CCDS at Ft. Benning:
A Slide Show
Photos taken by Carl Davidson and others at the 'School of the Americas' Protests
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Blog of the Week: Political Economy for Everyone
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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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By Randy Shannon, CCDS
"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 |
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...
 Occupy! and Labor,
Working Together...
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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Occupy Atlanta, Unions Join to Begin
New Encampment To Protest AT&T Layoffs
By Jason Cherkis
Huffington Post
Feb 17, 2012 Occupy Atlanta launched a surprise protest against AT&T Monday, staging a sitin at the communication giant's Southeast headquarters in downtown Atlanta to protest its planned layoffs of hundreds.
While another Occupy protest might not be that shocking, the participants may be: retired Communications Workers of America (CWA) members, a Teamster organizer and members of Atlanta Jobs With Justice. They sat as a group in the lobby, each wearing hotpink hearts made of poster board that read "No Layoffs" and "AT&T Have A Heart."
Union guys don't normally do cute. When they've mixed with Occupy in the past, it's generally been to provide bodies at a rally, but in this case union workers helped lead a risky direct action. They told AT&T officials they would not leave unless the company called off the layoffs.
In December, the company sent out a letter notifying its workers that 740 of them would be receiving final paychecks in March.
"They were completely shocked," said Ben Speight, the organizing director for Teamsters Local 728 and a member of Atlanta's Jobs With Justice. "It totally took AT&T off guard. ... Their jaw was dropped to the floor."
Within an hour, the 12 activists were all charged with criminal trespassing and arrested. By then, however, the activists had called in reinforcements and about 100 CWA and Occupy Atlanta activists marched to the headquarters. The Teamsters provided logistics and transportation for tents; communication workers carried letters that spelled out: "EXPECT US."
AT&T promptly locked its doors, and the activists set up tents on the sidewalk in front of AT&T and began an encampment maybe the first unionsupported one since the Occupy movement started.
Speight argues that joining with Occupy Atlanta is an important step. "We have to begin to speak to more than just our membership," he said.
Walter D. Andrews, 62, president of CWA Local 3204, agrees. "It gives us hope," he said. "It's been a new experience." ...(Click title for more)
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New Jim Crow: Stop the
School-to-Prison Pipeline!
 By the editors of Rethinking Schools
"Every man in my family has been locked up. Most days I feel like it doesn't matter what I do, how hard I try-that's my fate, too." -11thgrade African American student, Berkeley, Calif.
This young man isn't being cynical or melodramatic; he's articulating a terrifying reality for many of the children and youth sitting in our classrooms-a reality that is often invisible or misunderstood. Some have seen the growing numbers of security guards and police in our schools as unfortunate but necessary responses to the behavior of children from poor, crimeridden neighborhoods. But what if something more ominous is happening? What if many of our students-particularly our African American, Latina/o, Native American, and Southeast Asian children-are being channeled toward prison and a lifetime of secondclass status?
We believe that this is the case, and there is ample evidence to support that claim. What has come to be called the "school-to-prison pipeline" is turning too many schools into pathways to incarceration rather than opportunity. This trend has extraordinary implications for teachers and education activists. It affects everything from what we teach to how we build community in our classrooms, how we deal with conflicts with and among our students, how we build coalitions, and what demands we see as central to the fight for social justice education.
What Is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?
The school-to-prison pipeline begins in deep social and economic inequalities, and has taken root in the historic shortcomings of schooling in this country. The civil and human rights movements of the 1960s and '70s spurred an effort to "rethink schools" to make them responsive to the needs of all students, their families, and communities. This rethinking included collaborative learning environments, multicultural curriculum, studentcentered, experiential pedagogy-we were aiming for education as liberation. The backtobasics backlash against that struggle has been more rigid enforcement of ever more alienating curriculum.
The "zero tolerance" policies that today are the most extreme form of this punishment paradigm were originally written for the war on drugs in the early 1980s, and later applied to schools. As Annette Fuentes explains, the resulting extraordinary rates of suspension and expulsion are linked nationally to increasing police presence, checkpoints, and surveillance inside schools.
As police have set up shop in schools across the country, the definition of what is a crime as opposed to a teachable moment has changed in extraordinary ways. In one middle school we're familiar with, a teacher routinely allowed her students to take single pieces of candy from a big container she kept on her desk. One day, several girls grabbed handfuls. The teacher promptly sent them to the police officer assigned to the school. What formerly would have been an opportunity to have a conversation about a minor transgression instead became a law enforcement issue.
