Polly guth charitable fund. The clements foundation. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations Whose Mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The bernard and audre rapoport foundation. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound. Org. Anne gumowitz. The betsy and jesse fink foundation. The hkh foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Welcome. My generation was moved and shocked by one of the most powerful documentaries ever made. Broadcast the night after thanksgiving in 1960, edward r. Murrows harvest of shame exposed us to the callous exploitation of the Migrant Workers who pick our fruit and vegetables. This is an american story that begins in florida and ends in new jersey. It is a 1960s grapes of wrath that begins at the Mexican Border in california and ends in oregon and washington. It is the story of men and women and children who work 136 days of the year and average 900 a year. They travel in buses. They ride trucks. They follow the sun. They are the migrants. Workers in the sweat shops of the soil. The harvest of shame. Believe it or not, more than 50 years later, the life of a migrant laborer is still an ordeal. And not just for adults. Perhaps as many as half a million children, some as young as 7 years old, are out in the fields and orchards working nine to ten hours a day under brutal conditions. A few decades ago, Baldemar Velasquez was one of those kids, working in the fields beside his parents who eventually migrated to ohio, where he still lives. His experience led him to a life organizing and fighting for social justice for workers still trapped, in his words, by their own fate and historical design. Following in the footsteps of the legendary cesar chavez and his united farm workers, velasquez founded the farm labor organizing committee, or floc, and slowly built a movement, taking on some of the biggest Corporate Giants in america. In 1978, he led more than 2,000 workers in ohio and michigan on strike against Vegetable Growers and the Campbell Soup company. The walkout and accompanying boycott were the largest Agricultural Labor action in the history of the midwest. Eight years later, campbells and the growers agreed to a deal, the first farm labor contract outside of california. These days, Baldemar Velasquez and floc are targeting r. J. Reynolds, the largest Tobacco Company in North Carolina and the second biggest in america. Earlier this month, velasquez joined protesters at the weekly moral monday rallies outside North Carolinas capitol in raleigh, demonstrating against draconian budget cuts and union busting. But this rich manufacturer from toledo was calling me about organizing the Migrant Workers in ohio. He says i want to talk to you about why you oppose me. So, he invites me to his country club, and so i go to this country club and i say are you a member of this country club, why are you a member of this country club . He said, because this is where i do my networking, this is where i gather with people like myself, to overcome the obstacles of doing my business. Youre a member of the chamber of commerce, right . For the same reason. Yeah, i said, you remember the rotary club for the same reason. He says, yeah. I said, how come you white guys can have all the unions and us mexicans cant have one . He was briefly arrested and surrendered peacefully, all part of the gospel according to Baldemar Velasquez, quote, speak truth to power with love in your heart. Pray for courage to speak it despite your fears. Explain the inequity and show your enemy the road to reconciliation. Baldemar velasquez is with me now. Its good to meet you. Thank you. What was that like when you were a boy growing up . Your parents were working in the field. You were working in the field. What was your day like . Well, pretty much like farm workers have now. That they get up at daybreak. And you have to work hard and fast, because when i was young, many of the crops were piece rate. There was no such thing piece rate meaning . Well, you get paid per container, or even by the acre. If you didnt work and fill those buckets or whatever, you didnt get paid. And you didnt have anything to eat. So youre primarily just trying to make enough just to eat and maybe have some money to buy clothes and be try to make it, follow the next crop, where it hopefully will go better. Just the other day, we were joking about, my brother jose and i, my younger brother, sometimes there were such sparse food in the house that we would actually count the beans on our plate to make sure we had the equal number of beans. If there was an odd bean, wed cut it in half. What did it do to your parents that they couldnt provide for all of you . That was one of the most traumatic things growing up. You see, being poor is in and of itself not traumatic. Its an inconvenience, but being poor and powerless to withstand the mistreatment, to watch my mom and dad be mistreated, and are being fooled about the wages and exactly stolen from us. How so . Well, when youre working piece rate, like my dad didnt know very much english. And he would we were say we were hoeing sugar beets, and we were getting paid by the acre. And my dad would always ask, well, how many rows are in an acre . So theyd tell him however many rows. And by this time, i was already in junior high school. And i was learning math. I was always good at math. Because as a little kid, youre picking by piece rate, youre counting all the time. So, i knew numbers pretty good. And so i said, well, i learned how many square feet there were in an acre and what the length and the width would be. And so i just one day i just got down on my knees and with a foot ruler and measured off the length of a field and worked backwards and figured out what the width would be. And then measured out the width with that ruler. And figured and then counted the rows in that width. And i find out that for every acre we hoed, we were two or three rows more than what the acre actually was. So when you hoe a 40acre