APRIL 5th National Teach-in!

(This is all taken right from the Teach-In flyers)

FIGHT BACK USA:


CORPORATE GREED, DEBT, AUSTERITY

APRIL 5th, 2011

Content Themes for Local Teach-in

If you are organizing a campus/local event on April 5th, you might considering the themes listed below. These themes form the core of the NYC live stream webcast Teach-in. The order is suggestive of the logic of the widespread crisis. All themes overlap of course, but this is a rubric for thinking about how to “connect the dots” for your audience.

Most importantly, the final theme “Into Action” is designed to get your group thinking about local action strategies that coordinate with existing campaigns around:

1) Anti-austerity

(union fight back on collective bargaining rights, teacher and other public sector union campaigns, protest of cuts to social services for the poor , war/war spending protests…)

2) Anti-bank protests

(anti-foreclosure movement, student loan/debt protests, bank bailout protests…)

Help make this the most memorable spring for US social justice movements in decades!

THEMES

CORPORATE GREED

 Income Inequality ( the growing income inequality gap that characterizes the US and global economy)

 Wealth Transfer (bailouts of banks and corporations) with tax dollars from working people people who slide deeper into crisis.

 Corporate Tax Breaks and Rising Profits (tax policy and relief designed by and for a rich and tiny minority, while starving essential services --at all levels of government--for the majority)

DEBT

 National Debt (war spending, bank bailouts, tax-breaks for the rich)

 Predatory Lending by Banks

 Mortgage Crisis

 Student Loan Crisis

 Consumer Debt Crisis

AUSTERITY

 Manufactured Crisis, Manufactured Solution

 Austerity as Myth (pretense for assault on civil society)

 Assault on Collective Bargaining and Union Rights (impact on worker’s rights of all workers going forward)

 Assault on Social Service Spending at all Levels of Government (impact on the poorest Americans)

 Demonizing Public Employees (teachers, civil servants, higher education)

 Sacraficing the Many for the Few

INTO ACTION!

 Identify Existing Local/Regional Campaigns (anti-austerity; workers rights/union campaigns; anti-bank actions)

 Include Representatives from these campaigns in your Teach-In (utilize local campaigners as speakers)

 Focus on Campus-Community Connections (strategize as to how campus energy and bodies can be leveraged for existing efforts; think through how different sectors --state workers, students, homeowner…-- posses different points of institutional leverage. Consider how, where and when direct action can be most effectively used to maximize different tyes and points of leverage.

 ACT ! (decide an action focus and start ORGANIZING!

Help make this the most memorable

spring for US social justice movements in decades!