by Peter Buckley
O.K., who am I to talk about this?
I'm a guy from Ashland. I spent just over 20 years in theatre as actor, writer, director, producer, and instructor. I'm now making $22,000 per year as a legislator in the Oregon House of Representatives, a job that has become so time consuming that I have almost no time whatsoever to do anything else. My family survives because I use as little per diem as possible when the legislature is in session and more importantly because my wife makes a decent salary. We chose Ashland as the place to raise our three kids because of two main reasons-she had a steady job and Ashland has good schools.
I've been involved in political campaigns on and off in different ways since I was in my teens. And I have always been a very active reader-a consumer of news and opinions-at least two hours every day, seven days a week-and when it became clear about ten years ago that our country was heading down a very bad road and the future of my kids was being threatened by that, I decided that I had to try to do something.
I was elected as representative from my district to the Oregon House in 2004. In 2006, I helped the House Democrats win the majority for the first time in 16 years. In 2008, in the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes, and in the most significant budget crisis the Oregon legislature has ever experienced, I let myself get talked into accepting the appointment to help lead the budget work in the Joint Committee on Ways & Means.
So–a middle aged guy from Ashland, three kids, a house a couple blocks from the high school, a loud dog, a very understanding spouse, a background in theatre and now with responsibility over a budget of over $55 billion dollars impacting the lives of over 3 and a half million Oregonians. That's what a citizen legislature is all about.
That's who I am and that's what I'm doing. But why am I talking about the middle class?
I'm doing this because I have some good news and some bad news and it is absolutely vital to tell you and as many people as I can.
I'm going to start, as you might have figured, with the bad news first.
A playwright I've always liked is Anton Chekov, a Russian playwright, and here's a quote from him" "Any idiot can face a crisis," he wrote. "It's the day to day living that wears you out."
The bad news I need to talk about is this: we are not only facing an economic crisis in America and in Oregon-we are in imminent danger of being worn out. In regard to the economic crisis, there are tools we can use and are using-and need to use more–to face it. But the consequences of allowing ourselves to be worn out last longer and will do even greater damage than the crisis of this recession if we do not choose otherwise.
I need to emphasize the word "choose." And I will do so a bunch of times in this speech.
One of the greatest dangers and one of the greatest challenges we face is the idea that the situation we have found ourselves in somehow was inevitable. It was not, and it is not.
There are some of you who might be somewhere close to being as old as I am, perhaps within a decade or two, and you must know what I am talking about.
I grew up in a middle class family in a middle class neighborhood. Our family had a nice house, all five of the kids in our house had access to college and none of us graduated with any kind of significant debt. My dad was the sole wage earner, but he made enough so we could be a middle class family in a middle class neighborhood, and we had decent health care that didn't bankrupt anybody and he had a decent pension plan, and we had every expectation in the world that the number of Americans moving into the middle class was going to keep on growing every year.
Our family grew into the middle class because there was a choice made in our country to build the middle class, to provide opportunities in education and in housing and a decent retirement, and that specific choice led to policies that resulted in those things.
That choice at that time was fueled by the fact that we were coming out of a world war where our country had hung together and won, and fueled by the success of the labor movement that set very clear standards for wages, benefits, working conditions, etc.
The combination of the G.I. Bill for housing and education and the labor movement for decent wages helped to build a vibrant middle class, and our government, our representative government, with its citizen legislators in every state and in Congress, responded to the choice we as a people had made by passing policies that strengthened the middle class. In the process, we built the most powerful economy in the world.
I don't mean to sugar coat any of this. The decades that proceeded the choice that we made as a country to actually put policies in place to build the middle class were decades of hardship, struggle and pain. Any reading of our history can tell you that the struggle for decent wages and working conditions through the labor movement was bloody, violent and harsh. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the millions of American workers who have come before us and paid the price. And the sacrifices made by millions of Americans during World War II, huge shared sacrifices, contributed mightily to the choice we made as a country to build a middle class.
We reached a point where we chose to acknowledge and act on a very simple reality: we all do better when we all do better.
But then we made a different choice. We chose to allow ourselves to be divided.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe that a group of rich and powerful men met in a boardroom someplace and planned this all out. I do believe, however, that the same interests that viciously opposed the labor movement for decade after decade, the same interests who bitterly opposed the creation of Social Security and then Medicare and Medicaid-these same interests have and continue to exploit the choice we made to allow ourselves to be divided.
We have allowed ourselves to be divided by racial fears, by real or perceived threats to national security, by religious beliefs, by gender, by social issues, and in every area where we have chosen to allow ourselves to be divided, our choice has been exploited by the same interests who have always placed their own good over the good of the American people as a whole. It is the way it has always been.
And day after day, week after week, month after month, we've allowed ourselves to be worn down. We have rallied every now and then, pushed back, made some progress, but then we have chosen to try to rest, to try to simply have the kind of positive lives we truly thought we were going to have when we were growing up in that world where the choice was to build the middle class and expand it. I will come back on this point in a bit.
The key weapon we have faced, that we have always faced, is fear. At every point of choice in the labor movement, the weapon of the opposition has been fear. If you try to organize, you will lose your jobs-or worse. And it evolved over the years to include every fear that could be brought up in the effort to exploit division. If Blacks and Latinos have fair opportunities, white workers will lose opportunities. If women are treated equally, men will lose out. If gays are allowed to marry, your marriage will be damaged. On and on and on. It is always fear. If we do not invade Iraq, we will be attacked again. And living in a state of fear has divided us and continuously worn us down.
