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obituary
Former President and Human Rights Champion Jimmy Carter Dies at 100
Carter served in the White House for four years and went on to work tirelessly for peace and human rights.
Dec 29, 2024
Former President Jimmy Carter, who served just four years in office and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of work promoting human rights and international peace, died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia at the age of 100.
His death was confirmed by his son and came close to two years after the Carter Center announced that the former president had stopped medical treatment for health conditions and was entering hospice care.
Rights advocates have credited Carter for his championing of the rights of marginalized people including Palestinians, even as the U.S. political establishment remains overwhelmingly supportive of Israel's violent policies in Palestine.
"He was our greatest ex-president and a very good president despite GOP efforts to tarnish him," said James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute. "He was a peacemaker and a human rights champion. A humble man. He taught us how to live with principles and how to die with grace."
During his term, Carter helped to broker peace between Israel and Egypt, finalized a treaty that returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama, and signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to limit strategic weapons. But conservatives attacked him for presiding over a period of high unemployment and inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, and an energy crisis in which the price of oil tripled.
Carter was credited with being ahead of his time regarding environmental concerns—installing solar water heater panels on the White House that were later removed by his Republican successor.
"A generation from now,” he said at a televised event when the panels were installed, "this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people."
He lost his reelection campaign to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. As the Republican president set about promoting trickle-down economics, with lasting effects on corporate power and income inequality in the U.S., Carter turned his attention to building affordable housing with Habitat for Humanity and promoting human rights and peacemaking around the world.
With his wife Rosalynn—who died in November 2023—Carter established the Carter Center in the early 1980s. The organization's health programs have been credited with helping to cure and control diseasesincluding river blindness, trachoma, and Guinea worm disease in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts," including his leadership during the painstaking negotiations that ended decades of conflict between Egypt and Israel in 1978. In his acceptance speech, Carter warned against the invasion of Iraq.
He published the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006, comparing Israel's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa. The book was treated as controversial, but he vehemently defended its central argument.
"The word 'apartheid' is exactly accurate," he told Democracy Now! "Palestinians can't even ride on the same roads that Israelis have created in Palestinian territory... The Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people."
In October 2023, the Carter Center issued a statement saying there was "no military solution" to the conflict between Hamas and Israel, and demanded a cease-fire.
Carter also distinguished himself among former presidents by speaking out against the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, saying the U.S. had become an "oligarchy with unlimited political bribery."
"My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love," said Chip Carter, the former president's son. "My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs."
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Former Sen. Fred Harris, Champion of Economic Populism, Dies at 94
"The fundamental problem is that too few people have all the money and power, and everybody else has too little of either," said Harris in 1975.
Nov 25, 2024
Former Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, a moderate Democratic lawmaker who fully embraced economic populism in his later political career and ran what one journalist called a "proto-Bernie" presidential campaign in 1976, died on Saturday at the age of 94.
Harris' death inspired tributes from an array of Democratic politicians and progressives, who remembered the former senator's outspoken support for working people and his championing of Indigenous rights.
Harris was voted into the Senate to replace Sen. Robert Kerr (D-Okla.) in 1964 after Kerr died of a heart attack. He began as a close ally of President Lyndon Johnson, supporting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and Johnson's Great Society programs aimed at reducing poverty.
But he "underwent a dramatic passage from moderate-conservative to liberal ideas," as The New York Times reported, embracing a "new populism" that was centered on promoting racial equality and a redistribution of economic and political power and fighting against the exploitation of workers. He also gradually changed his stance on Vietnam, calling for troop reductions and eventually a full withdrawal of the U.S. military in the region.
In 1967 he was a member of the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders, convened to determine the root cause of riots in Black communities across the country. He concluded that "entrenched racism" was to blame.
He was also credited with sponsoring a bill that pushed President Richard Nixon to return Blue Lake, a site that was sacred to the people of the Taos Pueblo tribe, to them.
"In Senator Harris, Oklahoma sent a public servant to Washington, D.C. who gave voice to those in need, lifted up those the economy left behind, was a champion of civil rights, and was a friend to Indian Country," said Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. of the Cherokee Nation.
"His story is one that too few people know—the story of an Oklahoman who championed working families and fought for justice and equity at every turn."
Running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, Harris called for higher taxes on the richest Americans and lower taxes for the rest of the country, stricter regulations on large corporations, a "moral" foreign policy, abortion rights, and "community control" of police forces.
Columnist John Nichols of The Nation said Harris adopted the slogan "No More Bullshit" during his presidential campaign.
