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February 10, 2012
In This Issue
Full Employment
Santorum's Rightism
Occupy & Unions
Birth Control & Politics
Baltimore Youth Jail
Chicago Youth Killings
Cuba's Green Energy
PBS on Chain Gangs
Johnny Cash Release
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Whatever Happened to Ben Morea? Paul Buhle Looks Over a Story of the 1960s Anarchists


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Tina at AFL-CIO
Blog of the Week:



Black News and Culture
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.
 New Fall Issue of the CCDS Mobilizer is Out!


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

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Tina at AFL-CIO

...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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Sex, Race & Class: The Perspective of Winning

Tina at AFL-CIO

Author: Selma James
Foreword by: Marcus Rediker
Introduction by: Nina L�pez
Publisher: PM Press
$20.00
Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary

Tina at AFL-CIO

By Giuseppe Fiori
Verso, 30 pages








Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis
Verso
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New Book: Diary of a Heartland Radical

By Harry Targ

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

Tina at AFL-CIO

Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei

 Buy it here...
An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 
GOP Driving Itself
into the Last Century 
       
 

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 [email protected]!

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...
How Rick Santorum Stokes Race and Class Anxieties to Win Unlikely Primary Victories



By Sarah Jaffe

AlterNet.org

Feb. 8, 2012 - Rick Santorum shocked many when he won three GOP primary contests Tuesday night, sweeping Missouri, Montana and Colorado to expose Mitt Romney's biggest weakness: the Midwest.

This past weekend, polling guru Nate Silver at the New York Times pointed out that Santorum was actually a bigger threat to Romney's perceived inevitability than Gingrich, and his victories on Tuesday cemented that point-even though Missouri's primary was nonbinding and the other two held caucuses, which are easier for candidates with a small but dedicated base to swing.

Silver noted:

With Mr. Santorum, however, you can at least draw up a coherent path to victory, one that runs through the Midwest. There is a Midwestern state left to vote at virtually every turn of the nomination calendar. After Michigan on Feb. 28 and Ohio on Super Tuesday comes Missouri (again) on March 17, when it holds its caucuses, then Illinois on March 20, Wisconsin on April 3 and Pennsylvania on April 24.

Silver pointed out that Mitt Romney is still overwhelmingly likely to end up with the nomination, but Santorum's ability to bounce back after his campaign had been written off by most observers (and was considered a joke right up until about a week before the Iowa caucuses) shakes up preconceived notions of which conservative white man is more electable.

Much has been made of Santorum's far-right views: The famed comparison of gay sex to "man-on-dog" intercourse that got him his unfortunate Google problem in the first place, his grandstanding on abortion, and his connections to a religious right desperate to have an alternative to the Mormon Romney.

But Santorum's success in Midwestern states isn't all about opposing abortion and hating gay people. Instead, what's working for him there is what brought him success in his home state of Pennsylvania, a swing state with a solid union base. What Santorum learned in Pennsylvania was to appeal to white working-class voters-the same ones Hillary Clinton invoked on the campaign trail in 2008 with her now-infamous comment about how "hardworking Americans, white Americans" were supporting her against Barack Obama, and the same ones former Pennsylvania Democratic governor Ed Rendell meant when he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that "there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate."....(Click title for more)
What Occupy Taught the Unions



SEIU and others are embracing the movement that has succeeded as they have faded


By Arun Gupta
Salon.com

Unions are in a death spiral. Private sector unionism has all but vanished, accounting for a measly 6.9 percent of the workforce. Public sector workers are being hammered by government cutbacks and hostile media that blame teachers, nurses and firefighters for budget crises.

To counter this trend organized labor banked on creating more hospitable organizing conditions by contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democratic Party the last two election cycles. In return Obama abandoned the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made union campaigns marginally easier, failed to push for an increase in the minimum wage, and installed an education secretary who attacks teachers and public education.


The Obama administration's dismal record on labor issues has been compounded by the rise of the Tea Party movement, which portrays unions as public enemy No. 1, and the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which opened the political floodgates to corporate money. By last year, organized labor realized that its days were numbered unless it took a different approach.

So it went back to basics. Across the country unions threw resources into community organizing, aiming to build a broad-based constituency outside of the workplace for progressive politics. In cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore., newly formed community groups found ready support for organizing around issues of economic justice, but they were stymied by a national debate dominated by voices blaming government spending for an economic crisis caused by Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street changed that. It flipped the debate from austerity to inequality, uncorked a wellspring of creative energy and started taking creative risks that unions typically shun. Within weeks unions adopted the 99 percent versus the 1 percent and started organizing actions under the Occupy banner. One labor leader said "the Occupy movement has changed unions'" messaging and ability to mobilize members. Union-affiliated organizers around the country say it has helped workers win better contracts and bolstered labor reformers.

