The President's Column: The Stakes are High
September 5, 2024
But we stand ready to fight for what’s right.
First things first: Kamala Harris is going to be the next President of the United States. And we 1199ers are going to help make that happen.
Joe Biden has been the most pro-worker, pro-union President in a century, and deserves our gratitude. Even in the weeks before he ended his campaign, he hammered corporate greed. He promised to make the rich pay more taxes. He pushed for the expansion of Social Security and called for eliminating medical debt. He started drawing up plans for Supreme Court reform and promised rent-control caps to deal with the high cost of housing nationwide. Kamala Harris will continue this platform to protect working-class people and allow us to secure our families. It may be hard to remember now, but back in 2019 when she was a Senator, Harris was a supporter of Medicare for All. We can help her return to that pledge.
Now, we beat Trump. As a former Senator, attorney general, and prosecutor, Kamala Harris is more than up to the task of prosecuting the case of why a twice-impeached, 34-times convicted felon—the person who instigated the assault on our nation’s Capital on January 6, 2021—and who was also found liable for sexual assault—has no place anywhere near the Oval Office. As a Black and Asian woman, Kamala Harris will continue to shatter glass ceilings and inspire a new generation of Americans.
Too many people in this country feel ignored by our political system. They feel insulted that politicians don’t care to understand what is going on in their lives. Sixty percent of our people live paycheck-to-paycheck. Life expectancy for working-class people is 10 years shorter than it is for the rich. We want a government that represents us, and not corporate America.
And Trump? His “Project 2025” platform calls for banning unions for public service workers; firing civil service workers and replacing them with anti-union Trump loyalists; letting bosses eliminate unions mid-contract; letting companies stop paying overtime, and allowing states to opt out of federal overtime and minimum wage laws; and eliminating child labor protections.
As we know, the corrupt Trump Supreme Court demolished the decades-long Roe v. Wade decision protecting bodily autonomy for women. Harris can do one interview and speech after another where she reminds female voters that Trump is a sexual predator and that he and his team would ban abortions, even for rape victims.
At the Republican National Convention, delegates were given signs to wave that demanded “Mass Deportations Now.” There are, at a conservative estimate, eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States today. Under a new Trump administration, were it to make a serious attempt to round up and deport eleven million people— there is no possible scenario that doesn’t look like an authoritarian nightmare. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top aide on immigration, has said he plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police and, if necessary, a private red-state army. This deportation force would go house-to-house and business-to-business rounding up millions of immigrants, expelling them to tent camps along the southern border, and then use the United States Air Force to transport them back to their countries of origin. Undeniably, Trump is a clear and present danger. But he is beatable! Republicans lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. Put another way, they’ve only won the popular vote once in the past 36 years.
Let’s do the math: Polls tell us that 69 percent of Americans support legal abortion. Ninety percent of the country wants stronger gun control laws. Seventy-two percent of us believe the Climate Crisis is real and that we must act now. Seventy-one percent of all Americans approve of labor unions. Nearly 80 percent of us insist the rich must pay more in taxes. Seventy-six percent of us want to see the federal minimum wage more than doubled to $17 an hour. Almost 75 percent of Americans support a cap on rents and the building of more affordable homes. Eighty percent of the American public demands a mandatory retirement age and/or term limits on all Supreme Court Justices. Seventy percent of us are demanding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
As we 1199ers know, we don’t win unless we fight. In poker, at the end of the game, there is sometimes something called “table stakes.” Every player pushes all the money they have into the pot for one last hand. That’s where we stand with this election. Everything we hold dear—our jobs, our union, our children’s futures, our health, our environment, our retirement security—everything is at stake.
Kamala Harris is going to be the next President of the United States—and we are going to help make that so. With 450,000 members from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast, we will mount the most massive voter turnout operation ever put together, to continue to advance the most pro-worker agenda in U.S. history.