http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=UwUL9tJmypI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2b1JrjLX2TQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=w5NE_YFtiNs

The l first link above ia from Franklin Roosevelt's "Second Bill of Rights" address. which he gave in January, 1944.  The speech both reflected the best aspirations of labor and the left for a postwar America and served as an important part of Roosevelt's fourth term election and gains made by liberal-labor candidates on the democratic ticket during the campaign.

Tragically, both the idelas expressed in the Second Bill of Rights address, and the legislation advanced to implement those ideals(national health care under social security, full employment legislation, greatly increased federal aid and programs for public education, public transportation, and public housing, new large public energy projects  modeled after the Tennesse Valley Authority(TVA) didn't materialize after the war.   The labor movement was divided and weakened by Taft-Hartley and internal red baiting and the Truman administration's launching of the cold war crippled any chance of enacting the Second Bill of Rights program which paid lip service to and used to elect Truman in 1948 under the slogan of a Fair Deal.

But FDR  made his speech sixty eight years ago, when I was literally thirty-two days old.  At the age of sixty, I went to Philadelphia last Saturday with a busload of AAUP-AFT people to  Support the ALF-CIO's Workers Stand for America Rally. The second and third links above are about and from that rally.

  The center of the Workers Stand for America  rally was  a call and a petition drive for a "Second Bill of Rights."   Labor is demanding that political leaders and candidates along with all citizens sign petitions for the Second Bill of Rights While Roosevelt's name wasn't mentioned, readers who listen to the link above can  see that his vision lived through the rally. The five general points of Labor's 2012 "Second Bill of Rights" called for "The Right to Full Employment and a Living Wage"  "The Right to Full participation in the Electoral Process; the Right to a Voice at Work; the Right to a Quality Education; the Right to a Secure and Healthy Future." 

Under each heading are specifics calling for investment in the nation's infrastructure, defense of collective bargaining, affordable education from kindgerten to college defense of social security, medicare, and the advance of national health care.

FDR in 1944 assumed that political rights and civil liberties, the first bill of rights, were secure, even though he knew that the segregationist Southern democrats with whom he routinely cut deals were denying millions of African Americans and a lesser but significant number of low income whites the right to vote through a variety of maneuvers.  These maneuvers ranged  from subjective voter registration "tests" that no African-American could pass, to cumulative poll taxes that drove poor whites away from the polls.

 Today, instead of poll taxes, the Republican right spends huge sums of money for private contractors of disenfranchisement to keep minority and working class voters from registering to vote and/or to cancel their registration and keep them from voting by a new series of maneuvers that are an affront to political democracy.

Actually,  some of the specific programs  in this new Second Bill of Rights  are more "conservative" today then those that New Dealers put forward at the end of WWII when about a third of the non agricutural work force belonged to trade unions.

  But that is much less important then the fact that this is both labor's program and a program significantly to the left of the National Democratic Party, a program on which the Obama administration and the liberal labor Democratis of today, the progressive Democrats can win, and a program to hold the administration to when they win.

The rally itself was great.  Over forty thousand people jammed the the square by the Philadelphia Museum to hear workers, political leaders, community leaders speak.  The story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, no friend of labor or progressive politics, claimed that the crowd consisted of "mostly white men in various colored t shirts representing their unions and trades from at least ten states." 

While the rest of the story wasn't too bad, the crowd that I saw had a great many African-American and Latino men and women in T-shirts from the their unions  along  with working class families.  There were also smaller numbers of South and East Asian American working people in the rally

 Even though the day was hot and humid, the spirit was upbeat and militant, as were the speakers--unemployed young workes talking  about  a life without the security that Roosevelt called for  through an advancing American Standard of Living, which today is called the "American Dream"(I prefer standard of living, since dreams are unreal things that often provide dreamers with escape from real conditions].

There had been criticisms of the Democratic National Committee's keeping labor at arms length  but the Committee's chair, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was one of the rally's most effective speakers as she blasted Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate, highlighted Ryan's anti-labor, anti social security/medicare policies which she, from her personal experience of fighting against them in House Committees and on the House floor, knew all well.  She also introduced her daughter, a girl of grade school age, to show  that the battle against the Romney Ryan ticket and  was first and foremost a battle for working families, a battle against those who would force seniors into poverty, drown students in debt, and export jobs abroad.

President Obama addressed the rally through a video clip for Washington, stressing, as did most of the speakers, the campaign to save the "Middle Class"(labor's definition of the middle class as workers and consumers) by repealing for good the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and advancing programs in the interest of labor and the people that Congressional Republicans have either blocked or undermined. 

As I left the rally, AFL-CI0 president Richard Trumka said it best for labor and the people with these words. "work defines us.  Work is who we are.  But hard work alone never led to decent wages and retirement.  It takes hard work---and activism."

And so it does. And so it will, if we are to revitalize the movement which defeated the Republican Right decisively in 2008, create a balance of political forces that will advance a Second Bill of Rights program in legislation, and, one should not forget, defeat the forces that Franklin Roosevelt warned the nation about in 1944,as victory approach in WWII, if "rightist reaction triumphed in postwar America"it is certain that even as we would have defeated our enemies abraod, we would have yield to the spirit of fascism at home." 

Norman Markowitz