Thank you, Wisconsin friends

I'm taking a break from blogging until Monday. But I wanted to offer some words of gratitude here for this Thanksgiving week.

First, I want to thank all you folks out there gathering signatures on recall petitions as the weather gets colder and nastier. I want to thank especially those people standing with their clipboards amidst the crowds at Lambeau Field on Sunday. I have no doubt you received a load of grief from many fans, evidenced by the fear on the face of one young man as I approached him, and his relief when I cheered him on.

I want to thank the tens of thousands of people who showed up in Madison many times this year, including this past Saturday, for your good spirit as you reclaim space for the voices of those silenced in this repressive, divisive atmosphere created by the politics of exclusion of the current state government.

I want to thank those dedicated workers who are on the front lines dealing with the impacts on real human beings of the cuts in health care programs, education, and other essential services. I want to thank dedicated public sector workers who hang in there despite the demonization of them that is all the rage these days from the political right, including those who have been picking up our leaves and who will be plowing our snow this winter. What would we do without you?

And a special shout-out of thanks to public school teachers who these days seem to be on so many Repub dart boards. I don't get it, and this, too, shall pass. What you do is so important.

I want to thank the Occupiers who have sent a burst of energy into our movements for social justice, fairness, and decency, and for helping to make the concentration of wealth part of our national conversation - finally!!

I want to once again thank the Wisconsin 14 for their witness, for taking the drastic step that helped bring the true intentions of the Walker/Fitzgerald brothers into the light of day. You also helped reinvigorate popular democracy showing that sometimes elected officials will actually respond to, even take risks on behalf of, the people they represent.

This is a beautiful state full of good, good people. Yet, even as I give thanks here, I am aware that right in my own city there are thousands of people who are suffering from deep poverty, discrimination, and a special kind of urban hopelessness. As we give thanks, let's also remember that we have to do better than this.

While we worry about worker rights, let's also worry about poverty. While we worry about protecting wages and benefits in the public sector, let's also remember those with no wages or benefits. While we loudly defend our democratic rights, let's remember those whose voices are barely heard amidst all the noise, who are most likely to be shoved farther to the margins by the current regime.

Let's remember that our struggle is not a just one if we are only defending our own interests and the interests of our particular sector, union, or interest group. Our struggle is only just if it has at its foundation a concern for the well-being of all, for the common good and the good of the commons.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend!

The death of manufacturing and the death of a neighborhood

Everyone who cares about the city of Milwaukee ought to read this entire article from yesterday's front page:

Where city factories, and now babies, die


There is something so very wrong here, even more than what these journalists penetrate as they describe what the death of manufacturing has to do with the shocking levels of poverty, deaths of babies, and abandonment of whole neighborhoods.

Just one rotting factory at the 30th St. Industrial Corridor.

This story is about the 30th Street Industrial Corridor, a stretch of toxic wasteland that I had the opportunity to briefly tour in September with the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee. There have been other studies and articles written about the link between poverty and the crash of this neighborhood - due in large part to the moving of manufacturing out of the U.S. as corporations chased growing cheap labor pools in other countries.

But for me one of the most shocking things was the abandonment of these workers who once built and assembled the things that we used, that created the base of a broad middle-class. Racism had a lot to do with this, as we all know but hardly ever say out loud (it needs to be said out loud). The tax money of the middle and upper-middle classes poured out of the city as the affluent moved out to suburbs and exurbs. We failed to see the connections between the two, mostly because we didn't want to, and we certainly failed the moral test of the mutual responsibility that comes from living in this world and in a particular community.

For me, one of the shockers was that all these manufacturing companies could just close up and disappear with no sense of responsibility for what they were leaving behind. As our tour guide said, some of them left in the middle of the night - a way to avoid scrutiny and outcry. Left behind were not only abandoned workers and their families, but also a toxic contaminated mess, land so polluted that the city can't even make plans to reclaim this area without having to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated soil off the top (the guy said 2-3 FEET covers much of the area) and old seeping waste tanks buried underground.

This is among the aspects of capitalism that reveals its voraciousness, selfishness, and greed - that these companies felt and feel no responsibility about leaving in a responsible way - taking their factories apart and cleaning up the mess on their way out. No care for the humans; no care for the land and community.

It's a lot like Walmart and other big box stores. They come; they go; they leave their big box store and paved over land behind for someone else to worry about.

It is not time to rebuild the manufacturing economy of the post- World War II era. It is time to build a new economy altogether, one that puts the well-being of our communities at its heart, one that promotes the health and happiness of the people who live in these neighborhoods, one that does not tear at the fabric of the human community but binds us together.