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Classism

Has Dalit Uprising Given Birth To A Movement?

August 28, 2016 Mari Marcel Thekaekara, www.newint.org , , , ,
By Mari Marcel Thekaekara for New Internationalist Blog. While most of India was busy celebrating its 70th Independence Day, many people were trying to comprehend and make sense of a sudden Dalit uprising in Gujarat. Gujarati Dalits had begun a huge march for dignity and respect culminating in a rally on 15 August, Indian Independence day. They were demanding justice for four young Dalit men who had been stripped, tied to a car and viciously thrashed for hours in public on 11 July, by cow vigilantes, known locally as gau rakshaks, for skinning a dead cow. Every single day I receive a report of collated Dalit stories. With sickening, mind boggling regularity I read about Dalits who have been raped, flogged, humiliated and murdered, every single day, in some part of the country. Yet this particular incident, the flogging of four young lads from the leather tanning community, for doing a job their forefathers have done ever since anyone can remember, that is, skinning two dead cows, created an uproar not just in Gujarat but in Dalit circles all over India.

Flint Is About How We Treat The Poor

April 24, 2016 Leonard Pitts, Jr., www.miamiherald.com , , ,
By Leonard Pitts, Jr for the Miami Herald. To be white in America is to have been sold a bill of goods that there exists between you and people of color a gap of morality, behavior, intelligence and fundamental humanity. Forces of money and power have often used that perceived gap to con people like you into acting against their own self-interest. In the Civil War, white men too poor to own slaves died in grotesque numbers to protect the “right” of a few plutocrats to continue that despicable practice. In the Industrial Revolution, white workers agitating for a living wage were kept in line by the threat that their jobs would be given to “Negroes.” In the Depression, white families mired in poverty were mollified by signs reading “Whites Only.” You have to wonder what would happen if white people — particularly, those of modest means — ever saw that gap for the fiction it is?

Great Potential Of Poor Americans

January 26, 2016 Paul Buchheit, www.nationofchange.org , , ,
By Paul Buchheit for Nation of Change - The homeless are feared by the upper classes, and they’re often arrested for nonexistent or non-violent infractions, in good part because they are simply considered “offensive” to people of means. They usually have personal problems that society has failed to address. A study of nearly 50,000 cases revealed that most deal with alcohol or drug abuse, and mental health issues. Legislating against impoverished people is expensive: shelters, emergency rooms, jail cells.

Where Are Pitchforks Billionaires Are So Scared Of?

September 10, 2015 Fast Company, www.fastcoexist.com , , ,
By Fast Company - In the wake of the crisis and recession, despite the fact that nearly all the gains of the recovery have gone straight into the bank accounts of the wealthy, America's billionaires keep doing things like comparing themselves to persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany and talking about the ever-popular pitchforks. Many aggressively denounce policies designed to redistribute wealth as "class warfare." It's been noted extensively that if there is any class warfare happening, it's the wealthy waging it against the lower classes. Yet the idea of a popular worker uprising that results in loss of property or violence against America's rich is a bogeyman to which we keep returning. Even those in favor of addressing growing inequality use "avoiding class warfare" as the argument that putting in a fix is urgent. In a recent New York Times article, William Cohan, a former Wall Street banker, lays out the stakes of continued inequality: "That’s the real danger...This little thing called the French Revolution."

Join The Fight To Save Dyett High School

August 24, 2015 Staff, www.popularresistance.org , , ,
By Staff of Popular Resistance. Chicago, IL - The attack on Dyett is representative of what is happening to public education and school across the country. These resisters are on the front line of saving the human right to education. We hope you will take a moment to support them. 2 Parents, grandparents, community members and supporters from around the city started a hunger strike on August, 17th. Their demand is simple. Rahm Emanuel and his appointed school board needs to follow the community's wishes and use the now shuttered Dyett High School Building at 555E 51st St. for the innovative, academically excellent and culturally connected Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School.

Why Are 1% Organizing Against Inequality

August 12, 2015 Matthew Pulver, www.salon.com , ,
By Matthew Pulver in Salon - I’ve written previously about the growing fear among elites that they’ve pushed economic inequality too far. That fear is proliferating, according to a New York Times Op-Ed this weekend by former marketing conglomerate CEO Peter Georgescu. Joined by his friend Ken Langone, founder of Home Depot, Georgescu warns his fellow 1 percenters that “[w]e are creating a caste system from which it’s almost impossible to escape.” The column raises the specter of “major social unrest” if inequality is not addressed. Georgescu writes: "I’m scared. The billionaire hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones is scared. My friend Ken Langone, a founder of the Home Depot, is scared. So are many other chief executives. Not of Al Qaeda, or the vicious Islamic State or some other evolving radical group from the Middle East, Africa or Asia. We are afraid where income inequality will lead."

National Plutocrat Radio: Corporate 1%’s Dominate NPR’s Boards

July 3, 2015 Aldo Guerrero, www.fair.org , , , , ,
For a public radio service, NPR is notoriously known for its lack of diversity within its staff, audience and guests invited onto their shows—problems that NPR has itself acknowledged (6/30/14). A new FAIR study finds thatNPR’s diversity problem also extends into the board of trustees of its most popular member stations: Two out of three board members are male, and nearly three out of four are non-Latino whites. Fully three out of every four trustees of the top NPR affiliates belong to the corporate elite. While a majority of the board is populated by NPR station managers with backgrounds in public media, the rest of the board members have strong ties to the corporate sector. This includes NPR CEO Jarl Mohn, who has an extensive background in commercial media, having held executive positions within E! Entertainment, MTV and VH1.
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