Sankofa Meets the Future

Name It & Claim It

This is an important essay by Bay Area activist Steve Williams. It is a compelling argument for the Left to take a more aggressive stand in articulating an alternative to the dismal situation facing working people and people of color in this country. It is highly recommended and but one of a series of discussions being led by young, and some not so young activists.

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http://www.organizingupgrade.com/2010/05/name-it-and-claim-it/

The story is getting painfully old.  Local governments and corporations starve working class communities— normally also communities of color— for generations.  Then, as if channeling Christopher Columbus, they announce that they have discovered that the neighborhood has been neglected for decades and that developers will build market-rate housing, trendy shopping and some massive sports complex in an effort to turn the neighborhood around.

That part is old; exploiters always take advantage of misery.  But what pushes this story into the realm of the painful is that time and time again the affected community is split.  On one side, people in the community righteously denounce the developer’s plans on the basis that luxury condominiums, vanilla lattés and dog parks will do nothing to address the needs of the community; and that working class people of color will inevitably be displaced to make way for richer, whiter urban pioneers.  On the other side, some folks in the community support the project— not because they don’t fear the neighborhood being gentrified, but because they don’t see any other way.  To deal with sky-rocketing joblessness, environmental contamination, police violence and the lack of infrastructure like quality schools, public transportation and grocery stores, some people decide reluctantly to make a deal with the devil.

The breaking point for me came after a heated hearing at City Hall.  A young African American man who had testified that he desperately wanted a job that would allow him to raise his family in the City that he grew up in came up to me and asked, “All of what you’re saying seems on point, so what’s your alternative?”

That question has haunted me for months now.  This brother was trying to figure out what was going to be in his and his community’s best interest.  If he joined in opposing this project, then what?  I was silenced because I didn’t know.  Besides the prospect of some important immediate benefits, I couldn’t name a tangible alternative that he could hang his hopes on in the long-term.

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Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) Action at Reynolds American Shareholders Meeting

Remember the 1970 Student Resistance!

There is so much going on in the US (Arizona Senate Bill 1070, an oil spill and so much more) and around the world (Afghanistan, Haiti and Colombia) that an important anniversary has gone almost completely unnoticed . There was the 50th anniversary of the founding of SNCC, 40th of Malcolm X Liberation University and the Student Organization for Black Unity and a host of others from the turbulent period of the 1960's and 1970's.

1970 was a critical period in the Student Movement and it's escalating resistance to the war. Jimmy Higgins at Fire on the Mountain, a participant in or careful observer of the events of that Spring has produced 10 or more posts that are mandatory reading for veteran activists reflecting or current youth and student activists faced with two occupations and a host of domestic contradictions.

Read them now or save them for later but don't let them get by you.

Why African Americans should oppose the anti-immigrant movement

This is one of the most cogent discussions on the basis of African American and Latino unity that I have seen. It is done by a Latino activist and covers the historical and political basis for collaboration between the two groups of oppressed people. The only thing missing is the history of common struggle here in the US. Nonetheless it is essential for  African American workers AND Latino immigrants to engage this rich presentation

Andy Stern's Legacy: Right Questions, Wrong Answers | Labor Notes

http://bit.ly/9IDTDx

SEIU President Andy Stern walked away from his post this week, and the fight is on to define his legacy and the future of one of the country’s most important unions.

A little on the legacy. Stern started out asking a lot of the right questions.

Under his leadership, SEIU forced the rest of labor to confront its dwindling numbers. Unions needed strategies to organize entire industries, and they needed to devote the money necessary to do it seriously. They needed to roust often-sleepy and sometimes-corrupt local leaders from their complacency. And the house of labor needed friends in the academy, the embrace of community allies, and a welcome sign on the door for immigrant workers.

SEIU led by example, through high-profile organizing drives like Justice for Janitors and by ousting crooked leaders like New York City’s Gus Bevona.

But after two decades working to expand SEIU’s ranks—and reshaping the union’s structure to bolster that aim—Stern drew mostly the wrong conclusions. In his quest to reverse labor’s slide, he relied on shortcuts, trying to swell SEIU’s ranks by any means necessary—including ways that weaken unions everywhere.

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Andy Stern's Legacy: Right Questions, Wrong Answers | Labor Notes

Andy Stern's Legacy: Right Questions, Wrong Answers | Labor Notes.

International Donors' Conference at the UN: For $ 10 billion of promises, Haiti surrenders its sovereignty

International Donors' Conference at the UN: For $ 10 billion of promises, Haiti surrenders its sovereignty . Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 3:54pm
by Par Kim Ives

Haïti Liberté Vol. 3 No. 38 • 13 April 2010

http://www.haiti-liberte.com/

It was fitting that the Mar. 31 “International Donors Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti” was held in the Trusteeship Council at the United Nations headquarters in New York. At the event, Haitian President René Préval in effect turned over the keys to Haiti to a consortium of foreign banks and governments, which will decide how (to use the conference’s principal slogan) to “build back better” the country devastated by the Jan. 12 earthquake.

