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'Occupy the Highway' Washington Post reporter's daily tweets and stories on the OWS march from NYC to DC
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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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Fred Shuttlesworth-- Presente!
An Appreciation written by Charlie Orrock
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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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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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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
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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...
 The 1% Strikes Back,
OWS Evictions Rising...
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 with the Occupy! movement 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... |
Occupy Wall Street Is Not a Spectator Sport:
5 Ways the 99 Percent Can Help Right Now
Photo: Scrubbing down Zuccotti Park after Nov. 15 Eviction
How can the rest of the 99 percent demonstrate our outrage? Here are five things we can do, without parking a tent in the street.
By Les Leopold Alternet.org
Nov 8, 2011 - Let's take a look at where we are right now. There is battle royale underway between inhabitants of two entirely different universes over what's wrong with our nation and what should be fixed.
On the one hand, the entire political establishment, blessed by Wall Street, wants the conversation to be all about debt and "entitlements." We are told 24/7 that we're living over our heads, that our social safety net is too expensive, and that we need to cut, cut, cut trillions of dollars from public budgets so we don't become the next Greece.
In that framework the only question is how much to cut and how much we should sacrifice. The so-called liberal position is that the rich should pay a bit more while the rest of us suffer cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (Please note that taxes on Wall Street are not on the table.) The "grand bargain" is all about how much we will have to pay for the economic collapse caused by Wall Street. It's also a loser because the more we cut, the longer unemployment will last, and the more fiscal distress we'll face as tax revenues stall.
On the other side is the framework that Occupy Wall Street successfully put into play. It argues that Wall Street should pay for the mess it created. It suggests that the issue is employment for the many, not debt repayments for the few. It also gets us to face up to myriad of ways that income inequality is hollowing out our society, destroying the middle-class and increasing poverty. It points the finger at those who crashed our economy and it demands reparations. And it does all this without making any specific demands. It doesn't have to. It just needs to be the living embodiment of the many versus the few.
That's the fight. So how can we enlist? Sure, some of us can go down to our local encampment and join the party. But if you're old like me, or if you have a job and a family, you're not likely to head out to your local town square and sleep on the concrete. So that raises the critical question: How can the rest of the 99 percent demonstrate our outrage?
Here are five things we can do, without parking a tent somewhere:
1. Get Your Non-Profits into Gear
If you work for a non-profit of any kind (like a labor union, an environmental group, a church organization, etc.) then insist that your organization devote at least 10 percent of its resources to protesting against Wall Street. There are probably 500,000 full-time staff working for unions, community organizations and environmental groups all across the country. Imagine if each week, each of those staffers put in two hours protesting at an Occupy Wall Street site. Combine that with a little organizing to bring out the rank-and-file, and we're talking about a quantum leap in the size of the anti-Wall Street presence.
Of course, you might get stiff opposition from progressive non-profit leaders. After all, their organizations are set up to press important issues that might not seem to have any direct connection to the Wall Street mess. But it shouldn't take much to show that the Wall Street crash is a game-changer. It should be clear by now that we can't make progress on our individual issues unless we join together to reclaim our country from the Wall Street elites.
2. Organize Teach-ins about Wall Street's Casino Economy
If you are affiliated with any academic institution or high school, this is the perfect time to organize teach-ins that target financial elites. We need large forums where information can be shared about our dismal distribution of income, how Wall Street took down the economy, how money is influencing politics, and how jobs can be created. And be sure to invite the community. Americans are just waking up to how much they've been ripped off. The educational task is just beginning and teach-ins can push it along in a hurry..... (Click title for more)
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Bankster Crash Tax: Wall Street Reparations
By Leo W Gerard
International President, United Steel Workers
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost
Nov 14, 2011 - Wall Street waged war on the American economy and middle class with its reckless gambling.
It wasn't Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac that crashed the economy. It wasn't the federal government. It wasn't hapless homeowners who were sold mortgages they couldn't afford. It was Wall Street financiers that aggressively sought and bought mortgages to package and sell as derivatives, which the banks could wager on.
Americans bailed out Wall Street, handing it a Marshall Plan for reconstruction after its bad bets blew up the world economy. Now, three years later, happy days are here again for the Wall Street banksters. They're hauling in big profits and paying outrageous bonuses. But the American middle class continues to suffer high unemployment, record foreclosures and rising poverty.
So it's time for Wall Street to pay reparations. It's time for a crash tax, a tiny sales tax on Wall Street transactions, the revenues from which would pay for Main Street restoration. It's time for the 1 percent to repay the 99 percent, for Wall Street to share in the sacrifices necessitated by its rogue behavior.
