Working at Jo-Ann's: Real-World Graduate School

Working at Jo-Ann Fabrics—A Real-World Graduate Degree

Submitted to OpEd News on 4/3/14

Conventional—mainstream—traditional wisdom argues that the personal perspective of a writer has no place in a news story. But in a world where I’ve been down so long it looks like up to me—in a world ruled by people who wield concepts like sabers, I must tell the truth and shame the devil.

When I fled academia because I finally had to admit that my willing embrace of a fantasy both paid my mortgage and guaranteed that students who had studied with me would be working minimum wage jobs after graduation as they searched for stardom—I’d been a theatre professor, after all—when I woke up with a grand hangover after over twenty years teaching acting, I was still addicted to life as myth. I still thought that my belief in a fanciful reality could make it real both to myself and to others with whom I spoke. In other words, leaving academics had not completely cured me of my taste for fantasy.

A case in point: who else but a theatre professor would imagine that she could have a good time working as a sales clerk for Jo-Ann Fabrics? But that is exactly what I convinced myself I could do. In retrospect, I now think of it as both research and a form of penance. I experienced first-hand what students working minimum-wage jobs are likely to encounter after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in a field that offers no paying jobs. I have come to think of my year with this company as a kind of graduate school in which I came to better understand how many, many people in our country are forced to spend their working hours.

In March of 2013, wearing my friendliest smile, I walked into the local Jo-Ann Fabrics store, identified the most mature, knowledgeable-looking woman on the sales floor, and asked if she would take a look at the samples of sewn, knitted and embroidered pieces I’d brought in for her to see. 

Though she seemed the most likely candidate for store manager, and though she admired the tailored jacket, knitted pullover, and needlepoint pillow I’d brought in to demonstrate my handiwork skills, she told me two things that—if I’d really been listening, I would have considered very deeply. One, she was not the store manager. The twenty-one year old who looked frazzled and uncertain was, as the older woman termed it, “manager of the day.” MOD, they call them at Jo-Ann’s. And two, applications for sales positions are not filled out in the store; they are filled out on line using the Jo-Ann Corporate website. I thanked this friendly woman who had steered me right, and then went home to apply for a sales position at Jo-Ann’s using their on-line site.

You see, when I was twenty-one I’d worked for a fabric store and really enjoyed the experience. At loose ends, and needing a little extra income before my retirement kicked in, I thought I’d amuse myself by working part-time at a fabric store in 2014.

I had no idea how much retail had changed. But, because the store manager did hire me, I spent the next twelve months learning exactly how selling fabric to American women had embraced the most ruthless of corporate strategies. I soon experienced how things had changed since 1978.

So What’s Jo-Ann Fabrics?

According to Yahoo Finance, “Jo-Ann Stores has the fabric store market all sewn up. It's the #1 fabric retailer (ahead of Hancock Fabrics) nationwide, operating more than 800 stores in 49 states. The company sells a variety of fabrics and sewing supplies, craft materials, frames, home decorations, artificial floral items, and seasonal goods. Most of its small-format stores (averaging 15,000 sq. ft.) are located in strip mall shopping centers and operate under the Jo-Ann Fabrics and Craft name. The company also operates large-format Jo-Ann superstores (36,000 sq. ft. on average) and an e-commerce site, Joann.com. The company is owned by acquisitive private equity firm Leonard Green & Partners.” http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/10/10543.html.

I’ll return later to the connection between Jo-Ann Fabrics and Leonard Green & Partners.

Hoover’s company profile of this corporation notes that Jo-Ann Stores is rated #202 on the Forbes list of privately held companies. http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company-profile.Jo-Ann_Stores_Inc.4d1d1e6ac673f41b.html.

Gale Directory of Company Histories reports that Jo-Ann Stores sold more than $2 billion in recent years. Its nearest competitor sells only half as much merchandise, and owns less than half the number of stores of Jo-Ann’s empire.

