Tavis Smiley and Cornel West -Part 2

The Rich and the rest of us

Tavis Smiley and Cornel West on Growing Up Poor

Tavis Smiley and Cornel West discuss growing up in working-class households. "I saw so much poverty growing up," says Smiley, who lived with 13 family members in a three-bedroom trailer and learned that even when he was not optimistic, he could be hopeful.  West recalls how he worked with the Black Panthers to organize a general strike while growing up in Sacramento, California, in order to push for African-American studies programs in local high schools.  Looking at current events, Smiley and West cite Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s comment that "war is the enemy of the poor" and compare the amount of money spent in Iraq and the 2012 presidential campaign to funding for programs that assist the one in two Americans who are now poor.  

Slavoj Zizek explains why the German government gave money to Greece

"European and US governments play with democracy  but when things get serious, experts/technocrats take over  -more or less cancelling democracy"

U.S. troops posed with body parts of Afghan bombers

"It is a violation of Army standards to pose with corpses for photographs outside of officially sanctioned purposes," saidGeorge Wright, an Army spokesman. "Such actions fall short of what we expect of our uniformed service members in deployed areas."

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley -The Rich and the Rest of Us

The latest census data shows nearly one in two Americans, or 150 million people, have fallen into poverty — or could be classified as low income.  Dr. Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, spark a national dialogue on the poverty crisis with the new book, "The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto."  Smiley, an award-winning TV and radio broadcaster, says President Obama has failed to properly tackle poverty.  "There seems to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington that the poor just don’t matter. President Obama is a part of that," Smiley says. "I take nothing away from his push on healthcare, but jobs for every American should have been priority number one." West, a professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University, says that after the historic U.S. struggles against monarchy, slavery and institutionalized racism, "the issue today is oligarchy. Poverty is the new slavery, oligarchs are the new kings — the new heads of this structure of domination."

Declaration from Occupy San Francisco General Assembly

It has been well-established in declaration and law that all people are endowed with  inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly. We, and our descendants, share common human needs — a sustainable global ecology, adequate food, shelter, health, education, and equal opportunity to fulfill our potential.

Through a deliberate series of attacks, these rights and basic necessities are being stolen from us by the economic elite in Washington, London, Wall Street and other centers where money and power consolidate.

We have no redress from our government, as it is busy ensuring the health, prosperity, and security of corporations and financial institutions while ignoring and actively working against the basic needs of the People. In light of this, a call was made to occupy Wall Street on the 17th of September, 2011. From Liberty Square in New York City to the Financial District in San Francisco, we answered that call, occupying with determination and solidarity.

To reclaim our rights, we collectively confront a monolithic government, a parasitic financial system, and a military industrial juggernaut, all of which command overwhelming economic power and seemingly insurmountable physical and legal force. We confront these entities with courageous nonviolent civil disobedience. By occupying public space, mobilizing people, and transforming public discourse, we shine the light of truth on the situation at hand.

Financial institutions have become parasites of the economic system.  Instead of functioning as a buttress for the economy, they have constructed mechanisms that allow them to plunder the world’s wealth and divert it directly into their pockets. By abusing the money creation powers of the Federal Reserve, manipulating domestic and international financial markets, and creating risky, deceptive, and dangerous investment products, they accumulate staggering wealth and power, leaving in their wake global economic devastation.

Multi-national corporations are equally guilty.  Under the guise of fair competition, they take an unfair proportion of produced wealth.  When true competition threatens their power, they crush it.  They achieve global hegemony by using our armed forces as personal enforcers and looting the public treasury to fund their empires.  They befoul and contaminate the air we breathe, the waters we drink, and the soil that gives us life. The Earth’s resources are destroyed and depleted for their insatiable avarice.

To continue accumulating obscene wealth, these culprits commit horrendous economic, political, and environmental crimes.  To perpetuate these crimes and escape accountability, they deploy their vast ill-gotten wealth to buy control of our society and government at all levels, undermining the tools and abilities we have available to us to resist effectively.

• They buy the loyalty and votes of politicians through lobbying and corruption to create laws and regulations favoring the financial and corporate interests at the People’s expense.
• They influence the judicial system to interpret and enforce those laws and regulations primarily to their benefit, even going so far as to grant corporations the rights of people.
• They buy or neutralize government regulatory bodies tasked with protecting the People’s and economy’s health.
• They buy university curricula and research, particularly in science and economics, to advance their agenda.
• They influence the creation of, and even draft, anti-Constitutional legislation that punishes or inhibits those who publicly protest their misdeeds.
• They buy and consolidate the print and broadcast media to inhibit diversity of ideas and opinions and ensure mass media conformity to their agenda.
• They manipulate the political process and the media, demonizing our differences in ethnicity, skin color, gender, age, sexual orientation, nationality, political affiliation, and religion to separate us from our natural allies.
• They seek Internet censorship laws to eliminate the last bastion of free media and organizational tools for the People.
• They fabricate pretexts to divert excessive public resources into wars of choice, and the weapons and personnel to wage them.
• And they inflict debt slavery on the people of other nations by using the IMF and World Bank as their foreign arms of operation.