Again, this is not due to any kind of conspiracy. It is due to choice.
And what has it led to?
The highest level of poverty in Oregon and in America in decades. 21% of our kids live in poverty. In America. In 2011. 21%.
We have the largest gap between the wealthy and the average American worker that has existed since before the Great Depression in the 1930s.
And it has been so relentless, the rich getting richer, average families falling behind, students graduating with massive debts, homes being foreclosed on while CEOs get billions in bonuses, people going into bankruptcy due to health care costs, on and on and on.
And as I mentioned, we have pushed back at times. But we have shown a pattern of pushing back and then stopping, pushing back and then stopping, and each time we stop, we let ourselves be divided again. Or perhaps the very reason we stop is that we let ourselves be divided again. We're doing just that right now.
In 2008, we staged a pretty damned impressive rally. We had had enough. We drew the line. We chose to be united, we organized, we fought, we won, we thought we were finally back on track. We took control of the political process, and we won.
So what was the response to that? What was the response from those who have always been our opposition, who have always opposed progress for workers and for a vibrant middle class, what was the response to the overwhelming rejection of their policies and the results of their policies they had put in place for close to a decade?
They funded and brought about a tantrum. They chose to do everything possible to make our political process toxic. And it is.
And we have chosen, once again, to allow ourselves to be divided, to be worn down, to be disappointed and disgusted-to be divided.
We have allowed toxic politicians to dictate what can and what cannot be done in our federal government, and we are paying a painful price.
And you might find my remarks to be highly partisan, but I am not going to apologize in any way for that. I am partisan. I believe the choice to build and support the middle class is the absolute vital choice for Oregon and for America. I support people from any political party who also make that choice, and I oppose people from any political party who choose otherwise. It has come to that. The choice is clear and must be made-it is either our street or Wall Street. It is either the ultra-wealthy or the rest of us. It's either trickle down economics or it is middle class economics. And it is either a working government or a dysfunctional government.
We have to choose to build our middle class again. We have to refuse to be divided. We have to rally again, and this time, we have to make a commitment that we will not allow ourselves to be divided after we win, we will keep pushing and keep pushing, we will finally realize that our opposition will never stop, and the only choice, the only choice we have in the face of an opposition that will never stop, is to defeat them.
We have not come to a point of increased poverty and decreased opportunity because of an act of God. We have come to this point via decisions that were made each step of the way, and the policies that have been put in place to carry those decisions out.
We have come this way by choice. We absolutely must choose to go a different way, and once we are moving in that direction, we absolutely must commit to doing everything that can be done in order not to be dragged backwards again.
There is no reason that Oregonians and Americans as a whole cannot have decent paying jobs, decent housing, good health care, good education and decent retirements. The only reason we don't have that now is by choice. I suppose that is the bad news and the good news I'm bringing to you. We've chosen to let ourselves get disappointed, disgusted, worn down in the face of the relentless opposition and toxicity we face. The results are what you see in your family's situation, your schools, your hospitals, your communities.
We need to choose differently. We need to refuse to be divided by fear. We need to refuse to be divided by disappointment over the imperfections of those we elect-for God's sake, I'm a middle aged guy from Ashland with three kids, a loud dog, etc., and a background in theatre and I'm responsible for the state budget. We need to be more relentless than those who have always opposed the support and growth of the middle class and the strength of workers in our country.
And we can do this.
We can do this with a relentless focus on middle class economics versus trickle down economics. The data on this is absolutely clear. Trickle down economics has had its best possible trial run from 2001 to 2008. Just as in the earlier effort in the 1980s, it has failed miserably. It has not created jobs or anything close to widespread prosperity. It has instead resulted in the widest gap between rich and poor in generations, and in lost opportunities for the vast, vast majority of American families.
Middle class economics, practiced in the 50s, 60s, 70s and for a good part of the 90s, has a proven track record of working. And it works for all sectors of our society. The wealthiest Americans still enjoyed fantastic luxury in those decades, even if they were paying more in taxes towards the overall good. They were not deprived in any way. And there was a middle class able to buy American products, able to fuel the economy as a whole.
And it is remarkable that two specific theories-the idea that trickle down economics work and the idea that government, even our representative government of the United States of America, is an enemy to fight and obstruct instead of a tool for citizens to build the country they want-those two specific theories have become an absolute religious belief for the toxic politicians in DC and elsewhere.
We have to choose to unite again to remove those politicians from office, and to keep them out, in order for our families, our schools, our communities, our state and our country to thrive again.
We have a choice to make-to give up, give in, be divided, or to push back, continuously, take on whatever challenge is thrown at us, stay united, and win.
I'll end with one more quote, it's from a guy named John M. Richardson, who is an expert in sociology at American University in Washington, DC. He wrote this:
"When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen and those who wonder what happened."
Many of us look at America today and wonder what happened. I've tried to spell out what I think has taken place. And now is the time to choose what kind of people we want to be for the future. I believe we must be the ones who make it happen, for the good of our families, of Oregon and of our country.