March On!
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
Last year I posted a diary called Coalition Building 101 , calling for a massive march on Washington, using the image from the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
On October 2, 2010 a broad based coalition is doing just that, and I was pleased to see that there was a diary on the rec list, by oxfdblu linking to the information about that effort.
Using the image from the historic march in 1963, the organizers have sent out a call to action. They have called that coalition "One Nation Working Together" and they have the following mission statement:
We are One Nation, born from many, determined to build a more united America – with jobs, justice and education for all.
We are young people, frustrated that society seems willing to spend more locking up our bodies than educating our minds, yet still we find ways to succeed and shine.
We are students and newly-returned veterans – persevering in the face of mounting debt – determined not to be the first generation to end up worse off than our parents.
We are baby boomers and seniors – who saw hope killed in 1968 and will not let the dream of a united America be taken from us again.
We are conservatives and moderates, progressives and liberals, non-believers and people of deep faith, united by escalating assaults on our reason, our environment, and our rights.
We are workers of every age, faith, race, sex, nationality, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability – who have suffered discrimination but never stopped loving our neighbors, or our nation.
We are American Indians and Alaska Natives – citizens of Native nations – who maintain our cultures, protect our sovereignty, and strength America’s economy.
We are the new immigrants, raising our children in the torchlight of the Statue of Liberty, while confronting the shadows that are bigotry and mass deportations.
We are the native born. We inherited the divided legacies of settlers and American Indians, black slaves and white and Asian indentured servants. And yet, in this moment of shared suffering, we rejoice in newfound friendships and new alliances.
We are people who got thrown out – thrown out of our jobs, schools, houses, farms and small businesses – while Wall Street’s wrongdoers got bailed out. We are families who pray every day – for peace and prosperity; for deliverance from foreclosures; for good jobs to come back to urban and rural America.
We are unemployed workers – forced to watch hopes for bold action dashed – because some Senators threaten filibusters, and other would-be champions fold in fear.
And yet, we are the majority – fueled by hope, not hate. We have the pride, power and determination to keep ourselves – and our country – moving up and out of the valley greed created.
And most importantly – from ensuring women are treated fairly at work, to expanding health care coverage for millions– we have been victorious whenever we worked together. We have proven the only thing we need to succeed is each other.
What can you do?
Use your facebook, twitter, email lists, telephone and personal contacts to get out the word.
If you can't go, you can donate money to help provide transportation.
Donations
Please make out all Checks and Money Orders to:
One Nation Working Together
1825 K St. NW, Suite 210
Washington DC 20001
Or call our office: 202-263-4568.
Some of you weren't born at the time of that march in 1963. Others here at BKos were there, and have talked about it.
That march was successful because folks got up off their assets, no matter how much or how little they had, and showed up.
We don't need corporate faux news power.
We need Progressive People Power.
This March is not the be all and end all, because there is still so much work to be done. But it's about time we show the world (and ourselves) what people power is really about.
Seize the time, get on a bus, a train or in car-pool and I'll see you in DC!
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News by dopper0189
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Wow the traditional media at least gets this. NewsWeek: The Racial Politics of Glenn Beck's March on Washington.
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But it does seem that conservatives are constantly being accused of racial insensitivity and the tiresome cycle begins anew. Why is that?
Perhaps it has something to do with so many conservatives frequently behaving insensitively. Consider Glenn Beck's so-called Restoring Honor Rally, for which he just so happens to have booked the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for Saturday, the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Civil-rights organizations typically commemorate the massive civil- rights demonstration and Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic "I Have a Dream" speech there on that date.
Beck says the event will "reclaim the civil-rights movement," from progressives who have hijacked it for their redistributive agenda. The original March on Washington, like the civil-rights movement more generally, saw economic justice (hence "jobs") as inextricable from legal equality. It was an inherently liberal cause. Beck can disagree, and say that the two goals are separable, as indeed he does.
