Six years after the 2008 economic meltdown, the overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. and the E.U are still struggling. Most people know the system is rigged against them, and there’s no relief on the horizon. Disenchantment with “free-market” capitalism—and the global corporate/banking model that caused the Western economies to tank—is growing. The anti-globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street are the most well known expressions of resistance to the economic status quo. But disenchantment has filtered down to the person chatting in the barber’s chair or beauty shop.

Everybody knows somebody who is unemployed or underemployed or loaded with student debt. Devastated communities, like Jackson, Mississippi, realize that waiting passively for “jobs to come back”—to be granted at the whim of a corporation that extracts tax incentives from their community, pays low wages, and rewards it’s CEOs with obscene compensation packages—is no longer a viable option.

For things to really change, the extraction of wealth from our pockets and our communities has to stop. If we are to survive and support our families, we need humane and better paying jobs that provide a living wage. If the Earth is to survive, we have to move from an oligarch run, environment-destroying, war-centered economy to one that is life sustaining and wealth creating for everyone. But how can any of this happen when our elected officials are joined at the hip with those who have created this sick economy?

Waiting for austerity-addicted Washington, D.C. to create jobs isn’t the answer. Creating economic democracy, at the local level, is. Jackson, Mississippi, one of the poorest cities in the nation, is looking to older, successful, democratically run local cooperatives in Mondragon, Spain as a model for building wealth in their community.

What are the Mondragon cooperatives?

Michael Siegel writing at Truthdig gives a brief explanation of the Mondragon movement:

A leading international example of the cooperative movement is the Mondragon cooperative from the Basque region of Spain. Founded by a young Catholic priest and students of a technical school in 1956, Mondragon is now a cooperative of cooperatives, encompassing nearly 300 distinct businesses and employing over 80,000 people. Mondragon cooperative enterprises include banks, manufacturing, skilled and unskilled labor, public schools and a university. Consistent with a broader international movement to define and promote ethical cooperative enterprise, the pay differential between the highest and lowest paid workers at Mondragon is generally between 3-to-1 and 5-to-1, and the CEO of the entire Mondragon Corporation earns only nine times as much as the lowest-paid worker (this compares with an average ratio of 600-to-1 at large U.S. corporations).

Addressing Jackson, Mississippi’s wealth drain by creating local cooperatives

Siegel writes that although Jackson, Mississippi is 85 percent black, the student body of its public schools is 98 percent black, and the surrounding Hinds County is 75 percent black, out of the total of approximately $1 billion of annual public expenditures in the region, only 5 percent goes to black employees and black-owned businesses. The vast majority of government contracts are awarded to businesses outside of Jackson and even outside the state.

The late mayor Chokwe Lumumba secured a billion-dollar bond measure to rebuild Jackson’s infrastructure, including repairs to roads, water lines and sewage facilities. The funds will partly be used to incubate local worker cooperatives that could win contracts to rebuild the city. To address the draining of local resources out of the community, Lumumba put together a coalition of local and national groups including the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), the Jackson’s Peoples Assembly, and his office. “Jackson Rising” was born. Sadly, Chokwe Lumumba died of a heart attack in February of this year. The Jackson Rising conference was held in May. From the Jackson Rising website:

The primary objectives of the Conference were to stimulate and facilitate the creation of cooperative enterprises in Jackson to meet the unmet economic and social needs of the community. It also served as a space to launch Cooperation Jackson. Cooperation Jackson is an emerging cooperative network based in Jackson that is building four-interdependent and interconnected institutions: a federation of emerging worker cooperatives, a cooperative incubator, a cooperative education and training center, and a cooperative bank or financial institution.

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Perhaps if it hadn’t been for the Bush v Gore Supreme Court case, we would give the Supremes the benefit of the doubt when it comes to rendering a case based on actual legal considerations, rather than political ones. Now, once again, they have presented us with a decision that, whether legally sound or not, just doesn’t pass the giggle test.

As the New York Times reported, “The Supreme Court on Tuesday (June 25, 2013) effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, exactly 100 years after the  Fifteenth Amendment to the constitution made it unconstitutional to discriminate against African-Americans in exercising the right to vote. But the constitution is not self-enforcing; legislation has to be passed in order to carry out and enforce the mandates of the constitution. As part of the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society, Congress stepped up in 1965 and insisted that federal marshals ensure voting rights for African-Americans in those states that had historically discriminated against African-Americans.

