'Louder Than a Bomb'
A trailer for a great film chronicling four teams as they compete in the Chicago area teen poetry slam. Hopeful and heartbreaking, the film captures the tempestuous lives of these young poets, exploring ways writing shapes their world, and vice versa.
|
Blog of the Week:
|
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.
|
David Montgomery, Presente!
An Appreciation written by Eric Foner
|
|
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.
|
|
Order Our
Full Employment Booklets
 |
...In a new and updated 2nd Edition
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. |
|
Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion
|
Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Revolution
A Political Biography
By David S. G. Goodman
Routledge Press
|
Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Verso
Paperback
List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $8.00
Buy Now
|
Carl Davidson's Latest Book:
New Paths to Socialism
Essays on Mondragon, Marx, Gramsci and the Green and Solidarity Economies |
Solidarity Economy:What It's All About
Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei
Buy it here...
|
|
|
|
An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 | |
Iran's Revolutionary Guard
|
More Austerity,
More War Dangers and 2012 Politics
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... |
Iraq War's Aftermath & Obama's
Ominous Arming of Despots in the Gulf
By Carl Bloice BlackCommentator.com
Just as the year was coming to a close, three prominent Iraqi political figures declared their country "stands on the brink of disaster." Rather than becoming a "a functioning democratic and nonsectarian state," Iraq is on the path to becoming" a sectarian autocracy that carries with it the threat of devastating civil war," asserted Ayad Allawi, named Prime Minister of the Iraqi Interim Government after the U.S. Invasion, Osama Al-Nujaifi, Speaker of Council of Representatives of Iraq, and the country's finance minister, Rafe Al-Essawi, on the opinion page of the New York Times. The country "has become a battleground of sects, in which identity politics have crippled democratic development."
The three men, leaders of the large political non-sectarian coalition Iraqiya that won the most seats in the 2010 election and represents more than a quarter of all Iraqis, said they are now " being hounded and threatened" by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki "who is attempting to drive us out of Iraqi political life and create an authoritarian one-party state." Maliki, the three said, issues directives to military units, makes unilateral military appointments, interferes with the courts, has complete control over Iraqi intelligence and national security agencies, and serves the interest of Maliki's Dawa party that controls the Green Zone and intimidates political opponents.
Their country, the three politicians said, has become "the Iraq of our nightmares" in which "the nation's wealth is captured by a corrupt elite rather than invested in the development of the nation."
It would be hard to be more dismal that the picture Ali A. Allawi who previously served at different times has Iraq's minister of trade, defense and finance in succession between 2003 and 2006 drew for Time's readers this week:
"Agriculture has effectively collapsed; the great river systems of Mesopotamia have shriveled; trade routes based on Iraq's unique geography have vanished; and transport links have atrophied. Merchants and entrepreneurs are merely recyclers of state-owned and state-generated wealth and a previously open and culturally and religiously accommodating society has been replaced by beleaguered communities locked in laagers."
For this over one hundred thousand Iraqis have lost their lives since the United States, under a phony pretext, invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, killed its head of state, and occupied the country for over nine years.
The U.S. - led coalition forces have lost 4,805 lives in battle, 4,487 of them young women and men from the United States. The number of U.S. military personnel wounded during the conflict is officially 32,226. However, Dan Froomkin, senior Washington Correspondent for the Huffington Post, has written, "The true number of military personnel injured over the course of our nine-year-long fiasco in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands - maybe even more than half a million - if you take into account all the men and women who returned from their deployments with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing disorders, diseases, and other long-term health problems...." (Click title for more)
|
|
Why Mexican Immigrants Can't Get Ahead
 The real wages of Mexicans in the U.S. have declined since 1970, and Princeton sociologists say a 'perfect storm' of anti-immigrant laws is to blame.
By Melinda Burns
Miller-McCune.com
An annual Christmas pilgrimage used to see perhaps millions of Mexican immigrants, documented or not, return to Mexico from the U.S. for the holidays. But that flow has slowed as the U.S. militarizes its southern border and violence back home reduces the motherland's charms. But the economic charms of working in the U.S. are paling, too.
Among the so-called 99 percent of people in the United States who have not shared in the rising prosperity of recent decades, Mexican immigrants have fared worse than most. While the real wages of other groups have remained fairly stagnant since 1970, studies show that the wages of Mexican-born workers in the United States have actually declined, whether the workers were here legally or not.
A recent report by sociologist Doug Massey and Ph.D. candidate Julia Gelatt of Princeton University reveals that the average wages of Mexican-born immigrants in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, were no higher in 2007, on the eve of the Great Recession, than they were in the early 1960s. Massey says the trend continues today.
