Archive for the 'African-American' Category

The ‘Jackson Plan’: Solidarity Economy and Popular Power In the South

A Struggle for Self-Determination,

Participatory Democracy, and Economic Justice

Written by Kali Akuno

For the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

A major progressive initiative is underway in Jackson, Mississippi. This initiative demonstrates tremendous promise and potential in making a major contribution towards improving the overall quality of life of the people of Jackson, Mississippi, particularly people of African descent. This initiative is the Jackson Plan and it is being spearheaded by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Jackson People’s Assembly.

The Jackson Plan is an initiative to apply many of the best practices in the promotion of participatory democracy, solidarity economy, and sustainable development and combine them with progressive community organizing and electoral politics. The objectives of the Jackson Plan are to deepen democracy in Mississippi and to build a vibrant, people centered solidarity economy in Jackson and throughout the state of Mississippi that empowers Black and other oppressed peoples in the state.

The Jackson Plan has many local, national and international antecedents, but it is fundamentally the brain child of the Jackson People’s Assembly. The Jackson People’s Assembly is the product of the Mississippi Disaster Relief Coalition (MSDRC) that was spearheaded by MXGM in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Gulf Coast communities in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Between 2006 and 2008, this coalition expanded and transformed itself into the Jackson People’s Assembly. In 2009, MXGM and the People’s Assembly were able to elect human rights lawyer and MXGM co-founder Chokwe Lumumba to the Jackson City Council representing Ward 2.

What follows is a brief presentation of the Jackson Plan as an initiative to build a base of autonomous power in Jackson that can serve as a catalyst for the attainment of Black self-determination and the democratic transformation of the economy.

Program or Pillars

The J – K Plan has three fundamental programmatic components that are designed to build a mass base with the political clarity, organizational capacity, and material self-sufficiency to advance core objectives of the plan. The three fundamental programmatic components are:

Building People’s Assemblies Building a Network of Progressive Political Candidates Building a broad based Solidarity Economy

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In Some States, a Real Socialism Will Be on the Ballot—and It’s Not Obama

by @ Wednesday, February 29th, 2012. Filed under 2012 election, African-American, Organizing, Socialism

If You Like, You Can Make Your Vote Count for Socialism

By Scott Tucker
SolidarityEconomy.net via Truthdig.com

Feb. 28, 2012 - Stewart Alexander believes fair elections are worth a fair fight and he’s asking for your vote. The Occupy Wall Street movement encouraged a more honest discussion of class and capitalism in this country, but Alexander is not simply a critic of big banks and high finance. He is a democratic socialist, a military veteran opposed to militarism, an African-American community activist and the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party in 2012.

Alexander believes the candidate of “hope and change” is a defender of the status quo and of corporate rule. In his words:

“The phrase that came to mind immediately upon hearing President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech is ‘too little, too late.’ After spending the last few years coddling the banks and the richest 1 percent, Obama has the nerve to now call for ‘economic fairness.’ To him, this means tweaking payroll taxes and making a rhetorical call to reverse the Bush tax cuts for the rich. For working people in America, real fairness means the right to a job, a guarantee of health care for all and an end to the military-industrial complex. Obama won’t deliver this. That’s why I am running for president against him.”

The boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism require a semblance of representative government, even though Congress has become the front office of the corporate state. Even the most “progressive” reforms of the tax code now proposed by career politicians remain a form of institutionalized robbery of the working and middle classes.

“This is why,” Alexander says, “we propose creating a progressive tax structure where the rich pay far more than the average working person. In a democratic socialist society neither Obama nor Romney would be allowed to pay an effective tax rate of 26 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Corporate taxation, financial gains taxes and personal income taxes will be modernized—all loopholes will be closed and the rich will pay a steep tax on their income. This is what economic fairness looks like to a socialist.”

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Danger: Pushing ‘Recovery’ with a ‘White’ Top and a Black Bottom

by @ Thursday, April 23rd, 2009. Filed under African-American, Economic Democracy, Labor Movement, Racism

Economic Recovery for Everyone:

Racial Equity and Prosperity

 


by The Center for Social Inclusion

Published by POVERTY & RACE
RESEARCH ACTION COUNCIL
March/April 2009
Volume 18: Number 2


States are poised to receive significant federal funding to stimulate the economy and put people back to work. Much of it targets “shovel ready” projects. Government has to be smart about how it uses our money. The stimulus package alone will not be enough to put everyone who needs a job back to work. And it will not support all the services our communities need. But if it is allocated wisely and fairly, it can be a powerful boost to the economy and improve the lives of many.


To do that, states must ensure that those in the most need benefit from the stimulus. While we have made much progress on race and gender equality in this country, we have not yet achieved full fairness, and these inequities limit prosperity for all of us.

