The day before he died we took our last walk together in the sun. I’ll miss him. The house seems empty with one less spirit in it.

It’s a tricky business, this politically charged issue of capital punishment. On the one hand are the victims of crime, who understandably seek emotional closure over the shattering of their lives, and the loss of their loved ones, usually under terrible circumstances. On the other side, as the execution last night of Troy Anthony Davis despite nagging questions as to his guilt reminds us, is the troubling reality that our legal system is never foolproof, disproportionally penalizes the poor and historically has targeted minority communities. Without minimizing the suffering of the victims, the historical parallels — as in the case of Davis — to a dark American past, ought be cause for all of us to consider the issues of his case, the application of the law and deeper questions of justice and injustice.

Just over sixty years ago, on May 8, 1951, Willie McGee, an African American laborer, was executed by the State of Mississippi despite a lack of evidence that he had committed any crime. Thanks to the efforts of one southern writer, William Faulkner, and others who soon joined his cause, McGee’s case was one of the few capital punishment cases in the Jim Crow era that ever rose to international attention. The false charge against Willie McGee became one of the models for the fictionalized case against the character Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. McGee’s case was revisited by the award-winning New Mexico writer Alex Heard last year in his book, The Eyes of Willie McGee. The history of abuse of the law is as troubling today as it was then.

McGee’s trial lasted less than three hours. The all-white jury deliberated only two-and-a-half minutes before sentencing McGee to death. In the appeals that followed, a crusading young lawyer from New York, and a future Congresswoman, Bella Abzug, fought for clemency for her client, Willie McGee.

In the last days of McGee’s life, the Mississippi Supreme Court refused to hear Abzug’s appeal, and the Governor refused to meet with her; the hotels in Jackson, Mississippi refused to house her. In the final days just before McGee’s execution, Bella Abzug was forced to spend the night crouched down and hiding in a locked bathroom stall of the Jackson, Mississippi Greyhound bus station while a band of racist thugs searched for her. Bella Abzug’s legal crusade never stood a chance. In Willie McGee’s Mississippi there were two systems of justice.

Decades after the McGee case, studies have repeatedly shown that race, place and economic status are key factors on who lives and who dies in capital punishment cases. A 2003 University of Maryland study shows that race and geography continue to plague the justice system in death penalty cases. A similar study in North Carolina found similar statistics. Another report, commissioned by the New Jersey Supreme Court, also turned up a similar pattern of capital convictions and helped convince that state’s legislature to abolish the death penalty in the Garden State in 2007.

Last night’s execution of Troy Davis by the State of Georgia makes painfully clear, once again, that six decades on we still have two systems of justice in the United States. Davis was convicted of the murder of a white police officer in Savannah in 1991. The officer, Mark MacPhail, was gunned down while rushing to the rescue of a homeless man being pistol-whipped in the parking lot of Savannah’s Greyhound bus station. The day after the murder, several witnesses told police that Troy Davis was the shooter.

Subsequently, seven of nine eyewitnesses, including the homeless man who was under attack at the bus station that night in 1991, recanted their statements, citing pressure from police in the case. Others implicated Sylvester “Redd” Coles, one of the original so-called “witnesses” to the crime. No physical evidence was ever presented that linked Davis to the crime, and the weopon was never recovered. Yet despite so many doubts in the Davis case, the courts refused to stop the execution that was carried out last night.

With so many questions about what really happened in 1991, Davis’s life should have been spared.

“I hear Rosalee, see the eyes of Willie McGee,” wrote the haunted African-American playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, in her poem Lynchsong, shortly after the execution that was carried out in Mississippi in 1951. The lines of her poem were a reference to the pleas of Rosalee McGee for the life of her husband. Like the southern writers, William Faulkner, and later Harper Lee, images of injustice were just outside the doorstep and never very far away from the thoughts of Lorraine Hansberry, as well, though she lived far from the Jim Crow south. Her family fought housing segregation in the courts in Chicago, and her circle of friends, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Claude McCay, used their own pens over the whole span of their lifetimes to fight against a double-standard of justice far north of the Mason-Dixon line, where they lived and worked. New York’s “Battling” Bella Abzug never stopped fighting for the equal treatment for all, in the courtroom or in Congress.

The rest of us need to pick up the torch and carry on their cause. No more injustice!

It is too late for us to save the life of Troy Davis, but it is never too late to carry on the work to end inequality, and demand equal application of justice for all. We need to abolish the death penalty, nationally, once and for all time, and end that state-sanctioned system of vengeance that disproportionately sentences the poor and the powerless — while doing nothing to deter crime — and we need to do it now. For proponents of fairness, last night’s action by the State of Georgia against Troy Anthony Davis ought to prove one thing: silence is never an option.

A few hours after President John F. Kennedy called on Congress to pass comprehensive Civil Rights legislation in 1963, Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP, was gunned down outside his home in Jackson, that state’s capital city, the victim of a racist assassin. Evers died with his pockets filled with voter registration applications, soaked with the fallen civil rights leader’s blood. A combat veteran who fought in France and Germany during World War II, Medgar Evers was buried a few days after he was murdered, on June 19, 1963, forty-eight years ago this coming Sunday, with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, D.C.

In 1963 Medgar Evers paid the ultimate price for demanding the fundamental right guaranteed every citizen, everywhere; the right to register and vote. Today, less than half a century later, that basic democratic right of all citizens, eighteen years of age and older, under law, is under attack once again, here in New Mexico and across the United States. From the proposed legislation that would require voters to produce photo identification at the polls that is cropping up in many states across the country, including our own, to the proposal by Wisconsin’s extremist governor, Scott Walker, to strip college students of their right to the ballot box, attempts to disenfranchise average Americans has reached a level that hasn’t been seen since Medgar Evers’ time.