The levy, sometimes called a Tobin Tax after the American economist and Nobel Laureate James Tobin, who endorsed it in the 1970s, is far from shocking or novel. A financial transaction tax is advocated by a huge range of groups and individuals, from billionaires to conservative heads of state. Thirty nations, including Great Britain and Switzerland, already tax some financial transactions. The United States imposed a similar tax from 1914 to 1966. In addition to raising revenue in a time of government deficits worldwide, the tax would suppress the very kind of risky speculation that got the global economy into this mess. ,,,, (Clip title for more)
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Deeper Roots of Pedophiles and Rape in Penn State's Sandusky Case: 4 Questions, for Starters
By Amy Davidson
'Close Read' at The New Yorker
It's a week now since Penn State became a different school than it used to be; maybe in the next week, or, more likely, months, we'll find that it's becoming a better one.
Saturday there's a football game, against Nebraska, without Joe Paterno, who was fired for his failures in the Jerry Sandusky case. Sandusky, Paterno's former defensive coordinator, is facing forty charges of sexually abusing and, in some of the cases, raping eight children. (He denies the charges.)
The essential reading is the grand jury's findings. It's an awful story, full of moral mysteries; I wrote about it yesterday, and the question that concerned me most then was how this all looked through the eyes of those children. That's the one that matters. But there are dozens of others: the role of the governor; the power of the campus police; what the Penn State students carrying signs in support of Paterno were thinking; why, when one of them stood up to the crowd and talked about the obligations of leadership-video, above, via Andrew Sullivan-another tried to discredit him on the grounds that he was wearing a Tony Dorsett jersey (Dorsett, a native of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, went to Pitt); what on earth was going on at the Second Mile Foundation; what all this has to do with football. But just to get started, here are four personnel questions to take into the weekend:
1. Why did Sandusky leave his job in 1999?
There isn't a good answer for Paterno and Penn State to this one-just variations on the theme of delinquency. In 1998, there had been a campus police investigation: it began with a mother noticing that her son had returned from an activity with Sandusky with his hair wet; proceeded to officers listening in on a phone call in which Sandusky admitted to showering with the boy, and all but confessed to much worse; and ended, inexplicably, maddeningly, with a detective advising him that showering with children wasn't such a good move. (A D.A. declined to press charges; he later went missing, something that has inspired a whole sub-genre of questions.) Was Sandusky's departure, a year later, completely unconnected? (Mark Madden, a columnist for the Beaver County Times, looked at that timeline in a piece last April that should have kept the indictment from catching anyone at Penn State by surprise.) If it wasn't, why not? If it was, does that mean that university officials just decided to get a pedophile off of its staff, without worrying about any child whose parents weren't paying tuition to Penn State? ... (Click title for more)
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How Zuccotti Park Protest Camp Was Cleared
A man is escorted by a New York Police Department officer as New York City sanitation workers clear Zuccotti Park Protesters were told to take their belongings and leave
From BBC News Reports
It was early in the morning on Tuesday in Lower Manhattan when New York police began the process of evicting the Occupy Wall Street protesters who had been camping at Zuccotti Park for nearly two months.
They were woken up at 01:00 (06:00 GMT) and ordered to leave, before hundreds of police began dismantling tents and removing property.
Leaflets were handed out saying the park had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous. Any belongings left behind would be put into storage.
Protesters were told they could return in several hours after the park had been cleaned up, but without camping equipment.
The police seem to have taken the demonstrators by surprise: "I was dead asleep. Then I was like, oh man, there was cops kicking the tents and people yelling 'this is not a drill!'" Mutsukai Iroppoi, 22, told the AFP news agency.
"They gave us about 20 minutes to get our things together," protester Sam Wood told Reuters news agency.
Another protester, Timothy Fitzgerald, told the BBC World Service's World Today programme:
"They just turned up, they didn't make any effort to communicate with us ahead of time. They rallied in secret along the waterfront, on South Street, and they just kind of rolled in with all of their equipment, dozens of lighting trucks and probably several hundred cops." ... (Click title for more)
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Camila Pineiro Harnecker
on Cooperatives and Socialism in Cuba
 Camila Piñeiro Harnecker "holds a degree in sustainable development from the University of Berkeley, California. She is a professor at the Centre for Studies on the Cuban Economy at Havana University, and her works have been published both in Cuba and outside the island. She is also, incidently, the daughter of Chilean-Cuban journalist and author Marta Harnecker (who now lives in Venezuela) and her late husband, Manuel "Red Beard" Piñeiro, who headed revolutionary Cuba's state security and intelligence service for many years." Camila Piñeiro Harnecker: ´Cuba needs changes, to take us forward rather than backwards', Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Jan. 15, 2011.
