Five Years Later I miss Ted Kennedy Even More

May it be said of our Party in 1980 that we found our faith again.

And may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now:

"I am a part of all that I have met
To [Tho] much is taken, much abides
That which we are, we are --
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Senator Edward Kennedy, August 12, 1980


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Note:  Today marks the fifth anniversary of Ted Kennedy's death.  Here I repeat the post I wrote on the day we lost this great senator and friend to those who had almost given up on a government of, by and for the people.  I miss his huge voice, his huge heart, his ability to cut through the crap and get to the simple truths.  We could use you now, Teddy.  We could use you now.
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August 25, 2009:

I woke up this morning to the news I've been dreading for weeks now.  Ted Kennedy, the Good Man of the Senate, has died.  He has been on my mind a lot lately, as we wage this battle for the common good, because what I fear most now is that our progress will suffer badly without his counsel, without his presence.

For more than 40 years he has consistently been on the side of the people without power.  As former senator Bob Kerrey said on "Morning Joe" today, "If you're getting the shaft, you ought to be weeping today because Ted Kennedy was your best friend."

The list of his accomplishments, the bills he worked so tirelessly to get passed, the people whose personal stories tell the tale of a man of high privilege coming to understand his role in the negation of human misery--are all part of our history we will never forget.

But no matter how much we would prefer to concentrate on the triumphs of his life, on the undeniable good he has done for his country, the specter of Chappaquiddick will never stop casting a long shadow over it all.

Already, this early in the morning, it comes up in the remembrances of those who knew him and are now before the cameras talking about his life.  It happened--we know it happened.  The facts are that Mary Jo Kopechne's life ended on July 18, 1969, after  drowning in a river on Chappaquiddick Island.  It was late at night and she was a passenger in a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy.  They were heading toward the ferry to the mainland after a victory party when the car skidded off a bridge and crashed into the water. Kennedy survived, but Mary Jo didn't. She was just days away from her 29th birthday.

There is no question that Ted Kennedy panicked and swam across to the mainland, leaving Mary Jo in that car in that river.  Did he try to save her?  He says he did.  He says he was going for help, but it was hours before anyone found the car with Mary Jo's body inside.

Leaving the scene of an accident is a crime, and there were a lot of us--maybe most of us--who wanted to see him, at the very least, serve time in jail.  His sentence was eventually suspended, a seemingly contemptuous judicial act that stunned us all.  No punishment for running like a coward, allowing a young woman to die?  Why?  Because the rich and famous are exempt from having to pay for their sins?

For years I didn't want to ever hear the name Ted Kennedy again.  For years I heard the stories of his drinking, his carousing, and I wondered how the good people of Massachusetts could go on electing him.

He ran for president against Jimmy Carter and campaigned badly.  Again, we counted him out.  Then he gave his concession speech, his "the dream shall never die" speech, on the night of Jimmy Carter's primary victory.  There were a number of us in the room that night watching the returns, but I can still remember how quiet it was as we listened to the final moments of his speech..  I remember that none of us expected much from him by that time so when he started we were barely listening.  When it ended, we all looked at one another and someone said, "Why in God's name did he have to wait until now to give that speech?"

I've heard people say that he campaigned badly because, after Chappaquiddick, he felt deep down that he didn't deserve the presidency.  I can't begin to look into Ted Kennedy's soul at the time, but after that defeat he was a different man.  He went to work to fight for the causes his liberal heart told him were the most important, and he never looked back.
 
Already I'm seeing the hatred toward the Liberal Lion, the greatest senator of our times, bombarding the boards.  I won't repeat them here because I choose to celebrate Ted Kennedy's life.  It's a life that is ultimately deserving of praise.  Many of the people who are without a doubt going to go on the Hate Kennedy rampage today will laugh at the idea of a plea for forgiveness,  so I'll say this in words that most of them can understand:

Luke 17:3 - Take heed to yourselves; if your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.

To forgive is not to forget.  I'm not alone in wondering where Mary Jo's life would have taken her.  From all accounts, she was good, decent, smart, loving.  She was on Robert Kennedy's staff, even helping to write a speech he gave against the Vietnam War.  Who knows what kind of career she would have chosen?  Where she would be today?

I've always wondered if it's possible that Ted Kennedy chose to give his life over to helping people who couldn't help themselves because the one time he might have actually saved a life, he failed.  A noble act of repentance.

If I weep for Ted Kennedy today, it is not for all the things that might have been, it is for all the things that were and now will be no more.

Ramona

Immokalee: A Grassroots Journey to a Penny a Pound and a Victory of the Meek

“The Coalition of Immokalee Workers has just proven that when you get up every day to fight for what is right, when you don’t give up even when all the odds are against you, when you don’t compromise on basic principles of fairness, and when you build a strong grassroots movement, economic justice will prevail over greed, and the least fortunate can successfully stand up to the powerful."   Sen. Bernie Sanders, 11/17/10 

In March, 2009, I came across an incredible story of modern-day slavery and worker abuse in the tomato fields of Florida, one I couldn't believe I hadn't known about until then.  I wrote a piece called, "Harsh Realities in a Country gone Mad with Greed":

This is one of those stories that will seem so unbelievable, so beyond the pale, so, well, un-American, you might be tempted to either disregard it completely or cast it in a fictional light in order to escape the obvious conclusion: There are horrors perpetrated on human beings in this country that rival those in the worst of the worst of any third-world country.

