Which Side Are You On?
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'The Rag Blog' Geezer Advice from Mike Davis to Today's 'Occupy!' Activists
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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
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...
 OWS, What It Means,
Where Is It Going...
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! as a Wedge Widening the Gap
between the State and Civil Society
Ms. Civil Society vs. Mr. Unaccountable:
Crushing Flowers Won't Stop the Spring
By Rebecca Solnit
Progressive America Rising via TomDispatch.com
[TomDispatch Note: Nov 23, 2011 - They were the representatives not just of New York's billionaire mayor and the bankers and brokers who had previously made the area their own, but of the ever more militarized national security state that had blossomed like some errant set of weeds in the ruins of the World Trade Center towers. They were domestic grunts for a new order in Washington as well as New York that has, by now, lost the ability to imagine solving problems in a civil and civilian fashion.
They represent those who have ruled this country since 9/11 in the name of our safety and security, while they made themselves, and no one else, safe and secure. It is an order that has based itself on kidnapping, torture, secret prisons, illegal surveillance, assassination, permanent war, militarized solutions to every problem under the sun, its own set of failed occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the closest of relations with a series of crony capitalist corporations intent on making money off anyone's suffering as long as the going is good.
Behind the police, directly or indirectly, stands that bureaucratic monster of post-9/11 domestic "safety," the Department of Homeland Security. And behind both of them, without a doubt, that giant tangle of agencies -- 17 in all -- with an $80 billion-plus budget that go under the rubric of "intelligence" and dwarf the intelligence bureaucracy of the Cold War era, when the U.S. actually had an enemy worth speaking of.
All of this is the spawn of the 9/11 moment, which is why, on November 15th when the NYPD entered the encampment at Zuccotti Park, a weaponless and peaceable spot filled with sleeping activists and the homeless, they used pepper spray, ripped and tore down everything, and tossed all 4,000 books from the OWS "library" into a dumpster, damaging or mangling most of them. Books couldn't escape the state's violence, nor could the library's tent, bookshelves, chairs, computers, periodicals, and archives. Even librarians were arrested.
Much was literally trashed and, though "books are pretty sturdy objects," as one Zuccotti Park librarian wrote me, "when you throw them into a dumpster a lot of them get destroyed. We have recovered about one third of our books and of that number many are far too damaged to re-circulate." Novelist Salman Rushdie tweeted a perfectly reasonable response to the police action: "Please explain the difference between burning books and throwing thousands in the trash and destroying them."
Stop for a moment and imagine what the headlines here would have been like if Iranian or Chinese police had broken into a peaceful oppositional encampment and literally trashed its library without a second thought. The barbarians! Imagine what a field day the pundits would have had. Imagine what Fox News would have said.
Nothing, of course, had to be this way. That it was makes it part of the official legacy of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden. In the wake of that day, this is what Washington did to itself, and so to us. In the process, it did one other thing: it put the Constitution in the dumpster. Which makes it stirring to see, as only TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit could see it, the return of civil society, of us. We're back on the scene a decade later, like the cavalry, and it might just be in the nick of time. --TD]
Last Tuesday, I awoke in lower Manhattan to the whirring of helicopters overhead, a war-zone sound that persisted all day and then started up again that Thursday morning, the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and a big day of demonstrations in New York City. It was one of the dozens of ways you could tell that the authorities take Occupy Wall Street seriously, even if they profoundly mistake what kind of danger it poses. If you ever doubted whether you were powerful or you mattered, just look at the reaction to people like you (or your children) camped out in parks from Oakland to Portland, Tucson to Manhattan.
