Detroit's Agony, America's Choice

Jesse Jackson

There are so many vacant lots in Detroit that serious plans are being made to start up family farming there. 90,000 vacant lots and homes boarded up. Detroit suffers record unemployment. Not one chain grocery store still does business in Detroit. Not one national chain retail store. Detroit residents travel to the suburbs to shop, spending $2 billion a year outside the city.

Detroit's agony is mirrored by labor's decline. The U.S. lost one of three manufacturing jobs during the past decade. We suffered a staggering $5.9 trillion in trade losses, running up deficits that required borrowing $2 billion a day from abroad. As manufacturing declined, so did labor unions. In the 1950s and '60s, labor unions represented about 33 percent of private employees. Now labor represents less than 15 percent of the workforce, and less than 8 percent of the private workforce. The major growing unions have been public employees, now under assault from budget cuts and attacks on pensions.

Catastrophic corporate trade policies -- embraced by both parties -- contributed directly to the bubble and bust economy that ended in the Great Recession. They contributed to the decline in America's middle class, as non-college-educated workers have lost ground since Reagan became president and conservative ideas held sway. Corporate trade, privatization, deregulation, cutting government investment, attacking unions, celebrating CEOs, "liberating" finance -- this toxic mix produced not simply the hollowing out of Detroit, but the hollowing out of America and now the Great Recession.

The recession has not yet shattered these illusions. A hopeful new president called on America to build a new foundation for its economy, but was obstructed every step of the way by conservatives in Congress, and libeled by the race-bait right-wing noise machine. The banks got bailed out, and now Republicans vow to repeal what little financial reform there was. The trade deficits are coming back, and conservatives lobby hard for more of the same ruinous corporate trade deals. We've seen the cost of deregulation -- in the BP catastrophe, the criminal Massey mining disaster, the bankers' gambling spree -- and now conservatives call for rolling back what little regulation there is, denouncing the requirement that BP pay damages for its negligence as "extortion."

The U.S. owns 60 percent of General Motors, but we've saved the company, not the workers. "USA GM" is building plants in China and Mexico, while workers in Saginaw, Mich., join the ranks of the 99ers, out of work for more than 99 weeks.

America must choose. Do we stay wedded to the wrong ideas and cater to the powerful interests that have put us in the hole we are in or go another way?

That other way must be built from the bottom up, from people coming together to demand jobs and justice. Here labor is essential, and labor is stirring. In Detroit last weekend, in the great tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King and former UAW President Walter Reuther, labor, led by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, UAW, SEIU and AFSCME, joined with the Detroit NAACP, SCLC and other civil rights groups, ministers and concerned citizens -- the very coalition that led the civil rights movement.

This march will lead to others, and culminate on Oct. 2 for the One Nation march and rally in Washington, D.C.

We will march for jobs, for a plan to revive manufacturing in America, for investing in rebuilding vital infrastructure, for energy efficiency and renewable energy, and for putting people to work. We will march for justice, for one America, for ensuring that equal protection under the law and equal opportunity for all are not simply slogans etched on marble walls, but laws and practices embraced in daily life.

There is much talk about the "enthusiasm gap." As the poet William Butler Yeats wrote: "The center cannot hold. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." In Detroit's recent elections, 67,000 of 570,000 registered voters cast a ballot. If the young, the workers, the people of color, the single women lack all conviction, the reform majority will be supplanted by the reactionary minority.

We can survive broken sidewalks and broken buildings. We cannot survive a collapse of spirit. In difficult times, you can't fight fate with fists or guns. You fight fate with faith and with action. Now, as we head into Labor Day, labor is stirring. The reform majority is rousing itself. America faces a profound choice. The question is whether the broad majority of Americans show up to make it.

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Detroit's Agony, America's Choice