But to claim, as he recently has, that economic justice was not a concern of the civil-rights movement, and that liberal political leaders who are popular among African-Americans are "perverting" the cause, is both demonstrably false and deeply disrespectful to the African-American community. Beck says he and his overwhelmingly white followers "are the inheritors and protectors of the civil- rights movement." This is as direct a provocation to civil-rights activists as it would be to conservatives if Keith Olbermann said that he and his viewers were the inheritors and protectors of Ronald Reagan's legacy.
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NewsWeek article duly noted I thought the traditional media just spent the last month telling us on the left how we needed to be sensitive?? The Root: Sense vs. Sensitivity at Ground Zero and the Lincoln Memorial.
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The crowd raging on the right is red-faced and mad as hell: How dare anyone propose building a mosque -- a mosque! -- at Ground Zero, when it was Muslims who took down the World Trade Center? Never mind that the proposed project is neither a mosque nor located at Ground Zero; emotions are boiling over and reason has evaporated. The only thing that remains is the twisted, logic-challenged equation in which Islam plus Mosque times Muslims equals Terrorist Attack Where the Twins Towers Stood.
The proposed Islamic community center, two blocks away from Ground Zero, is envisioned as a grandiose, $100 million edifice. It would include a swimming pool, gym, basketball court, 500-seat restaurant, culinary school, library, reading room, art studios, child care center, Sept. 11 memorial and -- oh yeah -- a mosque that organizers say could attract as many as 2,000 worshippers on a given day.
Opponents argue that that's simply too much Islamic culture way too close to the World Trade Center site. (Since proposed mosques as far away as Tennessee are also facing protests nowadays, you wonder if they're acceptable anyplace in the country.) The opponents, who include family members of 9/11 victims, claim that anyone who supports the proposed location is insensitive.
And perhaps it is insensitive. But it's funny how the Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins and assorted Tea Partiers complain about sensitivity near Wall Street, while preparing to show none whatsoever on the National Mall. As they flock to Washington, D.C., for Beck's so-called Restoring Honor event on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, they're trouncing on many other folks' sensitivities.
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I'm half way through this book a must read with best label ever "The Rise of America's Prison Empire". As the author traces Texas prison system from its roots in plantation slavery. Austin Chronicle:Grim History.
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Earlier this year, historian Robert Perkinson published Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire (Henry Holt and Company, 496 pp., $35), in which he traces the history of American prisons through the prism of the "retributive mode" of the Texas system. Perkinson, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, has been studying Texas prisons since the late 1990s, when he wrote his doctoral dissertation on "convict leasing," the privatized, for-profit system that replaced plantation slavery after the Civil War and survived into the 20th century. The book's title is a quote from Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst – "There's tough. And then there's Texas tough." – advocating broader application of the death penalty. Perkinson's thesis is that harsh Texas prisons, perfecting punishment trends established throughout the South, have become a model for much of the country. Texas Tough is a broad historical survey, a detailed history of Texas prisons, and in the end a scholarly polemic about the state of American prisons in general.
Perkinson has spent his summers over the last decade visiting and researching the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and he says that on the whole, the TDCJ was very helpful in helping him do the research and providing current statistical information. The book is also informed by numerous interviews and correspondence with prison officials, inmates, and others with knowledge of the lengthy and complex history of prisons in Texas.
Perkinson has also met with state representatives and officials working on prison reform and is hopeful that Texas and the U.S. are, as he writes, "about to embark on another era of humanitarian criminal justice experimentation." We spoke recently about his book and his tentative sense that this could be a moment of opportunity for reform. "The good news," he told me, "is that [the book] could be kind of an obituary for a moment that could be passing. It's too early to tell."
Inmates head out to hoe the fields at the state-owned Clemens Farm in 1970
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10 ways to get more African-Americans in college. Tri-State Defender
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In Memphis, where the National Talent Dividend has faithfully touted the potential billion dollar benefits of college attainment, students heading to public colleges and universities this fall will be hit with higher tuition and fees.
These hard workers and big dreamers – some of them first-generation collegians – are being asked to pay for a greater percentage of their educational costs. African Americans are likely to be disproportionately impacted by these hikes. Ultimately, so will all the people of Memphis. The Economic Policy Institute reported earlier this year that in Minneapolis and Memphis, the African-American unemployment rate was three times the rate for whites. College is typically seen as a stairway to the job market.
