Executive Director's Corner

Martin King – 2012

Building a Movement for a New Democracy,

By Ethel Long-Scott, Executive Director
Women's Economic Agenda Project
January 16, 2012

 

HE COULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING…

Some think of Dr. Martin Luther King as a prophet, and it’s almost as if he might have foreseen this economic mess that we are in. He certainly worked hard right up to the day he was killed to prevent anything like our present economic crisis from happening. And like a lot of people who are working hard today to bring more economic justice to the people of our country, he didn’t get much credit for his vision of how to create a better economic world for everybody.

In May of 1968, not quite 50 years ago, thousands of people of all races from all parts of the country, people who did not share in the economic prosperity of those days of intense civil rights activity, traveled by train and by bus and even by mule train to Washington D.C. to protest economic injustice. Some of you may have been there. They didn’t call it “Occupy Washington” in those days, they called it Resurrection City. But it was a canvas and plywood tent city that occupied Washington, stretching for a quarter mile alongside the reflecting pools in front of the Lincoln Memorial and occupying the attention of the news media just as much as the occupy movements of today. Ultimately some 2,500 residents passed through it

The demands of the occupiers of those days were for economic security – jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and education. These demands were a reflection of Dr. King’s call – just 6 months before he was assassinated – for a poor peoples campaign as the next chapter in the struggle for equality. Dr. King believed that while desegregation and the right to vote were essential, economic security was even more important. As you know, he had grown as a leader to the point where he was doing critical analyses of capitalism – and the structural inequities it perpetuated – and the way it used color and race to keep people from uniting in pursuit of common economic interests. And of course he was a staunch critic of the war drain of that era, Vietnam.

And while Dr. King gets a lot of credit for his fight against racial segregation, the flowery words we hear in his honor today don’t often praise his vision of economic justice. Just imagine, “I have a dream,” economic security. That’s the dream of the 99 per cent that moved in on so many cities in the last few months. And yet, nearly 50 years after Dr. King’s economic security dream – a dream that was snuffed out by the powers that be of that era – the corporate and political powers that be of our era are trying to snuff out our dreams of economic security.

If Dr. King were alive today, what do you think he would advise us to do to keep our dreams from being snuffed out the way his were? He might say that despite the history of violent, anti democratic forces in our country that he battled throughout the course of his short life, American democracy is facing new attack by corporate power. In Dr. King’s time the Civil Rights Movement fought for the right of minorities to join in the economic success of corporations, and depended on government to come to its aid in the struggle for justice. But today, Dr. King would likely draw attention to the shameful role of all three branches of government in today’s unending economic assault against democracy.

So what has changed? Why do we see what amount to Resurrection City encampments occupying hundreds of American cities when it’s so clear that lots of the rigid racial barriers Dr. King fought against have fallen? Our children do not think in the limited racial categories that guided thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. What battles are we fighting now that would be familiar to Dr. King if he were here?

What has changed is that we are in the midst of an economic revolution that is dramatically altering the nature of capitalism, but our leaders are pretending it isn’t so. This is happening because digital technology and the computerized control systems and robots it spawned have fundamentally disrupted our economy. It’s a huge change, as big as the Industrial Revolution, because digital technology and globalization have changed the basic relationship between labor and profits that is the fundamental enabler of capitalism. It used to take huge numbers of people to make things, and most people lived reasonably close to their jobs. Not any more. Every day the list of goods and services produced by computer-controlled machines instead of people grows longer. It’s no longer possible to have the capitalism that your grandparents and parents grew up under. We began getting evidence of that 40 years ago with the first massive industrial layoffs as the manufacturing base of old industrial capitalism was systematically destroyed. Employers reacted by closing U.S. factories and moving jobs overseas in search of cheaper labor. That created what we now call the Rust Belt. Then 20 years ago the economic revolution began moving into white collar and professional jobs. Again, employers reacted by eliminating traditional jobs. One easy-to-see consequence is the decline of newspapers. As the digital economic revolution rolled forward, some captains of industry and their political allies maneuvered to secure their own economic positions. As a result the economic boom of the 1990s made the rich much, much richer without doing anything to improve the declining situation of blue collar workers and the poor. That was how determined our political and business leaders were to use the profits from digital technology for their own private gain. Now the impact of the digital economic revolution is devastating public employees, the people who tend to the infrastructure that supports the public good, benefitting all of us. As a consequence a race is under way state by state to gut collective bargaining while setting a blow torch to the safety net.

There’s a recent book, "Winner-Take-All Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, that blames an alliance between captains of industry and elected political leaders for the huge and still exploding wealth gap between rich and poor in the U.S. Their book has some rather shocking examples of just how effectively the 1% and their political allies moved to make sure the digital economic revolution coupled with globalization takes care of their interests at the expense of the rest of us. They say that from 1979 to 2006 the income of the top 1% increased by 250% - and we know what happened to middle class income during that time. The census bureau now says 146 million Americans are low income – that’s nearly half of the American population!