Piñeiro Harnecker has been interested in the organization of economic enterprises in forms other than western style corporations for some time. In line with the fundamental thrust of the Lineamientos (Economic and Social Policy Guidelines) adopted by the Cuban Communist Party at its 6th Party Congress in 2011, that serve as the blueprint for the current toolbox of changes contemplated in Cuba's economic organization, one that prohibits recourse to the corporate form (and the aggregation of capital) by individuals for the purpose of engaging in collective economic activity), she has been exploring cooperatives as an alternative form of aggregate economic organization.
(From Camila Piñeiro Harnecker: `Cuba needs changes, to take us forward rather than backwards', Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Jan. 15, 2011.)
I reiterate once again what is obvious to anyone who knows Cuban reality: that we must change innumerable structural aspects of the organisation of our society in all spheres of economic, political, juridical, communication, etc., life. We must break the inertia of so many years of not addressing the root causes of the grave problems that wear us down and degrade us and provoke a generalised and justified discontent.
However, it's important that we realise that something as simple as any change will not necessarily allow us to solve the problems and advance towards what we want. Since we are human beings with the capacity to think and be sensitive to the fact that the negative consequences of erroneous measures will fall on the most vulnerable people, and those who have sacrificed themselves the most for a better future for all of us, it seems to me important to try to do it as best we can. We must also avoid derailing what has been achieved to date, above all the humane outlook that characterises us. (Click title for more)
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Book Review - Midnight Rising: John Brown
and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War
Forgotten hero - or crazed fanatic? Journalist Tony Horwitz reexamines the story of John Brown and his raid on Harpers Ferry.
Christian Science Monitor Book Reviews
Despite the best efforts of some very good teachers, many things in American history remain murky to me. For instance: Who bribed whom to cause the Teapot Dome scandal? What did the Smoot-Hawley Tariff tax? And why did we fight the War of 1812?
Add to this list the story of John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. My favorite elementary school teacher called John Brown a hero, while my crisply edited high school textbook branded him a crazed vigilante. But exactly what he did and why I have never fully grasped.
That is, not until I picked up Tony Horwitz's absorbing new book Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War. Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author with a gift for writing engagingly about many things, is perhaps best known for "Confederates in the Attic," his 1998 book about America's ongoing obsession with the Civil War.
This time, Horwitz - dismayed that history sometimes treats Brown and his dramatic raid on Harpers Ferry as a mere "speed bump" in the race toward the Civil War - turns the clock back to 1800, the year that Brown was born into an infant United States, a country that was still a "preindustrial society of five million people," of whom "almost 900,000 were enslaved."
Even as a small boy, Horwitz notes, Brown showed signs of "a truculent and nonconformist spirit." That spirit, apparently, was roused to deep agitation when Brown, at the age of 12, saw a slave boy beaten with iron shovels. He would later write that this event jolted him into awareness of "the wretched, hopeless condition, of Fatherless & Motherless slave children" and marked the beginning of his "Eternal war with slavery."
Horwitz does a good job of marching quickly but clearly through the escalating tensions over slavery in the United States of Brown's adult years. Brown was hardly the only anti-slavery activist horrified by events like the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. And he was only one of thousands of Americans who moved to Kansas in the 1850s with the express purpose of influencing that state's vote to become either "free" or "slave." ... (Click title for more)
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New Film - Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
 By Mark Holcomb
Village Voice
Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
Directed by Jose Padilha
Variance Films
Opens November 11
Nov 9, 2011 - Packing an entire season's worth of The Wire's dirty cops, self-serving politicians, serpentine plotting, and gruesome, wasteful collateral damage into just under two hours, this sequel to the 2007 Brazilian hit Elite Squad will test the ideological mettle of law-and-order conservatives and lefty peaceniks alike.
That's a virtue, because though Elite Squad 2 (this movie's handier and more accurate original title) plays footsie with both socialism and fascism, it's never easy to peg. The film picks up on ultra-jaded Rio de Janeiro supercop Nascimento (Wagner Moura), whose special ops unit BOPE botches a prison riot raid that hands his detractors a reason to kick him upstairs.
Along with a cabal of government bureaucrats and a rogue police contingent intent on carving up the favela crime trade for itself, Nascimento's enemies include Fraga (Irandhir Santos), a human-rights activist who's shacking up with Nascimento's ex (Maria Ribeiro) and making an impression on his teenage son (Pedro Van-Held).
Fraga uses his own role in the riot to get elected to congress, and the two antagonists work from their polar positions to a corruption-busting collaborative climax that's as rousing as it is foregone. Screenwriter-director José Padilha favors the bullet-quick intensity and close camerawork of ES1 and his 2002 documentary Bus 174, and his preference for giddily shot bloodbaths that invite both tongue-clucking and anticipatory drooling will understandably irk hair-splitters. The unlikely last-act pact between Nascimento and Fraga-the lion and the lamb between the sheets at last-might be hard to swallow, too, but its conviction makes it tough to dismiss.
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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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