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UAW, Rainbow PUSH Launch Campaign for Jobs, Justice and Peace
The UAW is joining with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition in a new campaign to refocus our national priorities on jobs, justice and peace.
During a press conference today in Detroit, UAW President Bob King and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, founder and president of Rainbow PUSH, said the campaign will call on our national leaders to rebuild America through new industrial and trade policies that create jobs, encourage manufacturing in America and put workers first.
“The number one focus of our national leaders should be putting Americans back to work,” King said.
No group has suffered more from America’s economic meltdown than working men and women. We need industrial and trade policies that work to keep jobs and manufacturing in the U.S.
The campaign will begin with a march in Detroit on Aug. 28 to commemorate the “Freedom Walk,” when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march by 125,000 people through the streets of Motown in the summer of 1963. It was during this march that Dr. King first delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, just a couple of months prior to the historic March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.
Bob King and Jackson said their campaign also will push for enforcement of workers’ rights and civil rights laws, industrial regulation and fair and just education, economic and health policies. It will seek an end to the ongoing wars in the Middle East so the money in the war budget can be redirected to rebuilding America, they said. King added:
George [W.] Bush came into office with a $127 billion surplus. He proceeded to give billions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest Americans and wasted trillions of dollars on useless wars while funding for schools and other basic services was gutted. Bush and the Republicans left the American public with a trillion dollar deficit, a crumbling infrastructure, and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
Additionally, the campaign will focus on home foreclosures and will call for a moratorium on the practice that forces hardworking Americans from their homes while at the same time bailing out Wall Street executives and paying them million-dollar bonuses.
“Our cities are in financial crisis and teachers, transportation workers and all who do the hands-on work that make our cities run are the first to feel the effects of budget cuts,” Jackson said.
In Appalachia and the Gulf, years of unenforced regulation driven by corporate greed and government complicity have led to needless deaths and destruction in the coal and oil fields. Our national infrastructure is crumbling while millions of talented workers stand by, ready to stem the tide.
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2 Comments
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This is wonderful news. A MOVEMENT must be created to make the needs of America’s working people on the top of the political agenda.
At every level of government, the incumbent politicians of both Democratic and Republican parties must be confronted! No more platitudes, no more lies, no more spin!
What have these politicians in the past two years done to promote the interest of working people? What is the source of their campaign funding? How do they vote? What “revolving door” relationship do they have with corporations and corporate agendas?
This movement must come with a platform of priorities and agendas!
1. End all the Middle East Wars for profit.
2. End the “bailouts” for the wealthy and corporations. If the
banks will not be regulated, perhaps the FED should be nationalized. Urge the formation of State banks (like in Minnesota) to provide credit for governments and consumers, cutting out the profiteering.
3. Restore progressive taxation. Raise the “cap” to Social Security taxation so that higher brackets will pay their fair share.
4. Re-examine the “single-payer” health insurance question to minimize cost and guarantee universal coverage for all people,
5. Solve the immigration “problem” that has kept the majority of Mexican people in poverty by ending NAFTA, CAFTA, end the subsidies to agri-business that has flooded Mexico with cheap corn, driving impoverished millions of the land and into the U.S.
6. Demand that new funds not go to “deficit reduction” but to support of state and local governments, public education to re-build affordable public education through college.
7. End the privatization of the federal government and all public institutions essential for the survival of working people and their children. End privatization of public education. End the privatization of even the CIA which is 60-70 percent out sourced!
8. Form local groups to seek out and run pro-labor and pro-working people candidates for office in support of this agenda. Run school teachers, state employees, unemployed workers who can represent the needs of the people. Bring these
groups and individuals together into running as independents, write-in candidates and to start the formation of a new political party.
9. Demand daily access to mass media (especially PBS and NPR) to have a regular program to inform and educate all working people about the many crises facing this country caused by the corporate control of Congress and the White House.
10. The organized labor movement must expand it’s viewpoint to think about organizing people not just into a trade union but into a political party to wage the political struggle.
11. Consider nationalizing the entire oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries.
BP (Enron, Shell, Exxon) forever will continue to pollute to cut corners to maximize profit. They are not incompetent, but their “incompetence” is driven by maximization of profit.
War for oil in the Middle East will never end until the oil industry in this country is nationalized and the profit motive for war is ended.
The devastation to workers, water, air and land caused by coal mining will never be “fixed” by private corporations and must be nationalized.
We the people must unite to end this global devastation unless we are united into a movement of which a political party is one essential expression.
This is wonderful. Any plans to join the NAACP’s October 2nd march on Washington?