A GOP Pattern of Minority Voter Suppression
Newt Gingrich, a Republican aspirant for the White House and a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, has shamefully called for the return of poll tests, a practice made illegal by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Due to historical patterns of illegal voter suppression in the Jim Crow era, including phony “literacy” and other so-called ballot access tests, the 1965 landmark legislation outlawed such practices, nationally. Two of our neighboring states, Texas and Arizona, remain under special provisions of the Voting Rights Act that require those states to “pre-clear” any state legislative attempt to change “any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting” by the Federal Justice Department and a three-judge panel of the District Court of the District of Columbia.

Only a few years ago, under the cynical and corrupt leadership of Karl Rove and others, the GOP sought to politicize U.S. Attorney’s offices in a number of states, including in New Mexico, alleging that those federal attorneys were failing to bring prosecutions over a pattern of “voter fraud” that didn’t exist. The Rove assault was a brazen attempt to specifically suppress the votes of Hispanic and African American citizens.

Despite Rove’s departure, the GOP continues to engage in an ongoing pattern of voter suppression and intimidation, resulting in numerous prosecutions of local Republican leaders around the nation for their attacks on citizenship rights. Notoriously in Florida, African American voters were denied their right to vote when GOP officials wrongly, and illegally, challenged voters off the registration rolls as “former felons.”  The criminal challenges were made not on evidence — no such evidence existed — but rather by broadly cherry-picking voters off the rolls through the use of computer modeling, targeting specific classes of voters by neighborhood demographics, by age and by ethnic surname.

Duran, Martinez Try Suppression
Attempting to pass a voter suppression bill in the New Mexico Legislature earlier this year, New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran and Governor Susana Martinez claimed evidence of thirty-seven illegal voter registrations. Evidence to back up the claim vanished when the bill died in the legislature. Undeterred, Duran has subsequently flagged 64,000 New Mexicans, more than five percent of our registered voters and over ten percent of the citizens who cast votes in last year’s general election, to be “investigated” by state police.

Remember Sacrifices, Fight Back
The right of citizens to register and vote is sacrosanct. Voter suppression and intimidation is un-American. Efforts to return to a time when many of us were stripped of our central right to engage in democratic decision-making must be turned back, and we all need to be alert to the present danger. We need to act to protect that fundamental right which belongs to all of us. Forty-eight years after Medgar Evers was laid to rest for standing up for that basic right of citizenship, the right to vote, we need to remember the sacrifices of those who worked and sacrificed to guarantee access to the ballot and the voting booth, and carry on their fight.

Also published at Democracy for New Mexico

“Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time,” President Harry Truman often said.

Faced with the so-called wisdom of the chattering class and the august advice of Washington’s political insiders, Truman chose instead to take his own counsel and run his own re-election effort, his way. In the process, as we all should know, Truman transformed his often forecast loss into a solid victory, going away. In doing so, he overcame two fractious third-party efforts by former Democrats and recaptured both houses of Congress to boot.

A day after his historic election, from the rear of a train platform at St. Louis Union Station, Truman held aloft the famously overconfident journalistic faux pas of the Chicago Tribune, whose headline read, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Harry Truman, as was most often the case, got it right. If Democrats expect to win they need to run on honest principles, get a backbone and stand for something. We need not look too far afield to see that Harry Truman’s plainspoken wisdom still holds as true today as it did in 1948. Faced with difficult re-election efforts, two of New Mexico’s freshmen Congressmen banked on totally opposite strategies, both in their voting records in Congress, and in their re-election efforts in 2010.

In New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District, Martin Heinrich established a progressive voting record in Congress and ran forthrightly on that record in his re-election campaign. In New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District Harry Teague frequently ran away from the tough votes, or failed to support or deliver on many of the key national and local issues that he was first elected on, and which his constituency expected of him. Instead, he expended much of his energy and political capital trying to placate conservative voters in his southern New Mexico district that never had any intention of backing him for re-election and who were always destined to be far beyond his reach.

In his 2010 re-election efforts, Heinrich fielded an enthusiastic and energized base of supporters and won with over 52% of the vote in a district whose boundaries were drawn for his Republican predecessor. Teague, in contrast, ran campaign commercials running away from the Democratic Party and took an arms-length approach to the progressive base of voters in his district. Teague lost, and most importantly he lost badly, not at the hands of progressive critics, but by the votes of the very constituencies on which he had expended all his energy.

In his 2008 election, Harry Teague captured 50% of the vote in his home base, Lea County in far southeast New Mexico (see chart). In 2010, Harry Teague only garnered a devastating 21% of the vote in his home base (see chart). The same happened in Chaves and Eddy Counties.

In Doña Ana County, the largest county in the district, Teague captured 60% of the electorate in 2008 and held onto a solid 57% of the vote in his 2010 re-election effort. Harry Teague rolled up an even more impressive victory in Grant County, where he took 61% of the votes cast. In 2010, Teague won Luna and Hidalgo Counties as well.

Given the high registration numbers in Doña Ana County and the low voter turnout in Lea, Chaves and Eddy counties, Harry Teague might have won if he had been a little more progressive in the votes he cast in Congress, and if he had run another kind of campaign. Instead, he tried to play it safe. In the end, the majority of voters in the 2nd District just weren’t all that happy with Harry Teague, and what had been a promising start to a Congressional career ended after only one term.

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but last year’s election should be instructive to Democrats everywhere, from the President on down the line, both inside and outside the power centers of the Washington, D.C. “beltway” and in Santa Fe. As Harry Truman told us back in 1948, when Democrats keep to their principles and stand for something, we win. When we don’t, we lose.

