The Carter-Reagan-Bush Consensus

excerpted from the book

Voices of a People's History of the United States

by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove

Seven Stories Press, 2004, paper

p512

Marian Wright Edelman, Commencement Address at Milton Academy (June 10, 1983)

Where is the human commitment and political will to find the relative pittance of money needed to protect children? What kind of world allows 40,000 children to die needlessly every day? UNICEF estimates that for $6 billion a year we could save 20,000 children a day by 1990 by applying new scientific and technological breakthroughs in oral rehydration therapy, universal child immunization, promotion of breastfeeding, and mass use of child growth charts. At home, where are the strong political voices speaking out for investing in children rather than bombs; mothers rather than missiles?

In 1953 Dwight David Eisenhower warned:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies... a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the t hopes of its children.

And how blatant the world and national theft from needy children and the solution of pressing human needs is.

In its first year, the Reagan Administration proposed $11 billion in cuts in preventive children's and lifeline support programs for poor families with no attempt to distinguish between programs that work and don't work. The Congress enacted $9 billion in cuts.

In its second year, the Reagan Administration proposed $9 billion in cuts in these same programs; the Congress enacted $1 billion.

In its third year, the President is proposing $3.5 billion in new cuts in these same programs just as the effects of the previous cuts are being felt and millions of Americans are beset by joblessness, homelessness, and lost health insurance. Thousands of children face increasing child abuse, foster care placement, illness, and mortality because their families are unable to meet their needs while safety net family support, health and social services programs are being drastically cut back.

It is my strong view that the American people have been sold a set of false choices by our national leaders who tell us we must choose between jobs and peace; between filling potholes in our streets and cavities in our children's teeth; between day care for five million latchkey children and home care for millions of senior citizens living out their lives in the loneliness of a nursing home; between arms control and building the MX [missile]. There are other choices-fairer choices-that you and I must insist our political leaders make.

While slashing programs serving the neediest children, the President and Congress found $750 billion to give untargeted tax cuts mostly to non-needy corporations and individuals. And the Reagan Administration is trying to convince the American people to give the Pentagon $2 trillion over a seven year period in the largest arms buildup in peacetime history. Do you know how much money $2 trillion is? If you had spent $2 million a day every day since Christ was born, you would still have spent less than President Reagan wants the American people to believe the Pentagon can spend efficiently in seven years.

When President Reagan took office, we were spending $18 million an hour on defense.

This year, we are spending $24 million an hour.

Next year, President Reagan wants to spend $28 million an hour. The House Democratic leadership wants to spend "only" $27 million an hour and they are being labeled "soft" on defense.

By 1988, if the President had his way, we would be spending $44 million an hour on defense and every American would be spending 63 percent more on defense and 22 percent less on poor children and poor families. Just one hour's worth of President Reagan's proposed defense increase this year in military spending would pay for free school lunches for 19,000 children for a school year. A day's worth of his proposed defense increase would pay for a year's free school lunches for almost a half a million low income students. A week's worth of his proposed defense spending could buy a fully equipped micro computer for every classroom of low income children of school age in the U.S., assuming 25 children to a classroom.

How do you want to spend scarce national resources? What choices would you make in the following examples:

* Would you rather build one less of the planned 226 MX missiles that will cost us $110 million each, and that we still can't find a place to hide, or eliminate poverty in 101,000 female headed households a year? If we cancel the whole MX program we could eliminate poverty for all 12 million poor children and have enough left over to pay college costs for 300,000 potential engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who may not be able to afford college. Which investment do you think will foster longer term national security? President Reagan has cut safety net programs for poor families. He's building the MX missiles.

* Would you rather spend $100 million a year on 100 military bands or put that money into teaching 200,000 educationally deprived children to read and write as well as their more advantaged peers? American high school bands would be delighted to volunteer to provide music for patriotic events, I'll bet. President Reagan has cut compensatory education. He's not touched military bands.

* Would you rather keep or sell the luxury hotel the Department of Defense owns at Fort Dean Russey on Waikiki Beach which has a fair market value of $100 million, or provide Medicaid coverage for all poor pregnant women, some of whom are being turned away from hospital emergency rooms in labor? President Reagan has cut Medicaid. No one has seriously suggested curbing military luxuries like this hotel.

* We plan to build 100 B-l bombers at a cost of $250 million each. If we build 91-nine fewer-we could finance Medicaid for all poor pregnant women and children living below the poverty level. Do you think this will threaten our national security?

