Blog of the Week:
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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
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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...
 Slugfest with GOP
over Jobs Bill
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... |
Obama Job Plan: the Promise and the Drawbacks
By Carl Bloice BlackCommentator.com More than once in the morning after the President's jobs speech, I had the same conversation: "it's more than I expected." "It's a far cry from enough." "It doesn't really matter because the Republicans will kill it." Therein lay the quandary for progressives. Should we rally around a program that is deficient, or continue to press for more effective measures? My answer has been: both. Unquestionably, passage of the American Jobs Act would be a good thing. As the President outlined it, the proposal aims to "to put more people back to work and more money in the pockets of those who are working," and "create more jobs for construction workers, more jobs for teachers, more jobs for veterans, and more jobs for long-term unemployed." To say that it doesn't matter is to turn our backs on the millions of people out there struggling to maintain themselves and their families amid a faltering economy. "It's not nearly as bold as the plan I'd want in an ideal world," wrote economist Paul Krugman. "But if it actually became law, it would probably make a significant dent in unemployment." Will the jobs plan "provide a jolt to an economy that has stalled, and give companies confidence that if they invest and if they hire, there will be customers for their products and services"? Well, it's hard to say. Every day, the economic crisis appears to get worse. The President says the economy has stalled. Some economists suggest it has stalled like an airplane that has lost engine power and is poised to begin another descent. Combine what is happening here at home with developments in Europe and you have the makings of this current crisis of capitalism turning really ugly. At the moment, it seems to me, we should endeavor to put aside our policy wonk hats and concentrate on the politics of the situation. The battle lines are pretty clear: It's the White House proposal, or doing nothing. There's nothing else on the table. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka holds out hope that the pot will be sweetened. "The plan announced by the president is only the opening bid," he said. "We expect to see more proposals in the next weeks and months to put America back to work." We shall see. The danger remains that those in the Administration's camp who are never anything but political operatives will prevail, opportunity will give way to political expediency and fall prey to the notion that the 2012 election trumps all. That camp argues that all that matters is the vote of ill-defined "independents" and everything must be "bi-partisan" That notion should have been put to rest by the most recent Republican Presidential candidates debate. The GOP has no plan for job creation. The candidates presented a united front: the issue in the next election is "Obama." They seem to have figured out that the public is more concerned with unemployment than deficit reduction, and if the jobs crisis is to be pinned on the President then surely nothing should be done to alleviate it over the next 13 months.... |
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Shameless Opposition to the Jobs Bill Reveals
The GOP's Deep Hatred of the Working Class
 By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On
If you want to have your class consciousness raised a few notches, all you have to do over the next few weeks is listen to the Republicans in Congress offer up their shameless commentary rejecting President's Obama's jobs bill.
This week's doozy came from Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, who was outraged that capitalists were being restricted from discriminating in hiring the unemployed, in favor of only hiring people who already had jobs elsewhere. I kid you not. Here's the quote:
"We're adding in this bill a new protected class called 'unemployed,'" Gohmert declared in the House Sept. 13, 2011. "I think this will help trial lawyers who are not having enough work. We heard from our friends across the aisle, 14 million people out of work -- that's 14 million new clients."
One hardly knows were to begin.
First, the Jobs Bill does no such thing as creating a 'new protected class.' It only curbs a wrongly discriminatory practice.
Second, so what if it did? Americans who uphold the Constitution, the 14th Amendment' equal protection clause, and the expansion of democracy and the franchise generally, will see the creation of 'protected classes' as hard-won progressive steps forward from the times of the Divine Right of Kings.
Third, if Gohmert had any first-hand knowledge of the unemployed, he'd know they usually can't afford lawyers, especially when the courts are stacked against them.
Fourth, to create even more confusion, Gohmert raced to the House clerk to submit his own 'Jobs Bill' before Obama's, but with a similar name. Its content was a hastily scribbled two-page screed consisting of nothing but cuts in corporate taxes.
What's really going on here is becoming clearer every day. The GOP cares about one thing: destroying Obama's presidency regardless of the cost. They don't even care if its hurts capitalism's own interests briefly, not to mention damaging the well being of everyone else. Luckily, Obama is finally calling them out in public-although far too politely for my taste.
