99ers & Tier 5 Advocates: U-CUBED is advocating hard for JOBS


****Attention 99ers & Tier 5 Advocates: U-CUBED is advocating hard for JOBS - what are you doing to HELP?

In a site wide communiqué with all members of U-Cubed yesterday, Executive Director Rick Sloan encouraged all members of the Union for the Unemployed to take back their rights now.

The inspiring proclamation was titled: "Necessitous Men Are Not Free Men" and read in it’s entirety:
"True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1944 State of the Union Speech


Dear UCubed Leaders and Jobs Activists:
The three sentences quoted above led into FDR’s demand that Congress consider a Second Bill of Rights. For Roosevelt, the litany of economic rights included:
  • The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation
  • The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation
  • The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living;
  • The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad
  • The right of every family to a decent home
  • The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health
  • The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
  • The right to a good education.

What was the stated reason for this presidential initiative? Roosevelt said it was designed to forestall “the grave dangers of a ‘rightist reaction’ in this Nation.”

Roosevelt knew all too well the role necessitous men played in the rise of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tajo and Joseph Stalin. He had watched the demise of the Weimar Republic in Germany, the rise of fascism in Italy, the spread of militarism in Japan and the murderous march of communism in Russia. Each dictator had clawed their way to power by abusing those unemployed in the Great Depression.
A decade earlier, Roosevelt had battled America’s home grown demagogues – Senator Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith, and Dr. Francis Evert Townsend. They, too, sought power by appealing to necessitous men. From Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Plan and Father Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice to Dr. Townsend’s $200 per month old-age pension plan, each had attracted massive followings by Glenn Beck-like rants on the medium of the day: radio.

Roosevelt, who had been called a traitor to his class, knew that the forces of “rightist reaction” would use any and every excuse to wrestle power from the people, at first little by little and then when the time was right in large bursts. Their lobbyists would rewrite his New Deal regulations; their congressional allies would dismantle his New Deal programs; their judges would reinterpret settled law; and their presidential candidates would kowtow to corporate executives, promising to cut corporate taxes and red tape – all in the name of “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

So the Second Bill of Rights was meant to protect “We, The People” long after FDR left the world stage. Think about what it would mean today if Congress had acted and two-thirds of the states had ratified his language.
Unemployment benefits would be a constitutional right, not bait for a filibuster. The right to a useful and remunerative job would be backed by decades of legal precedents. Businesses would be afraid to pay sub-minimum wages. The right to a good education would be enforceable in, and protected by, federal courts. The right to adequate medical care would not be subject to whims of insurance companies.

But don’t just think about it. Act on it.

Ask your Senators and Member of Congress to sponsor a joint resolution that defines your economic rights.
In Unity – Strength,
If you are not yet engaged in U-Cubed Please DO SO TODAY:

U-Cubed on:

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/ucubed

TWITTER: @U_Cubed

WEBSITE: http://www.unionofunemployed.com

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Your Government has FAILED YOU BADLY! MAKE them HEAR YOU NOW!!!!

Take a look at this info from NELP: ...these findings do suggest that for unemployed workers, as well as for those seeking to move up in the labor market or entering it for the first time, the current distribution of job opportunities has deteriorated, compared to before the recession."
"Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt


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