As the current recession has dragged on, the national debate seems to have turned to slashing national investment and eliminating national debt at all cost, while, at the same time, backing dirty, failing and outdated industries, rather than growing our way out of bad economic times. Instead of engaging in sound market-based solutions and working toward the needed public investment that supports innovation, leaders of both parties seem intent on abandoning any semblance of classical economic policy for the all-out support of an outmoded policy of neo-mercantilism.

Mercantilism was a theory of economic development that held that there was a finite amount of wealth in the world, and that national treasuries were entirely dependent on the monopoly trade in, and the extraction of, that fixed wealth. The mercantilist age was based on increasing debt in protected commercial combinations, supported by massive militarist states, whose national blood and treasure was spent in maintaining those protected monopolies. Mercantile traders used their accumulated wealth to buy control of governments, who in turn spent the treasuries of those nations to maintain the mercantile monopolies. The mercantile epoch is best remembered for galleons filled with Mesoamerican gold, Indian cotton and southeast Asian spices plying the ocean waves to feed Europe’s little addictions.

For most of four centuries, up until the end of the 1800′s, European mercantilists stacked their gold and silver bullion and forced their home kingdoms deep into debt, engaged primarily in maintaining colonial supply lines including, most notoriously, the Atlantic triangular trade. This trade involved moving raw materials extracted from the Americas to Europe, sending manufactured goods back to the the Americas and to Africa and turning human beings into commodities. The human commodities were traded as slaves, and most perished working in the sugar cane fields of the Western Hemisphere, the cash crop of the colonial powers of mercantile Europe.

Adam Smith, War and Revolution
By the time of the enlightenment era of the mid-eighteenth century, the radical thinkers of Europe had mustered the courage to speak up against the mercantilist masters of that continent. Among the seditious, Adam Smith, the Scottish economist and philosopher wrote, “A great empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers all the goods with which these could supply them. For the sake of that little enhancement of price which this monopoly might afford our producers, the home-consumers have been burdened with the whole expense of maintaining and defending that empire.”

It would be comforting to believe that the old mercantilist age came apart merely through the superior economic and political arguments of enlightened spokespersons like Adam Smith. In fact, however, the old order collapsed in decades of war and revolution, including a thirty-years-long world war between Britain and France that finally hurled both of those empires and their allies from the Western Hemisphere. It should be little wonder why the framers of the United States Constitution were so suspicious of national trade monopolies and standing armies. Two-and-a-half centuries on, we seem to find ourselves right back at square one.

A New Incarnation of the Mercantilists
Over the last few years, our Republican and libertarian friends would have us believe that they are the great defenders of Adam Smith’s economic orthodoxy, champions of the “invisible hand” of the market, condemners of the large national debt and the defenders of enlightened economic growth, working to get us back to basics. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact they are just a new incarnation of the old mercantilist hoodoo.

Like medieval burgesses in their counting-houses, the Republican leadership puts the defense of monopoly trade combinations ahead of support for competitive small businesses, backs obsolete and dirty extractive industries over green technologies, opposes infrastructure development, whether it be rail, smart-grid energy, or rural broadband, and holds an outdated military-industrial complex sacrosanct, and all the enormous national debt that goes with it, at all costs. They place corporate protection ahead of innovation; they place government policing of individual “lifestyle” ahead of education, and military expenditures ahead of infrastructure, education, health and human resource development. Above all they defend tax breaks for oil companies over everything else. Drill here, drill now!

The Facts on Debt and Deficits
The inconvenient facts are readily available. Most of our national debt has been piled up almost entirely by Republican Administrations. Prior to sometime last year, when they got some kind of economic religion, the GOP told us, in the words of Dick Cheney, that “deficits don’t matter.” Ronald Reagan began his first term with a total debt of only $930 million and increased that total debt to $2.7 trillion, more than all the presidential administrations before him combined, including the “New Deal” of Roosevelt and “Great Society” of LBJ. The first Bush Administration expanded the national debt to over $4 trillion, and then George W. Bush nearly doubled the debt from $5.6 trillion to more than $10 trillion. Rather than calling for shared sacrifice, the second Bush fought two unfunded wars, while slashing the tax rates for the wealthiest Americans, and told the rest of us to just “go shopping.”

Most of our deficits come from support of one industry, of course, and that is maintaining the endless international supply lines of the oil industry.

A Right-Wing Prescription for Failure
Instead of addressing the real cause of all that debt, the Republican Party takes aim at everything that has nothing to do with the deficits, including Social Security. Instead of moving us away from our oil addiction, the GOP moves to protect that one industry against any competition. As gas and food prices rise and national capital cash flows remain sluggish, Republican leaders take aim at everyone and everything other than the root causes of all that debt — particularly education, health, infrastructure and services to the poor — and instead pump cash into the coffers of central bankers, falsely believing such transfusions will somehow cure capital-flow problems.

In Wisconsin, the GOP’s Governor Scott Walker attacks collective bargaining instead of building on that state’s strong education facilities. In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder seeks to cut corporate taxes by 86%, while raising individual income taxes and hatching a dubious scheme that would allow him to install un-elected corporate managers over elected local governments. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie calls for raising that state’s estate tax exemption from $675,000 to $1 million, while eliminating New Jersey’s earned income tax credit. Maine Governor Paul LePage, a Tea Party favorite, has introduced a tax package that would raise the state’s estate tax exemption from $1 million to $2 million — allowing four hundred of the state’s wealthiest estates to escape taxation — while hiking property taxes to make up the difference.

New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez wants to slash funds for public education while blowing away any regulatory oversight of dirty extractive industries or her pet campaign contributors like Doña Ana County’s dirty factory-dairy industry. Former Governor Gary Johnson, launching his vanity presidential campaign from a Taos-area ski slope, and looking to stoke the heart-strings of the so-called libertarian flock, tells us we should just go ahead and eliminate the whole national debt by next Thursday.