The irony will likely emerge if and when they ever do take Obama down. I'd bet good money that a good number of the GOP bigwigs would then turn on a dime and support many of the same measures they're now opposing.
But most of them, especially the far right, would still likely press on with their real aim, a full-throated neoliberal reactionary thrust that repeals the Great Society's Medicaid and Medicare, the New Deal's Social Security and Wagner Act, and every progressive measure in between. Their idea of making the U.S labor market 'competitive' and U.S. business 'confident' is to make the whole country more like Texas, with its record volume of minimum wage work and poverty, and then Texas more like Mexico-the race to the bottom. They're not happy with 12% unionization; they want zero percent, where all of us are defenseless and completely under the thumbs of our 'betters'.
In brief, prepare for more wars and greater austerity.
If you think I'm exaggerating, over the next months observe how the national GOP is trying to rig the 2012 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan and a few other big states. Our Electoral College system is bad enough, but they are going to 'reform' it to make it worse by attaching electoral votes to congressional districts, rather than statewide popular majorities. This would mean Obama could win the popular vote statewide, but the majority of electoral votes would still go to the GOP. Add that to their new 'depress the vote' requirements involving picture IDs, which are aimed at the poor and the elderly, and you'll see their fear and hatred of the working class.
We've always had government with undue advantages for the rich. But just watch them in this round as they go all out to make it even more so. We have to call it out for what it really is, and put their schemes where the sun doesn't shine.
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'One Person, One Dollar, One Vote!'
Who Will Occupy Wall Street on Sept 17?
By Nathan Schneider
Wagingnonviolence.org
When the culture-jamming activist group Adbusters put out a call on July 13 for "20,000 people" to "flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months," it never said who those people would be. Now, the question on the minds of everyone from the Department of Homeland Security to the Lower East Side anarchist set is just who and how many will actually show up.
The simplest cop-out of an answer is to say that nobody exactly knows. To an extent, it's true. The large, established, membership groups-unions, lobbies, etc.-have kept quiet about it, so their rank-and-file can't be counted on en masse. There's no central planning committee, no permit with the city, and not even an official website, so there's no obvious person to ask for a prediction or a figure. (Adbusters continues to say 20,000, though its role in organizing is, according to Senior Editor Micah White, solely "philosophical.") Saturday, among other things, will be a test of the scattered American grassroots-their ability to mobilize against the outsized power of corporate elites, and their inclination to do so.
Some on the right-wing's most lunatic of fringes have taken advantage of the information vacuum with headlines declaring "Wall Street Targeted for Britain-Style Riots" (along with thoroughly fictitious links to ACORN, SEIU, and even President Obama), a claim which has already turned into a fundraising scheme for Republican political candidates. Imaginative, but false.
A better place to look for some sense of what's in the works would be a visit to the "NYC General Assembly" that has been meeting for the past month or more on Saturday evenings in New York's Tompkins Square Park. For as long as five hours at a time, a crowd of 100, give or take, discusses matters of process and principles, as well as peanut butter sandwiches, bathrooms, and pepper spray. They can't pretend to be able to tell all the people who come what they can and can't do, but they can at least provide a loose framework and some information about what is and isn't legal-for example, no tents. They're not bringing any port-a-potties or appointing any marshals or police negotiators. They talk about nonviolence, with various conceptions of it in mind, and hope for the best.
The group is mainly young, with a tendency toward black T-shirts, bicycles, and hand-rolled cigarettes. A few have accents from Spain and Greece, through which they share stories from this year's uprisings in those countries. They vary in their levels of experience with the modified-consensus process that the Assembly employs-together with its concomitant courtesies, no-nos, and hand signals. There are those who have never done anything like this before, and then those who are coming freshly-inspired and well-rehearsed from taking part in the three-week Bloombergville encampment earlier in the summer. ....
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Podcast: Climate Change Pushing
Millions to Edge of Starvation
 Climatologist Chris Funk explains his findings that long-term ocean warming has created a chain reaction that is likely to permanently dry out East Africa.