Sounds like a pretty profitable business. You’d think that would be reflected in the way it treated its employees, its customers, and how it maintained its facilities. Unfortunately, all that profit seems to be going to top management salaries and to the relentless pace of expansion the corporation demands of itself. With over 800 stores in 48 states now, Jo-Ann is still expanding.

Who runs this fabric and craft empire?

The first store in this chain’s history was founded by two immigrant German families, the Rohrbach’s and the Reich’s. A cool bit of history that the current corporation does not mention in its promotions literature has to do with how ran and provided continuity to the earliest version of this company. When the company’s founder, Berthold Rohrbach, died in 1943, the same year he and the Reich’s founded the company,

[His] 30-year-old daughter, Alma Zimmerman, went to work full-time at the store with Hilda Reich. Hilda's daughter, Betty, joined the family business in 1947, and she and Alma opened the chain's second store in Cleveland soon thereafter.

http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company-profile.Jo-Ann_Stores_Inc.4d1d1e6ac673f41b.html.

Women oversaw the earliest versions of this store. You’d never know it from today’s list of upper management at Jo-Ann’s:

Chairman and CEO: Darrell D. Webb (He earned a little less than $800,000 in 2012.)

President and CEO: Travis Smith

Executive Vice President and CFO: James C. Kerr

Tom Williams to EVP, Operations and Human Resources

Wait for it. Upper management has recently added a woman to its ranks: Riddianne Kline as Executive Vice President, Marketing and Merchandising.

This little group decides how to implement the will of its Board of Directors, a group of executives dominated by Jo-Ann’s owner, Leonard Green and Partners, L.P.

One of Leonard Green’s founders is Jonathan D. Sokoloff, famous—or infamous, depending on one’s point of view—for his connection to Wall Street’s Drexel Burnham Lambert and its convicted junk-bond trader Michael R. Milken. Leonard Green and Partners looked at the financial crash of the 1990’s as opportunity. The New York Times quotes Sokoloff as saying, “What we learned at Drexel underpins our investment philosophy: Protect your downside and don’t lose money.” Or as Milkin was known to say, “[I]nvest in times of chaos and harvest in times or prosperity.”  What most Jo-Ann employees don’t realize is that their company actually exists to put money into Leonard Green and Partners accounts. Men like Sokoloff earn 20% of any profits made from Leonard Green funds’ gains. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/treasure-hunters-of-the-financial-crisis.html?_r=0.

Corporate designs crafted by men like Sokoloff, and put into action by men like Darrell Webb, eventually trickle down to create the miserable work environment endured by many Jo-Ann employees. So while business writers may praise Jo-Ann’s profitability, they either do not understand or do not care how the retailer’s approach is based on squeezing people until they have no more to give.

This profitable corporation employs 23,000 people, most of whom earn a minimum wage. The company is famous for keeping employees, who sometimes work for the company for years, at basically the same salary they commanded when they first started.

The stores expect the sales staff to mop floors, unload stock trucks, and get new merchandise onto the floor within 24 hours—even during the holiday rush period when over 300 boxes may arrive at the back door in a single morning.

When I worked for the company, the store had its floors professionally cleaned maybe once every two weeks, even in the sloppiest weeks of winter. The store used a contract company whose workers were beautiful, but clearly exhausted, Russian women who spoke not a word of English. They were managed by a Russian man who also spoke no English. About an hour after the Russian crew arrived, a man—who spoke English just fine—would call the store to tersely inquire if the cleaning crew was doing a satisfactory job. Apparently, he was the ultimate manager of the Russians, though we never saw him. One word from a Jo-Ann’s manager could get a member of the cleaning crew fired—and they had no opportunity to answer complaints about their work before they were shown the door. They arrived thirty minutes after the store closed, so customers never saw the crew hired to clean the store’s floors. After I met them, I realized that there were still worse examples of American business to fear and avoid.

Though sales associates were not expected to clean the public and/or employee bathrooms, managers had to do so. The break-room was rarely cleaned. The stockroom’s floor had not been cleaned for what looked like years.

