From South LA to Paris and BackIMG_0050_1

The Strategy Center heads to the United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change

with four demands to put in front of President Obama:

  1. President Obama: Reduce U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 50% of 1990’s levels by 2025 Starting Now!

  2. President Obama Contribute 10 billion Dollars into the United Nations Green Climate Fund Now!

  3. President Obama bring back more than 100,000 Black internally displaced residents to New Orleans — with jobs, housing, and medical benefits — starting now!

  4. President Obama end the federal Department of Defense 1033 Program that gives military grade weapons to local and state police forces including school police.

Check this page daily to stay up to date with our delegation

COP21 Paris Articles
December 23, 2015teleSUR English speaks to Manuel Criollo, the director of organizing at the U.S.-based Labor rights and environmental campaign group The Strategy Center about the possible failure of nations to reach an agreement in COP21 climate change talks and what any forthcoming pact could mean for Latin America. Delegates from numerous countries have been locked in negotiations for hours in a bid to thrash out a climate change pact and have yet to reach a total agreement. As a result, the summit’s official closing date is being extended. What are the stumbling blocks the negotiators have faced in their talks for the 2020 climate change agreement? Manuel Criollo: The story stays the same as it has for the past 20 years during this tragic climate chess game called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: On one side, the ex-colonial and imperialist powers of Europe, Japan and the white-settler nations of the Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States (its ringleader) and on the other side, stand the nations and peoples of the Third World (in U.N.-speak often referred as Developing Nations). It’s been a game of attrition, bullying, intimidation, divide-and-conquer and the constant changing of the rules at every turn. The binding agreement has to recognize and compensate for the climate crimes and climate debt that these Developed Nations (developed out of colonial and imperial plunder) have and will continue to cause on the planet. As a new draft of the Paris climate talks hits the halls of the U.N., one of the most important and yet utterly complicated early outcomes has been the embracing of a 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold by many parties, including the United States, to not surpass this climate threshold—a critical demand that many people of the world and those most impacted by the global warming have advocated for. Yet as negotiations move forward the details of the draft would render this important threshold a toothless and unenforceable goal and worst it would attempt to circumvent the idea of what been called “loss and damages” (U.N. talk to say climate reparations) for the climate crimes caused by the advent of U.S., European, Japanese colonial capitalist polluting development over the past 150 years…. Read the Full Article     Back to Cop21Paris   [...]
December 16, 2015The just concluded Paris Climate Conference — the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — was a critical juncture in human and planetary history. Could the world’s governments, all representing Homo sapiens often at war with each other, come together to stop the capitalist and carbon-based catastrophe that in only 200 years is destroy all that God and nature produced for millions of years — since the last mass extinction. As the world’s emperors in varying degrees of clothes congratulated themselves we face a +3 degree world in which 775 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing a world of catastrophic heat, droughts, floods, and famine. The pre-determined outcome in Paris was that the United States and President Obama needed a political victory more than the planet needed one and that all the parties, despite enormous antagonisms and conflicts of interests, would yield to the will of the world’s policeman and sole superpower. President Obama’s unique combination of charm, diplomacy, charisma, political will, and brute force gave him the victory he needed. But for a climate justice movement that does is just coming into being the challenge is can we convince people to give a damn enough to want to know the truth — and then can we get them to bring real structural demands on the president. The battle over Paris is not at all over. In fact, it is just beginning and the battle of the sum-up is the critical ideological and scientific baseline in the battle between hope and despair. Let me summarize some of the key battles that we have to fight and win that were not won in Paris. Read The Full Article Download the PDF File of the Article Here: The Paris Climate Talks [...]
December 4, 2015Posts from Paris: The World Is On Fire But the United Nations Is Not Post from Paris–Daily Commentaries for Pacific Radio The World is on Fire. But can the governments of the world put it out? I am here in Paris at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is a critical struggle by the world’s governments to see if we can protect the planet from the ravages of the capitalist economic system. The United States and Europe are the very governments that started the fire and are still pouring gasoline on it as they speak. This would be pretty ironic if not funny–if the future of every living thing on the planet and the planet itself was not at stake…. Read the Full Article [...]