By Jai Ranganathan
Miller-McCune.com
East Africa is being hit with the worst drought in 60 years, with rainfall less than 30 percent of normal in many areas. In Ethiopia, Kenya, and especially Somalia, widespread crop failure and livestock death have left millions of people on the brink of starvation. In Somalia alone, about 30,000 children under the age of 5 have died. Almost a million more Somalis have fled into overwhelmed refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya.
In the podcast, Chris Funk, a climatologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, fingers one of the key culprits for the drought: climate change. Funk relates that long-term warming of the Indian and Western Pacific oceans have started a chain reaction that is permanently drying out East Africa, an area that was already arid to begin with.
With severe droughts expected to occur more and more frequently in the region, the current East African famine may be just the beginning. All is not lost though, according to Funk, as international development aid focused on improving agricultural yields could effectively head off future food crises.
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Book Reviews - School 'Reform': A Failing Grade
Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
by Steven Brill Simon and Schuster, 478 pp., $28.00
As Bad as They Say? Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx
by Janet Grossbach Mayer Empire State Editions, 166 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Reviewed by Diane Ravitch
New York Review of Books
It is a well-known fact that American education is in crisis. Black and Hispanic children have lower test scores than white and Asian children. The performance of American students on international tests is mediocre.
Less well known are contrary facts. The black-white achievement gap, as a recent report put it, "is as old as the nation itself." It was cut in half in the 1970s and 1980s, probably by desegregation, increased economic opportunities for black families, federal investment in early childhood education, and reductions in class size.1
Another little-known fact is that American students have never performed well on international tests. When the first such tests were given in the mid-1960s, our students usually scored at or below the median, and sometimes at the bottom of the pack. This mediocre performance is nothing to boast about, but it is not an indicator of future economic decline. Despite our students' mediocre test scores, the nation's economy has been robust for most of the past half-century. And the news is not all terrible. On the latest international test, the Program for International Student Assessment, American schools in which fewer than 10 percent of the students were poor outperformed the schools of Finland, Japan, and Korea. Even when as many as 25 percent of the students were poor, American schools performed as well as the top-scoring nations. As the proportion of poor students rises, the scores of US schools drop.2
To put the current "crisis" into perspective, it is well to recall that American education was in crisis a century ago, when urban schools were overcrowded, swamped with students from Eastern and Southern Europe who didn't speak English. The popular press at that time warned that the nation was being overrun by a human tide from inferior cultures, and the very survival of our nation was supposedly at risk.
Then there was the crisis of the 1950s: influential authors such as Rudolf Flesch and Arthur Bestor bemoaned the sorry state of the schools in the early 1950s, and other critics such as Admiral Hyman Rickover blamed them when the Soviets launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957. Since then, the schools have been in nearly constant crisis. In the 1960s, civil rights leaders condemned the public schools for institutionalized racism. In the 1970s, critics like Charles Silberman discerned a "crisis in the classroom" and flayed the schools for "mindlessness." In 1983, a national commission convened by US Secretary of Education Terrell Bell declared that "a rising tide of mediocrity" in the public schools put the nation at risk. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush convened the nation's governors to agree on national goals for education. Since then, political leaders have agreed that what is needed to improve education is greater accountability, based on standardized tests.
A decade ago, President George W. Bush satisfied the demand for testing and accountability by proposing the legislation now known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law by President Bush in January 2002. It mandated that every public school in the nation must test all children in reading and mathematics from grades three through eight and classify the scores by racial and ethnic groups (white, African- American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, etc.), low-income students, students with disabilities, and students with limited English skills. By 2014, every student in every category was expected to reach proficiency in those subjects, as defined by each state and measured by standardized tests selected by each state, or the school would face a series of escalating sanctions, culminating in firing part or all of the staff, closing the school, or handing control of the school over to the state or to private management.
Because of its utopian goals, coupled with harsh sanctions, NCLB has turned out to be the worst federal education legislation ever passed....
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Passing of a Poet: The Eloquence of Carl Oglesby
 Carl Oglesby sadly left this world Tuesday morning Sept 13 after a long bout with cancer. President of SDS from 1965-66, he was a passionate American radical and one of the New Left's most eloquent speakers and critical thinkers. I made several trips to Antioch College in the 1960s just to pick his brain. His main books then were Containment and Change and The Yankee-Cowboy War, from which many of us learned to look at our society in a deeper way, to be better able to change it. -- Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog
By Mike Davis
The Rag Blog
September 15, 2011 - In my lifetime I've heard two speakers whose unadorned eloquence and moral clarity pulled my heart right out of my chest.
