THINKING FOR OURSELVES
Beyond Budgets & Speeches
By Shea Howell
Michigan Citizen, Feb 7, 2010
After a year of little progress and a White House strangely out of touch with the concerns of most Americans, President Obama has demonstrated a new energy for addressing our economy.
His State of the Union address combined a more sober but determined tone to pursue his agenda. Acknowledging that this first year had not produced much, he said candidly, “I campaigned on the promise of Change. ‘Change you can believe in,’ the slogan went. And right now there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we can change—or that I can deliver it.”
President Obama then added, “But remember this, I never suggested change would be easy, or that I could do it alone. Democracy in a nation of 300 million people can be noisy and messy and complicated. And when you try to do big things and make big changes, it stirs passions and controversy. That’s just how it is.”
In a speech calling for bipartisanship and for an end to “tired old battles,” President Obama remained faithful to his original agenda, though slightly recast, effectively portraying the Republican party as “the party of No,” and striving to restore confidence in his determination.
Just two days later, making good on his own effort to improve cross-party relationships, President Obama appeared at the Retreat held by House Republicans for a spirited debate. Before TV cameras, with no script, he engaged in a lively, energetic exchange. Sometimes philosophical, sometimes combative, he listened to Republican grievances, pledged to follow up on good ideas, and demonstrated a remarkable capacity for thoughtful discussion. Even House Minority Leader John Boehner, the conservative Ohio Republican, found himself saying, “This has been a good first step in having more of a dialogue.”
However, these events receded into the distance as President Obama delivered a $3.8 trillion budget for 2011, trying to balance two competing goals: continued government spending to create jobs and controlling a soaring national deficit. Making good on his State of the Union claims, the budget includes $53 billion in tax cuts and $50 billion in job creating plans, including small business tax cuts and investments in repairing the nations infrastructure. The Bush tax cut for households making more than $250,000 a year would be allowed to expire and a new “financial crisis responsibility fee” would be put on the largest banks.
This budget, with deficits that are too large to grasp, has a long and messy road ahead. The New York Times responded with a headline that read, “Red Ink Decade.” The Washington Post said “Obama’s budget would spend billions more” and Republicans said that it avoided tough choices and doesn’t fix the deficit. Over the next few weeks positions will no doubt harden and the “tired old partisan bickering” will be back.
For all of President Obama’s gifts, he has been unable to face the depth of the crisis we are confronting. The plain truth is that even if he cut out every single cent in the budget, we would still be in deficit, owing an enormous debt to the Chinese who have bailed us out time and again. Moreover, our economy has not produced enough jobs for people in more than a decade.
We face much more than the challenge of creating jobs, restoring regulations and controlling a deficit. The old industrial economy is gone. We face nothing short of the responsibility and challenge to create a new kind of economy. The capacity to do this, based on principles that value meaningful work and caring relationships with one another and with the Earth, will never come from Washington. New ways of living will have to be created by us.
LIVING FOR CHANGE
Changing Consciousness
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Feb 7, 2010
Last week I was involved in some important consciousness changing discussions.
On Wednesday and Thursday, January 27-28, I participated in an intimate Retreat focused on the role of informal leadership in individual and community transformation.
The Retreat was at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a center committed to creating a world based on Love, Forgiveness and Compassion. This commitment calls upon us to relate to one another and to the world with our hearts and not just with our heads. I view it as an important step toward embracing a new philosophy that frees us from the scientific rationalism of the industrial epoch and therefore empowers us to create a more human post-industrial civilization.
At the Wednesday night gathering I told the story of how grassroots leaders in Detroit, believing in our hearts and minds that another world is both necessary and possible, have been transforming our city from a national and international symbol of the devastation of de-industrialization into a 21st century City of Hope. One result is that the 2nd USSF is bringing 15-20,000 people to Detroit in June.
Thursday morning began with the group singing a “Sweet Honey in the Rock” spiritual led by Elandria Williams from the Highlander Center in Tennessee. Local leaders then told stories of their work.
