Blog of the Week: Hatewatch
...Southern Poverty Law Center monitoring the far right.
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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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Marv Davidov, Presente!
An appreciation written by Randy Furst in Minneapolis
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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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...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. |
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Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion
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Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Revolution
A Political Biography
By David S. G. Goodman
Routledge Press
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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 |
Solidarity Economy:What It's All About
Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei
Buy it here...
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Early Victories,
Tough Battles
Ahead in 2012
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...
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Astonishing Trifecta: People vs. Corporate Greed
Occupy Wall Street Energizes Wins vs. SOPA Bill,
Oil Pipeline and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker
By Juan Gonzalez
Progressive America Rising via NY Daily News
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, blacked out his website Wednesday to protest a bill in Congress against online piracy.
This nation's fast-growing populist movement against unbridled corporate power scored an astonishing trifecta this week.
In the span of just a few hours on Wednesday, three vastly different protest movements all achieved startling success the same way: by mobilizing the fury of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens.
An unprecedented one-day Internet blackout drew the most attention. Organized by free speech advocates, and backed by several major Internet companies, the protest sought to derail bills in Congress that the powerful entertainment industry has demanded against online piracy of movies and music.
If that legislation passes, its critics argue, the government will be able to shut down access to any website suspected of carrying copyrighted works, even if the website operator does so unknowingly, and even before any court hearing is held.
"These bills are very badly written," Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told me in an interview yesterday. "It's all well and good . . . to find solutions to criminal behavior online. It's not OK to set up a censorship regime in response to that."
Wikipedia and more than 10,000 websites went dark, while firms like Tumblr, Google and Facebook directed millions of their users to flood Congress with phone calls and petitions.
By the end of the day, several stunned senators and congressmen who had originally supported the legislation - including both Democrats and Republicans - had jumped ship, and the bills in their current forms now seem dead.
The Internet blackout was just one citizen victory that day.
Environmental activists were equally elated when President Obama announced his rejection of a permit request by energy giant TransCanada to build a 1,700-mile pipeline to pump oil from Canada's tar sands through the heartland of the U.S. all the way to Texas. ...(Click title for more)
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Don't Be Fooled: The Tea Party Is Still Powerful
 The Tea Party has proved itself spectacularly adept at two tasks: exacting promises and submission from presidential candidates and setting the Republican policy agenda.
By David Weigel
Washington Monthly
Jan. 9, 2012 - Go to the panels with the boring names. That's the secret to any political conference. Flashy names are candy floss meant to tempt you into meetings that at best will tell you what you already know, and at worst will bore you mindless.
That's the approach I take, anyway, at the 2011 Defending the American Dream Summit, the annual megaconfab put on by Americans for Prosperity. This is the Tea Party group chaired by the billionaire industrialist David Koch with a budget, at last measure, of more than $40 million. Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani are all here to address thousands of Tea Partiers. But the actual planning is happening in small rooms, under titles like "Property Rights in Peril." I head inside to find AFP's petite Oregon director, Karla Kay Edwards, clicking "Play" on a PowerPoint. We see a map of the United States with public lands marked in red.
"Dead capital is property that has no possibility of securing property rights on it," says Edwards. "Folks, I submit to you that everything in red has no possibility of securing property rights on it."
A few dozen Tea Party activists take it in, scribble down notes. They're spending two days in Washington, D.C., on heavily discounted tickets. If they live close by-Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina-odds are that they took a chartered bus here with fellow Tea Partiers. They're the vanguard of the movement, Republican precinct chairs and campaign volunteers, and they are learning that the 2012 elections won't count for much unless victory results in a huge sell-off of public lands.
It's easy to think that the Tea Party is on the wane. Its obituary has been written countless times in the past twelve months. And, in a couple of big, visible ways, it's true. The large "taxpayer march on Washington" on September 12, 2009, was never matched or repeated. April 15, 2011, the third annual day of tax protests, was mostly a fluke. And the Tea Party's punching weight in the GOP presidential primary has been hard to measure. Just as conservatives failed to decide on an alternative to John McCain, they have fumbled and staggered from candidate to candidate in a vain attempt to challenge Mitt Romney. In September, Romney appeared at a ballyhooed Tea Party Express rally in New Hampshire. I was there. The activists only outnumbered the reporters by around four to one.