* Whose hunger would you rather quench? Secretary Weinberger's or a poor child in child care? Every time Secretary [of Defense Caspar] Weinberger and his elite colleagues sit down in his private Pentagon dining room staffed by 19, they pay $2.87 a meal and we taxpayers pay $12.06. This $12.06 could provide 40 mid-morning milk and juice and cracker snacks President Reagan has forced poor children of working mothers in child care centers to give up. I think we should urge Secretary Weinberger to eat in one of the four other Pentagon executive dining rooms and give one million food supplements back to poor children instead.

Just as I believe we ought to weigh military nonessentials against civilian essentials-and apply the same standards of national purpose, efficiency and effectiveness to military programs as we do to domestic ones-I also believe that the non-needy should bear a fair portion of the burden of economic recovery. They have not.

As you go out into the world, try to keep your eye on the human bottom line. I also hope you will understand and be tough about what is needed to solve problems, change attitudes, and bring about needed changes in our society. Democracy is not a spectator sport.

***

p515

César Chavez, Address to the Commonwealth Club California (November 9, 1984)

Twenty-one years ago last September, on a lonely stretch of railroad track paralleling U.S. Highway 101 near Salinas, 32 Bracero farm workers lost their lives in a tragic accident.

The Braceros had been imported from Mexico to work on California farms. They died when their bus, which was converted from a flatbed truck, drove in front of a freight train. Conversion of the bus had not been approved by any government agency. The driver had "tunnel" vision. Most of the bodies lay unidentified for days. No one, including the grower who employed the workers, even knew their names.

Today, thousands of farm workers live under savage conditions-beneath trees and amid garbage and human excrement-near tomato fields in San Diego County, tomato fields which use the most modern farm technology. Vicious rats gnaw on them as they sleep. They walk miles to buy food at inflated prices. And they carry in water from irrigation pumps.

Child labor is still common in many farm areas. As much as 30 percent of Northern California's garlic harvesters are under-aged children. Kids as young as six years old have voted in state-conducted union elections since they qualified as workers.

Some 800,000 under-aged children work with their families harvesting crops across America.

Babies born to migrant workers suffer 25 percent higher infant mortality than the rest of the population.

Malnutrition among migrant worker children is 10 times higher than the national rate.

Farm workers' average life expectancy is still 49 years-compared to 73 years for the average American.

All my life, I have been driven by one dream, one goal, one vision: To overthrow a farm labor system in this nation which treats farm workers as if they were not important human beings. Farm workers are not agricultural implements. They are not beasts of burden-to be used and discarded. That dream was born in my youth. It was nurtured in my early days of organizing. It has flourished. It has been attacked.

I'm not very different from anyone else who has ever tried to accomplish something with his life. My motivation comes from my personal life-from watching what my mother and father went through when I was growing up; from what we experienced as migrant farm workers in California.

That dream, that vision, grew from my own experience with racism, with hope, with the desire to be treated fairly and to see my people treated as human beings and not as chattel. It grew from anger and rage-emotions I felt 40 years ago when people of my color were denied the right to see a movie or eat at a restaurant in many parts of California. It grew from the frustration and humiliation I felt as a boy who couldn't understand how the growers could abuse and exploit farm workers when there were so many of us and so few of them.

Later, in the '50s, I experienced a different kind of exploitation. In San Jose, in Los Angeles and in other urban communities, we-the Mexican American people-were dominated by a majority that was Anglo. I began to realize what other minority people had discovered: That the only answer-the only hope-was in organizing.

More of us had to become citizens. We had to register to vote. And people like me had to develop the skills it would take to organize, to educate, to help empower the Chicano people.

I spent many years-before we founded the union-learning how to work with people.

We experienced some successes in voter registration, in politics, in battling racial discrimination-successes in an era when Black Americans were just beginning to assert their civil rights and when political awareness among Hispanics was almost non-existent. But deep in my heart, I knew I could never be happy unless I tried organizing the farm workers. I didn't know if I would succeed. But I had to try.

All Hispanics-urban and rural, young and old-are connected to the farm workers' experience. We had all lived through the fields-or our parents had. We shared that common humiliation. How could we progress as a people, even if we lived in the cities, while the farm workers-men and women of our color-were condemned to a life without pride? How could we progress as a people while the farm workers-who symbolized our history in this land-were denied self-respect? How could our people believe that their children could become lawyers and doctors and judges and business people while this shame, this injustice was permitted to continue?

