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.
|
Blog of the Week: The 75-munute film on YouTube
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
Order Our
Full Employment Booklets
 |
...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. |
|
Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion |
Shades of Justice
An antiwar political history
by Paul KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press
$25.64 |
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...
|
|
|
|
An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Racism, Austerity & War Dangers: Context for 2012
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...
|
Right-Wing Media Are the Ones Playing
the "Race Card" Over Trayvon Martin's Death
 By Solange Uwimana
Media Matters for America
April 4, 2012 - As questions remain as to the role race played in the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin and the decision-making by local authorities in the aftermath, the right is using race-baiting tactics to silence any broader conversation about racism and stereotyping.
More than a month after the shooting, the facts about the shooting remain unclear. What is clear, however, is that the right-wing media's modus operandi when it comes to racial issues hasn't changed. Now that prominent black Americans are singling out race as a reason the 17-year-old is dead, conservative media figures are out in full force with what can only be described as ferocious backlash against those they deride as "professional race baiters."
Above is a recent cover of Rupert Murdoch's conservative New York Post, bearing the headline, "Trayvon Hoodwink: Tragedy hijacked by 'race hustlers' ":
New York state Sens. Kevin Parker, Bill Perkins, and Eric Adams are shown in the photo above wearing "hoodies in solidarity" in Albany, while protesting the "demonization of minorities by police." The website url for the accompanying NY Post article read in part "race_buzzards_circle_trayvon."
This is the way the right-wing media are treating those who have dared raise the possibility that race might have played a role in Martin's death. They have been smeared as "race baiters" and "race hustlers," and are identified as "racially divisive." In other words, they are "playing the race card." (Click title for more)
|
|
Van Jones on Trayvon Martin, Racial Violence and Why Obama Ignored Race Issues for Two Years
Interview Via Democracy Now!
As thousands of people across the country call for justice in the case of Trayvon Martin, we're joined by Van Jones, longtime anti-police brutality activist and co-founder of ColorOfChange.org, which aims to strengthen Black America's political voice. He describes fearing for his own safety while wearing a hoodie and discusses the state of race relations under President Obama. "This kind of hits close to home for me. I'm an African-American father. I've got two little black boys," Jones says. "How am I going to protect these young guys? I mean, do you have to dress your kid in a tuxedo now to send them down the street?" Jones says the moral voice of the black community on race went silent after Obama was attacked for his response to the 2009 unlawful arrest of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr., and hopes the Trayvon Martin case "opens the door for the kind of grown folks' conversation we thought he was going to be able to lead when he was a candidate-well, that he did lead when he was a candidate, that hopefully we can see now going forward." [includes rush transcript]
Van Jones, served as the green jobs adviser in the Obama White House in 2009. He is an award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean energy economy. He is the bestselling author of The Green Collar Economy. His new book is called Rebuild the Dream.
AMY GOODMAN: The Senate failed to pass a measure Friday to end billions of dollars in tax breaks for large oil companies. Before the vote, President Obama urged Congress to pass the bill, arguing that the same investment should be made in clean technologies.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Today, members of Congress have a simple choice to make: they can stand with the big oil companies, or they can stand with the American people. Instead of taxpayer giveaways to an industry that's never been more profitable, we should be using that money to double down on investments in clean energy technologies that have never been more promising-investments in wind power, in solar power, in biofuels, investments in fuel-efficient cars and trucks and energy-efficient homes and buildings. That's the future. That's the only way we're going to break this cycle.
AMY GOODMAN: The measure failed on a 51-to-47 vote, short of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican-led filibuster.
Well, today we spend the hour with President Obama's former green jobs adviser, who has accused both the Obama administration as well as supporters of not doing enough to push through environmental and progressive legislation. In his new book, Rebuild the Dream, Van Jones explores a number of mistakes made both by the White House and also different movements after Obama's 2008 victory, including not pushing through such measures when Democrats had a majority in Congress. Van Jones is the first former Obama official to release a book. He writes, quote, "Too many of us treated Obama's inauguration as some kind of finish line, when we should have seen it as just the starting line. Too many of us sat down at the very moment when we should have stood up."
President Obama appointed Van Jones as his green jobs adviser in 2009. But Jones resigned his post after he came under an attack spearheaded by, well, the, at the time, Fox News host Glenn Beck. Beck was ultimately forced out, as well. Van Jones writes about his experience in this new book.
Before his shift to focusing on the environment, he co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, focusing in part on victims of police abuse. After Hurricane Katrina, he co-founded ColorOfChange.org, a web-based grassroots organization that aims to strengthen Black America's political voice. He is also the bestselling author of The Green Collar Economy. His latest book, Rebuild the Dream, is being released on April 4th, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.
Van Jones, it's great to have you back to Democracy Now!
VAN JONES: It's good to be back. Feels like home.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's really wonderful to have you here, and it looks like, in some ways, we are coming full circle, talking to you today on this day when thousands of people have marched in Florida and around the country around a case of-
VAN JONES: Racial violence.