For example, Sharif Abdullah, author of Creating a World that Works for All, described an incident at a firm where he has been a consultant. A white male worker, walking past an African American woman worker smoking a cigarette outside the building, suddenly came up to her and struck the cigarette from her mouth. She could have responded by accusing him of racism and sexism. However, recalling Sharif’s challenge that we strive to relate to one another as members of the human race, she decided to probe further and discovered that he had just learned from his doctor that he had lung cancer and was reacting not to her but to the cigarette fumes.
Friday night I participated in a discussion at the Boggs Center with members of Word & World, a group which seeks to renew the church as a movement struggling for justice by bridging the gulf between Seminary, Sanctuary, and the Streets. The purpose of Friday night’s discussion was to help Word & World prepare a Call to Spiritual Leadership at the 2nd USSF.
We started out with a “fishbowl,” consisting of community activist pastors Detroiter Bill Wylie-Kellerman and Nelson Johnson from Greensboro, N.C.; Claudia Horwitz from the Stone House Center for Spiritual Life and Strategic Action; and myself.
Our “fishbowl” explored the distinction and connection between “human time,” e.g. going to work, doing the laundry, cooking dinner, and “God’s time,”when we share and renew our Faith in the power within us to create the world anew.
Speaking from the larger group, Jim Perkinson, Ecumenical Theological Seminary professor, suggested that the division between the two times could be bridged by Sabbath Economics, an economics based on sharing and having “enough” rather than on accumulation and exploitation.
Young street people, e.g. King Jorge of the Greensboro Almighty Latin Kings & Queens and Yusef Shakur of Detroit Urban Networks, then spoke passionately of the need to create community safety and unity by bringing the neighbor back into the ‘hood. They were joined by Wesley Morris, a young man from the Greensboro Beloved Community Center who emphasized the importance of seeing with our hearts and not only with our eyes.
These conversations assume a new significance in the wake of the Massachusetts election, the Supreme Court decision validating corporate financing of elections, President Obama’s frantic efforts to defuse the anger over bankster bailouts and his State of the Union speech, which together reveal that Wall St. and Washington have lost all moral authority.
In this crisis, which is both institutional and moral, conversations like these help to nurture the transformative leadership needed to help us change both ourselves and our world.
The struggle for educational justice in our communities and nationally is stronger than ever. The declining economy, increased privatization of schools and lock down on our communities call for us to come together and share resources & energy for revitalizing the education for liberation movement.
Teachersforjustice.org is an innovative new website launched by Teachers for Social Justice in Chicago that will combine teacher-driven news, actions, resources, and research aimed towards strengthening the social justice educator community. We hope that this website can be a tool where educators can find immediate support for their classrooms and communities and help us all connect to the growing network of educators who work for justice and education for all.
Teachersforjustice.org will feature a database of curriculum written by teachers for our Annual Teaching for Justice Curriculum Fair, a calendar of events & actions related to Educational Justice in Chicago and nationally, and links to articles, resources and communities that educators and activists of all types can appreciate. Don’t hesitate to use this website as a portal to Friends of our Entire Network at Rethinking Schools and the National Education for Liberation Network, as well as all of our sister Teacher Activist Groups around the country.
If you’re looking for ways to learn about the work of the social justice educators & the context of our struggles, find resources & research, learn collectively and build community, check in at Teachersforjustice.org and please help spread the word!
John Maguire will never forget his first encounter with a “precocious” divinity student who later became the leader of a movement that swept through the nation.
In 1951, Maguire visited a theological seminary in Pennsylvania, where he heard a young Martin Luther King Jr. give a welcoming speech to curious students.
“He was an incredible, forceful speaker,” Maguire says. “He was only 21 years old at the time, so clearly he had the gifts of oratory from a very young age.”
Maguire, an accomplished civil rights activist and president emeritus of Claremont Graduate University, shared common ground with the man whose gifted rhetoric spurred action around the country and caused many to think globally.
“He had the most radical, fresh vision. He really made it international,” says Maguire, who is also senior fellow of the Institute for Democratic Renewal. Maguire’s life journey sometimes mirrored the path of King.