This “better” Haiti envisions some 25,000 farmers providing Coca- Cola with mangos for a new Odwalla brand drink, 100,000 workers assembling clothing and electronics for the U.S. market in sweatshops under HOPE II legislation, and thousands more fi nding jobs as guides, waiters, cleaners and drivers when Haiti becomes a new tourist destination.“Haiti could be the fi rst allwireless nation in the Caribbean,” gushed UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton, who along with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, led the day-long meeting of over 150 nations and international institutions. Clinton got the idea for a “wireless nation,” not surprisingly, from Brad Horwitz, the CEO of Trilogy, the parent company of Voilà, Haiti’s second largest cell-phone network.

Although a U.S. businessman, Horwitz was, fi ttingly, one of the two representatives who spoke for Haiti’s private sector at the Donors Conference. “Urgent measures to rebuild Haiti are only sustainable if they become the foundation for an expanded and vibrant private sector,” Horwitz told the conference.”We need you to view the private sector as your partner… to understand how public funds can be leveraged by private dollars.”“Of course, what’s good for business is good for the country,” quipped one journalist listening to the speech. The other private sector spokesman was Reginald Boulos, the president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Haiti (CHIC), who fi ercely opposed last year’s union and studentled campaign to raise Haiti’s minimum wage to $5 a day, convincing Préval to keep it at $3 a day. He also was a key supporter of both the 1991 and 2004 coups d’état against former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, now exiled in South Africa

In counterpoint, the only voice Aristide’s popular base had at the conference was in the street outside the UN, where about 50 Haitians picketed from noon to 6 p.m. in Ralph Bunche park to call for an end to the UN and US military occupation of Haiti, now over six years old, and to protest the Haitian people’s exclusion from reconstruction deliberations. (New York’s December 12th Movement also had a picket at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza on 47th Street).

“No to neocolonialism,” read a sign held up by Jocelyn Gay, a member of the Committee to Support the Haitian People’s Struggle (KAKOLA), which organized the picket with the Lavalas Family’s New York Chapter and the International Support Haiti Network(ISHN). “No to the Economic Exploitation Disguised as Reform. MINUSTAH [UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti], out of Haiti! “

The exclusion of Haiti’s popular sector was masked by the inclusion of other “sectors” in the Donors Conference, although their presentations were purely for show, with no bearing on the plans which had already been drawn up. Joseph Baptiste, chairman and founder of the National Organization for the Advancement of Haitians (NOAH), and Marie Fleur, a Massachusetts state representative, spoke on behalf of the “Haitian Diaspora Forum.” Moise Charles Pierre, Chairman of the Haitian National Federation of Mayors and Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay spoke on behalf of the “Local Government Conference.” Non-governmental organizations had three spokespeople: Sam Worthington for the North American ones, Benedict Hermelin for the European ones, and Colette Lespinasse of GARR, for the Haitian ones. Even the “MINUSTAH Conference” had two speakers.

Michele Montas, the widow of slain radio journalist Jean Dominique and former spokeswoman for Ban Ki- Moon, spoke in English and French on behalf of the “Voices of the Voiceless Forum” which held focus group discussions with peasants, workers and small merchants in Haiti during March. “A clear majority of focus group participants,” she said, “from both rural and urban areas, strongly believe that there is a critical need to invest in people. Focus groups highlighted fi ve key immediate priorities: housing, new earthquake resistant shelters for displaced people; education, in all of the school systems throughout the country; health, the building of primary healthcare facilities and hospitals; local public services, potable water, sanitation, electricity; communications infrastructure, primarily roads to allow food production to reach the cities... There seemed to be unanimity on the need to invest in human capital through education, including higher education.”

“Support for agricultural production,” Montas continued, “was stressed as a top priority... Agriculture, perhaps more than other sectors, is seen as essential to the country’s health, and the prevailing sentiment is that the peasantry has been neglected.” Even Préval has recognized this neglect, but he got in trouble last month when he called on Washington to “stop sending food aid” because of its deleterious effects on the Haitian peasant economy (see Haïti Liberté, Vol. 3, No. 36, 3/24/2010). The U.S. responded that there was “severe corruption” in his government. Préval fell back into line. His government prepared a Post-Disaster Needs Assessment report (PDNA), the conference’s reference document, with “members of the International Community.” Of the $12.2 billion total it requested for the next three years, only $41 million, or 0.3 percent, would be earmarked for “Agriculture and fi shing.”