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Anti-Immigrant in Black Face?

by @ Tuesday, May 29th, 2007. Filed under African-American, Economy, Labor Movement
Advertisement for the 'Coalition for the Future American Worker'The picture in the ad immediately caught my attention. The photo was of a very dignified older African American man looking into the camera, very determined and equally pensive. Underneath his photo was a caption giving his name—T. Willard Fair—and the fact that he was the veteran of 40 years of struggle in the Civil Rights Movement. This was certainly enough to pique my interest. Beneath the caption was a statement declaring that the alleged threat to African Americans comes from documented and undocumented immigrants. He went on to suggest that any notion of legalizing undocumented workers was a slap in the face of African Americans. The ad is associated with a group called the “Coalition for the Future American Worker.” Fair’s attack is not surprising, although the virulence and historical nature of it is very unsettling, particularly because it is bound to strike a chord among many African Americans. Black America has been taking a prolonged economic hit since the mid 1970s. The economic reorganization which many people call de-industrialization has had a devastating impact on the (more...)

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“These People Frighten Me”

by @ Thursday, May 3rd, 2007. Filed under African-American, Elections
Rep. Dennis Kucinichby Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel is right to be scared of most of the Democratic field of presidential candidates. Except for Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the contenders jockey for the title of most-likely-to-attack-Iran. Impeachment "is the only way to discredit Republicans enough to insure a Democratic victory in 2008," but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will hear none of that. Even if the Democrats somehow triumph, nothing much will change, because the frontrunners are all beholden to Big Money and enthralled with war. During the first Democratic presidential debate a little known candidate, former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, ended up with one of the most memorable lines of the evening: "And I got to tell you, after standing up with them, some of these people frighten me - they frighten me. When you have mainline candidates that turn around and say that there's nothing off the table with respect to Iran, that's code for using nukes, nuclear devices. (more...)

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To some in Paris, sinister past is back

by @ Thursday, March 22nd, 2007. Filed under African-American, Justice
Creola Cotton visits her daughter, Shaquanda, in juvenile prison[Note from SolidarityEconomy.net editors: We encourage readers to post this story far and wide, especially to those who think we live in a 'colorblind' society.] In Texas, a white teenager burns down her family's home and receives probation. A black one shoves a hall monitor and gets 7 years in prison. The state NAACP calls it `a signal to black folks.' By Howard Witt, Tribune senior correspondent PARIS, Texas -- The public fairgrounds in this small east Texas town look ordinary enough, like so many other well-worn county fair sites across the nation. Unless you know the history of the place. There are no plaques or markers to denote it, but several of the most notorious public lynchings of black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds, where thousands of white spectators would (more...)

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Putting Black Faces on Imperial Policies

by @ Thursday, February 15th, 2007. Filed under African-American, Anti-War Movement, Politics & Elections
CondiPoutingOsama.jpgby Glen Ford "Barack Obama is our son and he deserves our support," declared Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr., speaking to a gathering of Black Democrats at the party's winter meeting, in Washington, earlier this month. By Jones' logic, Condoleezza Rice deserves automatic African American support as "our daughter," and Colin Powell, her predecessor as George Bush's Secretary of State, was due fealty as "our brother." Jones' embrace of the entire African American family tree must also, therefore, extend to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, the most reactionary, anti-Black member of the High Court; and to "our brother" J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State whose consuming mission in 2004 was to deny the franchise to as many fellow Blacks as possible. (more...)

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The Sit-in Movement was Not Spontaneous: It Took Brains, Sweat, Planning and Organization

by @ Thursday, December 21st, 2006. Filed under African-American, Organizing
s-sncc.jpgby Rhone Fraser
“The sit-in movement was built upon deep layers of African American organizational experience stretching back generations.”
The American civil rights narrative has too often been reduced to a tale of spontaneous invention, rather than the product of intense debate, meticulous planning and, often, tactical and strategic genius on the part of the organizers. It’s long past time to tell the truth about this watershed moment in the Black radical tradition. (more...)

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The Black-Latino Future

by @ Friday, November 3rd, 2006. Filed under African-American, Latin-American, Politics & Elections
Black Agenda Report:
AfricanLatin Finding a Way to Solidarity By Glen Ford BAR Executive Editor When as many as two million immigrants and their supporters, most of them Latino, turned out for demonstrations against draconian undocumented worker legislation in cities across the nation this spring, everywhere the question was raised: Is this the new civil rights movement? By all appearances, some kind of great awakening had indeed occurred which, if sustained, would transform the participants and, eventually, the society at-large. However, Black opinion was decidedly mixed. Traditional and progressive African American organizations generally supported the explosion of Latino activism, and marveled at the coordination and sheer size of the rallies in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Houston, Seattle – at least two dozen cities, nationwide. Luminaries such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, NAACP chairman Julian Bond, the SCLC’s Rev. Joseph Lowrey, and numerous Black congresspersons were quick to make a positive connection to the struggles of the Sixties. (more...)

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