December 3, 2015President Barack Obama’s mission in Paris should be to join the world, not dominate it. We demand that he make real climate changes. The world is demanding that the United States dramatically reduce its emissions and pay climate debts to third-world victims of its obsessive production and consumption. Please join with the Labor/Community Strategy Center organizers who are in Paris calling on President Obama to take serious steps: We are calling on President Obama to announce in Paris (and return home to vigorously promote) these measures: — The United States contribute $10 billion a year to the United Nations Green Climate Fund to help finance third-world transitions to cleaner fuel and to pay for “loss and damages” caused by U.S. and E.U. emissions since 1850. — Reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2025 — starting now. Sign The Petition Here [...]
December 3, 2015Check out “Wine and Books” The Katrina’s Legacy international book launch if you happen to be in Paris at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.       [...]
December 3, 2015Check out Eric Mann’s Interview on the Laura Flanders Show Eric tells of how he first joined the movement and the atmosphere of the Black Revolution Movement of the 1960’s. He also speaks about the 4 demands that The Strategy Center is taking to the United Nations to put in front of President Obama. Cut U.S. Greenhouse gas Emissions by 50 percent of 1990’s levels by 2025 Starting Now. Contribute 10 billion dollars in to the Green Climate Fund Starting Now Return 100,000 internally displace black people to New Orleans End the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program which give military grade weapons to local police departments   [...]
December 3, 2015The Republican Senate just voted to reject plans by President Obama and the EPA to dramatically reduce emissions from coal power plants. This is reactionary politics. It is also political theater that plays right into the hands of the President. This allows President Obama to create the illusion that he is the embattled climate warrior–going to Paris slaying the Republicans with one sword and the Koch brothers with the other. But both parties and the Democratic-dominated Beltway environmental groups are complicit in a charade. The Republicans are simply carrying out election-year posturing while the president will veto the Republican bill and they don’t have the votes to override him. The U.S. media, especially those close to the Democratic Party, is now saying that the Republican vote will “weaken” the President’s hand in Paris. In fact, President Obama is the commander in chief of the U.S. army, the CEO of the U.S. Empire, and the manager of 800 military bases all over the world. He runs a drone program that targets and assassinates his political opponents. The president is nobody’s prisoner and nobody is tying his hands. At the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC), the President has told the world’s delegates that he needs to come out of Paris with a victory that can pass Republican objections. Even his allies are laughing because everyone knows there is no possible positive outcome that the Republicans would support. Instead, they blame the president for weakening if not destroying an urgently needed climate agreement in Paris–a plan he is carrying out for Democratic not Republican objectives. The President’s positioning for Paris is brilliant but reflective of American Deceptionalism. The President wants to give the impression that he is a visitor or at best a participant in the Paris UNFCCC when in fact he is in charge of it. The U.S. and President Obama are playing a very destructive role at the Paris UNFCCC. He is preventing a binding agreement in climate reductions and substituting voluntary and unenforceable Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC). He is misrepresenting the U.S. INDC by using a 2005 baseline from which he is calculating intended reductions of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions instead of the 1990 baseline that most other nations are using. As such, his already inadequate proposed 28 percent GHG emission reduction plan is at most a 14 percent reduction by 2025. He is opposing language in the Durban Platform, the final statement to the world of the UNFCCC, that would call for a 50 percent to 70 percent GHG reductions by the U.S. and the E.U. He is opposing language calling for massive payments, climate reparations, to Third World countries for “loss and damages” caused by the U.S. and the E.U. that could “finance” their development based on low and zero emission energy plans. Unless the U.S. plan is overturned in Paris the present draft is a scientific and ecological disaster. At this point in history, the primary goal of courageous elected officials is to present the radical, political, economic, and personal changes that will be required to save the planet–not just humanity but all species and the entire ecosphere. Given that the president was the leading force who pushed through the format of “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” the President should lead with a commitment to reduce U.S. GHG emissions by 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2025. What