🇺🇸🗽IN COMPETITIVE MICH 3RD, FORMER BIA ATTORNEY HILLARY SCHOLTEN REACHES VOTERS WITH VALUES-BASED CAMPAIGN FOCUSING ON LISTENING, SOLVING PROBLEMS, ADDRESSING LOCAL ISSUES, & PROTECTING INDIVIDUAL LIBERTIES! — Lissandra Villa Huerta @ BoGlo Reports!

Hillary Scholten
Hillary Scholten
Democrat
Candidate for Congress
Michigan 3rd District
Lissandra Villa Huerta
Lissandra Villa Huerta
National Political Reporter
Boston Globe
PHOTO: BoGlo Website

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/08/27/nation/democrats-michigan-hope-capitalize-swell-support-abortion-rights/

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Hillary Scholten, a 40-year-old Democratic congressional hopeful, only had to knock on a handful of doors last Saturday in a residential neighborhood here before she encountered Maria D’Angelo, who was sitting on her front porch, about to have coffee with her neighbor, Sara VanderArk.

Both women in the historically conservative but now Democratic-leaning district are overwhelmingly focused on a single issue this November: women’s rights.

“I’ve had to voice publicly and to family members that I never intended to tell that I’ve had abortions,” D’Angelo, a Democrat, told the Globe about the fallout from the Supreme Court’s June decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. VanderArk, who identifies as an independent, said she was inspired by the court ruling to join abortion rights protests and that her vote would largely hinge on the issue in the fall.

They are exactly the type of galvanized voters that Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in Michigan and across the country are hoping will give them a boost in the November midterm elections. Midterm years are historically bad news for the president’s party even without high inflation and sagging presidential approval ratings, but Democrats now are nursing a sliver of hope: They’re narrowing the enthusiasm gap — the motivation level of voters — and popular opinion on the issue of abortion is on their side.

That’s especially true in Michigan, a battleground state where, like Kansas before it, there has been a surge in the number of women who’ve registered to vote since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June after almost 50 years as settled precedent, according to an analysis by TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. A recent poll commissioned by AARP, the interest group for older Americans, showed the issue was among voters’ top concerns. And Michigan’s new third congressional district, where Scholten is running, is a rare congressional race where Democrats aren’t just having to focus on defending their turf, they feel bullish about their odds of flipping the seat.

“The level of engagement on this issue is just so high,” Scholten told the Globe in an interview at her campaign office last weekend. “It’s the only thing I hear about. Women stop me in the grocery store and grab my arms and are like, please do something about this.”

Scholten, an attorney and former Department of Justice official, said she saw a surge of volunteers, fund-raising, and willingness of voters to answer doors and talk to her after the Dobbs decision.

This may sound strange in a district that has historically voted Republican. Its congressman is Republican Peter Meijer, a scion of a Midwest grocery store dynasty, and its voters have backed Republicans in the last three presidential elections. But the district’s newly drawn boundaries that are in place for the first time this election cycle make it significantly friendlier to Democrats. Since Meijer, who was one of just 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach former President Trump, lost his primary to his more right-wing and anti-abortion opponent John Gibbs, Democrats hope to motivate the more Democratic-leaning voters in Grand Rapids and its suburbs who are now part of the district and are mad as hell about the abortion rights repeal.

“Everywhere around the state, when we knock on doors, people bring up abortion — it’s not a negative anywhere,” said Michigan state Senator Winnie Brinks. “People used to be pro-choice, but they were quiet about it. Now they’re not quiet about it. They’re like, ‘Nope, this is on the line, we’re gonna talk about it.’”

That was clear in interviews with voters in downtown Grand Rapids for the city’s “3rd Thursdays,” where residents congregate for live music and can go into the city’s art museum for free courtesy of the Meijer Foundation. It was clear in interviews on the other end of the district on the shore of Lake Michigan, where voters strolled watching the sun set over the lake on a Friday night. And it was clear in the views expressed by voters Scholten met knocking on doors.

“I will for sure be there to vote,” said Erica Kochaney, a Democrat and Grand Rapids resident who was at Grand Haven State Park on Friday evening. Reproductive freedom “is my number one reason for getting out there for sure.”

On the Scholten-Gibbs race and the issue of abortion, she added, “I know where she stands on it, and I’m fine, and I feel like I know where he stands on it, and I’m not fine with it.”

. . . .

