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Indybay Feature

A Statement on Ron Dellum's Mayoral Race

by Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (repost)
Message to the Grassroots
Voice of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Oakland, CA Chapter
August 2005
Considering Ron Dellums for Mayor: 4 Fundamental
Issues and Requirements.

A lot is being made of a potential Ron Dellums Oakland Mayoral run. Campaign Committees are actively being formed and a “Draft Ron Dellums!” publicity campaign has been launched by a group of progressives in the Oakland Post and other community newspapers and weekly’s. Given Ron Dellums broad name recognition and progressive credentials he could potentially win the Mayoral election by a landslide, but the question is, what could and would a Dellums Mayoral term amount to? What would his Mayoral term offer or enable for the
masses of New Afrikan and other oppressed and working people in Oakland?

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) believes that one potential positive development of a Dellums campaign could be the formation of a broad progressive coalition and voting bloc. This bloc, as it stands, would of necessity be a “populist” formation, as it would in part be centered on a popular personality and a coalescence of short-term interests. Despite the weaknesses of populist formations and movements (i.e their capitulation to capital, petit bourgeois
domination, white supremacy, etc), this initiative would be a positive development if it would stimulate the various progressive candidates in the race to come together and combine their forces to not divide the progressive vote and give right wingers, like Ignacio De La Fuente, the opportunity to win the election in
2006. However, in order for this potential populist initiative to have any substantive meaning for the masses of oppressed and working people in Oakland it must address four fundamental issues.

1. Reversing the State Occupation and radically transforming the school district and education in Oakland.

The Dellum’s administration would have to take a clear progressive stand against the State Occupation of OUSD. This stand we believe must be premised on:
• Supporting the unions, students, parents, and community organizations in ending the state takeover.
• Demanding the immediate removal of the State Appointed Administrator.
• Demanding the immediate resumption of local control over OUSD.
• Demanding the immediate installation of a new School Board.
• Demanding the immediate cancellation of OUSD’s debts.
• Demanding that corporate Oakland, including the Port of Oakland, pay its share for public education in Oakland, including the elimination of the debt.

Furthermore, we believe this stand should include a vision wherein:
• New democratic governance structures are established to eliminate and transcend the inept School Board structure. We need real participatory democratic structures to serve the needs of our children and our communities.

• The teaching force reflects the national, ethnic, gender, and class diversity of Oakland, and the creation and implementation of a multinational
peoples-centered curriculum that reflects the aforementioned diversity.
• The complete elimination of corporate driven high stakes testing and the implementation of more authentic assessment measures.
• The repeal of Proposition 13 and the creation of a system of taxation that demands that corporations pay
their just share for public education and other public goods and services.
• The repeal of the destructive No Child Left Behind Act that aims to privatize education, starting with its repeal in Oakland.

To meet these demands and enact this vision the Dellums administration and the popular forces that support it must be willing to challenge the state government, various corporate interests, foundations like the Board Foundation (whose fundamental mission is to privatize public education), and unprincipled non-profits like the Bay Area Coalition of Equitable
Schools. To this end, we believe the Dellums campaign must build a strategic alliance with the “Take Back Our Schools Coalition”, which consists in part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Organize the Bay (ODB) Coalition, ACORN, Xicano Moratorium Coalition, Education not Incarceration, Oakland Parents Together, the Oakland Federation of Teachers, Californias for Justice, the Million Worker March, CalCARE, Tojil, Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network, American
Federated County State and Municipal Employees, and the Oakland Educators Association (see http://www.organizedabay.org or http://www.oaklandrising.com for more details).

2. Resisting and controlling the agenda of Developers and development in Oakland.

The Dellums administration would have to take a strong stance in resisting, controlling and ultimately curtailing the agenda of the Developers whom are currently dictating the agenda of Oakland’s politics. This includes taking on the likes of Shorenstein, Rick Holiday, and the consortium of interests planning on dispossessing the Eastlake/Laney community to for a
baseball stadium, and those working to sell off substantial parcels of OUSD and Merritt College.

It also means taking on the Port Authority, Walmart, and other corporate interests to ensure that their development projects contribute to the social development of Oakland, and that their enterprises are at minimum unionized and ecologically sustainable.