field, youre only getting paid for 33 or 34 acres. And thats the way they cheated us. And i would tell my dad, theyre cheating us, dad. You know, theyre thats not how many rows are in an acre. This is the correct number. So, what could you do about it . Given that they were in charge . Nothing. Thats the problem. There was no way for us to complain. No way for us to appeal to anyone. And if we wanted to go to local Law Enforcement, well, the farmers were all related to the Law Enforcement. Some of them were family in the Law Enforcement, whether theyre the judges or the police or the sheriff of the county. And it made it not to our advantage to complain. Because then you would be blacklisted from other farmers and nobody would hire you. And then we couldnt work. And we wouldnt have anything to eat. Were your parents subjected to humiliation, the racial humiliation, the racial snubs and epithets . Well, the verbal mistreatment of my mom and dad was something thats very was very hard to take. A young man wants to defend his mom. And you love your mom and you love your dad. And you dont want to see them treated with disrespect and less than a human being. And when you watch your parents being treated that way, it makes you angry. It makes you want to do something. It makes you want to fight. And at some point, when i got to be about 12 or 13 years old, i decided that if when i grew up, if i can do something about this, im going to do it. That young . Well, i started thinking about it at that time. But i felt kind of like, how in the heck do you go around, you know, changing these things . It seems so overwhelming and the parties not only the farmers we thought were big, but when you look at the corporations who bought the crops, the manufacturers, and now the retailers, who are directly buying from many large farms, it seems so overwhelming and, like so powerful. And you almost have to decide that if you fight these people, its kind of like suicidal. Theyre going to blacklist you in the work. Theyre going to discredit you in the community. Theyre going to do everything they can to make you a pariah of society. And i think that at some point, you make that decision. Say, okay, if they do that, thats okay, but thats not going to keep me shut up. What did you do . Well, i went to college. I got through my first year, two semesters for 800, outofstate tuition, living with my grandparents. And i borrowed half of that money from a local bank in ohio, and had to work the following summer to work that off. But doing what . Picking cherries up in michigan. But it was my experience in south texas, the way to watch my grandparents, the way they were treated, and my aunts. The way i mean, didnt make any sense. This was 1965. And 80 of the population are mexicanamerican. And every judge, every mayor, every county commissioner, everybody, they were all white. I said, now, how is this . And you watch the condescension. Well, thats the way my grandparents were treated. Thats the way my aunts were treated. And that was in the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. The folk singers were singing protest songs. I learned and gleaned everything that i was hearing. And so i went to volunteer for c. O. R. E. , the congress of racial equality in cleveland, ohio. And i lived in a tenement house with an africanamerican family. And my job was to ride shotgun with another man with a Police Scanner in the car. And our job was to respond to police calls and Document Police brutality cases in the black neighborhoods. Well, id go home every night to that tenement house, and id sleep on this guys couch. Well, one morning he asked me, son, ive got to ask you a question. I say, yeah, go head. He says, well, youre the only person ive ever had here as a volunteer that hasnt complained about the rats. Why is that . So, i told him my rat story, that i grew up with the rats in labor camps and the Old Farmhouse we lived on the county line in northwest ohio. There was the couch that was in the living room was my bed and my brothers bed. He slept on one end, and i slept on the other end. And there was that couch pushed up against a window overlooking the front porch. And there was a crack underneath the pane. And thats where the rats would come in at night. So, at night, youd hear the scratching along the back of that couch. And we knew there was a rat going to get up on the top up there. And we knew that the rat had to jump on the seat where we were sleeping before he got on the floor. So, when wed hear the scratching on the back of that couch, wed kick each other and pull the blanket taut, to make kind of like a trampoline for the rat. And the rat would jump down on the blanket. And when wed hear that, wed go with our fists underneath, boom, like that, to see how far we could make the rat fly. And that was our game, to see how far we could make the rat fly. But the man says he looked kind of stunned, and he said, good lord, son, why arent you doing something for your own people . And thats what provoked the thought, i need to go back and start organizing the Migrant Workers and try to follow the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement to speak for people and organize them so they can speak for themselves. You make me think of a video that i saw the other day of a speech you made after one of your colleagues in floc had been murdered in mexico. Let me play that video for our audience. Im talking to you as organizers. Look, were not doing this because the objective listen carefully here, the object is not to win. Thats not the objective. The objective is to do the right and good thing. See because, if you decide not to do anything, because its too hard or too impossible, well then nothing will be done. And when you die, when youre on your deathbed, youre going to say to yourself, i wish i wouldve tried to do something. So, if you go and do the right and good thing now, and if you do it long enough, good things will happen. How did you come to that strategy . I figured that, well, we can just lay down and just let matters overwhelm us and take us in, and whine and complain about how bad things are, or get up and do something and start speaking to those things that are upon you and those things that are evil, and the misdeeds upon you, and just do it and dont stop, and whatever happens, happens. But its better, as Emiliano Zapata said, its better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. And your parents understood that . My mom was the strong one. She was a charismatic catholic. She would say, only god knows, in spanish, you know. And, whatever the lord decides. How can we have a god, you know, thatd keep us in this situation. And i was always angry about it. I would be very puzzled that my mom would have that kind of faith in light of our reality that we had at that time. How did you reconcile the reality that you were dealing with and the faith your mother was expressing in a benevolent and good god . Well, i didnt hear an audible word from god. But it came to me that if he were to speak words, it would come out like this. Look, had you not gone through all those trials, and all those problems, i would not now have a spokesperson to speak for the people. And now i can take that experience and try to verbalize it and try to explain it to the world so that other people who are in that situation can have some visibility in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of the public, the lawmakers, other people. They need to have a voice. And i cant speak for all of them, but i can help open the door and organize them so they can speak for themselves. So thats the way it was reconciled. And more importantly, i think that the anger issue which any young mans going to have growing up in that situation, is not just is just not the issue of getting even anymore. But it was, at one time, wasnt it . It was. You felt, i was going to get even with these yes, right. These guys whod taken advantage of us. But when you come to know the lord, you begin to understand that what true reconciliation is. And true reconciliation is tough. Because if youre angry and just want to fight, theres a winner and theres a loser. But when theres true reconciliation, you bring the harmony of the opposition into some way in which you can live in this world together. Because thats really what were trying to do. And this is really what we want. Ive read that youve even said, we need to love these businessmen. Well, in scripture, theres a principle about hating the sin and loving the sinner. And a person can be running a corporation. And i say this to them. I told the Campbell Soup executives, i told the heinz executives, i told the dean foods executives, i told the mt. Olive executive, the ceo, and im telling Reynolds America right now, youre a good man. But the system that you operate is wrong. And its built on inequity. And you need to fix it, because you have the power to do so. And i keep telling them and find ways to get their attention until they do something about it. And how do you get their attention . We campaign. We boycott. We protest. We march. We go in front of Retail Stores and organize the consumers, who are our best ally. The consumer . The consumer, because theres the growing conscience in this country for safe food, good food produce under just conditions, treating their labor and the environment correctly. And thank god for the consumers who are conscious about those things, for their own sake, and for their familys sake. Thats a huge power there, in the public, among the people. We can tell the Retail Stores, youve got to tell Reynolds America to negotiate an agreement with floc to guarantee the rights of workers at the bottom of their supply chain. They can do that. They can fix that. They have the power to do that. What is the issue right now with r. J. Reynolds . How long has this campaign been going on . Been going on almost five years. Five years. Yeah. So whats the issue . The issue is that the inequality that theyve designed in their supply chain, when they do the pricing of the tobacco, it really amounts to economic marginalization of the small family farmer. So, if the family farmer is marginally is financially marginalized, thefarm workers going to be in a terrible situation trying to be employed by that farmer, by that supplier. So, its like one of us throwing a bone at two dogs and let them fight over whos going to get the better of it. And thats really the fight between farmers and migrant farm workers in this country today. And its the wrong fight. It shouldnt be happening. The farmers and the farm workers should be talking to this to the retail people, big corporations, and the manufacturers about just pricing in the industry so there can be some equity for those people to be able to make a living and to be able to feed, educate, and clothe their families. And yet, r. J. Reynolds refused for years to meet with you, didnt they . Yes, they have. What did they say . They said, we dont were not the employers. They said the employers are down there, the small farmer. Yeah, right. But ive just put a proposal down to them in writing. And im asking them to do three things. One, stop relying on Human Trafficking for your labor supply. Number two, end the squalor in the labor camps, because you cant talk about health and safety without talking about sanitary facilities where theyre living, where theyre housing these workers. For instance, in tobacco, one of the biggest threats to a Workers Health is the nicotine ingestion, nicotine poisoning of his body. And you have to wash that off every night. You have to wear a change of clothes every day. So, youve got to have good washing facilities, good shower facilities. And three, youve got to end the state of fear of those workers being able to complain about matters that many of them are lifethreatening issues like, for instance, North Carolina leads the nation in heat stroke deaths. In what . Heat stroke. And many of them happen in agriculture. And workers cant be afraid to ask for