The centerpieces of the Clinton plan are assembly factories and tourism (see Haïti Liberté, Vol. 3, No. 36, 3/24/2010). But the former president still pays lip-service to agriculture. In the hallway outside the Trusteeship Council, Haïti Liberté asked Bill Clinton what had led him last month before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to renounce his policies as US president of dumping cheap rice on Haiti.

“Oh, I just think that, you know, there’s a movement all around the world now,” Clinton responded. “I fi rst saw Bob Zoellick, the head of the World Bank, say the same thing, where he said..., starting in 1981, the wealthy agricultural producing countries genuinely believed that they and the emerging agricultural powers in Brazil and Argentina... that they really believed for twenty years that if you moved agricultural production there and then facilitated its introduction into poorer places, you would free those places to get aid to skip agricultural development and go straight into an industrial era. And it’s failed everywhere it’s been tried. And you just can’t take the food chain out of production. And it also undermines a lot of the culture, the fabric of life, the sense of self-determination... And we made this devil’s bargain on rice. And it wasn’t the right thing to do. We should have continued to work to help them be self-suffi cient in agriculture. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing now. We’re thinking about how can we get the coffee production up, how can we get ... the mango production up, ... the avocados, and lots of other things.”

In other words, the U.S. and other “agricultural powers” would provide Haiti food, “freeing up”Haitian farmers to go work in U.S.-owned sweatshops, thereby ushering in “an industrial era,” as if the cinder-block shells of assembly plants represented organic industrialization. Now Clinton, sensitive to the demands of Montas’s “focus groups,” promotes agriculture, but as a way to integrate Haiti into the global capitalist economy. Many peasant and antineoliberal groups see agricultural selfsuffi ciency as a way to disconnect and insulate Haiti from predatory capitalist powers.

At a 5:30 p.m. closing press conference, Ban Ki-moon announced pledges of $5.3 billion in reconstruction aid for the next 18 months, exceeding the Haitian government’s request of $3.9 billion. The total pledges amount to $9.9 billion for the next 3 years “plus” – a signifi cant detail given how notoriously neglected UN aid promises are. Bill Clinton announced that only 30% of his previous fundraising pledge drive for Haiti had been honored. Haitian Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive and President Préval played only supporting roles at the Conference, requesting support at the start and thanking nations at the end.

The essence of this conference was summed up by Hillary Clinton. “The leaders of Haiti must take responsibility for their country’s reconstruction,” said Hillary Clinton as Washington pledged $1.15 billion for Haiti’s long-term reconstruction. “And we in the global community must also do things differently. It will be tempting to fall back on old habits – to work around the government rather than to work with them as partners, or to fund a scattered array of wellmeaning projects rather than making the deeper, long-term investments that Haiti needs now.”

So now, supposedly, NGOs will take a back seat to the Haitian government, but a Haitian government which is working with the NGOs and under the complete supervision of foreign “donors.” The World Bank distributes the reconstruction funds to projects it deems worthy. An Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (HRIC), composed of 13 foreigners and 7 Haitians, approves the disbursements. Then another group of foreigners supervises the Haitian government’s implementation of the project. The only direct support the Haitian government got at the Donors Conference was $350 million to pay state salaries, only 6.6% of the $5.3 billion anticipated in the next 18 months. This came after the International Monetary Fund warned that the budget support was necessary to keep the Haitian government from printing money, thereby risking infl ation.

Over 150 nations and international organizations pledged $5.3 billion in aid to Haiti over the next 18 months

“We trust that the numerous promises heard will be converted into action, that Haiti’s independence and sovereignty will be respected and ennobled, that the government of President René Préval and Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive will be facilitated to exercise all its faculties, and that it will be able to benefi t, not the white and foreign companies, but the Haitian people, especially the poorest,” said Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parilla at the conference. “Generosity and political will is needed. Also needed is the unity of that country instead of its division into market shares and dubious charitable projects.”

Indeed, there are some interesting ideas in the Haitian government’s Action Plan, also presented at the conference. It calls for 400,000 people to be employed, half by the government and half by “international and national stakeholders,” to restore irrigation systems and farm tracks, to develop watersheds (reforestation, setting up pastureland, correcting ravines in peri-urban areas, fruit trees), to maintain roads, and to work on “minor community-based infrastructure (tracks, paths, footbridges, shops and community centers, small reservoirs and feed pipes, etc.) and urban infrastructure (roadway paving, squares, drainage network cleaning) ... and do projects related to the cleaning and recycling of materials created by the collapse of buildings in the areas most affected by the earthquake.”

All that sounds nice, but unfortunately, now the decision is up to the strategists at the World Bank.

Support for N.C. Immigration Reform Activists

The Black Workers for Justice Say: Unite in the Fight for Immigration Reform

March 21, 2010 represents the next step in the long and powerful struggle for justice that caught the attention of the world on May Day 2006. On that day, but starting in April, the Latino community along with other immigrants stood up by the millions, all over this country, to demand justice and an end to the unfair and undemocratic immigration system in the U.S.