Ironically, King’s death confirmed the truth about society’s ills, about hate, about racial injustices plaguing mankind. Maguire believes King’s premature death shattered his cohesive vision to attain a “beloved community.” And though he outwardly opposed the Vietnam War, comparing the exploitation abroad to the segregation at home, his message was stopped short.
CREATE // CONNECT // TRANSFORM
the 12th annual Allied Media Conference. June 18-20, 2010. Detroit, Michigan. McGregor Conference Center, Wayne State University.
Media and Creativity to Transform Our Selves and Our World
Register now for 3 days of Focused Discussions, Skill Sharing, Hands-On Media Lab, Film Screenings, Music, Bowling.
We come together to share tools and tactics for transforming our communities through media-based organizing. Register today. Be a part of it at www.alliedmediaconference.org
Stay in town for the U.S. Social Forum: June 22-26, 2010.
Featured on WUOM 91.7 FM Ann Arbor. Michigan Radio’s Morning Edition host Christina Shockley speaks with Detroit-based hip hop artist Invincible. Listen here.
The United States Misreads Brazil’s World Policy
by Immanuel Wallerstein
Agence Global, Feb 1, 2010
When the United States first realized circa 1970 that its hegemonic dominance was being threatened by the growing economic (and hence geopolitical) strength of western Europe and Japan, it changed its posture, seeking to prevent western Europe and Japan from taking too independent a position in world affairs.
The United States said in effect, although not in words: Up to now, we have been treating you as satellites, required to follow our lead without question on the world scene. But you are stronger now. So we invite you to be partners, junior partners, who will share in the collective decision-making, provided only you don’t stray too far on your own. This new U.S. policy was institutionalized in multiple ways — notably the creation of the G-7, the establishment of the Trilateral Commission, and the invention of the World Economic Forum of Davos as a meeting-ground of the “friendly” world elite.
The main U.S. objective was to slow down the decline of its geopolitical power. The new policy worked for perhaps twenty years. It was finally undone by two successive events. The first was the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991, which removed the major argument the United States had used with its “partners” that they should not be too “independent” on the world scene. And the second was the self-defeating unilateral macho militarism of the Bush regime. Instead of restoring U.S. hegemony, it resulted in the devastating failure of the United States in 2003 to get U.N. Security Council endorsement of its invasion of Iraq. Bush’s neocon policies had backfired entirely, turning a slow decline in U.S. geopolitical power into a precipitate decline. Today, almost everyone recognizes that the United States no longer has the clout it once had.
One would have thought the United States might have learned some lessons from the errors of the Bush regime. But it seems it is trying to repeat the same scenario with Brazil today. It will not take twenty years for this attempt to unravel.
The major geopolitical move that Obama has undertaken was to turn the G-8 meeting into a G-20 meeting. The crucial group that was added to the meeting were the so-called BRIC countries, otherwise called the “emerging” countries. BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia (already included in the G-8), India, and China.
What the United States is offering Brazil is “partnership.” This comes out very clearly in the recent report of a Task Force of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) entitled U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality. The CFR is the voice of the centrist Establishment, and this report probably reflects White House thinking.
There are two crucial sentences in this report concerning Brazil. The first reads: “The Task Force believes that deepening strategic relationships with Brazil and Mexico, and reformulating diplomatic efforts with Venezuela and Cuba, will not only establish more fruitful interaction with these countries but will also positively transform U.S.-Latin American relations.”
And the second sentence deals specifically with Brazil: “The Task Force recommends that the United States build on its existing collaboration with Brazil on ethanol to develop a more consistent, coordinated, and broader partnership that incorporates a wide range of bilateral, regional, and global issues.”
The report was issued in 2009. In December, the CFR organized with the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) a seminar on “rising Brazil.” By coincidence, the seminar occurred just at the moment of both the Honduran political crisis and the visit of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad to Brazil. The U.S. participants in the seminar did not speak the same language as the Brazilians.
