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The Wealthy and Powerful Aid Social and Economic Justice Activists

10 Business Leaders that Just Say No to Income Equality

by Vince Lamb
Flickr/creative commons

A recent report from Standard & Poor’s (S&P) led us to examine more closely how income inequality dampens growth for rich in poor alike. Conservatives, as well as progressives, are beginning to better understand some of the underlying causes, and what can be done. Safety net programs such as social security and food stamps are not the culprit. Actually at fault are things like tax cuts for the highest earners, the tendency of rich people to accumulate wealth for the sake of accumulation without putting some back into the economy, and growing gaps in educational opportunity which inhibit social mobility.

Capital and Main collaborated with The Huffington Post to spotlight some powerful people who already understand the problem and are available now to be tapped as resources, sponsors, and donors in the struggle for social and economic justice. We have paraphrased it slightly (with credit) and added some hyperlinks to help you on your way to greater advocacy on this important issue.

Here it is. Go get ’em!

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream co-founder Ben Cohen founded TrueMajority to stem the financial bailout of banks, and Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities to help transfer taxpayer money from military programs to education and health care.
Multinational investment manager Morris Pearl is a member of Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength which favors the end of tax cuts for the wealthy.
Library software entrepreneur Stephen M. Silberstein endorses corporate tax rates that tie CEO pay to average worker income, and executive-produced Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All.
Early Amazon.com investor Nick Hanauer has gone on record saying that the middle class consumer is the driver of job creation, advocating for higher median incomes instead of tax cuts for people with high incomes.
Republican Ron Unz seeks to raise the minimum wage because it is a conservative issue: If low-wage workers have more money, taxpayers will have to pay less for social programs.
Former CEO of AT&T Broadband Leo Hindery, Jr., supports the right of all Americans to join a union.
Board member of major corporations Erskine Bowles favors repealing tax breaks for companies moving jobs overseas, expanding “wage insurance” programs to give support to workers forced to work lower paying jobs, and creating nonprofit community development corporations.
Retired civil rights attorney and major Democratic Party donor Guy T. Saperstein is a leading advocate for public option health care, and cautions against a possible President Hillary Clinton because of her close ties to Wall Street.
Shout! Factory CEO and philanthropist Richard Foos helps numerous community support organizations such as Chrysalis, which helps to train and employ the long-term unemployed.
Investment banker turned Columbia University Professor Eric J. Schoenberg joined the debate about economic inequality by revealing his own tax records in an article for the Huffington Post, pointing out that while the average American family with an income of $55,000 a year pays an effective 5.5 percent tax, Schoenberg pays only one percent.

Are you sleeping through a revolution?

Portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Chris Tank located in the MLK Jr. Memorial Library, Washington, DC
Flickr/Creative Commons

“One of the great liabilities of history is the fact that all too many people find themselves amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to achieve the new attitudes and the new mental outlook that the new situation demands.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Springfield College Commencement , June 14, 1964

It was empowering this week to re-read and reflect on an oft-overlooked commencement address by Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered 50 years ago at Springfield College.

Just days before the speech, King was arrested with a group of demonstrators attempting to eat at a restaurant and sent to St. Johns County Jail, an infamous building that housed many civil rights pioneers for non-violent demonstrations in and around St. Augustine, Florida. He wasn’t sure he would get out in time to go to Springfield, Massachusetts, for this commencement address, or to Yale University where he was scheduled to speak the following day.

Here are some excerpts from Springfield College address, but we urge you to read it in full.

The theme of this speech cautions all social change advocates and activists to make sure they are not “sleeping through a revolution” by not doing everything possible each day to make the world a better place. He urged his listeners first to adopt a world perspective to understand the breadth of our collective social ills. Next? Wipe out poverty. And, third, recognize the “urgency of the moment.”

As long as there is poverty in this world no one can be totally secure. Somehow we are all tied together in this great system of humanity. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be; and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: “No man is an island entire in itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,” and then he goes on toward the end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

When we recognize this, King goes on to say, and “are concerned about our brothers who are less fortunate, then we are remaining awake through a great revolution.”

[I]f we are to remain awake through this great revolution, we must work passionately and unrelentingly to remove the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation and from the world.

In exposing the modern problem of failing to “recognize the urgency of the moment,” King’s words cross time, just as pertinent today as they were 50 years ago.

There are people all around who are saying, “Cool off.” There are individuals all around who are saying, “You are pushing things too fast.” And they are saying only time can solve the problem. The only answer that we can give to the myth of time is that time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation have used time much more effectively than the forces of good will. And I am absolutely convinced that the Wallace’s, the extreme rightists and the individuals committed to negative ends have used time much more effectively in our nation than the individuals committed to positive ends. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people who will bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time. Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals . . .time itself becomes an ally of the primitive and insurgent forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation.

The speech happens to elucidate the roots and foundations on which VenusPlusX stands, articulated in our recently release of our Manifesto for a New Age of Sexual Freedom, which begins: “The New Age of Sexual Freedom is synonymous with the end of sexism and racism (the greatest form of sexual oppression), and the end of nationalism for the purposes of war (the greatest form of racism), in the shortest amount of time (because we are killing each other).”

We hope social justice advocates everywhere will be inspired by this speech and more of King’s writings, and reflect on what more then can do, how many other people they can awaken to their cause, and how we can all avoid sleeping through the revolution.

Photo by Anne Adrian
Flickr/Creative Commons