Blog of the Week:
LEO Weekly
Louisville's Alternative Paper
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By Randy Shannon, CCDS
choice "Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to
just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against
unemployment."
- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
I. Introduction
The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest
percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is
the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became
public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new
level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that
targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II. |
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Order Our
Full Employment Booklets
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Capitalism may well collapse under its own excesses, but what would one
propose to replace it? Margaret Thatcher's mantra was TINA...There Is No
Alternative. David Schweickart's vision of "Economic Democracy"
proposes a serious alternative. Even more fundamentally, it opens the
door to thinking about alternatives. His may or may not turn out to be
the definitive "successor system," but he is a leader in breaking out of
the box. |
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Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion
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Solidarity Economy:
What It's All About
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Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging
Edited by Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber
$45, Syracuse University Press
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Tropic of Chaos
By Christian Parenti 
Nation Books $18.95 at Powell's |
Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Verso
Paperback
List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $8.00
Buy Now
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Carl Davidson's Latest Book:
New Paths to Socialism
Essays on Mondragon, Marx, Gramsci and the Green and Solidarity Economies |
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Race, Class, Jobs
and Voting Rights
We're the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism...Do you have friends who should see this? Pass it on...Do you have a blog of your own? Others you love to read every day? Well, this is a place where you can share access to them with the rest of your comrades. Just pick your greatest hits for the week and send them to us at carld717@gmail.com! Most of all, it's urgent that you oppose austerity, make solidarity and end the wars! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom... |
How Prisons Imperil Black Voting Power
By Zoe Sullivan New America Media Sep 01, 2011 - NEW ORLEANS-Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is one of the most notorious prisons in the United States. Sometimes called "The Farm" because of its plantation-like set-up, it houses almost 5,300 men, of whom 3,900 are serving life sentences, 968 face terms of 40 years or more, and 83 are on death row. The prison is located 90 minutes north of Baton Rouge in the verdant countryside near the Mississippi River and the tourist town of St. Francisville. For purposes of redistricting, the penitentiary and the town-whose population is approximately one-third that of the prison-are in the same state senate district. But because inmates can't vote, they have no say in how the state or parish is governed. Thus, roughly one-eighth of the district's residents are politically voiceless. For criminal justice advocates, this discrepancy between eligible voters and counted population is a stark example of how prisons are skewing Louisiana's political process, shifting power from urban areas to rural ones and further disenfranchising African-American communities suffering from the historic legacy of racism and the recent calamity of Hurricane Katrina. "As far as we're concerned, this recreates the plantation system," says Rosana Cruz, associate director of Voice of the Ex-Offender (VOTE), a New Orleans-based organization dedicated to reintegrating formerly incarcerated people. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Louisiana has the highest per capita male prison population in the United States, with African-Americans incarcerated at much higher rates than Whites. Angola's Black population, for example, is 78 percent. Roughly 1 out of 2 blacks in the state House electoral district that includes Angola are ineligible to vote....
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Confessions of a GOP Hit Man Who Left 'the Cult':
 3 Things Everyone Must Know About
the Lunatic-Filled Republican Party
By Mike Lofgren
TruthOut.org, Sept 5, 2011
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization....
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Defense Spending: The Worst Way to Make Jobs
by: Dina Rasor
Truthout
Sept 7, 2011 - I see it coming. As President Obama gives his speech on how important it is for the government and the country to produce more jobs, and as the budget noose starts to tighten on all government programs, including the Department of Defense (DoD) this time, the DoD will flood the Congress with charts and statistics on how cutting the DoD will also cut important defense manufacturing jobs across the US.
Each member of Congress will be notified about how many jobs will be cut for any given weapon system, and this is especially effective because the DoD has becomethe master of spreading weapon production contractor and subcontractor jobs across as many districts and states as possible to get the weapons funded in the first place.
The DoD will politically tout that it is an acceptable place in the government to "stimulate" the economy with manufacturing jobs, and this may prove to be irresistible to lawmakers because it is just so easy to get increased defense funding passed, even by the Democrats. According to Businessweek, "Including the cost of the wars, defense spending has doubled in the past decade, to $691 billion in fiscal 2010 from $316 billion in fiscal 2001." And since the DoD budget has already doubled since 9/11, cutting it will bring howls of protest that it will lead to more unemployment, especially in the manufacturing area.