The tasks required in the store expose workers to physical strain, workplace chemicals such as formaldehyde on the fabrics, particulates and dust from the cut fabric and craft handling. Employees, myself included, were expected to climb aluminum ladders to stock heavy bolts of fabric on shelves set high on store walls. I actually took to asking customers to page my ladder when I had to climb up to reach a bolt of fleece fabric. At least with their weight on a bottom rung, I had a better chance of keeping the ladder steady as I reached sideways to pull the bolt off the tightly packed shelf.

The culture of the company is such that those women who jump corporate hoops and attain the level of assistant manager or manager, if they are full-time and salaried, are expected to work well beyond forty hours each week without complaint. Their punishing work schedules make it impossible for them to hear concerns or complaints of their part-time workers with anything but indifference or a sense of helplessness. At least part-timers—and they are the vast majority of Jo-Ann’s employees—endure this difficult work situation for a limited number of hours each week. And if part-timers complain in any way, the manager suddenly discovers that she just can’t give that employee as many hours during the next pay period.

The culture of the company is also such that sales associates, called Team Members, see the misery the manager must endure and support her decisions even when they bring physical or economic hardship to them. The team members also come to see each other’s difficulties, and when the corporation institutes yet another policy that makes their life unpleasant, they commiserate with each other, and watch out for each other—but they do not complain.

While I worked for this company, in spite of the fact that our store was meeting the sales expectations set by corporate offices in Ohio, the manager was ordered to cut the number of hours she scheduled each week even as she was encouraged to hire additional staff. The result was that employees, some of whom had worked for the store for years, found their hours cut even as they were asked to train new workers. Additionally, workers who had been stocking shelves at 6 a.m. for years were told in January 2014 that the stocking work would now begin at 4 a.m. Some of the women who did this work were in their 50’s and 60’s. All of these changes reveal the corporation’s way of increasing demands on workers so that new stores can be opened, and the losses of some of the stores offset by squeezing the stores that are doing well. It was at this point in my time at the store that I decided I had been there long enough.  

Never do sales associates hear that a corporation worried about its bottom line is cutting management salaries at the same time that it is asking its sales associates to make do with fewer hours.

The salaries at Jo-Ann’s are so awful that many women working there, especially if they are the sole supporters of their family, have to hold two or three part-time jobs in order to survive.

So why did these women continue to work there? Why did I work there for a whole year?

Those questions are best answered by the truly wonderful part of the people connected to this business: the women on the floor and the customers who regularly shop there. I don’t think most Americans really understand how many women in this country can sew and make beautiful things. These women are not forced to buy clothes or home décor items ready-made. They are able to craft these complex things for themselves. The problem is that companies like Jo-Ann’s are, as Yahoo put it, “sewing up” the fabric and craft markets in this country. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find locally-owned, profitable fabric and craft stores. So if you really love to sew and craft and want to work in that industry, companies like Jo-Ann’s are often the only option.

The hiring policy: find women whose motto is, “I’m just glad I have a job.”

I started this article by confessing how my predilection for fantasy led me to work at this store. I wasn’t the only one with that bent.

Women who work at Jo-Ann’s, at least the ones I met, were creative dreamers limited in their personal expression by circumstance. They were kind and patient—to a fault, this curmudgeon would say. And they genuinely cared about the women who came into the store. In many cases, sales associates had been helping the same women with their creative projects for years.

Many of them told me that they did not think they could get any other kind of work. “I’m just glad I have a job,” was one woman’s reply when I asked her why she did not complain about some of the company’s policies.

Sometimes women stay because they are truly committed to sewing and crafting. They want to help the women who are keeping these skills alive in our culture. That in part describes why I stayed for as long as I did.

On websites that describe employee attitudes to the corporation, women posting there will often say they stayed in spite of difficult and unfair working conditions because of the relationships they had formed with some of the customers.

I could write an entire article about how the corporation uses sales and coupons to extract the maximum amount of profit out of women shopping at Jo-Ann’s. That could be an article all its own.

