“An Overdue Second Bill of Rights” Oct. 7, 2018 Dr. Roger Ray
Roosevelt's January 11, 1944 State of the Union Address included:
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
The 19thcentury French writer and poet, Anatole France, made the statement of the obvious, that, in spite of how obvious it is, needed to be said: the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
We talk about liberty and equality and freedom as if these lofty aspects of a more perfect union are attained by simply abolishing slavery, insisting that our court system, no matter how unjustly skewed it really is, is somehow blind to race and class, and allowing the public to choose their own profession and avocations. But that presumes that you have choice. No sane person who has a home would choose to sleep under a bridge . . . though camping often looks a lot like that in my eyes.
No decent person who could afford to pay for their bread would either steal it or beg in the streets. So the laws that prohibit sleeping in homeless encampments, panhandling at intersections, or petty theft are not laws that affect people who have resources, a living wage or some other form of income. I don’t like panhandlers, I don’t like being robbed, and I would be uncomfortable if homeless people were camping in my backyard. In our minds, under the influence of a fairly rigid Protestant work ethic, we tend to assume that everyone has the ability to sleep in their own home or rented apartment, that they can buy basic groceries, and other necessities. It doesn’t take much time to wake up to the fact that this just ain’t so but it seems to take quite a bit longer to figure out what to do to create this more perfect union enshrined in our American constitution.
I have just returned from spending a few days touring the cradle of American democracy with my daughter in Boston. None of our nation’s founders were quite as pure and selfless as they were presented to us in our early education but, in spite of how much spin was put on their true selves, there really were a lot of geniuses who attempted to create a free democracy that had never really existed anywhere before that time.
They were not able to be at all consistent with the lofty language they put into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They compromised on the full humanity of people of color. They did not allow women to vote and, frankly, there were a number of other restrictions on women that might make not voting seem like one of the more mild infractions.
But the language of freedom and liberty was there and they wrote a bill of rights that was intended to insure that liberty against the kind of abuses that they had suffered at the hands of the British monarch and, frankly, some of the colonial governors.
But as Franklin Roosevelt observed in his State of the Union address in 1944, that people who are in desperate poverty are not really free. I think this is obvious but my good friend, Ron Hertenstein, and I have argued the point a bit, and since he is not here, I’ll use him as a foil to present my case…. Trust me, it is a lot easier this way:
You have heard me say through the years that virtually all of our bananas are grown under slave conditions. Almost all of our coffee is slave produced and most of our shoes and clothing are manufactured in circumstances of slavery. Col. Ron will insist that if those workers can choose to walk off of the coffee plantation, the banana farm, or out of the sweat shop where they sew suits and shoes with Italian sounding labels in them that they are not slaves.
Now, I have been on the coffee plantations in Nicaragua and I can speak with authority that there are armed guards with machine guns who at least look like they will shoot any workers who tries to leave, but, at least, in theory, they could leave if they had anywhere to go. The land is owned by the very wealthy who own huge tracts of land. The poor own nothing, and so far as they know, the whole world is made up of plantations owned by the wealthy who hire thugs with machine guns and so they could walk for two weeks to escape one plantation and end up on one that is just as bad or maybe even worse. I say that is slavery or the economic equivalent of it, Col. Ron says that if they can leave that they are not really slaves. Ron is not here, I have the microphone, and it turns out that in this debate, I win.
I am encouraged by the fact that I have Franklin Roosevelt on my side. You may be aware that having Roosevelt on your side is not always a deal closer. Many of his contemporaries called him a Socialist, and there was a fairly serious plan to gather up disgruntled veterans to form a militia that would have removed him from power. They don’t talk about it in school but you can review the basic facts in my sermon of : June 18, 2017 entitled, “War is a Racket.” The more years that I preach the more this becomes like a Sherlock Holmes series, you have to know the back story to fully understand what is happening now!
A slave is bound by chains and goes to work at the point of a sword, but, in our time, a virtual slave is bound by chains of poverty and goes to work at abusive jobs that do not pay a living wage because they don’t have a better option. We don’t want to acknowledge that WalMart, McDonalds, and Amazon engage in slave labor practices but, in reality, it is the same as. And, as long as the largest employers set the salary level for the rest of the economy, our experiment in democracy envisioned by Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, is on thin ice.