In the past, some scholars have attributed the falling wages of Mexicans in the U.S. to a decline in the skill and productivity of successive waves of immigrants. But Massey and Gelatt show that the educational levels of Mexican immigrants here have steadily improved in recent decades. They argue that a "new regime of immigration enforcement" is to blame for the stagnant wages of Mexicans in the U.S., beginning in 1986 with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act under President Ronald Reagan; and continuing in bipartisan fashion through the administrations of presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. According to new Census data, Hispanics are now the poorest ethnic group in the country. ...(Click title for more)
|
The Socialist Menace in 2012?
Memo to the GOP: We Should Be So Lucky
 By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin' On
Do you ever wonder if Republicans are living on another planet, one of those 'alternate history' sci-fi worlds?
I do, especially when they get shrill about the new socialist order that a menacing Barack Obama is supposedly dragging us into.
If only! Imagine, if you will, that our President, during his first months in office, had done the following:
1. Got EFCA, the Employee Free Choice act, passed through Congress, so we could double or triple the number of union members in the country fairly quickly.
2. Instead of nationalizing RomneyCare, took a strong stand for 'Medicare for All' as the standard for health care, even as a 'public option.
3. Let the stocks of the biggest 'too big to fail' banks fall down to penny status, then bought them all up, and sub-divided them into state-owned banks like the Bank on North Dakota-and nationalized the Federal Reserve to boot.
4. After picking up a majority share in failing auto firms, fired the old management and leased them to the UAW, where the workers in each plant would elect their own managers.
5. Devoted the entirety of his stimulus package to a green manufacturing industrial policy, rather than giving half of it away as tax cuts for the rich, and kept on Van Jones to implement a Green Jobs programs hiring those who needed work the most, first.
6. Brought all the troops home from the wars, repealed the 'Patriot Act' and pushed through a new GI Bill for schooling, healthcare and jobs.
Now if even half of these things had taken place, we might stretch a bit and say the weird claims of Republicans had a small point. Unfortunately, we're not even close. Moreover, even if we were, these are still simply deep structural reforms. They alter relations of power, to some degree, between the working class and finance capital, in the favor of workers. In that sense, they represent economic democracy, which can serve as a bridge to socialism-but again they also may not. In any case, the real thing, where the working class and its allies held the preponderance of political power, would still be a ways down the pike.
But none of these reform items have come into being in any complete or substantive way. However beneficial they might be, they've all been declared 'off the table' inside a Beltway under the thumb of Wall Street's neoliberal hegemony.
So what are all the GOP 2012 presidential contenders carrying on about with their dire warnings of 'socialism?'
It's all a smokescreen to hide two things. First, they want to take the country back to 1900, where the working class has zero power-but Wisconsin and Ohio have taught them they can't say that out loud. Two, a good-sized portion of their base can't stand an African American in the Oval Office-the main reason 'birtherism' won't die, and why they keep giving it a wink and a nod.
Now I'd like a President who really would fight for the six points listed above. But it's not likely this round. In any case, I'm crystal clear on one point: we need to defeat any and all Republicans this round, from top to bottom, whose victories would strip us of any power whatsoever.
|
Decentralized People Power: What OWS
By Grace Davie
NationofChange.org
At an Occupy Wall Street meeting in midtown Manhattan on December 20th, a debate broke out about the general assemblies (hereafter, GAs)-the core decision-making forums of the movement and its most visible embodiment of direct democracy.
The meeting was the second of its kind devoted to exploring the idea of a city-wide general assembly. About 80 people attended, including members of several OWS working groups and GAs across the city, of which there are now about a dozen. While some people seemed dissatisfied with the GAs, and perhaps even ready to dispense with them, others appeared intent on popularizing them even more.
The discussion reminded me that this movement is growing and deepening its ties with local neighborhoods-yet as it does, it is encountering the challenge of how to accommodate new communities and support existing organizations that share its goals. While this challenge is still fairly new for OWS, it is one that has been faced and overcome by other movements before.
As a participant-observer who wants the Occupy movement to flourish, this strikes me as an appropriate moment to look back at another social movement that promoted consultation and consenus-building. In the 1980s, South Africa's United Democratic Front (UDF) helped to end apartheid by empowering existing community-based organizations and developing the leadership capacities of local leaders, some of whom had little or no prior experience as activists. Notably, the UDF inspired and mobilized diverse affiliates without trying to impose one political framework upon them. At this particular juncture, when OWS's New York City-based leaders appear divided over the question of how much emphasis to place on the GAs and on the general ethos of consensus-based politics, the UDF's victories seem instructive.