Those who attack our union often say, "It's not really a union. It's something else: A social movement. A civil rights movement. It's something dangerous."

They're half right.

The United Farm Workers is first and foremost a union. A union like any other. A union that either produces for its members on the bread and butter issues or doesn't survive. But the UFW has always been something more than a union although it's never been dangerous if you believe in the Bill of Rights. The UFW was the beginning! We attacked that historical source of shame and infamy that our people in this country lived with. We attacked that injustice, not by complaining; not by seeking hand-outs; not by becoming soldiers in the War on Poverty.

We organized!

Farm workers acknowledged we had allowed ourselves to become victims in a democratic society-a society where majority rule and collective bargaining are supposed to be more than academic theories or political rhetoric. And by addressing this historical problem, we created confidence and pride and hope in an entire people's ability to create the future.

The UFW's survival-its existence-was not in doubt in my mind when the time began to come-after the union became visible-when Chicanos started entering college in greater numbers, when Hispanics began running for public office in greater numbers-when our people started asserting their rights on a broad range of issues and in many communities across the country.

The union's survival-its very existence-sent out a signal to all Hispanics:

That we were fighting for our dignity,

That we were challenging and overcoming injustice,

That we were empowering the least educated among us-the poorest among us.

The message was clear: If it could happen in the fields, it could happen anywhere-in the cities, in the courts, in the city councils, in the state legislatures.

I didn't really appreciate it at the time, but the coming of our union signaled the start of great changes among Hispanics that are only now beginning to be seen.

I've traveled to every part of this nation. I have met and spoken with thousands of Hispanics from every walk of life-from every social and economic class.

One thing I hear most often from Hispanics, regardless of age or position and from many non-Hispanics as well-is that the farm workers gave them hope that they could succeed and the inspiration to work for change.

From time to time you will hear our opponents declare that the union is weak, that the union has no support, that the union has not grown fast enough. Our obituary has been written many times. How ironic it is that the same forces which argue so passionately that the union is not influential are the same forces that continue to fight us so hard.

The union's power in agriculture has nothing to do with the number of farm workers under union contract.

It has nothing to do with the farm workers' ability to contribute to Democratic politicians.

It doesn't even have much to do with our ability to conduct successful boycotts.

The very fact of our existence forces an entire industry-unionized and nonunionized-to spend millions of dollars year after year on improved wages, on improved working conditions, on benefits for workers. If we're so weak and unsuccessful, why do the growers continue to fight us with such passion? Because so long as we continue to exist, farm workers will benefit from our existence-even if they don't work under union contract.

It doesn't really matter whether we have 100,000 members or 500,000 members. In truth, hundreds of thousands of farm workers in California-and in other states-are better off today because of our work. And Hispanics across California and the nation who don't work in agriculture are better off today because of what the farm workers taught people about organization, about pride and strength, about seizing control over their own lives.

Tens of thousands of the children and grandchildren of farm workers-and the children and grandchildren of poor Hispanics-are moving out of the fields and out of the barrios and into the professions and into business and into politics. And that movement cannot be reversed!

Our union will forever exist as an empowering force among Chicanos in the Southwest. And that means our power and our influence will grow and not diminish.

Two major trends give us hope and encouragement:

First, our union has returned to a tried and tested weapon in the farm workers' non-violent arsenal-the boycott! After the Agricultural Labor Relations Act became law in California in 1975, we dismantled our boycott to work with the law.

During the early- and mid-'70s, millions of Americans supported our boycotts. After 1975, we redirected our efforts from the boycott to organizing and winning elections under the law. The law helped farm workers make progress in overcoming poverty and injustice.

At companies where farm workers are protected by union contracts, we have made progress in overcoming child labor, in overcoming miserable wages and working conditions, in overcoming sexual harassment of women workers, in overcoming dangerous pesticides which poison our people and poison the food we all eat. Where we have organized, these injustices soon pass into history.

But under Republican Governor George Deukmejian, the law that guarantees our right to organize no longer protects farm workers-it doesn't work anymore!

In 1982 corporate growers gave Deukmejian one million dollars to run for governor of California. Since he took office, Deukmejian has paid back his debt to the growers with the blood and sweat of California farm workers. Instead of enforcing the law as it was written against those who break it, Deukmejian invites growers who break the law to seek relief from the governor's appointees.

What does all this mean for farm workers?

It means that the right to vote in free elections is a sham!

It means that the right to talk freely about the union among your fellow workers on the job is a cruel hoax!

It means the right to be free from threats and intimidation by growers is an empty promise!

