Dialogue & Initiative 2012 The new annual edition of our journal of discussion and analysis is now out. More than 130 pages, it includes 13 articles related to the Occupy! movement, as well as seven others vital to study in this election year. Cost is $10 plus shipping. Or get one by becoming a new member or sustainer. Click the title to buy it directly.
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Blog of the Week: News on the Solidarity Economy
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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 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
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Trayvon's Murder
Unmasks Deeper
Roots of Racism
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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As Millions Fight for Trayvon Martin,
Kill at Will Laws Flourish in Half the U.S
By Julianne Hing
Colorlines.com
March 29 2012 - It's been over a month since Trayvon Martin was gunned down by George Zimmerman. An arrest has yet to be made, and charges have not been filed.
The criminal justice system has only recently sprung into action to respond to the case, spurred largely by the public outrage and protests around the nation. As the state of Florida and Zimmernan's defense gear up for legal proceedings, the question on many people's minds is: can the criminal justice system deliver a modicum of that for Martin's grieving family?
Zimmerman has escaped arrest by evoking Florida's 2005 "stand your ground" law. The author of the law has said that it was never designed to protect vigilantes like Zimmerman, yet legal experts say the law presents significant obstacles to any attempt to seek justice for Martin.
A grand jury is set to convene on April 10 to hear evidence in the case and decide whether or not to charge Zimmerman, who admits he shot the unarmed black teen yet says he was acting in self-defense. Angela Corey, the newly assigned Florida attorney general announced with confidence that she won't need the direction of a grand jury to decide how to proceed. Yet even she has acknowledged that the decision about how and whether to prosecute will hinge upon the winnable options available to her office.
"When we're done with this, you'll know what we could do with what we had," Corey told the Miami Herald in a plea for patience from the public.
But patience is something that's in short supply right now, as the days since Martin's death march on.
Zimmerman has contended that on the rainy night of February 26, he killed Martin after he had his nose broken and head slammed into the concrete sidewalk by the 17-year-old boy. Martin was unarmed. Under common law, a person has the responsibility to do everything in their power to avoid using deadly force in self defense, "up to and including turning around and running away," said Bob Dekle, a law professor at the University of Florida.
"But the stand your ground law provides that no matter where you are you can stand your ground and meet force with force, up to and including deadly force. Even if that's offered to you, you don't have to turn around and retreat."
What prosecutors are now trying to figure out as they map out their legal game plan is whether or not Martin presented such a threat to Zimmerman. Some experts say that even under Florida's loosely written "stand your ground" law, Zimmerman overstepped his rights.
Zimmerman made a 911 call that night, one of 46 he'd made in the course of eight years, just before he killed Martin. Zimmerman was concerned about the presence of a "suspicious" person in his gated Sanford, Florida, community, but ignored the directions of the dispatcher not to trail Martin. Both sides will likely argue most over what happened in the next few minutes. Zimmerman says that Martin assaulted him and broke his nose; Martin's girlfriend says that she got a call from Martin who was worried about someone who was following him just before Zimmerman approached Martin and the line went dead.
"Martin had no weapon, he was clearly no threat to Zimmerman's life, nor is there evidence that Martin posed the threat of great bodily harm," said Sam Walker, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. "So when he invokes the law, he's wrong."
That point is something that even the author of the law, Florida lawmaker Dennis Baxley has argued as he's gone on national television in recent weeks to defend his statute. "There is nothing in the stand your ground law that authorizes a person to pursue and confront," said Baxley. Even a representative from the NRA, which was instrumental in crafting Florida's law, suggested that it appears that the statute "doesn't apply" to Zimmerman here. It's a strategic move to distance themselves from someone who they'll continue to depict as a rogue vigilante.
Yet the law presents a series of other obstacles to prosecutors. Dekle underlined a provision of the law which also says that if a person makes a claim of self defense the police are cautioned not to arrest.... (Click title for more)
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NRA Pushed 'Stand Your Ground' Laws
By Susan Ferriss
Nation of Change
In 2004, the National Rifle Association honored Republican Florida state legislator Dennis Baxley with a plum endorsement: Its Defender of Freedom award.
