Harry Belafonte Helps Michigan Shape the Debate
At a town hall meeting and workshop held in Detroit at Martin Luther
King, Jr High School on Sat., Jan. 31, it was
Michigan’s turn to help set “The People’s Agenda”
for the 2004 election. The one and only Harry
Belafonte was there to inspire and help --
along with US Congress Reps John Conyers and
Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. Thanks to a grant
from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington
DC and organizing help from IPS, the Detroit Area
Peace with Justice coalition, of which WAND Michigan
is a member, was able to pull off this day-long,
free non-partisan meeting of minds. Without
WAND’s own Kim Bergier, Jan 31 would never
have happened. Kim worked tirelessly during
the month that DAPJN and IPS had to pull the event
together, including an 11-hour day on the 31st.
People from all walks of life and work, all
races, colors and creeds participated. Numerous
workshops on everything from electoral reform to
the environment, national security to education,
criminal justice to jobs and the economy, health
care to human rights were attended by about 225
people attending. We’ll post some of the workshop
results after they are collated by IPS from individual
reports that are still coming in.
Meanwhile, here are a few words to inspire everyone
to help shape the debate and DO something about
taking back the White House, and our country, in
2004:
From one-woman powerhouse Joann Watson of
the Detroit City Council, citing an old rallying
cry “Stop agonizing and start organizing! Get off
of the couch and get out on the street!” A real
barnburner as a speaker, Watson could have gotten
a dead tree stump to get off it’s turf and out on
the pavement.
From the elegant and eloquent Carolyn Cheeks
Kilpatrick: “Let’s connect, let’s BUILD! We’ve
got about eleven months to do something” -- about
healthcare, jobs, sheltering and empowering the
poor. Social inequity, she said to rousing applause
is “not just a racial thing,” she said, “it’s a
CLASS thing.”
From the equally eloquent and elegant Harry Belafonte,
“We’re in a war, alright” he said, one we can
only win with non-violent tactics, just as the Civil
Rights movement was won, he said, repeating
Kilpatrick’s thought that it’s not a war about color,
it’s a war about poverty and disenfranchisement.
“Without MASS NON-VIOLENT ACTION we’ll lose
that war....Joshua has been called, Jericho sits
before us, trumpets must be blown!”
IRV: Bringing Elections into the 21st
Century
WAND Michigan has endorsed the concept of IRV, Instant
Runoff Voting (i.e., ranked choices voting, which
might be a more descriptive name, since there is
nothing "instant" about counting votes,
especially when people vote for more than one candidate,
ranking their choices in order of preference. It’s
an electoral reform whose time has come and which
has been used in many cities in the US, and in countries
all over the globe. The workshop I attended
at the People’s Agenda focused on electoral reform
and IRV in particular. IRV has the potential
to (1) equalize the playing field by neutralizing
the role of money in campaigns (2) make it possible
for third parties to field candidates without their
becoming "spoilers" in a general election
(3) bring the election process into the 21st century
(our current system literally dates to horse &
buggy days when we were a rural, not an industrial,
much less post-industrial society)
Caucuses harken back to an even more home-spun if
also more hands on exercise of the vote. In
Michigan this month they were not as colorful as
Iowa, but they were very different from the kind
of voting experience most of us are used to. There
was a hi-tech version, you could vote on the internet,
and a very low tech version where you came to the
polls in person on Feb 7 and wrote out your choice
for Presidential nominee by hand. Then the ballots
were counted by hand as well (more than once and
by more than the same set of people, as a fail safe).
Some WAND members lent their hands to
the process, working the precincts and even doing
the preliminary count, among them Shelli Weisberg,
Clare Mead Rosen and Linda Kohlenberg, but especially
Claire Colman, who managed one precinct for
the state Democratic party and conscripted the rest
of us to help out.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT: The Nuclear Threat
is Greater Now Than Ever
Ask anyone and they’ll tell you: we’re far safer now from nuclear disaster
than we were before the watershed year of 1989 when
the Cold War died along with the old USSR. Wrong.
Like the Cold War, this myth is
taking a long time to die. But don’t take my word
for it. Can 40 national and international
experts of vastly divergent political views and
professional backgrounds be wrong when they ALL
agree that the nuclear danger looms large and clear?
In Washington DC from January 25, 26 and 27th,
these 40 experts — nuclear scientists, military
brass, medical doctors, nuclear watch dogs and nuclear
policy wonks of various persuasions -- all answered
the call of WAND founder Helen Caldicott
to participate in a symposium sponsored by her recently
formed Nuclear Policy Research Institute. (Following
the symposium, Helen Caldicott intends to go on
one of her “bombing runs” throughout the country,
rallying “soccer moms” and others to heed the new
nuclear danger. (She MAY be in Chicago in
June with a similar symposium. Check www.npri.org)
The experts at the NPRI conference in Washington
differed when it came to hard core issues such as
whether or not maintaining nuclear arsenals makes
sense at all any more, given the greater than ever
potential for (1) nuclear accidents (2) nuclear
terrorism (3) nuclear black markets peddling both
material and know-how, all of which are much harder
to “contain” than anything the US and USSR faced
in terms of their mutually recognized, most powerful
deterrent: mutually assured destruction.
The fact that nuclear abolition, however indirectly
framed, was even being discussed in such a high-powered,
highly diverse group like this was itself a hopeful
sign. Imagine this sentiment, for example,
coming out of the mouth of a US Air Force General,
Charles A. Horner, formerly Commander-In-Chief
of the North American Aerospace Defense Command
and Commander of US Central Command Air Forces during
the first Gulf War: “I may disagree with most of
you (the left-leaning audience) on a lot of things,
except ONE: getting rid of nuclear weapons.”
An increasingly number of military brass find
nuclear weapons an albatross and a dangerous one
at that.
Interestingly enough, in view the myths about Iraqi
WMD still espoused by the current administration,
General Horner also stated flatly that when
it comes to nuclear WMD in Iraq, “we got about half
of them in Dessert Storm, and the inspections (that
followed the war) took care of the rest” He added
that chemical and biological WMD such as the anthrax
and botulism spores known to be stored by Iraq were
too widespread and inaccessible and dangerous to
risk eliminating militarily, but that they, too,
in fact had almost certainly been destroyed
by Saddam well before the current war. “We
had that intelligence directly from Saddam’s
sons-in-law, who defected” to the West, Horner said.
They told us that Saddam “got rid of them
because he was afraid that the US would try to destroy
them.” It made sense, but nobody wanted to
believe them, he added. Horner also tried to prevent
a $300 million Congressional allotment to “update”
in our ABMs. “It was all about benefiting
the industry, not our defenses,” he said, “but I
lost that one.” Later, a weapons expert told
the audience that updating nukes is a waste of time
and money, because these weapons don’t really age
much, virtually all problems come from original
defects in the weapons, not aging.
Among the audience was none other than former Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara, but that’s another
story out of many I hope to tell from this fascinating,
powerful gathering.
Clare Mead Rosen