AMY GOODMAN: Racial violence, and a case of, it looks like, and we'll see from grand jury investigations, serious police misconduct in dealing with this case, the case of Trayvon Martin.
VAN JONES: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Your comments on the killing of the 17-year-old African-American teenager who had Skittles and Arizona iced tea with him in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, and was killed by a neighborhood so-called watchman, George Zimmerman, who has yet to be arrested?
VAN JONES: Well, you know, this kind of hits close to home for me. I'm an African-American father. I've got two little black boys. And, you know, I think, for myself, how am I going to protect these young guys? I mean, do you have to dress your kid in a tuxedo now to send them down the street? They said, "Well, the guy had on a hoodie." I've seen white people jogging in hoodies my whole life. It was raining. I think it just-I don't know how you get a capital offense out of wearing a hoodie. So now, I think for a lot of African-American parents, how do you protect your kids? This kid was not involved in gang activity. He was not armed. He was not doing anything that any other kid doesn't do. And yet, somehow, he gets targeted.
The one thing you expect when something like that happens to your child, your unarmed child is killed by a stranger, is that the police will be on your side. And here, not only do you have your expectation that your kid, who's not in trouble, can get to the store and come back safely, but then even the police won't be on your side. It feels like the privatization of the kind of racial violence that we often associated with some of our worst police departments. Now, private citizens are doing this sort of thing with apparent police approval.
Now there is the need for more facts, but often what would happen, if the situation was reversed-can you imagine a black kid says, "Look, I was walking around my neighborhood, trying to protect it with a gun. I saw a white guy. I don't think he belonged here, so I shot him"? The kid would at least get arrested. I mean, that-you know, you would at least have the beginnings of the criminal process. Now, certainly, you get a chance to get before a jury of your peers. I think people are outraged because it seems like this is another step down the road of saying black male life, young black male life, is not valued in our society. (click Title for More)
|
How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State
By Michael Klare
Alternet.org
April 1, 2012 - The "curse" of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet's twenty-first-century "new Saudi Arabia" for "tough energy" -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here's a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America, that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World?
Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet's dominant energy producer. But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil.
Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent.
Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state.
Knowledgeable observers are already noting the first telltale signs of the oil industry's "Third-Worldification" of the United States. Wilderness areas from which the oil companies were once barred are being opened to energy exploitation and other restraints on invasive drilling operations are being dismantled. Expectations are that, in the wake of the 2012 election season, environmental regulations will be rolled back even further and other protected areas made available for development. In the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot.
Welcome to the Third World of Energy
Up until 1950, the United States was the world's leading oil producer, the Saudi Arabia of its day. In that year, the U.S. produced approximately 270 million metric tons of oil, or about 55% of the world's entire output. But with a postwar recovery then in full swing, the world needed a lot more energy while America's most accessible oil fields -- though still capable of growth -- were approaching their maximum sustainable production levels. Net U.S. crude oil output reached a peak of about 9.2 million barrels per day in 1970 and then went into decline (until very recently)....(Click title for more.)
|
Note to Obama: We Need a Peace Candidate
A Protest of NATO From NATO Countries By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via HuffPost Peace movements in every country are raising their voices against the war in Afghanistan in advance of the May 18-20 NATO summit in Chicago. Some will converge on Chicago, while others will march in NATO capitols. Around two-thirds of the public in NATO countries now opposes the war, and most of their governments are anxious to withdraw if a face-saving path can be found. The Obama administration and its allies are scrambling to showcase an announcement of progress before the Chicago summit gathering, which thousands of journalists are planning to cover. The administration already has relocated the G-8 summit on the world fiscal crisis, originally planned at the same time, to the secure seclusion of Camp David.
The administration faces a growing reality of quagmire, possibly even deeper chaos, in Afghanistan. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say the U.S. "should not be involved", a jump of 16 percent from last year. The percentages tend to be even higher in NATO countries. A March 7 New York Times headline, "Intractable Afghan Graft Hampering U.S. Strategy", summarizes the terminal ineptitude of the Karzai regime. According to NATO data, only one of the Afghan army's 158 battalions is able to fight on their own, up from zero last year. (New York Times, March 16, 2012) Meanwhile those same Afghan soldiers and police are "killing their colleagues among the international military force here at an alarming rate", according to another New York Times report. (March 28, 2012) One result of the deepening quagmire has been a collapse of U.S. military morale and discipline, as seen in widely-publicized cases of American soldiers burning Qurans, urinating on dead bodies, and a shooting spree against innocent Afghan villagers. The suicide rate in the American armed forces is at a historic high. The suspicion is deepening that the war is no longer about benefits for Afghanistan, if it ever was, but about protecting the reputation of NATO. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in Foreign Affairs (2010), a division between the U.S. and Europe over Afghanistan "would probably spell the end of the Alliance." Former White House National Security Adviser James Jones said in 2007 that "NATO has bet its future," on sustained combat in Afghanistan. The well-connected Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid has written that, in Afghanistan, NATO "would find meaning for its continued existence." (Rashid, Ahmed. Descent into Chaos, pp. 372-373) