Keeping The Dream Alive... In North Carolina

A few days ago we mentioned a brighter side of what's going on in North Carolina, Cecil Bothwell's reelection campaign. As Reid Wilson pointed out in his Washington Post column yesterday, the fascist-controlled Art Pope legislature really is wrecking the state government.

Even after a legislative session dominated by Republican legislative victories, on issues as diverse as gun control, abortion, taxes and election reforms, deep differences divide [Republican Governor] McCrory and state Senate President Phil Berger (R), who spearheaded the most controversial parts of the conservative agenda that passed the legislature, and won McCrory’s signature, on party-line votes.

In a special session this week, the House and Senate voted by wide margins to override two of McCrory’s vetoes, on measures that would require drug testing for welfare recipients and that would loosen e-Verify requirements for ensuring agricultural workers are legally permitted to work in the United States, even after McCrory and his allies lobbied legislators to sustain the vetoes.

...Conservative initiatives Republicans pushed through this year on abortion, taxes and voting rights earned outraged national headlines from liberal media outlets like MSNBC, The Huffington Post and ThinkProgress. In North Carolina, it inspired a group of Democratic constituencies, led by the NAACP and joined by abortion rights activists and labor unions, to form a weekly protest, dubbed “Moral Mondays.” Several observers on both sides of the aisle likened the protests-- which have sometimes attracted more than 1,000 people to the state capitol-- to the tea party protests that rocked American politics during the health-care debate in 2009 and 2010.

McCrory has not always handled those protests with aplomb. In July, he carried a plate of chocolate chip cookies to activists protesting the abortion bill. The protesters returned the cookies with a note: “We want women’s health care, not cookies.” Several hours later, a staff member came out of the governor’s mansion to hand a 12-year old protester three slices of cake, inviting unflattering comparisons to a certain queen of France during the reign of King Louis XVI. Several McCrory advisers blanched at the gestures.

Needless to say, in the midst of his own reelection campaign in Asheville, clear across the state from far-off Raleigh, Cecil Bothwell has been playing a real role in the Moral Monday movement, even chartering buses from Asheville to Raleigh for demonstrators and going himself. At the end of last month, he spoke in Sylva at one of 13 rallies being held across the state to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The rallies were sponsored by the North Carolina NAACP and were intended to send a message to the state Republican legislature that further attempts to dismantle freedom and equality will not be tolerated by the people of the state. His speech:

Our economy, in Western North Carolina is slowly climbing out of the  Great Recession. Recovery from that economic collapse, which began more  than five years ago, has been far slower than necessary. That slow pace  has been the direct result of misguided government policies.

You’d think our policy-makers didn’t learn anything from our experience of the Great Depression. Then as now, unregulated  banking and lending created a global bubble, then as now when the bubble burst the effect on American workers was devastating, and then as now,  our government’s first reaction was to cut taxes and cut spending. That  was exactly the wrong cure for a depression in the 1930s, and it has  proven to be the wrong cure in our own era.

But some of our  elected representatives are so completely committed to their misguided  ideology that they ignore economic reality.

In North Carolina,  when a sane policy would be to hold taxes steady, or even increase them, particularly on the wealthy, our General Assembly chose to give an  enormous tax break to the rich.

When a sane policy would be to  retain state workers, we see payrolls slashed, particularly in education where the latest cuts will eliminate 4,000 teaching jobs.

When a sane policy would be to expand Medicare by accepting some $9 billion  in federal funds, we see Medicare sharply curtailed.

When a  sane policy would be to maintain unemployment benefits until expansion  of the economy puts people back to work, we see former workers dumped  from benefit rolls, and payments to remaining recipients slashed.

The far right ideology that is controlling North Carolina’s economic  future today takes the position that all social welfare programs are  simply give-aways to the undeserving poor.

It’s as if  legislators imagine that poor folks will stuff all that extra cash in  offshore, tax exempt investment accounts, like the rich plutocrats who  finance their political campaigns.

Nothing could be more shortsighted.

When the unemployed draw benefits, they don’t stuff money in a  mattress, they spend it for the necessities of living. That money flows  into the North Carolina economy and employees people.

Medicare  payments don’t go into a mattress either. The money goes to health care  facilities and health care workers, maintaining essential jobs for the  experts we need in times of personal or societal crisis.

Education cuts are the most shortsighted piece of the austerity budget  approved in Raleigh. Education is the cornerstone of our future  development and of preparing our children for the jobs of that future.

This state succeeded in climbing from the nation’s bottom ranks of K-12 education in recent decades. We built a university system that has  turned out leaders in science and technology, in medicine, in the  humanities and in business, tea-partiers in Raleigh have decided to join a race to the bottom.

It is not the way to rebuild the American Dream. It is, frankly, insane.

We can do better, North Carolina. We know that corporations are not people, and that people matter more than money.

Forward together! Not one step back!

At this dark time in its history, outspoken, values-based progressive leaders like Cecil Bothwell are essential to keep the dream alive. If you can, please consider helping his campaign here. This song always makes me cry: