CA/Community Assembly Continuations

Let's build a movement together.

edit · view 

Community Assembly Continuations

On Saturday, May 5th, 2012 a coalition of 80 community, labor and social justice activists gathered at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland, Oregon to actively participate in a Community Assembly to Create a People's Budget. One of the event's primary objectives was to educate attendees on the often opaque decision making that produces the City of Portland's annual budget. Another major objective was to show how budgets produced through genuine community participation contrasted sharply with those produced mostly behind closed doors, with little (if any) community input.

Participants also had an opportunity to educate each other about the struggles each faced in the current climate of imposed economic austerity. Students and parents from the Harriet Tubman Leadership Academy for Young Women talked about their ongoing struggle to take their school off the budget chopping block. Community activists from Right 2 Survive and Right 2 Dream Too described how cutbacks to already skimpy basic services for Portland's most vulnerable citizens heaped even more burdens on the already extraordinarily difficult lives of Portland's unhoused community. Laborers from Laborers' Local 483 showed how funds diverted to "urban renewal" projects result in the layoffs of city maintenance workers.

Organizers also presented their research findings. The Community Assembly's "Where's the Money" group connected the dots on how urban renewal financing provides both investment opportunities and tax breaks to wealthy individuals and corporations while shifting tax burdens onto working people and main street businesses. Event organizer Shamus Cooke contrasted the "cuts only" approach--pitting vulnerable members against each other to fight over budgetary "crumbs from the table"--with participatory budgeting. Although participatory budgeting approaches vary, the most democratic of them allow community members to control the entire budgetary process--from raising revenue to distributing funds and services.

A Brief History

The inaugural event on Saturday, May 5th was the culmination of more than six months of intensive planning involving close to a dozen labor organizers and social justice activists. Work began in November 2011 after the Occupy Portland Labor Solidarity Committee tasked a group of volunteers to form a subcommittee to organize and launch a participatory "people's budget" initiative. On November 20th, Mark Vorpahl--a local union steward, anti-war and Latin American Solidarity activist--distributed a link to The Peoples Movement Assembly Organizing Kit to others on the newly formed committee.

Vorpahl explained that he wasn't necessarily suggesting the committee follow the template provided by the Peoples Movement Assembly Organizing Kit, but as "an example that we can use to adapt what is relevant to our project, exclude what isn't..." and suggested the committee "bring unions, community groups, and, of course, the various constituencies of the Occupy Movement together in forming this project." Committee member Jennifer Sims saw the "success of the Peoples Assembly coming from including the jane's and joe's of the neighborhood," adding that the "Peoples Assembly ... could be the way to connect the people to the movement." Vorpahl boiled the down the email discussion to a handful of clarifying questions:

1. Why (do) we need a Peoples' Assembly?
2. What would a Peoples' Assembly look like and do?
3. Who are we going to approach as partners in building this?
4. What are our next steps towards putting this proposal together?
5. What are we going to report to the Labor Outreach Occupy meeting on Friday and who is going to give the report?
6. When will be our next meeting as a subcommittee?

Post-Event Organizing; Building a Unified, Grassroots Movement

Continual Organizing

• Upcoming assemblies
• Post-assembly actions and follow-through events
• Alliance building
• Connecting organizations, groups and people
• Connecting communities—near and far

Budgetary Requirements

• Office
• Skeleton staff, office expenses, materials, etc.

Globalized Anti-Democracy

The current economic order--variously characterized as "free-market capitalism," "neoliberalism," and "predatory capitalism"--has devolved from being merely anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian. It's still all that, but it has also become an existential threat to living beings on an relentlessly persecuted planet. It's a threat that will never go away voluntarily, although biospheric collapse might kill it, while also snuffing out every living thing.

This economic and social order has integrated into (some say "infested") a growing number of economies across the world into "globalized" marketplace characterized by extraction, consumption, widening inequality and massive exploitation. "Resources" are extracted to the point of depletion, provoking continual social, political and environmental mayhem in the process. Billions of ordinary people are transformed into consumers of products and services, with each consumer heavily conditioned to feel an unquenchable thirst for "more." A handful of multinational corporations profit at the expense of everyone else.

A neo-feudal social order is taking shape as familiar historical trends reassert themselves: extreme wealth concentration; social, economic and political domination over societies by a tiny clique of "elites"; environmental degradation and collapse. Indeed, for much of the planet's human population, these conditions have persisted, and now in the "rich," developmentally "mature" "democracies" these chickens are coming back home to roost.

Control over one's own economic livelihood is quickly diminishing, creating a "race to the bottom" effect as growing numbers of economically imperiled people attempt to sustain themselves by any available means. As this wretched race (to the bottom) accelerates, it leaves leaves expanding human and environmental catastrophe in its wake.

Institutional Failure

A complex society striving to build and maintain any sort of healthy democracy relies on a number of primary institutions, including education, media, religious, legal, political, military and economic. If we judge the legitimacy of these institutions by their capacity to deliver the greatest benefits to the largest number of people, they are all failures.

For instance: instead of instilling a genuine desire to learn, schools teach pupils to passively accept a culture of rigid hierarchy, domination and control. Too many church "leaders" focus more energy on demonizing folks they've already damned rather imparting the universal principle of doing "to others what you would have them do to you." Doing so ensures that the "flock" is kept divided and conquered.

Foreign military invasions are perpetrated to gain geostrategic advantage or to pursue resource domination, actions that degrade the actual security of the "homeland." Legal systems are degraded to favor those with sufficient political and economic wherewithal to corrupt the law. Politicians, much like harlots, sell themselves to anyone ready and willing to pay. Economic systems are rigged to favor a tiny elite at the expense of everyone else.

Managed Ignorance

It's instructive to look at our society's relationship with our major media. Major corporations have captured all of our primary media organizations. These are private companies that sell products to make a profit. They are not in the business of delivering vital information in order to serve the common good, especially if such information potentially threatens profits.

Put another way, we've allowed a handful of big businesses, motivated by profit and social control, to manage the information (including disinformation, propaganda, sales pitches and so on) we're exposed to. This is insane. Corporate-owned media companies have produced one of the most propagandized and heavily deluded societies the world has ever known.