the people didn't give up our ancestors didn't give up because they were fighting for their children they were fighting for their grandchildren and they were fighting not only for the present but for a better future and a more hopeful no seven people and organizations all over the country had put so much pressure on congress that congress was forced to pass the tillman act which was the first federal legislation that banned contributions by corporations so despite the elections being stolen they put so much pressure on congress that the people had a huge win and six years later because of the mass pressure from all over the country we got a us kasa to tional amendment that authorize congress to have a personal income tax and it only applied to the richest two percent of american families they said it couldn't be done in our ancestors did this the same year after years of organizing they also pushed through a constitutional amendment that called for direct elections a u s senators ok because previously they'd been elected by the legislatures and a lot of the legislators had been bought sold and paid for by corporate power so three huge victories that expanded our democracy despite the fact that corporations were still dominant economically so one of the big fights at the same time was bust up the big corporations they were called the trusts and they were strangled literally strangling the country and there you can you can look at the literature of the time and you see standard oil which was the biggest of the big this is the rockefeller people is an act opposed that is strangling the entire country ok so the fight was that we got to break up the corporations we've got to limit their ability to contribute money we want to limit the amount of money that the wealthy can put into elections because we're trying to take our democracy back because it was a guy who was supposed to be a government of by and for the people and we one of the government to affirmatively act and do things like ban child labor make the right to organize unions important and legal so that we could raise the standard of living so our kids could be able to go to school and that be forced to work out of economic hardship and desperation so while we're winning some of these major struggles to expand our democracy at the same time there is a counterattack in that and one of the big counterattacks is in the south and a lot of blacks and a lot of white joining together this is the end of the one nine hundred centuries and they build coalitions and in some states they actually elect coalition governments that start to work on behalf of the people and this is a direct quote we rested our state government from negro supremacy really rested our government from negro supremacy do you know what this means this means that a bunch of whites and a bunch of blacks got together and voted and elected some black folks into office along with some white folks and they're working together and they're starting to improve and make better laws that serve the people ok the ruling elites down there working with hard core races said we're not going to allow this so they began the counterattack to take the right to vote away with literacy tests with poll taxes and other kinds of techniques and in mississippi alone between in hundred seventy six seventy percent of the eligible voters voted in one thousand nine hundred twenty it was less than ten percent they had virtually taken the right to vote away from all black folk and the vast majority of the white working class and poor white farmers were also disenfranchised even though the us constitution says that at that point every male has a right to vote unless you've been convicted of a felony  so they're starting to they're start to take that they're starting to take the democracy away in certain parts of the country based on racism and also class interests at the same time we're winning some other fights to expand the democracy so it's it's a mixed report in other states we're fighting at the state level and we're winning the right to get an initiative we're getting the right for a referendum because we want to have ability to go directly to the people to change the laws because in too many cases the legislatures are bought sold and paid for by corporate interests so the struggle for democracy is to expand our democracy and really have our government serve the people is very complicated and made much more difficult by taking the right to vote away ok what is another issue that's going out obviously is women's right to vote this is that new information i'm sure anybody in this room in one nine hundred thirteen five thousand women marched through the streets of washington d demanding the right to vote they were attacked by angry mobs one hundred of them were beaten so badly they were hospitalized and they had to bring the u s army out to restore order so that they could continue to exercise their constitutional rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and so the fight for the women's right to vote was also not just people standing around and saying why don't you do the right thing here people suffered in every one of these areas people were fighting and struggling saying we want a government that is of by and for the people and not of by and for the corporations ok so let's go back to the fight over child labor this this story is not finished ok at the same time folks are fighting to ban child labor so make it illegal and to try and raise wages or kids can have a brighter future the fight is than to have free mandatory public education free this is an important word that you have to pay for it which was a revolutionary idea is that you should have free public education it took until nine hundred eighteen to finally have every state have free mandatory public education don't get me wrong it wasn't of equal quality because you got separate but equal blacks and poor whites are going to get inferior educations to the children of the well to do and the middle classes but at least we were winning that fight so let's go back to thailand or again the struggle continues and the organizing continues across the country we get to nine hundred eighteen and we  ancestors hammer on congress to the point that in one thousand eight hundred congress passes the first federal law banning