water. And because its terribly you mean they can be afraid to ask for water now . Theyre afraid to take breaks. I went to work in a tobacco farm about three summers ago now, figuring if im going to represent tobacco workers, i need to go out and do the work to see what they go through. So, i moved into a labor camp. And worked a sixday work week. And believe me, the major thing you fought was the heat, the hydration issue, and nicotine ingestion. You had to Wear Clothing buttoned up to your neck. And in the morning, youd wear plastic bags, trash bags made into ponchos so that it keeps the wet leaves, the dew thats on the leaf or rainwater thats on it, that water has nicotine in it. So, when it gets on your body, you ingest it through the skin. A researcher just said that a worker that handled tobacco that they ingest the equivalent of having smoked 22 cigarettes in a day. So, you fight the nicotine ingestion and you fight the dehydration. And it bill, its impossible to keep hydrated. Because its over 100 degrees. The humidity is high. And some of the particularly the rows that are very long and i walked down one end of one row and back before where the water supply was. The farm i worked had great water supply. But by the time you went down there and back, its two hours. And by that time, youre soaked with sweat. And its impossible to keep totally hydrated in the field, no matter how much water you drank. I didnt get hydrated till i got back to the labor camp at night. Give me a sense, a brief picture of the r. J. Reynolds tobacco supply chain. How does it work . Well, the company contracts the tobacco from independent family farms. Theyre mostly fairly small, anywhere from a dozen to 20, 30 employees. And the size of the acreage is a lot smaller than the bigger operators. But the r. J. Reynolds contracts that tobacco directly with those farms. So, they may have any number of farmers contracted to them to grow the required tobacco that they need produced in North Carolina. And thats a pretty direct contract. And then, of course, the farmers then, in turn, they hire either guest workers, undocumented workers through the use of labor contractors and crew leaders. And a lot of times the crew leaders are the ones that have the economic relationship directly with the workers. So, youve got the company. Youve got the growers. And you might have a level of crew leaders, labor contractors, and then the workers. So, all those parties have to come together at some table. And you represent the tobacco cutters, the guys the workers. Right down there in the on the bottom. What do they make . That depends. Believe it or not, the guest workers make more than the undocumented people. Define the difference between a guest worker and an undocumented worker. The worker comes with a visa, an h2a visa. And the department of labor requires those employers to pay a prevailing wage. This year its 9. 68 an hour for the 9. 68 an hour . In North Carolina. If you have the visa . If you have the visa. If you dont have the visa . If you dont have the visa, who knows. Youre undocumented. Youre undocumented, you dont know. Particularly if youre working for a labor contractor. Theyre only obligated to pay, you know, the minimum wage, 7. 25 an hour. Weve seen cases where the farmer pays the crew leader 7. 25 an hour for all the hours reported for his crew. And weve discovered that the crew leader takes a cut off of that. So, theyre really making under minimum wage and sometimes even less. Weve had cases, which we tried to report to the department of labor and the local Law Enforcement agencies, workers held pretty much in captivity. We found a crew of 50 workers living in three house trailers. Only one had a working stove. Only two had working toilets. And many of them were sleeping on the floors like sardines. And three of them escaped and came to us for help. Workers are afraid to complain. Theyre afraid to come out and file a complaint because because . Of retaliation. Theyll be sent home . Or theyll be punished in some other way . Exactly. Or the crew leader knows where their families live in mexico. Theyre afraid for their families, not only here, but theyre afraid for their families in mexico. And its true, the the h2a workers, not the people in the h2a thats the guest workers from mexico. We know of cases in other areas that with other labor contractors that recruit workers in mexico that sure dont do things by the book. At one time, you were seeking what you call freedom visas, which simply granted workers the right to move across the National Borders the way corporations can. Are you still an advocate of the freedom visa . Well, that was a response to the north American Free trade agreement. Nafta, signed by president clinton in 1993. Right. Yeah, see, that devastated the mexican countryside. Just in the commodity of corn. Which is a staple in mexico. Everybody grows corn in mexico. And they grow it for their local use, for themselves. And then the excess, they tried to sell it in the local market. So, when nafta opened the borders to north american corn, those small corn farmers in mexico couldnt help to compete with u. S. Farmers. Theyre highly mechanized and highly subsidized. We have the one of the largest farm aid programs in the world. So the mexican farmers cant compete with subsidized u. S. Farmers. And they take over the corn market in mexico driving these people off their land. The Carnegie Endowment issued a report on the commodity of corn. And now theyre saying that its displaced 2 million corn farmers in mexico. And we complain about these same guys coming over our border now. I say, well, if you want them to stop coming over, itd be a good idea. But maybe we should stop displacing them, so they wouldnt have to come here in the first place. And so i think its important that if were going to be talk about free trade and free markets, which both republicans and democrats are big advocates of, then we should talk about the labor market as a market also. And what drives markets . Law of supply and demand. So, if youre going to allow the labor to be a free market, as well, you got to allow labor to flow freely, the way you do other commodities, under your philosophical thinking. And in order to do that, you got to have a visa so that these workers can travel freely within the countries that signed these agreements, that created this problem in the first place. Isnt that a market . Isnt labor a market . And shouldnt it be treated as a free market . And if it would be allowed to flow freely like they want commodities to do, thatll do the same. And let the markets saturate themselves. But the one caveat to that would be that it would the workers would be given their labor rights. They cannot restrict their labor rights. The freedom to be able to have association, to organize themselves, and that that be recognized. Because that is a very a fundamental american principle that we try to marginalize people by denying that right to a group of people. After your colleague i think he was the manager of your office in monterrey was killed back in, what, 2007 . I could tell from the speeches i saw you delivering then, particularly that one to the that i showed earlier, that you were really angry. You said, our organization is a threat to the diabolic elixir of demagogues, oligarchies, unfair trade, and Financial Services industry. I think thats the truth. And yes, im angry. You know, but you have to be careful when youre angry. Scripture tells us that there is such a thing as righteous anger, but do not sin in your anger. To hold those people accountable for the decisions that make that have the effect like that on other people. And im afraid that this country needs a shaking up in that regard. We its very difficult to see whats happening in our country today. What do you mean whats happening . Well, the marginalizing democracy. People that speak for themselves. I mean, isnt that why we fought the british crown, that we had a right to speak for ourselves and not have things imposed upon us without our representation . Isnt that why we fought a Civil Rights Movement, so that people could have a right to vote, to have to speak, to represent themselves . And now theyre cutting those things off. When you say that your adversary is a diabolical system oligarchy and money and all of that, youre fighting back. Youre outnumbered. But you keep fighting with a ragged army of marginal people . Well, thats better than fighting with nothing. And cesar chavez described it best in the times i spent a lot of had a lot of discussion with cesar. He says, well you know, the rich have a lot to oppose us. They got a lot of money. And farm work we farm workers, we dont have anything. In the back of my mind, im thinking, well, anything becomes a powerful weapon. Because when you dont have anything, you dont have anything to lose. So, what youre investing in the fight is nothing but time. And the opposition is investing money. And the way cesar put it was, theres a lot more time than there is money. And moneys going to run out before time. So, as long as we dont give up, something has got to happen. So, it doesnt take a whole lot to fight. Youve just got to be wanting to do it. And the problem with a lot of people is they dont want to do it, because they think theyre going to lose something. They got they think they got too much to lose. Well, in that regard, youre already lost before you even started. How long have you been doing this . Since 1967. 45 years. Someone told me you dont even have a pension. That you dont have a retirement. No, i sure dont. How old are you now . 66. And youre not showing any signs of slowing down or trying to figure out what youre going to do next . I thought about that at one time. And a friend of mine recently passed away, an attorney friend who had good money, offered to fund a pension for me. I said, jack, i cant do that, because the farm workers dont have any. And if i got something and they didnt, theyre going to say, well, its nice for you to go out and talk about fighting the big corporations when and youre all set in your life. so, it doesnt make it much like youre sharing too much of the sacrifice of the people that are trying to organize. But literally, what it comes down to again, that the Spiritual Foundation that i got from my mom. Matthew 6 26 this is jesus talking. He says, why do you worry about what youre going to eat tomorrow . And says, look at the birds of the air, they no sow nor reap, nor they store their grains in barn. Yet, my heavenly father feeds them. How much more am i going to care for you . And look at the lilies of the field. If youre wondering about what youre going to wear tomorrow, the lilies of the field, not even solomon, in all its splendor, is dressed as one of these. That youre going to be taken care of. And i thats my pension right there. Jesus also said, as you have quoted, love thy neighbor. Turn the other cheek. But he also threw the moneychangers out of the temple. So, i think he probably embraced both philosophies. Well, i remind people of that, as well. And that sometimes you got to speak to the injustice. Its the same thing as jesus speaking to the storm and calming the waters. And everybodys afraid of the storm and the waters around them. But he told the disciples, you know, oh ye of little faith. You know, you speak to the mountain, itll move. And so, i think this is what were doing, bill. Were speaking to those mountains. Those mountains of wealth and capital that needs to be humanized. For them to use that wealth and that capital for good things, for people, to develop our nation and make it strong. Because when you this whole immigration reform, when you have 11 Million People without papers living in the shadows and you have exploited farm workers on the bottom, i think that makes our country weak. How can we go around the world and saying that were the bastions and the light of freedom throughout the world, when we marginalize people within our own country and our own society . And it says