It means the right to sit down and negotiate with your employer as equals across the bargaining table-and not as peons in the field-is a fraud!

It means that thousands of farm workers-who are owed millions of dollars in back pay because their employers broke the law-are still waiting for their checks.

It means that 36,000 farm workers-who voted to be represented by the United Farm Workers in free elections-are still waiting for contracts from growers who refuse to bargain in good faith.

It means that, for farm workers, child labor will continue.

It means that infant mortality will continue.

It means malnutrition among our children will continue.

It means the short life expectancy and the inhuman living and working conditions will continue.

Are these make-believe threats? Are they exaggerations?

Ask the farm workers who are still waiting for growers to bargain in good faith and sign contracts!

Ask the farm workers who've been fired from their jobs because they spoke out for the union!

Ask the farm workers who've been threatened with physical violence because they support the UFW!

Ask the family of René Lopez, the young farm worker from Fresno who was shot to death last year because he supported the union ....

History and inevitability are on our side. The farm workers and their children-and the Hispanics and their children-are the future in California. And corporate growers are the past!

Those politicians who ally themselves with the corporate growers and against the farm workers and the Hispanics are in for a big surprise.

They want to make their careers in politics. They want to hold power 20 and 30 years from now.

But 20 and 30 years from now-in Modesto, in Salinas, in Fresno, in Bakersfield, in the Imperial Valley, and in many of the great cities of California those communities will be dominated by farm workers and not by growers, by the children and grandchildren of farm workers and not by the children and grandchildren of growers.

These trends are part of the forces of history that cannot be stopped! No person and no organization can resist them for very long. They are inevitable! Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed.

You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.

Our opponents must understand that it's not just a union we have built. Unions, like other institutions, can come and go. But we're more than an institution. For nearly 20 years, our union has been on the cutting edge of a people's cause-and you cannot do away with an entire people; you cannot stamp out a people's cause.

Regardless of what the future holds for the union, regardless of what the future holds for farm workers, our accomplishments cannot be undone! "La Causa" our cause-doesn't have to be experienced twice. The consciousness and pride that were raised by our union are alive and thriving inside millions of young Hispanics who will never work on a farm!

Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism.

That day may not come this year.

That day may not come during this decade.

But it will come, someday!

And when that day comes, we shall see the fulfillment of that passage from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament, "That the last shall be first and the first shall be last."

And on that day, our nation shall fulfill its creed-and that fulfillment shall us all.

***

p530

Douglas A. Fraser, Resignation Letter to the Labor-Management Group (July 19, 1978)

I deeply regret that it was necessary to cancel the meeting of the Labor-Management Group scheduled for July 19. It was my intention to tell you personally at that meeting what I must now convey in this letter, because the Group is not planning to meet again until late September.

I have come to the reluctant conclusion that my participation in the Labor-Management Group cannot continue. I am therefore resigning from the Group as of July 19. You are entitled to know why I take this action and you should understand that I have the highest regard for John Dunlop, my colleagues on the labor side and, as individuals, those who represent the corporate elite in the Group.

Attractive as the personalities may be, we all sit in a representative capacity. I have concluded that participation in these meetings is no longer useful to me or to the 1.5 million workers I represent as president of the UAW.

I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in this country-a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress.

For a considerable time, the leaders of business and labor have sat at the Labor-Management Group's table-recognizing differences, but seeking consensus where it existed. That worked because the business community in the U.S. succeeded in advocating a general loyalty to an allegedly benign capitalism that emphasized private property, independence and self-regulation along with an allegiance to free, democratic politics.

That system has worked best, of course, for the "haves" in our society rather than the "have-nots." Yet it survived in part because of an unspoken foundation: that when things got bad enough for a segment of society, the business elite "gave" a little bit-enabling government or interest groups to better conditions somewhat for that segment. That give usually came only after sustained struggle, such as that waged by the labor movement in the 1930's and the civil rights movement in the 1960's.

The acceptance of the labor movement, such as it has been, came because business feared the alternatives. Corporate America didn't join the fight to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act, but it eventually accepted the inevitability of that legislation. Other similar pieces of legislation aimed at the human needs of the disadvantaged have become national policy only after real struggle.

This system is not as it should be, yet progress has been made under it. But today, I am convinced there has been a shift on the part of the business community toward confrontation, rather than cooperation. Now, business groups are tightening their control over American society. As that grip tightens, it is the "have-nots" who are squeezed.

