Capitalism in Crisis: tearing down poverty, building economic alternatives & a solidarity economy Track US Social Forum Workshops

Join us in manifesting sacred connection, love and prayer through a living mandala offering to nourish the land and spirits on local community project land.

Sacred Service Living Mandala

Panel will initiate discussion on state budget crisis and how popular fightbacks can rebuild public space.

Socialist Activists Rebuilding Public Space Through Fighting the State Budget Crisis

Will you join us in the middle of a whirlwind? In cooperation with other organizers and activists, we will present during this two-hour workshop, on the importance of research to movement building as we seek a return radical community organizing—toward making a revolution possible!

Join in the Whirlwind: A Cooperative Panel on Research and Movement Building

It is time for a just transition past the boom and bust coal economy of Central Appalachia - join us as we discuss a better path.

Appalachian Economy in Transition

Human rentals, the standard employment relationship, violate people’s inalienable rights and must be abolished. www.abolishhumanrentals.org

Abolish Human Rentals: Inalienable Rights Revived

Participants will examine how welfare reform has negatively impacted families in poverty & how welfare reform has influenced the mainstream's myths & stereotypes about families on welfare. We'll examine what we do locally and nationally to organize around welfare rights and anti-poverty issues.

Women Fighting Poverty: Stories from the Frontlines

This workshop will explore the Right To The City NYC's Condo Conversion Campaign, which is aiming to convert vacant luxury condominiums in NYC into low-income housing. This workshop will also explore the participatory action research the Alliance has engaged in to support our campaign work. In August, 2009, RTTC-NYC released the Right to the City-NYC Policy Platform, which includes 33 policy demands most important to our low-income membership and serves as the guiding document for the work of the Alliance. From the policy demands listed in our platform, RTTC-NYC’s membership prioritized campaign work on the Condo Conversion Campaign. To inform the Alliance’s Condo Conversion Campaign, RTTC-NYC engaged in a participatory action research project in which over 150 members of the Alliance canvassed their neighborhoods to locate and document information about vacant condominiums. In May, 2010, this information was compiled and released in the report, Homes without People, People without Homes. The report will share lessons learned and strategies used in the work of RTTC-NYC.

Right to the City-NYC’s Policy Platform & Condo Conversion Campaign

A divers group of students who have had heir free speech taken away from them for being political.

Defending Free Speech for Political Groups on Campuses

In May of 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the WPA, the largest public works program in U.S. history. The WPA created 8.5 million jobs during the depression of the 1930s. 75 years later, do the lessons of the WPA offer a fightback strategy to counter the deepening poverty and unemployment facing the US working class? What can be done to spark a resurgence to push back against corporate lay-offs and plant closing, right-wing Tea Party racism and bigotry and government tax breaks and bail-outs of banks and big business? There are more than 30 million unemployed and underemployed people in the country today. Everyone from youth graduating from high school and college, veterans returning from imperialist wars, long-time workers unsure about their future, seniors forced back into the job market, immigrants facing job discrimination and police harassment -- all need jobs or income now! It's time to say no: to a jobless recovery -- to an economy based on permanent high unemployment and low wages — to trillions of $ for Wall St., and trillions of $ for war, but nothing but joblessness, foreclosures, evictions, layoffs, low wages, union-busting, hunger and homelessness for workers and the poor. We need a real WPA-type program that is big enough to ensure that those who need work get work — work that is socially useful, that pays union wages and benefits. This wide-ranging discussion will bring together the experience of youth organizers in Detroit, Baltimore and Raleigh, trade unionists from San Francisco, historians and Bail Out the People Movement organizers – all of whom are building grass-roots support for a massive federally-funded jobs program that eliminates profit-skimming by corporations by directly paying workers to build and repair infrastructure, rehabilitate schools, housing and hospitals, build and beautify parks, walking and bike trails, create public art and advance community participation in culture and sports and so much more needed work.

How to Create 30 Million Jobs Now:The Lessons of the WPA