While union organizers stress the importance of the movement's autonomy, they are also joining in, providing advice, experience, supplies and access to money and space. Many believe, as one Chicago labor activist put it, that "Occupy is too big to fail." In fact, the Occupy movement is in the vanguard of labor, enticing workers into the streets, making them negotiate harder and think bigger.

But the Occupy movement is also a double-edged sword. Some observers say organized labor shares the blame for its decline because unions treat members as clients who pay dues in return for benefits, are riddled with self-serving leaders, stuck in a busted collective bargaining system, too close to Democrats and too willing to ally with big business in return for jobs. If the Occupy movement revitalizes labor, as the left did during the 1930s, then it could invigorate rank-and-file militancy, foster internal democracy and sweep out officials who protect their fiefdoms and perks at the expense of fighting for the 99 percent....(Click title for more)
The Sexual Revolution Changed America Forever

By Nancy L. Cohen

Counterpoint Press via Alternet

Feb 5, 2012 - Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from "Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution is Polarizing America" by Nancy L. Cohen. 

Perhaps if the pill had not been invented, American politics would be very different today.

Enovid, the first birth control pill, went on the market in 1960. Unlike any other previously available form of contraception, the Pill was both reliable and controlled by a woman herself, requiring neither the consent nor the knowledge of her sexual partner. "I don't confess that I take the Pill," said one Catholic mother after the Vatican reaffirmed its doctrine against the use of birth control, "because I don't believe it is a sin." Within five years, 6 million American women were on the Pill. With one quick visit to a doctor, a woman immediately gained sole and exclusive power over her fertility, a power that had eluded her sex since . . . well, since forever.

The Pill made possible the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The true warriors in that revolution were young, single women, who, with the help of this new contraception, took their sexuality into their own hands. If not for women's self-determined sexual liberation, the sexual revolution might have been another unremarkable episode in the long and varied sexual history of humankind. Instead, with the impetus the sexual revolution gave to a new feminism and a movement for gay liberation, it became one of the major catalysts of America's ongoing political delirium.

Men certainly benefited from the new sexual freedom, but for them, it was hardly an innovation. Although religious doctrine and public mores told them chastity and marital fidelity applied equally to men and women, the practical moral code included an important loophole: the double standard. Single men had always been able to avail themselves of sexual relations outside of marriage, even at the pinnacle of American sexual puritanism in the waning days of the nineteenth century. For men, the sexual revolution changed things by making sex relatively cost-free. Women were now liberated, and the Pill steeply lowered the risks of accidental fatherhood and unwanted marriage.

For women, likewise, the sexual revolution concerned the rules of engagement, rather than the act of sex itself. Premarital virginity had been going out of fashion for decades before the declaration of sexual liberation. It started in the 1920s, as middle-class Americans converted from Victorianism to Freudianism and began to accept that a desirous woman was perhaps not so depraved after all. There- after doctors and psychologists counseled America's women that a happy marriage was sustained by mutual sexual satisfaction. Experts encouraged women to explore their natural desires, but to start the journey in the marital bed. Women accepted the prescription and ignored the fine print. At the high noon of fifties traditionalism, 40 percent of women had sex before they married-compared to just 10 percent who did in the reputedly Roaring Twenties.

Yet sex before marriage, like any act of civil disobedience, entailed risk. Each and every time an unmarried woman had intercourse, she risked pregnancy, and with it a limited number of unsavory life- changing options: an illegal abortion of doubtful safety, a shotgun wedding, forced adoption, or single motherhood of a child whose birth certificate would be stamped for posterity with the word "illegitimate." With rare exceptions, all known human cultures have policed the sexual behavior of girls and women, and America, circa 1959, was no different. Before women obtained the power to control their fertility, they had compelling reasons to comply with whatever arbitrary double standard their society imposed. The Pill permanently changed women's age-old pragmatic calculus. With a little pharmaceutical ingenuity, the double standard relaxed its clawing grip on female humanity....(Click title for more)
Occupy Baltimore Protests Building of Youth Jail

5-minute video: Baltimore Occupy and Algebra Project activists are arrested by police during protest of new juvenile facility for youth charged as adults  

Occupy Baltimore Activists Protest Building of Youth Jail (7-Feb-12)(POLITICS IS ACTION series)
Occupy Baltimore Activists Protest Building of Youth Jail  

More Young People are Killed in



Since 2008, more than 530 youth have been killed in Chicago with nearly 80 percent of the homicides occurring in 22 African-American or Latino community areas on the city's South, Southwest and West sides.

[Photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz]


By Kari Lydersen & Carlos Javier Ortiz
Chicago Reporter - Jan 25, 2012

"Pour out your heart like water

For the lives of your children

Let justice roll down like waters

Righteousness like an everflowing stream."