The following year, Baxley, a state representative, worked closely with the NRA to push through Florida's unprecedented "stand your ground" law, which allows citizens to use deadly force if they "reasonably believe" their safety is threatened in a public setting, like a park or a street.
People would no longer be restrained by a "duty to retreat" from a threat while out in public, and would be free from prosecution or civil liability if they acted in self-defense.
Florida's law is now under a cloud as a result of the controversial February shooting of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Sanford, Fla. The 28-year-old shooter, George Zimmerman, who was licensed to carry a gun - and once had a brush - claims he acted in self-defense after a confrontation with Martin, and some legal experts say Florida's law could protect Zimmerman, who has not been charged. The case has inflamed passions nationwide in part because Zimmerman is Hispanic and Martin was African-American. Baxley, whose state party has benefited from large NRA donations, contends his law shouldn't shield Zimmerman at all because he pursued Martin.
The NRA has been curiously quiet on the matter since the shooting as the nation takes stock - in light of the Martin case and other similar examples - of whether "stand-your-ground" laws are more dangerous than useful to enhance public safety. The gun-rights organization did not respond to requests for comment. But the group's silence contrasts sharply with its history of unabashed activism on stand-your-ground legislation. Since the Florida measure passed, the NRA has flexed its considerable muscle and played a crucial role in the passage of more than 20 similar laws nationwide.
Beginnings
The Florida law is rooted in the centuries-old English common law concept known as the "Castle Doctrine," which holds that the right of self-defense is accepted in one's home. But the Florida law and others like it expand that established right to venues beyond a home.
Since Florida adopted its law in 2005, the NRA has aggressively pursued adoption of stand-your-ground laws elsewhere as part of a broader agenda to increase gun-carrying rights it believes are rightly due citizens under the 2ndAmendment.
To gain attention and clout at the state level, the NRA has ponied up money and offers endorsements to legislators from both parties. The NRA and the NRA Political Victory Fund, its political action committee, have donated about $2.6 million to state-level political campaigns, committees, and individual politicians since 2003, according to records compiled by the National Institute on Money and State Politics.
And ambitious politicians take note that the NRA is heavily invested and involved in congressional races....(Click title for more)
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Steelworkers Announce 'Union Model' for
Photo: Mondragon's Danobat manchine tool coop looking to set up railroad parts plant in Ohio
By Carl Davidson
Beaver County Blue
The United Steel Workers and the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation-the largest industrial union in the U.S. and the world's largest network of worker-owned cooperatives respectively-held an upbeat press conference at USW headquarters in Pittsburgh March 26, announcing new progress in their innovative two-year-old partnership.
"For American workers, the traditional corporate model for organizing production and producing jobs has broken down," stated Tom Conway, USW International Vice-President for Administration. "It's simply not fair, and we're not afraid to try something different."
For those unfamiliar with Mondragon, 'something different' was inspired by the Steelworkers investigation into the Mondragon cooperatives (MCC) in Spain's Basque country. MCC is a 50-year-old thriving and ongoing experiment in radical democracy consisting of some 120 worker-owned cooperatives involving nearly 100,000 workers and allied with another 130 allied coops in the region, with revenues in 2011 of some $24 billion.
The MCC coops operate one the basis of one worker, one share, one vote-and no one outside MCC holds any shares. It is the leading edge of the Spanish industrial economy.
The USW took note of MCC after a successful effort with the cutting edge Spanish wind turbine firm, GAMESA, to build three innovation green energy factories in Pennsylvania. While not part of Mondragon, GAMESA and MCC shared a common representative in the U.S., Michael Peck, who then took a USW team to Spain to visit MCC.
Leo Gerard, the USW's president, has long been an advocate for a 'clean energy and green manufacturing industrial revolution' as a progressive way out of the current economic crisis. But given the conflicted and deadlocked Congress on such matters, little is being done on the matter trough traditional channels. Hence the turn toward the Mondragon partnership.