The Americans believed that Brazil should act as a regional power, that is, as a sub-imperial power. The U.S. participants couldn’t understand Brazil’s disapproval of Colombia’s military and economic links with the United States. They thought also that Brazil should assume some responsibility for maintaining “world order,” which meant joining in the U.S. pressure on Iran’s nuclear policies, whereas the Brazilians felt that the U.S. position on Iran was “hypocritical.” Finally, whereas the U.S. participants saw Chavez’s Venezuela as being “far from democratic,” the Brazilians echoed President Lula’s characterization that Venezuela suffered from an “excess of democracy.”
In January 2010, Susan Purcell, a conservative U.S. analyst, published in the Miami Herald a critique of U.S. policy on Brazil, calling it “wishful thinking.” She may well be right. In her view, “Washington may need to rethink its assumptions regarding the extent to which Brazil can be relied on to deal with political and security problems in Latin America in ways that are also compatible with U.S. interests.”
In January also, Valter Pomar, Secretary for International Relations of Lula’s party, the PT, said that the U.S. intention in creating the G-20 was “to try to absorb and control alternative poles of power, …to maintain a multipolarity under control.” He insisted that, in the strain between supporting world capitalist interests as a sub-imperial power and supporting “democratic-popular interests,” Brazil would end up on the latter side.
Given the increased strength of western Europe and Japan in the early 1970s, the United States offered them promotion to the status of junior partner. France and Germany opted to proceed further to an independent world role in 2003. And Japan, in its national election in 2009 and its mayoral election in Okinawa in 2010, seems to be opting for it now. Brazil, given its increased strength, was offered junior partnership only in 2009. It seems to be insisting on an independent world role almost immediately.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New Press).
THINKING FOR OURSELVES
Massachusetts Message
By Shea Howell
Michigan Citizen, Jan 31, 2010
One year into the Obama presidency, the Democrats managed to lose the most Democratic Senate seat in the country. Until the last weeks of the campaign, they didn’t even see it coming. They had viewed the election as simply a formality to fill the vacancy caused by Senator Kennedy’s death.
Too late, the Democrats realized they were in trouble. In spite of the last minute efforts of Bill Clinton and President Obama, the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley went down to a resounding defeat by a little-known Republican insurgent, Scott Brown.
The most immediate effect will be to deprive the Democrats of their filibuster proof majority, an advantage they have done little with, and will most likely stop the health care bill.
The response from the Republicans has been joyous, although they, too, were taken by surprise at Brown’s victory and the support he was able to garner from the tea-bagger movement.
In essence, both parties are severely out of touch with what is going on in America.
Independent voters, owing allegiance to neither party, are fed up.
Independent voters were crucial to the 2008 Obama victory. But over the past year they have been moving away from the Democrats. This fall in the Virginia governor’s race, they gave the Republicans a victory, dropping away from Democrats by 16 points. In New Jersey it was by 21 points. In these two races independents went 2 to 1 for Republicans. In Massachusetts they went 3 to 1 for the Republican, Scott Brown, in one of the highest voter turnouts for an off term election in 20 years.
This is a resounding rejection of the direction of the country. Much is being made of this. About the only thing anyone agrees with is that voters are angry.
But there are some exit polls we should look at carefully. First the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard School of Public Health noted that in November 2008 Obama carried white voters without college degrees by 57% versus 42% for his opponent. Brown carried 65% of the same group with only 37% going for Coakley.
This group of white, working class voters is clearly skeptical about much of the Obama administration’s direction. 50% of all voters, down from 63% in November 2008, said that government should do more to solve problems for the white working class.
Moreover, the Brown campaign made an explicit pledge to stop the Obama health care plan. Exit polls showed 52% of those who voted opposed the bill, and 42% cast their ballots with the specific intention of killing the Obama plan.
Massachusetts, of course, has one of the best health care environments in the nation, providing near universal care. Its model has been used to help shape the current bill. So it would be foolish to think votes rejected the idea that we need health care reform or that we have an obligation to support the most vulnerable among us. Rather, people are fed up with what has been a leaderless effort characterized by back room deals, concessions to every small-minded politician and special interest group from Big Pharma and the insurance companies to labor unions. After nearly a year the House and Senate have produced a bill that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer can only call “better than nothing.”
For independent voters big government means supporting big business from Wall Street bankers to out-of-touch auto execs.
