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Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (New York: Monthly Review Press 2013)
A little known document from the mid-1960s provided the labour-left with a blueprint for realizing the most radical promises of the civil rights movement. Reflecting the ideas of its socialist authors, the "Freedom Budget for All Americans" promised the elimination of poverty by ending unemployment and providing increased access to education, housing, and healthcare. Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates trace the long history of the "Freedom Budget" and argue for its continuing relevance in an era of austerity politics, growing inequality, and rising social unrest.
Activists and scholars, many of whom had worked together to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, developed the Freedom Budget, which called for $180 billion in federal spending over ten years and went far beyond Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs in addressing the root causes of poverty. Following the passage of the landmark civil rights bills of the mid-1960s, supporters of the "Freedom Budget" viewed it...