child labor in dangerous industries and starting to get the kids out of schools and guess what happens the corporate tom unaided u s supreme court declares it unconstitutional and it struck down it it struck down ok our ancestors didn't take a lie and out they reorganize they put the big fight on they pushed another a lot through congress banning child labor in in that agricultural industries in one nine hundred twenty three and lo and behold what happens the corporate dominated us supreme court steps in and declares it unconstitutional ok so you've got all these laws that say that you're supposed to be going to school but you can't get a law passed that says kids it's illegal for them to be working during school hours ok and if your parents are desperate and don't have enough money a lot of them are going to continue to go to school ok fast forward to the one nine hundred thirty s the greatest up people in american history working people and community allies stood up and built a powerful labor movement and began demanding fundamental changes in the country in the worst hard times that our country has ever seen economically in one thousand thirty eight after ninety years before eating and struggle we finally got the congress to pass the fair labor standards act which banned a child labor in most not agricultural industries where it was dangerous and the primary emphasis was on going to school there i forgot to mention one thing here they tried to get a constitutional amendment for child labor laws ok they managed to get it through congress and they got it they set it out to the states it only passed in twenty eight out of the thirty six states that required to ratify that constitutional amendment and you know where that failed it failed in the states where they had been systematically taking the right to vote away from black folk and poor white working class and farmers ok and if you look at the map where they were systematically stripping away the right to vote were the states that systematically said we are not going to ratify a constitution constitutional amendment that says congress has the authority to pass child labor laws to protect our children and make sure that they have a brighter future i got of order here so after that it took the great up evil of the one nine hundred thirty s and when congress passes finally passes the child labor law protections inside of the fair labor standards act guess what the supreme court decides without one word changed in the u s constitution that it was constitutional ok and the reason they did it was because we had built enough political power that we had elected presidents who had nominated people to the u s supreme court who actually wanted to serve the interests of the people and have a government of by and for the people they read the exact exact same document document and came to a different conclusion ok so in some cases yes we want constitutional amendments but by god we better build a political power so we can put people in the supreme court who will read that document as if it is actually about a government of by and for the people and not of b for corporate power ok this was a ninety year struggle and repeated efforts repeated efforts and repeated efforts and finally we have the great breakthrough and once when my father was old knew he died at age ninety three and i ask him probably in his mid eighty's i asked him i said what was your grandfather's what was my grandfather's what were his proudest moments you know this is a guy who's third grade educated work from ages ten to seventy five and my dad got teary eyed you know and this is like really unusual and i said so what was it and he said the day i graduated from high school the day i walked across the stage and i got a high school diploma because my grandfather said my top priority is to make sure that my children get educated and for them for them that meant to get a high school diploma and my father and mother were the first people in the entire history of our families going back till adam and eve or wherever that thing started who actually got a high school diploma and that their political activism was being driven in part by they wanted a better future for their kids and their grandkids and children yet to be born and they were going to shut up and working to give up no matter how many times they lost no matter how many times they got beat down because they didn't want to say to their children or their grandchildren the future looks pretty bad and there's nothing we can do and we need to draw on this rich history to understand that people like us in the past when hard times have meant upon us and it feels like the corporations were stepping on our throats that people like us came together organized and kept common despite the feat after defeat after defeat until they finally won so let's fast forward to getting a time machine and fast forward to the  seventy s when we're you know having several decades of relative prosperity the the greatest and brought us prosperity we've ever had in this country not that it was perfect people of color were still trailing whites women were still trailing m but at least the future was looking brighter and better and we want all these victories in the one nine hundred thirty s we won all these victories in the one nine hundred sixty s and we were broadening our democracy and broadening economic opportunity and educational opportunities for more and more people myself included and i'm certainly not the only poor kid who got a chance to reach for their dreams because people stood up and said shouldn't we have a chance to go to college even if my father didn't have a dime to help even though he former president of the american bar association he served on the boards of eleven major u s corporations and in august twenty third one thousand nine hundred seventy one he wrote a secret memo to a friend of his at the u s chamber of commerce it's called the attack on the free enterprise system is a fourteen page document i urge you to google this and read it because if you're concerned about what is happening in america you've got to be distracted i consider it the most important piece of political writing in the last fifty years and what he lays out in this memo secret memo is the strategy by which corporate america can reassert its dominance