does he have to lose? All he has to say is that he “intends” to do it. He will explain that he will make a lot of that happen through the most expansive interpretation of his Executive power and Executive orders. The rest he will aggressively place before state and federal legislative bodies including the U.S. Congress. He could write the following script, “I understand that planetary climate change is creating a catastrophe in front of our faces and having a disastrous impact on Third World and developing nations. I would like to profoundly apologize to the world that my selfish nation–with only 5 percent of the world’s population but more than 25 percent of the world’s GHG emissions–has a moral responsibility to reverse our legacy of climate disasters that some are even calling climate crimes. I plan to reduce U.S. emissions by 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2025. I plan to shut down U.S. highways two days a week and prevent auto use in large parts of the U.S. I plan to stop all drilling for oil and natural gas, and as I have learned from the Peoples Republic of China, shut down all factories for days if needed to dramatically reduce emissions right on the spot. I realize that ten years after Hurricane Katrina, one of the world climate disasters in U.S. history, there are still more than 100,000 Black Internally Displaced people in my country. I plan to enact executive orders to carry out the Effective Right of Return of those 100,000 Black people back to New Orleans.” So what could the Republicans do? Organize another No vote that he could veto? Condemn the president politically and call him what, everything they have called him since he was first elected in 2008? No, the problem is the Democrats who fear a strong climate platform will generate an exodus of corporate contributors and selfish voters to the Republicans. But the problem goes deeper. There are no prominent Democrats who are willing to support a 50 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions now. No Democratic presidential candidate has challenged the President’s weak and destructive policies in Paris. No Democratic presidential candidate has called for the Right of Return of Black residents to New Orleans. Let me escape from the mundane and self-serving Democratic Party debates to address the world crisis of mass extinction and in particular the clear and present danger to the people of Africa. A recent article by Justin Gillis and Somini Sengupta in the New York Times, “Limited Progress Seen as Even More Nations Step Up on Climate,” states that based on the governments’ “pledges” for Paris, “if fully honored would reduce the warming of the planet at century’s end to about 3.3 degrees Celsius from an expected 4.4 degrees Celsius.” But the terrible reality is that the pledges are deceptive and will not be fully honored unless a true climate justice revolution can beat off the ground. But even assuming all the pledges are real and honored the 2 degree Celsius alleged wall has been breached. Let’s look at what 3 degrees Celsius means for the people of sub-Saharan Africa. Mark Lynas in his book Six Degrees explains, “Sub-Saharan Africa in a three degree world will experience an extent of drying that is going to be far off any scale that would permit human habitation. And for people already eking out a living on the margins of subsistence the result can be summed up in one word: famine.” “Sub-Saharan Africa” is made up of real nations, real people. Those nations are Angola, Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Sao Tome and Principe, the Seychelles, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Zimbabwe with a combined population of 775 million people.” We need people who place the future of the planet and the truth as primary to challenge both the Democratic and Republicans parties and to build a climate justice movement–as we did during the 1960s–willing to challenge J.F.K., L.B.J. and the Democrats on civil rights and the war in Vietnam. We need Democrats willing to challenge the U.S. President and stop hiding behind the Republicans as the excuse for their own cowardice and opportunism as the world is on fire. My organization, the Labor/Community Strategy Center, rooted in the traditions of Martin Luther King, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and the broader civil rights and anti-war movements is going to Paris to ally with NGO and government forces who do not see the U.S. or the Democratic Party as the center of the earth–but rather, see the center of the earth as the challenge to the U.S., the Democratic Party, and President Barack Obama. Eric Mann is an NGO delegate to the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference representing the Labor/Community Strategy Center. He will be doing daily “Posts from Paris” for Pacifica and his KPFK radio show, Voices from the Frontlines, www.voicesfromthefrontlines.com His new book, Katrina’s Legacy: The Black Nation and the People of the World Confront the U.S. Empire and Its Genocidal Climate Crimes will have its international opening in Paris in December 2015 and its U.S. opening in Los Angeles in January 2016. He can be reached at eric@voicesfromthefrontlines.com   Read the Original Article on Huffington Post [...]
