Granny D's last speech

A Facebook friend shared this speech which he received by e-mail.  It is a wonderful piece of writing, and really hits on all the issues we, as a people, face today.  I miss her, I wish we still had her, but we still have her voice and her vision.

This is a draft of the last speech Granny D was working on last February when she was in Arizona, less than a month before she died. She was planning to give it at the September 2010 Bob Fest event in Wisconsin.

She had spoken at three previous Bob Fests, billed as the largest progressive rally in the nation. She and Jim Hightower have been among the most requested repeat speakers.

At last summer's gathering, she posthumously received the Robert M. LaFollette Congressional Advocacy Award, a musical tribute by the Raging Grannies and a long and loud standing ovation.

In honor of what would have been her 101st birthday on Jan. 24, here are the words she had wanted to say last summer, her gift to all of us. 

Her words, work and indomitable spirit go marching on...

            Nations, history has shown us, have a state of mental health. A nation may be open and positive, hard-working and fully confident of its future. It may send great white fleets around the world and humans into space.  A nation may also be angry, self-destructive, cruel. We are individuals and we are parts of a whole. The whole can be as troubled or as ecstatic and positive as an individual. You all know this very well, and you know that, at the present time, America is angry and divided and rather like a mentally-disturbed person. Many of its citizens are turning away from obvious truths and embracing angry and dangerous fantasies instead.

            If someone you know flies off the handle in an uncharacteristic way and will not listen to the clear facts, perhaps his dear wife will take you aside and explain that there is a major problem with their son, or his job or the family business is in trouble.  It’s hard to settle arguments and put away anger when we are desperately anxious about our future and our family’s future.  That sort of anxiety is driving America’s politics today. And where does it come from? Anger and blindness to the facts are the twin children of powerlessness––powerlessness over one’s own––and one’s family’s––future.

            That anxiety is manipulated by masters of self-interest. In the 1950s, as great corporations began to wash away the family businesses of Main Street, the anger of those middle class families should have been directed against those corporations and the political officials in league with them. Instead, anger was redirected very purposely and methodically against a phantom Communist threat, against the civil rights of blacks, and against any expansion of government into worker protection and consumer protection.  Because the anxiety was misdirected, it was not brought to bear on the proper cause of the anxiety, and so the anxiety only grew.

            Corporations and the very wealthiest people began to finance the election campaigns of their foot soldiers in Congress. They financed talk radio and propaganda television. We now see millions of people whose anxiety has been hijacked and redirected against all their own best interests.  In the Reagan years, all the stops were taken off things like hostile corporate takeovers and the rise of new monopolies, so that even the most ethical companies were forced to ship their jobs overseas and shutter their plants in American towns and cities. This was all very profitable for the wealthiest elite. You might wonder why these people have allowed things to go so far that the earth of their grandchildren is now endangered, and perhaps fatally, and the answer is that they do not care about their children or grandchildren, so long as they themselves have the longest yacht in Monaco harbor.

            From those yachts are sent instructions that control what Fox News watchers and talk radio listeners will be upset about tomorrow. This undead army will be used to stop all real progress toward real solutions, and the mass anxiety of the people will grow even greater, even as their homes are taken from them and their foods are poisoned. All this engineering needs ready enemies, and so it is the Mexican immigrants or Arabs anywhere who are the Other who now have the honor of being the scapegoats and the diversions.  We could, after all, end illegal immigration by improving economic conditions in Latin America, and we could end Arab anger by moving our economy from oil to solar, but those are big business considerations for proper discussion in the yachts off Monaco, not in our pretend Congress.

            So the anger of anxiety grows. Guns and ammunition now flow into our communities in semi-trucks.  The politics polarizes to the extent that the Republicans have no moral or patriotic objection to sabotaging the economy if it will mean more votes in the next election. And facts as plain as day––as plain as a birth certificate––will be insulted and burned in the streets.

            If I were the President of the United States, looking at all this, what would I do?

            I would do a great deal.

            I would use administrative powers to do as much as I could to return a sense of personal power to people.  Every notch will help defuse anger. I would require federally-insured banks to have human beings answering their phones, and have local human beings assigned to personally help every customer, with full authority to make most decisions regarding those accounts.  I would find out which other industries federal leverage would permit similar returns to the human scale, so that people had more daily moments when they did not feel so powerless against the machinery of modern life.  Just because we have the technological power to dehumanize our world, doesn’t mean we should do so.

            As the President, I would look at the companies that sell things to the federal government.  I would give a purchasing preference to those companies that dumped their computerized, outsourced telephone systems and other systems of human contact in favor of a more human-scaled operation. I would give a preference to small businesses. I would order the agencies of government to buy American products when possible, even at a premium.  I would start a holy war against the kinds of red tape at every governmental level that inhibits the creation of Main Street businesses, market areas, small family businesses and small-scale manufacturers. 

