Blog of the Week:
BBC News on Science 
Chiles's ALMA telescopes look back nearly to the beginning of time...
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Lost Writings of SDS..
Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson
Changemaker, 273pp, $22.50
For the full contents, click the link and view 'Preview' under the cover graphic.
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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...
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Solidarity Economy:
What It's All About
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Lenin Rediscovered:
What Is To Be Done in Context
By Lars T. Lih
Haymarket Books
880 Pages
$58.95
Why 'What Is To Be Done' Is a Champion of Democracy. Appendix includes a new translation of the original work.
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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...
 Progressive America
Rising: New High Tide
of 'Square' Occupations!
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... |
NYC Solidarity: 20.000 Union Workers, Students and Community Activists Join Wall St Protests!
The Latest Developments on
the Occupy Wall St. Movement
Via Alternet.org
It's Day 20 of Occupy Wall St. (#OWS), a movement that has inspired Americans all over the country to fight Wall St.'s assault on their political and economic rights. Yesterday, in the biggest action yet, over 20,000 people marched in Lower Manhattan. Occupations have sprung in over 200 cities all over the country. Occupy Wall Street is only getting bigger.
AlterNet has the latest updates -- check back for continuing coverage.
- Friday, October 7
8:54 AM The AFP reports that 11 were arrested in Los Angeles' demonstrations last night, among a reported 500 people (the LA Times seems to underestimate the crowd at 100). Six men and five women were detained for trespassing in the lobby of a Bank of America branch, protesting the big bank's foreclosure practices; they were let go on around $5000 bail each.
In Seattle, unions joined the movement yesterday, as that city's protesters prepare to join forces with a protest of the ten-year anniversary of the Afghanistan War Friday afternoon.
In St. Louis, ten protesters were arrested after refusing to leave their post in Kiener Plaza after curfew.
And in Portland, organizers estimated a turnout of as many as 10,000 people, with no arrests. Today, however, Twitter reports suggest the cops will pen in the protesters and arrest them. An incredible photo of the Portland protests, courtesy the Guardian....(click headline for much more)
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Obama Tips His Hat to the Wall Street
Protestors, Pushes 'Jobs for America' Bill
VIA Al-Jazeera
US President Barack Obama has said that the "Occupy Wall Street" protests in New York and other US cities reflect "broad-based frustration" among Americans with how the US financial system works. In depth coverage of US financial crisis protests
Obama spoke on Thursday at the White House, adding that the protests were indicative of public anger that those who helped cause the financial crisis are fighting efforts to curb abuses.
"I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country ... and yet you're still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place," he said at a news conference.
Obama also used the opportunity to push forward his $447bn jobs bill, the American Jobs Act, saying it would ensure tougher oversight of the financial industry.
"Any senator out there who's thinking about voting against this jobs bill when it comes up for a vote needs to explain exactly why they would oppose something we know would improve our economic situation at such an urgent time," Obama said.
Congress is to vote on the bill before the end of the month.
Growing frustration
Steps away from Obama's news conference, protesters on Thursday converged on Freedom Plaza in the nation's capital to establish another "Occupy" camp and rally under the banner "Get money out of politics!"....(Click title for more)
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How Occupy Wall St Protesters
Can Defeat the Corporate Elite
A Young Occupy Wall Street organizer explains the strategy behind the movement, how far it has come and where it's headed.
By Yotam Marom
Alternet.org
Oct4, 2011 - The occupation of Wall Street is now in its third week. Thousands of people have worked and fought for it, have given it their time, their bodies, their ideas, their blood. People have used their bodies as shields, sent letters of solidarity, marched, slept out, donated, tweeted, and more. There are still thousands more who have not been with us, whether because of geographical reasons or because they are busy struggling elsewhere.
I have been involved, in some way, with the occupation on Wall Street since the first planning meeting a number of months ago, and I have been out there almost every day since the occupation actually began, though mostly keeping quiet and working on the sidelines, often critically. I have participated in assemblies and working groups, done outreach to community organizations, pushed demands, been to dozens of meetings, gone hoarse from chanting about the banks, been bruised by metal police batons while marching for Troy Davis, and had about a million incredible conversations, at the occupation at Liberty Plaza itself, in other political contexts around New York, and even in jail with the 87 friends I made during the mass arrests of September 24. I am not an authority, and others have struggled and sacrificed much more than I, but I have learned a lot; enough, I think, to begin sharing some of it.
