Dr. Robin Meyers' We Are One Speech

Dr. Robin Meyers is the senior minister at Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City and one of the leading progressive voices in Oklahoma.

This speech was delivered on the south steps of the Oklahoma Capitol building as part of the WE ARE ONE rally movement held across the country.

More information can be found here:
http://www.mayflowerucc.org/Staff.html



Dr. Robin Meyers' We Are One rally speech:
We are One Rally
State Capitol 4/4/2011

I have long believed that America has the most patient workers
in the world. All that ended in a big way in Madison Wisconsin when
the state’s new governor tried to strip all public employees (except the
ones that voted for him), of their collective bargaining rights. Finally,
the Great Awakening has begun, and the people who actually get up
and go to work in this country—who teach our children, who put out
fires, who pick up the trash—got mad as hell and decided they weren’t
going to take it anymore.

For 30 years, since the election of Ronald Regan, we have been
living the myth of supply-side economics in this country. Simply put,
it holds that tax cuts for the rich will spur investment and economic
activity that will “trickle down” to the middle class and the poor. It
sounds good, and we continue to act as if it works, despite the fact that
we have 30 years of evidence that it doesn’t. Supply Side remains the
dominant economic theory of this country despite the fact that since
we started down this road, the rich have gotten fantastically richer,
the middle class has become stagnant or declined, and the ranks of the
poor have grown. As Ross Perot put it in his bid for president as a third-
party candidate, “We threw a lot of money at the top, and most of it
stayed up there.”

The reason is that the investor class does not spend most of the
money it gets in new tax breaks. Because a rich person doesn’t need a
new refrigerator or a new car (because he already has one), the money
mostly goes into stocks and acquisitions, or into elaborate schemes to
avoid paying any taxes at all, like off-shore accounts or other elaborate
depreciation schemes. General Electric and Bank of America, two of
the largest corporations in the world, pay absolutely no federal income
tax, while they use all public services for free—the courts, the roads,
the trade regulators, the patent enforcement—all of it paid for by you

and me—as if we are their servants.

The greatest threat to this country is the ever-widening gap
between rich and poor, and it now approaches levels not seen since
the age of the Robber Barons amassed enormous fortunes right before
the Great Depression. Only two things have ever slowed that process
down and protected the middle class—1) progressive tax rates and 2)
the power of collective bargaining for higher wages. That’s why the
Republicans are obsessed with two things: cutting taxes and trying to
destroy unions. And when we hold rallies like this, they accuse us of
engaging in class warfare. Let’s get something straight. Class warfare
has been going on for a long time now, and the rich won. The only
question now is whether the rest of us will get back into the fight.

To do this, first of all---we must call out and name the lies that
are begin told everyday in this country by the corporate owned media
that serves the investor class and allows politicians and pundits to
blame the Great Recession on American workers. Teachers (who are
the most underpaid and under appreciated members of our society),
did not cause The Great Recession; neither did firefighters, neither did
sanitation workers; neither did immigrants, including those who are
undocumented—the ones who put on every new roof in this city after
the big hail storm and who do most of the hardest manual labor in an
economy that both exploits and demonizes them. They did not cause
the Great Recession. Let’s get this straight.

Wall Street bandits and corrupt bankers and criminals in the
financial services sector caused the Great Recession. None of them
were punished; none of them have had to pay anything to repair the
enormous damage they have done. Instead, believing that a crisis is
a terrible thing to waste, the Rabid Right in this country wants to deal
with the deficit it has largely created by asking that those with the least
pay the most and those with the most pay nothing.

Make no mistake; many Republicans want to end Social Security,
Medicare, and Medicaid. No matter how devotedly Christian they
claim to be, they do NOT believe that we are our brother or sister’s
keeper. No matter how often they say they don’t believe in evolution,
they love Darwin with it comes to economics—it’s every man or woman
for him or herself, so let the law of the economic jungle rule. Forget
the golden rule. Let those with the gold rule. The philosophy of
today’s Republican Party can be summed up very simply: the market is
rational and can solve all the problems of life.

That is the most dangerous myth in the land today, and nobody
seems willing to stand up and say “The Emperor is naked!” The
prosperity that you promised us has not come to pass because the
premise upon which it was built is false. Without checks and balances
upon human greed, people will do terrible things to one another to
make their fortunes. Without reasonable regulations, they will destroy
the environment, poison the water, foul the air and do it all in the name
of what we truly worship in this country, which is the almighty dollar.
Unless we say “Enough is enough.” And only if we do more than just
say it. We need a new workers movement in this country, and we need
it now.

When America was the strongest and most prosperous, its
middle class was strong and prosperous. In the 50’s and 60’s, a time
that many conservatives like to point to as the “good old days,” one
out of every three workers belonged to a union. Now it’s one in
eight, and if Republicans have their way it will be zero. Taxes on the
wealthiest Americans under Eisenhower were at 70%. Today, the
effective tax rate is 16 percent. Workers on the other hand, pay
25% through payroll deductions, without any of the tax avoidance
schemes that corporations enjoy. Don’t forget, Republicans have never
favored raising the minimum wage, and never would unless forced by
Democrats to do so.

Two out of every three American corporations paid no federal
income in the last decade. When some of the largest banks paid
nothing into the treasury and then almost drove this country over the
cliff because of their greed and corruption, we bailed them out with the
tax dollars they didn’t even contribute to! So here is our real economic
system today: for corporations, profits are privatized, while risks are
socialized—the investor class gets to gamble with your money, and if
they win, they win, but if they lose, you lose.

Now, thanks to the disastrous Supreme Court ruling in Citizens
United, corporations are not just legal arrangements on paper for
making money. Corporations are now people with Constitutional rights
to contribute unlimited secret cash to political campaigns. Now we
are supposed to believe that if we saw a corporation walking down the
street, we would recognize it as one of our neighbors. Mr. and Mrs.
Nike. Mr. and Mrs. General Electric. Mr. and Mrs. Goldman Sachs.

If this sounds ludicrous then you are beginning to get the point.
We now live in a “corporateocracy”—and these shadowy and secretive
entities are more powerful than the government. They pay next
to nothing in taxes, which means they have more money to lobby
lawmakers to lower their taxes. They play but they don’t pay. Then
when they slip and fall, they go to the emergency room of the U.S.
Treasury and demand to be healed. That would be tax-payer funded
socialized medicine for corporations. The rest of us are on our own.

And if we remain divided, we will lose. Only if we join our voices,
only if we march together, only if organize, stay informed, stay
involved, and refuse to accept the death of the American middle class
will we be able to change things. We owe it to our kids. I just became
a grandfather and I owe it to my granddaughter. I refuse to let this
amazing country become a plutocracy, ruled by the Koch brothers.

Forty three years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King was
assassinated after standing up for the rights of public sector workers in
Memphis Tennessee. It would be a shame to just named streets after
Dr. King and not march down those same streets to demand the justice
that he lived and died for. Equal rights, equal treatment under the law,
equal opportunity. Wake up America! This country is too good to lose.

Never give up! Never give up! Never give up!

Thank you.