Barriers to this is the greed on Wall Street, never more prosperous than now, bailed out by our taxes and now still refusing to lend money to the rest of us. Meanwhile, the Obama agenda turns the world upside down looking for monsters to kill when the biggest one, all-devouring is a few hours' drive from the district, Wall Street, now the locus of assertion by a few brave people standing for all of us, the 98 or 99 percent nearly skin and bones if not already so.
We must escalate our demand for jobs and refuse the cuts in social security the Tea Party would substitute. We must fight across the country from the grassroots, bottom up. We need to find dream candidates like Elizabeth Warren to replace the brainless minority.
And if we join together, said Borosage, we can win. It may take time, but as the vast majority, we are the owners of our land; it is ours to take back this country is ours to take back.
(I thought to myself that the huge number of unemployed people have the time, presumably to take to the streets. Imagine the millions on our streets.)
Christina Neumann-Ortiz, founding director of Voces de la Frontera, next took the podium; her topic was low-wage workers and immigration and how this whole country is composed of immigrants, so that our exclusivist attitude toward the latest Latino influx is totally ungrounded. We must reach the average person, a high percentage of our huge 98--99 percent majority, and bring them into our crusade.
I had to make a quick exit and by the time I got back, Congresswoman Donna Edwards was speaking.
Representative of the fourth district of Maryland, Edwards displaced a Democratic incumbent who played too much to his financial supporters and not enough to his voter base, the people she is proud to speak for. A member of the Progressive Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus, she spoke of her humble roots in the Depression and Jim Crow era and how her parents believed in her potential even amid those barriers.
We need another "FDR moment," Edwards said. The poverty rate now, 46.2 million, is the highest since these figures were first systematically recorded, 52 years ago.
Will our children be better off than we are, as we have superseded our own parents?
No tax breaks have yet trickled down to us. The big banks won't lend us 10 cents. We must go door to door from now until 2012 reaching out to these average people and convincing them that a better world is possible.
A minimum-wage income yields $22,000 a year. We must return the gavel to those who know what to do with it, she said.
The American dream means enjoying our retirement; the wealthiest 2 percent of our country control 70 percent of Congress.
We need to work harder than ever before--what's at stake is the generation ahead of us. We must reach for another FDR moment and not let the top 2 percent walk away with the American dream exponentially exaggerated.
Taking up where Edwards left off, keynote speaker Van Jones, as witty as Borosage was rife with imagery, quickly held the audience in the palm of his hand as he began with the pronouncement, "We're sick and tired of being sick and tired."
The co-founder and chairman of Rebuild the Dream, referring to the lead story in today's New York Times, on voter suppression largely by means of the epidemic of voter i.d. requirements sweeping the nation, said that all we need is votes from 10 percent of the population of five states to win in 2012.
Victory will come, he said, from knowing ourselves and knowing the enemy.
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