SEQUIM — They came from many parts of the North Olympic Peninsula, more than 600 strong, gathering to redesign the American political landscape to bring about a new economic agenda.
“Let this be a historic gathering on the Olympic Peninsula,” keynote speaker David Korten told the impassioned audience Tuesday night in Sequim High School’s auditorium.
He joined Port Townsend family physician Kathleen Ottaway, regional AFL-CIO executive board member Robby Stern and Dorothea Hover-Kramer, Clallam County MoveOn Council leader, at the highly publicized and promoted “American Awakening” community call-to-action event sponsored by MoveOn.
Balance
Korten, an activist working with citizen action groups who is the publisher of Yes! magazine, based on Bainbridge Island and produced to empower people, said the nation needs to build an economy to help everyone and be in balance with nature.
“This is economics we can all understand,” he said, adding that the other option was “footloose, publicly traded corporations” that care not for the economic imbalance that is leaving growing joblessness and abject poverty in its wake.
“Medicare is a threat to Wall Street insurance corporations,” Korten said. “It couldn’t be any simpler than that.”
He called for a “single-payer solution” for Medicare, which is medical care funded from a single insurance pool run by the state.
Under a single-payer system, universal health care for an entire population can be financed from a pool in which employees, employers and the state have contributed.
He supports a Social Security system that remains as it is, with one generation paying for the next generation of retirees.
He labeled Wall Street “a job killer,” mocking those who contend that if taxes are reduced for “job creators” and government steps aside, the economy will “work its magic to benefit us all.”
He urged support for MoveOn’s “Contract for the American Dream.
The contract identifies 10 “most critical steps”: invest in America’s infrastructure, create 21st-century energy jobs, invest in public education, offer Medicare for all, make work pay, secure Social Security, return to fairer tax rates, end foreign wars and invest at home, tax Wall Street speculation and strengthen democracy.
Lots of applause
The impassioned crowd filled the room with thunderous applause off and on for two hours as Korten and others called for Wall Street financial reforms, an expanded Medicare system with universal coverage for all and efforts to spur jobs growth in a country facing a double-dip recession.
Ottaway, a family medicine physician who practices in Port Townsend and a member of Mad as Hell Doctors and Physicians for National Healthcare, also voiced support for preserving Medicare as is and expanding it to a single-payer system.
Having delivered babies for 18 years and working with people as old as 104, Ottaway said, “The health care system is getting in the way, so I’m fighting back.”
She said she has heard many stories around the nation, citing the fact that about 50,000 Americans die each year because they cannot afford health care or even co-paying what medical insurance will not pay for.
Others filed for bankruptcy because they can’t afford care, she said.
“The only people making a profit are the insurance companies,” she said, especially chief executive officers of insurance companies who make on average $14 million a year.
Referring to the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, Hover-Kramer said, “Nothing suggests that our government is owned and operated by those who have the most wealth.”
The career psychologist and clinical nurse specialist who leads Clallam County’s MoveOn Council said the most affluent 2 percent in the U.S. are now in power “while 98 percent of us are the workers and taxpayers.”
She said the existing corporate power structure in America is not the dream of the Founding Fathers.
Hover-Kramer contended that such economic inequality, financial risk-taking and business development that is environmentally destructive were not in the spirit of the American dream.
“People are waking up,” she said, citing the movement that began in Wisconsin last spring when the state’s progressives got involved in demonstrations against anti-union legislation proposed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
Stern praised activist government employees and young people who are demonstrating against Wall Street today.
He asked audience members to join an organization for change.
“It’s going to take something real big to turn this around . . . to take away the power of Wall Street.”
He said Social Security has not contributed a single penny to the nation’s nearly $15 trillion deficit.
“But it’s under attack,” he said, adding that Social Security needs to be defended so it can be passed on as a legacy to the children of the future.
The program ended with more than 20 audience members lining up to have their remarks video-recorded for a MoveOn presentation to the so-called “Committee of 12,” which includes Sen. Patty Murray.
The Capitol Hill “supercommittee” will review and by Nov. 23 draft a proposal for at least $1.5 trillion in deficit-reduction measures over 10 years for Congress to consider.
Audience members
Audience voices were heard from Port Hadlock and Port Townsend to Sequim and Port Angeles.
Others were pessimistic about the supercommittee making a different in the political deadlock in Washington, D.C., saying they had lost faith in their political leadership.
The program opened with the group Raging Grannies of Port Townsend singing “Oh Bring Back the Jobs We Have Lost” to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” and they ended it with more biting political commentary set to music.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