The struggle is still very much underway. Those of us who can, who have that privilege, should be out in the streets, so now might not be the time for the most thorough analysis. It is, however, important for occupiers to be writing in our own words; to reach out to the many around the world who want to be a part of this in some way, to offer our own analyses (infinitely more powerful than those provided by pundits from far away), and to counter the media blackout we are experiencing....(Click title for more)
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Drones, Banks and Multitudes
By Harry Targ
Diary of a Heartland Radical
In this age of tweets, sound bites, and short-hand references to broad and complicated swaths of history, what political scientist Murray Edelman called "symbolic" politics, becomes "real" politics. Three symbols represent politics today; "drones," "banks," and "multitudes."
Drones refer metaphorically to state-directed murder, often using the latest technology to target and assassinate those who have been defined by officials as the enemy or as threats to society, or just plain criminals. Based on recommendations by key decision-makers, civilian, military, and police, the U.S. has increasingly relied on new high-tech instruments of murder. Drones, smart bombs, and chemicals are used to kill, maim, and disable people abroad and at home with little or no threat to the safety of the personnel pushing the buttons, dropping the bombs, or spraying the victims. These newer forms of murder continue to be paralleled by a variety of police beatings and shootings and executions sanctified by governments attributing crime to the poor and people of color. The 21st century nation-state, to paraphrase sociologist Max Weber's original definition, is the organization that holds the monopoly of the "legitimate" implementation of murder.
Banks are real but as symbols refer to a capitalist economic system which organizes workers to generate wealth which is increasingly appropriated by the few. In reality, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century saw huge manufacturing corporations mobilizing working classes and stealing the wealth that they produced. When rates of profit began to decline the corporate elites collaborated with the heads of banks, institutions which at one time served as the accountants and vaults for accumulated profits. Great mergers of manufacturing and banking capital in the early twentieth century and more so since the 1970s contributed to a new kind of capitalist economy based on finance. Most transactions now are speculative: buying and selling stocks and bonds, the creation of hedge funds, and real estate and insurance investments. Banks and investment houses are global. They produce enormous profit without creating useful products for people to use or consume. And, the banking metaphor represents a vision of an economic system that has become grotesquely unequal.
The third metaphor, the multitudes (borrowed from abstract formulations by Italian theorist Antonio Negri) refers to the rising up of masses of people-- the traditional working class, the unemployed, youth without hope, youth with vision, women long oppressed, people of all races, and people who clean streets or live on them, serve coffee at Starbucks, and even write software programs for big corporations. The multitudes, Negri suggests, represent the underside of a new global order, an economic empire that traverses the earth bursting out of its national and sovereign boundaries.
Drones and banks represent both the coercive and the manipulative power of capitalism. Americans see examples of each on television or computer screens every day. Just in the last two weeks U.S. drones killed U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen. Troy Davis, despite evidence raising reasonable doubt that he was guilty of a murder, was executed by the state of Georgia. And, the Bureau of the Census reported the rise of rates of poverty not seen in the United States since the 1990s and numbers of persons living in poverty larger than any time since the 1960s.
What is also becoming a regular feature of our electronic experience is resistance, anger, and collective mobilization. This is occurring all across the globe--Arab spring; student protest in Santiago, Chile; angry Israeli citizens; workers in Athens, Greece; students and public workers in Madison, Wisconsin, Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana--and now undifferentiated groups occupying Wall Street and metaphorical Wall Streets around the United States.
It is unclear what will come of all of this except that the contradictions between drones and banks versus the multitudes is becoming more clear and that the transformation of society that is so desperately needed just might be emerging. Hope so.
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Van Jones on America's Uprising:
It's Going To Be an Epic Battle
Highlight from 'Rebuild the Dream' Conference: Jones talked to AlterNet about the growing social movements for change, running real progressives in 2012, and how we can train a million new leaders.
By Adele Stan and Don Hazen
Alternet.org
Oct 4, 2011 As the grassroots sit-ins and marches that originated as Occupy Wall Street spread to other cities, Van Jones, lead evangelist for the American Dream movement, took the stage Monday at a Washington, DC hotel where organizers of the institutional element of the progressive movement converged at Take Back the American Dream. The gathering was organized by the Campaign for America's Future in partnership with Jones' new organization, Rebuild the Dream. Jones voiced his support for the spontaneous Wall Street uprising, and for the U.S. Marines who agreed, he said, to protect the protesters while wearing dress blues.