These schemes are not a recipe for recovery; they are a prescription for failure. They place protection for favored trade combinations ahead of innovation or sound market investment.

The Real Adam Smith
Even old Adam Smith, usually cited for his pure market orthodoxy, understood the need for public investment to public support the marketplace. Smith frequently called for government infusion of funds for key areas of development, including infrastructure and public education. Far from backing the unchecked support of corporate interests, Adam Smith was frequently among big business’s greatest critics, especially when they worked with government partners to support old trade combinations and stifle small-market innovation. “Businessmen,” Smith wrote in the Wealth of Nations, “are an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

The time is now for the government and the marketplace to invest in the future and oppose the policies of the new mercantilists, both those of the Republican Party and the corporatists in the Democratic Party, and to get back to basics and build for the future.

Among the many architectural gems in the city of Chicago, a city of landmark architectural gems, stands a large stone home constructed in 1886 and designed by the Boston architect H.H. Richardson. Because of its open interior floor plan, the Glessner House is considered by many to be the first “modern home.” Commissioned by John Glessner, a partner in Warder, Bushnell & Glessner, a 19th-century farm equipment manufacturer. The dichotomy between the home’s flowing open interior spaces and rich wooden detail and its severe fortress-like, harsh-stone exterior, with a facade lacking of any large windows, is a striking, often unnerving experience to present-day tourists and other visitors to the building.

One of the most unusual features of the structure is a stark, brick-walled servants’ corridor that runs the entire length of the exterior walls of the house and separates the interior of the home and the outer stone walls. The exterior windows along the corridor are mere arrow-slit openings only a few inches wide.

Glessner’s fortress home was not so much a statement of avant-garde architectural tastes as it was a domestic military engine, conceived by design, by the architect, and intended to protect the Glessner family from the working people of Chicago. For all of their wealth, John Glessner and his neighbors on Prairie Avenue in Chicago were a frightened and miserable lot, virtual prisoners in their opulent homes.

George M. Pullman, the railway sleeping car manufacturer, and Glessner’s immediate neighbor, was laid to rest at a secret midnight funeral, buried in a lead-lined coffin within a reinforced steel-and-concrete vault, under a slab of several tons of reinforced cement, due to fears that his body might be exhumed and desecrated by his angry employees. Marshall Field, the legendary retailer and another Prairie Avenue neighbor, lived in hiding, moving from his downtown businesses to his home in a dark, sealed carriage. His family, cooped up in their gilded-age mansion, lead lives more resembling the confines of a penitentiary than that of respected leaders of the community, a family wracked by scandal, murder and suicide.

Class Warfare
Just beyond their fortified homes were America’s working people, and a state of virtual war. Beginning in March of 1886, as H.H. Richardson was designing the Glessner home, a series of labor conflicts spread through the streets of the city and culminated in a general strike on May 1, 1886. Four days later, violence between police and workers escalated to a bombing. Though the perpetrator, or their political intentions, were unknown, Marshall Field led efforts on behalf of the Chicago business community to hang eight innocent men. The “Haymarket Tragedy,” as the event became known in the United States, set off world-wide pro-labor protests, and the events known as “Haymarket” to Americans have been commemorated internationally ever since, as May Day.

Conditions in Chicago were repeated in every major city that year, and deep into the plains. In 1886 alone, over 1400 violent strikes crippled the nation. 350,000 industrial workers struck in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and New York. Over 200,000 railway workers struck for seven months in states from Missouri to Texas, violently battling the hired vigilantes of the Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific railroads, the state militias west of the Mississippi and the Texas Rangers. The labor unrest spilled north into Canada and south into Mexico. Conflict also spread out onto the farms on the great plains, as Granger farmers called “populists” demanded the immediate nationalization of the banks and railroads.

Anti-Democratic Utopia
In the aftermath of 1886, Americans began to wrestle with the ongoing conflict between labor and business owners that threatened to turn the nation into Armageddon. A utopian novel by Edward Bellamy titled Looking Backward: 1887-2000, became the top-selling book of the era. Concerned with the incalcitrance of the special interests, the book envisioned an ideal future where labor and business lived in a world of perfect co-operative harmony. Largely forgotten today, Bellamy’s novel spurred a mass movement of followers, and Bellamy Clubs organized thousands of chapters in all corners of the United States. If Bellamy’s comforting vision of harmony between the classes attracted many, that projected harmony came at a very high price — the abolition of American democracy — which Bellamy thought corrupt.

Choosing Progressive Reform
Fortunately for all of us, Americans embarked on a substantially different path in the years following 1886, choosing progressive reform instead of the various extremist visions that devoured many of our sister nations. In choosing reform, Americans were able to bring labor and farmers together with business, and forge a prosperous nation for all Americans. One key to that prosperity, and a major one, was the recognition of America’s unions.

Faced with the challenge of extremism, either the anti-democratic extremism of the corporate special interests, or the anti-democratic visions of people like Bellamy, Americans chose, at the beginning of the 20th century, to steer the nation onto a path of principled, democratic reform — and back onto the sound republican vision of the Americans that had gone before them. “Friends,” Theodore Roosevelt said, “our task as Americans is to strive for social and industrial justice, achieved through the genuine rule of the people.”

Using the “bully-pulpit,” Roosevelt took on the special interests and adopted the path of reform of the progressives. “I prefer to work with moderate, with rational, conservatives,” Roosevelt said, “provided only that they do in good faith strive forward toward the light but when they halt and turn their backs to the light, and sit with the scorners on the seats of reaction, then I must part company with them.”

