Rebuild the Dream (35 page)

For the past ten years, corporations have been paying about 10 percent less in taxes than they used to. While the official statutory rate of 35 percent corporate income tax for publicly traded C-corporations is the second highest in the world (after Japan), between shelters, subsidies, and tax breaks, their average effective
tax is 18.5 percent—and, as widely publicized, some pay as little as 2 percent or even 0 percent. The difference amounts to billions of dollars of uncollected tax revenue.

Also, our tax dollars support greedy companies such as Wal-Mart that are too cheap to foot the bill for their employees' healthcare (as of 2007, a little less than half, or 47.4 percent, received health insurance from Wal-Mart). Employees without health insurance are then forced to turn elsewhere, including to public programs such as Medicaid, on which more than 3 percent of the 1.3 million workers employed by Wal-Mart rely, though far more qualify (others—about 10 percent—remain uninsured, and another 25 percent are covered by spouses or through the military). We also guarantee the loans when companies such as NRG Energy, Scana Corporation, and Constellation Energy undertake the risky project of building a nuclear power plant; Constellation's vice president Michael Wallace was quoted in the
New York Times
openly admitting, “Without loan guarantees, we will not build nuclear power plants.”

And we permit giant metal mining companies such as Newmont and ASARCO to take gold, silver, and uranium from our public lands without paying royalties. Unlike in other extractive industries, current regulations on metal mining as established under the 1872 Mining Law (not updated since) allow the mining of public lands without paying royalties, that is, what the owner (the American public) could charge for the land's use. Newmont, for example, with its revenues of $7.7 billion in 2009, has never paid a cent. Earthworks, the mining reform advocacy organization, estimates that approximately $500 billion worth of minerals have been mined from public lands without royalties.

Estimates for the total amount of oil and gas subsidies paid by our government are quite literally incalculable because they depend on the factoring in of things such as military expenditures that
protect our access to oil, or investments in the national highway system, rather than mass transit. In a 2010 report for the Center for American Progress, economist Sima J. Gandhi calculated the total of nine types of subsidies as coming to $45 billion over the next ten years; however, she did not even attempt to include the two expenditures named above—military costs to protect access and investments robbed from mass transit.

The fact is that a huge amount of money is going to prop up the dirty economy, what Annie Leonard, author of
The Story of Stuff
, calls “the dinosaur economy—the one that produces more pollution, greenhouse gases, and garbage than any other on Earth—and doesn't even make us happy.” Americans are paying for agricultural subsidies that encourage environmentally destructive farming practices that poison our land, our water, and our bodies. Through the Superfund program, our tax dollars are paying to clean up toxic chemical spills caused by corporations, when corporations should be cleaning their own messes. The average cost of cleaning a Superfund site is $ 140 million.

For the 99% to thrive, we must shift our nation's taxes and public investment priorities.

That does not mean that we can “redistribute” our way to prosperity. Rebuilding the middle class will take more than merely changing the tax code. To be globally competitive, America must tackle a range of issues, including the need for a smarter trade policy, monetary policy, and more robust research and development strategies. We need a national commitment to bring back manufacturing, fix our schools, grow small businesses, focus on entrepreneurship, and retrain our workforce. We also need the American Dream 2.0 strategies, discussed earlier, bolstering the non-monetary, alternative economies grounded in gifting, bartering, and sharing.

But none of those strategies will make a difference—as long as the top 1% continues to siphon off and horde money at the very top. We must rebalance the economy so that more money circulates among the 99%. Our economy should respect and reward the contribution of working families. We cannot have a vibrant country without a strong middle class—because someone has to build things, and someone has to buy them. Our nation's economic policy should be overhauled to put Main Street's needs ahead of the Wall Street's greed.

Faced with these problems, too many Americans shrug their shoulders and assume that we can't repair our democracy and get our country back on track. Our ancestors and forebears would be appalled. They faced much worse challenges and endured deeper disappointments, but they did not give up. We should look to their examples—to find the strength to win the future.

