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 KrehbielAutumn 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...
 Women Surge Against GOP Attacks on Rights
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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Virginia Women's Pro-Choice Rally Turns Raucous
State Police Descend on State Capitol, Arrest Dozens
By Vernal Coleman
Style Weekly
About a thousand women's rights protestors descended on the state Capitol Saturday afternoon, March 3, to protest anti-abortion legislation in the General Assembly, and then things got ugly.
About 20 State Police officers, many in swat gear with face shields and body armor, were called in to assist Capitol Police in controlling the crowd. Some of the State Police officers wore green camouflage and carried rifles and canisters of tear gas (no tear gas was used, however). After being warned to vacate the south steps of the Capitol, police officers arrested 31 people -- 14 men and 17 women -- on charges ranging from unlawful assembly to trespassing, according to Capitol Police.
The rally ended a raucous two weeks in the statehouse, with anti-abortion legislation generating national headlines in a Republican-controlled General Assembly. While legislation granting unborn children "personhood" status was shelved until next year and a bill requiring invasive, transvaginal ultrasounds prior to abortions was watered down at the request of Gov. Bob McDonnell, women's rights protestors descended onto Capitol Square nonetheless.
Organizers for the event, Speak Loudly With Silence, say that an estimated 1,000 people participated in the rally, which also involved members of the Occupy Richmond movement.
Claire Tuite says that the arrests were not planned. When the protestors emerged on the Capitol, some made an "autonomous decision" to "occupy" the steps of the Capitol building. "This was a peaceful protest on taxpayer-funded property," Tuite says. "We have every right to be here."
Josh Kadrich, one of the organizers, says a small group broke off from the larger crowd of protestors, determined to make it to the steps. They blew by the cops standing on the steps leading towards the capitol. Others joined in. "Eventually, there were around 400 people sitting on the steps of the capitol in silence to protect women's rights," Kadrich says.
Then State Police, many officers in riot gear, showed up. The protestors were asked to leave and given a countdown as to when the police would begin making arrests. Some complied peacefully. Others locked arms and resisted. (Click title for more)
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Thousands Kick Off Selma to Montgomery March
Pushing Back the the GOP 'Voter ID' Scam to Depress the Vote
By John Wojcik
People's World
March 5 2012 - Several thousand union members, civil rights activists, community organizers, religious leaders, and others have opened a five-day series of events tracing closely the historic 1965 Selma to Montgomery, Ala. civil rights march.
The kickoff was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama Mar. 4, the place where Bloody Sunday took place 47 years ago. People marching for their constitutional right to vote were brutally beaten that day by Alabama state troopers.
Organizers say that, more than a commemoration, the march this week is a demonstration against modern day attacks, not just on voting rights, but on immigrant rights and workers rights.
The AFL-CIO is calling upon people who can't be at the march to click here to sign a pledge of solidarity with the marchers and join a virtual march.
Union activists at the march will share the tens of thousands of online comments they expect from across the country with those actually making the cross-country trek.
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., an Alabama native and now a veteran member of Congress, had his head cracked open by troopers on the bridge in Selma 47 years ago.
Addressing a huge crowd Saturday in Montgomery, Lewis praised the positioning of a historic marker at the bottom of the steps of the state capital there. Because of the marker, "generations yet unborn can understand what happened and how it happened; people should embrace it," he declared.
The marker is just downhill from a giant statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Lewis said the positioning illustrates how much times have changed.
"The distance we've come and the progress we've made is evident here today," Lewis said, "The governor back then (George Wallace) wouldn't let us come to the steps of the Capitol."
When the marchers who had left Selma arrived in Montgomery on March 25, 1965, they were joined by tens of thousands of others who jammed the streets to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver one of his famous speeches.
The first full day of events began this morning with several hundred marchers starting out from the famous bridge. Determined to meet what they say are new challenges to civil rights today, they were led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Arlene Holt Baker, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO. (Click title for more)
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'If You Take Climate Change Seriously, You Have
to Throw Out the Free-Market Playbook'
 Interview Naomi Klein on ideological impediments to addressing climate change and how to move forward
From Solutions via Common Dreams
Perhaps one of the most well-known voices for the Left, Canadian Naomi Klein is an activist and author of several nonfiction works critical of consumerism and corporate activity, including the best sellers No Logo (2000) and Shock Doctrine (2007).
In your cover story for the Nation last year, you say that modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the political Left, including redistribution of wealth, higher and more progressive taxes, and greater government intervention and regulation. Please explain.