Of course, "camped out" doesn't quite catch the spirit of the moment, because those campsites are the way people have come together to bear witness to their hopes and fears, to begin to gather their power and discuss what is possible in our disturbingly unhinged world, to make clear how wrong our economic system is, how corrupt the powers that support it are, and to begin the search for a better way. Consider it an irony that the campsites are partly for sleeping, but symbols of the way we have awoken....(click title for more)
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OWS and the Young Trade Unionists
Interview with Cory McCray and George Hendricks
 Cory McCray, Founder of the Young Trade Unionists, and George Hendricks, Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) Rep and Vice President of the Young Trade Unionists (YTU)
By Mark Nowak
MRZine.org
If you head down to the IBEW Local 24 Union Hall Auditorium on W. Patapsco Avenue in Baltimore on the first Tuesday of any month, you'll encounter a meeting of an energetic group of young union members from the Metro Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area. The Young Trade Unionists (YTU) was founded in November 2009 by Cory McCray, a graduate of both the Baltimore City Public School System and the five-year apprenticeship program of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Participants in the YTU include young workers from the IBEW, UFCW, teachers' unions, building trades, public employees' and other sectors.
On the heels of the massive rally and march across the Brooklyn Bridge last week -- and coinciding with the arrival of Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) marchers in Washington, D.C., today and Wednesday's "day of action" in DC -- I spoke with McCray about the ways in which the #OWS movement and young workers today might deepen their bonds. McCray participated in this past weekend's 28th Biennial Convention of the Maryland State and District of Columbia AFL-CIO, where membership passed a resolution for its members to treat occupy sites in DC and Baltimore as they would a formal picket line.
MR: How have young workers in Baltimore and all of Maryland been perceiving, and talking about, the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Cory McCray: Amongst young workers, it's something that's definitely supported due to the fact that in Baltimore, as young workers, we've seen multipliers for pension programs go up, we've seen the cost of low wages and manufacturing jobs going overseas and numerous other actions that have been taken, not only amongst workers in general but young workers that have been affected the most. I attended the State Federation conference this weekend, AFL-CIO, and one of the actions that the Young Trade Unionists proposed from the Baltimore side was to show solidarity at a meeting on December 6 at McKeldin Square.
What do you think are some of the possibilities for labor and #OWS to work together?
CM: I think they go hand in hand because the labor movement has always fought against the foreclosures, the high cost of education, the workplace violations, the large corporations. . . So many of the things that #OWS are bringing to attention and putting to the forefront are always things that labor has taken action on. But right now it's such a visible tone because it's very strategic and placed all across the country. Right now, the labor movement has a great possibility of having something come to fruition with the #OWS movement. But I think that this is probably the beginning, that's what it looks like. And it's ready to come to something big. And when we do these types of things, we always are going to need partners. It's definitely not only going to be labor. It's also going to have to be the communities, the churches, LGBT, the minority factor. I think that it takes everyone as a whole to lift up the workers....(Click title for more)
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AFL-CIO's Trumka Featured in Esquire
The American worker has been getting thrashed for thirty years. Jobs leaving the country, wages flat, his boss getting rich. One coal miner from Pennsylvania knows exactly what to do about it.
By John H. Richardson
Esquire Magazine
Richard Trumka stands at the podium like a man with his foot in the doorway of history, relaxed and confident and grinning at the audience. Wisconsin? The attempted murder of public unions? That was actually a win, he says.
A big beefy guy with a bristling mustache and Blagojevich hair, Trumka started life as a coal miner. His grandfather was a union man. His father was a union man. He became a union man and put himself through college on the midnight shift, leading many bitter strikes in the coal patch where rock-throwing miners confronted guards with machine guns, scenes from an epic American history few people remember. Two years ago he rose to the top of the American labor movement, president of the AFL-CIO, where he represents twelve million firefighters, teachers, nurses, miners, electricians, and entertainers. He came in with a lifetime's worth of dreams for reviving labor and saving America. So when Governor Scott Walker this year took away the right of collective bargaining for government workers in Wisconsin, the law of the land for seventy-five years, Walker didn't just aim a dagger straight at the heart of American labor, he aimed it at Rich Trumka's heart.
But Trumka is grinning. "We've been trying for three decades to get a national debate on collective bargaining. Scott Walker gave us the national debate we were looking for."
By national debate he means thousands of angry citizens marching in the street. Occupying the state capitol. Mounting recall elections. That's the kind of national debate Trumka thinks America needs.
"Now 70-some percent of Americans think every worker, public or private, ought to have the right to collective bargaining."
So would you support going after Walker?
Trumka doesn't hesitate. "Would I support going after Lucifer? Of course - the guy's been a bad governor, he tried to use a contrived deficit to take people out."
