Al Levie walked away from Paul Ryan. Levie refused to go along with Ryan's hypocritical side show on stage, after he received the MLK Humanitarian Award.
Al Levie is one of three recipients of Gateway Technical College's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Awards bestowed Monday and made these remarks in his acceptance speech. Levie is a social studies teacher at Horlick High School and is on the state executive board of Voces de la Frontera and the Racine chapter of the NAACP. He is an advisor to the student youth group Youth Empowered in the Struggle.
Here's a part of Levie's speech:
Lincoln saw the rights of workers superseding the rights of capital. He said labor is prior to, and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
The struggle for equality is not only a civil rights struggle; it is an economic justice struggle. There is no wealth problem in this country only a distribution problem. Our society needs to reorder its priorities and meet human need instead of fostering individual human greed.
As a recipient of Gateway Technical College's Humanitarian Award, I pledge to redouble my efforts in the struggle for social and economic justice. Concretely, that means fighting to roll back the power of the corporate elite in our society, making the ultra-rich pay their fair share in taxes, fighting for adequate funding for our public schools, restoring collective bargaining for public employees, fair and humane immigration reform, and restoring the voting rights for all people living within our state and country. That is what democracy looks like.
Go Mr. Levie! So proud to be a Gateway grad today.
ReplyDeleteYou go, Al Levie!
ReplyDeletePuts me in mind of this story from my family:
In the early 1950s my father was named Outstanding Young Man of the Year by the South Milwaukee Junior Chamber of Commerce. He accepted, on the condition that he not appear on the same stage with the main speaker, Senator Joe McCarthy. He waited in the back of the room until the Senator, who showed up late and drunk, had spoken. Taking the stage after McCarthy left, my father accepted the award and got his moment to speak. We don't have a record of what he said, but knowing him we're sure he gave an alternative to Joe McCarthy's point of view.
Thanks for the story.
ReplyDeleteThe most expensive primary and secondary public education in the industrialized world and yet one of the worst (if not the worst)...yeah, you really have the moral high ground you moron.
ReplyDelete"Liberalism is a mental disorder"