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Jim Brown is right this has to stop! Many Black athletes repeat errors of absentee dads.
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The self-inflicted wound crippling the black community spread on the Internet this week like a popular joke. There was New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie on the HBO show Hard Knocks, using his fingers to count his children and appearing to struggle with their names and birth dates. Eight kids by six women in five states. Cromartie just turned 26 -- a damaging stereotype come to life, allowing America to mock black men and black athletes. The Jets reportedly had to front Cromartie $500,000 before he played a down for them, just to cover all the paternity suits.
Jim Brown, civil-rights pioneer, legend and proud black man, felt his giant shoulders sag. When will this ever change? He goes into ghettos and prisons with his message of help and hope. Rival gangs stack their guns on the table when he speaks in front of them. And so little changes as he gets old and tired. Even the lucky ones who escape, like Cromartie, continue to make the mistakes of their absentee fathers, reckless negligence passed down from generation to generation like a genetic disease.
``How in the world do gangbangers control a neighborhood?'' Brown asks. ``Twelve- and 13-year-olds, these babies with guns in their hands? They control a community because there are no families there, no fathers there. The biggest problem in the black community is that fathers aren't taking care of their responsibilities. It is one of the biggest contributors to our disorganization and discord. It has turned everything backward. The social effect can't even be measured. It's totally devastating.''
He pauses here, so exhausted by this fight.
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New York Times: In South Africa, a Push for Industrial Growth
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To many outsiders, South Africa has long been an unstable business environment with an economy overly dependent on natural resources.
Now, the government and a new breed of entrepreneurs are optimistic that they can change perceptions and climb the industrial ladder.
A group of companies is working in sectors like clean energy, aviation, engineering, military contracting and mining, hoping to benefit from positive growth forecasts for the region.
The state hopes this will lead to job creation and other benefits, and has played its part in some cases by offering direct financing and other sweeteners. It has also backed new university research positions and is trying to promote centers of excellence.
"We are a producer and exporter," said Naledi Pandor, the minister of science and technology. "Now we’re saying: let’s become an innovator."
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More sadness from Africa's broken heart... New York Times: U.N. Congo Report Offers New View on Genocide.
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A forthcoming United Nations report on 10 years of extraordinary violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo bluntly challenges the conventional history of events there after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, charging that invading troops from Rwanda and their rebel allies killed tens of thousands of members of the Hutu ethnic group, including many civilians.
Killings in Congo and Rwanda have led to long inquiries.
The 545-page report on 600 of the country’s most serious reported atrocities raises the question of whether Rwanda could be found guilty of genocide against Hutu during the war in neighboring Congo, but says international courts would need to rule on individual cases.
In 1994, more than 800,000 people, predominantly members of the ethnic Tutsi group in Rwanda, were slaughtered by the Hutu. When a Tutsi-led government seized power in Rwanda, Hutu militias fled along with Hutu civilians across the border to Congo, then known as Zaire. Rwanda invaded to pursue them, aided by a Congolese rebel force the report also implicates in the massacres.
While Rwanda and Congolese rebel forces have always claimed that they attacked Hutu militias who were sheltered among civilians, the United Nations report documents deliberate reprisal attacks on civilians.
The report says that the apparently systematic nature of the massacres "suggests that the numerous deaths cannot be attributed to the hazards of war or seen as equating to collateral damage." It continues, "The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who were often undernourished and posed no threat to the attacking forces."
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Matt Taibbi has been keeping track of all the Tea Bag fueled hate from the right, for those still in denial... Rolling Stones: Tea Party Rocks Primaries
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In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts "warning" Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in "self-defense." A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:
[] On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the ultimate aim of killing white babies. "They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it." He also said that "we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, 'Kill all white babies.'"
[] CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the Panther mess: "Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls."
[] On July 6, the Washington Times columnist J. Christian Adams wrote an editorial insisting that "top [Obama] appointees have allowed and even encouraged race-based enforcement as either tacit or open policy," marking one of what would become many assertions by commentators that the Obama administration was no longer interested in protecting the rights of white people. "The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination," Adams wrote. "During the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected."
