We are proud to feature Stewart Acuff’s Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life In Organizing
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Read more about this publication. Read part of Foreword by Bernie Sanders.
I recently came across a study of the effect recessions have on new college graduates. For the record, the study was published in the January 2012 issue of American Economic Journal and is titled “The Short- and Long- Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession.”
The authors of the study had a particularly good 20-year set of data on recent male college graduates in Canada. They admitted that this wasn’t everybody, but decided to go where the data was. What they lacked in looking at a bigger picture of how recessions hurt working people was made up for by how closely they could look at what was happening to new college grads. It is not a pretty picture.
For starters, they found that even a garden-variety recession dropped earnings for the group by 9 percent. This effect gradually faded as the recession eased, but it took 10 years for the negative effect to disappear altogether. The effect was much larger for those who graduated when the recession started than it was for those who had even only a few years in the work force.
I suppose we could attribute these results to bad luck. There is more to the story, however. Graduating in tough times affected different people in different ways. As the authors of the study put it, “recessions lead to high and unequal losses in cumulated earnings for unlucky college graduates.”
The “unequal” part came about because of, you guessed it, privilege. If the graduate did not go to an elite college or major in one of the highest paying majors, he took a much bigger hit. What the researchers called the “least advantaged” graduates suffered a lifetime earnings loss of more than four times the elite group.
Here’s how I read the study results: Our emerging third world economy is hitting the youngest workers the hardest. All will take time to catch up to their middle class dreams, and many of them never will with the way things are going. A college education, despite all of its many advantages, is no refuge from our economic storm. Power, not smarts, is necessary to get a fair share of today’s economic pie.
I’ll end by thanking UAW for all they are doing to organize graduate assistants. That will show tomorrow’s leaders something that they are increasingly unlikely to hear in college: Labor unions and middle class economies go hand-in-hand.
In my new book, Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, I write about the legacy Dr. King left amongst organizers for social justice and the role Kingian nonviolence continues to play in organizing strategy.
There is no better example of “playing bigger than you are” than the centuries-long struggle for justice for African-Americans. From the struggle for emancipation led by former slaves and Black intellectuals like Frederick Douglass and clergy like William Lloyd Garrison, to the hundred year struggle for post-slavery freedom led by giants like Dubois, A. Philip Randolph, and Dr. King, organizers for racial justice in America have fought overwhelming odds.
Dr. King developed his ideas and strategy for nonviolent struggle in part because he realized the power of the opposition was superior and that no other strategy would be successful.
But at this time as we honor Dr. King, let us remember he knew the movement he led and the struggle he engaged in were much larger than freedom for African-Americans. He understood that freedom for African-Americans would mean freedom for all Americans.
And he knew social freedom and racial justice were not enough.
Dr. King was just as committed to economic justice. He once asked what good it is to be able to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger? Of course, he died while leading a strike of working poor sanitation workers in Memphis. His last campaign, which brought him to Memphis, was The Poor People’s Campaign.
The financial elite, the corporate media, and radical rightwing politicians like Georgia native Newt Gingrich this weekend portray King as a “dreamer,’ a “drum major,” innocent and non-threatening.
Those of us whose lives have been changed by the struggle and vision of Dr. King would do well to remember he was with the 99 percent. He was one of the world’s greatest organizers. He believed in action, not just dreams. He never gave in to power. Dr. King disrupted the status quo and business as usual in the Jim Crow south and challenged the polite racism of the north. And, as Jesus did, Dr. King turned over the tables of the moneychangers in Memphis and Selma and Albany and, especially, Montgomery.
With 50 percent of Americans living in poverty, with our country’s greatest-ever income inequality, with the growing, abusive power of the 1 percent, the financial elite, we need Dr. King’s message and vision just as much as ever. We need his real message of struggle and organizing and sacrifice and rigorous strategy and economic justice, not the financial elite’s scrubbed and sanitized version of Dr. King. We need the version he lived and he died for. Dr. King understood “playing bigger than you are.”
I hope you will read my new book available at Levins Publishing, Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing.
As someone who lived in Atlanta, GA, from 1985 to 2000, I’ve listened to Newt Gingrich way more than I ever wanted. In fact, I led four demonstrations against him in 1995 when he assumed the Speaker’s chair and tried to enact his Contract on America. He even threatened Rico action against me for advocating nonviolent protest against him, and I got a set of my own intelligence officers. I tell the whole story in my new book, Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing.
I have never agreed with Newt on anything– till this week. In a TV interview on his campaign bus he said that just because something is legal, it’s not necessarily the right thing to do.
Of course, Newt was talking about Mitt Romney’s time at the private equity firm Bain Capital.
I never expected to hear Newt say anything I agreed with; I also never expected to watch such a raging debate about capitalism at the very highest levels of the Republican Party.
The debate is not about capitalism vs socialism, or social democracy or capitalism vs communism, as John McCain said. It’s about whether our society and our economy and each one of us can expect capitalism to work for the vast majority of us, the 99 percent, or only for the 1 percent.
From 1932 till 1980, part of the economic consensus in America was that to work best for our economy and our people, capitalism had to be tempered and regulated. There had to be counterweights to capitalism’s destructive power: unions for workers, government oversight, and financial regulations.
The breaking of that consensus and the social compact, which helped create it, has had a disastrous effect on our economy and the American people. We’ve had 30 years of wage stagnation and decline; a healthcare and insurance system that allows people to die unless we are willing to give it ever increasing amounts of our productive capacity; a 30 year housing crisis, especially for veterans; and now the impoverishment of almost 50 percent of Americans.
The deregulation of Wall St. and our largest banks and subsequent drunken financial gambling led directly to their destruction of five trillion dollars of America’s wealth. Meanwhile, GOP state legislators and governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich and Mitch Daniels want cops, firefighters, teachers, and other public employees to take wage and benefit cuts.
Unfettered capitalism is always ultimately destructive.
The American people and, indeed, all people deserve economic systems that serve all of us, not just the obscenely wealthy at the top who use their wealth to create the power to make more and more of us poor, sick, homeless, and hopeless.
Please check out my new book Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing at LevinsPublishing.com.