Jeremy Seekings' definitive account, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-1991, shows that this umbrella coalition that energized a broad swath of people by leading from behind. It gave affiliates ways to withdraw their support from apartheid and from the economic transactions that kept it in place. It knit together a wide range of civic organizations into an unprecedentedly large mass movement. And, like OWS, it promoted participation and consultation. Explains former UDF General Secretary Popo Molefe:
The structures for decision-making within the UDF may have often seemed tedious, but they taught us the importance of consensus politics and participatory democracy. ... The regular debate within the UDF on democracy and accountability, the insistence that unaccountable leaders be recalled and the importance attached to criticism and self-criticism served to weaken any potential autocratic tendencies in the "new" South Africa.
Some students of South African politics might argue that the UDF did not go far enough to weaken "autocratic tendencies." The current ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has launched salvos against free speech while continuing to rely on economic policies that have entrenched the privilege of elites rather than creating the kind of equitable society many UDF supporters envisioned in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the UDF is worth revisiting. For OWS, it suggests that a flexible, open, decentralized approach, one that allows extant groups to affiliate without radically altering their language or abandoning their existing decision-making processes in favor of new ones-namely, those of the GAs-can still succeed at dismantling oppressive systems..... (Click title for more)
|
Whose Egypt? Anti-Democracy Is Tenacious
By Adam Shatz
London Review of Books
The awakening is not over, but the heady days of the Arab Spring have come to an end. The counter-revolution, Régis Debray once observed, is revolutionized by the revolution.
And so it has been. In Syria, protests have degenerated into sectarian warfare, fomented by a thuggish ruling clique that seems ready to bring the entire country down with it. In Yemen, President Saleh has agreed to stand down after nearly three decades in power, but on the northern border with Saudi Arabia, the dirty war between Shia Houthi rebels and Salafists is getting nastier.
In Libya, the oil companies are doing business again, but the country's new rulers, swept to power by Nato, are talking about restoring Sharia law, perhaps even polygamy.
In Bahrain, a peaceful uprising by the Shia majority has been crushed by the al-Khalifa monarchy, with help from troops dispatched by Saudi Arabia. (Tehran, the Saudis claimed, was behind the protests, an assertion rejected by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry in November.)
Never keen on popular politics, and furious with the Americans for 'deserting' their mutual friend Mubarak, the Saudis have been assiduously fighting the revolutionary wave, mostly with petrodollars, sometimes with guns. The Obama administration was not pleased with the Saudi intervention in Bahrain, but it barely uttered a word of criticism: the Fifth Fleet is stationed there, and preserving the special relationship with the House of Saud is paramount.
Civil strife, sectarian warfare, repression: the forces resisting revolutionary, democratic change in the Middle East are proving tenacious. The only country to have been spared such turbulence is Tunisia, where, in an extraordinarily smooth post-revolutionary segue, the moderate Islamists of the Nahda have come to power in elections, reassuring secular Tunisians that they intend to respect the country's progressive family code. But Tunisia has the luck of being small and peripheral. It is an island of comparative tranquillity because it barely casts a shadow beyond its borders.
Egypt, by contrast, casts a very long shadow. It has the largest population of any Arab country: some 83 million citizens. It has the Suez Canal, through which American warships are accustomed to pass at short notice. It shares a border with Israel, with which it signed a peace treaty that has allowed the Israeli army great room for manoeuvre when it has invaded its neighbours. Egypt has a very close relationship with Washington, particularly when it comes to counter-terrorism, and it has provided services that dare not speak their name, such as torture. But it has never been merely a client state. Egypt is a genuine nation, with a pharaonic history of which it is understandably proud. It has memories of leading the Arab world under Nasser, and despite the many humiliations that followed Nasser's defeat in 1967 it has never quite given up on the idea of leading it again, as if the last four decades were just a caesura. And then there is the city of Cairo, overcrowded, grimy and a bit battered but still, in its bewildering size and wounded ambition, the cultural and political capital of the Arab world: a status it lived up to, for the first time in decades, in Tahrir Square during the 25 January revolution. The stakes in Egypt are very high.
Less than a year has passed since the uprising began, but the euphoria in Tahrir Square already seems like a distant memory. The young people who launched the revolution are still protesting, but they have been outflanked by the hard men, the soldiers and Islamist politicians now calling the shots. The Mubarak regime was replaced by a military junta, the 20-member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), headed by Field Marshal Muhammed Hussein Tantawi.The Scaf has all but declared war on Tahrir, assailing protesters calling for civilian rule as 'enemies' of the revolution which it perversely claims to embody. On 16 December, military police officers armed with electric prods and clubs, and assisted by thugs, moved into the square at dawn. At least 14 people were killed and hundreds injured; a woman was stripped half naked and beaten in the square. The country's newly appointed prime minister, Kamal El-Ganzoury, blamed protesters for the violence, accusing them of an 'assault on the revolution'.
