Against the Wal

Enough is enough.

Wal-Mart, one of the richest companies in the world wants to set up shop in Chicago – but refuses to pay a decent wage or to stay neutral if their employees want to unionize. They cynically use the need for jobs as their main weapon against paying a living wage.

Mayor Richard Daley has cut city services, laid off hundreds of city workers and forced thousands of others to take week of unpaid time off - essentially a 10% pay cut, while sitting on a mountain of cash reserves to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

Our neighborhoods are overrun with boarded up houses while the banks we bailed out refuse to renegotiate the bad loans they made and fight against mediation programs that would help people keep their homes.

If there is one American we can look to for inspiration in this time, someone who knew what it was like to confront seemingly insurmountable challenges, it is Martin Luther King. In 1955 in one of his earliest speeches, at only 26 years old, he said:

“You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression … If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined… to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

King was up against the wall in 1955. We are up against the wall in 2009.