The Massachusetts election is more than a wake-up call to the political establishment. It is a call to the rest of us that we cannot expect national politicians to take care of our neighbors or our families. For this we have to organize ourselves to create healthy communities.
LIVING FOR CHANGE
Re-Imagining America, Re-Creating Ourselves
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Jan 31, 2010
As we move towards the 2nd USSF that will bring 15,000-20,000 people to Detroit in June, new visitors to the Boggs Center are giving me a deeper understanding of the energies stirring in our country at this very special time on the clock of the world.
For example, on a recent snowy afternoon, we enjoyed a conversation with Dan Wang and Mike Wolf, two artists from the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor (MRCC), Dan was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, and now lives in Minneapolis. Mike is from the Chicago area.
Before our conversation I had viewed maps mainly as aids to get drivers from one place to another. Dan and Mike gave me a sense of how maps created by artists not only expand our knowledge and imaginations but can also help us arrive at life-changing decisions.
MRCC maps provide a picture of the many cultures in the Midwest. They tell us how people live in cities and rural areas, the availability of land, fuel, water; whether they are able to grow their own food or have to import it from long distances (consuming tons of fuel and requiring, often carcinogenic, preservatives and additives); how they dispose of waste, how they educate and entertain themselves, what historic struggles and events they remember and tell each other stories about.
MRCC artists are cultural creatives who recognize that our world and especially the United States are in the middle of a huge cultural revolution. So their maps provide all kinds of information about city life and rural life, about who lives where and when, about gentrification and struggles against gentrification, development and struggles against it, industrialization and de-industrialization, current and increasingly urgent challenges to create the world anew.
I was especially impressed with the information these maps provide about Native American communities because MRCC mapmakers recognize that in this period we have so much to learn from indigenous peoples about the need to think ahead seven generations when we make everyday decisions.
Talking with Dan and Mike, I also got a sense of the huge changes that have taken place in the world and in young people since I became a radical nearly 70 years ago.
When I moved from New York to Detroit in the middle of the 20th century, most radicals, myself included, thought mainly in terms of Race and Class, Blacks and Whites, Workers and Capitalists, I had no idea that one day I would find myself growing older in a country where whites are the minority and people of color from Latin America, Asia and Africa are the New Majority.
I never dreamed that Detroit, once the national and international symbol of the miracles of industrialization, would become the world symbol of the devastation of deindustrialization. Or that, as a result of the new information technology, only one in ten workers actually works in manufacturing and the number of workers outside factory walls exceeds those inside.
It never occurred to me that eventually my identity would be shaped not mainly by my ethnicity, class or gender but by how I responded to the challenge to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up.
I never suspected that the day was coming when people the world over would view the American way of life as mainly responsible for the global warming that threatens all living things on Planet Earth.
Or that a new generation of young Americans, coming out of obscurity and with a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, would assume leadership for encouraging all Americans to live more simply so that there will be a future for all of us and our posterity.
MRCC maps help these millennials decide where to settle and begin rebuilding and revitalizing this country from the ground up.
Another World is Possible. Another US is Necessary. A New Detroit is Underway.
Register Early to Join the Planning and Avoid Late Fees. 20,000 changemakers will be gathering in Detroit in June from all different sectors and communities to share vision, strategy, practice, and action.
You can now register yourself or your organization at http://ussf2010.org/register.
Workshops Submissions Are Open. After you register, your organization can submit a workshop proposal to facilitate during the forum. Details are available at http://www.ussf2010.org/call_for_proposals
The organization of workshop tracks was informed by a consulta/survey of with over 800 responses.
Build the Forum Planning Process Locally and Nationally. Assemblies, Brigades, Caravans, Detroit Expanded. The Social Forum is not an event or an organization it is a self-organized process made by people like you.
Check out http://ussf2010.org/get-involved for ideas on how to become part of the lead-up.
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NOW AVAILABLE AT THE BOGGS CENTER STOREThe American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook (2009 edition)
Revolution & Evolution in the Twentieth Century (2008 edition)
Living for Change (Signed by Grace Lee Boggs)
Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nations Future
Let's Talk About Malcolm & Martin