in scripture, a house divided in itself cannot stand. And at some point, itll come back to hound us. It seems to me youve not only listened to jesus, youve also listened to Martin Luther king. You remember he said, when you impede the rich mans ability to make money, anything is negotiable. I think this has been one of the cornerstones of our thinking in every campaign we design. The only time i ever was with dr. King in the winter of 68, i believe. And i got an invitation to come to atlanta to help plan the Poor Peoples Campaign. This was very early in my organizing career. And i went to atlanta and got to meet some of the other latino leaders and indian leaders that he brought in for the planning. And i, being innocent not knowing that history was before my very eyes so that afternoon, when i was there, it was like 3 30 in the afternoon. And dr. King comes in with a column of ministers with Ralph Abernathy on one side and andy young on the other side and a young Jesse Jackson in tow. And he was deciding in this Poor Peoples Campaign that the question of inequity in america was not just black, that it was a class issue. It wasnt just a black issue. To us, that was important. The discussion came to that question about, how do we as poor people, were talking about organizing a Poor Peoples Campaign to take on the powers in washington, the monolithic economic institutions of our country to bring equity to the poor people in this country. How do we as poor people who have nothing, who dont have the money and the power and the politicians in our hip pocket to compel the Worlds Largest the richest people to sit down and talk to us. And that was the response. That i remember, it was so burned into my brain, that, when you impede the rich mans ability to make money, anything is negotiable. And we have followed that principle in all the campaigns weve designed. And we keep looking until we find it. Baldemar velasquez, thank you very much for being with me and thank you for the work you do. Thank you, bill. Its been an honor being here. Baldemar velasquez and r. J. Reynolds were to hold another negotiation this past week. It was postponed amidst rumors the company is lobbying the states rightwing dominated legislature for protection against the union. Velasquez says floc will fight on. Theyve never lost yet. Farm workers arent the only ones being exploited. Virtually every low wage earner in america is taking it in the neck. Walmart, with revenues last year of nearly 470 billion, is threatening to abandon plans to build three giant stores in washington, d. C. Why . Because the city councnsists they pay a living wage of 12. 50 an hour. Now, keep in mind that if adjusted productivity, the federal minimum wage, should be almost twice that amount. Walmart is in a tizzy over the washington living wage demands, despite the heirs of founder sam walton already socking away almost 116 billion. You have to ask, how much is enough when no matter what you have is never enough . Which brings us to mcdonalds. The fast food giants new ceo don thompson was just awarded a pay package of nearly 14 million. Now, perhaps that helps explain why mcdonalds has set up a website with visa, to show its fulltime workers how to get by on the minimum wage it pays, which turns out to be a little over 1,100 a month. All you have to do, they say, is get a second job, and not spend any money on food because presumably you can live on the crumbs from Don Thompsons table. Thats a lot of leftover chicken mcnuggets. Clearly, the owners of capital are determined to wring even greater wealth from the sweat of workers, deepening our spin into economic inequality, until, and unless, in solidarity, those workers stand up like Baldemar Velasquez and demand a fair wage for a hard days work. As the world knows, Trayvon Martin was stalked and shot to death by an armed vigilante. The Police Report that night called it an unnecessary killing to pre vest an unlawful act. We will never know the full story because the victim has been forever silenced. Thats the thing about guns, they have the last word. Martins killer George Zimmerman pleaded selfdefense and was acquitted thanks, in part, to floridas stand your ground law. That law was the handiwork of the National Rifle association, whose lobbyist, marion hammer, is seen standing there beside governor jeb bush when he signed it in 2005. Ever since, members of the rightwing organization, the American Legislative Exchange council, also known as alec, have been pushing versions of bills like it in state capitols across the country. 21 states have followed suit. To understand whats happening, read this important new book, the last gun how changes in the gun industry are killing americans and what it will take to stop it. The author is tom diaz. Hes a veteran, former n. R. A member, and worked as an assistant managing editor at the conservative washington times. Trained as a lawyer, he served as a senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center before turning to fulltime writing and speaking on guns and their impact on america. Tom diaz, welcome. Thank you so much. I heard you say earlier that the real winners in the florida tragedy are the nra and the gun industry. How so . Well, for two reasons, i think. One, it, in their eyes validates the whole concept of this, what they call stand your ground law. Look, zimmerman stood his ground and nothing bad happened to him, so that validates the idea that youre going to need these things to protect yourself. Secondly, it increases the market which is what ultimately this is all about. Now they have a case to say, dont you wish you had one of these things in your pocket, if some guy was beating your head into the sidewalk . So, one hand reinforces the other. The conservatives are claiming that stand your ground was not a factor in this case. The National Review online says the media is, quote, inventing reasons to blame the verdict on floridas gun laws, when in fact the stand your ground law wasnt even used in zimmermans