After the initial announcement of the joint effort in the fall of 2009, little was heard about any progress on the matter. Yesterday's press conference, however, revealed what was going on behind the curtains. There were three major projects underway.
The first was the production of 'Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Coop Model.'
As a piece of intellectual work, it represents a remarkable effort to take the core MCC principles and model, and translate into an America reality through the lens of progressive trade unionism. It thus connects modern-day cooperativism back to James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln and Terence Powderly of the Knights of Labor. More important, it reviews the MCC model from the perspective of existing U.S. law on coops, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPS) and small businesses, which vary from state to state-and comes up with several variations on how it can work here.
"This is a made-in-America, eclectic pragmatic model," Michael Peck, MCC's North American representative explained. "It's based on and carries over the core values of the Mondragon model, but with new adaptations to American realities and traditions. Most obviously, the American model includes a role for the USW and other unions." ... (Click title for more)
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U.S. Imperialism and the Danger of War with Iran
Given the troubled history of U.S./Iranian relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by both Israel and the United States are not surprising.
By Harry Targ
The Rag Blog / March 28, 2012
U.S. Imperialism in the beginning
Modern imperialism is intimately connected to the globalization of capitalism, the quest for enhanced military capabilities, geopolitical thinking, and ideologies of national and racial superiority.
The rise of the United States empire occurred as the industrial revolution spread to North America after the civil war. Farmers began to produce agricultural surpluses requiring overseas customers, factories were built to produce iron, steel, textiles, and food products, railroads were constructed to traverse the North American continent, and financiers created large banks, trusts, and holding companies to parley agricultural and manufacturing profits into huge concentrations of cash.
Perhaps the benchmark of the U.S. emergence as an imperial power was the Spanish/Cuban/American war. The U.S. established its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, replacing the Spanish and challenging the British, and became an Asian power, crushing rebellion and planting its military in the Philippines. The empire has grown, despite resistance, to this day.
While U.S. expansion occurs wherever a vacuum of power exists, and an opportunity to formally or informally control a regime and/or territory, particular countries have had enduring salience for the U.S. Iran is such a country.
Scale of significance for U.S. imperialism
To help understand the attention U.S. policy-makers give some countries, it is possible to reflect on what is called here the Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism (SSUSI). The SSUSI has three interconnected dimensions that relate to the relative importance policymakers give to some countries compared to others.
First, as an original motivation for expansion, economic interests are primary. Historically, United States policy has been driven by the need to secure customers for U.S. products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, opportunities for financial speculation, and vital natural resources....(Click title for more)
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China's Riders on the Storm
The country's cautious oligarchy sacked a populist party secretary they saw as threatening to the system's stability.
By Pablo Escobar
Asia Times
Hong Kong - Not many people outside China are familiar with foggy Chongqing, in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, in the heart of Sichuan province. Well, this is the biggest megalopolis in the world: 31 million, and counting. There are more people in Chongqing than in the whole of Iraq, or Malaysia.
 And then, suddenly, Chongqing became literally the talk of the (global) town, like a dystopian new Rome, thanks to a monumental political scandal during the National People's Congress on March 15: the downfall of Bo Xilai, politburo member and party secretary for Chongqing.
Bo, wily and media-savvy, was sort of a pop star in China as the top promoter of the so-called Chongqing Model: a back-to-the-past, partly Maoist-inspired push for more state control of the economy, better social services, a harsh crackdown on the local mafia and an effort to promote wealth redistribution, thus alleviating social inequality. Hong Kong residents call for bigger say in polls
Even though Bo was a "princeling" - the son of one of the eight immortals of Mao Zedong's revolutionary generation - his rise to power and fame started in the bottom of the hyper-complex party hierarchy.
Bo was promoted from trade minister to party head in Chongqing in 2007. His Holy Grail was to enter the nine-member Standing Committee of the 25-member Politburo, the people who actually run China Inc like a very select oligarchy.
