Congresswoman Barbara Lee accepts Thomas Merton Award

The great Thomas Merton once said, “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” At the 43rd Merton Award Dinner, Congresswoman Barbara Lee trumpeted that lesson as she accepted the award in his namesake.
Lee was resoundingly applauded throughout the night when reference to the fact that she was the only member of congress that voted against the authorization of force following the attack on 9/11.
“It was really a blank check, not only for President Bush but for any president to use force against any organization, individual, nation. To me that was too broad and that set the stage for action in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and all around the world.”
She said she is fighting with New House Speaker Paul Ryan on repealing those bills and getting an up or down vote in congress on continued military action in Syria.
Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr. were both pacifists who believed violence was never the answer. Lee in the same mold gave her acceptance speech intertwining the two men as role models whose words continually need to be reflected upon. The key King Jr. quote she recited and addressed to the crowd was from his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech at Riverside church where he outlined the triple evils of militarism, racism and poverty.
On addressing King’s second evil of poverty, Lee said her hardest fight is getting funding for domestic programs. Speaker Ryan’s budget privatizes Medicare, social security, cuts snap, food stamps, HUD, higher education and head start.
That budget jeopardizes her goal to finally reach the promise of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Lee admitted she just recently has begun to open up about how she herself was once on food stamps.
“It was a bridge over troubled waters.” Admitting that for a long time, she felt embarrassed to admit it, adding, “99 percent of people don’t want to be there, they want a job and to raise their families, so you can’t cut that.”
“Budget is a moral document, it should reflect our values,” Lee said.  As she informed the room that corporate chief executives are now making as much as 300 times the amount of the average worker. She has new legislation that tries to address it.
“If your CEO is making 25 times more than what the lowest paid employee makes, you don’t get a tax break,” she said.
This likely would not curb the rate of CEO pay from rising, which it did by 16 percent last year, or incentivize companies to raise their minimum wage, she said. Otherwise any company that pays workers at a rate of $7.25 an hour would be limiting their CEO to 25 times $15,080 a year which amounts to $377,000 or surrendering their tax break. John Hammergren, CEO of Mckesson Corporation, brought in $131 million last year. If McKesson wanted a tax break from the government the lowest paid worker would have to make no less than $5.24 million a year to get a tax break, she said. The real impact is that successful corporations won’t continue to get corporate welfare. If Lee’s bill passes, Republicans who want to cut the budget will have to start at the top, not the bottom.
King’s third pillar of evil was racism. Lee specifically targeted the criminal justice system stressing the significance of ending secret juries, mandatory minimums, three strikes and making sure deadly force cases are heard by a judge.
“Our criminal justice system needs to be rebuilt” she said while also evoking Merton’s truth to power statement: “The world if full of great criminals with enormous power and they are in a death struggle with each other,” she continued. “It is a huge gang battle using well-meaning lawyers, policemen and clergymen as their front; controlling papers, means of communication and enrolling everyone in their armies.”
Secondarily, she touted the importance of voting rights and advocating for the Voting Rights Advancement Act to undo certain protections that have been eroded over the years.
Lee ended the night on a lighter note stating that she and Congressman Mike Doyle have a diplomatic trip to Cuba coming up soon and praised President Obama for beginning the normalization process and describing his district, which consists of most of Allegheny county as wonderfully diverse and eclectic.
When asked if she would ever run for president, she didn’t give it a second thought but added that firsts are important to show kids they can do things. “I got encouraged to get into congress by Shirley Chisolm. She took me to task and told me I better register to vote. I organized her campaign and the rest is history.”
 
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