December 3, 2015In December 2015 the world’s governments will meet in Paris for a truly historic event — the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference. (UNFCCC). The objective of the conference is to protect Mother Earth from the assault of its most ungrateful inhabitants. The challenge is whether Homo sapiens, especially those of the ruling classes of the United States and Europe, can be civilized by the rest of the world before it is too late for all of us. The challenge to the UNFCCC focuses on the growing world demand that the U.S. and Europe — as the greatest historical polluters, the initiators and beneficiaries of the Industrial Counter-Revolution, and the creators of economies based on slavery and conquest — must lead the way with radical reductions of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) of at least 50 percent if not 60 percent or more over the next decade. My fear is that the world’s governments, under pressure from the United States, President Obama, and the leaders of the European Union, will be unable to reach any agreement as we move towards the catastrophe of a 2 degree and then 3 degree world — as massive and hysterical production and consumption in “the West” and the world system proceeds unabated. I am a civil rights and climate justice organizer. I have been working at the United Nations through the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. I have spent the last year reading every version of the U.N. Durban Draft, and have attended, along with Strategy Center Associate Director Barbara Lott-Holland, two preparatory UNFCCC meetings in Bonn, Germany in May and October. I have spoken with hundreds of representatives of world governments and international NGOs. Based on this investigation and assessment I am deeply troubled by President Obama’s role in this process and want to put forth some positive and necessary programmatic proposals. The President’s Present Trajectory — A Tragedy in Four Acts 1) President Obama is not just attending the UNFCCC in Paris — he is running it. The U.S., as the world superpower with 800 military bases and its hand in every zig and zag of the Paris Process, is the elephant in the climate change bathtub. Whatever UNFCCC’s achievements or failures, President Obama and the U.S. will be the chief architects. In my assessment, the U.S. tactical plan is to prevent any strong commitments in Paris that will expose the paucity of its own proposals. As I’ll explain it is working to prevent a strong final document and is setting the bar for success very low so that the President can claim victory and protect any Democratic Party candidates from having to defend and run on a controversial climate agreement. 2) The President and the E.U. have set the ground rules for Paris that prohibit any legally binding agreements such as Kyoto — which the U.S. had refused to ratify. This time the U.S. has imposed a plan for Paris called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC). Under the INDC process every nation is free to make up whatever GHG emissions reduction numbers it chooses, to present them without an implementation plan, and to leave Paris without any obligation to carry out its “intended” reductions. This is planetary destruction on the honor system–what I call Pretended Nationally Deceptive Retributions. 3) The U.S. INDC is based on a mathematical misrepresentation — with disastrous consequences. Most of the nations’ INDC proposals are based on reductions in emissions from 1990 levels. But the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — a well-known reactionary bloc at the U.N. called JUSCANZ — have arbitrarily rejected the 1990 baseline and instead, submitted their INDC proposals based on 2005 emissions. As such, the President’s already inadequate proposal for a 28 percent reduction is in fact only a 14 percent reduction from 1990 levels. As the Centre for Science and Environment observes in their compelling study, Capitan America, “Just by changing the base year, the US has avoided cutting 500 Million Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide Emissions (500 MMTC02E GHG)” 4) The President is the main obstacle to progress in Paris. Contrary to his view that he is “dragging the world behind me to Paris” (as he told Rolling Stone) most U.N. delegates see the President and the U.S. as the main obstacles to a strong agreement in Paris. The UNFCCC has been working for a year to reach an agreement on the final text off a document — The Durban Platform. This, while not binding, could possibly set a high moral and scientific standard for emission reductions and, like the Pope Francis’ Climate Encyclical, create a moral pressure on governments. Third World governments are proposing language based on what is called “common but differentiated responsibilities” that calls on the primary polluters to make the largest cuts. There is proposed language for what is called “loss and damages” that would require the large polluters — U.S., Canada, E.U — to make massive payments, specifically100 billion a year, into a Green Climate Fund to “developing countries.” This would be used to facilitate their transition to less polluting and zero emission development and to give “technology transfers” from the “developed nations” to the “developing nations.” And yet, at every daily debate of the governments, the U.S., the E.U., and JUSCANZ, have blocked any language in the document in that direction. The last preparatory conference in Bonn, October 19-24, was marked by bitter denunciations from many Third World nations of “powerful forces” who were blocking any strong statements. This battle is not over as many representatives of the G77 and China served notice there would be very contested negotiations in Paris to prevent a cover up masked as a coronation. And yet, many seasoned delegates from governments and NGOs told me they fear that President Obama will recreate his power play at the 2009 Copenhagen COP where he came in at the last minute and pushed through a draft agreement that undermined all the work that others