Minnie Bruce Pratt

New Book--"Anti-Capitalist Poetics in Action"

2011-02-10T16:01:00.003-05:00

Still working on health, which is why I haven't posted here in so long.

But I'm launching a new book. It includes many "Daily Draft" poems available on my poetry blog--

And it is political poetry that I started writing after I read The Communist Manifesto for the first time--very late in life!

I fell in love with the beautiful poetic language in The Manifesto--and the clarity and truth of its message.

I said to myself, "If Marx and Engels can bring poetry to their economics, what would happen if I tried to write their economics into my poetry?"

Inside the Money Machine is the result--poetry for the "immense majority'—for those who work for a living, out of the house or at home, from the laundromat to the classroom, from the blue-collar construction sites to the white-collar desk jobs. These fresh, gritty and passionate poems are about the people who survive and resist inside "the money machine" of the 21^st -century capitalism.

http://www.mbpratt.org/insidemoneymachine.html

“Take Back Commencement Rally” at SU Against Banks!

2010-04-24T06:17:00.009-04:00

Students at Syracuse University held a chanting, pot-banging, marching “Take Back Commencement Rally” on April 16 to oppose the school administration's choice of the CEO of JP Morgan Chase as their graduation speaker. The bank is the second largest in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the world. Here is my talk at the rally. For more on this struggle see also:
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/students_0415/index.html
http://www.workers.org/2010/us/syracuse_0429/

Thank you for asking me to speak at this important rally—you are doing such great organizing! I want to begin by reading a poem I wrote for the seniors, to honor your struggle against having the CEO of the second largest bank in the U.S. selected as commencement speaker for your class of 2010:

Whose voice comes through me now?
For years I just repeated the words.
Well, that’s how you learn as a child,
the palaver problem. After a while
as I moved my mouth I heard what
I was saying. Some of my students
are saying they don’t want to listen
to a CEO at their graduation, they
reject a banking concept of education,
they aren’t blank accounts to deposit
ideas or money into, they want to hear
someone they don’t owe money to,
not JPMorgan Chase rich, richer, richest
on interest they’ll pay for fifteen years,
the $27,455 loans on average, the rage
they are commencing with, and what
jobs? Where will they live? Their cars?
The street? They say predator and thief,
their work stolen before they pass Go,
monopoly capital in control of the board.
This is the future we’ve been told, hoard,
and crush the other. But there is the sudden
sitting at our desks when we see our hands
digitally click like a marionette’s sticks,
raising the questions: And whose work done?
What do we want from our opposable thumbs?
Not games, and not to build thick bank vault
walls, set inside our work’s locked-up worth.
Now these young hands up, demanding halt.

http://mbpdailydrafts.blogspot.com/2010/04/graduation.html

By rejecting this CEO as your speaker, you have rejected the “banking theory of education” first described by Paulo Freire, the great Brazilian educator and socialist—
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed

Instead you are leading in the intellectual and political discussion of the fate of education in the U.S. by raising a fundamental question posed by the invitation to Dimon—

In what ways are corporate interests and the goal of profit-making determining the process of education now? How is the profit-making of capitalism actually closing down paths of questioning and rejecting attempts to look at new ways of shaping a more just future?

And you are also showing that the lives and futures of students are directly connected to the lives of millions of working people—in the U.S. and globally—

The comments on your petition make that connection—
http://www.petitiononline.com/SUGRADUA/petition.html

The heartrending and passionate statements by people citing suicides, homelessness and family suffering that resulted from bank foreclosures, while students graduate with crushing debt, into an economy that has been devastated by bank speculation—all of these practices designed to wring profit in any way out of the hard-earned income of working people—

In 2005 JP Morgan admitted that in its earlier form it had profited from the heinous U.S. slave trade—that it had actually held as property 1250 enslaved people. Lawyers working on a class action suit against Morgan & similarly implicated U.S. banks and corporations estimate that their total profits from the slave trade would amount to over $2 trillion today.
http://www.workers.org/2005/us/reparations_0224/index.html

The year Dimon became CEO at JP Morgan the bank announced a $5 million scholarship fund as compensation—one example Dimon gives for it being a “good bank”—

But that scholarship was mere public relations—a cover-up for the actual role of the banking system—just as Dimon’s commencement speech will be another pr effort—

Predecessors banks of JP Morgan financed chattel slavery—and claimed the ownerships of thousands of human beings, whose labor and lives were being brutally exploited—

Then with the development of industrial capital—Morgan bankrolled the railroads & steel mills and other industries where millions of workers suffered and died in poverty in wage slavery—using people to make products and compensating workers for only a fraction of the value of what those workers produced—with the industrial owners living more lavishly than ancient kings off the profits—

And now JP Morgan and other banks are financing the wars of capital exploitation the U.S. is waging worldwide—where more people are suffering and dying—to keep the profit system in place—where decisions are made by a ruling class handful to try to determine the destiny of the vast laboring majority of humanity—
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=9848

Those who fought to abolish slavery in the U.S.—abolitionists—were shouted down and attacked and told slavery was unchangeable—but slavery was ended. Human beings ended slavery through cataclysmic struggle.