The piece came out of my interest and my shock at the fact that belief in climate change in the United States has plummeted. If you really drill into the polling data, what you see is that the drop in belief in climate change is really concentrated on the right of the political spectrum. It's been an extraordinary and unusual shift in belief in a short time. In 2007, 71 percent of Americans believed in climate change and in 2009 only 51 percent believed-and now we're at 41 percent.
So I started researching the denial movement and going to conferences and reading the books, and what's clear is that, on the right, climate change is seen as a threat to the Right's worldview, and to the neoliberal economic worldview. It's seen as a Marxist plot. They accuse climate scientists of being watermelons-green on the outside and red on the inside.
It seems exaggerated, but your piece was about how the Right is in fact correct.
I don't think climate change necessitates a social revolution. This idea is coming from the right-wing think tanks and not scientific organizations. They're ideological organizations. Their core reason for being is to defend what they call free-market ideology. They feel that any government intervention leads us to serfdom and brings about a socialist world, so that's what they have to fight off: a socialist world. Increase the power of the private sector and decrease the public sphere is their ideology.
You can set up carbon markets, consumer markets, and just pretend, but if you want to get serious about climate change, really serious, in line with the science, and you want to meet targets like 80 percent emissions cuts by midcentury in the developed world, then you need to be intervening strongly in the economy, and you can't do it all with carbon markets and offsetting.
You have to really seriously regulate corporations and invest in the public sector. And we need to build public transport systems and light rail and affordable housing along transit lines to lower emissions. The market is not going to step up to this challenge. We must do more: rebuild levees and bridges and the public sphere, because we saw in Katrina what happens when weak infrastructure clashes with heavy weather-it's catastrophe. These climate deniers aren't crazy-their worldview is under threat. If you take climate change seriously, you do have to throw out the free-market playbook.
What is the political philosophy that underscores those who accept climate change versus those who deny it?
The Yale cultural cognition project has looked at cultural worldview and climate change, and what's clear is that ideology is the main factor in whether we believe in climate change. If you have an egalitarian and communitarian worldview, and you tend toward a belief system of pooling resources and helping the less advantaged, then you believe in climate change. And the stronger your belief system tends toward a hierarchical or individual worldview, the greater the chances are that you deny climate change and the stronger your denial will be.
The reason is clear: it's because people protect their worldviews. We all do this. We develop intellectual antibodies. Climate change confirms what people on the left already believe. But the Left must take this confirmation responsibly. It means that if you are on the left of the spectrum, you need to guard against exaggeration and your own tendency to unquestioningly accept the data because it confirms your worldview.
Members of the Left have been resistant to acknowledging that this worldview is behind their support of climate action, while the Right confronts it head on. Why this hesitancy among liberals?
There are a few factors at work. Climate change is not a big issue for the Left. The big left issues in the United States are inequality, the banks, corporate malfeasance, unemployment, foreclosures. I don't think climate change has ever been a broad-based issue for the Left. Part of this is the legacy of siloing off issues, which is part of the NGO era of activism. Climate change has been claimed by the big green groups and they're to the left. But they're also foundation funded. A lot of them have gone down the road of partnerships with corporations, which has made them less critical.
The discourse around climate change has also become extremely technical and specialized. A lot of people don't feel qualified and feel like they don't have to talk about it. They're so locked into a logic of market-based solutions-that the big green groups got behind cap and trade, carbon markets, and consumer responses instead of structural ones-so they're not going to talk about how free trade has sent emissions soaring or about crumbling public infrastructure or the ideology that would rationalize major new investments in infrastructure. Others can fight those battles, they say.
During good economic times, that may have seemed viable; but as soon as you have an economic crisis, the environment gets thrown under the bus, and there is a failure to make the connection between the economy and the climate crisis-both have roots in putting profits before people.....(Click title for more)
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One Minnesota Town's War on Gay Teens
In Michele Bachmann's home district, evangelicals have created an extreme anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.
By Sabrina Rubin Erdely
Rolling Stone
Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, bracing for the inevitable.
"Dyke."
Pretending not to hear, Brittany would walk briskly to her locker, past the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who loitered in menacing packs.
"Whore."
Like many 13-year-olds, Brittany knew seventh grade was a living hell. But what she didn't know was that she was caught in the crossfire of a culture war being waged by local evangelicals inspired by their high-profile congressional representative Michele Bachmann, who graduated from Anoka High School and, until recently, was a member of one of the most conservative churches in the area. When Christian activists who considered gays an abomination forced a measure through the school board forbidding the discussion of homosexuality in the district's public schools, kids like Brittany were unknowingly thrust into the heart of a clash that was about to become intertwined with tragedy.
