Thursday 24 March 2011
Friday 18 March 2011
Debt, Austerity and How to Fight Back ☀
Wall Street Banks, American corporations and their political allies have declared a one-sided war on the American people. This war is being waged at our schools and colleges, the workplace and in our communities. Today, Americans are working harder and earning less while corporate profits soar. As homeowners, consumers and students we see our wealth being stripped away by banks. Our government plunges into debt waging trillion-dollar wars. Meanwhile, our infrastructure erodes and climate change proceeds unchecked. Schools, daycare centers, senior citizen facilities, clinics, parks and firehouses are starved for funds so that corporations and the rich can get billions in tax breaks!
Corporate America’s unprovoked assault on working people has been carried out by manufacturing a need for fiscal austerity. We are told that there is no more money for essential human services, for the care of children, or better public schools, or to help lower the cost of a college education. The fact is that big banks and large corporations are hoarding trillions in cash and using tax loopholes to bankrupt our communities.
Spending on social needs is not the reason governments at all levels are facing massive budget short falls. Our debt and deficit problems are a direct result of corporate tax rollbacks, and the extortionist policies of banks and financial institutions that are engaged in a coordinated and massive wealth transfer from the American people to their own coffers.
The courageous actions by the citizens in Wisconsin are an inspiring defense of the core values of this country: a civil society based on freedom of association, ensuring that our communities have high quality public services—education, public safety and support for our elderly and most vulnerable—along with good jobs for all. The outpouring of support nationally shows the possibilities for challenging deepening economic inequality and political marginalization of the majority of the American people.
We are on the cusp of a great movement to resist and roll back that corporate domination by banks, energy companies and war profiteers. To join that movement and escalate the activism planned in the days, weeks and months ahead we are organizing a “National Teach-in on Debt, Austerity and How People Are Fighting Back.” The live web-streamed teach-in will be held on Tuesday, April 5, 2011, at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, beginning at 2 pm (EST). Admission is free. Speakers from schools and communities around the country will be hosted by moderators Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West in New York City through a live webcast that you can join by organizing a teach-in on your own campus.
Friday 22 October 2010
Monday 16 August 2010
Here’s how you know if someone is living the brand, is emotionally connected to the story and is literate and informed—or if they’re just emotionally connected in the moment: Ask a lot of questions. Cornel West can talk for hours about race, the Bible or Marx. He knows it cold. Dan Dennett can write for three hundred pages about the philosophy of free will and consciousness and he’s just getting started. There’s depth there. I’ve talked to brand stewards from JetBlue and Starbucks that could go deep or wide or detailed for hours. Then compare these passionate leaders to a pundit, spin doctor or troll (for just about any cause du jour) being interviewed on TV. After three sentences, they run out of assertions, facts or interesting things to say. There’s a lot to be said for being deep, scientific and informed. Seth Godin ☀
Saturday 29 May 2010
Wednesday 17 February 2010
Thursday 1 October 2009
That’s why I was so surprised when Barack Obama chose him to be the national economic adviser. I said, here’s somebody who has no history whatsoever of sensitivity to poor people or working people, who had been supporting deregulation for a long time as a Clintonite, in the Clinton administration. What is going on here? Or has Obama already become so comfortable with the establishment that you had to have an economist who was legitimate to the establishment in order for him to get his regime off the ground? OK. I mean, if that’s the kind of argument you have, then put it forward. But don’t tell me you’re a progressive, then, and generate that kind of support or major advisers speaking to you—speaking to you every day. Now, if he had Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz or Sylvia Ann Hewitt, I’d say, “Hey, you got something going here. I think we’ve got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.” But I do forgive Larry Summers for this reason: that I think we all ought to have joy in life, and you can only have joy when you overcome arrogance and open to your own ignorance, because you end up being smart and brainy, but suffering from spiritual malnutrition, emptiness of soul, you see. Cornel West ☀
Sunday 12 July 2009
You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people. You can’t save the people, if you don’t serve the people. Cornel West ☀
Monday 30 March 2009
Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian believers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian- a follower of Jesus Christ- is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love that embraces socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope. If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite romans and subjugated jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage- who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries. To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire. Cornel West ☀
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