But this is the wrong way to look at the Tea Party. After 2010, the movement evolved. Activists got jobs with newly elected Republicans. Political organizations like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks grew their staffs and budgets. Elected Republicans continued to draw on them for strength, support, and warm bodies at campaign events. ...(Click title for more)
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Opposition Erupts as Chicago City Council
Passes G8/NATO Summit Ordinances
By Kari Lydersen
In These Times
CHICAGO-The marble floor in Chicago City Hall vibrated as labor union members and other protesters stamped their feet and loudly chanted "Shame! Shame! Shame!" after the council overwhelmingly voted for two ordinances Wednesday related to police powers and protest restrictions in advance of the simultaneous G8 and NATO summits in Chicago in May.
City Council members argued that changes made to the original ordinance in the face of massive public outcry make it an acceptable alternative. Changes included the elimination of increased fines for resisting arrest, and scaling back a requirement that all sound and recording equipment, signs and banners to be used by protesters be described in a parade permit application.
But opponents-including the labor-community coalition Stand Up Chicago! and members and leaders of SEIU Local 73, Jobs with Justice and other workers and grassroots groups-say the ordinances are still a serious attack on basic civil rights. Among other things, they allow the city to deputize police officers from outside Chicago for temporary duty, change the requirements for obtaining a protest permit and allow the city to enter into no-bid security contracts without city council approval. (The ordinances can be read here and here.)
At a press conference before the vote Wednesday, representatives and advocates of unions, disability rights, community groups, veterans and mental health patients said the ordinance could mean a reprise of the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago-where police viciously attacked demonstrators-and seriously gut free speech rights.
They said it would make it especially hard for disabled and low-income people to exercise their rights to protest, and hence it will make it even harder for people to challenge city policies that disenfranchise low-income and African American communities, the disabled, the homeless and others who already feel they have been attacked by first-year Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who the movement has dubbed "Mayor One Percent."....(Click title for more)
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Fighting a Forbidden Battle:
How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong
 17-year-old's MLK Prize-Winning Essay on Breaking with an Oppressor Identity
By Jesse Lieberfeld
PulseMedia.org
Jan. 17, 2012 - I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world-and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time. Once, I thought that I truly belonged in this world of security, self-pity, self-proclaimed intelligence, and perfect moral aesthetic. I thought myself to be somewhat privileged early on. It was soon revealed to me, however, that my fellow believers and I were not part of anything so flattering.
Although I was fortunate enough to have parents who did not try to force me into any one set of beliefs, being Jewish was in no way possible to escape growing up. It was constantly reinforced at every holiday, every service, and every encounter with the rest of my relatives. I was forever reminded how intelligent my family was, how important it was to remember where we had come from, and to be proud of all the suffering our people had overcome in order to finally achieve their dream in the perfect society of Israel.
This last mandatory belief was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel's spotless reputation to the back of my mind. "Our people" were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified. We would never be so amoral as to fight an unjust war. Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called "conflict" with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned. I routinely heard about unexplained mass killings, attacks on medical bases, and other alarmingly violent actions for which I could see no possible reason. "Genocide" almost seemed the more appropriate term, yet no one I knew would have ever dreamed of portraying the war in that manner; they always described the situation in shockingly neutral terms. Whenever I brought up the subject, I was always given the answer that there were faults on both sides, that no one was really to blame, or simply that it was a "difficult situation." It was not until eighth grade that I fully understood what I was on the side of. One afternoon, after a fresh round of killings was announced on our bus ride home, I asked two of my friends who actively supported Israel what they thought. "We need to defend our race," they told me. "It's our right."
"We need to defend our race."
