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August 27--After eight years of disdain and inaction in the U.S. House and Senate, Congressman and PDA Board member Jim McGovern (D-MA) (Co-chair of both the House Hunger Caucus and the House Human Rights Caucus) urged the audience of 200 rapt listeners to demand that the President once again put the issues of the poorest among us back on the front burner of governmental responsibility. In McGovern's view, if we actually win the presidency, and win enough seats in the House and Senate, we can quickly be on the edge of truly dramatic opportunities to end poverty in America. The audience stood for five minutes applauding his courage and efforts.
Carmen Rhodes, Executive Director of the Front Range Economic Strategy Center, proposed that the creation of good paying sustainable jobs--especially jobs in health care, infrastructure maintenance and repair, and jobs in the green energy sector--were the keys to breaking the poverty cycle. Ms. Rhodes also urged a revitalization of the labor movement, with unionization and passage of the Employees Free Choice Act being critical components in bringing about an economic turn-around. Rep. McGovern added that energy independence by pursuit of green collar jobs would be a boon-industry for the poor--as a sector providing good jobs, and as an industry that would ultimately reduce the capital required to be spent on foreign and fossil fuel energy.
Lori Wallach of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch noted that control of the wheel driving the American economic justice and jobs ship is currently and inordinately in the hands of business. Given that reality, progressives must help to build the confidence in the citizenry that will permit them to reach up and grab the wheel of economic justice themselves. Creating new jobs by making an ongoing demand for such jobs from our elected representatives is one way to accomplish that goal. The key to success is articulating an explicit vision and an equally explicit set of shared common goals, and then demanding that our representatives seek to honor them. A clever way to do that, suggested Wallach, is to gather signatures of candidates on pledge documents that we can hold them to after their election.
What we must do, the panelists agreed, is to usher in a new New Deal of jobs, human rights, and dignity, to reject all trade policies that beat people down, and support a global universal minimum or fair wage standard. We must cease our embrace of torture and of despots. We must realize and believe that people power is really more powerful than money, especially in the offices of our Congressional representatives, and that grassroots organizing matters.
And, of course, we must also recognize that the expense of America's military folly in Iraq, and wasteful military spending, are truly bankrupting us. And that while maintaining a military second to none is foundational, that we also need a new definition of what "national security" means, one that recognizes the need for economic security, environmental security, and health care security.
The panelists agreed that electing different people to office only creates the opportunity to create change, and does not create change in and of itself. What is really required is a commitment to ACTION, for the world will not get better without the organized efforts of like minded people demanding and working for the changes we know are morally and democratically in the best interests of the greatest number of Americans.
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