Stand Up Monday for the Workers King Died Supporting

They're predicting thunderstorms and tornadoes in Louisville Monday but I'm going to be there anyway.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., where he was standing with sanitation workers demanding their dream of a better life. Today, the right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a middle-class life are under attack as never before. Find out more here.

Join us to make April 4, 2011, and the days surrounding it, a day to stand in solidarity with working people in Wisconsin and dozens of other states where corporate-bought politicians are trying to take away the rights Dr. King gave his life for.

Join millions of others who are electrified by King’s same dream and are joining together for our common dreams.

Find an event near you here.

From Katrina vanden Heuvel at the Nation, "It's time for fair share politics":

Yet it’s par for the course in this take-no-prisoners, slashonomics budget debate, where fighting to protect programs that help people get basic needs like housing, healthcare and heat is derided, but no corporate loophole is left unprotected. The debate in Washington has almost always been out of touch with the realities of people’s lives, but that gap has now widened into a gulf—perhaps greater than we’ve seen in generations.

Yet I still have hope.

A strong inside-outside strategy to reset, reboot and reframe the budget debate is emerging. The spirit, energy and outrage we saw in Wisconsin is being sustained and nurtured in communities across the country. Driven by progressives allied with the labor movement, people from a great range of backgrounds are standing up and delivering a message: our problem isn’t one of caring too much for working people and the most vulnerable and it won’t be solved by cutting vital investments. Our problem is freeloading corporations that need to pony up their fair share.

What demoralized progressives need to remember is there are allies on Capitol Hill showing real moxie, and doing what they can to offer real alternatives that respond to rising suffering, inequality and corporate greed, rather than shrink from it.

Consider the good Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Always the people’s champion, he’s called for closing corporate tax loopholes to raise more than $400 billion over a ten-year period. He’s also introduced legislation that would impose a 5.4 percent surtax on millionaires and yield up to $50 billion per year. In the House, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky introduced the Fairness in Taxation Act, which would create new tax brackets for millionaires and billionaires. (According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the most popular way to reduce the deficit is through a surtax on millionaires, preferred by 81 percent of Americans!)

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Common sense and humane response demand that we fight to reset the terms of a suffocatingly narrow and wrongheaded debate and pursue continued movement building. This is our heritage as progressives—independent mass movements have led this country towards its greatest ideals—we’ve seen it with the abolitionists, populists and suffragists and the workers, civil rights, women’s, LGBT and immigrant movements.

On April 4—the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he stood for the rights of sanitation workers in Memphis—this movement takes its next step. Progressive allies, the Nation-inspired US Uncut and people who have simply had enough of the lies and distortions that define this budget debate, and the poor and middle-class who pay the price for it, will participate in actions, teach-ins, demonstrations, vigils and more.

This is our moment to reclaim the best principles of this country. Turnout on April 4.