Democratic Agenda
More than 1,200 people attended the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee initiated Democratic Agenda Conference held November 16-18, 1979, at the International Inn and Metropolitan AM Church in Washington D.C.. The conference focused on "corporate power'; as the key barrier to "economic and political democracy," concepts many Democratic Agenda participants defined as "socialism.'
The Democratic Agenda meetings attempted to develop "anti-corporate alternatives" through influencing the direction of the Democratic Party during the period leading to the July 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York.
Keynote speakers included Washington, DC, Mayor Marion Barry, Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee leader Mildred Jeffrey and Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee chairman Michael Harrington.[1]
Harrington said that the Democratic Agenda alliance hoped to control as many as one-third of the delegates to the Democratic Party National Convention. "We have to see to it that when that convention meets in New York, it is an anticorporate convention,"
Harrington said, "We must light a fire and turn this crisis into a movement for economic and social justice... We must take this nation as far beyond Roosevelt as he took it beyond Hoover.
References
- ↑ Information Digest, December 14, 1979, page 372
