Because if anything was made clear in this past week, it’s that regular people can and will make the choices that politicians won’t. We will take care of each other, and that is a principle we should all strive for our society to embody.
Since his first encounter with police 65 years ago, Jazz has emerged as a prominent community activist in Harlem. He has earned four university degrees, participated in the lead-up to the 1971 Attica Rebellion in New York, and led a class-action lawsuit against New York State to end its practice of disenfranchising prisoners and parolees. At 71 years old, Jazz continues to organize, and has become one of the leaders of the fight against stop-and frisk.
We have to keep studying, debating, testing new strategies, and sharing our experiences with each other and those who will come after, and along the way, we will win.
Some folks go into the police force genuinely wanting to protect and serve, but it’s not just that those good apples are overshadowed by the bad ones. The institution itself is rotten to its core.
Mind-boggingly, last week Barnard President Debora Spar herself wrote, “Of course, companies should strive to create generous maternity leaves,” and “…keep fighting the proverbial fights—better day care, better family leaves, more flex time at work and co-parenting at home. These are important goals.” Yet she is in charge of demanding huge cuts to maternity leave and flex time.
“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” This past year was a year of such weeks, and now the first anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park is just around the corner.
Gentrification isn’t just about some people choosing to leave and others choosing to move in, it’s about the social forces that restrict people’s choices, which result in pushing out the poor to make way for money.
It’s clear from the past four years that Obama and the Democrats are either unwilling or unable to do what a majority of Americans elected them into office to do. They’ve betrayed us or they’ve failed us.
Clearly this isn’t about protecting regular people, this is the state preemptively demobilizing any movement for racial or economic justice, maintaining the permanent underclass of poor and under and unemployed people of color and dividing the working class. Like every war, the "War on Drugs" is really a "War on People."
We have to build an independent, fighting movement for universal healthcare from the ground up, starting with local struggles such as the fight for single-payer in Vermont and the successful struggle that won life-saving liver transplants for two undocumented immigrants in Chicago. Only through these kinds of struggles can we expose the crooked priorities of the for-profit healthcare industry and push for the sane solution, affordable healthcare for all.
Follow us at
Like us on
Recent Comments