Bo's weapon of choice was quite sophisticated: his neo-Maoist political campaign of purification (in this case, to get rid of the local mafia) - inspired by Mao's Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 - was advised by a number of local intellectuals. No wonder he became wildly popular. Because tens of millions of Chinese deeply resent the arrogance of the new rich - some of whom made lightning-fast, dodgy fortunes - an anti-corruption drive mixed with a fight for social inequality couldn't possibly do wrong.
But in the eyes of the collective Beijing leadership, it did. And then came the downfall - propelled by the defection and subsequent arrest of Bo's top lieutenant, Wang Lijun, who had sought refuge nowhere else than inside the US Consulate in Chengdu, the no-less frenetic capital of Sichuan province.
Is that a tank or a Ferrari?
Anxious to decode what was going on from Sichuan to the corridors of power in Beijing, Western media fed into the immense conspiracy pool, ranging from the silly to the sillier, and including the full display of silliness.
Chinese micro-blogging sites such as Sina Weibo and QQ Weibo, and the bulletin board of the search engine Baidu, may have speculated about "abnormalities" in Beijing on the night of March 19. But if you know how to set it up, anyone can access Google, YouTube and Facebook in China. The notion that tanks in the streets of Beijing would not be noticed or photographed is simply ludicrous.
Clues about what's really going on in the rarefied inner rings of China's politics usually have to be found in the official media. Significantly, in an unsigned essay that went viral, the Global Times referred to "The Chongqing Incident" without even naming Bo, and called for the Chinese people to trust the party leadership.
Which begs the inevitable question: what is the party line right now?
Reading the tea leaves tells us that Bo's downfall happened only one day after Premier Wen Jiabao officially announced that China needed profound political reforms.
That's an understatement, to put it mildly. China is now smack in the middle of not only a once-in-a-decade political transition; it's also in the middle of an earth-shattering once-in-a-generation transition - from a successful economic model shaped by massive investment to the emerging reality of a consumer society.
No wonder the party is more than ever ultra-cautious in its slow, Deng Xiaoping-esque "crossing the river by feeling the stones". And along comes the charismatic Bo - a sort of Chinese "Slick Willie" Clinton - to lay bare all the indecisions at the top. The collective leadership simply could not handle it....(Click title for more)
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Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia,
1930-1942 by Christopher Wilkinson
 Book Review: Almost heaven...for big bands
By Evan Minsker
Paste Magazine
West Virginia is arguably the most geographically muddled state in the Union.
Some Northerners think of the state as "the South." I remember Chris Matthews referring to it off-handedly as a "Confederate" state several years ago in a "red state" election round-up.
Some Southerners think of it as "the North." Again, that's sort of fair considering the state seceded from Virginia to join the Union during the Civil War.
Either way, West Virginia sits firmly in the Appalachia region. The irony of that term-Appalachia-is that it comprises a few common-knowledge Southern states (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas), parts of three obvious Northern states (New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania), and one Midwestern state (Ohio).
So West Virginia belongs to the South and the North, but also to neither, and to all three of those Appalachian regions ... and none of them. It's a state with its own mythology and archetypes-coal mines, whitewater rafting and the Hatfields & McCoys being some prominent tropes.
Musically, the go-to archetype for the state is hillbilly music-folk, bluegrass, and country. In most pop-culture depictions of coal mining, that's the music that accompanies men going down into the mines. And why not? Hillbilly tunes are beloved in the region, as chronicled by Ivan Tribe's Mountaineer Jamboree. In the foreword of that book, the late Senator Robert C. Byrd wrote, "People often ask me, 'What is folk music?' 'What is country music?' 'What is bluegrass?' 'What kind of music do you have in West Virginia?' These are not easy questions to answer, and they will perhaps never be answered to everyone's satisfaction."