Where had I heard that before? Wasn't it the same excuse our own country had used to justify its abuses of African-Americans sixty years ago? In that moment, I realized how similar the two struggles were-like the white radicals of that era, we controlled the lives of another people whom we abused daily, and no one could speak out against us. It was too politically incorrect to do so. We had suffered too much, endured too many hardships, and overcome too many losses to be criticized. I realized then that I was in no way part of a "conflict"-the term "Israeli/Palestinian Conflict" was no more accurate than calling the Civil Rights Movement the "Caucasian/ African-American Conflict." In both cases, the expression was a blatant euphemism: it gave the impression that this was a dispute among equals and that both held an equal share of the blame. However, in both, there was clearly an oppressor and an oppressed, and I felt horrified at the realization that I was by nature on the side of the oppressors. I was grouped with the racial supremacists. I was part of a group that killed while praising its own intelligence and reason. I was part of a delusion.
I thought of the leader of the other oppressed side of years ago, Martin Luther King. He too had been part of a struggle that had been hidden and glossed over for the convenience of those against whom he fought. What would his reaction have been? As it turned out, it was precisely the same as mine. As he wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail, he believed the greatest enemy of his cause to be "Not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who...lives by a mythical concept of time.... Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." When I first read those words, I felt as if I were staring at myself in a mirror. All my life I had been conditioned to simply treat the so-called conflict with the same apathy which King had so forcefully condemned. I, too, held the role of an accepting moderate. I, too, "lived by a mythical concept of time," shrouded in my own surreal world and the set of beliefs that had been assigned to me. I had never before felt so trapped.
I decided to make one last appeal to my religion. If it could not answer my misgivings, no one could. The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and-answer session about any point of our religion. I wanted to place my dilemma in as clear and simple terms as I knew how. I thought out my exact question over the course of the seventeen-minute cello solo that was routinely played during service. Previously, I had always accepted this solo as just another part of the program, yet now it seemed to capture the whole essence of our religion: intelligent and well-crafted on paper, yet completely oblivious to the outside world (the soloist did not have the faintest idea of how masterfully he was putting us all to sleep). When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked, "I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?" I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me. "It is a terrible thing, isn't it?" he said. "But there's nothing we can do. It's just a fact of life." I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our thousands of killings as a "fact of life" was simply too much for me to accept. I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back. I thought about what I could do. If nothing else, I could at least try to free myself from the burden of being saddled with a belief I could not hold with a clear conscience. I could not live the rest of my life as one of the pathetic moderates whom King had rightfully portrayed as the worst part of the problem. I did not intend to go on being one of the Self-Chosen People, identifying myself as part of a group to which I did not belong.
It was different not being the ideal nice Jewish boy. The difference was subtle, yet by no means unaffecting. Whenever it came to the attention of any of our more religious family friends that I did not share their beliefs, I was met with either a disapproving stare and a quick change of the subject or an alarmed cry of, "What? Doesn't Israel matter to you?" Relatives talked down to me more afterward, but eventually I stopped noticing the way adults around me perceived me. It was worth it to no longer feel as though I were just another apathetic part of the machine.
I can obviously never know what it must have been like to be an African-American in the 1950s. I do feel, however, as though I know exactly what it must have been like to be white during that time, to live under an aura of moral invincibility, to hold unchallengeable beliefs, and to contrive illusions of superiority to avoid having to face simple everyday truths. That illusion was nice while it lasted, but I decided to pass it up. I have never been happier.
Jesse Lieberfeld, 17, is an 11th grader at Winchester Thurston, Pittsburgh, PA. His essay just won the 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Award. Also see our dear friend Phil Weiss's piece on the award.
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Vietnamese Film Helps Change Attitude to Gays
By Tran Thi Minh Ha
AFP News
Jan 12. 2012 - Vietnam's first film to openly feature love and intimacy between gay men is helping to change attitudes in a country where homosexuality is often seen either as a disease or a source of ridicule.
Curious filmgoers have streamed into cinemas to catch "Lost in Paradise", which chronicles the doomed love affair between a gay prostitute and a book seller and provides a rare glimpse into a usually hidden side of Vietnam.