over the economic and political life of the country i am not a conspiracy theorist and that some kind of wingnut to make this stuff up this guy really existed he really did write it and two months after he wrote it while it was still secret president nixon appointed him to the u s supreme court where he served for sixteen years and he was one of the architects of the landmark supreme court decisions that said that free speech is equal to money which lays the foundations for the struggles that we'll talk about in a few minutes so what does he say in this memo he says we need a decade's long strategy to reassert domination we need to win the war of big ideas we need to build a national idea machine those are my words but fun think tanks fund and out chairs in the universities attack our enemies in the universities who disagree with us use the corporate owned media which by the way we own to our great advantage and we need to go out in a relentless attack against our economic and political enemies that are restricting our ability to dominate the country and that only included organized labor but it's the environmentalists it's seniors it's students it's women who are saying you shouldn't be able to discriminate against us in employment it's people of color who are doing the same thing it's all of the movements of the sixty's and seventy's that are saying hey wait a minute we should have more control in what goes on here and by the way don't pollute the environment and destroy the world in which we're trying to live ok and the environmental victories and the movement pushed him and other corporate leaders to say hey we've got to we've got to get in gear here because this is really going to cost us dearly so what happens in the next few years is all these think tanks are created heritage foundation manhattan institute probably heard of some of these outfits they increase the number of corporate lobbyists from one thousand to ten thousand in ten years in washington d c they muscle up and say we're going to go to serious work and we're going to make sure that we're going to pour unlimited amounts of money into elections and we don't that what restrictions on our ability to buy elections they had a grand strategy and now making this up so let me read you a quote from one thousand nine hundred seventy five the trilateral commission which is a group of leading corporate leaders from western europe north american japan come together and they have a series of discussions because they believe there's a crisis in democracy that that's the title of their final report and the crisis of democracy was there is too much democracy there are too many people getting involved in trying to influence government and it's not working to our benefit and one of the famous quotes from this final report is the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy in not involvement on the part of some individuals and groups let me repeat requires some measure of apathy and not involvement of some individuals and groups now who do we think they're talking about they're not talking about themselves they're talking about people like us do either convince us that it doesn't make any difference to get involved well like what difference does it make they're all the same or to make it more difficult to vote so that they can maximize their influence and if you doubt this paul why rich who is the co founder of the heritage foundation which is one of the think tanks created after the powell memo this is a direct quote from one thousand nine hundred i don't want everybody to vote our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down sisters and brothers i'm talking about people and institutions that are powerful who actually want to systematically dismantle the essence of our democracy the essence of government of by and for the people ok trying to take us back to the kind of domination that we had in the youth of my grandparents in the eight hundred ninety s in the early twentieth century let's fast forward to two thousand and six i assume everybody's heard of warren buffett right gotta say yes ok good example of those i have to dear friends one is named sheldon and one is named mary i'm there the ableson it's from las vegas they are the casino owners there worth fifteen billion i don't know them well actually i've been in one of their casinos and i put some money in a slot machine it's actually a limited friendship they donated ninety million dollars of their own money in the two thousand and twelve election and according to the citizens from the supreme court one of them called citizens united and another one this year called mccutcheon everyone in this room has a constitutional right to donate ninety million dollars of your own money in the next election ok we are all equal that way now if you choose not to do that that's your business i'm not telling you how to live your lives ok but we're all equal according to a new corporate dominated supreme court that says that money is equal to free speech and any limits on the ability to give money in elections is taking away the free speech of the people ok and those decisions affected the repealed the nineteen zero seven tillman act that i mentioned earlier that was a result of the great fight of our ancestors are over one hundred years ago to try and get big money out of elections they went back one hundred three years and basically overturned that decision ok because they want to get back to the good old days at least the good old days for themselves you know another piece of this is i call this if you can't get them to vote right don't let them vote there this isn't this is a different method it's called voter suppression and they were using that back in the early twentieth century but they were lynching black folks they were murdering people who were attempting to vote they're not using those tactics now but they're making it more difficult for people to vote with voter id laws and various other techniques that are being used now that the supreme court is starting to say to some extent  legal now the voting rights act of one thousand nine hundred sixty five which was passed in response to a century of systematically denying black folk the right to vote right they put a provision in there that said for the states that have a long history of discrimination