He's right-West Virginia's music is a muddle, too. The state has been home to Bill Withers, Hasil Adkins, Daniel Johnston, punk bands, Greg Dulli, countless fiddlers, jazz session men, rock session men, folk singers, nu-metal bands, and country stars. There's no simple answer to Byrd's final hypothetical. But Senator Byrd and author Tribe go on to primarily discuss the stereotypical hill music which Byrd himself knew well. (The man released a surprisingly great album of his own fiddle music while he was serving in the Senate.) So West Virginia music turns out to be a lot like the state's placement in the country-several things, not any one thing.
So what about the black coal miners? Sure, hillbilly music informed James Brown and countless other Southern R&B, blues and soul singers weaned on country radio. (For a long list, read Barney Hoskyns' country soul opus Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted.) But what did these Appalachian African-Americans listen to?
Again, it isn't exactly North and not quite South, and that geographic gray area affected listening patterns. West Virginia counted thousands of black miners, especially in the 1930s and '40s, the era of the blues, medicine shows and most prominently for the national African-American community, jazz.
Like everyone else at the time, African-Americans listened to big band. So perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that black West Virginians, both in the middle class and in the coal mines, heard big band jazz not only on the radio and in concert halls, but also in coal camps.
Naturally, that's the subject at hand of Christopher Wilkinson's exhaustively researched Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942. The book depicts West Virginia's relationship with big band, showing the state as an unlikely-and oddly ideal-environment for hosting big band jazz during those 12 Great Depression/WWII years.
When coal started to become a big business, giving the local economy a bump, more and more African-Americans moved to Appalachia for work. Mining, after all, paid better than agriculture and even factory jobs in cities. What's more, in West Virginia black men could vote and get equal pay for equal work in the mines. The miners sent their kids to school, creating a black middle class of teachers and local business owners. For about 12 years in the 20th century, West Virginia became, more or less, a great place to live for black families. And coal money went into the pockets of big band legends.
Most notably, Joe "King" Oliver, the mentor of Louis Armstrong, set up headquarters in Huntington for about a year between 1934 and 1935. To learn why, author Wilkinson looked at booking records. He found that musicians earned the best money in West Virginia-because of the aforementioned equal pay, black families had extra money to spend on dances. Other parts of the country didn't generate the same kind of earnings. Oliver could jump from coal town to coal town and make money all along the way. The majority of the shows Oliver played that year took place in West Virginia, with a few in Ashland, Kentucky (directly across the Ohio River from Huntington, W.V.). Clearly, West Virginia held an eager audience for big band.
I was born and raised in Huntington, and believe me, this came as a surprise-I've long harbored an interest in music history, and I knew nothing of all this.
When it came to my hometown's history, I knew a few things growing up. Huntington is home to Marshall University. It's a port town, and even though it's in the coal state, you'd have to travel a while to hit a proper mine. Still, I knew of no local music history to speak of ... unless, again, you're talking about the state's hootenanny lineage.
Even so, I wasn't surrounded by jug band jam sessions (though that would've been awesome). In high school, the only concerts in town came courtesy of Journey, ZZ Top, Staind, and a handful of other acts of similar quality and aesthetic. (The best local show I saw around that time was a Blue Oyster Cult show in Charleston.)
I moved to Chicago, despite my West Virginia pride, for two (in my mind) equally big reasons: College and Concerts. (From Huntington, the closest concerts of interest most often happened three hours away in Ohio.) It came as an enormous revelation, then, that Oliver, one of the founding fathers of jazz, held a residency in my hometown months before he died. And that didn't just surprise me-none of my audiophile friends in Huntington knew about Oliver's residence either. That's probably the greatest gift of Wilkinson's book-he offers a largely untold West Virginia music history for music nerds like me.
It's easy to see why the subject had never been explored prior to Wilkinson's book. Big band and West Virginia just don't aesthetically fit together. Big bands and big cities? An obvious fit-YouTube videos of horn players in tuxedos performing for aristocrats makes that clear. Big bands in the South? Again, it makes sense-in the simplified origin story of the genre, jazz's forefathers migrated from New Orleans and the Deep South to Chicago, New York, Paris and beyond. But jazz jumped in the Mountain State, too, and Wilkinson does an excellent job at proving its little-discussed presence....(Click title for more)
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Books to Film: What Are The Hunger Games?
