Speech delivered before the Florida State branch of the NAACP, ca. 2004

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surplus on an unwise tax cut that primarily benefited the weathly, and it continues to threaten Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds.

To make up for just the initial tax cuts, we would have to cut spending by $5 billion dollars five days a week for over a year. That was always the point - not just to further enrich the already wealthy, but also to starve and bleed the government, making it unable to meet human needs, signing a death warrant for social programs for decades and decades to come.

Now they have made matters even worse. Even as our troops were marching forward toward Baghdad, Congress was marching backward toward even greater deficits and even more tax cuts for the rich.

We learned when Ronald Reagan was President that tricke-down economics don't work. Tax cuts don't tricke down - instead they've helped create a downpour of debt and a flood of fiscal disaster for states from coast to coast. The result is swamped state budgets, closed schools and hospitals, and cuts in programs serving the poor.

The nation's governors warn that state deficits are the largest in more than 50 years. Some states are saving money by unscrewing every third light buld, having teachers serve as janitors, releasing prisoners before their sentences expire, laying off teachers, cutting financial aid, closing schools.

And this is the richest country in the world!

The Administration also has declared its intention to farm out 850,000 federal jobs to private companies. And they've proposed new overtime rules that could cause 8 million workers, including some who earn as little as $22,100 a year, to lose their right to overtime pay.

Their proposal is a job-killer, and an instruction manual to employers on how to lay off workers and force the ones they keep to work double hours for free.

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14 The Administration is engaged in a relentless assault on the wage economy, part of its plan to favor the privileged over the people.

The President called his tax giveaway a "Jobs and Growth" plan. The only growth we've seen is in millionaires' bank accounts and the number of black people standing in unemployment lines.

Last month ^year the unemployment rate rose to 6.4 percent, the highest in nine years. And "the number of employed blacks shrank while the number of employed whites grew".^xxi

The White House says its tax cut has yet to kick in, but the failing economy is already kicking us!

Unemployment for blacks in June was ^{is, as always} more than twice the rate for whites.

You cannot patch the leaky economy -- or any other domestic problem -- with duct tape and plastic sheets.

You don't show compassion by offering guests at the millionaires' banquet second helpings and an extra dessert.

We would do well to recall the wise counsel of President Franklin Roosevelt who said:

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

We are meeting in "the poorest big city in the United States -- poorer than Newark, poorer than Detroit, poorer than any city with a population of 250,000 or more." Just a few minutes drive away from here is the gateway to Fisher Island, an exclusive enclave that, according to the 2000 census, is the wealthiest community in America.^xxii

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While we add to the abundance of those in Fisher Island, and provide less than ever to the poor in Miami, our nation is regressing, not progressing.

We know there is an appalling double standard played out on Florida's shores between the treatment received by Haitian and Cuban immigrants--the Haitians are given the back of America's hand and the Cubans a hearty handshake and a loud "welcome aboard."

One problem faced by hardworking immigrants is found in abundance here in Florida--the exploitation and near peonage of farm workers. Our units here in Florida have worked to improve their lives, and we support efforts nationwide to enable them to earn a decent wage under safe and secure conditions.

We've invited representatives of all the Caribbean nations to come to this convention to share their problems and the problems their nationals face in the United States.

We know America's policy makers often ignore this section of the globe, except as a pawn in the great power struggles of the past.

So too do America's policy makers often ignore Africa, choosing neglect over concern and engagement, so we applaud President Bush's trip there last week. But while we are please that the President has discovered Africa, the continent needs more than an exotic photo-op presidential visit.

And we cannot help but be outraged by the overthrow at Haiti's elected democratic government with the complicity of the United States

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fair share of American attention, Americam trade, and American aid. Egypt and Israel alone receive as much US aid as do all the African nations south of the Sahara.^xxiii

Just as we have work to do abroad, we have work to do at home. This Administration has not been good for civil rights. It has not been good for civil liberties. It has not been good for democracy.

What better place than here and what better time than now to recall the travesty of the 2000 election.

You all know the story - Governor Bush' administration hired a firm to purge the voter rolls, and purge them they did, removing the qualified and the ineligible with equal eagerness, 94,000 in all. This was truly a weapon of mass voting rights destruction.^xxiv

By the way, the man who ran that purge got a reward - today he is in the Voting Rights Section of the Department of Justice as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.

Winesses told the sorry story of voter suppression and nullification in Florida at our hearings after the election. They described police stops near polling places, demands for multiple form of identification from people who had voted for decades, long-time voters' names missing from the rolls, a long and too-familiar litany of the sorts of activities practiced for years across the country to keep racial minorities from the polls.

With our coalition partners we filed and won a lawsuit, NAACP v. Smith, and received promises that what happened in 2000 will not happen again. But is has been happening for years, in Florida and elsewhere across the country.

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