The other principal beneficiary of the uprising, the Muslim Brotherhood, has seen its political party, Freedom and Justice, win more than 40 per cent of the vote in the first round of elections, and appears to have done just as well in the second round. The Egyptian Bloc, a left-liberal secular coalition, came a dismal third, and performed well only in Cairo: a reminder that 'Egypt isn't Tahrir Square' (as Major General Mukhtar el-Mallah put it), and that Cairo isn't either. The runner-up was al-Nour, a fanatical Salafi party that promises to impose Islamic law, and to lead the country 'on the path to light'. Al-Nour appeared on the scene shortly after the revolution, when scores of Salafi prisoners were released from Mubarak's jails; they are said to receive support from Saudi Arabia, perhaps as a way of sticking it to their neighbourhood rival Qatar, which backs the Brotherhood. The bearded men of al-Nour frown on women's rights and make little secret of their hostility to Christians. Their strong showing only added to the anxieties of the Copts, nearly a hundred thousand of whom have already emigrated, a number expected to rise to 250,000 next year....(Click title for more)
|
Hip Hop's Ietef Vita: Rapping the
Righteousness of Wheatgrass Juice
 By Andrew Leonard
Grist Magazine
Grist is proud to present the Change Gang -- profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we've written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you'll have heard of; most you probably won't. Know someone we should add to the Change Gang? Tell us why.
Three blocks from his old high school in the historic Five Points district of Denver, Colo., recalls Ietef Vita, stands a youth penitentiary where friends Vita hasn't seen since middle school are still locked up.
Gentrification is now starting to soften the hard edges of Five Points, but when he was growing up, says Vita, the neighborhood was "saturated by gang violence and police brutality."
"And there wasn't a community garden anywhere," he laments.
That's changed now, in part due to Vita's relentlessly positive food justice hustling and his determination to claim the idiom of hip-hop for green, sustainable, social enlightenment. Vita's MC handle -- DJ Cavem -- is an acronym for "Communicating Awareness Victoriously Educating the Masses." Vita has even redefined hip-hop itself -- in his gospel, the words stand for "higher inner peace, helping other people."
So say goodbye to the old school OG -- "original gangster" -- and hello to the new "organic gardener." In Five Points, Vita says, it's time to tune out the hip-hop glorification of sex and alcohol and violence, and tune in to, no kidding, the righteousness of wheatgrass juice....(Click title for more)
|
Ravi Shankar: Past 90 Years and Still
Expanding Our Consciousness
By Doug Heselgrave
Paste Magazine
Ravi Shankar:
Nine Decades Volume 2:
Reminiscence of North Vista
At 91 years of age, Ravi Shankar has earned the right to be reflective. As a dancer, choreographer, composer and virtuoso sitar player, Shankar has spent most of his life- since he was a very young child-on the road, fulfilling a mission to expose the world to Indian classical music. Up until a very few years ago, he maintained a touring and recording schedule that would exhaust most players half his age, but the intense physical demands of playing the sitar have finally forced Shankar to pare down his activities and spend more time at home.
While this may be bad news for concertgoers who have had the privilege of attending Shankar's illuminating live performances over the years, the extra time Shankar has on his hands now has been well spent. For, even though his reflexes may have slowed down somewhat, Shankar's intellect and restless creativity has not, so for the last year or two the sitarist has been attending to the preservation of his recorded and performance legacy by releasing archival concerts on his label East Meets West Music as a part of a personally selected series entitled Nine Decades.
The music for this second volume of the Nine Decades series was recorded at Shankar's home in California on Aug. 29, 1969 just one week after he played the Woodstock Festival. Unlike his performance at that legendary event, which was characterized more by its speed and virtuosity than its subtlety, this home recording finds Shankar and Alla Rahkha, his table player, in a much more reflective mood. At this time, Ravi Shankar was at the height of his popularity in the West and not surprisingly, the parties at his home attracted luminaries from the worlds of music and film, including George Harrison, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Peter Sellers and Marlon Brando. And, while it remains uncertain how the intricate improvisations and interweaving melodies resonated with the celebrity audience in attendance, the recording preserved here is among the very best of Shankar's music captured anywhere. Comprised of two meditative evening ragas (melodic sketches) the tracks on Nine Decades Volume 2 showcase Shankar at his intuitive peak. The compositions are soothing and can be enjoyed at low volume as background music, but listen actively and you'll hear the work of an improviser who-without flash or bombast-is every bit the equal of Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix at their freewheeling best.
George Harrison once famously credited Ravi Shankar with 'inventing world music' and though that might be a bit of a stretch, if you listen to Nine Decades a few times, it might be enough to understand that no one alive today has contributed more to the development of the genre than he has. This CD is absolutely essential listening and belongs in everyone's collection....(Click title for more)
|
|
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 |
|
|