Crushing poverty threatens to turn our democracy into a tyranny. And though I do not want to spend one minute of my precious time talking about the 45thPresident this morning, it is just a basic fact that any president, any government administration in congress or the senate, that widens the income gap, that undermines the wages and benefits of the poor, is, in effect, dismantling democracy to make way for tyranny. The promised middle-class tax cut actually went into the pockets of the top 1% with the tired old “trickle down” propaganda saying that giving money to the owners of corporations would create jobs, when, in fact, it did what it always does . . . it prompted stock buy-backs that are inflating the stock market on borrowed money and sent profits to off-shore bank accounts. Both of which will only serve to hasten the collapse of both our economy and our democracy.
Look, I am not an expert on American history, but I know enough to recognize that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, and Ben Franklin all had glaring moral blind spots and personal failings. But given the European soup of monarchy and class tiered society that they emerged from, the experiment in democracy that they tried to launch was, and I’ll defend this point against all comers, a moral triumph. You don’t go from moral nightmare to perfection in one giant leap nor do you do it in a single generation and evidently not even in a single century.
Insuring the freedom of speech, of religion, of association, and protections against unwarranted search and seizure, ex post facto laws, and the like was huge. But by the time the world had fallen into the second world war, it was evident that our 18thcentury bill of rights would never create the more perfect union our founders envisioned.
In the midst of that global conflict, President Roosevelt envisioned coming out of that great war with the moral resolve to finish the job by creating the kind of economic independence that would actually make Americans free.
Roosevelt’s proposed second bill of rights has 8 points and though he proposed them nearly 4 generations ago, none of them have yet been implemented and we progressives in this age find ourselves still advocating and working for all of them.
The first of his points was:
· The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
No one who wants to work should be without a job. The New Deal exemplified a primitive model for this in creating public works jobs that built some of the bridges and parks we still have in Springfield today. Everyone who is willing and able to work should be able to have a paying job, no exceptions.
His second suggested amendment said that all Americans have:
· The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
Roosevelt was obviously advocating for full employment at a living wage but there is one more word here that I don’t want for us to miss and that is the word “recreation.” It is like the famous song from the women’s labor movement that demands that their wages be enough, not simply to buy bread, but to also buy roses. The point being that human beings do not exist simply to work. We are not cattle to be milked for our labor and then turned into leather coats and shoes and hamburgers. Compensation for labor should be enough to provide for some quality of life, some happiness, some leisure and recreation. A hundred years ago women marched for bread AND roses because we should be able to be both free and happy!
The failure to take note of Roosevelt’s third and fourth amendments has resulted in the lethal transfer of wealth from the whole of the nation into the hands of the few.
· The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
· The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
Note how, in the absence of sane guard-rails on unbridled capitalism, the growth of WalMart made one family more wealthy than the lower half of our nation of over 300 million people by forcing smaller, family owned businesses all over the world into bankruptcy and impoverishing even the people who worked for them. And now, upstart Amazon.com has made Jeff Bezos the richest person in the world, putting even WalMarts in danger of closure and killing off shopping malls and retail stores all over our country. Thankfully, with the persuasive help of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Bezos has just decided to raise the wages of all of his domestic employees to $15/hour. That is a step in the right direction, but it still leaves our marketplace open to a handful of people becoming the Lords in a nation full of serfs who can never own a business or hope to do more than minimally survive.
Are we really a free nation if we continue to allow the 1% to claim 80% of the earth and its resources for themselves while leaving the rest of us to fight over the scraps? This unbounded economic system that can’t seem to come up with a livable floor of income surely must also have some kind of sane ceiling that makes the distribution of the world’s wealth much more fair than anything we will ever get out of the largess of the Walton, or Bezos families, or even the relative generosity of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
Somewhere between very rich or even obscenely rich, and “master of the universe” there is a sane place at which we can say that enough is enough already! There are more than enough resources in the world to satisfy the needs of the poor but there will evidently never be enough to satisfy the greed of the obscenely wealthy. The society as a whole has the right, nay, the obligation, to set some sane boundaries.
Roosevelt’s fifth tenet is:
Our little church building was first constructed here in the midst of a lower middle class neighborhood with modest homes. In the past decade, this area just outside of town is becoming populated with gated communities protecting private homes the size of small hotels and with about as many rooms and bathrooms as a small hotel though many will house no more than two people who are apparently compensating for something.
On the one hand, you might say that such competition in a social “edifice complex” is none of our business but is it none of our business when there are nearly a thousand people in our community who are sleeping under bridges, in drainage culverts, and sewer catch basins? Can a just society let Fred and Susie sleep with their little Sarah and Billy in a car parked on Commercial St. while Brett and Britany have a 8000 sq. ft home in Springfield, a 3000 sq. ft cabin on the lake, and a 4 bedroom ski lodge in Aspen? At some point you have to see the connection between Brett and Britany having too many houses and Fred and Susie not having a house. This is not complicated. Excess on one end of the scale creates deficits on the other end of the scale.