Today’s Radicalism
After some of what we have seen coming from the Republican Party and their corporate sponsors in the past few months, we would all be wise to spend a little time looking backward. We are right to be concerned about the extremist radicalism of the governments of Wisconsin and elsewhere — including the Martinez administration here in New Mexico — that seeks to replace moderate leadership with class, gender, ethnic and race hatred, against LGBT people, and to strip the unions of collective bargaining rights. This radicalism aim to turn back the clock a full century and a quarter, back to the dark world-vision of Glessner, Pullman, and Field.

We, as Americans, chose a different path in Roosevelt’s time, and prospered as a nation for that vision. We need to pick up the torch and get back to basics, and to our genuine American values, again today.

As we have watched the largest public protests in decades unfold in the streets of Madison over the past few days, I’ve been reflecting on my own values, old family ties, and the many hard working families that still live in that Midwestern state. I know a little about Wisconsin and its people. I was born there.

As a Wisconsin native I feel it necessary to comment on the working people of the state, on their collective bargaining rights, and on the fake budget crisis contrived by the newly elected Governor, Scott Walker, and his corporate masters the Koch Brothers; a fake crisis echoed here in New Mexico and on the national stage. As we probably all know by now, Walker came to office this year with a budget surplus, a rare occurrence in this economic downturn, and used his good fortune to launch a Union-busting scheme in the heart of one of the nation’s most progressive states; in fact, the state that gave progressivism its name.

My own progressive values were shaped at the dinner table in my grandparents’ Milwaukee kitchen where I spent many of my summer days when I was growing up. My grandfather, Stephen, for whom I was named, was a streetcar motorman. My grandmother’s given name was Sophia, though she preferred being addressed by the more familiar “Sophie.” She may have been the best cook in her northwest side Milwaukee neighborhood. She baked her own bread, made her own noodles, spent hours creating baked goods that few so-called professionals could match, and canned everything that didn’t sprout flowers from her garden — skills carried over to city life from a rural ancestry. It was State Fair award-winning stuff. Cooking wasn’t her sole obsession. She used a manual-wringer washing machine and wash board decades after the world had adopted automatics. The automatic contraptions “didn’t really get the cloths clean,” she said.

My grandparents, some 10-12-years before I was born

They were stout Union people and proud of it. Like most Wisconsinites and Milwaukeeans, they were proud of their state and proud of their city. They were proud of what their generation of working people had accomplished there; namely, a place with the best schools, the best parks, the best libraries, and the best cultural institutions in the region, if not the nation. The high standard of living of Wisconsin residents came largely through collective bargaining. It was a stalwart Labor state.

It was a pleasant enough life to come from. Wisconsin was known for its respect for natural areas and its high-ranking universities. Milwaukee was known for its honest, clean government, parks and great schools. While other cities were reeling in the Rust Belt, Milwaukee was still prosperous. The state’s workers were among the best paid in the nation, and had some of the best benefits. Milwaukee had the highest rate of home ownership in the nation. Many of those homes were collected in wide bands of housing called “Milwaukee flats,” two-story craftsman homes that had begun as simple one-story buildings that were quickly converted into large lot-filling two-story buildings, as Milwaukee’s skilled Union workforce invested their savings into becoming entrepreneurial landlords.

In those summers in that kitchen, my grandparents, Stephen and Sophie, repeatedly tried to impress on me that none of Wisconsin’s life advantages were ever to be taken for granted. Before he was a Union streetcar motorman, my grandfather had worked twelve-hour days in a mill where the men who had been crushed, burned or perished in the unsafe machinery during the night shift, then had their hats lined up at the plant gate to greet the incoming day shift as a kind of macabre memorial or warning to the incoming workers. In the old mills, before the Unions, life had been cheap.

Before she took to cooking and washing and making a home for her children, my grandmother worked in a sweatshop stitching linings for steamer trunks, then helping her mother cook and clean at the family boarding house that lodged the laborers that faced the unsafe mills at night. She met my grandfather when he was a workman-boarder at her mother’s house.

Labor Wars and LaFollette
They were veterans of the labor wars that rocked Milwaukee at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, and of the progressive movement that wrested democratic control of the state from corrupt party machines tied to corporate power, which ran the place over a century ago. 19th-century Wisconsin, like most states, was closely associated with the raw power of the economic trusts. Farmers faced off against legislatures bought on Wall Street, workers faced off against physical attacks from the bosses. In 1886, then-Governor Jeremiah Rusk sent the State Militia to Milwaukee with orders to fire on protesting workers demanding an eight-hour day at the Bay View Rolling Mill. Seven people, including a twelve year old boy, were killed. The event helped to spur the reform movements in Wisconsin that overturned the trusts and led to a national movement of reform we know as progressivism.

Combining traditional, authentically conservative family and community values with sweeping economic and political reform, the organization of voters in Wisconsin led to key reforms nationally. In Wisconsin the movement was led by Robert LaFollette (above left), a Madison Congressman who coined the term “progressivism” at the end of the 1890s. He was elected Governor in 1900, then U.S. Senator in 1908, where he would eventually lead a bloc of progressive voices in the Congress.

LaFollette’s reforms include many innovations that progressives still champion, and that many of us take for granted today. State-elected regulatory agencies, publicly elected school boards, workmen’s compensation, unemployment insurance, municipal home rule, the minimum wage, the primary election system, voter initiatives, referendum and recall, direct election of U.S. Senators, women’s suffrage, the abolition of child labor, and progressive taxation, among others.

Milwaukee’s municipal reformers established he first government-run water and sanitation systems, created the nation’s first community college, and passed the first mandatory public-education ordinance. The reforms were sweeping. The public library launched the first publicly funded telephone reference system, and Lutie Stearns, the system’s Children’s Librarian and a friend of the LaFollette family, used her personal savings to launch the world’s first bookmobile service and took a lending library on wagon-top to rural communities in Wisconsin. Stearns was just one of the many public servants, including many of our public schoolteachers, who have put innovation and sacrifice ahead of personal gain.