Jones said that after he left the White House, where he served as a green jobs adviser to President Barack Obama, he occupied his time studying how the Tea Party movement came into existence and marshaled its power. (Among his texts, he said, was the AlterNet anthology, Dangerous Brew: Exposing the Tea Party's Agenda to Take Over America.) Jones had been a target of Tea Party ire, stoked by Glenn Beck on his Fox News Channel platform, back when Beck served as the de facto community organizer for media baron Rupert Murdoch, before Beck fell out of the mogul's favor.
Jones explained the Tea Party's "leaderless" model to the activists with a PowerPoint showing how the instigators of the Tea Party movement -- leaders of groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity -- didn't so much create a top-down organization as they did a network that fostered the development of local Tea Party organizations by local activists, who then took ownership of their own corners of the movement. "The Tea Party is an open-source brand," Jones explained, "that 3,528 affiliates use; none of them own it." For all their talk of rugged individualism, Jones said, the forces behind the Tea Party "have enacted the most collectivist strategy for taking power in the history of the republic."
Jones also demonstrated, with modeling schematics, how progressives had initially, during the 2008 presidential campaign, centered their movement more around a person -- Obama -- than their own issues. In no small part, Jones implied, progressives were drawn to the Obama campaign's branding, with its iconic "O" logo onto which people projected their own aspirations and beliefs.
"It has been a tough couple of years," Jones told his audience. "We went from hope to heartbreak in about a minute...We have the wrong theory of the presidency."....(Click title for more)
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New Book: Hillbilly Nationalists,
Urban Race Rebels and Black Power
 Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban
Race Rebels and Black Power:
Community Organizing
in Radical Times
By Amy Sonnie and James Tracy
Melville House Publishing
A beautiful, powerful, surprising account of class-based interracial organizing, I expect Hillbilly Nationalists to inspire a new generation of activists who understand that a true rainbow coalition is not only desirable but our only hope."-Robin D.G. Kelley
The historians of the late 1960s have emphasized the work of a small group of white college activists and the Black Panthers, activists who courageously took to the streets to protest the war in Vietnam and continuing racial inequality. Poor and working-class whites have tended to be painted as spectators, reactionaries, and, even, racists. Most Americans, the story goes, just watched the political movements of the sixties go by.
James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, who have been interviewing activists from the 1960s for nearly ten years, reject this old narrative. In five tightly conceived chapters, they show that poor and working-class whites, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party, started to organize significant political movements against racism and inequality during the 1960s.Their book explores an untold history the New Left. Challenging the Right for the allegiance of white workers, a diverse network of new political groups helped to redefine community organizing at a pivotal moment in the history of the United States, collaborating with their better known colleagues in SDS and the Black Panthers.
These organizations kept the vision of an interracial movement of the poor alive by working arm in arm with Dr. Martin Luther King and the Puerto Rican Young Lords and, in so doing, gave rise to a generation of community organizers. In the best tradition of people's history, Tracy and Sonnie bring these diverse and groundbreaking movements alive.
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Music Review: Debbie Harry Does Her Own Reggae
.jpg) Blondie:
Panic of Girls
By Holly Gleason
Paste Magazine
When new wave erupted on the back-end of punk, there was Blondie, all crisp beats, silent screen star peroxide beauty and a sense of '50s pop undertow that was equal parts innocence and pulp fiction knowing. Fronted by the soignée Deborah Harry, a former Playboy Bunny, and anchored by Chris Stein, a lean guitarist who recognized the palpable collision that was vintage pop with punk's aggression, the band created an almost art project that blazed trails and winked at those bright enough to get that this wasn't just another fad.
The amyl nitrite-feeling soprano wielded by Harry belied that cold knife to the throat force that she actually packed, and it instilled in her an urgent, deadly desperation. This wasn't pillow-swallowing writ large, but a sense of the hunter being drawn by the game- be it the disco-throb "Call Me," the techno-reggae-rap of "Rapture" or the girl group "Hanging On The Telephone."
With Panic of Girls, nothing has changed: the Blondie allure remains potent as ever: polyrhythmic, organic, dance-floor current and always driven by waves of sangfroid postmodern feminism; the first spawn of CBGBs carve grown-up punk for a new millennium.
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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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