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Read the rest of Lissandra’s coverage at the link.

A “home grown daughter” of her Michigan District, Hillary is an experienced, resilient, courageous, values-based problem solver committed to making Government work for the common good rather than infringing on individual liberties, invading bedrooms and doctors’ offices, banning books, interfering with elections, and “dumbing down” education.

She is also a highly successful working parent who knows that the same teamwork, caring, creativity, and unselfishness that goes into the challenges of raising a family also can apply on a larger scale to American society. She knows that problems like inflation, infrastructure, climate change, health, safety, and education affect all Americans, regardless of party affiliation.

As a DOJ attorney working in one of the most fractured areas of American law and public policy, Hillary has seen first hand what works and what doesn’t work in today’s Government. She knows that “same old, same old” won’t get the job done for 21st Century America! She seeks a better America — for all Americans, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, or status.

Several weeks ago I wrote about under-appreciated American “good government hero” Frances Perkins, our first female cabinet secretary, appointed by FDR.  https://immigrationcourtside.com/2022/08/14/%e2%9a%96%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%97%bd%f0%9f%a6%b8%f0%9f%8f%bb%e2%99%80%ef%b8%8f%f0%9f%8e%96-a-true-american-hero-gets-her-due-frances-perkins-was-the-mother-of-americas-safety-net/

Frances Perkins
Hillary Scholten is following in the footsteps of another “Good Government Trailblazer,” Frances Perkins (1880-1965)
U.S. Secretary of Labor (1933-45)
PHOTO: Public realm

Perkins was driven by her life experiences and values, yet courageously and effectively “worked the system” (then basically an “Old Boys’ Club”) to achieve successes and innovations that have shaped our nation for generations (Social Security is just one of her achievements). Hillary Scholten embodies qualities that made Perkins a successful leader who made life better for all Americans!

No one legislator can do it all. But if anyone can bring fact-based legislating, the hopes, fears, and positive values of people in the heartland, and informed debate to our national legislative process, it’s Hillary and other “practical problem solvers” like her! Values, progress, innovation, and humanity over political expediency — that’s Hillary! She is a good listener and team-builder — willing and able to find common ground with those who might not share all her views.

I know Hillary as an unusual combination of intellectual and moral toughness with kindness, compassion, humanity, and common sense. She’s one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet — makes you want to be on her team! She gets things done by inspiring others, not by threatening , demeaning, or excluding them!

The good folks of Mich 3 have a chance to do something really great — for their own district and for the future of America — by sending Hillary to Washington! We need you, Hillary, now more than ever!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-06-22

⚖️🗽🦸🏻‍♀️🎖 A TRUE AMERICAN HERO GETS HER DUE: FRANCES PERKINS WAS THE “MOTHER OF AMERICA’S SAFETY NET!” — By Professor Heather Cox Richardson — “She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.”

Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson
Historian
Professor, Boston College
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins (1880-1965)
U.S. Secretary of Labor (1933-45)
PHOTO: Public realm

Letters from an American

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August 13, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

11 hr ago

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Since it seems clear we will be deciding whether we want to preserve the Social Security Act by our choice of leaders in the next few elections, I thought it not unreasonable to reprint this piece from last year about why people in the 1930s thought the measure was imperative. There is more news about the classified material at Mar-a-Lago, but nothing that can’t wait another day so I can catch this anniversary.

By the time most of you will read this, it will be August 14, and on this day in 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While FDR’s New Deal had put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act is known for its payments to older Americans, but it did far more than that. It established unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship between the government and its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she lasted from 1933 to 1945.

She brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had harped on the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men worked their way up, providing for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that people in communities had always supported each other. The vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support.

As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, where the old-fashioned, close-knit community supported those in need. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

The next year, in 1911, she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire turned Perkins away from voluntary organizations to improve workers’ lives and toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system, the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering caused by the Great Depression made Perkins realize that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

Through her Tammany connections, Perkins met FDR, and when he asked her to be his Secretary of Labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation. They said they worried that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that those displaced by the Depression had added new pressure to the idea of old-age insurance.

In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.

Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric, and together, they began to change the public conversation about social welfare policies.

They spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn’t have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn’t stay long enough in any one place, they didn’t have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”

FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan to create a basic social safety net, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with a final plan, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”

By the time the bill came to a vote in Congress, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.

When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don’t know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”

With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.