So sang a soaring chorus of voices-young and old-inside Hyde Park Union Church on Nov. 6. The songs were interrupted by a somber litany of names: Chicago youth killed since the school year started in 2008. The event was called "Urban Dolorosa," a commemoration held at five different churches around Chicago in November casting the Biblical mourning of Mary for her son in the context of contemporary youth violence.

The scene is a painful and all-too-familiar reminder of the youth violence epidemic that has gripped Chicago, the home of more youth homicides than any other American city. Chicago has a homicide rate more than double those of New York City and Los Angeles....(Click title for more)
Cuba on the Road to Clean Energy



By Patricia Grogg

Inter-Press

HAVANA, Feb 7, 2012 (IPS) - More than a decade ago, solar electricity changed the lives of several mountain communities in Cuba. Now this and other renewable power sources are emerging as the best options available to develop sustainable energy across the island.

"If the world's clean energy potential exceeds our consumption needs, why do we insist on using the polluting kind?" asked Luis B�rriz, head of the Cuban Society for the Promotion of Renewable Energy Sources and Respect for the Environment (CUBASOLAR), a non- governmental organisation that promotes the use of alternative and environmentally-friendly power sources.

According to his calculations, the amount of solar radiation Cuba receives is equivalent to 50 million tonnes of oil a day.

"If we covered the 1,000-kilometre-long national highway with solar panels we would generate all the power currently used, without using fossil fuels or occupying a single square metre of agricultural land," B�rriz said to IPS in an interview.

Moreover, "nobody can block the sun; it belongs to all of us," he added.

B�rriz is a researcher and long-time advocate of renewable power sources who prefers to talk about "reversing" climate change - which he says is caused by "the destructive actions of today's societies" - instead of "adapting" to it. (Click title for more)
Chain Gang: Sharon Malone, Eric Holder's Wife, Tells Her Story in PBS' 'Slavery by Another Name'

By Cherie Saunders
EurWeb.com

*Imagine this...

You do some research into your family tree and discover that your uncle, who was born nearly 30 years after slavery, was one of thousands of black men pulled back into a forced labor system in which they were arrested - largely on trumped up charges - and compelled to work without pay as prisoners.

Imagine that this "convict leasing" system saw the groups of prisoners sold to private parties - like plantation owners or corporations - and that it was not only tolerated by both the North and South, but largely ignored by the U.S. Justice Department.
Slavery By Another Name - Promo
Slavery By Another Name - Promo
Now, imagine that nearly a century after your uncle served 366 days in this penal labor system, you find yourself married to the head of the U.S. Justice Department, who, ironically, just so happens to be the first African American in the position.

Dr. Sharon Malone, wife of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, tells the heartbreaking story of her uncle Henry in the upcoming 90-minute PBS documentary "Slavery by Another Name." The film is based on the eye-opening book by Douglas A. Blackmon, which exposes a part of American history that most folks either had no clue existed, or didn't know existed to the extent that it did.

"I want people to understand that this is not something that's divorced and separate, and this doesn't have anything to do with them," Dr. Malone told EURweb exclusively at the Television Critics Association press tour last week. "If you were a black person who grew up in the South, some way or the other - whether or not you were directly involved in the system as my uncle was - you knew somebody who was, or your daily lives were circumscribed by those circumstances."

"But more importantly," she continues, "why I really want people to see this film is because this is American history. This isn't just southern history, or African American history. It explains a lot of who we are as a people. It is a missing puzzle piece for what happened. You had the Civil War, you had reconstruction, gap, gap, gap, and then you're at Martin Luther King. This fills in that gap."

"Slavery by Another Name," narrated by Laurence Fishburne and produced and directed by Sam Pollard, premieres Monday, Feb. 13, 2012 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS..
Johnny Cash's 'Soul of Truth' Ready for His 80th   

Johnny Cash Bootleg Vol. IV:
'The Soul of Truth'
Set for April Release

Paste Magazine- To celebrate what would have been The Man In Black's 80th birthday on Feb. 26, Legacy Recordings will release a special two-disc album, entitled Bootleg Vol. IV: The Soul of Truth.

That collection, which comes out through Columbia/Legacy on April 3, contains 51 tracks of both previously released and unreleased material. Much of the album focuses on Johnny Cash' gospel and spiritual music from the '70s and '80s.
Johnny Cash -
Johnny Cash - "Ain't No Grave"
Cash's son, John Carter also contributed a 1,500-word essay for the liner notes of Bootleg Vol. IV: The Soul of Truth. In it he writes, "The music set a foundation for J. R. Cash and upon it he established the motivation for his existence. With the songs of the gospel came faith, and along with faith, a fortitude and persistence that would not be denied. If you were convinced of my Dad's honesty, it is because he was confident of his purpose, and that purpose was defined by gospel music. Though he would sing many kinds of music in his life, he was never truer than when he sang songs of faith."

Legacy Records plans on announcing other Cash projects in the coming weeks.
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