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The Road From Memphis

President Obama and his family celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday by painting fruit characters on a schoolhouse wall as part of anti-obesity campaign.

Evoking King’s legacy, the president didn’t mention Memphis.

That was the slain civil rights leader’s last campaign. He went to support a hotly contested unionization effort on the behalf of the city African-American sanitation workers.

Listening to President Obama’s remarks on King’s birthday, you might think that the slain civil rights leader was mainly about encouraging volunteerism.

No doubt child nutrition is an important issue. But reducing King’s legacy to some bland notion of community service seriously understates what King, and the others who struggled alongside him, were about.

King upset people. He challenged power. He divided the country. During his lifetime, politicians demonized him. Law enforcement wiretapped and harassed him.

King, meanwhile, moved from a struggle for civil rights for minorities to a broader struggle for economic rights.

In Memphis, conflict had been building since February 1968, when two black sanitation workers were crushed to death when the compactor mechanism of their trash truck was accidentally triggered during a heavy rain.

On the same day in a separate incident also related to the bad weather, 22 black sewer workers had been sent home without pay while their white supervisors were retained for the day with pay. A couple of weeks later most of he city’s black sanitation workers began a strike for job safety, better wages and benefits, and union recognition.

The mayor, Heny Loeb, staunchly opposed the workers' demands, especially union recognition, and he resisted all efforts to resolve the strike.

King had led a march in support of the strikers in late March but he was deeply distressed when it turned violent and one man was killed. Nonetheless he returned to the city a week later to participate in another march. Several days before the march was scheduled, as King stepped out of his motel for dinner, he was assassinated.

Only after King’s death did the sanitation workers win their struggle for better working conditions and union recognition.

Is it any wonder that President, who every day binds himself more tightly to the interests of Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce, wouldn’t want to invoke this more challenging aspect of King’s legacy?

Obama’s election can be seen as the historic culmination as just one of King’s ambitious goals. But on the road that took King to Memphis, we still have a long way to go.

The Republican Who Tackled Foreclosures

President Obama isn’t the first politician to have to stare a massive foreclosure crisis in the face.

The last time foreclosures loomed so large in the economy and the national consciousness was during the Great Depression, when farmers and homeowners were losing their land in massive numbers.

Several states passed laws including moratoriums on foreclosure. Not because the banks couldn’t prove they owned the farms, or because they screwed up the paperwork. The moratoriums were implemented in recognition that the country was in an economic emergency and that having so many people lose their homes was bad for the country.

Minnesota passed such a law in 1933. After a judge allowed a couple to postpone foreclosure, the building and loan association that owned the mortgagee challenged the law. The firm appealed to the Supreme Court, contending that law was a violation of the Contracts Clause of the Constitution. But in its landmark ruling in Home Building v. Blaisdell, the high court upheld the law. By a 5 to 4 vote the court ruled that the contracts clause wasn’t absolute and it didn’t outweigh the rights of the states to protect the vital interests of its citizens. In dissent, Associate Justice George Sutherland warned that the ruling would be just the beginning of further erosion of the contracts clause.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, an appointee of President Herbert Hoover, wrote the majority opinion. Hughes wasn’t some ivory-tower judge but a seasoned and fascinating Republican politician who had served as two-term governor of New York, with a record for establishing a public service commission, as well as pushing through labor law and insurance reform. He ran unsuccessfully for president against Woodrow Wilson before serving his first stint on the Supreme Court before running for president. After a stretch as secretary of state under President Calvin Coolidge, he was in and out of private life before President Hoover appointed him chief justice in 1930.

Though liberals gave him a hard time in his confirmation hearing, he often provided a swing vote in favor of the New Deal on a highly contentious court. But Hughes also repeatedly tangled with Roosevelt, voting against the constitutionality of the National Recovery Administration and opposing FDR’s court-packing scheme.

What do we get from this excursion into history? There’s some comfort in knowing the country has grappled with these tough times and issues before and survived. But it’s hard to encounter a figure like Hughes and not wish that some of his courage and unpredictability could rub off on our current crop of leaders, who seem so timid and tame by comparison, and who seem to have forgotten that protecting the vital interests of citizens isn’t just a matter of bailing out banks and tax cuts for the rich and hoping some of the booty will trickle down to the rest of us.

Foreclosures / Martin Column - 10/13/2010

Mr. Angelides, Which Side Are You On?

While I was watching the hearings into the financial crisis last week, a haunting old song got into my head and wouldn’t leave.

It was “Which Side Are You On?” from the 1930s out of the coalfields of Harlan County, Kentucky.

Coal miners faced brutally harsh living and working conditions, under strict control by the coal barons who had complete power over the miners and their communities. The miners and their families waged a tough struggle to win recognition for their union and concessions from the bosses.

The lyrics describe how at a certain point in the fight, the population of Harlan County had to take sides.

They simply couldn’t remain neutral any more. They either had to stand with the miners and their families or with the coal barons and the thugs who enforced their rule.

I wanted to ask Angelides: which side are you on?

Are you on the side of the people who are suffering in the worst economic calamity since the Depression? Or on the side of the bankers and the politicians and regulators who did nothing to halt the crisis and whose response has only made it worse?

Lots of people admire Angelides. He’s a former real estate developer who built a reputation as a reformer while California Treasurer, then ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2006.

I found him an odd choice. Previous high-profile investigations have featured lawyers with not only great intellectual chops but who were skilled storytellers and fearless to boot.

Angelides is a bright guy who has some understanding of high finance, but without any of the characteristics that distinguished previous investigators. Far from being a courageous outsider, he’s a Democratic Party insider who has grubbed for political contributions.

He’s bright enough to get training and surround himself with people with those skills.

So why were the hearings so lacking in urgency to get to the bottom of the financial crisis, hold people accountable and offer material support for real reform?

Because Angelides doesn’t understand that at this point, there simply are no more neutrals. If you understand the public’s anger and the mishandling of the financial crisis, then you have an obligation to take a strong stance, and show you are on the side of really fixing the problems.

That’s what Sen. Christopher Dodd found out.

For years the Connecticut Democrat was a darling of the financial industry. Then came the crisis and the bailout. He tried to refashion himself as a reformer but he had no credibility with his constituents after having taken millions in campaign contributions from the financial sector over the years.

The voters in Connecticut weren’t buying the new image. They were threatening to throw him out, so Dodd retired. Since his announcement, he’s showed his true colors, doing his contributors’ bidding by dropping his push for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Unlike Dodd, Angelides is not running for office, at least not now. But he’s wearing the mantle of public protector, and the public is in no mood for phonies.

People don’t want an arbitrator, they want a fighter.

They also don’t have a burning need for another investigation. Several very thorough investigations have already been conducted, including one by the Consumer Education Foundation that you can find here.

Mr. Angelides, we know what happened. What we want to know is, what are you going to do about it? You can still set this commission straight. But you have to bring a sense of passion for the fight that has been missing so far. And you’ve got to know which side you’re on.

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission / Martin Column - 01/20/2010