As workers, our lives and our rights are under fire at every level as the super rich and corporations who are stopping at nothing to increase their profits by squeezing workers pensions or health care or slashing life-saving safety net programs. Ultimately either the corporations are going to win by creating a society where everything is privatized, there is no public good and you can only have as much qualify of life as you can pay for; or we the workers are going to win a world where the power of computer controls and robots will be used for public benefit, to protect our children and future generations and not for private gain.

It doesn’t have to be the way it’s going now. But it will continue to be this way until we understand that our elected officials of both major parties have failed us. They are determined to put corporate profits ahead of the public good. And that’s not right, because the public good is what has helped so many people in this country achieve the American dream. Isn’t government - on all levels - supposed to be about the public good? Providing services, from quality education to water, to roads and bridges, that benefit all of us. We need a new vision and a new strategy to create a new social contract.

Historically democracy has been an elusive and ill-defined concept. It has been the political cover for slavery, for disfranchisement of minorities, for the exclusion of women. The concept of majority rule has been used to justify the most violent attacks against minorities. Throughout our history the popular democratic forces have eventually beaten back the forces of slavery, reaction and fascism – so far.

Democracy is much more than the right to choose which bandit will rob you. It is the free and equal participation in the political process of determining the goals and functioning of government.

Genuine democracy depends on the individual controlling the necessaries of his or her existence. If someone controls the essentials of your life you are ultimately their slave. How many American workers control access to their food, shelter and clothing? Democracy can never be less than political independence based on economic independence. Dr. King was moving in that direction when he was killed.

So today democracy movements like Occupy and World Social Forums require us to better define values of democracy that do not embrace oppression and exploitation but rather affirm a new vision for democracy and justice. It means that if democracy is to live it must be based in the common, public ownership of socially necessary goods and resources. This would prevent any one group from controlling the economic and ultimately, political life of others.

The country is slipping deeper into an economic and social revolution as the wealth and poverty gap becomes more pronounced. As the crisis deepens, the political awakening of the people slowly develops. The people will use whatever democracy remains to secure their existence at the expense of this elite and super rich. The elite intends to prevent this. The battle lines are drawn along this front.

Who of us wasn’t sickened with horror as pregnant mothers punched in the stomach, young protesters talked about being beaten in the ribs by UC cops while watching other cops spray liquid pepper down throats that were speaking out against foreclosures, unemployment, and cuts in education and medical care. Whose America is it, anyway? According to the Peoples Tribune, a radical press that advocates for the rights of the propertyless, a clue can be found if we track the United States Senate. “They voted for the Defense Authorization Act that gives the President the power to use the Army to imprison American protesters as “war combatants!” So in answer to the question why such police violence visited against young and old alike we would need to conclude that partly it’s because the US Senate is part of the 1% of the US population that owns 40% of the wealth. About 46% of the members of the House are millionaires and 56% of Senators are millionaires. The twenty richest Congress members are worth over $38 million—the richest is Rep. Darrell Issa of California, weighing in at $303 million.

With each Senate seat costing $8 million to win, even these rich one per-centers can’t afford to run without generous corporate support.  As a result they sell out the American people to their corporate patrons. They have sold huge chunks of the American government to the corporations. For example, Lockheed monitors air traffic. The Department of Homeland Security pays private companies $200 billion a year to perform ”security functions” which include surveillance, private prisons, and militarized police. The bottom line is that capitalism is a system that profits from exploitation and war. At the heart of the economy is the military industrial complex, and it cannot be voted out. This is in sharp contrast to the numbers in poverty who are growing The census bureau is citing that up to 146 million are officially low income.

The situation today is grave. The Occupy Wall Street movement has shown the potential of the people as well as the police state reality. Regardless of differences, the we must not allow one more democracy-destroying law to pass. At the same time we must utilize every aspect of democracy to defend ourselves and advance our cause.

The super rich continue to get richer at the expense of the rest of us, while workers continue to lose ground. This is the power of government being used to reorganize society so that private corporate power dominates everything and public services nearly disappear. The drive to set up anti-democratic government is pushed on a federal level, in our states and local municipalities.

Our elected officials from both major parties are setting things up to guarantee that the super rich will continue to get richer at the expense of workers and the middle income and poor. The Occupy movement has been important for bringing attention to the fact that all of this is being driven by an economic revolution that should be used to provide a more secure life for everyone by expanding public resources instead delivering them to private interests.

I said earlier that we need a new vision of the possible that will transform society. One thing the digital economic revolution makes possible is an unprecedented abundance that could deliver the necessities of life to everyone. That’s not what it’s being used for, but it could be.

We need to build a broad transformative movement with organizing campaigns that show how we can establish a new social contract that puts the things we need into the public domain, from housing, to education, to health care, for the safety and security of all society!

