[statecom-discuss] Fwd: King's Legacy Grows Green in Memphis

Tue Apr 1 05:59:05 EDT 2008

This is an example of Rainbow politics. Several of the participating groups are from Massachusetts, and maybe we should think about working with them to organize an event based on this conference. Let me know if there's any interest.

Gary Hicks
==========================================================

gary hicks <big_g19462002 at yahoo.com> wrote: Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 00:16:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: gary hicks <big_g19462002 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Fwd: King's Legacy Grows Green in Memphis
To: gary hicks <gooberthink06 at yahoo.com>

moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG wrote: Date:         Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:55:39 -0400
From:         moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: King's Legacy Grows Green in Memphis
To:           PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG

 King's Legacy Grows Green in Memphis

By Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith
Submitted to portside by Jeremy Brecher
March 31, 2008

Today they'd be called "green-collar jobs" cleaning up
the environment. Back then, the workers who performed
those jobs were just garbage men.  And they were
treated like garbage.  Martin Luther King, Jr. died
fighting to make their green-collar jobs be good jobs.

On the 40th anniversary of King's assassination, the
green-collar jobs group Green for All is bringing
people from all over the country to Memphis, Tennessee
April 4-6 for The  Dream Reborn, a celebration of the
life of Dr. King -- and a call to create millions of
good green-collar jobs as a pathway out of poverty.

The Dream Reborn will "bring together a generation of
new leaders who are taking on the chief moral
obligation of the 21st century, building a green
economy for all."

The gathering will dramatize the message that "today we
must respond with the same courage to perhaps the
biggest crises our species has ever collectively faced,
global warming."

We believe that if Dr. King were with us today, he
would be working to build a green economy -- strong
enough to lift people out of poverty and restore hope
to America. He would be standing with those communities
that have been locked out of the last century's
pollution-based economy. And he would indeed be working
to ensure that ALL our people, the entire beloved
community, is included in the emerging clean and
renewable  economic vision.

As Michael Honey shows in his magisterial new book
Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin
Luther King's Last Campaign (New York: Norton, 2007),
by 1967 Dr. King was calling for a "radical reordering
of our nation's priorities."[1]  He proposed to match
civil rights and voting rights laws with laws creating
jobs or income.  Government redistribution would
abolish poverty by providing training for displaced
black workers while shoring up their incomes, so that
they could become self-sufficient citizens who could
work their way out of poverty.[2]  The program would
stimulate the economy and cut poverty-induced crime,
drugs, and imprisonment.  The money squandered on the
Vietnam war could end poverty in a decade.

Green for All, a new organization created by local
green-job organizers around the country and sponsor of
The Dream Reborn, brilliantly updates King's vision. 
Its mission is  "to help build a green economy strong
enough to lift people out of poverty."

By advocating for a national commitment to job
training, employment and entrepreneurial opportunities
in the emerging green economy - especially for people
from disadvantaged communities -- we fight both poverty
and pollution at the same time. We are committed to
securing one billion dollars by 2012 to create "green
pathways out of poverty" for 250,000 people in the
United States, by greatly expanding federal government
and private sector commitments to "green-collar" jobs.

Van Jones, an organizer in Oakland, California and one
of the initiators of Green for All, says he was getting
burned out going to court hearings and funerals for
kids in his community.  Then,

I just had this epiphany in mind and said, you know,
these kids in America need green jobs, not jails . . .
.  We want to lift a quarter million people out of
poverty into  the green economy by creating
green-collared job training, employer incentives and
entrepreneur opportunities.

As in King's vision, training and good jobs could give
disadvantaged young people a "pathway out of poverty."

If you teach a young person how to put up solar panels,
that kid is on their way to becoming an electrical
engineer.  They could join the United Electrical
Workers Union. If you teach a kid how to weatherize a
building, double-pane the glass so that it doesn't leak
so much energy, that kid is on his way to becoming a
glazer that can join a union.[3]

The green-jobs vision is working its way into the
political mainstream.  At the end of  2007, Congress
passed and President Bush signed the Green Jobs Act
that provides $125 million for workforce training
programs that target veterans, displaced workers,
at-risk youth and individual families who fall 200
percent under the poverty  line.[4]

Democratic candidates Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama
have both called for the creation of millions of
green-collar jobs to combat global warming. Even
Republican John McCain says he is willing to invest in
research and development of green technology, calling
it the "path to restore the strength of America's
economy."[5]

Martin Luther King understood that good jobs in the
service of community needs could be the basis for
ending poverty and creating equality for America's poor
and oppressed.  As he arrived in Memphis to support the
sanitation workers' strike, King asserted that the
person who picks up garbage is as essential to the
health of society as the physician, and that the city's
sanitation workers "work day in and day out for the
well-being of the total community."[6]  As we face the
global catastrophe of global warming, nothing could do
more for the "well-being of the total community"  that
creating a path out of poverty through jobs that
protect the well-being of the total planet.

_____

[1] P. 177.

[2] P. 175.

[3] Jerika Richardson, "Creating Greener Future for
Urban Youth

One Attorney Is Getting Inner City Youth Off the
Streets and On Track for Green Jobs,  ABC news, Feb.
13, 2008 http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/Story?id=4286562

&page=1

[4]  Jerika Richardson, op cit.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/Story?id=4286562

&page=1

[5] Laren Weber, "McCain vows to fix job, foreclosure
woes while campaigning in Ohio," Toledo Blade,

February 26, 2008.
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/
20080226/NEWS09/802260352

[6] Michael Honey, p. 298.

_____________________________________________

Portside aims to  provide material of interest
to people on the left that will help them to
interpret the world and to change it.

Submit via email: moderator at portside.org
Submit via the Web: portside.org/submit
Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq
Subscribe: portside.org/subscribe
Unsubscribe: portside.org/unsubscribe
Account assistance: portside.org/contact
Search the archives: portside.org/archive

---------------------------------
Special deal for Yahoo! users & friends - No Cost. Get a month of Blockbuster Total Access now

---------------------------------
You rock. That's why Blockbuster's offering you one month of Blockbuster Total Access, No Cost.