Today, the Reverend Jesse Jackson swung by the Demos and Prospect offices in Washington, D.C., after visiting the new Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. Jackson feels that the new statute on the Tidal Basin will become the new site for protests and rallies, rather than the Reflecting Pool near the Lincoln Memorial where King himself drew huge crowds.
The dedication ceremony set for Sunday, the 48th anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech, is postponed because of Hurricane Irene, but as Jackson was here to remind us: "We've weathered storms before."
What's happening in Washington that needs to change?
If you're in a hole, you need a rope. The Republicans are offering shovels instead. We need ropes. You have to look at where to find resources. Student-loan forgiveness is a huge resource. When I was a kid and the Russians put up Sputnik, we were traumatized. The Russians had an advantage on us, and so to offset the Russian scientific advtange, we passed something called the NASA Scientific Defense Act. If you went back to school for science, it was almost a free ride. In the summertime, music teachers, coaches, went to summer school to get their master's in science. During that time, there were more science scholarships than athletic scholarships. We unleashed our education resources on science. In five years we caught the Russians, and we never looked back. We caught them not with a counter-missiles; we fought them with education. That's the way to create global competition.
So student-loan-debt forgiveness is a big step toward global competition. So is the issue of public transportation. In the past, wherever the train stopped, a town developed. If a train didn't stop, a town couldn't develop. Now, with the highways, wherever there's an exit, there are service stations and food places. That's why there's a big fight over transportation. Wherever that exit sign is, there's development. Today when these states'-righters fight against access to public transportation, it's because they don't want federal standards imposed. They cut off access to public transportation and make it illegal to have a car -- if you're on welfare you can't own a car -- and block access to public transportation. They're locking people into poverty and away from jobs and growth.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a classic case of it. Here's a governor with a $137 million deficit that turns down $800 million because ideologically he does not want the federal intervention. He doesn't want to give people in the cities access to suburban jobs. So we're paying a big price for limiting the marketplace. We didn't know how good baseball could be till everybody could play. We don't know how good the economy can be until everybody can play. The more women and people of color in our economy ... everybody wins.
It seems like the recovery is faltering, and people will remain jobless regardless. What can we do?
The banks took us to the brink because of lack of oversight. I remember they had the big bankers here and wanted the big bankers to confess what happened. But next they should have had the congressional oversight committee that allowed them to do it. The fact is, you remove Glass-Steagall, and they can invest and lend under the same roof, they choose investing over lending. They make taking us to the brink; they make money coming out.
First of all, we should have restructured before the fact -- smaller, focused industrial banks across the country in the first place. Fewer bigger banks. But the bailout was not linked to lending. Take Detroit: You've got 100,000 vacant homes or abandoned lots. You take a goal of 25,000 homes that have been destroyed and boarded up. You plan to reconstruct destroyed homes -- remove those boards, and bring in windows. That's job creation. You need plumbing, brick-masonry, painting, weatherization. You create more jobs than a city has the workers to fill, just to reconstruct what's been destroyed. If those banks had benefitted from that, so they could be part of the reconstruction plan. Instead, we bailed them out on wings with no bricks in their pockets.
Do you think politicians could come together over something like that?
We're having a gravy discussion. You cook meat and overflow is the gravy. But if you have gravy without a meat base it's just greasy water. You need the meat. If you say, well, we're going to have a budget discussion, and you're going to take off the table Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, repeal the Bush tax cuts -- there's nothing less to discuss but gravy. The meat's gone.
It felt like it was 1973, or 1976, was really the last time we saw a great amount of unrest around the economy and the biggest labor strikes. Why aren't people in the streets?
I think there are maybe two reasons why they're not in the street yet, because I think it's on the way. One, if you ask people, "Are you facing foreclosure or rent you can't pay?" and the hands go up. You ask, "You have a relative in jail?" Hands go up. If you ask, "Do you have credit-card or student-loan debt?" Everybody's hands go up. So far, they're cushioned by credit cards. They're not broke yet because they've still got credit. But that's running out. The credit's running out, and the credit scores are being used not to get the next job.
