“Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired”

Retired clergy of the greater Kansas City metropolitan area have monthly meetings, and I often attend those enjoyable lunch gatherings.

FANNIE LOU HAMER WOMEN’S COMMITTEE

Bridget and Fran were the guest speakers at the March 14 (yesterday’s) retired clergy meeting. They have been workers in the fast-food industry for several years and both are active in the organizations known as Fight for $15 and Stand Up KC.

Neither woman has any worker benefits or health insurance. In addition, Fran has serious health issues, and she and her children are homeless.

Both women are members of the Fannie Lou Hamer Women’s Committee (FLHWC).

According to Stand Up KC’s website, FLHWC was formed in Oct. 2014 in order “to create a place where women can organize around the special issues” that they face as people in low-wage jobs, issues such as “discrimination, harassment, and lack of paid maternity leave.”

WHO WAS FANNIE LOU HAMER?

Many of you may have long been familiar with the name of Fannie Lou Hamer, but for some reason I don’t remember her name from the 1960s and ’70s when she was one of the most important advocates for civil rights in the U.S.

Fannie Lou was born in October 1917, the youngest of twenty children of Jim and Ella Townsend, who were sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. She began working in the cotton fields when she was six and was only able to go to school through the sixth grade.

In 1942 Fannie Lou married Perry (“Pap”) Hamer, and although they adopted two daughters, Fannie never became a birth-mother.

Fannie Lou bravely sought to register to vote in 1962. Upon returning to the plantation the owner would not allow her to remain there, so she had to leave her husband and family. That is when she was courted by and, consequently, began to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The following year when returning from a voter’s registration training meeting to her hometown of Ruleville, Miss., she was badly beaten in Winona, where the bus had stopped. She suffered from those wounds for the rest of her life.

For the next fourteen years, though, she became “the spirit of the civil rights movement.” (Her compelling story is told in detail in Kay Mills’s book This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1993)

Fannie Lou died 40 years ago yesterday, on March 14, 1977, at the age of 59. Her tombstone is engraved with one of her famous quotes: 

INSPIRED BY FANNIE LOU HAMER

While Fannie Lou’s main fight was against racism in Mississippi and in the nation, she was also a fighter against poverty—as was Martin Luther King, who launched the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968.

It was also in 1968 that Hamer started what she called a Pig Bank, and the following year she established the Freedom Farm Cooperative.

It is partly for that reason that the Fannie Lou Hamer Women’s Committee say on their website,

She knew that things only change in this country because people stand up to fight for what’s right.... We see her as an inspiration to continue our fight for collective rights.

We fight for economic dignity because, like Fannie Lou Hamer famously said, we are “Sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

When I chatted briefly with Fran after the meeting yesterday, she told how she and others who are struggling for better wages in Kansas City continue to be inspired by Fannie Lou.

I hope we can all be inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer to do more in support of women like Fran and Bridget.

Economic Justice for All

This month’s election was full of ironies. One was that many blue collar voters in the so-called Rust Belt were so worried about their stagnant, or disappearing, wages that they voted for a billionaire who has a history of mistreating workers to be their rescuer.

Another irony is that neither of the presidential candidates made much mention of a major problem in the U.S.: poverty and the lack of what some term “economic justice.” In spite of all that was said from both sides, there was little attention given to the worrisome conjoined twins in contemporary USAmerican society: racial injustice and economic injustice.

The Bishops’ Document

Ten years ago, Diana Hayes gave the annual Romero Lecture in Camden, New Jersey. The title of that significant talk was “The Color of Money: Racism and the Economy.”

Dr. Hayes is an outstanding person: she was the first African-American woman to earn a Pontifical Doctorate in Theology, and until her retirement in 2011 she was Professor of Systematic Theology at Georgetown University.

In her 2006 lecture, included in the book Romero’s Legacy (2007), Hayes introduced “Economic Justice for All: Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy,” a document the National Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted in November 1986.  

Ten years later the same Conference issued a new document: A Decade after Economic Justice. In the “Introduction” the bishops noted three nations in our midst: one “prospering and producing in a new information age,” one “squeezed by declining real incomes and global economic competition,” and the third “an American underclass.”

My guess is that in this month’s election a majority in the first nation voted for Clinton, a majority in the second nation voted for Trump, and a great many in the third nation didn’t vote at all.