Children are being branded as criminals at ever-younger ages. Zero Tolerance in Philadelphia, a recent report by Youth United for Change and the Advancement Project, offers an example:
Robert was an 11yearold in 5th grade who, in his rush to get to school on time, put on a dirty pair of pants from the laundry basket. He did not notice that his Boy Scout pocketknife was in one of the pockets until he got to school. He also did not notice that it fell out when he was running in gym class. When the teacher found it and asked whom it belonged to, Robert volunteered that it was his, only to find himself in police custody minutes later. He was arrested, suspended, and transferred to a disciplinary school.
Early contact with police in schools often sets students on a path of alienation, suspension, expulsion, and arrests. George Galvis, an Oakland, Calif., prison activist and youth organizer, described his first experience with police at his school: "I was 11. There was a fight and I got called to the office. The cop punched me in the face. I looked at my principal and he was just standing there, not saying anything. That totally broke my trust in school as a place that was safe for me."...(Click title for more)
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Why Right Wingers (and Media Hacks) Are Wrong
 What Americans Believe: We're Becoming Less, Not More, Conservative
By Sarah Jaffe
AlterNet.org
Feb 17, 2012 Despite some misguided triumphalism on the Right, America is not getting more conservative. In fact, if you look at lots of public opinion polls, you'll find that just the opposite is true-Americans' views on the most pressing issues of the day are actually solidly progressive, with strong support for the social safety net and growing support for once-controversial social issues like marriage equality.
Nevertheless rightwing and center contrarian media outlets love to jump on polls that identify Americans as conservative, without ever asking what the difference is between what your average Ohioan means by that word and what Marco Rubio means when he announces at CPAC that "the majority of Americans are conservatives."
(Rubio's inaccurate comments sparked a controversy and prompted a vehement reaction from Rachel Maddow this week, as Politifact debunked his statement-but then rated it "mostly true" anyway, proving the pervasiveness of the myth of conservative America.)
An article by the Atlantic's Richard Florida titled, "Why America Keeps Getting More Conservative," is an excellent example of the problem of relying on nebulously defined, self-identified "conservatism" as a measure of ideology. Florida cites new Gallup poll numbers (the same ones Rubio and Politifact cited) that the polling outlet itself said provided little evidence that America is "track[ing] right." Gallup offered the far more innocuous headline, "Mississippi Most Conservative State, D.C. Most Liberal," with the subhead: "State patterns in ideology largely stable compared with previous years."
But "nothing has changed" doesn't make a good headline, and so Florida hooked an entire story on a false premise that belies the conclusions drawn by the pollsters he cites. Gallup goes on to point out, "Unlike political party identification, which has shifted significantly over the last four years, the state-by-state patterns in ideology have remained remarkably stable this year compared with previous years."
And Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly noted:
If you look at the Gallup data on which Florida's entire "analysis" (mainly just a charting of ideological self-identification by state) rests, it certainly doesn't show any dramatic recent rightward trend. The percentage of Americans self-identifying as "conservative" since 1992 has varied from a low of 36% to a high of 40% (a high it reached in 2004, before dropping to 37% in 2008). As it happens, the percentage of Americans (again, according to Gallup) self-identifying as "liberal" has also gone up 4% since 1992 (from 17% to 21%). The percentage self-identifying as "moderates" has, accordingly, drifted down from 43% in 1992 to 35% in 2011, though the number was only two points higher in 2007 and 2008.
So this is a nonstory given a clickworthy headline. Yet the willingness of writers and editors to greenlight stories on the myth of "conservative" or "center-right" America - and the willingness of supposed factcheckers to support the idea - shows that this is a myth with incredible staying power in the American imagination. Why is that?...(Click title for more)
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30 Minute Video: Richard Wolff on
How Socialism Can Save America
 | American Marxist economist Richard Wolff speaks in Berlin about the failure of capitalism and liberalism in the U.S. and the necessity of hollowing out the shell of capitalism with worker directed enterprises
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America's Last Hope: A Strong Labor Movement
To achieve economic justice in the 21st century, we need to fight for democracy in the workplace
By Dorian Warren
Salon.com
The fate of the labor movement is the fate of American democracy. Without a strong countervailing force like organized labor, corporations and wealthy elites advancing their own interests are able to exert undue influence over the political system, as we've seen in every major policy debate of recent years.