Michele Bachmann's Holy War
Brittany didn't look like most girls in blue-collar Anoka, Minnesota, a former logging town on the Rum River, a conventional place that takes pride in its annual Halloween parade - it bills itself the "Halloween Capital of the World." Brittany was a low-voiced, stocky girl who dressed in baggy jeans and her dad's Marine Corps sweatshirts. By age 13, she'd been taunted as a "cunt" and "cock muncher" long before such words had made much sense. When she told administrators about the abuse, they were strangely unresponsive, even though bullying was a subject often discussed in school-board meetings. The district maintained a comprehensive five-page anti-bullying policy, and held diversity trainings on racial and gender sensitivity. Yet when it came to Brittany's harassment, school officials usually told her to ignore it, always glossing over the sexually charged insults. Like the time Brittany had complained about being called a "fat dyke": The school's principal, looking pained, had suggested Brittany prepare herself for the next round of teasing with snappy comebacks - "I can lose the weight, but you're stuck with your ugly face" - never acknowledging she had been called a "dyke." As though that part was OK. As though the fact that Brittany was bisexual made her fair game.
So maybe she was a fat dyke, Brittany thought morosely; maybe she deserved the teasing. She would have been shocked to know the truth behind the adults' inaction: No one would come to her aid for fear of violating the districtwide policy requiring school personnel to stay "neutral" on issues of homosexuality. All Brittany knew was that she was on her own, vulnerable and ashamed, and needed to find her best friend, Samantha, fast.
Like Brittany, eighth-grader Samantha Johnson was a husky tomboy too, outgoing with a big smile and a silly streak to match Brittany's own. Sam was also bullied for her look - short hair, dark clothing, lack of girly affect - but she merrily shrugged off the abuse. When Sam's volleyball teammates' taunting got rough - barring her from the girls' locker room, yelling, "You're a guy!" - she simply stopped going to practice. After school, Sam would encourage Brittany to join her in privately mocking their tormentors, and the girls would parade around Brittany's house speaking in Valley Girl squeals, wearing bras over their shirts, collapsing in laughter. ...(Click title for more)
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Cooperating to Replace Capitalism
 Interviewing Cheyenna Weber of SolidarityNYC
By Dru Oja Jay
Montreal Media Coop
See also: part two, The Occupation of Workplace Democracy: Challenges and solutions for a solidarity economy.
SolidarityNYC is a New York City-based group which works to create links between social movements and the "solidarity economy." The latter consists of cooperatives, small businesses, non-profits and other economic activities which "reinforce values of justice, ecological sustainability, cooperation, and democracy." The group aims to promote the solidarity economy as an alternative to the "competition and hierarchy which characterize corporate capitalism."
Much of SolidarityNYC's recent work has centered around Occupy Wall Street, where many of its members have been active. Through their "Occupy Workplace Democracy" event and other activities, SolidarityNYC has worked to "challenge the social justice movement to take up grassroots economic community development" as a way of building solidarity and concrete alternatives to capitalism.
Cheyenna Weber of SolidarityNYC answered questions via email. More information about the group can be found on their web site and facebook page.
Can you talk a bit about your own background in organizing, and how SolidarityNYC got started?
SolidarityNYC grew out of a desire to organize the positive solutions-oriented forms of anti-capitalist resistance that are often overlooked by the social justice movement and the larger public.
When we got started I'd been organizing students to change the way their schools invested, which is a long term dual strategy of corporate subordination and wealth redistribution, and I was really burnt out by the limited forms of change we could make and by the negative thrust of our work.
By then I'd been involved in corporate campaigns for many years and I'd grown used to always striking against corporate power in defense. The solidarity economy demonstrated to me it is possible to build something resilient, beautiful, and life affirming that also strikes very direct blows at capitalism and oppression.
This was important to me because of my background--I grew up in West Virginia surrounded by extreme inequality and many forms of violence. I had struggled with a deep and self-destructive sadness and anxiety from that experience, and I wanted my life to be organized not on negative terms of merely easing suffering but in positive terms of meeting violence and oppression with love and affirmation. I wanted to build rather than just tear down all the time.