Everything that happens in this story happens because the ones with the power could not, would not, control their greed. Everything that happened to these people happened because there was nobody looking out for them. The perpetrators knew they were living in an era where laborers were a dime a dozen. If one died off, there were plenty more where they came from.

This is the story of the cruel exploitation of produce pickers, but it didn't happen in the 1930s of Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", or in the 1950s-60s of the "Harvest of Shame" , or before Cesar Chavez began to organize migrant farm workers. It happened--and is happening--right here, right now, under our watch, in the 21st Century. (Read the rest here.)

I promised at the time that I would keep the story going, that I would report on the progress, that I wouldn't forget it or ignore it--but, aside from a few links and retweets, I did just that.

I don't pretend that anything I might have passed along would have made a difference, given the paltry number of readers I welcome regularly to my blog, but thankfully there were advocates with real power who backed the workers, who strong-armed the packing companies, who threatened and carried out boycotts of the chains buying tomatoes from those companies.  And finally, last week, after  a struggle lasting more than 15 years, their efforts have begun to pay off. 

From The Nation:  At a news conference on a farm outside of Immokalee in southwest Florida, Jon Esformes, operating partner of the fourth-generation, family-owned Pacific Tomato Growers—one of the five largest growers in the nation with more than 14,000 acres in the US and Mexico—declared, “In a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

And with that he announced an agreement with the 4000-member Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to implement a penny per pound pay raise—which stands to increase workers’ annual earnings from about $10,000 to as much as $17,000—and establish a code of conduct that includes an external complaint resolution system, shade and protective equipment in the fields, and a worker-to-worker education process on their rights under the new agreement.

A penny a pound.  It may not sound like much, and--let's face it--it isn't, but this was a company who joined the discussion kicking and screaming and came out at least pretending to recognize the folly of their former ways.  The penny-a-pound concession is what they were after, but it takes a back seat to the fact that tomato pickers deserved to be treated like human beings and they didn't stop fighting for that very simple right until they had won it.

 It didn't hurt that four Democratic senators from the north, Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, Dick Durbin, and Sherrod Brown, became advocates for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, holding a Senate hearing about the abuses in April, 2008, and, at least in Sanders' case, following up and keeping sunshine on the story until the first baby steps were taken last week, when Pacific Tomato Growers, shunned by every fast-food chain in the land and many major supermarkets, finally hollered Uncle.

In January, 2008, Sen. Sanders went to Immokalee to see the conditions there for himself: 

In talking with workers who go out into the fields I learned that they make approximately 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. This wage has not increased since 1998; and in fact, farm worker wages have dropped 65 percent in the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation. I also learned that while it is possible under optimum conditions to make as much as $10-$12 an hour, the average hourly wage is far lower than that. In fact, most workers in the tomato fields earn about $250 a week in income. Why are wages so low?

I also learned that there is no overtime when workers work more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. There are no benefits. Health care is a serious problem especially for people who do hard, physical work as they do in the tomato fields, yet employers offer no health insurance. The housing that I saw was deplorable and extremely expensive. It was not uncommon for eight or 10 workers to be paying $500 a month to live in a trailer which, in the city where I was mayor, would never have passed a safety inspection.

"Is it really going to take an act of Congress to get Florida's tomato pickers a raise?" an editorial in the St. Petersburg Times asked. "The men and women who work the fields in Immokalee earn 45 cents on average for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes harvested. It is a meager wage that has not been raised in more than 20 years. Yet when a couple of fast food giants generously agreed to pay workers an added penny per pound, the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange sabotaged the deal and has refused to negotiate even after congressional leaders offered to be intermediaries."

 So last week, more than two and a half years after the senate hearing, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, 4000 strong, won for their people a meager pay hike and a promise of better working conditions.   Still, they see this small victory not so much by what they gained but by how they gained it.  They showed the people willing to work on their behalf that they were worth the effort by being smart about their protests.  They came out of the shadows to shine a light on what a human being working under those conditions was forced to endure.  Many of them couldn't speak or understand a word of English, but a necessary dialogue took place and the people with the power to help understood the need and went to work.

It won't go without notice, by me, anyway, that Sen. Bernie Sanders stopped what he was doing, went down to Florida to take a look, and didn't give up until the thing was done. (I'm not surprised that Ted Kennedy worked hard to get this thing done either, even as his final illness was taking its toll.) 

To his credit, Florida governor Charlie Crist, after initially refusing, finally met with the CIW in March, 2009 and publicly condemned the actions of the growers.