had done — and undermined what was left of the Kyoto agreements. In their view, President Obama shifted the burden from the U.S. and the E.U. to China and India. From President Obama’s point of view, as he boasted to Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone, in Copenhagen, he “crashed” a meeting of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, China, India) because he felt that the work they were doing was “a disorganized mess.” He felt he had to “rescue” all the parties by “strong arming” them to agree that “it wasn’t enough just for the advanced countries to act — that China, India, and others, despite having much lower per-capita carbon footprints, given the sheer size of their populations and how rapidly they were developing, were going to have to put some skin in the game as well.” An alternative view, from the most militant climate organizers I have spoken with in both India and China is that President Obama, in fact did not lead with addressing the U.S.’ historical responsibilities but rather, resorted to what they called “India and China bashing.” And his “strong arming” was little more than Great Power Bullying. While it was a public relations victory for the president, in their view, his heavy handed behavior in fact set back the world climate movement immeasurably. I have spoken with representatives of the Small Island States at the U.N. — Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Samoa, who have begged the U.S. to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to stop the floods and destruction of their islands and cultures. They observed, “The President has refused, telling us he can’t get a strong commitment through a Republican Congress. But we feel it is he who does not really want to do it — for all he has to do is make the case and make the Republicans look bad. But the U.S. is too powerful for us to challenge them directly. That is your job.” Four Climate Justice Proposals for Paris My organization is going to Paris with four action proposals that we are asking the president to endorse and for which we will be organizing international support. 1) The United States must cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2025 — starting now! The established science and the world climate crisis mandates the U.S. to initiate at least a 50 percent reduction of emissions from 1990 levels by 2025. Such a plan would have to go far beyond setting stricter standards for power plants and fuel efficiencies for cars. It would require shutting down factories, closing freeways, and stopping the U.S. society’s obsessive compulsion with consumer goods. The Strategy Center has initiated a No Cars in L.A. and the U.S. Campaign as a radical but reasonable response to the severity of the problem. The president does not have to put forth a comprehensive plan to achieve a 50 percent reduction but since he was the one to impose the idea of “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” he must start with the intention to do what is scientifically and climatically necessary–which is to popularize the concept of at least a 50 percent reduction from 1990 levels starting now. 2) The United States must contribute $10 billion a year into the United Nations Green Climate Fund—starting now! In 2010 the United Nations established the GCF as a mechanism to move funds to Third World, “developing” nations to finance transitions to lower emission and zero emission development. The stated goal is to raise $100 billion a year but most governments have either made weak promises or not even funded what they pledged. For example, the U.S. has pledged $3 billion but makes it ambiguous about whether that is $3 billion a year or $3 billion over 5 years. So far, the president has only pledged $500 million and none of it has been allocated by Congress or deposited in the fund. President Obama can make the pledge for $10 billion a year (compared to the U.S. military budget of more than $600 billion) and then we can build the movement to get the government to actually pay it. This should be in the form of cash payments not the ambiguous proposals of loans or “mobilizing funds from the private sector.” 3) The United States must bring back more than 100,000 Black internally displaced residents to New Orleans — with jobs, housing, and medical benefits — starting now! In my forthcoming book, Katrina’s Legacy I explain Ten Tactics by which the U.S. carried out a Genocidal Climate Crime in New Orleans by consciously driving more than 250,000 Black people out of New Orleans in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina and working to prevent their return. Now, there are still more than 100,000 Black Internally Displaced People, former residents of New Orleans, scattered and discarded all over the U.S. This demand has been raised by the Survivors Village and Advocates for Environmental Human Rights in New Orleans and is still an ongoing and real demand requiring presidential intervention. We plan to bring this to the UNFCCC to build international support for this demand and call on President Obama to take executive actions to make it happen. 4) President Obama must end the federal Department of Defense 1033 Program that gives military grade weapons to local and state police forces including school police. The Strategy Center has initiated a No Tanks in LA and the U.S. Campaign along with other civil rights groups calling for an end to this counter-insurgency program — that provides tanks, armored vehicles, and M16 rifles to local police forces. As the protests against police brutality and poverty in the U.S. escalate so has police violence and intimidation tactics against demonstrators. As the climate crisis intensifies both inside and outside the United States, daily life is marked by droughts, floods, extreme weather events, food shortages, hunger, famine, mass poverty. This in turn generates massive movements of internally displaced people and world refugees and immigrants who in turn will be making demands on world governments including the U.S. It seems clear that U.S. ruling