Blog of the Week: Slide Show and articles on the Shadow Wars of Team Obama
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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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...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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Shades of Justice
An antiwar political history
by Paul KrebielAutumn Leaf Press
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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...
 Taking Over Factories
in the Fight for Jobs...
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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Chicago's Republic Windows Workers
Consider Employee-Owned Co-Op
By Laura Flanders
The Nation
March 1, 2012 - Three years ago, a worker occupation in Chicago saved a factory and sent up a flare of resistance. Three years on, workers at the same factory are illuminating not only how workers might resist layoffs but also what they might do next.
"Last time it took six days. This time it took about eleven hours." That's union representative Leah Fried describing winning another reprieve last week for the factory formerly known as Republic Windows and Doors.
In December 2008, days after receiving a $25 billion federal bailout, Bank of America cut off Republic's credit, leading management to fire all 250 workers without pay or notice. With layoffs approaching 500,000 a month around the country, Republic's workers and their union, the militant United Electrical Workers, voted to resist. They occupied the plant and stayed, winning the hearts of downcast Americans everywhere and inspiring even an incoming US president. Bank of America backed down, giving the factory time to find a new buyer, which it did, a company called Serious Energy.
Last Thursday morning, workers heard from Serious Energy that once again, the plant was to close at once with no notice and no severance. This time mobilization was speedy. As soon as word went out, allies started arriving. Former Republic employees, Occupy Chicago, ARISE, the Chicago Worker's Collaborative, Jobs with Justice and Stand Up Chicago showed up primed with pizzas and tents and created a supportive cordon as workers negotiated with police. No need to wait for media to catch on; a live stream fed video to the world from the start. As workers inside prepared to bed down for the night, Serious Energy backed down, announcing a ninety-day stay.
"It's come full circle." Says Fried. It's not just that, three years after the occupation at Republic, "Occupy" has acquired a Twitter handle and a whole new frame of reference. "It's that, in the last few years, there's been a real shift in our movements towards direct-action tactics," says Fried.
Now workers are back at work and they and the company have ninety days to find a solution that doesn't bring them back, three years hence, to this same place. That picture too, is looking different.... (Click title for more)
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When (and Where) Work Disappears:
 Overseas manufacturing competition hits U.S. regions hard, leaving workers unemployed for years and local economies struggling.
By Peter Dizikes
MIT News Office
Feb 24, 2012 - As the United States seeks to reinvigorate its job market and move past economic recession, MIT News examines manufacturing's role in the country's economic future through this series on work at the Institute around manufacturing.
The loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs is a topic that can provoke heated arguments about globalization. But what do the cold, hard numbers reveal? How has the rise in foreign manufacturing competition actually affected the U.S. economy and its workers?
A new study co-authored by MIT economist David Autor shows that the rapid rise in low-wage manufacturing industries overseas has indeed had a significant impact on the United States. The disappearance of U.S. manufacturing jobs frequently leaves former manufacturing workers unemployed for years, if not permanently, while creating a drag on local economies and raising the amount of taxpayer-borne social insurance necessary to keep workers and their families afloat.
Geographically, the research shows, foreign competition has hurt many U.S. metropolitan areas - not necessarily the ones built around heavy manufacturing in the industrial Midwest, but many areas in the South, the West and the Northeast, which once had abundant manual-labor manufacturing jobs, often involving the production of clothing, footwear, luggage, furniture and other household consumer items. Many of these jobs were held by workers without college degrees, who have since found it hard to gain new employment.
"The effects are very concentrated and very visible locally," says Autor, professor and associate head of MIT's Department of Economics. "People drop out of the labor force, and the data strongly suggest that it takes some people a long time to get back on their feet, if they do at all." Moreover, Autor notes, when a large manufacturer closes its doors, "it does not simply affect an industry, but affects a whole locality."
In the study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Autor, along with economists David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, examined the effect of overseas manufacturing competition on 722 locales across the United States over the last two decades. This is also a research focus of MIT's ongoing study group about manufacturing, Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE); Autor is one of 20 faculty members on the PIE commission.
The findings highlight the complex effects of globalization on the United States. "Trade tends to create diffuse beneficiaries and a concentration of losers," Autor says. "All of us get slightly cheaper goods, and we're each a couple hundred dollars a year richer for that." But those losing jobs, he notes, are "a lot worse off." For this reason, Autor adds, policymakers need new responses to the loss of manufacturing jobs: "I'm not anti-trade, but it is important to realize that there are reasons why people worry about this issue."
Double trouble: businesses, consumers both spend less when industry leaves
In the paper, Autor, Dorn (of the Center for Monetary and Fiscal Studies in Madrid, Spain) and Hanson (of the University of California at San Diego) specifically study the effects of rising manufacturing competition from China, looking at the years 1990 to 2007. At the start of that period, low-income countries accounted for only about 3 percent of U.S. manufacturing imports; by 2007, that figure had increased to about 12 percent, with China representing 91 percent of the increase.... (Click title for more)
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Bombing Iran: Will They or Won't They?