in voting was they had to get prior approval from the department of justice in order to make changes to the voting was this was sort of like we're putting you on permanent probation because you had one hundred years of being a bad actor said they were discriminatory and they were going to limit people's right to vote seven hundred and in two thousand and six when the voting rights act was renewed and they kept that clause in place the republican controlled house and this is the chair of the house judiciary committee said a majority of these proposed changes were calculated decisions to keep minority voters from fully participating in the political process seven hundred ok in the last year the supreme court went in and struck down that provision of the voting rights act because because they said it's not necessary anymore because we don't have the problem anymore and now a lot of these a lot of states are going at it full tilt going in trying to figure out a way to take the right to vote away it's a slicker method it's not murdering people and lynching them and shooting them in the alley like they were doing one hundred years ago but it is the same deliberate attempt so they're trying to do it you know by buying the elections they're trying to do it by taking the right to vote away and these are exactly the same methods that were being used one hundred years ago and our ancestors stood up and said no we're going to keep common and we're not going to let you do this ok so let's fast forward again to  how are our kids doing you know because education is critical right it's critical now our kids today are a trillion bucks in the hole with their student debt and it's gone up four hundred percent in the last ten years all right well it's a different version of of making it difficult for kids to be able to get an education one hundred years ago when they couldn't get child labor laws through and they made it difficult to get mandatory free public education and now when you need more education and training to be able to get a decent hopefully they're making it more and more difficult for the kids whose parents do not have money to do this ok so they're playing the same game again it looks differently it's not the child labor fight present but is restricting those opportunities for kids and the question is are we going to let him do it and i say to every audience we all have a choice here and whether or not we're going to stand up and fight this or let what corporate america did to one hundred years ago try and do what it can to us now you know well frederick douglass's one of my great heroes said eight hundred fifty seven if there is no struggle there can be no progress find out what any people will quietly submit to and you will of found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them he said that an eight hundred fifty seven he said that right after the supreme court i keep going back to these nineteen guys there's a couple of women now but back then they were all white guys they had just issued the dred scott decision which was probably the worst decision in the history of the united states the dred scott decision said if you are an escape slave who's living in a free state in the north slavers from the south can come and grab that person and drag them back into slavery in the south and anybody in the north who is aiding and abetting that escaped slave can go to prison with a felony because they're aiding and abetting stolen the stealing of property ok and frederick douglass stands up and says this after that decision will talk about a bad day for black folk and a bad day for the american people and a bad day for our democracy when our supreme court can reach that kind of a conclusion and he stands up and says look they're going to keep doing this to us until we make them stop and i would say that brother douglas was right in eight hundred fifty seven his words are every bit as true today as they were one hundred fifty seven years ago and if we don't stand up and don't get better organized and reach out to our families and our friends and into our communities and say hey look where the future is headed folks and if we don't stand together we have got a pretty good idea that the future may not be heading in a direction that we really want to live into but the point of looking at history is to say our ancestors went through harder times than we are going through they did not give up they didn't give up because they loved their kids and their grandkids and the young people that they knew and the people in their communities and said we can't give up because if we do we've got to go home and tell the people that we love that the future looks pretty grim and there's nothing we can do and sorry about that and i've now have yet to talk to anybody who wants to go home and have that conversation with the young people that they know and care about is anybody here want to go home and have that conversation with the people young people you know raise your hand ok well this is the hundred forty authority and that no one's been willing to volunteer that attention so as i'm going around and talking to folks people accuse me of prozac lectures and they go robert lang what did you bring this guy here for this is so depressing i mean i may have to go get some prozac or something because i don't think to handle five more minutes to listen to this guy's depressing story well the story is not depressing because our ancestors went through hard times and kept common and eventually won and we're in hard times and i say we now had we need to find inspiration and courage from our ancestors to go if they could do it if my third grade the sixth grade educated grandparents could stand up and not back down and keep at it i say we can do the same we are standing on their shoulders and we have got to help our young people move toward a better world so let me give you some examples of some winds that are going on around here across the country that don't get a lot news there's systematic attacks and unions across the country in oregon big business down there tried to push through an initiative to basically break down the unions even farther they built a huge labor community coalition and they told the business community in oregon if you try this we're going to put three initiatives on the ballot