The latest breakdown in our relationship is also perhaps the most serious. The fight waged by the business community against the Labor Law Reform bill stands as the most vicious, unfair attack upon the labor movement in more than 30 years. Corporate leaders knew it was not the "power grab by Big Labor" that they portrayed it to be. Instead, it became an extremely moderate, fair piece of legislation that only corporate outlaws would have had need to fear. Labor law reform itself would not have organized a single worker. Rather, it would have begun to limit the ability of certain rogue employers to keep workers from choosing democratically to be represented by unions through employer delay and outright violation of existing labor law.

I know that some of the business representatives in the Group argued inside the Business Roundtable for neutrality. But having lost, they helped to bankroll (through the Roundtable and other organizations) the dishonest and ugly multimillion dollar campaign against labor law reform. In that effort, the business representatives in the Group were allied with groups such as the Committee to Defeat the Union Bosses, the Committee for a Union Free Environment, the Right-to-Work Committee, the Americans Against Union Control of Government and such individuals as R. Heath Larry, Richard Lesher and Orrin Hatch.

The new flexing of business muscle can be seen in many other areas. The rise of multinational corporations that know neither patriotism nor morality but only self-interest, has made accountability almost non-existent. At virtually every level, I discern a demand by business for docile government and unrestrained corporate individualism. Where industry once yearned for subservient unions, it now wants no unions at all.

General Motors Corp. is a specific case in point. GM, the largest manufacturing corporation in the world, has received responsibility, productivity and cooperation from the UAW and its members. In return, GM has given us a Southern strategy designed to set up a non-union network that threatens the hard-fought gains won by the UAW We have given stability and have been rewarded with hostility. Overseas, it is the, same. General Motors not only invests heavily in South Africa, it refuses to recognize the black unions there.

My message should be very clear: if corporations like General Motors want confrontation, they cannot expect cooperation in return from labor.

There are many other examples of the new class war being waged by business. Everyone in the Group knows there is no chance the business elite will join the fight for national health insurance or even remain neutral, despite the fact that the U.S. is the only industrial country in the world, except for South Africa, without it. We are presently locked in battle with corporate interests on the [Hubert] Humphrey-[Augustus] Hawkins full employment bill. We were at odds on improvements in the minimum wage, on Social Security financing, and virtually every other piece of legislation presented to the Congress recently.

Business blames inflation on workers, the poor, the consumer and uses it as a club against them. Price hikes and profit increases are ignored while corporate representatives tell us we can't afford to stop killing and maiming workers in unsafe factories. They tell us we must postpone moderate increases in the minimum wage for those whose labor earns so little they can barely survive.

Our tax laws are a scandal, yet corporate America wants even wider inequities. If people truly understood, they would choose not Proposition 13's, but rather an overhaul of the tax system to make business and the rich pay their fair share. The wealthy seek not to close loopholes, but to widen them by advocating the capital gains tax rollback that will bring them a huge bonanza.

Even the very foundations of America's democratic process are threatened by the new approach of the business elite. No democratic country in the world has lower rates of voter participation than the U.S., except Botswana. Moreover, our voting participation is class-skewed-about 50 percent more of the affluent vote than workers and 90 percent to 300 percent more of the rich vote than the poor, the black, the young and the Hispanic. Yet business groups regularly finance politicians, referenda and legislative battles to continue barriers to citizen participation in elections. In Ohio, for example, many corporations in the Fortune 500 furnished the money to repeal fair and democratic voter registration.

Even if all the barriers to such participation were removed, there would be no rush to the polls by so many in our society who feel the sense of helplessness and inability to affect the system in any way. The Republican Party remains controlled by and the Democratic Party heavily influenced by business interests. The reality is that both are weak and ineffective as parties, with no visible, clear-cut ideological differences between them, because of business domination. Corporate America has more to lose by the turn-off of citizens from the system than organized labor. But it is always the latter that fights to encourage participation and the former that works to stifle it.

For all these reasons, I have concluded there is no point to continue sitting down at Labor-Management Group meetings and philosophizing about the future of the country and the world when we on the labor side have so little in common with those across the table. I cannot sit there seeking unity with the leaders of American industry, while they try to destroy us and ruin the lives of the people I represent.

I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold. We in the UAW intend to reforge the links with those who believe in struggle: the kind of people who sat down in the factories in the 1930's and who marched in Selma in the 1960's.

I cannot assure you that we will be successful in making new alliances and forming new coalitions to help our nation find its way. But I can assure you that we will try.

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