 Iran insists it is not producing or about to produce nuclear weapons... Israel is known to possess at least 200 nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
By Jack A. Smith
The Rag Blog
March 1, 2012 - What's the Obama Administration's latest position on the possibility of an attack on Iran? It seems to be in flux but the White House is reported to be urging Israel not to start a war before the November elections.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says there is a "strong possibility" that Israel will attack Iran in either April, May, or June. The purpose would be to destroy Iran's alleged building of a nuclear weapon, an assertion Tehran rejects, pointing to strong support for its position from authoritative American sources.
Commenting on Panetta's report, a February 25 Associated Press dispatch declared: "An Israeli pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear sites could draw the U.S. into a new Middle East conflict, a prospect dreaded by a war-weary Pentagon wary of new entanglements... with unpredictable outcomes."
Foreign policy theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter with links to the Obama White House, told CNN Feb. 24 that if Israel attacks Iraq, "it will be disastrous for us in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the terms of oil, but also in the Middle East more generally."
On February 28, the AP reported that "Israeli officials say they won't warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities."
The U.S. is in daily communication with Israel about the matter. President Barack Obama is scheduled to hold discussions with warhawk Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on March 5.
In the midst of this gathering war talk there are indications Washington does not want Israel to start a war at this juncture for several reasons:
The Obama Administration believes bombing Iran's nuclear facilities will cause far more problems than it solves, and that the more effective policy is composed of sanctions, spying, and subversion, leading to regime change if possible.
Washington is hesitant to get any deeper into a potential Iran quagmire at a time when Afghanistan is blowing up in its face, and while the U.S. is involved behind the scenes in ousting the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus.
The White House does not want a new war on its hands during the last few months of an election campaign. The Wall Steet Journal online pointed out February 28 that "Iran and its nuclear intentions are rapidly emerging as the ultimate wild card in this year's presidential race."
In any event, President Obama and the entire U.S. national security bureaucracy know very well that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. ...(Click title for more)
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Why Progressives Can't Ignore Religion
Painting: John Brown, inspired by Bible.
By Mike Lux
AlterNet.org
Feb 28, 2012 - In this fine country of ours, there is "a wall of separation between Church and State," as Thomas Jefferson once put it. And thank God for that (at least, if you're inclined to believe in it). Our country has been so much stronger and more free as a result of having that wall.
Here's the thing, though: having that wall doesn't mean that the cord linking politics and religion can ever be severed, at least not in this country where religion lives so fervently. The fact is that the USA remains, by a considerable margin, more religious and more Christian than any other Western nation, with close to 80 percent of us still calling ourselves Christians (in spite of somewhat falling percentages on that number in recent years).
Even beyond that, though, religion permeates our culture, our language, our traditions, our public rituals, our history, and yes, our political debate. More than anything else -- more than political party, more than political history, more than any cultural icon whether it be Shakespeare, Star Wars or John Wayne - Christian religion is at the core of what America believes in and relates to. Progressives ignore or dismiss religion at our peril: we will never get to a majority political coalition in this country without understanding religion and the people who believe in it.
The fact is that religion has driven most of our country's great conflicts and has been the inspiration for most of our progress. The abolitionists and the pro-slavery Southerners, the suffragists and the appalled conservative ministers who railed against them, the Populists of the late 1800s and the High Church business elite who were locked in combat, the Protestant Prohibitionists and the heavily Catholic "wets" who opposed them, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950-'60s and the racist but Bible-beating Southerners who fought them: they have all fought over an impossibly tangled blend of religion and politics.
The good news is that the religious fault-lines are pretty much the same kind of fault-lines as the political ones political activists are more used to. In religion as in politics, conservatives tend to be rather individualistic, as the ultimate goal is to win the reward of heaven for yourself. Conservatives tend to value tradition and traditional hierarchy above change and openness, believing that too much change is scary and that only traditional authority figures can protect us. Conservatives tend to believe that an excess of democracy and "rights," whether in government or a church setting, is a bad thing. God's role for conservatives is to punish us if we stray from the one true path.
Religious progressives, on the other hand, are drawn less by hope of heaven and fear of hell than by the appeal of the sacred community, and the teachings of religion to love their neighbors as themselves. They tend to be more open to new ideas, new kinds of leaders, and new ways of thinking about faith; and much less inclined toward thinking there is one true path....(Click title for more)
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Why Are Romance Novels Feminist?
Hint: Men Are 'The Other'
 By Maria Bustillos
The Awl.com
February 14, 2012 - Romance fiction is widely reckoned to be a very low form of literature. Maybe the lowest, if we're not counting the writing at Groupon, or on Splenda packets. Romance fiction: probably the worst! An addictive, absurd, unintellectual literature, literature for nonreaders, literature for stupid people-literature for women! Books Just For Her!
Low or not, romance is by far the most popular and lucrative genre in American publishing, with over $1.35 billion in revenues estimated in 2010. That is a little less than twice the size of the mystery genre, almost exactly twice that of science fiction/fantasy, and nearly three times the size of the market for classic/literary fiction, according to Simba Information data published at the Romance Writers of America website.
It would be crazy to fail to pay close attention when that many people are devoted to something.