Six moral principles

In the original document issued 30 years ago, the bishops set forth six moral principles—all of which still need to be considered conscientiously today:

Every economic decision and institution must be judged in light of whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person.

Human dignity can be realized and protected only in community.

All people have a right to participate in the economic life of society.

All members of society have a special obligation to the poor and vulnerable.

Human rights are the minimum conditions for life in community.

Society as a whole, acting through public and private institutions, has the moral responsibility to enhance human dignity and protect human rights.

Concerning the fifth principle, the bishops quoted Pope John XXIII, who stated that “all people have a right to life, food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, education, and employment.” The bishops then explained that this means that “when people are without a chance to earn a living, and must go hungry and homeless, they are being denied basic rights.”

A small step forward?

Given the problem of economic injustice in the nation, the lingering question is, What can be done?

Ten years ago Hayes averred that justice is not being done when a “million or so have slipped into poverty because of our refusal to raise the minimum wage” (p. 87). One presidential candidate did promise to reverse that refusal. Unfortunately, she lost.

Under the new President-elect and Republican Congress, raising the minimum wage doesn’t seem likely to happen, nationwide at least. However, in the Nov. 8 election voters in four states did approve raising the minimum wage—a small step in the right direction.

Then yesterday (Nov. 29) there were widespread strikes and rallies pushing for increasing the minimum wage—perhaps another small step forward in the struggle to create economic justice for all.

A Second Bill of Rights

Last week I posted a blog article about President Roosevelt’s famous “four freedoms” speech, which was his State of the Union address delivered 75 years ago.

Three years later, on January 11, 1944, FDR gave his 11^th (!) State of the Union talk. He had just recently come back from an overseas trip during which he had conferred with British Prime Minister Churchill in Cairo and then had attended the “Big Three” summit with Stalin in Tehran.

In addition to being exhausted, he had also caught influenza from which he was still recovering. So the President chose to send his 1/11/44 “State of the Union” message to Congress in writing and to read the message to the American people from the comfort of the White House.

That talk was another of FDR’s “fireside chats” to the whole nation. It was a highly significant talk, for in it he set forth what he called a second Bill of Rights. (Hear part of it here.)

The Second World War would not be over for another 19 months, but FDR was looking past the end of the war, which he confidently thought the Allies would win.

In that momentous “chat,” he asserted that a “basic essential to peace—permanent peace—is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.”

The President clearly was reinforcing two of the freedoms he had emphasized in his State of the Union message three years before.

He went on to aver that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. . . . People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

So President Roosevelt proposed “a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all.” He explained that those rights include . . .

** The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

** The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

** The right of farmers to raise and sell their products at a return which will give them and their families a decent living;

** The right of every business man, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

** The right of every family to a decent home;

** The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

** The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, and sickness, and accident and unemployment;

** And finally, the right to a good education.

Immediately following this listing, the President went on to assert, “All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”

There was some progress in the U.S. toward realizing these goals in the first 20 years following the end of the war.

But in the 1960s it began to be increasingly realized that some, especially African-Americans, were not being treated fairly and their economic rights were not being realized sufficiently.

The struggle goes on as even today, for example, many of our political leaders oppose increasing the minimum wage and have voted to repeal “Obamacare” without proposing any way to provide adequate medical care to many “fellow citizens.”

R U 4 15?

If you think the title of this article looks like a text message, U R right. Actually, though, since in some ways I am a Luddite and don’t even have a smartphone, I don’t send text messages—and I tweet very little.

But today has for several months been designated as a day of advocacy for raising the minimum wage for fast food workers, and others, to $15 an hour. And I assume today, April 15, was chosen as the day for the marches and other appeals because they are for $15 (4 15).

But what about you? Are you (R U) for such a decisive increase in the minimum wage?

When I first heard about today’s plans, my first reaction was that trying to more than double the current national minimum wage, which is $7.25, was asking for far too much.

I have since seen that those who are calling for $15 are envisioning that as something that would be implemented over the next four or five years, not all at one time.

Here in Kansas City, there will be a rally this afternoon at 5:00 and a march at 5:30. Those activities are being planned by a group known as Stand Up KC. Similar activities will take place in some 190 cities across the nation.

A few days ago it was reported in the local news media that city officials in Kansas City are sympathetic to the activities of civil rights and religious leaders “to improve the plight of the working poor.”

But, as might be expected, there is opposition to raising the minimum wage or even allowing a city to do so.