Because these financial institutions and multinational corporations have committed these crimes, the government, the corporate media, and the prevailing ideology no longer represent the People.

We, the People, are left to suffer the staggering costs that these financial institutions and multinational corporations inflict — on the economy, political process, and the environment.

• We suffer from a shrinking middle class, rising unemployment, insecure jobs, diminishing wages, retirement plans looted by Wall Street, a decline of living conditions, and a slide toward poverty.
• We suffer from millions of fraudulent home foreclosures and evictions that have devastated our communities and families.
• We suffer the costs of fighting and financing unnecessary wars, and the inadequate support our government provides for veterans.
• We suffer from an exorbitantly expensive and inefficient health care system, leaving us at the mercy of employers and insurance companies who can arbitrarily deny, or prohibitively price, the coverage our very lives depend on.
• We suffer from decimated lands and imperiled wildlife caused by the unsustainable rape of the environment.
• We suffer from food and water supplies laced with poisonous runoff and unhealthy additives, due to woefully inadequate government regulation.
• We suffer from an increasingly inaccessible college education system that results in decades of crushing student debt and extremely limited job prospects after graduation.
• We suffer from a brutal austerity regimen resulting in ever-worsening K-12 education, imploding social services, and crumbling infrastructure.
• We suffer incalculable personal and community devastation due to the reckless privatization of public necessities, including education, healthcare, and even prisons.
• And we suffer from a broken political system where moneyed interests are represented, but the People and communities are not.

We, the People, are fed up with this unwarranted suffering. We can no longer idly stand by, with indifference and apathy, watching our rights, our economic security and our shared environmental heritage being torn from us.  We answered the call to Occupy because all of us can agree that these profound wrongs must be righted.

Occupy is both the conversation and the space to make meaningful change happen. Occupy is a big tent and all are welcome to help us create the solutions for a better world. Whether it’s removing money from politics, transforming the economic system, or advocating for a more just and equitable society,  we have the energy and we have the ideas, but the most important thing we need is your passion! You have more power than you’ve been led to believe, and your voice is more needed than you think. These are the days when we must speak out, no matter how our voices shake.

As we grow, the criminal financial institutions, multinational corporations, and their government lackeys will continue to attempt to silence us.  But our resolve and purpose will only grow stronger.  They can tear down a tent, they can eject a body, but they cannot evict an idea once it is rooted in the hearts and minds of a People.  We are an expression of hope and solidarity for a better tomorrow. We are the cry that has found a voice, and that is the voice of the People. We invite you to join your voice with ours. Let us stand together and let it be known that we we will not go quietly into the night. We are Occupy!

Note: This declaration was unanimously passed at the OccupySF General Assembly on 5 April 2012. It is an official document of Occupy San Francisco. It was authored through consensus by the OccupySF Ideological Liberation working group (formerly OccupySF Research and OccupySF Ideological Warfare). Although this is presented in text format, it is intended for wide distribution via flier, pamphlet, and other electronic means. We invite other Occupations to adopt this document wholly or edit as they see fit and use it as the seed for your own homegrown declaration. Please spread far and wide!

Toni Morrison -I'm not somebody else's version of who I am

The idea for a novel about a black girl made to feel so ugly by the culture around her that she prays for blue eyes, came out of an encounter Morrison had as a child. A fellow classmate confided to her the same dream of blue eyes, which, even as a 12-year-old, struck Morrison as grotesquely self-loathing. She remembered it. "I wanted to know how she got to that place."
She was Chloe Wofford then; Toni was a nickname that came out of her baptismal name, Anthony (after St Anthony), which she took at 12 when she joined the Catholic church. She knew who she was and puts it down to a combination of class – in her town, they were all poor together, black, white, Polish, Spanish – living in the same streets and attending the same high schools. Her parents were also fiercely resistant to outside influence. For a while, her family was on food aid, or "relief" as it was then known, a word Morrison finds preferable to today's language. "I liked that word. Because it was, like, it's just a pause. You're going to be all right, it's just 'relief'. And I remember my mother got some cornmeal or something and it had bugs in it. She wrote a letter to Franklin D Roosevelt. And his office answered! And the woman who dealt out this crap came to see my mother, and my mother said, 'You're giving us food with bugs in it?!' She was the type who tore eviction notices off the door."

When Morrison was in her early teens, she got a job as a domestic in a white family's house. Looking back, she is inclined to think her white employer had a point when she yelled at her for being useless at the job. "I was so stupid, I'd never had a vacuum cleaner, my mother used a mop! And she had a very elaborate stove, which I didn't know how to use." At the time, she says, she took it very personally and ran home in distress. Her mother told her to quit, but she wanted the two dollars a week. Her father gave her a long, stern lecture that has stayed with Morrison all her life.

"He said, 'Go to work, get your money and come home. You don't live there.'"

She was not obliged, he said, to live as they saw her in their imagination. 


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/13/toni-morrison-home-son-love?INTCMP=SRCH