What I will say here is that I am now torn about shopping at this store. I hate the cheap seasonal merchandise they carry, probably, at incredibly inflated prices. I hate the coupon books they put out every few weeks that promise savings until a customer gets to the store and realizes that everything has been marked down and the coupons cannot be used on ‘sale’ merchandise. I hate that the bulk of Jo-Ann’s stock comes from Asia where God only knows what kind of working conditions must be endured by the employees over there.

But I occasionally shop there because the women who still work there want those jobs. I wish I could support them, their talents and abilities, their dreams and their kindness, without supporting the insatiable maw that is corporate America’s approach to profitability.

This Diseased Land of Oz: Look Squarely at the Little Man Behind the Curtain

If I cannot remember the days when Mom and Dad fought with each other—blamed each other—because they were afraid and poor, then I have no business offering solutions to others who struggle now.

If I cannot remember how necessity bred creativity—with the food we ate, and the clothes we found to put on our bodies, the places we lived, and the fearful noisy streets we walked to gather those things that kept our family together—then I have no right to play at theories and philosophy.

But if I can remember those times, then I will be able to imagine how people today who feel powerless and out of control hope for larger social systems to represent their interests, and to equalize the power gap between private citizens and hugely wealthy transnational corporations. And maybe, just maybe, if I remember my immigrant parents and their struggle to make a life in this country, I will be able to persuade others to awaken their own resourcefulness and courage at a time when existing systems are unlikely to help them at all. 

Looking carefully at the situation our family knows, I see that we enjoy a certain amount of personal freedom. My husband and I have jobs and bring income into the family. We are free to apportion that income as we think best for the family. We are citizens of the United States, and as such have the right to voice our opinions—even when those opinions are very critical of existing social and political structures. We are free to mistreat our bodies by eating and drinking in ways that abuse our systems. And we are free to choose the doctors who will ‘cure’ us of the ills we have brought upon ourselves. We are free to worship as we choose, as long as those of us who make minority choices in that regard don’t make too much noise about our practices. And we’re free to have as many children as we want, even if our household finances won’t support them, or our choices to have five or six kids will increase the human burden on the planet. We are free to vote in elections, though increasingly those we elect seem incapable of addressing current drastic realities. These overt freedoms are truly ours.

Continuing my careful examination, however, I find that in many ways we are not free. We must purchase car, home and health insurance, even if we know that the insurance companies enjoy far more profit than they will ever pay out to their policyholders. If we have retirement accounts, we must leave the money there, or in similar accounts, until an age specified by law—or pay significant tax penalties for withdrawing the funds before retirement age. In this country, internet service is not provided by the government, so we must pay for that access or go without the vast amount of information available through the medium. Television is no longer free, and to have channels with even a modicum of quality requires high monthly fees. We must pay for costly phone service, sometimes to multiple providers, if we want to have dependable access to this connecting technology. Increasingly, even our children's education is not free, as fees increase at public schools, or we opt for private schools, or we worry about how to pay for higher education. Our energy supplies, and perhaps soon, our water supply have been privatized and we must pay for even these basic necessities of life. And usually we must buy our food from large corporate entities often unwilling to provide us with healthy choices.

In so many ways, our social freedoms are undercut by the economic costs we must pay in order to be part of this ever more privatized system in which we try to find meaning and a dignified life.

The parts of our lives that are circumscribed by forces beyond any political voting right we might wield must also be examined. Our civil rights largely disappear during those hours when we work for a corporate entity—to speak our mind plainly at work would cost the vast majority of us our jobs. And these powerful entities, our employers, direct their resources toward transnational efforts to control what we eat, how we clothe ourselves, how we build our dwellings, how we define and promote human health, and how we ignore the interface between human choices that emphasize short-term profits even as the choices foul our planetary nest. As private individuals, we have little chance of effectively thwarting the aims and methods of transnational corporations focused on the bottom line. They operate largely above a nation’s political system. So in the world of work, we become part of systems that are racing to put all life on the planet in peril—whether we agree with those systems or not. And there seems to be no political activity at this time that can effectively make these rapacious corporate entities accountable for the harm they bring to us all.

We have basic social freedoms, but not economic freedoms that would allow us to truly express our views in the way that corporations understand best—in terms of profit and loss.

