Dr. Cornel West on Poverty In America


Cornel West, is one of America’s most gifted, provocative, and
important democratic intellectuals, now focusing much of his energy on his second national tour to heighten awareness of poverty in the U.S., aggressively committing to stopping Stop & Frisk practices and resisting efforts to privatize public education and against school closings.

The national discourse has been focused on the deterioration of the
“middle class”. But this framework ignores the plight of the
growing number of working poor and those not included in the workforce, suffering crushing poverty. Organized labor’s wages and benefits are under threat, chronic, high unemployment persists, increasing numbers of workers are falling off the unemployment benefit rolls and those new jobs created increasingly paying poverty wages. The recent Census shows that more than 46 Million Americans last year were living below the poverty line ($22,314 for a family of 4), the highest level since 1993.

However, the rise of poverty has been ignored by politicians and the mainstream media. But,author,lecturer,public intellectual Cornel West is a welcome exception to that reality. He has co-authored the new book “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto” and has been traveling the country broadsiding his message that now is the time to confront the underlying conditions of systemic poverty in America.

He’s broadcasting the message that there are nearly 150 million
impoverished people in America, who aren’t responsible for Great
Recession, yet they pay the price for it. The poor did not create the
deindustrialization of America, unmitigated corporate profiteering
and greed, more than a decade of foreign wars and unregulated tax
benefits for the wealthy. Rather, the housing and jobs crisis the
plutocrats created have fostered a poverty unseen in generations,
crossing race, age and gender lines.

Cornel West places the eradication of poverty in the context of the
nation’s greatest moments of social transformation - the abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage, and the labor and civil rights movements. As did Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. West raises ending poverty as the defining civil rights struggle of America’s 21st century. Building on the legacy of Dr. King he asks us to re-examine our assumptions about poverty in America, confront our dormancy and travel the road laid out to undertake to eradicate poverty, to redistribute the wealth and challenge the system that thrives off of inequality.

http://archive.org/stream/BuildingBridgesNationalDr.CornelWestOnPovertyInAmerica  
play stream

http://archive.org/download/BuildingBridgesNationalDr.CornelWestOnPovertyInAmerica/cornelpovertyntl.mp3
download

Read More...

All Day, All Week – N.Y.C. Occupy Wall Street Actions
atSotheby’s Auction Lockout,
Harlem Protest Against Stop and Fisk
andVerizon Workers Contract Protest

It’s been a busy week for NYC’s Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Building Bridges brings you coverage of three of the multitude of
actions the've joined with community and labor activists. First we
went to NYC’s posh Upper East Side where Teamster Local 814
art handlers have been locked out for months in a contract dispute
over cutbacks and outsourcing demands by Sotheby’s Auction house
which caters to the 1%. Then uptown to Harlem where hundreds
demonstrated in front of the Harlem 28th Precinct where 33 activists
led by noted author, activist and Princeton Prof. Cornel West and
veteran revolutionary fighter Carl Dix were arrested protesting the
N.Y. Police Department’s racist, illegal, illegitimate stop and frisk
policy which is on track to impact over 700,000 people, mostly Black
and Latino youth, in 2011. Then downtown to Wall Street to protest
for a fair contract for 45,000 Verizon workers whose negotiations are
not going well. Like Sotheby, Verizon is an extremely profitable
company whose demands include cutbacks and outsourcing.

play stream or
download

Read More...

40th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion and Massacre & the Struggle TodayAgainst the New Jim Crow
with
. Dhoruba Bin-Wahad, Consultant , Inst, for Development of Pan African
Policy (Ghana), a 43 year veteran of the Black Liberation and Pan-African Movements
. Joseph "Jazz" Hayden, Campaign to End the New Jim Crow
. Dr. Cornel West, Prof. Princeton Univ., public intellectual, author & activist

Forty years ago, September 9, 1971, inmates in New York's Attica Prison
began a protest against jail conditions that ended on September 13, as
one of the bloodiest days in the 20th century in the U.S. Troopers shot indiscriminately over 2000 rounds of ammunition, and 29 prisoners and
10 state personnel would die. After the shooting stopped, police beat
and tortured scores of prisoners, 90 of the surviving prisoners were
seriously wounded but were initially denied medical care. The state
would originally claim that all of the guards had died at the hands of the
inmates. The New York Times reported on its front page that the throats
of all of the guards were slashed. But it was lies, the guards as well as
the prisoners who were deemed expandable had been shot dead during
the raid.

The Attica uprising is an under-commemorated historic event. Millions,
watched the drama, from interviews with the inmate leadership all the
way to the climactic helicopter gunship assault, which was as ruthless
and one-sided as anything that was coming out of Vietnam. While the
legacy of the Attica uprising, includes the establishment of Prisoners
Legal Services, and the Prisoners Rights Project, it also includes the
Rockefeller Drug Laws. The lasting lesson of Attica is that little will
change until current and former inmates, many times more numerous
than in 1971, again take their destinies into their own hands, as many
are doing, and continue to organize themselves and we in our
communities follow suit in a political fight to roll back the prison state
in our lifetimes, inspired by the sacrifice of the heroic Attica Brothers.

play stream or
download

Read More...

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Jobs:
How Racism, Global Economics, and the New Jim Crow Fuel Black
America's Crippling Jobs Crisis
with
Andy Kroll, Assoc. Editor, TomDispatch and reporter at Mother Jones magazine

The Labor Department released the latest figures on unemployment and payrolls - the unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent, and employers added only 18,000 jobs last month, below the 150,000 threshold that economists say is needed to prevent the unemployment rate from increasing. The figures were dismal for the working class, however what isn’t delineated & probed within that general dilemma is the unemployment rate for black workers, almost double the percent rate for the rest of the population - it's twice the 8% white jobless rate. Since the 1940s, the jobless rate for blacks in America has held grimly steady at twice the rate for whites. The question of why has divided economists, historians, and sociologists for nearly as long.

Plus
The acclaimed public intellectual and author of "Democracy Matters" and "Race Matters", Cornel West, as he spoke recently at a youth teach-in continues to stir us to organize – forward ever, backward never!

play stream or

download

Read More...

Building Bridges: Your Community and Labor Report
National Edition
******************************
America at a Crossroads
With Dr. Cornel West,
Class of 1943 Professor, Princeton Univ.. Author of “Race Matters”,
“Democracy Matters” and “Hope on a Tightrope”

Cornel West is one of our most renowned public intellectuals. As we approach an economic, political, & spiritual crossroads, the next chapter of the American story is about to be written. Professor West reflects about America’s continuing dialogue on race and justice, the Obama Presidency, and the economic
crisis.
play
or Download

Read More...