What good is an equity plan with no follow through?
Liberals have become extremely proficient at making promises to the constituent base of people of color. The theme song is “come vote for me so that me and my people get paid to distribute a few tax dollars to you,” not “come fly with me to prosperity.”
Betsy Hodges, our incoming mayor, made the traditional liberal promises last Monday, January 6, 2014, in her inaugural. Under the guise of equity, the constituent base, people of color were told to wait on another five-year plan. The Soviet Union communist five- and 10-year plans were not funny. With the African American community no longer having access to City Hall, it’s still not funny: plans as promises made with no intention of being kept.
Someone pointed out the other day that the Bush Foundation gave a $100,000 grant to a member of city council to develop an equity plan. As we can’t get an equity plan implemented for the Viking stadium, how for the entire city?
The Somali community announced (January 5, 2014, Star Tribune) that it has been rewarded with a special Somali Advisory Committee attached to the mayor’s office. And yet, despite all the pain and broken promises that slave-descended African American communities endured over the decades, no previous mayor — liberal or conservative — created a Native American or African American Special Advisory Group to the mayor of the city of Minneapolis.
The City Council could not muster enough votes last Monday to allow 100 citizens to have input on a proposed equity plan. The suggestion made: “You people” do it through the committee structure, not public testimonies. So, even the council rule of only two minutes per person never happened.
This is how the least of our citizens (in this case a powerless Black community) is left dangling, despite the funding and expectation of the Bush Foundation that the City Council will begin to craft an equity plan. The waiting for a stadium equity plan now shifts to waiting for an equity plan for the building of a light-rail system (that represents 100s if not 1,000s of jobs in North Minneapolis that, at best, cannot begin until 2017), and then shifts to wait for the next big or small things.
The equity plan/promise also talks about housing and education. Nellie Stone Johnson always said “no education, no jobs, no housing.” And yet, after the equity study report of October 2010, the current mayor and six members of the city council did nothing to address the inequities that were pointed out in the $500,000 taxpayer study on the lack of equity access and opportunity in the city of Minneapolis. So why should we think they will now?
The observation from people aware of what did and didn’t happen have every right to say, in a public manner, that we can expect nothing but broken promises in a broken city with broken morals that goes to great lengths to pretend they care for the least of our citizens and children of color.
Clearly, their pretense is as false as their mission. No promises kept. No expectant future. That is the sad, immoral, and corrupt Minneapolis Equity Plan. The failed $10 Trillion War on Poverty begun 50 years to beat poverty which is now at a 50-year record high. President Lyndon B. Johnson, January 8, 1968: “unconditional war on poverty in America to attack causes not just symptoms of poverty;…a fair chance to develop their own capacities;…an investment…return its cost manifold to the entire economy;…to replace their despair with opportunity.”
Stay tuned.
For Ron’s hosted radio and TV show’s broadcast times, solution papers, books and archives, go to www.TheMinneapolisStory.com. To order his books go to Beacon on the Hill Press.
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