Or is that conclusion accurate? Maybe we could take actions that would disentangle us from the suicidal course that is business as usual.

I have, from time to time, become involved in activist efforts to stymy corporate aims. The work reminds of David and Goliath, only I sometimes feel these groups lack the excellent aim with their slingshots that David wielded. So this work can be discouraging, take a very long time to effect change, and require living a double life: work an 8+ hour day and then work another four to six hours trying to influence the very institutions that pay our wages. And sometimes I feel that the activist’s internal position implies that some power ‘out there’ will see the light after our protests and letters. That some large corporation or branch of government will admit how poorly it is behaving and devise a solution that will improve the lives of the vast numbers who live within its sphere of influence. Always the focus is on fixing what is ‘out there.’ And, truly, there is little will in the majority of those businesses and government agencies to make the significant changes that are needed right now. I do this work in spite of my misgivings, but I also believe there must be other choices I could make.

What occurs to me is that large power structures are only powerful because there are so many of us willing to play their game. If every single person in Oz, for example, had seen the little man behind the curtain, they could have quickly or slowly begun to change how they lived their lives. And as they did so, the power of the little man behind the curtain would have—slowly or precipitously—been diminished. The people of Oz kept the little man in power because they did not bother to look behind the curtain. And in a myriad of ways, their choices propped up the illusion of the little man’s power. The people of Oz were complicit in keeping the little man in power.

So how might we make new choices that revealed how little men are truly all that exist behind powerful sounding corporate names? How could we put our effort and our resources toward lives that gradually or instantly unplugged from corporate institutions? If our governments won’t reclaim the ability to control corporate entities, how could we stop waiting for someone ‘out there’ to rescue us from these powers on paper and find ways to walk away from them right now?

If you own a home with a mortgage, sell it and buy a very small home outright, or one that will significantly lower your mortgage payments.

If you are not healthy, and it is in part the result of lack of exercise and a poor diet, change those behaviors and reap your right to a healthier body.

If you are spending more money each month than you bring in, make changes this month in ways too numerous to count.

Figure out how to live with one car—or no car at all, using bikes and public transportation and your own two feet.

Relearn how to do things for yourself—fix things, build things, create things of your own devising and be proud when they do not look like things you would have chosen in a store. Begin to realize that "professional" is often another word for "corporate." Be proud of the nuances of objects that are hand-made.

Live and contribute to and celebrate your community. Support its local businesses and manufacturers, craftsmen, tradesmen and farmers. You can’t do everything for yourself, but when you have to spend money with others, try to keep that money within your community.

Reexamine every insurance company with whom you do business. Choose those companies that seem aware of the need to change how they do business to address current global realities. There is green car and home insurance. There are insurance companies that cover alternative health approaches. Find them. Do business with them.

When we become hypnotized by the countless glistening messages that promise us happiness if we will only buy more things, we are truly fools. Our expenditures keep us enslaved to an economic system careening out of control. All we have to do is step away from this game that brings anxiety, not happiness.

But if we are a little better off, if we have a retirement account, for example, or a stock portfolio, or investments of some kind, we can reinvent our country’s concept of patriotism. We can pay the 10% early withdrawal fee, we can pay the taxes, and we can take the money we have left after those ‘costs’ and apply them to investments that will actually help us.

Look at it this way. If extreme weather and its costs continue to plague our planet, and to ravage the bottom lines of corporations and governments, how likely is it that our retirement ‘savings’ will be there for us to spend in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years? When corporations continue to expand as if oil supplies are not dwindling, how long will it be before Wall Street crashes again? When we fear the ‘penalties’ and leave our retirement funds in existing corporate structures, we fund Wall Street, we fund business as usual, and participate in creating our own demise.

With the money you pull out of your retirement account or investment portfolio, you could:

Pay off your home mortgage?

Install a solar array on your roof?

Improve a vegetable garden and put up a small greenhouse?

Significantly improve your home’s insulation, windows, and doors?

Invest in a local business?

Help out one or more people in your community who are not in as good a position as you are?