As we drawdown troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the defenders of the DoD budget, which unfortunately includes the new Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, will want to transfer any money saved back into their favorite endeavor: weapons production. In a recent article in US News, they have already started that chorus that cutting DoD is cutting into important jobs.....
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Steal This Idea: North Dakota Fights
Wall Street's Influence With a State Bank
By Ellen Brown
YES! Magazine
Sept 4, 2011 - In an article in The New York Times on August 19th titled "The North Dakota Miracle," Catherine Rampell writes:
"Forget the Texas Miracle. Let's instead take a look at North Dakota, which has the lowest unemployment rate and the fastest job growth rate in the country. "According to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics today, North Dakota had an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent in July-that's just over a third of the national rate (9.1 percent), and about a quarter of the rate of the state with the highest joblessness (Nevada, at 12.9 percent). "North Dakota has had the lowest unemployment in the country (or was tied for the lowest unemployment rate in the country) every single month since July 2008. "Its healthy job market is also reflected in its payroll growth numbers. . . . [Y]ear over year, its payrolls grew by 5.2 percent. Texas came in second, with an increase of 2.6 percent.
Why is North Dakota doing so well? For one of the same reasons that Texas has been doing well: oil.
Oil is certainly a factor, but it is not what has put North Dakota over the top. Alaska has roughly the same population as North Dakota and produces nearly twice as much oil, yet unemployment in Alaska is running at 7.7 percent. Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming have all benefited from a boom in energy prices, with Montana and Wyoming extracting much more gas than North Dakota has. The Bakken oil field stretches across Montana as well as North Dakota, with the greatest Bakken oil production coming from Elm Coulee Oil Field in Montana. Yet Montana's unemployment rate, like Alaska's, is 7.7 percent.
A number of other mineral-rich states were initially not affected by the economic downturn, but they lost revenues with the later decline in oil prices. North Dakota is the only state to be in continuous budget surplus since the banking crisis of 2008. Its balance sheet is so strong that it recently reduced individual income taxes and property taxes by a combined $400 million, and is debating further cuts. It also has the lowest foreclosure rate and lowest credit card default rate in the country, and it has had NO bank failures in at least the last decade.
If its secret isn't oil, what is so unique about the state? North Dakota has one thing that no other state has: its own state-owned bank....
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The Path to Left Unity - Quebec Style
The following article is scheduled for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Alternate Routes. It is an expanded and updated version of a presentation to the third annual conference of the Critical Social Research Collaborative, held March 5, 2011, at Carleton University, Ottawa, on the theme "Varieties of Socialism, Varieties of Approaches". Part II (below) will discuss the evolution of Québec Solidaire since its founding.
By Richard Fidler
A number of attempts have been made in recent years to launch new parties and processes, addressing a broad left or popular constituency, that are programmatically anti-neoliberal if not anti-capitalist, some of them self-identifying as part of an international effort to create a "socialism of the 21st century". They vary widely in origins, size, social composition and influence.
The process has gone furthest in a number of Latin American countries; among the best known are the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), led by Hugo Chávez, and the Bolivian Movement Towards Socialism-Political Instrument of the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP), led by Evo Morales.
Efforts in Western Europe, such as Italy's Refoundation Party, Germany's Die Linke, or France's Parti de Gauche originated in part in splits in the traditional parties of "20th century socialism", in avowed rejection of both Stalinism and social democracy. Many of these parties include members who in the past were associated with one or another of the Marxist currents identified historically with Trotsky's anti-Stalinist legacy. In France, the Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste (NPA) was initiated under their aegis.
Parallel developments have not yet occurred in the United States or Canada, where anticapitalist ideas and movements have less presence in the political landscape today than they had a century ago. However, as it does in so many respects, Quebec constitutes something of an exception. A new left party, Québec Solidaire, created during the past decade, is attracting considerable interest and growing support as an anti-neoliberal alternative to Quebec's three capitalist parties. While not explicitly anti-capitalist or socialist, it defines itself as a party "resolutely of the left, feminist, ecologist, altermondialiste,[1] pacifist, democratic and sovereigntist".
This paper will outline how this party originated, describe how it functions and explore some major challenges it faces and how it is confronting them.