and we're going to come straight at you and corporate oregon back down and pulled it off the table same thing  happened in ohio where they took collective bargaining rights away from public employees they just walked in they had virtually no discussion legislature they took away rights that people have had for decades organized labor and their community allies they community young people old people came together put an initiative on the ballot they needed four hundred thousand signatures they got a million all time record in the state of ohio and they went to the polls and won back those rights that were stolen from them by a legislature and a governor that is bought sold and paid for by corporate interests in the state of ohio they said it couldn't be done and they did it we got the fifteen dollars our minimum wage fight going on in our city as we speak  it is long overdue for people to be able to make enough money if they've got a full time job to not be in poverty and they said it could be done we won it just down there in sea tac a few months ago and we're going to win another major victory here in the city and this minimum wage fight is an example of people coming together and saying we're going to start to take our country back and we're going to start to take our government back in california they pushed to a ten dollar an hour minimum wage in two thousand and thirteen three million people are going to get a raise in the state of california said it couldn't be done and they did it and young people were a critical part of the flight down there how many of you've heard about the moral monday marches in north carolina raise your hands one of you ok on february eighth of this year fifty thousand people participated in a demonstration in march and rally north carolina fifty thousand that was by with four zeros after it and what are they fighting about they passed the worst law in the country taking voting rights away they kicked one hundred snotty thousand people off of unemployment insurance who were unable to find work they denied health care through medicaid expansion for five hundred thousand people they kicked thirty thousand chill poor children off of head start programs the they are jacking up the tuition making it more and more difficult for working class and poor kids to go to college and the people in north carolina are saying hey we're not going to take this anymore and they have the biggest demonstration in the history of the south probably and at least forty years in asheville north carolina lad it was last december which is in the appalachian foothills they had a march of ten thousand people in  city of two hundred fifty thousand how many of you heard about that one measure in zero ok sisters and brothers there's a lot to go out there that mainstream media that's good trolled by big corporate interests are not interested in making it easy for people like us to find out that people like us across the country are doing things and everybody just isn't taken it and as we know more about these kinds of fights and actually some significant wins it can give us hope that mo maybe we can turn this around and it's not all gloom and doom and being hopeless in connecticut working people organized labor and a community came together in one paid sick state wide hundreds of thousands of people now have paid sick leave there so when your kid is sick and you don't make a lot of money and your employer will give it to you they're required to do so by law so you don't have to make a choice between well if i stay home with the kids we may not have enough money to eat and they won that we won the same thing in seattle here in two thousand and twelve one hundred ninety thousand people in the city now have paid sick leave the didn't have it the said it couldn't be done we were told oh my gosh the economy is going to collapse if we do this and i have noticed so far that the economy has not collapsed in the city of seattle it got real close but we managed to hold it off and it's not you know didn't didn't completely melt down the scare tactics that they try and tell us about if we fight for positive change somehow it's going to backfire and make it worse are just lies lies and damn lies and we can't believe them we need to look to see not only what folks are doing here but across the country wal mart here's the biggest corporation the world making tons of money what do they do as part of their business practice when you apply for a job in many states at wal mart they give you an application to apply for state medicaid which is a government subsidized and funded health plan rather than them providing it themselves right and then they turn around and give money to right wing politicians who bash away at people who sign up for medicaid and say we have got to deal with these lazy takers who won't go out and do the right thing while last year the day after thanksgiving workers walked out of fifteen hundred wal mart's across the country demanding an increase in pay this is a long fight but it's also part of the working people in the community coming together and saying we don't have to take this anymore in two thousand and twelve this is very dear to my heart because this is about poor kids and working class kids reaching for their dreams they wanted to double the interest rates on the student loans from three point four to six point eight percent ok remember this issue you know i knew i'd leave the big banks were getting zero percent loans from the federal reserve and they want the legal right to raise the loans that they're given to the working class and poor kids from three point four to six point eight while they're already a trillion bucks in the hole i mean really is this the america that you want to live in out i want to live in a country like this i want this changed because this touches me very deeply because i got a chance to reach for my dreams my country gave me a chance but it was because people fought for it that i got that chance and now they're trying to steal it away and you know what happened in two thousand and twelve students across the country got into the streets raised hell they beat on congress so hard that congress did not double the rates let's hear it for our young people in our students ok yeah how many of you knew this story this was huge this is huge