Or if cashing out your retirement account, in whole or in part, is a course you just can’t take, find an investment counselor who will truly invest your money according to your ethical principles. In that way you can contribute to the social good and provide for your retirement.

The diseased Land of Oz that our country has become is counting on us to be afraid of making drastic changes. Its corporations are counting on our desire to stay safe and secure within systems as they currently exist. We need to make choices based on our understanding that the status quo is not designed to keep us safe and secure—it is simply designed to maximize profit for corporations. And corporations, which are not people, are not capable of the complex thought that we can muster. Corporations focused only on profit don’t seem to realize that they are designing their own destruction, even as they insist we keep them company as they crash to the earth.

We don’t have to play according to rules devised by those who are incapable of rational choices. Our system has become insanely greedy. We, as individuals supporting each other, can make the rational choices. We don’t have to wait for someone ‘out there’ to make it all better. We just have to make choices based on a careful examination of what is really before us. We must keep up the activism, but revise how we live, too. We have options. We can change our world one person, one home, one street, one town, one state, and one country at a time. Don’t wait. Begin.

Freedom of Expression

   www.ppt-backgrounds.net                          

            Why did the educated, propertied and influential white men gathered at Philadelphia to write a constitution value freedom of expression so highly that they explicitly included it in the document that founded the United States of America?

The public school rationale provided to American students teaches that under the British governing system, freedom of expression was suppressed. British citizens enjoyed informally defined degrees of free expression depending on their social and/or economic rank in society, with poorer folk who depended upon the wealthier for their livelihoods required to hold their tongues for much of their lives.

            The men who have come to be known as our founding fathers attempted to create a country in which citizens, regardless of economic or social class, would have the legal right to express their thoughts and feelings about anything—as long as such expression did not encourage others to become violent, or lead to mass hysteria that could cause bodily harm to others. In other words: even in America it is wrong to shout “Fire!” in a crowded movie theatre and cause a stampede for the doors.

            Since this country’s inception, citizens have had the opportunity to experience and observe how well the concept of freedom of expression is working in our country. Writers such as Noam Chomsky have observed that freedom of expression without the opportunity to effect real political or economic change offers only limited power to those exercising their lungs. One person’s voice or even the voices of thousands raised on a public square for many weeks lack the persuasive power of those whose voices are expressed through incredible economic power.

            Making noise does not equal the ability to make change—at least not as our country’s system currently exists. Or, if looking at this reality from a slightly more hopeful point of view, making noise to effect change takes a lot longer than making change using economic influence.

            Freedom of expression could be a far more influential right if people burrowed a little more deeply into this idea. Why is it so important for people to have this freedom? Is it simply, as some psychologists suggest, a right that allows people to communicate who they are? Is freedom of expression what allows citizens to feel they are living authentic lives, rather than moving through their days wearing masks of compliance? And if those who wield economic power endure the free expression of those who work for them, do they really have much to lose when they grit their teeth and suffer through outbursts or written communications with which they disagree?

In a system that permits freedom of expression but expects those who are dissatisfied with the political, social or economic system to wait lifetimes before change happens, citizens enjoy a hollow right. Sadly, freedom of expression is often a constitutional guarantee that seems important but, in reality, often substitutes for real change.

Consider how long it took before blacks or women were granted the right to vote in this country. Consider how temporary changes that improve the lives of the vast majority of Americans really are when a vote by elected representatives or appointed judges—who are part of a powerful economic class or who are influenced by the political contributions from powerful economic entities—can undo progress that took decades to put in place. This year the Voting Rights Act that at least attempted to protect the voices of blacks in our country has been undermined. Decades of work designed to give blacks a voice in their states is threatened.

Freedom of expression serves the majority of people in the United States only if the thoughtfulness, commitment and courage required for such expression are understood as first steps in the process of shared governance. When the vast majority of people in a country come to a consensus about a problem and—let us hope—a shared sense of how to address the problem, they should be able to trust that elected representatives put into office with their votes will effect change that expresses the will of the people.