Now bankers, politicians, the media, and, yes, sometimes, teachers! tell you that capitalism as an economic system will and should never end—

But your organizing represents the hope that we can build a future not constructed on profit-making—on wage-slavery—on the theft by the few of the labor made by the hands of the many—Your organizing represents the hope that instead we will build on a new foundation where those who do the work of the world decide and create a system that gives us
“bread and roses” for all—food, homes, jobs, health care, and friends, poetry and dancing!

How do we get there? We keep organizing!

May 1st Rally in Union Square, New York City, for jobs and all rights for immigrants!
http://may1.info/index.shtml

Bank Out People Not Banks!
http://bailoutpeople.org/

Stop the wars on the rest of the world—not just Iraq and Afghanistan, but the threatened war against Iran—and the increasing U.S. military operations in many nations in Africa—
Troops Out Now Coalition!
http://www.troopsoutnow.org/

Stop the war at home! Stop all foreclosures!
Stop attacks on women’s reproductive rights and LGBT lives!
http://www.iacenter.org/buffalo/

Connect nationwide to students and workers joining together to fight the economic crisis—
Stop the budget cuts! Cancel all student debt! A job is a right!
Alabama: http://www.workers.org/2010/us/alabama_bus_drivers_0318/index.html
Arizona: http://www.workers.org/2009/us/arizona_0212/index.html
California: http://www.workers.org/2010/us/berkeley_0422/
Georgia: http://www.workers.org/2010/us/sodexo_0422/index.html

Let’s put our hands up saying halt—but let’s do it for real now, hands up, say:
Stop, stop, stop the profit war on people!!

SU Students Protest Commencement Speaker

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010

Stop neo-facist hate! Rally in Buffalo, NY, 4/12--

2010-04-11T17:03:00.001-04:00

There has been an increasing right-wing campaign of hate in the U.S., led by the so-called "Tea Party" movement.

I grew up as a white girl and young woman in the segregated South in the 1950s and 60s. I can tell you that the racist, anti-gay, and anti-woman language and actions of this neo-facist group is shockingly familiar to me from that violent era, when the powers-that-were, the ruling white elite, preached their supremacy.

Only mass action, led in even the smallest towns and rural counties by people from the Black community, ended segregation.

Public mass action is what is needed today to end the hateful scapegoating message of this current right-wing campaign, and to point to the corporations, banks, and system of profit that are actually responsible for the dire economic crisis casting so many people into fearful conditions.

Join the rally against neo-fascist hate in Buffalo, NY, tomorrow (4/12) sponsored by the International Action Center.

Leslie and I plan to drive over (hir health permitting) and hope to see and meet you there, with others in the area!

For info on place & time--
http://www.iacenter.org/buffalo/
or Facebook the Buffalo Iac

Students Fight to Stop Bank "Takeover" of Graduation.

2010-04-10T19:04:00.005-04:00

Some of my students at Syracuse University are organizing against the CEO banker scheduled as their 2010 Commencement speaker. I wrote a poem for them, and that's up at http://mbpdailydrafts.blogspot.com/2010/04/graduation.html

But for more journalistic details, take a look at the news story I did on their struggle--

http://www.workers.org/2010/us/students_0415

For more up-to-date news, and to find out how to support the students,
visit their Facebook page: "Take Back Commencement"

Celebrate International Working Women's Month!

2010-03-27T19:16:00.006-04:00

To celebrate, I'm putting up my first entry on this blog!

I hope to post news of love and struggle here when I can--

Some years back I wrote up a brief history of the origins and revival
of International Women's Day:

"1970: Reviving the Fighting Spirit of International Women's Day"
http://www.workers.org/2005/us/womens-day-0303/index.html

And "fighting spirit" definitely describes how working women are
uniting in the midst of the current capitalist economic and military crises:

Check out the People's Video Network of women leading an IWD protest
in New York City:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE1YE0pcI3Y

For a roundup of world-wide protests to mark March 8, the 100th anniversary
of IWD--International Women's Day--

http://www.workers.org/women/international_womens_day_0325/index.html