The very wealthy will always have nicer digs than the poor but isn’t there a rational floor that we should insist upon. Shouldn’t everyone have a safe and decent shelter in which they can cook, sleep, and bathe?
I wouldn’t care if Brett has an elevator for his cars in his garage if I didn’t see Fred being turned away from Crosslines because they won’t give groceries to someone who is too poor to have a stove and a refrigerator. Did you know that there are people who are so poor that even poverty programs can’t give them anything? Did you know that there are people with so little income that even Habitat for Humanity can’t give them a house? I’m just making the modest proposal that Brett can have his 18-seat home theater when Fred gets a refrigerator and a flushing toilet. Is that too much to ask?
And I want to take this amendment out of order because I see it as being directly connected to those just mentioned: The right to a good education.
Long ago our nation realized that we could not survive as a viable democracy without an educated population. But technology, the marketplace, and the global network of the economy has changed in such a way that a college education is as necessary to a successful career today as a high school education was a generation ago. What nations from Europe to South America have realized is that if you want to be an economically successful country in the future, you have to make a university education tuition free right now. Germany realized this, as did Denmark, Finland, Venezuela, for goodness sake, Slovenia has tuition free higher education! But in the USA we are doing exactly what our closest rivals and state enemies would want us to do: we are making higher education more expensive, more unattainable, and less likely for a larger and larger majority of our workforce.
If we don’t correct this, we will become the nation exporting labor to shine the shoes of the French and pick the coffee beans for Venezuela. The wall between the USA and Mexico may become Mexico’s defense against undocumented American agricultural workers pouring over their border…. Which is the only circumstance under which Mexico will pay for the wall.
Our apparently crazy socialist politician friend, Franklin Roosevelt, also said that we all should have:
· The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
For all of Sarah Palin’s rhetoric about “death panels” and Ben Carson’s insistence that Obama-care was worse than slavery, our American health care delivery system that discriminates between the rich and the poor, the insured and the uninsured, to a degree that Franklin Roosevelt, even though wheelchair bound when he wrote this, could never have imagined. I am 62 years old and have never taken a sick day during my entire adult life, and yet my healthcare costs more than my house payment so that once a year a very pretty young doctor with a diamond stud in her nostril can tell me that I really ought to lose some weight. . . not that I’m bitter.
Millions of Americans die prematurely because they either have no insurance or they cannot begin to afford the high deductibles on the insurance they do have. Our system of rationing healthcare only to the wealthy and the well insured actually costs more than giving adequate healthcare to everyone and in light of that simple fact, Americans can only stand as being found guilty of being moral monsters in the modern world. We could give healthcare to everyone in our nation and save money while doing. The choice not to do so sends hundreds of thousands to their graves prematurely and our politicians, with rare exception, are silent about it and, for that matter, most pulpits are silent about it. I do not have repeatable words strong enough to condemn this outrage that people of conscience have been trying to correct for almost a century and which has been long ago corrected in other industrialized nations where church attendance is only a fraction of what it is in America. So, when you hear me saying that mainstream religion is more of a problem than it is a solution, you will understand what I mean.
And finally, Roosevelt’s second bill of rights asserts that we all have:
· The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
This is the one of Roosevelt’s eight declared rights that he actually meaningfully addressed in the creation of the Social Security system. It is far from perfect and it has been adulterated in a way to insure its eventually actuarial collapse but, even still, such mathematical geniuses as George W. Bush and Marco Rubio have wanted to privatize it so that your hard-earned retirement could be transferred from you to wealthy hedge fund managers.
The very elite have an inexplicable and indefensible belief that they are somehow the rightful owners of the assets of the poor and middle class and the only thing that will keep them from taking those assets will be if churches, labor unions, low wage workers, and voters who also have a conscience, will wake up and defend themselves against the exploitation of the powerful.
As you may have noticed, I love finding historical examples of people who promoted the progressive agenda that we believe in from long ago. Using Roosevelt’s proposed second bill of rights was a suggestion of one of our YouTube listeners but as I wrote this sermon sitting in the dining hall of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, I noticed that next to my coffee cup was this quote from the 4thcentury Turkish saint, St. John Chrysostom:
You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. You know that we have not yet become that more perfect union that lies within our grasp and it is your life assignment to being it into existence.
