United Against EM
If Governor Snyder had any sense, he would find a way to back off from the decision to appoint an emergency manager for the city of Detroit. This is a manufactured financial emergency, created to justify seizing control of the city’s assets, breaking the power of democratic constituents, and blunting the newly revised Detroit City Charter. It is based on bogus figures.
If Governor Snyder was concerned about Detroit, he would pay attention to what the people have said at every opportunity. We do not want a state takeover. We do not want public assets turned over for private gain. We do not want to destroy the city for short term financial fixes. We do not believe Lansing has the interests of the people of Detroit in mind. We want the state to live up to its financial obligations to the city. We want the state to respect local home rule and the sovereignty of cities.
Virtually no one in the city thinks an emergency manager is a good idea. In the last election, 82% of the people voted against this law. Only the mainstream media, who flanked Governor Snyder during the announcement of his plan, have endorsed this effort.
A Roadmap for Women's Leadership
By Aljosie Aldrich Knight, National Council of Elders
Faye Bellamy Powell, one of the South’s most amazing lifelong organizers for human rights, justice and social change, won’t be around to celebrate International Women’s Day this year. On January 4, 2013, she succumbed to cancer in Atlanta, Georgia.
On February 22 hundreds of people gathered in the auditorium of the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History in Atlanta to celebrate her life and legacy.
Fay’s life is a road map for young and old, searching for inspiration, clarity, and direction.
Growing up in the small town of Clairton, PA. Not far from Pittsburgh, Fay suffered the discrimination and racism experienced by all African Americans, but in 1955, when she was 17, the brutal murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, transformed her consciousness. Just being concerned with her own life lost its flavor. Then, in 1963, when Fay heard of the four little girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, she knew, she said, that “play time was over.”
Searching for the “baddest” Civil Rights organization, Fay joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was assigned to Selma, Alabama, to run the field office. With top notch skills acquired in business school, she became “the glue of the field operation.”
Between the demonstrations held every other day and under dangerous, hostile conditions, she wrote press releases, worked with national and international press, coordinated logistics, documented operations and participated in the second Selma to Montgomery March.