One was Bernadette Devlin (nee McAlliskey), speaking from the roof of the Busy Bee Market in Andersonstown in Belfast the apocalyptic day that Bobby Sands died.
The other was Carl Oglesby, president of SDS in 1965. He was 10 years older than most of us, had just resigned from Bendix corporation where he had worked as a technical writer, and wore a beard because his face was cratered from a poor-white childhood. His father was a rubber worker in Akron and his people came from the mountains.
I'm not capable of accurately describing the kindness, intensity, and melancholy that were alloyed in Carl's character, or the profound role he played in deepening our commitment to the anti-war movement. He literally moved the hearts of thousands of people.
He was also for many young SDSers -- like myself and the wonderful Ross Altman (original UCLA SDSer and Carl's close friend, whom I salute) - both a beloved mentor but also leader of the wild bunch. At a crucial moment in the tragic history of this desert country, he precisely and unwaveringly defined our duty. He was a man on fire.
To those who knew him, I send my deepest love and solidarity -- as I do to those yet to discover this great, tormented, and most-old-fashionedly American radical.
[Mike Davis is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. An urban theorist, historian, and social activist, Davis is the author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire. Read more articles by Mike Davis on The Rag Blog. This tribute was originally published by counterpunch.]
Also see:
"Skipping Stones With Carl Oglesby" by Jeff Shero Nightbyrd / The Rag Blog / Sept. 15, 2011
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Angela Davis: Stop the execution of Troy Davis,
Set for Sept. 21 in Georgia
By Angela Davis
San Francisco By View
I urgently appeal to Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and to the members of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole - L. Gale Buckner, Robert E. Keller, James E. Donald, Albert Murray and Terry Barnard - to spare the life of Troy Davis, a young African American citizen of your state.
 I hope everyone within sight or sound of my words or my voice will likewise urgently call and fax Gov. Neal and the members of the board. Under Georgia law, only they can stop the execution of Troy Davis.
First of all, there is very compelling evidence that Troy Davis may be innocent of the murder of Police Officer Mark MacPhail in 1989 in Savannah. The case against Davis has all but collapsed: Seven of nine witnesses against him have recanted their testimony and said that they were pressured by police to lie, and nine other witnesses have implicated one of the remaining two as the actual killer. No weapon or physical evidence linking Davis to the murder was ever found. No jury has ever heard this new information, and four of the jurors who originally found him guilty have signed statements in support of Mr. Davis. [2] Angela Davis More importantly, the planned execution of a likely innocent young Black man in the state of Georgia has become a terrible blot on the status of the United States in the international community of nations. All modern industrial and democratic nations and 16 states within the United States have abolished capital punishment. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the men and women on death rows across the country are Black and other people of color - and are universally poor - severely undermines our country's standing in the eyes of the people of the world.
Most importantly, the execution of Troy Davis will contribute to an atmosphere of violence and racism and a devaluation of life itself within our country. If we can execute anyone, especially a man who may be innocent of any crime, it fosters disrespect for the law and life itself. This exacerbates every social problem at a time when the people of our country face some of the most difficult challenges regarding our economic security and future.
I urge everyone to join with me in urging Gov. Neal and the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole to stay the execution of Troy Davis and commute his death sentence. Give this young man a life and an opportunity to prove his innocence.
Please, call, fax or email today. Stop the execution of Troy Davis!
Gov. Nathan Deal: phone (404) 651-1776, fax (404) 657-7332, email georgia.governor@gov.state.ga.us [4], web contact form http://gov.state.ga.us/contact.shtml [5] Georgia Board of Parsons and Parole: phone (404) 656-5651, fax (404) 651-8502
Legendary freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis, now retired from the U.C. Santa Cruz faculty, is the founder of Critical Resistance [6], which can be reached at 1904 Franklin St., Suite 504, Oakland, CA 94612, phone (510) 444-0484, fax (510) 444-2177, email crnational@criticalresistance.org [7].
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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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