...and Why Should I Care if I'm Not 14?
By Leah Beckman
Gawker.com
Hunger Games mania is upon us. The Young Adult trilogy-turned-blockbuster is due out this weekend, and some of you out there still have no idea what these crazy Food Games are all about.
Fear not, as we have compiled a detailed Hunger Games explainer, just in time for G-day. Be you screaming tween, good-sporting parent, or disgruntled old timer, this explainer will guide you as we as a nation prepare for the newest (and unavoidable) pop-culture phenom.
(Note: You might also find it helpful to have this Hunger Games cheat sheet at the ready. Each of the words with an asterisk next to them is decoded in the glossary.)
What is/are the Hunger Games?
 The Hunger Games is a Young Adult book series, a trilogy in fact, written by Suzanne Collins. The first Hunger Games novel made its debut in 2008 and has been adapted into the highly anticipated movie, starring Jennifer Lawrence as the series' protagonist, Katniss Everdeen. It is due out this coming Friday. Or Thursday at midnight, depending on your level of fandom.
The novels follow Katniss, a 16-year-old living in the dystopic world of Panem*. At its most basic, Panem is the collection of twelve districts that surround the Capitol* city, located at the heart of what was once North America. Each of the districts' economy and livelihood relies on a resource- fish, produce, textiles- that is eventually exported to the Capitol. Katniss, our heroine, lives in District 12: the coal district. All of the 12 districts*, which vary in size and population, share in common their impoverishment and complete subordination to the Capitol's rule. All citizens outside the Capitol are on some level starving, poorly clothed and sheltered, and under the control of an often corrupt security system that acts as liaison enforcement via the Capitol. The Capitol, in comparison, is a wealthy, cosmopolitan metropolis. Think L.A., but an L.A. completely devoid of poor people and even more fanatical about plastic surgery.
That sounds pretty unfair. 12 Districts spread across North America seems like a lot of people. Why would they stand for the Capitol's mistreatment? Can't they just overthrow them? They did rebel, once, 74 years before the novel's present day. At the time of the uprising, there existed a thirteenth district and together the districts banded together in an uprising against the Capitol's control. Unfortunately for the Districts, strength in numbers doesn't always do the trick when your opponent can afford to create a technologically superior army* virtually out of thin air. The rebellion was quelled, the thirteenth district completely demolished as punishment, and an annual event known as the Hunger Games instated to remind the districts of their failed uprising.
Oh. Does this have anything to do with all this grisly child-murder I keep hearing about? Is it true? Yes. Scene after scene depicts the bloody end of a child at the hands of brutal Capitol adults or their fellow competitors. There is cutting out of tongues, torture, maiming, starvation, etc. ETC. Here's why this happens: beginning at age 12 until they are 18, every boy and girl from each of the districts must add his or her name to a lottery. There is then a Reaping* in which the name of one girl and one boy is selected from each district to participate in the nationally televised Hunger Games. The Games take place in a different terrain, all depending on the whims of the Gamemakers*. There they fight each other to the death. There can only be one winner overall, meaning even those from the same district are pitted against each other as competitors. The arena, though set up to look like your run-of-the-mill jungle or forest, is completely controlled by the Gamemakers and booby-trapped with all kinds of lethal danger . There are Muttations* and fires and floods and droughts and Tracker jackers*.
And remember how I mentioned that district residents are incredibly poor? Well, when they turn 12, the year they are required to submit their name for the Reaping, they are also eligible for Tessera*, or extra food rations. But for every Tessera, the name of the submitter is entered and additional time. Super unfair, especially for the peasants. And there are a lot of them.
Also, because the Capitol is superficial and very into their weird brand of aesthetics, each of the contestants (read: kids) must submit to a total makeover....(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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