[] July 12: Rush Limbaugh says Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder "protect and represent" the New Black Panther party.
[] July 28: Rush says Supreme Court decision on 1070 strips Arizonans of their rights to defend themselves against an "invasion": "I guess the judge is saying it's not in the public interest for Arizona to try to defend itself from an invasion. I don't know how you look at this with any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to." That same day, Rush says this: "Muslim terrorists are going to have a field day in Arizona. You cannot ask them where they're from. You cannot even act like we know where they're from. You cannot ask them for their papers. We can ask you for yours. Not them."
[] July 29: The Washington Times asks "Should Arizona Secede?" and says the Supreme Court "is unilaterally disarming the people of Arizona in the face of a dangerous enemy" with the aim of creating a "socialist superstate." The paper writes: "The choice is becoming starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution."
[] July 29, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy continues the Radio Rwanda theme, saying, "If the feds won't protect the people and Governor Brewer can't protect her citizens, what are the people of Arizona supposed to do?"
There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
This past weekend, on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington, a right wing demagogue and his ill-informed minions descended on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to, as they put it, Restore Honor in America.
"America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness," the demagogue sputtered and as his minions cheered.
The theology the demagogue invoked though, was something entirely different than the theology of Martin Luther King and by extension, Obama's; and different than the theology that took me to Latin America the year Archbishop Romero was assassinated. The demagogue made it abundantly clear what those differences are,
"You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it."
The demagogue then insisted that to, "turn back to God", was to glory in the future and the goodness that will come; and to ignore the harpings of the "victims" of that progress.
But we will not forget the sins of our past and present. We will not forget how it is that we are where we are. A battle is taking place then, between forces that claim to have the ear of God; similar to the battle between the Angels of Heaven and Earth in Robert Hayden's...
The Ballad of Nat Turner
Then fled, O brethren, the wicked juba
and wandered wandered far
from curfew joys in the Dismal's night.
Fool of St. Elmo's fire
In scary night I wandered, praying,
Lord God my harshener,
speak to me now or let me die;
speak, Lord, to this mourner.
And came at length to livid trees
where Ibo warriors
hung shadowless, turning in wind
that moaned like Africa,
Their belltongue bodies dead, their eyes
alive with the anger deep
in my own heart. Is this the sign,
the sign forepromised me?
The spirits vanished. Afraid and lonely
I wandered on in blackness.
Speak to me now or let me die.
Die, whispered the blackness.
And wild things gasped and scuffled in
the night; seething shapes
of evil frolicked upon the air.
I reeled with fear, I prayed.
Sudden brightness clove the preying
darkness, brightness that was
itself a golden darkness, brightness
so bright that it was darkness.
And there were angels, their faces hidden
from me, angels at war
with one another, angels in dazzling
combat. And oh the splendor,
The fearful splendor of that warring.
Hide me, I cried to rock and bramble.
Hide me, the rock, the bramble cried. . .
How tell you of that holy battle?
The shock of wing on wing and sword
on sword was the tumult of
a taken city burning. I cannot
say how long they strove,
For the wheel in a turning wheel which is time
in eternity had ceased
its whirling, and owl and moccasin,
panther and nameless beast
And I were held like creatures fixed
in flaming, in fiery amber.
But I saw I saw oh many of
those mighty beings waver,
Waver and fall, go streaking down
into swamp water, and the water
hissed and steamed and bubbled and locked
shuddering shuddering over
The fallen and soon was motionless.
Then that massive light
began a-folding slowly in
upon itself, and I
Beheld the conqueror faces and, lo,
they were like mine, I saw
they were like mine and in joy and terror
wept, praising praising Jehovah.
Oh praised my honer, harshener
till a sleep came over me,
a sleep heavy as death. And when
I awoke at last free
And purified, I rose and prayed
and returned after a time
to the blazing fields, to the humbleness.
And bided my time.
-- Robert Hayden
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Post time for Tuesday's Chile will now be at 4PM EST.
Welcome to the Front Porch to those who are new or joining us to comment for the first time. If you are new, let us know, by saying "hi".
Plenty seats available and we'll be serving baby back ribs and corn on the cob.