So, what is in all these hundreds of millions of books? What is their strange allure? As it happens I am in a position to say, because I read and love romance fiction. It's one of the genre things I collect sporadically; I have a particular fetish for Mills & Boon and Harlequin romances of the period between the late 1930s and 1980, what I think of as their Golden Age. During this time, the two houses produced an immense and vastly entertaining body of writing with a unique function and value in American life. Or Anglophone life, to be more exact, since Mills & Boon was founded in London (Whitcomb Street, W.1.) in 1908. Harlequin, which came much later, is a Canadian firm.
Romance novels are feminist documents. They're written almost exclusively by women, for women, and are concerned with women: their relations in family, love and marriage, their place in society and the world, and their dreams for the future. Romances of the Golden Age are rife with the sociopolitical limitations of their period, it must be said. They're exclusively hetero, and exclusively white, for example. Even so, they can be strangely sublime.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex (1949) "[Woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other."
In romance fiction this formula is reversed, as scholar and former Mills & Boon editor jay Dixon (who spells her name with a lower-case "j") observes in her book The Romantic Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909-1995. Woman is the Subject, man the Other. (This is a marvelous book, by the bye, far and away the best one on the subject; thorough, scholarly, fun and beautifully reasoned.)...(Click title for more)
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C. Wright Mills Would Have Loved Occupy Wall St
Remembering a Hero of the 1960s New Left
By Peter Drier
Huffington Post
Feb. 29, 2012 - C. Wright Mills, the radical Columbia University sociologist who died 50 years ago (March 20, 1962) at age 45, would have loved Occupy Wall Street. In the 1950s, when most college professors were cautious about their political views and lifestyles, Mills rode a motorcycle to work; wore plaid shirts, jeans and work boots instead of flannel suits; built his house with his own hands; and, in a torrent of books and articles, warned that America was becoming a nation of "cheerful robots," heading toward a third world war and was being corrupted by an economic elite.
In three books published between 1948 and 1956 -- The New Men of Power, White Collar and The Power Elite -- Mills challenged the widely held belief that American society, having triumphed over the fundamental problems of the 20th century (depression, war and fascism) had become a model of economic success, political democracy and social well-being. At a time when social scientists and journalists were extolling America's post-World War II prosperity, Mills warned about the dangers of the growing concentration of wealth and power.
Mills' most influential book, The Power Elite, published in 1956, challenged the predominant view that America was a classless society and that all segments of society -- farmers, workers, middle-class consumers, small business and big business -- had an equal voice in its democracy. Instead, he described the power structure created by overlapping circles of business, military and political leaders whose big decisions determined the nation's destiny, including war and peace.
The academic and media establishment attacked Mills' caustic critique of what he called the "American celebration." His was a lonely voice among academic sociologists, but his books sold well, suggesting that at least some Americans were not happy with the postwar status quo. His writings eventually struck a chord with a significant segment of the American public and with the small but growing radical movement on college campuses. In a 1961 article, "Who Are the Student Boat-rockers?" in Mademoiselle magazine, student activist Tom Hayden listed the three people over 30 whom young radicals most admired. They were Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington and Mills.
Many of Mills' ideas, considered radical in his day, are now taken for granted. His phrase "power elite" -- criticized by conservatives and liberals at the time -- is widely used today by the mainstream media....(Click title for more)
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Film Review: Modern Albania, A Feudal Tragedy
 'The Forgiveness of Blood' looks at a Balkan nation that has left behind feudalism and then communism but not the traditions of the blood feud.
By Lewis Beale
Miller-McCune.com
Give director Joshua Marston credit - he doesn't take on easy film projects. Marston's debut feature, 2004's Maria Full of Grace, was about a Colombian drug mule and her desperate attempts to find her way in the U.S. It humanized a demonized underclass and featured a critically acclaimed performance by Catalina Sandino Moreno.
Now, in The Forgiveness of Blood, Marston has gone to Albania to make a film about blood feuds and what adherence to a 15th-century set of legal codes known as the kanun has meant for a country on the road to modernization.
"I was fascinated by the juxtaposition between the old and the new, the oddities and unexpected moments one finds in this period of transition Albania is going through," Marston said in an interview with Miller-McCune. "It's a truism that the world is changing all around us, but it's often difficult to see. One of the things that's fascinating is to go to a place like Albania and see it more clearly."
 | | The Forgiveness of Blood Official Trailer #1 (2012) HD |
You can say that again. Set in a small town in the northern part of the country, The Forgiveness of Blood, with its contrast between the modern and the feudal, plays at times like a science fiction film. The plot concerns a father and uncle who murder a rival in a land dispute, and the teenaged son who is forced to drop out of school and stay at home because under the kanun, the family of the murdered man is entitled to take the life of a male from the murderer's family as retribution.
What makes this all so bizarre is that this centuries-old ritualism is set in a totally contemporary atmosphere. These people may be poor, but the accoutrements of contemporary living are everywhere: everyone has cell phones, while conveniences like refrigerators, TVs, microwaves, and computers are ubiquitous. Yet all this seems to mean nothing when the people in the film are strangled by the heavy hand of tradition. And the legal system, such as it is, can't seem to do much about it....(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
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Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS |
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