But citizens in our country can rely on no such reality. Instead, exercising one’s right to freedom of expression at this point in our country’s history has become, at worst, an unsatisfying panacea or, at best, a right whose power is valued so much less than the power of many dollars gathered into a bank account. The right to exert economic influence has effectively diffused majority voices in our country, like the roar of a crowd swept away by a stiff wind.

Freedom of expression, unfortunately, often resembles the circuses of classical Rome, where the many enjoyed an afternoon of spectacle and filled their stomachs with free bread only to return to their difficult lives when the circus was over. The thrill experienced by those who attend protests in Washington D.C.? Those who devote their limited budgets and their time to express themselves do so hoping that if their numbers are great enough and their voices loud enough they will somehow force politicians to change policy positions so that the needs of the many are finally taken into account. But how long must they wait for such changes! When such protests focus on one issue at a time, years will be needed to bring positive change to our country. And many of us understand that our country just doesn’t have that kind of time to turn life around.

Freedom of expression has been gutted because this right of ours currently has little power to affect economic interests in our country. In fact, even our elected representatives have little power over economic interests that now circle the globe.

I have written this before and I will write it here again: a country that lacks the power to control economic interests within the country—even if those interests do business in other parts of the world—has lost the true power to govern. Such a country’s political system is most accurately described as being in service to economic interests that are more powerful than political leaders.

It is also patently obvious that safeguarding economic interests in our country will not improve the lives of the majority--no matter how often corporations or economic experts insist such a linkage exists. Safeguarding economic interests increases corporate profits. And increasing corporate power makes these entities even more likely to put us at risk in ways too numerous to count.

We must, as a people, look long and hard at the true nature of governance in our country. We can’t hope to improve the rights of blacks, latinos, working people, poor people, women, children, or the environment if each issue competes with others to get the attention of politicians and somehow convince them to do the right thing. But if all of us who are suffering in one way or another came together and recognized that the political/economic system as it currently exists is at the heart of our problem—if we devised ways to disentangle ourselves from this system—we would discover how we can understand and empathize with each other. If we learned to join forces, we would find at last how to speak with one voice.

Freedom of expression offers us most power when citizens speak with a voice that is as united as the voices of economic interests. There is no equivalent to an MBA for citizen activism. We must teach ourselves how to come together. Our willingness to do so presents the only obstacle to our success.

Attempts to do this are already beginning in several places in our country. In many states, there are People’s Action organizations. Illinois People’s Action brings activists together to work on environmental, socio-economic and political issues http://www.illinoispeoplesaction.org/. In Washington citizens have formed the Working Family’s Party http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/. In Florida, there is discussion about a party that will be called the New Congress Party http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-New-Congress-Party-a-by-Roger-Copple-Democracy_Education_Happiness_Health-130907-817.html. Chris Williams has written at Climate and Capitalism an article titled, “Strategy and Tactics in the Environmental Movement,” http://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/09/21/strategy-tactics-environmental-movement/ partly a response to statements by Naomi Klein about the complicated relationship between environmental activists and labor http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/naomi_klein_big_green_groups_are_crippling_the_environmental_movement_partner/. And recently, the author Frances Moore Lappé has written “Before You Give Up on Democracy, Read This!” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-moore-lappe/before-you-give-up-on-democracy_b_3915901.html about the need to link ecological and socio-political concerns together. These writers are asking difficult questions about how our country currently disempowers so many of us and how we might look critically at the forces that stand in our way.

It is not un-American to look critically at the country we live in—to do this work is the most patriotic action we can take. To re-imagine how we might govern ourselves, taking into account how economic power is added to the equation, is the stuff of citizenship. Our country is the sum of our people, the living plants and animals within our borders, and the land on which all of us live. If there are economic entities in our country that seem very powerful, we must remember that they were imagined and built by citizens. The entities are only real as long as our laws give them the right to exist. Citizens write laws. We need to redefine our country so that citizens, not economic interests, have voices powerful enough to bring positive change to what is truly our country.

Most importantly, we need to bring our most positive efforts to working together. We cannot afford to stand divided anymore.