Yet the American labor movement is in crisis and is the weakest it's been in 100 years. That truism has been a progressive mantra since the Clinton administration. However, union density has continued to decline from roughly 16 percent in 1995 to 11.8 percent of all workers and just 6.9 percent of workers in the private sector. Unionized workers in the public sector now make up the majority of the labor movement for the first time in history, which is precisely why - a la Wisconsin and 14 other states - they have been targeted by the right for all out destruction.
The urgency is striking. Instead of being fundamentally discredited, the oligarchs and plutocrats who crashed our economy are raking in record profits and acting even more aggressively to bury the American labor movement once and for all. Over the last year, several labor leaders have told me that they believe unions have only about five more years left if they don't figure out some kind of breakthrough strategy.
The complete collapse of unions would have devastating consequences. The labor movement has played a crucial role in advancing economic justice in the workplace and in politics. Union membership raises median weekly earnings and reduces race and genderbased income gaps, and union workers are much more likely to receive health care and pension benefits than workers who are not members of a labor union. The decline of organized labor is directly linked to the rise in economic inequality over the last 40 years and the onset of a "Second Gilded Age." The decline in union density coupled with the decline in the real value of the minimum wage explains onethird of the dramatic growth in wage inequality since the early 1970s.
Over the past 30 years, American employers have become even more aggressive at violating their workers' rights to organize under a toothless and outdated labor law regime. Contrary to the intent of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which made it national policy to encourage and promote collective bargaining, the NLRA now provides incentives for employers to break the law routinely and ignore any compulsion to negotiate collective agreements. When there is little outrage for the daily violations of workers' liberty (employers fire workers illegally in 1 in 3 union campaigns for attempting to exercise freedom of association), our democracy is in peril.
As worker power has eroded in the workplace, the labor movement's political clout has also declined. ...(Click title for more)
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Occupy Activists From Across US
And Abroad Converge in Olympia
By Mark Taylor-Canfield
Huffington Post
Feb 21, 2012 Over President's Day weekend, Olympia, Washington became the first city in the nation to host a major national occupy movement conference. Activists from all across the country gathered to participate in three days of organizing activities, including dozens of workshops, training sessions and meetings. The Occupy Solidarity Social Forum was sponsored by the Alliance For Global Justice and Occupy Olympia.
Over 300 people attended the event, and organizers are calling it a great success. Due to the large number of activists on board an Amtrak train coming in from California, folks along the route renamed it the "Occupy Express." The train was met by a boisterous welcoming party of conference organizers when it arrived at the station in East Olympia.
According to Chuck Kaufman, National Co-coordinator for the Alliance For Global Justice, the forum was the result of a partnership with Occupy Wall Street that began in September 2011. Discussions were held in November to explore the possibility of cosponsoring a national conference. When members of Occupy Olympia decided to organize the Occupy Solidarity Social Forum, Kaufman says he was enthusiastic.
"We thought it would be a good time to bring people together from different occupy groups so they can discuss their problems and the solutions, and begin to take steps to turn the hundreds of local occupations into one coordinated national occupy movement," he said.
Economist David Korten and Occupy Seattle's Dorli Rainey were among the keynote speakers at the conference. Korten is the author of several books including, When Corporations Rule The World.
"It appears that the occupy movement is now moving into a new phase of holding activities like this where we can get together to educate ourselves about the deeper social and economic issues and their solutions," Korten told the audience. "This is a conversation that we need to continue to expand on a national and global scale."
In addition to the workshops and meetings, the forum included a film screening and two music concerts featuring folk singers Jim Page, Danny Kelly, and David Rovics, and hip hop artist Mic Crenshaw.
The Occupy Solidarity Social Forum was extended to a third day when organizers decided to add a march and rally on Feb 20, calling the event "Occupy President's Day!" Activists gathered at Sylvester Park and marched to the state capitol building where they performed music and staged political theater. A demonstration was held against drastic budget cuts to state government social programs currently proposed by Washington Governor Christine Gregoire and the Washington State Legislature....(Click title for more)
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China: The Wukan Uprising and Its Lessons
Workers' strikes and new local rebellions use the slogan 'Learn from Wukan'
Vincent Kolo and Zhang Shujie
Chinaworker.info
Feb. 23, 2012 Wukan is the fishing village in southern China's Guangdong province that achieved worldwide fame as a symbol of mass resistance. Like thousands of other rural communities in recent years, the 13,000 inhabitants of Wukan rose up against corrupt local officials who have stolen land and made millions in profits. But Wukan achieved something else, by displaying a new level of organisation and mass mobilisation, setting up independent popular committees and campaign structures. In so doing, Wukan has become a benchmark for future struggle in China.