Every Generation Better Than the Last
My grandparents were proud of the accomplishments of their generation, but feared that the clock might one day be turned back. My parents were never very happy when my grandparents talked about the past. To my father, a World War II veteran, and my mother, who had a successful career as a Veterans Administration nurse, my grandparents’ bleak stories and warnings about the past were not proper topics of discussion for the ears of their five-year-old son. At best they were ancient history, best forgotten. To my parents, Wisconsin and its local communities were places where everyone could safely look forward, not back. After all, America was a country where every generation had it better than the last.

Like my parents, most of Wisconsin’s people took hard work, responsive institutions, shared sacrifice, fair play, and the resulting shared affluence for granted. The state pioneered the progressive income tax, and its state income tax has always been among the nation’s highest, yet businesses have always eagerly headquartered there to gain access to the state’s extensive education facilities and highly educated workforce. Wisconsin’s citizens are traditionally among the most educated in the nation.

Wisconsin’s people believed in targeted government investment and spending, particularly in education, but were infamously frugal and valued conservation as well. The largest cathedral in the state was hand-built by Milwaukee workmen who hand-carried salvaged brick, wood, and stone north from Chicago’s demolished former Federal Office Building, and refashioned the salvage into the cathedral. It is the only church in the world whose door knobs sport the U.S. Federal shield logo.

Muir, Nelson and the Packers
Wisconsin’s John Muir and Gaylord Nelson were national leaders of the conservation movement. Muir left his Portage, Wisconsin home and took his naturalist vision west late in the 19th century to “Save the American soul from total surrender to materialism.” Muir was a leading proponent of the National Parks movement, and Nelson founded the Wilderness Society in the 20th century. Environmentalist and forester Aldo Leopold, another Wisconsin native, is well-known to most New Mexicans as the naturalist who developed our own state’s natural resource management systems.

The so-called “Wisconsin idea” we learned about in the Dairy State as children provided a pretty good life for all. Even the champion Green Bay Packers are a product of that “Wisconsin idea.” The Packers are the only community-owned professional sports franchise in the nation; the team and its facilities are owned co-operatively by Green Bay’s citizens rather than a multi-million-dollar corporate entity.

No Room for Complacency
In 1912, at the height of his political career, Senator Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin wrote in his autobiography that “We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government is democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results.” We were wrong to be so complacent, Senator LaFollette went on to warn us. “Tyranny and oppression,” he wrote, “are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated.”

Senator LaFollette and my grandparents were right to worry. As the people of Wisconsin learned last week, corrupt corporate-driven voices are never every truly at bay. While Wisconsin entered 2011 with a budget surplus, state workers — whose average wage is a mere $24,000 annually — found their lives and livelihoods under attack within months of Scott Walker’s inauguration. Wisconsin’s new masters sought to strip them of their health care and pensions, as well as their collective bargaining rights.

Stand With Wisconsin’s Working People
The rest of us need to join Wisconsin’s working people and stand up to this attack on hard-won middle class lives. The challenge may seem daunting, but hardly more daunting than it was for the laborers who demanded an eight-hour day at the Bay View Rolling Mill in 1886, or the recalcitrant and corrupt political establishment that Robert M. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette took on and defeated at the beginning of the 20th century. This, at a time when progressive reform was an untried idea rather than the successful and long-proven ideology that brought America to prosperity in the decades that followed his leadership.

“The essence of the Progressive movement, as I see it,” Robert M. LaFollette wrote, “lies in its purpose to uphold the fundamental principles of representative government. It expresses the hopes and desires of millions of common men and women who are willing to fight for their ideals, to take defeat if necessary, and still go on fighting.”

Wise words for any generation.

Congressman Steve Pearce (R, NM-02), leading a group of Congressional Tea Party favorites, raided Columbus, New Mexico on Tuesday where the group met with residents at the Columbus Community Center. Columbus is a small border community just north of the Mexican border in southwestern New Mexico where Pancho Villa led a raid onto U.S. soil in 1916 during the era of the Mexican Revolution.

Joining the Pearce event at Columbus on Tuesday were Georgia Congressman Phil Gringey, Iowa Congressman Steve King, and California Congressman Ed Royce, all Republicans. Congressmen King and Gringey are co-sponsors of H.R. 140, the “Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011,” an effort to overturn the 14th Amendment in the United States Congress. In his press release issued Sunday announcing the visit, Pearce claimed “I want to help get beyond the beltway rhetoric of border security, and work toward solutions that reflect the complexity of the problem.”

If overturning the U.S. Constitution constitutes getting beyond the overheated “beltway rhetoric,” it’s hard to see how. Far from representing a reasonable borderlands voice on security issues, Pearce’s new alliance with extremists like King and Gringey is anything but reasonable.  According to Congressman King, “The current practice of extending U.S. citizenship to hundreds of thousands of ‘Anchor Babies’ every year arises from the misapplication of the Constitution’s citizenship clause and creates an incentive for illegal aliens to cross our border. The ‘Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011’ ends this practice by making it clear that a child born in the United States to illegal alien parents does not meet the standard for birthright citizenship already established by the Constitution.”

Nothing could be further from the facts. The only constitutional “misapplication” showcased by the Congressional party is that of Congressmen Pearce’s allies, Gringey and King. The 14th Amendment clearly states “All persons born or naturalized” are citizens of the United States. Birthright citizenship to all persons born on American soil was the clear intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment and subsequently strongly supported by the Supreme Court and other case law.

