Tens of thousands tuned in this week to Our Revolution’s Economic Justice Town Hall with Reps. Barbara Lee and Ro Khanna, Professor Richard Wolff, and worker activists like Sergio Valderrama from around the country.
We dug into the issues that cut to the core of our shared economic struggle, including jobs, wages, housing, labor power, healthcare costs, student debt, greed-flation, and more.
A rigged economic system is crushing people and creating a wealth gap that has enabled the ultra-wealthy to hijack democracy in America.
Rep. Barbara Lee lived the struggle as a single mother and knows the tough decisions families face when wages are too low, and the rent is too damn high.
She has spent her life and career waging the fight for economic justice, and now we have a chance to send her to partner with Bernie Sanders and speak for our movement in the Senate.
“I know what economic injustice is. I know how people are struggling,” Barbara said on the Town Hall. “We can’t have people just hanging on the edge in the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world.”
Barbara and Bernie recently teamed up together on the new OLIGARCH Act to tax the ultra-wealthy. They’re also pushing for a Wall Street speculation tax, a bill to close the CEO-worker pay gap, an audit of the Pentagon, and more.
“Senator Sanders and I have worked on this daily,” Barbara said. “People cannot wait. Billionaires are scamming the system, and regular folks are paying excessive taxes to fuel the Pentagon budget. This is money that should be invested in healthcare, housing, and lifting people out of poverty.”
Rep. Ro Khanna is chairing Barbara Lee’s campaign for the U.S. Senate because he knows her passion and record and these crucial issues.
“I’ve often said Barbara Lee is the antiwar voice we need, but I could never have predicted we’d need that voice so urgently in the moment we’re in,” Ro said on our Town Hall. “If you care about peace, if you care about a ceasefire in the Middle East, Barbara Lee is the only candidate in this race to come out for a permanent ceasefire.”
“As is often the case, she is a bit ahead of all of us. She showed the way, and we’ve got to rally around her. She’s going to win because people are going to find out California is a progressive, pro–peace state.”
When 1% of America controls nearly a third of the wealth and the bottom half can claim less than 3%, we’re in trouble, and so is our democracy, Ro told us.
“For 50 years, there’s been a war on the working and middle class in this country, and people feel that,” Ro said. “Wages aren’t keeping up, and folks can’t afford medical debt, student debt, credit card debt. They say, ‘I can’t afford to live in America.’”
“That is the central challenge that the Democratic Party has to tackle,” he explained, “to create economic opportunity and wealth generation in every district in America. There are many parts of this country where there’s no economic opportunities, no job creation, no sense of the American Dream. This country cannot stand that divided. “
“It’s why I co-chaired Bernie’s campaign and why I’m chairing Barbara Lee’s campaign. We need to prioritize the working class. That means Medicare for All, universal childcare, forgiving student loans, free public college, a living wage, paid family leave, power for labor unions, and more. We know what needs to be done in this country, and it also means taxing the ultra-rich.”
We were excited to have Economist Professor Richard Wolff also join the Town Hall on Monday!
“The problem for people is an unequal distribution of wealth, which is used to corrupt our politics,” Professor Wolff told us. “The rich understand you can’t have democracy because the mass of people might use it to change the distribution of wealth, and for that reason, they aim to stop that process.
“If you want a political democracy, you have no choice but to advocate for an economic democracy because, without that, you’ll never get the political democracy either,” he explained.
Wolff said he takes great encouragement from seeing the surge of unionization and labor strikes — from Starbucks to UAW to graduate students organizing on campus.
“There is a movement already underway of people saying they don’t need to live in a world as unequal as this one,” Professor Wolff said. “We can do better than this, and it’s our job just as the working people who struggled before us — to stop slavery, to stop feudalism. Now, it’s our turn to make a better world.”
Sergio Valderrama is doing just that and making a difference as a worker activist with Fight for $15 and a Union.
He joined our Town Hall Monday night from his car between DoorDash deliveries. A McDonald’s worker for 10 years, Sergio has always had to work two or three jobs to support his wife and children.
Last year, Our Revolution joined Sergio in the fight to win AB257, which set a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers and gave them a seat at the negotiating table in California — a form of sectoral bargaining we want to export around the country.
“Winning this bill was important. It helped a lot with expenses and rent, but the cost of living keeps going up, and we must keep fighting,” he said. “And I don’t have insurance, so I can’t actually afford to go see the doctor.”
Sergio speaks for so many of us, and we’re proud to be with him in this working-class movement to demand real change and elect progressive leaders who fight alongside us.