defense. It wasnt used technically, that i would agree with. But the stand your ground law changed the circumstances in florida, under which a person might go about armed as did zimmerman. And so that even if the lawyers, i think quite wisely the defense lawyers chose not to make this an issue, it encouraged the kind of carrying of weapons and the thought that, well, i can use this. The law of selfdefense which goes back to ancient times to the talmud, its absolutely clear that a person whos being threatened, whose own life is being threatened, has the right, the moral, ethical, legal right to if necessary kill a person trying to kill them, thats not a question. What we did develop though in our common law were restraints about when you might use that. One had a duty to retreat generally, avoid violence if you can. Why take another human life if theres a way out of the conflict . There was an exception to that, and that was in ones own home. This is the socalled castle doctrine. Thats where the word the phrase, stand your ground, came into legal significance. If youre in your own home and i come in and clearly are going to do you harm, you have no duty to retreat. If necessary, you can take my life. Whats happened here is that the nra, marion hammer, and the people in florida and gun advocates generally have twisted this language, so that now theyve taken this concept of stand your ground into the public space. And theyve tried to say, well, the law hasnt changed. In fact the law has changed. It was very carefully crafted to reduce mayhem, to reduce the chance that somebodys going to be killed and now turned into a situation that practically begs for someone to be killed if i feel threatened. Do you think this is what happened to George Zimmerman . Yes, i have to say i dont think George Zimmerman is a victim, i think he was a tool. A tool . He was the perfect marketing target of the gun industry, small handgun carried around, if youre going to buy no pun intended at target, which was apparently his destination, dont you need your gun to protect yourself . This is exactly what the nra and the gun industry wants to do because it increases sales. And theres a whole, within the industry themselves they talk about how wonderful this concealed carry, stand your ground laws are for selling small handguns exactly like zimmerman had. But there are dangerous people out there, they will tell you that. We have known there are dangerous people since medieval times. And weve understood theres a problem. And weve said you can defend yourself when necessary. That hasnt changed one bit. What has changed is the mix so that we now have people going around with more deadly weapons. Its something that i think that most average americans simply have no understanding of the mindset of the diminishing number of people who own firearms and who own them specifically to carry out on the street, nevertheless they have a mindset. And that mindset is, danger lurks everywhere, and you better have your gun to protect yourself. Goes to the extreme of having, you need a gun in your bathroom because what if youre going to the bathroom and your gun is in the living room. You need a gun in your ankle, because suppose you drop your gun that you carry in your waist. This is not an exaggeration. I read regularly the fan magazines of the gun business. And i say its like reading these bodiceripper romance novels without any good parts. The two things they talk about more than anything else are military style assault rifles and handguns for selfdefense. Almost every issue of every magazine fuels this feeling that you better have a gun, and hey, heres the greatest new gun in the industry. Youre saying this is a Business Strategy . Oh yeah, the gun industry admits it. One of the prolific writers in the industry magazine, this is not fan magazines now. This is a magazine where the industry talks to itself, called it cashing in. Basically, im paraphrasing here, but, the exact phrase, but he said if youre not cashing in on concealed carry laws, youre not going to make money. Article after article in the industry publication says these laws are going to boost your sales of handguns and specific kinds of handguns that are going to bring you out of the slump. And not only that, both in the case of assault rifles and handguns, one writer described the customer as a walking cluster, a walking cluster of aftermarket sales. Youre going to need special holsters. Now theyre even saying youre going to need a special coat for the winter or the summer to conceal your gun. So, the aftermarket and accessories are where and as a matter of fact, its where as in a lot of consumer products, its where the big profits are. And what it appears to be is that its not so many new buyers as it is old buyers buying more and more guns. The average number of guns owned by gun owners has gone up and up and up. The average number of households and individuals who say they own guns has been going down. So, what we have is fewer and fewer people buying more and more guns. How do you reconcile what youve just said about fewer and fewer people actually owning guns with the increasing power of the National Rifle association . You write in your book that the nra has gone to extreme lengths to draw a veil of secrecy over the facts the facts surrounding its impact on our lives. Well, the gun industry learned a lot from the cigarette industry. When the cigarette industry was sued, one of the things probably one of the most important things that the people who litigated against the cigarette industry, was the internal papers of the cigarette industry where we found out these guys not only knew they were killing people, they went to lengths to cover up the fact that they were killing people. The gun industry was terrified when some litigators said, hey, why dont we do to the gun industry what we did to the cigarette industry and other evil industries . So, they got congress to pass a law, to do away with lawsuits, and again, its very hard to sue the