 Still, it took until now, after a dozen years of food chain and supermarket boycotts, after a senate hearing on field worker abuses, after scores of TV, newspaper and magazines exposes, and more than a year and a half after Gov. Crist signed his letter of farm labor support, before the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange finally knuckled under and agreed to a penny a pound increase and a promise of a stab at fair play.

One final note:  It's apparently not over till it's over.  Publix Supermarkets still refuses to agree to the Fair Food Principals, so the CIW and certain Florida churches are collecting pennies in penny folders to hand out to Publix managers as a reminder.  It's their Thanksgiving message:  "Farm Workers in the fields are Family, too". (More reading here.)

Have a loving and bountiful Thanksgiving.  Enjoy your long weekend.  But there is no end to the turkeys out there, so I'll see you on the front lines again next week.

(Remember the CIW and farm laborers everywhere by buying Fair Trade.)

A Year of Obama: The Hope Still Lives

A year ago today, as I sat watching the inauguration of Barack Obama, listening to our new president's call to duty, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be a good day to start a political blog.  I already had a couple of sadly neglected blogs on other subjects, and I had been sort of casually thinking of ideas for it, so I got to work setting it up the morning of January 20 and finished it around 4:30 that afternoon.  I began it like this:

Today is January 20, 2009. Inauguration day for Barack Obama, and it can't have come soon enough. It's true that he's been de-facto president since November, 2008, when George W. Bush unofficially, without fanfare or hesitation, turned the job over to him, but today it became official. What a day it's been! They're estimating the crowds at 2 million strong, a sight unseen on any Presidential First Day in modern history.

Obama's speech, so anticipated by us all, was anticlimactic and, at first hearing, a bit of a disappointment. It didn't soar. It didn't sing. The soundbites were few and far between. But, as I think about it now, I realize that what he was going for was resonance. I don't remember the words, but I feel the feeling. What he said was that we're in trouble, we'll need to work hard to get out of it, and if we'll do all that we can do, so will he. He told the world that we were back to being honest and sincere and that they could trust us again.  He told those who would want to harm us to back off.  But most importantly, he told the Fat Cats that their glory days are over. As I said, resonance.

Oh, the joy in my heart as I wrote those words.  Take THAT, you lousy, bloated, insufferable faux-Capitalists.  The Sheriff's saddling up and the posse's not far behind.  We're off to save the ranches!  Widows and orphans, help is on the way!

But lest you think I was totally naive, I also wrote:  "I have no grand illusions about a rapid return to health for this country."  No, I had no grand illusions, but I did have dreams.  I've followed the Great Depression and the effect Roosevelt's brave New Deal had on the country, and I thought I heard the welcome sounds of a Rooseveltian Revolution in Obama's words.  Three hundred and sixty five days later, I realize my hearing might have been failing me.

Still, as I've said so many times before, I'm not ready to write Obama off.  I'm nervous about a lot of what's been coming out of the White House this past year--I admit it.  When I saw Wall Street move in, I chewed my fingers to the nubs.  When Rahm Emmanuel became the head whip-cracker, I felt a distinct shiver up my spine.  And when Barack Obama stopped talking about labor, even as hundreds of thousands of our workers were losing their jobs every month,  I gave up any inclination I might have had to genuflect.

I keep reminding myself that the Good Man took on what amounted to a national nightmare.  There were no easy fixes, and nobody pretended there would be.  But I would have slept better this past year if only I had been able to see the president as a "people person".   Was he ever that?  I don't know.  We might have made him into our own images, taking much needed comfort in an illusion of our own making.  Maybe he is what he is.  But what is he?  After a full year of hosting him in The People's House we're no closer to knowing where he stands, or, more importantly, where he's going.

And yet. . .  And yet.  I trust him.  I believe he is a Good Man.  I believe he understands what it is we need from him, and I believe he is Honest to God trying.  Do I believe he's done everything right?  Of course not.  The proof is in the pudding.  We are not that far along.   In fact, in some respects, we've fallen farther behind.  Our unemployment numbers hover at an unacceptable 10 percent, the bankers are giving out even bigger bonuses even as more and more homes sit empty, the stock market sings "Hallelujah" every time it looks like we're all shout and no clout, and just last night the state of Massachusetts awarded Ted Kennedy's senate seat to a Republican whose election promise was to kill any kind of Health Care Reform bill.   As if it isn't enough that we had to say goodbye to the great Lion of the Senate last year.  Now we have to watch as health care reform, Teddy's all-consuming passion, breathes its last.

So, as this January day marks the beginning of Barack Obama's second year, I'm remembering the grand enthusiasm of that dawning day one year ago.  And, while I admit to the need to dream, I'll be at my listening post, keeping my eyes wide open, pushing--ever pushing--this Good Man to find his backbone and boldly lead where no Democrat has gone before.  (Or at least not for a long, long time.)

I think I'll send him this as a reminder.  Feel free to do the same:

" On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' And Vanity comes along and asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But Conscience asks the question 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right"

The Rev. Martin Luther King.  Address at the Episcopal National Cathedral, Washington D.C., March 31, 1968

Ramona

 (Cross-posted at Talking Points Memo here.)