3. Stimulating sustainable economic development in Oakland, particularly creating jobs for New Afrikan youth.

We strongly believe that it would be imperative for a Dellums administration (or any progressive administration for that matter) to do everything within its power to implement the “Urban Environmental Accords” outlined in the United Nations Environment Program World Environmental Day Accords. More specifically, we believe that a Dellums administration
should seek to advance the basic aims and objectives of the “Reclaim the Future Project” (see http://www.ellabakercenter.org/page.php?pageid=233 for more information). We would demand of Dellums that New
Afrikan youth and youth from other oppressed nationalities (Xicanos, Latinos, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Islanders) be given first priority in all of the contracting, training, and employment directives of this Green initiative.

MXGM recognizes that the basic framework of the Urban Environmental Accords as it presently stands is in its essence reformist, meaning that its implementation will basically serve to strengthen the barbaric rule of capital. However, given the fundamental nature of the ecological crisis now confronting humanity, we feel that its implementation, if only on a local level, will be a major contribution towards initiating a substantive revolutionary transformation in our thinking and practice of ecologically and socially equitable and sustainable production, distribution, and circulation nationally and internationally.

4. Controlling the Police Department and creating a comprehensive recreational and skills training programs for youth.

The Dellums administration would have to buck against the reactionary owning class forces that seek to criminalize working class New Afrikans, Latinos and Southeast Asians and demand more police and more repression to solve the socio-economic crisis in Oakland. More Police and repression will not solve the crisis it will only aggravate it further. More specifically, the Dellums administration would have to take a concrete stance against the criminalization of New Afrikan and oppressed nationality youth that has characterized the Brown administration. This would entail the repeal of all of the reactionary loitering, curfew, sideshow, and eviction laws in Oakland. Its core policy initiatives however, we believe must entail the following:
• The implementation of a real Community Control or Oversight Board to direct the Oakland Police Department. This Board must be directly elected and have the ability to conduct independent investigations and to indict both officers and their supervisors for misconduct and non-social (i.e. criminal) offensives.
• Resisting the PATRIOT Act and other anti-terror directives from the Federal government through active and deliberate non-compliance. This entails refusing to engage in the immigrant registrations and raids, and the illegal monitoring, tracking, wiretaps and surveillance perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security and other Federal entities.

Before a Dellums administration could implement this agenda his campaign would first have to endorse them. MXGM believes that progressives and radicals must make our endorsement of his campaign conditional on the adoption of these (and other) program, policy and agenda items. However, the progressive and radical forces in Oakland must be clear that even if Dellums agrees and adheres to these points as an individual, he and his administration will be powerless to implement them if there is no mass movement to give them strength and meaning. Likewise, should he and his administration deny or betray these interests, it will and must be the organized strength of the mass progressive movement that must force him and his administration to adhere to this agenda and its demands. Ultimately the progressive forces must organize themselves into a coherent force and movement, and it must be this force that must exercise power in its own name and interests when all is said and done. Ron Dellums and his popular progressive candidacy can and might be a catalyst for stimulating this initiative in Oakland, but ultimately it is not something he as an individual will lead or control, that is something we must do for ourselves.

International Reflections and Lessons
“I say this very deliberately, not even those of us who stand on this platform can tell you that the remedy in Guyana is that a new set of people must take over from the old set of people and we will run the system better. That is no solution to the problems of Guyana. The problem is much more fundamental than that. We are saying that working class people will get
justice only when they seize the initiative, when the mold themselves together. No body else can give it (liberation) to them as a gift. Someone who comes claiming to be a liberator is either deluding himself or trying to delude the people. He either doesn’t understand the process of real life, or he is trying to suggest that you do not understand it. And so long as we suffer from a warped concept of politics as being leadership, we are going to be in a lot of trouble.” – Walter Rodney, Guyanese Revolutionary Intellectual assassinated in 1980, taken from the film “the Sky’s Wild Noise”.
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Comments (Hide Comments)
by Socialist
The wealthy 70-year-old Democrat Ron Dellums was last earning a living as a lobbyist for the corporations. His autobiography's title, "Lying Down with the Lions" says it all about Ron Dellums. The Democrats exist to keep the Reds out of office, and that is precisely what Dellums, and his current successor, Barbara Lee, did and are now doing. They provide enough radical rhetoric and go through the motions of appearing to do something to get elected so that the workingclass has no representation, much less results, and capitalism prevails. All Democratic officials, for example, are staunch supporters of the US military base known as Israel. That immediately negates the rhetoric about challenging the military budget and claiming to be for peace.

The chant at the peace marches is "We remember Hiroshima; we remember Vietnam, Democratic Party, we know which side you're on." From Truman to Kennedy-Johnson and beyond, the twin party of capitalism, the Democrats, is on the same side as the Republicans.