There have always been ample justifications and excuses for despair. They existed even at the moment of our founding. The shortcomings of this republic were troubling enough, in fact, to leave sorrow in the hearts of the founders, themselves. For example, as Thomas Jefferson reflected on the injustices that were being heaped upon enslaved Africans on these shores, he lamented, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

Jefferson knew that millions were suffering horrors and abuses, including those whom he had himself enslaved. But he did not surrender his belief in the promise of America; he accepted that the nation was founded on higher ideals than his generation could embody.

And yet those very ideals became our true north, calling us always to a higher ground. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all . . . are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The story of America is the story of an imperfect people, struggling to bring our founding Reality closer, ever closer, to the beauty of our founding Dream.

Over the decades, those pulling America forward have been winning. In the last century, the dreamers beat the doubters, hands down.

Remember, every cause and constituency that people of conscience care about was in the garbage can, as recently as 1900. At the turn of the last century, women couldn't vote. African Americans and other people of color had no rights at all. Workers had no rights or security; there were no weekends; there was not one paid federal holiday; there was no middle class to speak of. Kids were toiling in factories. There were no environmental protections at all. Not only did lesbians and gays have no rights; they didn't even have a specific designation or acknowledged term in the English language. That was where we were in 1900.

It is hard to believe now, but there were people who looked around in those days and said, “Well, this looks pretty good to me! Let's
conserve
things just the way they are.” They were the cheap patriots of their day.

Thank goodness, even in those days, America was blessed with a bounty of deep patriots. Looking around, they were aghast. They
said, “America will never be perfect. But we can have a much more ‘perfect union' than this.”

Those heroes and heroines worked day after day, year after year, decade after decade, often risking their lives—to bring about
progress
. Some were jailed. Some were beaten. Some were martyred. But they didn't give up. By the end of the twentieth century, we had a much fuller expression of American democracy.

Those heroes forged an extraordinary century, characterized by the birth of a mass middle class. They made heroic advances in the areas of worker's rights, environmental protection, equal opportunity, and more. What the world came to call “The American Way” is, in many ways, just an amalgamation of all their hopes and aims: that America could be a thriving, entrepreneurial nation, where work is respected, workers are protected, the middle class is growing, and opportunity is expanding to more and more of our people.

What do we call the remarkable century that these deep patriots shaped?

We call it the American Century.

Some progressives take umbrage at the notion of American exceptionalism, seeing nothing but arrogance and jingoism in the idea. But America is exceptional if for no other reason than because Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made us exceptional. The suffragettes made America exceptional. Dolores Huerta and César Chávez made America exceptional. The Stonewall rebellion made America exceptional. Over the decades and centuries, countless good and decent people of every color and every class have marched, worked, bled, and died to make this country exceptional. We should be proud of their past achievements. And we should speak from that place of pride as we share our dreams for America's future.

We have a long way to go. In this age of polarization, one political extreme pretends that we already have obliterated every vestige
of bigotry and bias. The opposite extreme, meanwhile, insists that we have not made an inch of progress in one hundred years. Neither camp is being honest. There was much to overcome, and much work remains to be done. But our ancestors' sacrifices and struggles were not in vain. We are a better, more inclusive nation today than we were in 1900 or 1950 or even 1980. And we will be still more so, thirty years hence.

In America, we honor the past—good, bad, and otherwise. And yet we place our faith in the future. We should never deny the pain of yesterday. But we should never let that pain have the last word, either.

The future is worth fighting for. The dreams of our forebears are worth defending. The aspirations of our children are worth protecting. And the American Dream itself is worth reinventing—and rebuilding.

We have a duty to stand up to the dream-killers in our country.

At stake is not just the American Dream, but the Dream that is America.

Cowardice and capitulation before the foes of progress is not an option, nor has it ever been. The time has come for the next generation of deep patriots to step forward.

We have another century to win.