the next year they lost and they did double the rates ok so the but the fights not over and i want to just talk for a minute about immigration ok does anybody know how many of the wall street executives who wrecked the economy in two thousand and eight run documented workers in mexico now no i don't know why this is so funny this is a very serious lecture does anybody know what the answer is zero ok the answer is actually zero i checked ok the national security agency did the research for me because they know everything about everybody now because they're listening in on everything ok the answer is actually zer but if i was a space alien from mars and i was monitoring radio and t v broadcasts in the united states you'd think it was about fifty percent and i'm here to tell you that if we fall into the trap of saying the reason that things are screwed up around here and times are tough and things are hard is because we've got some poor folks who are desperate and they're working under the table bus and dishes at a restaurant down the street from where i live if that's the reason that america is turning into what it is is because of them we got a completely wrong and that is people can disagree about how we fix immigration but we can't fall into the trap of going it's their fault they have nothing to do with spending ninety million dollars to lections or ruling that people don't have the right to vote or making it more difficult for our kids to be able to afford college they have nothing to do with that at all but it is a way to get us fighting amongst ourselves so we don't focus on the great task of taking our democracy back and restoring a broadly shared prosperity so what can we do i am here because i'm i'm trying to help get a u s constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics and repeal the ridiculous idea that corporations are legal persons protected by the us constitution there's not one word in the constitution about corporations a sixteen states have passed through varying legal means it is through their legislatures or votes of the people calling for a constitutional amendment to essentially repeal the idea that free speech is equal to money and that you should be able to spend as much money as you want and that our government does not have the legal right to monitor and rip require mandatory reporting and also to limit the amount of called initiative thirteen twenty nine it's being pushed by an organization called wyoming and and we're working hard to get enough signatures to get an initiative on the ballot so that we can have a vote in november so that we can be another one of the states calling for let's have a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics and restore some sense that we are once again going to be a government of by and for the people so let me let me mine i don't have the nerve to actually put my name on a quote short up on the screen the ultimate test of a person of a movement and a people is not whether or not we get knocked down it is what do we do when we get up are we stronger are we smarter are we more determined and are we more united this is always our choice and i say to everybody in this room you as individuals and us collectively in our diverse communities get to make that choice of are we going to stand up get stronger smarter more determined and more united and if we do like our ancestors showed so many years before they did it we can do it too let's take our country back so that once again the future is going to get brighter not only for ourselves but for the young people that we love and care about thank you while there's a bears abroad question the place that i met at this point in time is that we have multiple movements in this country that are fighting for some piece of a better future organized labor is doing it environmentalist are doing it women's groups are doing it case and lesbians are doing it students are doing it seniors are doing it immigrant rights are doing it probably leaving out some groups not meaning to offend anybody but there are other movements that are all sort of trying to work for some peace of of a better a better future and i argue that the  efforts is less than the sum of our parts and what i mean by that is that our efforts you know they should be additive so that we get more out of it rather than less but because we're split up in we're not united in a long term strategic way around a common vision that's anchored in values that it's hard for us to move forward in the so part of what i'm going out doing is talking to all sorts of groups and saying we're all getting pushback we're all getting ripped off and that is our common ground so let's sit down and break bread with each other figurative really and literally and talk about how we work together more strategically so that we can form a posit you know what is that positive vision that we're fighting for because too many of us in some ways are sort of fighting for a piece of it or we're fighting to avoid things getting worse and and the critical role of vision anchored in the i'll use i do a lot of work with unions and i was talking to a union leader recently that i'm helping their union sort of rethink about who they are and how they approach things and we were talking about being critical importance of talking to people's hearts before we talk to the head and he said well you know when a lot of my members are really into they've got all these ideas and i said he said so give me your best example and i said you heard a reverend dr martin luther king and he goes yeah because there's a do you remember this i have a dream that someday the descendants of slave owners will walk hand in hand to the red hills of georgia with the descendants of slaves on the long road to  community goes the major point and that our side i think part of the discussions we need to have is not these just these immediate fights but also what is that unifying inspiring vision of what we're fighting for where we're trying to get to and what are the values that underlie that and i would argue that our side is not very good at that yet and that because we're not it's harder for us to build the unity and the power we need to win big like our ancestors did it different points in the past they didn't win everything but they made things qualitatively better than