Harris' presidential bid, said journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, "was a road-not-taken that would have led to a much better world than we have now."
Harris told the Times in 1975 that the issue he was most concerned with was "privilege."
"The fundamental problem is that too few people have all the money and power, and everybody else has too little of either," he said. "The widespread diffusion of economic and political power ought to be the express goal—the stated goal—of government."
Harris' campaign garnered enthusiastic support from many voters, with the former senator taking aim at "the superrich, giant corporations" and leading efforts to gain the confidence of blue-collar workers, farmers, poor Black and white voters, and unemployed people.
"Those in the coalition don't have to love one another," Harris said. "All they have to do is recognize that they are commonly exploited, and that if they get themselves together they are a popular majority and can take back the government."
After his presidential run, Harris became a political science professor at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and left politics to raise chickens on a farm in Corrales, New Mexico.
In conversations with Axios reporter Russell Contreras in his later years, Harris expressed frustration with the Democratic Party, saying leaders didn't discuss poverty as much as they should.
"It's harder to get out of poverty today than it was back then," he told Contreras.
He added that showing a commitment to fight for working-class and low-income people would motivate people in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and on Native American reservations across the country.
"We are grateful to see national media highlighting the life and legacy of former Senator Fred Harris," said the Oklahoma Democratic Party. "His story is one that too few people know—the story of an Oklahoman who championed working families and fought for justice and equity at every turn."
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'A True Hero': Pay Equity Crusader Lilly Ledbetter Dies at 86
"Let's honor her by continuing to challenge discrimination in all forms—and finally closing the wage gap."
Oct 14, 2024
Labor unions and women's advocacy groups on Monday paid tribute to Lilly Ledbetter, the former Goodyear employee whose fight for equal pay made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress, after her death at the age of 86—with economic justice advocates hailing Ledbetter as "an icon."
"Lilly Ledbetter simply wanted to be paid the same as her male Goodyear co-workers," said the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) on social media. But to workers who have benefited from the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, added the union, "she was a true hero."
Ledbetter began working at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden, Alabama in 1979, and was initially paid equally to her male counterparts.
But in 1998 she discovered that her compensation had dropped "way out of line" with that of the men who worked alongside her, after someone sent her an anonymous note.
"I felt humiliated. I felt degraded. I had to sort of get my composure back to go ahead to perform my job and then, the first day off, I went to Birmingham, Alabama and filed a charge with the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]," Ledbetter toldNPR in 2009.
In 1999, she filed a lawsuit against her employer, and four years later a federal court in Alabama awarded her $3.8 million—a sum that was reduced to a $300,000 cap and $60,000 in back pay.
The case was later appealed and proceeded to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Goodyear in 2007, with five of the nine justices agreeing that Ledbetter had filed her lawsuit too late after Goodyear's initial decision to pay her less than her male colleagues.
But in 2009, Ledbetter stood with then-President Barack Obama as he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gives people more time to file charges regarding unfair pay and affirms that each inequitable paycheck is a violation of the law, an assertion the Supreme Court had rejected.
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called on Americans to "honor her legacy by never ceasing in our pursuit of equality and justice for all."
Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, noted that after Ledbetter's legal case concluded, "she never gave up the fight to push for equal pay and fairness for everyone who came after her."
"It would have been easy for Lilly to quietly ease into retirement in Alabama after the Supreme Court held that there was no remedy to the decades of pay discrimination that she faced," said Goss Graves. "But Lilly was not built for the easy road. She shared her story because she knew that her experience of being undervalued and shortchanged on the job was the same story that working women of all ages across America shared, whether they had ever heard of the wage gap or not."
"Even into her 80s, Lilly never hesitated to hop on planes to speak to women across the country about why they must actively fight for wage equality," Goss Graves added.
Ledbetter also stood with Obama in the White House in 2014 when he signed two fair pay executive orders, one barring federal contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their salaries and one instructing the Labor Department to collect data on pay for men and women who work for federal contractors.
Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), said Ledbetter "leaves behind a legacy that fuels our ongoing fight against pay discrimination, exploitation, and those who would delay progress towards wage justice for all."
Farrell added that with women—particularly women of color—still earning an average of 82 cents for every dollar men earn in the U.S., "the fight for pay equity is far from over."
"We urge the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act and the implementation of comprehensive pay transparency measures at the federal level," said Farrell.
The Paycheck Fairness Act would add protections to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to eliminate gender-based wage disparities.
"Lilly Ledbetter's courageous fight for fair pay made history and opened a new future for millions of women," said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.). "Let's honor her by continuing to challenge discrimination in all forms—and finally closing the wage gap."
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