Within hours, this will be denounced as hate speech on right-wing blogs.
And the Occupy Wall Street protests, some recent union locals becoming involved - do you have an opinion on that?
Hell yes, he has an opinion. Unions have been trying to tell people that Wall Street is out of control since about forever. They've warned about lost jobs and stagnant wages and the insane wealth of the top 1 percent for almost as long. They've been major players in the push to reregulate Wall Street. They've been leading the fight against lavish executive pay. From the beginning of the protests, union bus drivers refused to take people to jail. The first major endorsement of the protesters came in the form of seven hundred union steelworkers.
"I think being in the streets and calling attention to issues is sometimes the only recourse you have," Trumka says. "Wall Street is out of control. Calling attention to it and peacefully protesting is a very legitimate way of doing it. I've done it thousands of times myself and I'll do it again." (Click title for more)
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The Thick Dark Fog: New Film Tracks
Cultural Genocide of American Indians
Walter Littlemoon speaks to students at Colorado State University. (Photo courtesy Mike Kalush, The Rocky Mountain Collegian / The Thick Dark Fog)
By Rose Aguilar
Truthout,org
Nov 24, 2011 - In 1892, US Army officer Richard Pratt delivered a speech in which he described his philosophy behind US government-run boarding schools for American Indians. "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," he said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
From 1879 until the 1960s, more than 100,000 American Indian children were forced to attend boarding schools. Children were forcibly removed or kidnapped from their homes and taken to the schools. Families risked imprisonment if they stood in the way or attempted to take their children back.
Many of the country's 100 schools were still active up until the 1970s. Generations of children were subjected to dehumanization, cruelty and beatings, all intended to strip them of their Native identity and culture. The ultimate goal was to "civilize" the children.
A new documentary, "The Thick Dark Fog," shines a light on the traumatic boarding school experience through the telling of personal stories. The film focuses on Walter Littlemoon, a Lakota who was forced to attend a federal government boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1950s. Littlemoon says his culture, language and spirituality were brutally suppressed.
"The government school had tried to force me to forget the Lakota language and I wouldn't do it," he says in the film. "We had a deep sense of preservation for our culture, so we would go and hide in order to speak Lakota. If we got caught, they were allowed to beat us with whatever they could, but we took that chance. The Lakota language is something that comes from deep inside of you. It comes from how you look at things and how you see things."
"The Thick Dark Fog" profiles Walter's healing process and attempt to reclaim his heritage. "It wasn't until my sixtieth year that I began to realize that there was more to me. Something was missing. It was like I was a nonbeing," he says. "I didn't know the medical words of multigenerational trauma or the complex post-traumatic stress disorder, so I called the problem what I felt it to be: the thick dark fog."
One of the film's more haunting moments provides a montage of excerpts of interviews with Indians describing their boarding school experiences:
"We had all our clothes taken from us."
"I remember always going to bed hungry."
"We were being punished, but none of us really knew why."
"It wasn't punishment. It was beatings. You'd put your hands down and they'd slam the desk down on your hands. They'd take you downstairs and make you kneel down on either a broom handle or a pencil."
"Soap. That's what she used to wash my mouth. I'll never forget the burning, the choking, the helplessness, the fading out that I went through."
Will the US government ever come to terms with and acknowledge its dark brutal past? In 1999, the state of Maine, in collaboration with the Wabanaki tribes, set up the Maine Tribal-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission. ... (Click title for more)
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Occupying Society: How the Movement Hashes
Out Race, Class and Privilege in Real Time
When encampments are shut down, it's not just the physical turf that's lost; a social experiment in working out the issues that have divided people for centuries gets crimped.
By Latoya Peterson
Alternet.org
Nov. 20, 2011 - Since Occupy Wall Street lost its stronghold in Manhattan's financial district last Tuesday, thanks to a long-threatened raid by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, discussion swirls about the fate of the movement -- especially in light of similar evictions of Occupy encampments in other cities.
