Becoming a new and unsettling force

 
The following is from a speech in Sacramento, Calif. June 18 at a Poor People’s Campaign event prepared by Ethel Long-Scott of the Women’s Economic Agenda Project in Oakland.
The American people are outraged at the ruling elites’ insistence that workers must live with increasing austerity in the midst of record corporate profits and CEO salaries. And even worse, this pushing Main St. deeper into austerity comes as increasingly robotized production promises a society awash in enough cheap and plentiful goods and services to supply the human needs of all people. Instead we see suffering, deprivation, exploitation and anguish everywhere we turn. I want you to think about this from the standpoint of becoming a new and unsettling force. From Ferguson to Baltimore was part of an unsettling force; from Standing Rock to Flint was an unsettling force. When Parkland youth said “never again,” that was an unsettling force. The challenge today is how do we unite these efforts to create one kind of vision. How do we begin to move as a common force to turn these priorities upside down.
Right now our government is separating families and terrorizing children in our name. These are Jim Crow arguments. They are aimed at terrorizing immigrants and telling the lies that divide and conquer, that the poor that are immigrants are the reason we don’t have jobs. That’s a lie.
We are here on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the culture I come from it’s called Juneteenth, when in 1862 we were preparing then to deal with the many fights we would have against the southernization of the nation. Then President Lincoln knew if he could unleash the slaves as a new and unsettling force against a system of inhumane treatment that started as slavery but later continued as a southern business model, that we as workers might have an opportunity. Attacks on workers, talking about that southern business model—it includes “right to work” laws, neglect of the people by government, and denial of voting rights. Today business and government, they have a dream about southernization of the country—that’s their goal. We gotta stop that.
When three human beings have more wealth than the bottom 160 million people in our country, we have to flip that script. Here in this state we have more than 21 million people who are poor and low-income. Six million are children; 11 million are women.
This is a dying capitalist system that’s eating its children, and creating a new class of dispossessed. What do I mean by this dispossessed? We’re contingency workers, we’re over-workers, part-time workers, unemployed and low-wage workers. Often times in the tent cities of Oakland they’ve got jobs. But they can’t afford to live in the exorbitant housing that is there. The new social force has to change those priorities, we’ve got to build unity. I want to make sure you understand that this digital revolution ain’t the problem; the problem is who’s running it, who owns those tools, and how they’re applied.
We the people have to take over these corporations and run them in the benefit of society and the future. The goal of the Poor People’s Campaign is to unite the poor as an essential step in pulling together the local struggles of working people for all of our basic needs. As the people who are being squeezed, we have the power to turn this thing upside down. We’re the change we’re looking for.