For some, the movie was eye-opening, with one Vietnamese woman saying the bittersweet love story had changed her views about homosexuality.
"Now I think they are just like us," said the 50-year-old state employee, who did not want to give her name, after watching the film in the capital.
Others, though, seemed uncomfortable, with a group of youths at a recent screening at Hanoi's Platinum Cinema laughing and a teenage girl covering her eyes during a scene in which the two lead actors kiss tenderly.
Homosexuality remains largely taboo in communist Vietnam, where Confucian social mores, with their emphasis on tradition and family, still dominate.
Gays are routinely portrayed as comical figures or as people suffering from a condition that can be treated -- something the makers of "Lost in Paradise" hope to help change....(Click title for more)
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Indiana and the 'Right to Work for Less'
By Harry Targ
Diary of a Heartland Radical
Fifty working people assembled at a town hall meeting in West Lafayette, Indiana on Saturday, January 14 to share information about the latest phase of Indiana's battle over a new "Right-To-Work for Less" bill. The bill will be voted upon some time in the coming week.
One of the minority Democrats in the State House, Sheila Klinker, described the Republicans fast-track effort to get its Right-To-Work bill through the legislature and signed by Governor Mitch Daniels well before the National Football League Super Bowl game on February 5. The NFL players union has strongly condemned the bill.
Labor activists had attended the Governor's State-of-the-State address three days earlier and booed him loudly as he made claims about how Right-To-Work would bring jobs to Indiana (even though he has already praised himself for alleged increases in new investors and jobs in the state during the first seven years of his reign without being a Right-To-Work state).
The Klinker update included reference to the upcoming meeting of the Indiana House of Representatives at which time that body will vote for and probably endorse the bill. Republicans have a 60 to 40 vote majority in that body (and an even bigger majority in the State Senate). Despite the odds, she and her Democratic colleagues support an amendment to the bill which would bring the issue to voters next fall in a referendum.
Although chances of blocking the national reactionary big money juggernaut and the state Chamber of Commerce from getting their way are slim, those for the referendum argue that, because the issue is not well-understood, many Hoosiers remain undecided about it. Since the bill would have such great consequences for workers, union and non-union alike, time to get educated and discuss it are desirable. Also from the standpoint of most Democrats a referendum would defuse the escalating political conflict around the state....(Click title for more)
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Bruce Springsteen's Upcoming 'Wrecking Ball'
 | Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball - October 2nd Title song teaser for upcoming album -
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By Hilary Saunders
Paste Magazine
Members of Camp Springsteen did a pretty good job keeping the lid closed on all things pertaining to the Boss' new album, but the lead single "We Take Care of Our Own" just hit the Internet.
Available for digital download via Amazon, "We Take Care of Our Own" sounds like standard 21st century Bruce-driving, defensive, and defiant.
The full album, Wrecking Ball, is due out March 6 in the U.S., and the tracklist was released this morning:
1. We Take Care of Our Own
2. Easy Money
3. Shackled and Drawn
4. Jack of All Trades
5. Death to My Hometown
6. This Depression
7. Wrecking Ball
8. You've Got It
9. Rocky Ground
10. Land of Hope and Dreams
11. We Are Alive
"Bruce has dug down as deep as he can to come up with this vision of modern life," manager Jon Landau said in a release. "The lyrics tell a story you can't hear anywhere else and the music is his most innovative of recent years. The writing is some of the best of his career and both veteran fans and those who are new to Bruce will find much to love on Wrecking Ball."
Additionally, Landau told Rolling Stone that Ron Aniello (Candlebox, Jars of Clay, and Patti Scialfa) produced it and that members of the E Street Band, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, and former Pearl Jam drummer Matt Chamberlain all perform on the LP.
Two bonus tracks will appear on a special edition of the album, along with exclusive artwork and photography.
Though we already reported that this album with be Springsteen's angriest yet, we definitely have a nice teaser to whatever is still to come with "We Take Care of Our Own." Take a listen below.
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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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