History of 14th Amendment
As we have frequently pointed out on Democracy for New Mexico, the issue of birthright citizenship was extensively debated in Congress by the authors and sponsors of the Amendment leading up to passage and ratification in 1866 and 1867, and their intentions made clear in their extensive speeches and writings.

In an address to Congress on March 9, 1866 Congressman John A. Bingham of Ohio, the Representative who drafted the original language of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, specifically made his intent clear. Speaking in support of the proposed Amendment Bingham said, “I find no fault with the introductory clause [birthright citizenship], which is simply declaratory of what is written in the Constitution, that every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural-born citizen; but sir, I may be allowed to say further, that I deny that the Congress of the United States ever had the power or color of power to say that any man born within the United States, is not and shall not be a citizen of the United States. Citizenship is his birthright, and neither the Congress nor the States can justly or lawfully take it from him.”

As to whether birthright citizenship was to extend only to former slaves, and not to the children of immigrants, Bingham spoke forcefully for the language and for equal protection of the law for all persons within America’s borders. He  asked opponents of birthright citizenship in Congress, “So you propose to allow these discriminations to be made in the States against the alien and stranger? Can such legislation be sustained by reason or conscience? With all respect to any gentleman who may be a supporter of it, I ask can it be sanctioned? Is it not as unjust as the unjust State legislation you seek to remedy? Your Constitution says ‘No person,’ not ‘no citizen’ ‘shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without the due process of  law.”

Missing the Point
Pearce, Gringey and King are off the mark on immigration, on constitutional intent, and they fail to grasp the real security challenges facing the border region, generally. Furthermore, if the Pearce-Gringey raid on Columbus was meant to highlight an historic event when Mexican nationals under General Villa entered the territory of the United States and shot up the town, the Congressmen seem to have missed the obvious historical analogy. Villa’s 1916 raid had nothing to do with immigration into the United States but rather was an action, on Villa’s part, to extract revenge against an American gun dealer who had illegally sold weapons and then cheated the Mexican revolutionary.

That gun dealer, Sam Ravel, had sold guns to Villa and other leaders of the Mexican revolution, and then failed to make good on the promised delivery to Villa’s forces. Ravel’s property was destroyed in the 1916 raid, though Ravel, who was in Albuquerque at the time of the raid, himself escaped harm. If Pearce and his allies King and Gringey are truly concerned with border security, they might begin by addressing the illegal gun sales from north of the border into Mexico that have destabilized the region and contributed to a northward flight of refugees from conflicts south of the border both in 1916 and in the drug-driven borderland crisis today. Unlike birthright citizenship, illegal gun-running by rogue weapons dealers is not protected by our Constitution.

While FBI statistics show a dramatic decrease in illegal immigration and criminal activity in the areas on this side of the border, as well as more deportations than ever before, the death rate in northern Mexico at the hands of drug cartels armed by illegal gun merchants from north of the border are higher than ever.

On the meaning and intent of our Constitution, specifically the birthright citizenship provision of the 14th Amendment, and its democratic guarantees of equal protection and due process, Congressman John Bingham, its original author, said in 1866, “Your Constitution provides that no man, no matter what his color, no matter under what sky he might have been born, no matter in what disastrous conflict or by what tyrannical hand his liberty may have been cloven down, no matter how poor, no matter how friendless, no matter how ignorant, shall be deprived of life or liberty or property without due process of law–in its highest sense, that law which and impartial, equal, exact justice.”

We realize Representative Steve Pearce isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but Congressman Bingham’s words and intent ought to be clear enough even for the Congressman from New Mexico’s 2nd District to understand.

As implementation of the national health care reform legislation, passed last year, moves to the states, New Mexico’s current legislature and supporters of health care reform are faced with important decisions to make the transition to reform go smoothly and effectively and offer access to health care for all New Mexicans. Elements of the bill are already in place, including access to health care for those with pre-existing conditions.

Under the federal law states will need to fully implement health reform by 2014. While the national Affordable Care Act, the Federal legislation, is a monumental leap forward for all Americans, and one that has been decades overdue, we can do better. As President Obama said in the State of the Union address, we ought not refight the old debates, but rather work to improve the law.

Many states are already well underway in implementing health reform on the national model, while several are also working to tailor reform specifically to their own states. Vermont lawmakers are designing an alternate state plan to implement a single-payer program for the Green Mountain State, rather than the private insurance exchanges mandated in the Federal legislation. To enact their plan, Vermont is actively seeking a waiver from the federal government to implement their own health insurance plan in place of the national plan by the 2014 deadline. The Affordable Care Act as presently enacted only permits states to implement their own plans after 2017.

In preparation for health reform on the state level, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin and the leaders of that state’s legislature have called on Congress to pass legislation sponsored by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.) to amend the Act to move the opt-out date up to 2014.

Health Security in New Mexico
New Mexico should follow Vermont’s lead. We should call on our state Congressional delegation to support the Wyden-Brown bill. We should call on our legislators in Santa Fe to begin the process of building on this landmark legislation, now rather than later. Rather than wait until 2017, progressives in New Mexico should urge our state legislature to pass a state health reform bill that goes beyond the Federal legislation and better meets the needs and conditions of our own state. One such plan that many of us are familiar with is the Health Security Act that has been previously offered in legislature, and has been reintroduced in the current session as SB 5. The bill is being proposed by the Health Security Campaign, a broad-based coalition of civic and health reform organizations, as well as endorsing counties and local communities across New Mexico.

Progressive activists should urge passage of the New Mexico Health Security Act in 2011. The Health Security Act both meets the requirements of the Federal legislation and goes well beyond the national bill to enroll more New Mexicans and provide more benefits at a much lower cost.