The Quebec exception
Quebec's political evolution has always followed a distinct trajectory within the Canadian social formation. A crucial determinant has been the province's character as the homeland of a distinct nation, with its own territory, language, culture, historical tradition and a well-defined national consciousness as a minority people within Canada and North America. Until well past the mid-20th century, French-Canadian nationalism was essentially defensive, focused on protecting the autonomy of Quebec, the last major enclave of the Francophone presence in Canada, against involvement in imperialist wars and the increasing encroachment on the province's constitutional jurisdiction by the federal state with its expanding economic and social functions. Industrialisation and the concomitant urbanisation and growth of trade unions aggravated these tensions, disrupting the social and political culture of a Francophone population long dependent on church and parish for the provision of basic social and community services. ...
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BOOK REVIEW: THE MAN WHO NEVER DIED:
The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon
 By William M. Adler
Bloomsbury, 448 pp. $28 Reviewed by Chuck Leddy
Boston Globe
Sept. 6, 2011 - Legendary songwriter and union activist Joe Hill, who died in 1915 at the hands of a firing squad, seems as relevant today as ever. With historically high unemployment, plummeting union membership, and a political system in which corporate money talks louder than ever, unions and workers are on the defensive, trying to hold on to gains they made decades ago. Earlier this year in Wisconsin and Ohio, for example, legislation passed that restricted collective bargaining rights of public unions, and other states are following suit. As this splendid, sympathetic biography makes clear, Joe Hill spent his life on the run from the dark realities of capitalism, but Hill's true genius was his refusal to surrender to despair.
William M. Adler's biography is truly a "life and times'' of the labor activist and his union, the Industrial Workers of the World (the I.W.W. or "Wobblies''). Hill, raised in Sweden, where his railroad-worker father died from injuries sustained in an industrial accident, started working at age 8 and, as a teenager, nearly died from tuberculosis. To say that Hill lived a hard life would be an understatement. Adler shows that Hill used two strategies to fight despair: music and humor. When he arrived in the United States and joined the I.W.W., then the nation's most embattled union, Hill wrote songs that weren't just scathing attacks on the brutalities of capitalism, or calls for workers to protest, but were also hilarious and hope-fueled.
Hill's songs, lampooning "robber baron'' industrialists, union scabs, and anti-union politicians, were sung in union halls, and during street protests and strikes. "His songs were so popular,'' writes Adler, "because of his singular talent for boiling down complex social and economic issues into darkly funny parodies.'' In "Casey Jones - the Union Scab,'' for example, Hill humorously shows a worker (Jones) refusing to join a railroad strike and then falling to a fiery death when his train isn't properly maintained. When Jones gets to heaven, Hill writes that he "went scabbing on the angels'' and gets shipped off to the devil because "that's what you get for scabbing.''
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Upcoming: Bob Dylan, Jack White and Norah Jones
Record Unknown and unheard Hank Williams Songs
 New compilation will also feature Levon Helm, Alan Jackson and Sheryl Crow
By Rolling Stone
August 4, 2011 - The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, a new collection of previously unheard songs by the country great recorded by artists such as Bob Dylan, Jack White, Norah Jones and Levon Helm, will be released on October 4th. The set, which will be issued on Dylan's imprint Egyptian Records, was originally conceived by veteran A&R executive Mary Martin as a Dylan-centric project, but eventually evolved into a multi-artist tribute to the late singer-songwriter.
The songs featured in the set were rescued from notebooks left behind in a leather briefcase by Williams after he died in 1953 at the age of 29. The notes contained lyrics and song ideas that were finished by the 13 artists who contributed to the disc. The full story of Williams' notebooks will be told in the album's liner notes, which were penned by Michael McCall of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
The full tracklisting for The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams is as follows:
Alan Jackson "You've Been Lonesome, Too"
Bob Dylan "The Love That Faded"
Norah Jones "How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart?"
Jack White "You Know That I Know"
Lucinda Williams "I'm So Happy I Found You"
Vince Gill and Rodney Crowell "I Hope You Shed a Million Tears"
Patty Loveless "You're Through Fooling Me"
Levon Helm "You'll Never Again Be Mine"
Holly Williams "Blue Is My Heart"
Jakob Dylan "Oh, Mama, Come Home"
Sheryl Crow "Angel Mine"
Merle Haggard "The Sermon on the Mount"
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Become a CCDS member today!
 The
time is long past for 'Lone Rangers'. Being a socialist by your self is
no fun and doesn't help much. Join CCDS today--$36 regular, $48
household and $18 youth.
Better yet, beome a sustainer at $20 per month,
and we'll send you a copy of Jack O'Dell's new book, 'Climbing Jacobs
Ladder,' drawing on the lessons of the movement in the South in the
1950s and 1960s.
Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS |
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