But the loss of encampment space is about more than the movement's physical presence; it threatens the loss of the most compelling story, a hybrid of breaking news and reality TV show. This couldn't have been dreamed up by MTV, but the premise feels familiar: An organic, ad hoc society springs from encampment village, hashing out in real time tensions around class, race and competing priorities that have gripped the progressive movement for decades -- essentially the early seasons of "The Real World" for change agents and social activists. (The comparison wasn't lost on MTV producers, who created a special called True Life: I'm Occupying Wall Street, which aired earlier this month.)
Occasionally, the competing priorities of the movements made headlines, but the stories aired and published usually focused on tensions that arise when resistance to the state meets the need for police authority, as evidenced in ongoing battles over dealing with sexual assault in some encampments. Matters of diversity, homelessness and conversational direction draw less attention from media, but are fiercely debated in the Occupy communities -- and those conversations are instructive in the quest to create a new type of society. (Click title for more)
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Movie Review - Police Misconduct:
A Bad Cop Getting Worse in 'Rampart'
 Rampart
Directed by Oren Moverman
Starring Woody Harrelson
Millenium entertainment
By Karina Longworth
Village Voice
Directed by Oren Moverman (The Messenger) from a script by Moverman and L.A. noir master James Ellroy, Rampart tracks the downward spiral of LAPD cop Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson). A Vietnam vet whose personal code allows for extreme bad behavior in the name of a hazily defined greater good, Brown describes his approach to patrol as "a military occupation, emergency law."
Asked by a rookie lady cop about the scandal that gives the movie its title-the action's set in 1999, right around the time 70 Rampart Division cops were busted for misconduct-Brown replies that it's "bullshit." He also claims that the rat's accusations have created a new problem, inducing "hopped-up, wannabe-Rodney King beaners" to goad cops into fucking up in the vicinity of cameras. "I am not a racist," Brown says later. "The fact is, I hate all people, equally."
Sure enough, soon Brown is at the center of his own scandal, when a surreptitiously shot video of him beating a suspect makes the nightly news. The dominoes fall from there: An effort to obtain cash for his legal costs leads to a second charge of suspicious force, which leads to Brown's ejection from the home he shares with his two daughters and two ex-wives-who happen to be sisters.
Rampart is Moverman's second consecutive collaboration with Harrelson, after The Messenger, which earned the actor an Oscar nomination. Here the director pulls off the formidable task of marrying two unwieldy performances: Harrelson's, a volatile and vulnerable feat of showboating, and Ellroy's, whose writing voice is unmistakably the voice of the movie....(Click title for more)
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Now Out: The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
Various Artists on Bob Dylan's Egyptian Label
By Doug Heselgrave
Paste Magazine
"The silence of a falling star
Lights up the purple sky
I wonder where you are tonight
I'm so lonesome I could cry."
We've all listened, played and maybe even sung those lines by Hank Williams so many times that they've worn out. It's a fate that hits a lot of great music. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix. You own all of their albums and rock radio plays their music so often that it's over for you and it'd take years for you to hear any of this music with fresh ears again. And with artists like Hendrix and Marley who have been dead for decades, it's a sure thing that they won't be releasing any new music on this side of the mortal coil any time soon.
Hank Williams is like that. His songs have been such a deep integral part of roots, pop and country music for so long that it's often difficult to believe that they were the work of a single person who had a short career and died tragically at the age of 28 in 1952. Nearly 60 years later, his star has yet to diminish, but if you're like many Williams completists who own every single, album, radio show and anthology, the newly released Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams comes as nothing short of a revelation. There have been many excellent tribute albums of Williams' music-the Timeless collection that features many of the same artists as this one is a standout- released since the singer's death, but this one truly offers something different.
More than anything else it offers a fresh opportunity to listen to and appreciate what made Williams' music so unique in country music. Like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, Williams was one of the few country artists who found an appreciative audience in the larger musical community and The Lost Notebooks reminds us why this was so. He was the consummate artist and listening to his music one encounters a mind, soul and spirit like none other in the history of pop music. His economy, directness and the stripped down perfection of his lyrics and melodies have never been bested.
The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams is the second CD released on Bob Dylan's Egyptian Records label and is structured very much like the Mermaid Avenue CDs released a decade or so ago by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Those CDs featured new music set to lyrics by Woody Guthrie....(Click title for more)
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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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