Under the Act, New Mexico would establish its own health insurance plan that will cover almost all New Mexico residents, and do so more cheaply and effectively than under the guidelines of the national bill. Rather than the mandated health insurance exchanges dictated by the Federal bill, the Health Security Act enroll New Mexicans into a larger state insurance pool.

Under the Plan, if enacted, private insurance would become supplemental insurance on the model of Medicare. In place of high cost individual plans offered in exchanges, the Health Security Act would build on the contracted system offered state employees. The plan would guarantee choice of contacting private provider, even across state lines, and guarantee a good minimum benefit package that must be as comprehensive as the services now offered state employees. The plan also preserves the private delivery system and allows for choice of doctor, hospitals and other health providers.

The Plan will guarantee access to comprehensive, quality health care coverage regardless of income or health and employment status, and would protect retirees. Most importantly the Health Security Act builds on the goals of the national bill by greatly reducing overall costs and providing another alternate model to meet provisions of the national Affordable Health Act.

The Federal Affordable Health Act goes a long way toward guaranteeing access to health care for all Americans, but we can do better. The pending Health Security Act represents a cost effective model for New Mexico, tailored for New Mexico, and we should pass it. The time is now for our state to lead, rather than follow in the implementation of health reform.

On a cold December morning in 1905 a small group of old friends of the late William Lloyd Garrison gathered at the door of the old African Meeting House on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston to mark the centenary of the birth of the fiery abolitionist leader. One passerby, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, out for an evening stroll, indignantly crossed to the opposite side of the street, telling his wife that nothing could induce him “to do honor to a man who broke the condition of social life by bidding the very structure of society perish rather than he not have his way — expressed in terms of morals, to be sure, but still his own way.”

For Holmes looking back at Garrison in 1905, being morally right was not worth the carnage of national conflict; rather it was better, Justice Holmes believed, to restrict provocative speech. Holmes, a veteran of national conflict, was three times wounded in Civil War battles from Antietam to Fredericksburg before returning to Harvard after the war to earn a law degree. He then practiced as a private attorney in commercial law before his appointment to a Federal Judgeship in 1878. In 1902 President Roosevelt appointed Holmes to the United States Supreme Court.

It was in the capacity of a Supreme Court Justice that Holmes wrote the majority opinion in Schenck v. United States, echoing his feelings on the limits to free speech he first expressed on Commonwealth Avenue, and shaped by his life experience as a soldier and a wounded veteran. Holmes likened what he viewed as dangerous speech to “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.”

Charles Schenk, the Secretary of Socialist Party, had been arrested in 1917 under the wartime espionage act, for passing out leaflets at a military induction center. Schenk’s leaflet urged inductees to defy the draft and refuse service as a “violation of rights.” In his opinion Holmes found that Schenk’s agitation presented “a clear and present danger” to the order of American society, and found that Schenk had no right to criticize the Federal government in a time of war. In Schenk, Holmes likened the agitator’s speech to “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater,” the often improperly paraphrased sentence for which the opinion is best remembered.

Holmes Changes His Mind
Holmes’ opinion in Schenk set off widespread debate among academic circles. After engaging in a spirited correspondence following his decision with Zechariah Chafee, a young professor at Harvard, and others, Oliver Wendell Holmes had second thoughts. In his written dissent in Abrams v. United States only eleven months later, Justice Holmes decided he had made an error and instead appealed for free and open speech. In his dissent in Abrams, Holmes concluded that suppression of free speech posed an even greater danger to the exercise of a democracy than its restriction in the interest of national tranquility.

In less than a year, Justice Holmes decided that suppression of the speech of a William Lloyd Garrison, or even of a Charles Schenk, might, in the end, have much worse consequences to the well being of the nation than the free exercise of open debate. In his dissent, Holmes wrote, “When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundation of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.”

Relevance to Today’s Debate on Vitriolic Speech
In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, there has been a lot of concern and public discussion of vitriolic speech in the airwaves and among certain so-called leaders, particularly the hate speech of many so-called “conservatives.” Whether this overheated rhetoric drove a single disturbed individual to stalk Representative Giffords with a semi-automatic weapon we may never know. In the end, it is really a question to be decided by each one of us, individually.

Like most of us, I hope that the events of this past weekend will give some of us pause before spouting violent speech against our fellow citizens. That examination of conscience, however, is best arrived at by the members of the press, the political leaders of our nation, the media personalities who make their trade in creating division and by ourselves as individual citizens. It would be a mistake for any of us to seek to limit the free speech of any among us, onerous as it might be.

Words do have consequences, as we learned again this week. Any of us can, after all, falsely shout fire in a crowded theater if we choose to do so. If we do so, however, we ought to realize there will in the end be a price to be paid. Ms. Palin and others may now be learning this simple lesson. Time and reflection will ultimately tell. In the aftermath of this week’s violent event there have been demands to restrict speech on the air and elsewhere. This would be a mistake.

Protect Our Best Values and Traditions
There isn’t really much value in demanding that so-called “conservatives” refrain from carrying guns to political rallies, speaking in terms of “second amendment remedies” or branding themselves in terms of street warfare. By now we ought to know that those so-called “conservatives” have very little ability to restrain themselves, anyway. At the end of the day, their path is neither a long-term winning strategy nor a valuable vision for our future. As progressives, we had best stay our own course, and work to protect the best traditions of our nation, including protecting the free exercise of speech we may not like.

As horrified as we may be today, we should refrain from restricting the values we most cherish, including the free exercise of speech. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his Eulogy to the Martyred Children, in the aftermath of the killings of four young girls at a Birmingham church in 1963, “Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.” The violence and negativity of the speech of conservatives “may well serve as a redemptive force … to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future, and yet cause the nation to come to terms with its conscience. At the end of the day there is little to be gained, really, in restricting the speech of anyone, in the words of Dr. King, “who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred.”