First of all, thank you to my parents, Loretta Jean Kirkendoll Jones and the late Willie Anthony Jones. Also, my grandparents, the late Bishop Chester Arthur Kirkendoll and Alice Elizabeth Singleton Kirkendoll. I honor my wonderful wife, Jana Carter, and our beautiful sons. They have made untold sacrifices for me to create this book. I salute my entire family, the Kirkendolls, the Carters, and the legendary Smith-Jones-Glover clan of Memphis, Tennessee; my twin sister Angela Thracheryl Jones and her sons, DeAubrey Jerome Weekly and Brandon Demetrious Weekly; my godparents—Dorothy Zellner, Constancia “Dinky” Romilly, and Terry Weber; and my godsister, Diana Frappier.

Through the hard times, I relied on the friendship of Jodie Evans, Baye Adofo-Wilson, Bracken Hendricks, Priya Haji, Gillian Caldwell, Michelle Loren Alexander, Marianne Manilov, Kalia Lydgate, Aaron Wernham, Jana McAnich, Abigail “Abby” Clark, Valerie Aubel, Karen Streeter, Craig Harshaw, Ai-jen Poo, Billy Parish, Deborah James, E. Jerold Ogg, Jane Ogg, Lynne Twist, Eva Jefferson Paterson, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, Joel Rogers, Robert Gass, Robert Borosage, David Friedman, Fred Krupp, Claude Pepin, Vin Ryan and family, Bill McKibben, Kerry Kennedy, Laurie David, Arianna Huffington, John Podesta, and Al Gore. Many thanks too, to Perry Rosenstein and to the Puffin Foundation for their generosity and support.

This book's insights did not come into my brain, fully formed; they arose out of innumerable conversations with extraordinary people. For any valuable contributions, I am happy to share the credit with my colleagues at the Center for American Progress, the Campaign for America's Future, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Appalachian Voices, Demos,
350.org
, the Democracy Alliance, and the Clinton Global Initiative. As for the shortcomings in conception or presentation, those are mine, alone.

I enjoyed teaching at Princeton University's Center for African American Studies, in conjunction with the Woodrow Wilson School, during the 2010–2011 academic year. I grew in conversation with professors Eddie S. Glaude, Noliwe Rooks, and Cornel West. The whip-smart
undergraduates who took my Liberation Ecology class taught me as much as I taught them.

I thank everyone who has helped to build the Ella Baker Center, Color of Change, Green For All, and Rebuild the Dream. I am proud to be a cofounder. Regarding Rebuild the Dream, I am eternally grateful to Natalie Foster and Billy Wimsatt, along with Wes Boyd, Nina Utne, Ilyse Hogue, Guy Saperstein, Ian Kim, Jim Pugh, Caroline Murray, Somer Huntley, and the rest of the team. I appreciate
Moveon.org
for being the incubator. I thank those who believed in us early, including Nancy Bagley, Patricia and Stephen Blessman, Joanie Bronfman, Peter Buckley, Marilyn Clements and family, Quinn Delaney and Wayne Jordan, David desJardins, Farhad Ebrahimi, Ellen Friedman and the Compton Foundation, Agnes Gund, Anna Hawken and Rob McKay, Heidi Hess and James Rucker, Suzanne and Lawrence Hess, Courtney Hull, Marion Hunt, Swanee Hunt and the Hunt Prime Movers, Michael Kieschnick, Anna Lefer Kuhn, Fran and Charles Rodgers, Susan Sandler and Steven Phillips, Steve Silberstein, Nancy Stephens, Pat Stryker, Ellen and Steve Susman, Marge Tabankin and the Streisand Foundation, Valerie Tarico and Brian Arbogast, Kate and Phil Villers, Christy and Scott Wallace, Jennifer Wood, and Al Yates. As my main thinking partner at the conceptual stage, Noland Chambliss's ideas and insights were indispensable. We never could have gotten this thing off the ground without the leadership, generosity, and dedication of Cynthia Ryan.