In 2009 I met a couple of people who were interested in something similar, in large part due to the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, and by 2011 we formalized into the collective that currently exists. ... (Click title for more)
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Red Lines and War Drums:
Hanging with Netanyahu at AIPAC
By Carl Bloice
BlackCommentator.com
Here's something you probably didn't read in your local newspaper. It wasn't in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Blogging from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) conference in Washington, Chris McGreal of the British Guardian wrote: "Ahead of the speeches there has been a foreign policy discussion panel. Among the speakers was Liz Cheney, a former State Department official and daughter of George W. Bush's vice president. There was widespread applause for her attacks on Barack Obama including when she said the president is more interested in 'containing Israel' by discouraging it from attacking Iran than blocking Tehran from developing a nuclear bomb. There was also applause when she said there was no president who had done more to 'undermine and delegitimize' Israel. There were loud cheers when she predicted that the next Aipac conference will be held under a new US president."
In the end, the weekend turned out to be a disappointment for Cheney and the other homegrown U.S. political opportunists and reckless supporters of Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and his rightwing Likud party. While a big effort has been made to put a positive face on the weekend confab, they didn't get what they really wanted.
"Basically, Obama has refused to have the Greater Israel Lobby move the red lines to rendering Iran incapable of producing a nuclear weapon, rather than deciding to make one or actually making one," Andrew Sullivan wrote on the Daily Beast. "And this will be where the Greater Israel lobby shifts its support to the Christianist GOP, already committed to the Netanyahu-Lieberman position on Iran and the settlements, and now financed by Greater Israel fanatics, like Sheldon Adelson... So no surprise to hear Liz Cheney was on a panel with this kind of reception."
Right before Cheney spoke, McGreal blogged, "Then came a statement from one of Aipac's members that sets the tone of the conference of Israel as besieged by threats and enemies: 'Iran is marching towards the bomb, the Palestinians seem more interested in bringing the terrorist group Hamas in to power and the Arab Spring has turned to a cold winter.'"
"Tellingly, Obama made only a brief reference to the Palestinian issue and Netanyahu said nothing about it at all, demonstrating how much it has been sidelined by the Iran crisis, to the Israeli leadership's gratification," McGreal reported.
But alas, the Palestinian issue is hardly going to go away. In an opinion piece in Monday's Financial Times, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard Kennedy School respectively, wrote that the Aipac confab offered Netanyahu and the U.S. President "a chance to appeal to some of Israel's most ardent American supporters. We can therefore expect to hear repeated references to the 'common interests, 'unshakeable bonds' and 'shared values' of the two countries."
"This familiar rhetoric is misleading at best and at worst simply wrong," Mearsheimer and Walt wrote. "No states have identical interests, and Israel and America are at odds on two vital issues: Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Obama should continue to rebuff Israel's efforts to push him into military confrontation with Tehran, while reminding Mr. Netanyahu the true danger to Israel lies in its refusal to allow a viable Palestinian state."....(Click title for more)
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Woody at 100
By Jim Hightower
Nation of Change
Where's Woody when we need him?
In these times of tinkle-down economics - with the money powers thinking that they're the top dogs and that the rest of us are just a bunch of fire hydrants - we need for the hard-hitting (yet uplifting) musical stories, social commentaries and inspired lyrical populism of Woody Guthrie.
This year will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of this legendary grassroots troubadour, who came out of the Oklahoma dust bowl to rally America's "just plain folks" to fight back against the elites who were knocking them down.
As we know, the elites are back, strutting around cockier than ever with their knocking-down ways - but now comes the good news out of Tulsa, Okla., that Woody, too, is being revived, spiritually speaking. In a national collaboration between the Guthrie family and the George Kaiser Family Foundation, a center is being built in Tulsa to archive, present to the world and celebrate the marvelous songs, books, letters and other materials generated from Guthrie's deeply fertile mind.
To give the center a proper kick-start, four great universities, the Grammy Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the Kaiser Foundation are teaming up to host a combination of symposiums and concerts (think of them as Woody-Paloozas) throughout this centennial year. They begin this Saturday, March 10 at the University of Tulsa, then they move on down the road to Brooklyn College and on to the University of Southern California and Penn State University.
If Woody himself were to reappear among us, rambling from town to town, he wouldn't need to write any new material. He'd see that the Wall Street banksters who crashed our economy are getting fat bonus checks, while the victims of their greed are still getting pink slips and eviction notices, and he could just pull out this verse from his old song, "Pretty Boy Floyd":
Yes, as through this world I've wandered,
I've seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life your travel,
Yes, as through your life your roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
(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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