It is amazing that this has to be said to a group that can come up with a decent agenda as stated above. The one problem with the above agenda is its nationalism. So long as you view the world as a color conflict rather than a class conflict, you will make no progress whatsoever and instead waste your time chasing after worthless Democrats like Ron Dellums who should be retired. We saw this happen with the Black Panthers. In addition, the American workingclass needs to develop the consciousness that we who sell our labor for less than $70,000 a year, usually much less, are the workingclass and we are one workingclass. It is the duty of serious workingclass organizations to provide that education by addressing all of us, regardless of color, as the workingclass.

The workingclass is international, as is the capitalist class and its lackeys like Ron Dellums, and any serious organization that wishes to advance the cause of the workingclass must call for more jobs for the entire workingclass, regardless of color. Only on the basis of class unity can there be any serious change.

The Dellums campaign hustle may very well endorse all of the above. We had this same routine with Willie Brown in San Francisco. Willie Brown was a lifelong, millionaire, pro-gambling, anti-rent control thug claiming to be some kind of liberal sitting in the California legislature. He never did anything liberal; his legal representation of civil rights protesters was just a paycheck and his bill to overturn the sodomy law in California, which finally passed in 1975 due not to Willie Brown but to our mass movement for peace in Vietnam which gave birth to today's gay movement, was simply to win the gay vote in San Francisco. As mayor, he proved to be viciously anti-gay.

Please keep away from the Democrats and please address the entire workingclass as the workingclass. We desperately need to build class unity in this country to make fundamental change.
by Oaktown old boy
So, what you're basically saying you want the new mayor to do is:

1) Return control of Oakland schools to the same corrupt gang that used race-based politics to produce a generation of illiterate thugs and call it a graduating class.

2) Stop all development except maybe welfare housing so that Oakland can return to what you apparently consider its natural state, i.e., a permanent slum.

3) Create jobs for people who essentially don't know how to do anything, including how to spell "African."

4) Do away with all policing and turn the city over to gang-bangers, but only as long as they are "New Afrikan" gangbangers, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean. Have you got some kind of problem with old Africans, or Mexicans, or Chinese people, or Caucasians, or any of the other myriad ethnic groups who also live in Oakland? Maybe you and your minuscule and mini-brained movement should fuck off to New Afrika, wherever the hell that is.
by Steve
No surprise here. These professional thugs are the same crowd that has ruined Oakland for 30 years. Now they are upset that change is happening and no one is listening to them anymore. Wal-Mart's about to open, providing a place for low income people to buy things that are not 50% higher at the "locally owned, independent" ripoff store. Housing is being built that is not going to be an instant slum full of drug addicts and dealers. Schools are being run by a competent authority who is not afraid of or beholden to the Oakland teachers' rapid Marxist union thugs. For the first time in decades, Oakland has a future. And it doesn't include the likes of the Leftover Left.
by Hey Steve-you're a bitch and a coward
You always come and vomit your right wing hit and run comments on this site, but refuse to engage in a coherent dialogue or debate when the facts start flying--you are a troll and a keyboard warrior
by Oaktown old boy
Where are these "facts" you speak of?

All you've vomited up yourself is the following:

<<You always come and vomit your right wing hit and run comments on this site, but refuse to engage in a coherent dialogue or debate when the facts start flying--you are a troll and a keyboard warrior>>

So basically all you've done is a bit of name-calling. What sort of "coherent dialogue or debate" is possible in response? "Neener neener, you're a bigger one"?
by to &quot;Oaktown old boy&quot;-defender of &q
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/04/1732897_comment.php#1742800
That link shows Steve blindly sticking to his opinions re" S.F.Needle Exchange even in the face of evidence/facts-- the one time he did actually engage in a discussion---but that is an exception as he usually makes hit and run/sarcastic/antagonistic comments and doesn't repsond to postings that refute his assertions
by me (scyjlcoleman.yahoo.com)
I am for anyone who is about reform!

We have to make changes, starting with our children.
Are we molding our youth into monsters?

We are responsible for ourselves, though you can hold people accountable, we ultamately must organize for change.

We must start with our children, after all we don't won't millions of ignorant, uncompassionate, heartless people running our lives and communities.

We are all responsible. My philosophy is take care of yourself first, then your family (children, etc) and then our community, last but not least the world.

I want who ever represents me and my family to be focused on the youth, particularly the very young preschool age children because that is the most critical time. That is were it begins so it is important that we are loving and nuturing our children.

There is no excuse for all of this violence in Oakland it breaks my heart to see this. Does anyone care?

Lets take back our communities!
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