ustxtxb_obs_1996_07_12_50_00018-00000_000.pdf

global people’s movementthe Human Alliancehas to help precipitate a new global people’s movement, eject the multinationals from control of democracy, and set up democratic alternatives all over the world. We don’t know if we can do it. But, we are going to try. We must fight all-out. We must put aside racism, sexism, classism, and fear of foreigners. Recommit ourselves to the equal value and importance of every person. And re vive and live again the rebellious democratic essence of the American Populist movement of the late 1890s. First, we must know the terrain in our own areas before we can act shrewdly and effectively. Alliances have begun, therefore, to make Alliance’s area, enlisting area power-structure specialists to help, with an additional focus on the activities of these corporations and alternatives available in the area, co-ops, worker-owned businesses, farmers’ markets, buying groups, and so on, each one evaluated for first to be defined, eventually to be listed by neighborhoods. Second we need a media strategy, inventorying all the alternamainstream media; determining who owns the local mainstream media; and devising local and national program-origination strategies to help all the movement organizations break through the media to the public. Third, to catalyze local coalitions in actions, either make a database, or if one exists augment it, of all people-first area organizations, including all such local unions, so that whenever one organization plans an action, every other people-first organization can be flashed by email and invited to participate in the planning and the action. Seek out strikers with offers to help. Teach citizen action in high schools. Join up with reform organizations on college campuses. Use suburban-urban dialogue and actions, and communityor area-wide house parties, all the same night perhaps, to have democratic conversations on a subject, and to bridge the racism built into neighborhood-limited movements. Join then in efforts to complete a national database and build a global one. issue subjects to bring into the focus the corporations that lie behind the thwarting of reform. Fifth, for self-education, put together a recommended Alliance reading list. Establish a storefront alternative reading center, eventually possibly selling selected publications there. Sixth, conduct local inquiry-projects, directly asking people working for a given company, such as McDonald’s, or a given public agency, such as the airport, how much they’re paid and whether they get health benefits. Announce the results at a press conference. Seventh, in tandem with unions and other local organizations, using an 800 number, form a right-to-work database and facilitate the formation of worker-owned businesses among the unemployed, underemployed, and temps. Eighth, form in one’s own Alliance, or in one’s area, servicesbusinesses, bartering systems, and new credit unions or co-ops, or join existing ones if they are democratically controlled. Ninth, survey and study the structural wrongs and injustices in your area, and get either to know or at the least to understand your opponents, divine what they value and how they are likely to react, identify and focus on those relatively few persons in hierarchical organizations who can direct or help to cause material change to occur, and \(remembering, I would suggest, that Gandhi’s practical Tenth, prepare to use either initiative-and-referendum, or proposed constitutional amendments, as means to inject democratically radical changes into public thought and democratic possibilityfor example, ending the standing corporations have at law as persons with all of an individual’s constitutional rights; revoking the state charters and dismantling and redistributing the assets of criminal corporations; limiting the ratio of a CEO’s compensation in a large corporation to that of the average worker’s salary in it; denying corporate officials immunity from prosecution for crimes; and redefining the corporation from an irresponsible center of power into an entity subordinate to democracy. Ronnie Dugger will be in Texas the second half of July to participate in forming local populist Alliances in the state where authentic anti-corporate populism began in the late 19th Century. Dugger and the Alliance invite all concerned citizens to join the Alliance and make the movement theirs. On Wednesday, July 17, Dugger will be speaking in Dallas on the corporate domination of democracy and what the Alliance plans to do to end it. This meeting, open to the public, will be held at the Midway Hills Christian Church in Dallas, on Midway just north of Royal Lane, at 7 p.m. A democratic conversation will follow. For more infor mation phone Lew King at 214-247-5080. The following Sunday, Dugger will speak in Austin on “Corporate Rule or Populism, Which Will it Be?: A Case for the Alliance.” The talk, with discussion, socializing, and organizing to follow, will be held at the AFL-CIO building at 11th and Guadalupe, Sunday, July 2, at 7 p’ .m. Send queries to the Austin Alliance: 1203 Cullen Avenue, Austin, Texas 78757. Those wishing to set up meetings to discuss forming more local Alliances in Texas or adjacent states during the second half of July can phone Dugger until July 15 at 3170. Dugger’s original “Call to Citizens” from the Nation last August and the first issue of the Alliance’s periodical, Deep Democracy, can be obtained for the fifteendollar price of national membership in the Alliance, by calling its national office at emailing [email protected] . For advice and help to organize a first meeting among respondents to the Call in your city or area, please call Lew King 453-3128 in Austin, or Kati Winchell, the 491-4221. 18 THE TEXAS OBSERVER or. JULY 12, 1996