When she recalled the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins recalled: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.”

Notes:

https://www.ssa.gov/history/35actinx.html

https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html

https://francesperkinscenter.org/life-new/

Share

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Perkins was an original “good government person,” unfortunately, an increasingly rare breed. She recognized that a strong, reliable government safety net promotes personal independence and achieving full individual potential.

Perkins Homestead
Frances Perkins Homestead
Damariscotta, ME
PHOTO: Francis Perkins Center

Perkins had strong Maine ties to her ancestral homestead in Newcastle, ME. It’s near our summer home in Boothbay Harbor, ME. A few years ago, Cathy and I had a chance to tour the homestead, now owned and maintained by the Frances Perkins Center in Damariscotta, ME.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

08-14-22

🇺🇸👍🏼😇HISTORY: LABOR DAY TRIBUTE: FRANCES PERKINS, GODMOTHER OF AMERICA’S SAFETY NET! 🥇❤️ — By Professor Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson
Historian
Professor, Boston College
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins (1880-1965)
U.S. Secretary of Labor (1933-45)
PHOTO: Public realm

pastedGraphic.pngFrom “Letters From An American:”

pastedGraphic.png

September 5, 2021

By Heather Cox Richardson

On March 25, 1911, Frances Perkins was visiting with a friend who lived near Washington Square in New York City when they heard fire engines and people screaming. They rushed out to the street to see what the trouble was. A fire had broken out in a garment factory on the upper floors of a building on Washington Square, and the blaze ripped through the lint in the air. The only way out was down the elevator, which had been abandoned at the base of its shaft, or through an exit to the roof. But the factory owner had locked the roof exit that day because, he later testified, he was worried some of his workers might steal some of the blouses they were making.

“The people had just begun to jump when we got there,” Perkins later recalled. “They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump, the[y] were trying to get that out and they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump. The… weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.”

By the time the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was out, 147 young people were dead, either from their fall from the factory windows or from smoke inhalation.

Perkins had few illusions about industrial America: she had worked in a settlement house in an impoverished immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and was the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for workers. But even she was shocked by the scene she witnessed on March 25.

By the next day, New Yorkers were gathering to talk about what had happened on their watch. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” Perkins said. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”

The Democratic majority leader in the New York legislature, Al Smith—who would a few years later go on to four terms as New York governor and become the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928—went to visit the families of the dead to express his sympathy and his grief. “It was a human, decent, natural thing to do,” Perkins said, “and it was a sight he never forgot. It burned it into his mind. He also got to the morgue, I remember, at just the time when the survivors were being allowed to sort out the dead and see who was theirs and who could be recognized. He went along with a number of others to the morgue to support and help, you know, the old father or the sorrowing sister, do her terrible picking out.”

“This was the kind of shock that we all had,” Perkins remembered.

The next Sunday, concerned New Yorkers met at the Metropolitan Opera House with the conviction that “something must be done. We’ve got to turn this into some kind of victory, some kind of constructive action….” One man contributed $25,000 to fund citizens’ action to “make sure that this kind of thing can never happen again.”

The gathering appointed a committee, which asked the legislature to create a bipartisan commission to figure out how to improve fire safety in factories. For four years, Frances Perkins was their chief investigator.

She later explained that although their mission was to stop factory fires, “we went on and kept expanding the function of the commission ’till it came to be the report on sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions and then to report all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects.”

And they did. Al Smith was the speaker of the house when they published their report, and soon would become governor. Much of what the commission recommended became law.

Perkins later mused that perhaps the new legislation to protect workers had in some way paid the debt society owed to the young people, dead at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”

But she was not done. In 1919, over the fervent objections of men, Governor Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission to help weed out the corruption that was weakening the new laws. She continued to be one of his closest advisers on labor issues. In 1929, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt replaced Smith as New York governor, he appointed Perkins to oversee the state’s labor department as the Depression worsened. When President Herbert Hoover claimed that unemployment was ending, Perkins made national news when she repeatedly called him out with figures proving the opposite and said his “misleading statements” were “cruel and irresponsible.” She began to work with leaders from other states to figure out how to protect workers and promote employment by working together.

In 1933, after the people had rejected Hoover’s plan to let the Depression burn itself out, President-elect Roosevelt asked Perkins to serve as Secretary of Labor in his administration. She accepted only on the condition that he back her goals: unemployment insurance; health insurance; old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week; a minimum wage; and abolition of child labor. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

She promised to find out.