Its people waged a daring and impressive four-month long struggle that ejected the local 'communist' (Chinese Communist Party) government, and set up their own elected council to run the community. Finally, in the face of repression, arrests, a siege by thousands of paramilitary police, and the death of a protest leader in police custody, a dramatic settlement was reached on 21 December that seemed to meet most of the villagers' demands. At that time, chinaworker.info warned that the agreement with provincial CCP representatives could not be trusted; that continued mass pressure through the building of democratic grassroots organisations and links with other mass struggles was needed. Our warnings have been confirmed.
Still, the impact of the Wukan uprising is enormous and goes far beyond its boundaries and even those of Guangdong province. This was, according to numerous commentators, the first time since 1949 that the CCP totally lost control of an administrative area. During a few short weeks the struggle in Wukan shattered the idea that the Chinese people need one-party dictatorship and are incapable of governing themselves democratically.
At the time of writing, Wukan is conducting a three-stage election process to elect a new village government, and this process too is being watched closely by overseas media and - more importantly - by tens of thousands of Chinese netizens. The provincial CCP leaders, headed by the ambitious Wang Yang, a standard bearer for the partystate's 'economic liberal' wing, intervened in December to broker a deal, resulting in the protest leaders agreeing to call off further action. This deal has spawned countless articles and speculation about a political shift and the advent of a new 'Wukan approach' to dealing with discontent. As our article will show, such hopes are misplaced.
Wukan incontestably marks an important new phase in the struggle of China's rural masses, with repercussions also for the urban population - for the first time now a majority in China (51 percent) - and in particular for the working class, which is the most important force for change in society. For socialists and for the supporters of the CWI and chinaworker.info, there are many crucial lessons from the Wukan experience that must be discussed, understood and shared by all those seeking ways to fight against one-party dictatorship, its corruption and capitalist policies. As Lenin once said, an ounce of experience - in struggle - is worth a ton of theory. ...(Click title for more)
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Food and Class: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table
 Book Review:THE AMERICAN
WAY OF EATING
By Tracie McMillan
319 pages. Scribner. $25.
By Dwight Garner
New York Times
One of the first things to like about Tracie McMillan, the author of "The American Way of Eating," is her forthrightness. She's a bluecollar girl who grew up eating a lot of Tuna Helper and Ortega Taco Dinners because her mother was gravely ill for a decade, and her father, who sold lawn equipment, had little time to cook. About these box meals, she says, "I liked them."
Expensive food that took time to prepare "wasn't for people like us," she writes. "It was for the people my grandmother described, with equal parts envy and derision, as fancy; my father's word was snob. And I wasn't about to be like that." This is a voice the food world needs.
Ms. McMillan, like a lot of us, has grown to take an interest in fresh, well-prepared food. She's written for Saveur magazine, a pretty fancy journal, and she knows her way around a kitchen. But her central concern, in her journalism and in this provocative book, is food and class. She stares at America's bounty, noting that so few seem able to share in it fully, and she asks: "What would it take for us all to eat well?"
The title of Ms. McMillan's book pays fealty to Jessica Mitford's classic of English nonfiction prose, "The American Way of Death" (1963). Ms. McMillan's sentences don't have Mitford's high style - they're a pile of leeks, not shallots - but both books traffic in dark humor. Standing in a Walmart, where she has taken a minimumwage job, Ms. McMillan observes that its "produce section is nothing less than an expansive lifesupport system." Most days, when it comes to vegetables, she's putting lipstick on corpses.
The book Ms. McMillan's most resembles is Barbara Ehrenreich's best seller "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (2001). Like Ms. Ehrenreich, Ms. McMillan goes undercover amid this country's working poor. She takes jobs picking grapes, peaches and garlic in California; stocking produce in a Walmart in Detroit; and working in a busy Applebee's in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. She tries, and often fails, to live on only the money she earns.
The news Ms. McMillan brings about life on the front lines is mostly grim. In the California fields, where she is the only gringa, she makes far less than minimum wage, sometimes as little as $26 for nine hours of backbreaking work. She lives in cockroach-filled houses, all she can afford, with more than a dozen other people. She delivers a brutal takedown of corporations that, in her view, pretend on their sunny Web sites to treat workers well but in practice use labor contractors that often cheat them. She names names. Here's looking at you, the Garlic Company in Bakersfield, Calif.
She charts the toll this work takes on people's health. ...(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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