This will be the fight of a lifetime, but we can do it! The automated systems that are destroying jobs have also given us the resources to give a good life to everyone without backbreaking labor. In the not so distant future we could have better food and housing production, the opportunity to end the agonizing worry and unnecessary suffering of so many people about their health care, a better education for many of our children. What stands in our way is an idea that has become time-honored because it’s been around since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It’s been around so long that it seems as natural as wearing clothes, but it’s now as outmoded and backward as the horse and buggy transportation that many of our ancestors thought would never go away. It’s the idea that nothing should be done unless some private company can make a profit on it. Thanks to computers, we no longer need the idea that making profits should determine how much respect we get as human beings. What we do need is a new way of thinking about how to make the best use of this fundamental technological shift in the relationship between labor and profits. What we need is a new social contract that puts people first, human rights first, and discourages profits as part of an outmoded value system.

So going forward we need a new solidarity movement that includes elevating the importance of poverty elimination in the our daily battles for workers rights as we fight to build a new economy based on these new tools of production. One way to build that movement is to keep talking it up.

The Women’s Economic Agenda Project (WEAP) like some of the leaders of Occupy is working to build this transformative people’s movement to eliminate poverty and working on building a new economy to replace the one being destroyed by the ravages of globalization. Over the course of nearly 30 years we have had the opportunity to cultivate partnerships with numerous leaders throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and western region. One of our most recent alliances is part of a major action—the World Court of Women on Poverty in the U.S. (WCW).

The objective of the first ever WCW in the US will be to expose the hidden face of poverty and advance new priorities and policy directions. The WCW is a project of the Asian Women’s Human Rights Council and El Taller International. This monumental event builds on the history of tribunals that have been held from the Nuremberg Trials to the UN. Since they were started in 1992, there have been 38 Courts of Women in different parts of the world. The World Court of Women held in 2012 will be the first to be held in the United States and WEAP will be hosting the convening in Oakland, California. The Courts of Women grew out collective work by activists, intellectuals, and artists.

The Courts have also been built on a history of tribunals such as the Nuremberg Trials to the UN Reconciliation Commissions. More formally put-together in 1989 by Corinne Kumar, a learned woman who left formal education in order to more relevant and enhancing political work, and Nelia Sanchez, a prominent dissident in the Philippines as they co-founded the transnational Asian Women's Human Rights Council (AWHRC).

• The WCWs work in rallying activists and NGOs as well as build connections between issues from war violence and nuclear testing to development violence, the violence of poverty, violence against women & children, trafficking, HIV/AIDS, migration, the destruction of the environment, food sovereignty, etc.

• Since 1992, there have been 37 Courts held in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South Eastern Europe and Latin America.

In the U.S. the WCW began with a major event at the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, where the “World Court of Women on Poverty in the United States: Disappeared in America” was introduced. From presentations to group dialogues, the concept and layout of the WCW at the US Social Forum was explored. The presentation and discussions at the U.S. Social Forum allowed for national and international attention to be brought to the human rights violations that the U.S. permits through allowing and producing poverty.

Through this collaboration, a Resolution of Action was crafted, which is a commitment that the domestic Courts of Women will work to inform a larger social movement with the elimination of poverty as its goal. The Resolution points out how poverty is not the result of personal failures, but that which is structural, stemming from an economic system that increases and deepens poverty while funneling the wealth of this country and the world into the hands of a few. Knowledge and skills will be shared, work must be done collaboratively for elevating the importance of moving resources we need into the pubic secure a social and an economic security. There is a recognition that people are dispossessed but not defeated, and that the government of this country needs to be taken back by the people as to be responsible and respectful to all those people that feels its effects.

You probably know that we see this as not only the continuation of the work of Dr. Martin King of from almost 45 years ago but we also see our responsibility of building on the courageous work begun by the contemporary occupy movement. So here’s where you and your leadership come in.

There will be five topical roundtables can be summarized as covering the following range of issues: (1) property rights, women’s rights, & workers rights, (2) the economy/why is there poverty, and how it intersects with all other issues(3) healthcare for the 99%, (4) oppression/violence of women & actions for healing, and (5) a mixed themed dialogue of several poverty inducing/producing/maintain structures including immigration rights. In all deliberations we will be striving to incorporate solutions on behalf of the 99% from a vision of applying the abundance of society to take care of our people. We encourage discussions and pursue solutions that facilitate the abolishment of poverty and solutions for the 99%.

We will be collecting up to 40 testimonies over the course of 3.5 days. We are providing time and space allow time to take in those experiences and consider what actions we can take to insure justice happens. There will be numerous cultural events at this vibrant community can contribute to this. From praise dance to rap and spoken word presentations.

In this context, no issue is more important than the battle for coming together and sharing our solutions for the way forward. The battle we must wage now is not to simply tinker with the crumbling system, not to save what little is left. Piecemeal solutions will not work in a time when the entire system is in jeopardy. Corporations will stop at nothing to squeeze more profits out of the tattered safety net—even when that means closing hospitals, schools, ramping up foreclosure and pressing for more austerity measures to save the banks. On this Martin King celebration let us recommit ourselves to re-igniting the broad transformative movement to protect our democracy and craft an economy that puts the people first. This time it’s all of us or none of us!