Tent City: Bushville Day 3

July 29, 2000:

Bushville entered its third day today. We were joined by many people, including more representatives from organization in the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, like the Deaf Committee for Universal Human Rights from Elyria, Ohio; Lifetime from San Jose, California; Sisters Together Ending Poverty from Massachusetts, Rock A Mole Productions from Los Angeles, California; the Rochester Poor People's Coalition from Rochester, New York, and a member of the Continental Front of Community Organizations from Mexico City, Mexico. We started the day with a brief history of the Campaign.

Delegates attended the Ad Hoc Coalition to Defend Health Care March in the early afternoon, while others attended Reality Tours and continued with outreach to the neighborhood and lot clean-up. We all gathered for lunch at the School of Social work at Temple University (Thanks to Dr. Mary Bricker-Jenkins and Carrie Young and all of the Underground Railroad-Temple Depot folks who hosted us!). After lunch, Campaign groups held a joint press conference to share their issues.

At 3 about 200 people attended the launching of a new project of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, called "The University of the Poor." The University of the Poor is a web-centered educational institution dedicated to training leaders of the poor and their allies to build a movement for economic human rights. It is the educational arm of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. We heard presentations from several of the schools of the University: including the Media College, the School for Social Workers, the School of Theology, the March of the Americas Educational Exchange Project, as well as an overview of the site. The URL for the new web site is: www.universityofthepoor.org.

Following was a forum on "The Labor Party and the Fight for Economic Human Rights". Panelists included Cheri Honkala, Executive Director of KWRU and member of the Interim National Committee of the Labor Party; Tony Mazzocchi, Paper and Allied Chemical Employees and National Organizer of the Labor Party; Brenda Stokely President of Local 215 AFSCME and Chair, New York State Labor Party, and Bill Kane, Moderator, President of the New Jersey State Industrial Union Council and Chair, New Jersey State Labor Party. Here are some excerpts from their remarks:

Cheri Honkala:

"The poor have absolutely no access to either of the major parties. Under a Democratic president, we had 'welfare reform,' we lost health care in this country, and we don't have a right to education. We couldn't buy into the rhetoric that the Democratic Party really represented us, because we were the ones burying the ones that we love, who died victims of poverty. We had to go forward in developing our movement by affiliating with the Labor Party…Until we have a massive party that truly represents us things will never change in this country. All sections of society must be represented. That is the only way we will have the future that we need to have in this country."

Brenda Stokely:

"We should not have to ask, to beg or to plead for the things that are the basic rights for all human beings. We are not asking for privileges. The rich would have us believe these things are privileges… The only way these things can change is for us to organize systematically, to beat the people in office, to build a party that is of us, looks like us, and fundamentally change the way this country is constructed. A very small minority have the best health care money can buy, the best education, the best of what you can have in the world. Are they more human than us? If the answer is no, we have to organize and build the Labor Party."

Tony Mazzochi:

"Some of us have seen in our lifetimes that society is capable of mobilizing to meet our basic needs. There has been a time in my own lifetime where people were very desperate, and I found that in our society we were able to address, in a critical moment, to address a condition that is imposed from the outside. When you get confronted with an idea you may say that that's impossible, a dream, implausible. Yet we have, in our society, used techniques to feed, house, and employ everyone, at almost a moment's notice.

People ought to have a right to a job. We want to amend the constitution to have a right to a job at a living wage. I woke up on a Sunday morning in December in 1941, with a house of about 16 people during the Depression. We were a nation that was ill housed and ill fed. But overnight, in a nation of 135 million people, we decide that we could uniform 17 million people, and provide them a place to sleep. We learned to distribute food, while we were told through the Depression that that couldn't' be done. We did it over night. We sent women to work in shipyards, and provided daycare. We built shelter, we transported people to every corner of the globe. We fed them. I was loaded on a ship with 15,000 other people. Someone had to figure out how to feed these people. A society that is determined to do something is capable of doing it.

We learned how to do these things. We can house, clothe, and feed everyone. We sent people to school as work and we paid them. These are notions that succeeded. Many of your parents may have gone through these experiences. We did it under war-time conditions. And we can do it again."

The Philadelphia Chapter of the Labor Party hosted a reception following the panel, and people returned to sleep at Bushville.