gun industry. But there were two other corollaries that led up to that. One was preventing the centers for Disease Control which is our Public Health research arm, the source of almost all of our data about everything from measles to firearms death, they decided a congressman by the name of jay dickey said, hey, we dont want them doing this research on guns. He originally wanted to shut down the whole unit that does all research. And finally they compromised and said, okay, you just cant spend any money on guns. So, we have told the only national Public Health research agency, you can look at anything else. You can look at measles, you can look at workplace accidents, but dont look at guns. So, thats one. Number two, theres an agency a Law Enforcement agency, a federal Law Enforcement agency called the bureau of alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives. Ill call it atf. Atf does something, its called tracing crime guns, which means if a gun is used in a crime or is found at a crime scene or illegally possessed, they trace that gun from its manufacturer, because the federal records are the manufacturers are required to keep records to the first point of its public sale. And then if they can they follow it to the point which it was either found or used in a crime. The value of that in terms of Law Enforcement is Law Enforcement investigators can tell was this gun used in another crime or crimes, how did this person get the gun, was it possibly sold by gun traffickers . From a Public Health point of view, the value of this data, and were talking about millions upon millions of cases investigated, that is, traced, by atf, is that we can answer some of the questions that now are just veiled. For example, when i worked in this field people would call me and say, well, how many glock pistols were used in shootings in the last ten years . And i would say, nobody knows. And we dont know. We could know if we could access the atf database. The same thing when the horrible shooting in newtown, people would say, well, how many of these bushmaster ar15 assault rifles have been used in shootings or crimes . We only know anecdotally. But if we could get that atf data, we would know precisely. So, it would answer questions about do these designs make a difference . Are specific kinds of guns implicated in crime . So, thats the atf contribution. If you take those two together, Public Health, Law Enforcement, you would have a very good picture of what is the impact, not only of guns generally in the united states, but of specific types, calibers, manufacturers. The industry is terrified of this. How is it theyve kept congress from giving us that basic information . How do you explain the power of the industry over our political process . They own our political process now. Well, i think there are two answers to that. And it doesnt give me any joy to say it. One of the things is the nra has a program called, refuse to be a victim. The american certainly the american national, and ill say liberal, progressive, whatever you want to say, political stab issuement has chosen to be a victim. They have given up on guns. Theyve bought into a thing called the third way which is somehow theres this mythical Common Ground we can reach with the nra or the gun industry, and lets not talk about gun control. They call it the third rail of politics, so you have a victim here. On the other hand it must be said that the National Rifle association has what every politician wishes they had, that is, they have somebody in every congressional district. Even if its only one or two people, they have somebody. When Wayne Lapierre in his palatial headquarters in fairfax, virginia, pushes the button, the talking points go out, the phones or the emails arrive in congress. The other side is not that organized. People who are gun control advocates have typically been small groups in los angeles, washington, new york. They cant respond to that. That, i hope, i think, is changing. Tom, were out of time right now, but lets continue this discussion online. Great, thank you. The book is the last gun how changes in the gun industry are killing americans and what it will take to stop it. Tom diaz, thanks for joining me. My pleasure. Thank you. Coming up on Moyers Company, 50 years after the historic march on washington, we go back to the scene with civil rights hero john lewis, the youngest man to speak on that historic august day and the last of the speakers still living. Thats next week on Moyers Company. Ill see you then. Dont wait a week to get more moyers. Visit billmoyers. Com for essays and video features. This episode of Moyers Company is available on dvd for 19. 95. To order, call 18003361917, or write to the address on your screen. Announcer funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of new york, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The kohlberg foundation. Independent production fund, with support from the partridge foundation, a john and polly guth charitable fund. The clements foundation. Park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. The herb alpert foundation, supporting organizations Whose Mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The bernard and audre rapoport foundation. The john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound. Org. Anne gumowitz. The betsy and jesse fink foundation. The hkh foundation. Barbara g. Fleischman. And by our sole corporate sponsor, mutual of america, designing customized individual and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement and Group Retirement products. Thats why were your retirement company. Tonight. Woman theres never been anybody like annie oakley this sweet person, but with this bigbang gun. Man she never missed. Woman if annie oakley were simply the sharpshooter, she probably would have been forgotten a long time ago, but shes such a complicated package. Annie oakley, on american experience. Nasa announcer liftoff, the clock is running. Ringside announcer schmeling is down