Co-Publisher Glen Ford delivered the following remarks to the Labor Plenary at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition 33rd Annual Conference, in Chicago, Illinois, June 29.

During the last couple years we’ve been hearing a lot about a “global clash of civilizations.” We have our own clash of civilizations going on, right here in the United States.

Essentially, civilization is the sum total of the expressed dreams of a people. It is their version – and vision – of what life is supposed to be.

But in the United States, only one very small group is empowered to dream its dreams – to build its version of civilization.

This group sees neighborhoods and cities and countries – the whole world – as its private Field of Dreams – places where they can make ever-increasing profits, at ever-diminishing cost to themselves. Forget about the rest of us.

Wal-Mart is the “model” for this brand of civilization. They lock up everybody else’s dreams in their Big Box. And, whatever they do, no matter how destructive – they call that, “development.”

Normal people, regular Americans, have their own “civilized” dreams, including people in the inner cities. They walk the streets of their neighborhoods, saying:

“There oughta be an entertainment complex, right over there,” or…

“This is a perfect place for a restaurant – if they’d just move the police station a little closer,” or…

“They need to build some housing, here – bring some life to this area.”

What these everyday people are doing, is urban planning. Normal people are keenly interested in development. But regular people are given no reason to believe that their dreams have any connection to “development” – or to the political process. It’s just…day dreaming.

Instead, we have allowed corporations to decide the fate of the cities. We hardly speak of democratic development. Even now, as the cities become more valuable than they have been in nearly a half-century, we still fail to tap the people’s dreams.

What we are left with, as a result – is Wal-Mart.

And, not just Wal-Mart, but the Wal-Mart “model” – which is applauded on Wall Street and at the White House as the way that American corporations should operate.

If we are to defeat the Wal-Mart model, we must become the enablers of the people’s dreams.

We must do that, by building a movement based on democratic development – development of the cities for the benefit of those who live in them.

We must give the people the tools, the information, and access to specialized disciplines, so that they can dream – and build – their city.

Labor is uniquely positioned to nurture such a movement, especially Black labor.

The imbalance in the struggle against the Wal-Mart model is about more than just money. It is also about information. Corporations gather data all the time, for their own purposes. Yet no city in this country has anything that could accurately be called an overall plan for development. And no major American city has ever performed a real audit of its assets, public and private.

Corporations hold all the information cards, and manipulate all the numbers, because development is considered the business of business – not the people’s business.

That’s what we have to change, if we truly want to beat the Wal-Mart model.

We must bring together real urban specialists and planners, to do audits of the public and private assets of the cities, to assess the actual potentialities of these places – in close collaboration with those activists who are daily grappling with corporate developers, in localities all across this country.

For Black labor in particular, this is the unfinished business of our people’s historical struggle.

Building a movement for democratic development is also the context in which to discuss how union pension funds should be invested – investments that should be made with a larger Plan in hand: a democratic plan for urban development.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan came to power with a vision of a Shining City on a Hill. You and I know that Reagan’s vision did not include us - that we didn’t even live in his imagined City on a Hill.

Our job in the fight against the Wal-Mart model is to raise up a people’s vision of their city – one that shines in their imaginations – a dream that they will fight for. Because, in the end, all great movements are sustained by dreams.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) played a key role in organizing the Labor Plenary at the Rainbow/PUSH conference.

July 15 2004
Issue 99

is published every Thursday.