circles have no plans to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emission but do have plans to repress rather than address mass protests — thus arming local police forces with tanks, grenades, and M16s. We have to end this Department of Defense civil rights, human rights, and environmental rights injustice and bring international awareness about and pressure upon the Obama administration to end this repressive program. On November 28 and 29 in Paris hundreds of thousands of demonstrators will be calling on the world governments to make the most radical reductions in GHG emissions and take the strongest actions possible to reverse the pace of lethal global warming. On November 30 through December 11 tens of thousands of government officials and NGOs will meet in Le Bourget, Paris to fight for a strong platform and agreement. Manuel Criollo, Barbara Lott-Holland, Channing Martinez, Ashley Franklin, and I, representing the Strategy Center, will be participating in those epochal events. Of course we cannot, alone, make history but as part of massive movements around the world for climate justice we can play an important role — to raise the central question, “What are we doing to do about the United States?” President Obama, who began as a community organizer, understands that our job is to bring clear proposals and demands on those in power with a strong scientific and moral rationale. We have seen the president respond positively to the militancy and moral clarity of the Dreamers and change some aspects of his immigration policies, respond to the militant advocates for gay marriage, and respond to Indigenous and environmental groups who called on him to end once and for all the Keystone XL Pipeline. It is our job to build a base around our program — to call on the president to change his baseline from 2005 to 1990 and his Intended reductions from 14 percent to 50 percent, to contribute $10 billion into the Green Climate Fund, to bring 100,000 Black Internally Displaced Residents of New Orleans back to their homes, and to end the Department of Defense 1033 Program. Paris is a great arena for organizing, for as we said during the 1960s, “The Whole World is Watching.” The President and we both understand the wisdom of Frederick Douglass who argued, “Power concedes nothing without a demand — it never has and it never will.” Eric Mann, director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center, is an NGO delegate to the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference. He will be doing daily “Posts from Paris” for Pacifica and his KPFK radio show, Voices from the Frontlines, www.voicesfromthefrontlines.com His new book, Katrina’s Legacy: The Black Nation and the People of the World Confront the U.S. Empire and Its Genocidal Climate Crimes will have its international opening in Paris in December 2015 and its U.S. opening in Los Angeles in January 2016. He can be reached ateric@voicesfromthefrontlines.com [...]
December 2, 2015LIVE FROM PRELUDE TO PARIS; Eric Mann, Manuel Criollo, Ashley Franklin, and Channing Martinez speak about the 4 demands being put in front of President Obama by The Strategy Center, and their delegation (including Barbara Lott Holland) during the ‪#‎UNFCCC‬ in Paris this December Listen to the Live Recording Here   [...]
July 30, 2015Written by: Eric Mann, Director of the Labor Community Strategy Center, Revolutionary, Civil Rights, Anti-war, Labor, and Environmental Justice Organizer. Originally Posted on Huffington Post On May 19 in front of Augustus Hawkins High School in South Los Angeles — on the 90th anniversary of Malcolm X’s birthday — 100 Black and Latino high school students, bus riders, security guards, hotel workers chanted, “President Obama: No Tanks in LA, No Cars in L.A.” Initiated by the Labor/Community Strategy Center and its Fight for the Soul of the Cities, we called on the president to end the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program that gives “surplus” military grade weapons to local police forces all over the United States — including the Los Angeles School Police Department and to go to the December 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris with an “frontloaded” “verifiable” “enforceable” plan” to cut U.S. emissions by 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2015 — starting today! But how can 100 people talking about No Tanks and No Cars in LA expect to get the president of the United States to make radical changes in national and international military and climate policies? Obviously there is no guarantee but the line between delusional and visionary can only be determined in retrospect and we have a real plan to win. All great social movements begin with an unassailable and irrefutable moral argument. U.S. policies are burning up our own cities and the planet. Today in every urban center in the U.S. Black and Latino communities are under a permanent military siege by the police and surveillance state with the express policy objective of beating back the revolutionary ideologies and achievements of the great revolution of what I call “The Two Decades of the Sixties” — from the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955 to the defeat of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam in 1975. The ruling language of “counter-insurgency” shapes why there are 2.5 million people in U.S. prisons 1 million of whom are Black and 500,000 of whom are Latino. Ending the “war on drugs” “war on crime” “war on gangs” will never work until the U.S. ends it war on Blacks and Latinos. The Defense Department’s 1033 program gives tanks, rocket launchers, assault rifles, MRAPs and M-16 rifles to local police forces all over the country and the application form says, “If you want it you can have it.” The Los Angeles Unified School District has 61 M-16s and the LAPD 1600 M-16s. (The International Red Cross has called the M-16 an inhumane weapon…) The goal, to shoot down protesting students, parents, teachers, community residents who rise up in anger demanding radical changes in our society. We