Bills pending in the Missouri House and Senate would prohibit cities from requiring any employer to provide either minimum pay or benefits that exceed the requirements of federal or state law. (Missouri’s current minimum wage is $7.65.)

The Mo. Chamber of Commerce is supporting those Republican-sponsored bills that would keep cities from raising the minimum wage. The argument, of course, is such a raise in wages would increase prices and cause greater unemployment.

But if truth be told, the biggest concern is most likely that business owners would make less profit. This seems to be the real struggle: raise the minimum wage to help the working poor, or keep the minimum wage low to enhance profits for business owners.

The specter of fewer jobs being available for low-wage workers is a legitimate concern. But perhaps that fear is not well-founded.

Earlier this year, two professors in the Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst published a well-researched 33-page paper titled “A $15 U.S. Minimum Wage: How the Fast-Food Industry Could Adjust Without Shedding Jobs.”

For those of us who are concerned about the plight of the poor, it is difficult to see what justification there is for not being on the side of those who need a living wage—and most of those seeking higher wages are not teenagers working for spending money.

According to an April 10 article in the Washington Post, “The typical burger-flipper is an independent adult or about 29, with a high school diploma. Nearly a third have some college experience, and many are single parents raising families.”

(That entire article, “Five myths about fast-food work,” is worth reading.)

This evening I am going to the rally of those seeking a significantly increased minimum wage and also the right to form a union. In spite of my initial misgivings about it, I am now 4 15. R U?

What are Republicans Thinking?

This article is not about Republicans in general. Rather it is particularly about the Republicans in the U.S. Congress.

The record of these Republican Congresspersons over the last three years has been quite consistent: they have almost unanimously opposed nearly everything the President has proposed.

There has always been political division in the country, but perhaps there has never been as much polarity as there is now.

In the Senate, the Democrats became so frustrated last week that they even used the “nuclear option” and changed the rules for approving nominations for executive and judicial positions.

That was not necessarily a good thing. But neither is the ceaseless obstructionism that led to that extreme, and possibly unwise, decision.

In particular, I am raising the question about what are Republican lawmakers thinking in their ongoing, obdurate opposition to positions that the large majority of U.S. citizens, including Republicans, are for.

Consider four such issues: (1) legislation to outlaw hiring/firing discrimination against gays/lesbians, (2) immigration reform, (3) background checks for those who want to purchase guns, and (4) raising the minimum wage.

(1) On Nov. 7, the Senate passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) by a vote of 64-32. (One of the negative votes was by Republican Senator Blunt of Mo.) But at this point, Rep. Boehner has refused to bring the bill up for a vote in the Republican dominated House.

A recent Gallup poll found that nationwide ENDA is supported by 63% of the citizens nationwide, with only 31% opposing it. Even among Republicans, there were 58% in favor and only 36% in opposition.

(2) Back in June, the Senate passed an immigration bill by a 68-32. (The negative votes were all by Republicans, including Senator Blunt.)

But it has yet to be approved by the House, even though earlier this year a CNN poll showed that 84% of the public (78% of the Republicans) backs a program that would allow undocumented workers to stay in the United States and apply for citizenship if they have been in the country for several years, have a job, and pay back taxes.

(3) The tragic school shootings at Sandy Hook were nearly a year ago. There were outcries across the nation for more stringent gun control. In April the Senate bill to extend background checks received 54 votes—but was killed by a Republican filibuster.

A subsequent Gallup poll then indicated that 65% of Americans thought that Senate bill should have passed; only 29% thought it shouldn’t have.

(4) Back in March, Senator Harkin (D-IA) proposed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, calling for an increase from the current $7.25 to $10.10. This month after passing ENDA, the Senate began to consider Sen. Harkin’s bill along with other possibilities.

This month, a Gallup poll indicated that U.S. citizens favor raising the minimum wage to at least $9.00 by a margin of 76% to 22% (and 58% to 39% among Republicans). But the Senate has yet to come up with anything that they think will be able to clear an expected Republican filibuster.

So here are four hot issues with overwhelming public support for change but which are opposed by Republicans in Congress—which leads again to my question: What can they be thinking?

And how can they claim to be representing the citizens of the country when they keep opposing what a large majority of the citizens are for?

Of course another pertinent question is this: Why do people keep electing lawmakers who do not vote according to the desires of the majority of the American people?