Those powerful marches, rallies and demonstrations helped to revive May Day in the country where it was born.  It also showed non-immigrant workers that they must stand up and fight no matter how great the challenges and no matter how afraid they are. The struggle for Immigration reform is on the cutting edge of the social movements in this country which have been guided by the idea that “Another World is Possible.”

In the days since those first protests many promises have been made but little has been done. The raids continue, Sheriffs continue to enforce 287g and Immigrant families continue to be devastated by the results of these actions.  In the workplaces, the employers continue to take advantage of undocumented workers while racist right wing politicians want to deny young people the opportunity for an affordable education after high school. Nonetheless, there has been and will continue to be resistance.

U.S. trade policies, like the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have helped to impoverish workers in Latin America forcing them to migrate.  They are now an integral part of the US working class and as such their struggle is one for Workers Rights and power. The right to fair wages, union representation and protection from retaliation is fundamental for immigrant and US workers. We must fight for them together. We believe that workers rights are human rights.

We struggled together with the Farm Labor Committee (FLOC) to win a contract with Mt. Olive Pickles; we struggled together with Black and Latino workers to win a union victory at Smithfield Foods; and we are struggling together with FLOC again to force the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company to treat agricultural workers fairly.  Latino and other immigrants must join us in the fight for collective bargaining for public employees and the battle to keep our schools diverse and not resegregated.

Since 2000, the Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ ) has fought to build the unity of African American and Latino workers. More recently we have worked together in the HKonJ Coalition. We vigorously reject the anti –immigration views of Black groups who are financed by white conservatives and racists. They are trying to foment even more distrust among us based on lies and half truths. Our differences are small while our common interests are tremendous.

We ask that your courageous work always include the voices and plight of African descendant immigrants. Specifically, the situation facing Haitians and Afro-Colombians as well as African immigrants demands our attention and solidarity.

Black people across the country are inspired and proud that you have adopted the song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize”.” As the song says, “the one thing we did right was the day we decided to fight.”  Brothers and Sisters, let’s fight together.

Black Workers for Justice

March 19, 2010

The People are on the move all over the country this weekend. Resistance and struggle for progressive change is on the agenda around education, opposition to the wars, immigration reform and many other issues. Ed demo in Sacramento, education forum in Wake County. Left Forum in NYC and events on revolutionary Puerto Rican women and Assata Shakur. UE student/youth training in Raleigh for organizing blitz and Peoples Assembly meeting in Raleigh. March for America for Comprehensive Immigrtion Reform. And many more activities in all of these cities and others but all aimed at fighting for justice and real democracy. Do your thing this weekend people!

US Workers Need A Public Jobs Program!

The following is a speech delivered at the 4th Annual HKonJ in Raleigh on February 27, 2010

My name is Ajamu Dillahunt. I am an Outreach Coordinator at the North Carolina Justice Center and a member of the Black Workers for Justice. I am here to say, WE NEED JOBS and WE NEED THEM NOW! What do we need? When do we need them?

All across the country and everywhere in this state our communities are in deep pain.  Devastating job losses, growing foreclosures and the loss of programs and services is making this recession a depression for many of us.  Like Gil Scott Heron said: “It’s Winter in America.”

If this is state of emergency then we need bold and quick action. There is a precedent. The Work Projects Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) created by the Roosevelt Administration are examples of the audacious steps that must be taken.

What we need is a massive public jobs program that quickly, and I mean quickly creates millions of jobs rebuilding our communities and restoring services.  Newly employed workers can repair and rehab schools and other public buildings.  They can work with childcare and early childhood centers and Senior’s centers. They can plant community gardens and weatherize homes in our communities. This is the time to really concentrate on green jobs and energy. 

It goes without saying; these workers must have health insurance. With 1.4 million north Carolinians still uninsured, we have to cover these workers IMMEDIATELY and continue a serious fight for REAL Health Care reform.

This is also the time to make sure that thousands of ex-offenders in our communities get work too.

 

The Senate bill is not enough.  Tax incentives to businesses are not enough. It will not be fast enough and it will not generate the 2 million jobs that we must have.

Congress must put millions to work IMMEDIATELY. We fought in the 1960’s for what we needed. We fought in 2008 for Change we needed.  And we have to fight, and I mean fight, today to make sure it happens.  Our job is to push ALL of our elected officials to support meaningful legislation coming out of D.C.

 

North Carolina is hurting. So we need a Jobs Summit. The Governor and legislators need to hear from those who go to be bed every night worried about how they will pay their bills, keep their home or apartment or see a doctor if they become ill.

They must tell their stories. They, along with advocates, the governor’s staff and legislators can come up with a jobs program to stop the pain.

Forward to a North Carolina Jobs Summit!

Create a Public Jobs Program Now!