By LILLIAN ROBERTS
Executive Director
District Council 37, AFSCME

We have to change the course of our country. Bush and his right-wing Republican team have steered our nation and its economy into chaos and corruption, and the only way we can straighten things out is by using the power of the ballot box to take back the White House.

More than ever, we have a direct and personal stake in who wins the presidency in 2008. Over the last 6 1/2 years, huge cutbacks have hit government programs that our members need and services that our members provide.

After-school programs, senior citizen programs, college tuition assistance, health care for children — where has the money gone? We all know the answer. Bush has squandered the money on tax cuts for the rich and the disastrous war in Iraq. The American people rejected the war decisively when they voted in 2006, but instead of listening, Bush has expanded the war and raised the death toll.

The war costs and tax giveaways have left the rest of us suffering as the price of food and gas climb and affordable housing is destroyed to build more million-dollar one-bedroom condos. Enough! We cannot take any more of this. We have to clean house in the White House, and the way to do that is with a strong political broom.

Anywhere you look, you see our country failing to meet its major challenges: the desperate need for affordable health care; the necessity of funding our faltering education system; the urgency of saving our planet from destructive climate change; the relentlessly growing wealth gap between the rich and the working class; the importance of making the global economy work for those who do the work and not just for those who reap the profits.

In the last week of June, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that twisted the famous 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling against racial segregation in public schools into a pretzel and declared that it prohibits many current, voluntary school integration efforts.
Bush has stacked the Supreme Court with so many right-wingers that it looks like a subsidiary of his administration instead of the independent branch of government it was created to be. The Bush court has forsaken its role as a guardian of human rights, protector of the Constitution and the nation’s strongest voice for justice. The president has turned it into a guardian of business, protector of wealth and a spokesperson for the administration’s constant assault on the rights and needs of minorities, women and working people.

This latest decision shows us that under the Bush administration, nothing is safe — certainly not the 1964 Civil Rights Act that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a quarter-million marchers demanded in Washington on August 28, 1963.

Those who think like Bush must be kept out of the White House in 2008, before they drive the nation’s highest court even further to the right — and we are the ones who can stop them, working with the 1.4 million members of our national union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

In June, many of our local leaders and activists attended AFSCME’s National Leadership Conference. They met with President Gerald W. McEntee and Secretary Treasurer William Lucy to jump-start the union’s 2008 campaign to take back the White House and strengthen the pro-union majorities in Congress.

To win, it will take people and money
To win in 2008, McEntee said, we need to build up our nationwide army of activists to 40,000-strong, and we need to double our PEOPLE war chest. The stakes are too high for us to lose in 2008. As our activists say, “The job you save may be your own.”

I am calling on every member to join the proud ranks of our political volunteers. If you have never handed out a flier, if you have never made a political telephone call, now is the time. Just call our political action folks at 212-815-1550.

And now is the time to join PEOPLE and make a small voluntary contribution from your paycheck toward the job of cleaning house in the White House. If you are already contributing, now is the time to become an MVP — Most Valued Participant — by raising your contribution to $4 a paycheck. (For more information, please click here.)

By volunteering and contributing like never before, we can protect our jobs and our rights and make this our America again.