are calling on the Los Angeles Unified School Board and the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s Departments to relinquish all their weapons from the 1033 program and “burn them, don’t return them” so they can’t be used on others inside our outside the U.S. Recently the president announced “modifications” to the program that restrict some of the weapons (and yes, the tanks) and create administrative procedures for the use of other weapons. But the police are still allowed many lethal weapons from the program and can kill people with impunity and then will deal with any sanctions after the fact. President Obama must end the 1033 program down to its last bullet. The president’s climate policies so far, have been marked by moments of inspiration followed by lethargy and a lack of will. Nature is not impressed as we approach the 10th anniversary of the Katrina climate catastrophe and the last ten years of federal inaction in the face of deteriorating permafrost, floods, droughts, melting coral reefs, and extreme weather events as the U.S. fiddles as the planet burns. The 2015 United Nations Climate Change conference is a big world stage event where governments try to finally grasp the enormity of the rapidly escalating rise of the earth and water’s temperature towards 2 degrees Celsius and beyond. But spoiler alert. Unless reversed, the conference is headed for a disaster because the ground rules of the UNCCC, unless reversed, allow each government to set its own policies, to have no mandated international inspections of emissions, and no penalties for non-compliance of goals that can’t be verified in the first place. The president recently signed a climate agreement with the Chinese government in which he pledged to cut U.S. emissions by 28 percent over the next 10 years. Many Beltway environmental groups have praised the president while not challenging the vague nature of the commitment or the inadequate goal of only a 28 percent reduction. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that while he is not clear about exactly what the president is saying he is clear he opposes it. So, as a social movement we begin by setting the terms of the debate and hoping that one key demand from U.S. organizations can at least push the U.S. and the UN governments into a debate about one clear, enforceable demand. We are proposing that President Obama go to Paris with a plan to cut U.S. emissions to 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2025 — starting now! Here’s how he can do it. Cut U.S. auto production and consumption by 50 percent immediately. Cut U.S. gas, coal, oil production and consumption by 50 percent immediately Support the Strategy Center’s No Cars in L.A. Campaign of dramatic restriction in auto use through auto free zones, auto-free rush hours and days in every city in the U.S. and making a major investment in a 5,000 zero-emission bus fleet, running 24/7, and yes, free public transportation through direct transfers of funds from the military budget to mandated bus systems all over the U.S. (The fiasco of the L.A. “rail” system and it raids on the L.A. bus system is the subject of the successful civil rights law suit we brought against the Los Angeles MTA-and the 2,500 new compressed natural gas buses were won were only a down payment on what is needed. This bus-centered system could be up and running now with dramatic expansion of buses on the streets in 18 months to 3 years.) I am on my way, along with Barbara Lott-Holland, Associate Director of the Strategy Center, to Bonn, Germany for preparatory meetings of the United Nations Climate Change Conference where we will be part of the broad governmental and NGO movement to make the Paris UNCCC the greatest success possible. In that international imperative, the president should issue every executive order under the sun to radically reduce emissions — and rally popular support around his proposals. But of course, here is where “organizing” and “movement building” come in. The 100 people at the rally are organizers not spectators; We are going door to door in South Los Angeles with 2,000 lawn signs with pictures of President Obama “No Cars in LA, No Tanks” in L.A. meeting with 100 new churches, labor unions, and community groups in the next 60 days — speaking at UCLA, USC, community colleges, and groups of liberal Democrats. We are reaching out to Black and Latino communities, civil rights and social justice organization, teachers and janitors unions, and the environmental justice movement in every city in the US. to call for “No Cars, No Tanks in Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Ferguson, Harlem, Baltimore” They are excited about our call for “the social welfare state not the police state — the climate justice state not the warfare state” and want to join a national campaign whose demands can be fought for and won strengthening our national movement. All great campaigns start with an unequivocal moral argument and as Frederick Douglass taught, making very clear demands on those in power. So, President Obama must end the 1033 Program now and put forth a plan to reduce U.S. carbon emissions to 50 percent of 1990 levels by 2025 — now. Do you agree? If you do then the No Cars, No Tanks campaign has already picked up one new organizer. Eric Mann, a veteran of the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, and the United Auto Workers is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and its Fight for the Soul of the Cities campaign. He is the author of Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer and the host of KPFK/Pacifica’s Voices from the Frontlines–Your National Movement Building Show. He welcomes comments at eric@voicesfromthefrontlines.com Take Action: Subscribe to our Newsletter Email a Comment or Question to Eric Mann Subscribe to Voices From the Frontlines: your National Movement Building Show Share this Page to you Facebook Buy Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer Donate   Read More Articles  [...]

 

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