            The object of these moves is simple: to give more people a sense of control over their own lives and futures.  This is not some Libertarian rant.  The Far Right would have us living in some everyone-for-themselves nightmare world.  Government at its best is just the lot of us making some decisions together for the benefit of all.  Getting back to that, and getting away from the “them versus us” notion of government is crucial. Getting rid of the bloat of bureaucracy is an essential part of it.  We can move with the right wing on this issue, though we may get off the bus a few stops before they do. I expect a roomful of citizens could come up with a thousand things that make them feel disempowered and that might be changed. Little empowerments can build toward more meaningful empowerment. People ultimately need to believe, and correctly so, that their daily efforts will bear the harvest they have earned.

            They need to own their own financial records just as they own their own medical records, and they should therefore have the right to opt out of credit reporting systems. A person’s name and address and email address should never be sold without their permission.  All the fine print in contracts––things you must click on and agree to if you are to get access even to things you have purchased, should be outlawed for purchases of under, say a thousand dollars. You shouldn’t have to sign a ten-page contract to buy a damn song or to use the program that plays it. All those little things are insulting to us, and they add up.  Maybe we will need to take our shoes off at the airport for awhile yet, but we shouldn’t have to bow so low to every company that tells us to.

            Stores ought to look for shoplifters and stop them, but devices that scan and beep and the doorways, and clerks who stop you at the door before leaving to examine your basket and your receipt are making an accusation that you are probably a thief, and Americans should not be accusing each other of such things without probable cause. It is dehumanizing. There should be a presumption of innocence even in our stores. Our dignity demands it. These little things that eat away at our dignity ultimately make us angry and alienated. So end those practices. Put consumer and government pressure to bear against companies that will not abide by a new and golden rule of personal treatment in America. When people are treated with an expectation of honor, they tend to respond. The few that do not are not worth worrying about or ruining our otherwise pleasant dealings with each other.

            When we have a Congress that again represents the people, we need to return to the states the authority to limit interest rates that can be charged on loans and credit cards. States used to have that power, and rates were generally limited to not much over ten-percent, but the interstate banking lobby bought Congress and we are all now paying for a lot of yachts as a result.  This can be a states’ rights issue, and we can do business with the right wing on this.

            The United States of America has an interest in the development of small, family-run local and regional businesses. Those businesses are good for the economy, good for communities, good for families, good for personal empowerment, and good for democracy. When we have us a Congress again, lets create a corporate tax system that discourages businesses from growing larger than they need to be. A computer company and an automobile company may need to be large, but there is no reason for general merchandise stores to be overlarge.  There is no reason for insurance companies or media companies to be overlarge.  Returning the economy to a more local and more human scale is important and necessary for our political, cultural and ecological survival. While we are at it, we should get rid of corporate-run prisons. What is a greater insult to an American than to be locked up by a corporation? Anyone in that circumstance out to have a right to resist. It is a science fiction horror that insults all of us.

            If we fail to act on these matters, the sense of personal disempowerment will grow, and also its anger and its violence.

            Returning a more human scale to our economy would also create quite a few jobs and quite a few new businesses. If a U.S. president would take up an aggressive campaign to return human scale and its personal power to Americans, I don’t think he or she would find too many opponents, except in the yachts off Monaco. They would of course instruct Fox News to rail against this return to the stone age. But the anger that fuels their toxic enterprise and others like it would dissipate, and we might soon have a governable country again.

            The idea of a social safety net, while constantly attacked by the wealthy elite and the Fox undead, provide important ways to reduce the kinds of anxiety that otherwise disrupt society and democracy. If parents know their children will be able to attend college, that they themselves will have a secure old age, and that the only time people will sleep outdoors in America is when they are camping, they will be better neighbors, better parents, better spouses, better and more productive workers, and better Americans.  

            If there is one thing that would guarantee any President’s re-election, it is this final suggestion: A President could administratively modify the procurement code of the federal government so that companies that do more than a million dollars worth of business with the federal government annually must not lobby the federal government in any way except in open hearings. This disempowerment would result in a grand re-empowerment of average citizens, who then would stand a chance being heard by their elected representatives. With every notch––and that would be a big one––anger subsides, racism subsides, we step away from the precipice now before us, and we move toward a much better America.

            These are ideas someone might package and promote. A joining of left and right might be possible regarding this package. A president in search of a little triangulation might even listen.   Frankly, I don’t think we have much time to waste.

             Thank you very much. 

              Doris "Granny D" Haddock

Doris“Granny D” Haddock, campaigner for election reform, died March 9, aged 100