Now the Supreme Court says that there is not sufficient current evidence that southern states would discriminate. Advocates of striking down the key provision of the voting rights act argued that the South has changed, and that such discrimination would not exist in sufficient numbers to make a difference.

But what does common sense say? It says that southern states are not ready to have full control over their elections. Consider that African-Americans make up 37.5% of the population of the state of Mississippi, more than in any other state. Yet in the 2012 presidential race, President Barack Obama received only 43.5% of the vote in Mississippi and he was soundly trounced by Mitt Romney who received 55.5%.

A cursory examination of these numbers shows that Obama received only 6% more votes than the total of African-American votes (Obama received over 95% of the African-American vote). The numbers play out that Obama received approximately 15% of the vote from Caucasian voters. There’s nothing subjective about this. Democrats in general have consistently lost southern states since 1968, the first presidential election year after the Voting Rights Act was passed.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court can argue all they want that the empirical evidence is on their side. But that’s simply not true. They are correct that there is a body of empirical evidence that helps substantiate their position, but this evidence is minimally relevant to the case. The irony of this decision is if the Supremes had sided with Al Gore in 2000, we would have a different make-up of the Court now and more just rulings. The shame continues.

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Over the last weekend in January 2013, Jackson Women’s Health Services applied a coat of bright-pink paint to its building at the corner of  State Street and Fondren Avenue in Jackson, Mississippi. While the  name of the paintcolor hasn’t been publicized, it might aptly be nicknamed “Pink with a Purpose,” or “In Your Face Pink,” because Jackson Women’s Health Organization chose the color to make a statement.

“It’s a woman’s color,” said clinic Owner Diane Derzis. “It’s says, ‘We’re right here, and we’re not going anywhere.’”

Jackson Women’s Health Services is the last abortion clinic in Mississippi, where the Republican-dominated state legislature and Republican Governor Phil Bryant have made it their avowed goal to make abortion impossible in their state. It’s a familiar scenario: The legislature passes, and the Governor signs, laws that put insurmountable hurdles in front of women’s health clinics that provide abortions. The main problem for Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the requirement that its doctors must have admitting privileges at a local hospital.

The difference between Mississippi’s laws and those in most other states is that, in Mississippi, they’ve put every abortion clinic other than Jackson Women’s Health out of business. Before the onerous restrictions on abortion clinics went into effect, Mississippi had 14 abortion clinics.

Ironically, Mississippi voters appear to have a different view of the kind of severe restrictions on abortion proposed by their legislature.   In November 2011, Mississippi voters defeated, by a margin of 52 to 47 percent,  a “personhood” amendment to their state constitution. The amendment would have defined “life” as beginning at the moment of fertilization,which would have effectively made all abortions illegal.

According to Clarion-Ledger. com:

Jackson Women’s Health Organization is currently awaiting word from  a federal judge on its request for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the new state law. It requires all its physicians to have hospital admitting privileges, but the clinic hasn’t been able to obtain them despite a months-long effort.If the judge doesn’t grant the injunction, the state could be forced to close the clinic for non-compliance. Attorneys for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization say closure could come as early as March.

Not surprisingly, the pink paint job has infuriated anti-choice groups. For those who actually support respect for established law and a woman’s right to control her own reproductive system, the clinic’s new pink exterior is a welcome symbol of courage.

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According to Addicting Info, a Mississippi school has arranged for suspensions to be served in prison–a  real prison, where children serve  alongside hardened criminals who are in for armed robbery, drug distribution, etc. It’s not exactly a surprise to find that a breakdown of who gets sent to prison for school infractions seems to depend heavily on skin hue and national origin. You might ask what kinds of nefarious behavior can get a school kid sent to prison instead of detention – well, passing gas is one.

Students in Meridian, especially African-American and disabled children, face the prospect of prison time for even the silliest infraction. As it turns out, the Department of Justice has been investigating the school system in the city for allegedly having students arrested and placed in juvenile detention. School principals and teachers punish students for infractions such as passing gas, dressing in an unacceptable manner, general disrespect, and swearing.

Obviously, these young people are incorrigible and well deserve being sentenced to jail cells instead of home rooms.

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