I think the other people have a certain hesitancy because they're waiting for President Barack. They have so much hope invested in him, people do not want to say, "This is a bad investment." They want the investment to work. People are still pulling for him, and all kinds of people still need him, but they also need to break out and have a serious national jobs summit and jobs actions. That will not hurt him; that will help him. Our silence betrays our vote, not our action. Dr. King supported Kennedy over Nixon but still had to march, really, against Kennedy's will. We still had to march for the right to vote. We weren't marching on Johnson -- we were marching for the right to vote. They became great because of our action. If we had not demanded Little Rock Central, Eisenhower wouldn't have become great. Eisenhower's great because he sent troops to Little Rock. Nothing else he did still resonates in your mind 50 years later. He intervened. Our action on Washington led to the Voting Rights Act. Our action is what creates the climate to make good guys great and kept them from playing regional politics.
I get the impression now that people are at a point where they can no longer afford unemployed. In Michigan, what makes it worse, is that you get people down, now, like the town of Pontiac, which has a deficit -- if you're down, they have the right to suspend your mayor, suspend your counsel, and suspend the vote and appoint an emergency manager who has the power to suspend all labor contracts, the power to sell off city properties. It's a czar. This is a democracy. There's been too much silence on that. If you go even further in Michigan, as of October 1, all people who have been on assistance for eight months, retroactively, will have to come off with no place to go. We think around 14,000 will be affected as of October 1, then it goes on to 80,000 families as it keeps going. This is absolute attack on the safety net, ripping the cords out. Again, there's been too much silence.
Do you think mass movements are still as effective?
They always work. The impact of taking those two seats from Scott Walker, though they did not win, sent an unmistakable message. He's a little less arrogant than he was three months ago. They've taken some air out of his balloon. He knows that there's another petition drive coming at him. They won, and they're keeping him real busy. You have to fight to get the crown -- you have to fight to keep the crown. I was with a teacher this morning over at the AFL-CIO from Cincinnatti, they have a petition drive -- 1.3 million trying to save the Voting Rights Act -- they're putting it on the ballot. Governor John Kasich's already beginning to hedge his bets. Mass action works, which was Dr. King's message. He believed in tough negotiation, mass confrontation, mass action, then get mass results. You'll not change all the things unless you engage in mass action. And you cannot go from negotiation to reconciliation. You have to go to negotiation and, if it works, reconciliation; if it doesn't work, confront. As long as it takes. When it's over, then you reconcile.
How do you get the progressives who favor Obama to challenge him and be confrontational?
I favor him. Wisconsin didn't have to wait for him to act. He's not holding us back. He's not holding Ohio back from doing a petition to fight these onerous schemes. He's not holding them back in Michigan. Our struggle is bottom-up. He'll read what his options are; our struggle gives our side options. The Tea Party does not represent some new avalanche of voters. It's partly a response to our non-vote, or our minuscule vote in 2010. If we voted in 2010 in 2008 numbers, they wouldn't exist. It's not like they have some insurmountable number of votes and some avalanche and we can't avoid it. Most people who have voted for their anti-Obama at all costs stance are now looking at the price they've got to pay. They got what they want and now they don't want what they got.
I was at Ole Miss, with Trent Lott. When he knew I was coming, he called me and told me he wanted me to visit a new jail. It was a beautiful jail, well-manicured lawn, teaching people new skills, I just had to see it. He was very proud of it. I went, and they welcomed me, the inmates cooked things. So then I went to speak at a school. It was packed and it was hot. Windows up, hot air blowing, no Internet. And I say, "There's a fight against public education. Your senator's number one. He's leading a fight against Internet. He's leading a fight against access. How do you reconcile him fighting against what you need?"
Finally the student body president said, "Reverend, you know I think the reason he did it, he was saving us from the Union. They're in Washington trying to take over our schools." Lott was that wed to the Confederacy. The fact that we're suffering, we're sweating, of course we'll do that for the right thing. I can imagine most Northern liberals, progressives, blacks, don't have any appreciation of how fastidious they are on this question of states' rights. I looked at the Republican debate two weeks ago, everybody's talking about the Tenth Amendment as trumping the 13th, 14th and 15th. Look at Texas Governor Rick Perry. He wants to secede from Washington and succeed in Washington at the same time. He is unequivocally a Tenth Amendment man, so let the fight begin.