Once in office, Perkins was a driving force behind the administration’s massive investment in public works projects to get people back to work. She urged the government to spend $3.3 billion on schools, roads, housing, and post offices. Those projects employed more than a million people in 1934.

In 1935, FDR signed the Social Security Act, providing ordinary Americans with unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services.

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and maximum hours. It banned child labor.

Frances Perkins, and all those who worked with her, transformed the horror of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire into the heart of our nation’s basic social safety net.

“There is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done,” Perkins said. “It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”

Happy Labor Day, everyone.

—-

Notes:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1933-02-19/ed-1/seq-23/

https://francesperkinscenter.org/life-new/

https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/primary/lectures/

https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html

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Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
Aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911)
ILGWU Archives
Public Realm

Get more from HCR at the above link!

Perkins is one of the most important and under-recognized heroes of modern American history. Perkins believed that Government was there to promote the public good.

But, it wasn’t just a hollow slogan like those spouted by many of today’s politicos. She actually “walked the walk,” using her powerful intellect, energy, talent, advocacy skills, persistence, and influence with FDR to make America a much better place.

Just think of it: “unemployment insurance; health insurance; old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week; a minimum wage; and abolition of child labor.” An amazing list of accomplishments for which she has received far, far too little credit from historians. Today, most Americans probably think of Perkins, if at all, as the “first female Cabinet Secretary.” But she was more than that. Much more!

Perkins also used her position as Labor Secretary (prior to WW II the cabinet officer with responsibility for immigration) creatively in an attempt to save Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Although she won a major legal battle on the positive use of “charge bonds” to assist refugees, the actual effects of her humanitarian efforts appear to have been unfortunately limited. 

In the xenophobic, anti-Semitic, isolationist America of the 1930s, she also became a target of the far right for her strong commitment to human rights. In 1939, Congressional xenophobes initiated an unsuccessful impeachment attempt.

In 1940, FDR transferred responsibility for immigration from the Labor Department to the Department of Justice. That spelled not only the end of Perkins’s efforts to help Jewish refugees, but also was a death sentence for many who might have been saved. 

The DOJ threw up a powerful combination of restrictive requirements and bureaucracy to guarantee the death of more European Jews in the Holocaust. Indeed, the DOJ went one better by putting Japanese-American U.S. citizens in concentration camps based on “national security” claims that have since been shown to be both bogus and racially motivated. Sound familiar?

You can read all about this disgraceful chapter in American history and Perkins’s largely fruitless attempts to “swim against the tide” here, in this article by Rebecca Brenner Graham in Contingent Magazine: https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/08/23/no-refuge/.

Rebecca Brenner Grahjam
Dr. Rebecca Brenner Graham
Teacher, Author, Historian
PHOTO: Rebeccabrennergraham.com

I really enjoyed Rebecca’s very lively, accessible historical writing that brings to life one of the ugliest episodes in modern American history, now largely swept under the carpet by today’s nativist revisionists. It’s also covered in the a Holocaust museum, an exhibit that contains much of  the same bogus “America is full” xenophobic rhetoric spouted by too many of today’s GOP nativists. 

This really horrible response by Western democracies to lives in peril was what gave rise to the Geneva Refugee Convention, the basis for the Refugee Act of 1980 and our current refugee and asylum system! How quickly we forget! The Trump Administration, with help from the Supremes, basically abrogated the legal system for refugees and asylees, without legislation. Despite promises to restore the rule of law, the Biden Administration has basically allowed most of Trump’s illegal and immoral policies to continue damaging humanity and diminishing us as a nation.

What would Frances Perkins have done? Certainly more than Garland and Mayorkas! At any rate, I enjoyed Rebecca’s historical writing and look forward to more!

A few years ago, Cathy and I had the pleasure of touring the Perkins Family Homestead, near Damariscotta, Maine, now owned by the Frances Perkins Center, with our dear, now departed Boothbay Harbor neighbor Sue Bazinet. It certainly opened my eyes to what true progressive values, lived and acted upon, were and still are!

Perkins Homestead
Frances Perkins Homestead
Damariscotta, ME
PHOTO: Francis Perkins Center

We could use more leaders like Perkins today! Many thanks to the always-fabulous HCR for highlighting this great American!

🇺🇸Happy Labor Day, ⚒ and Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-06-21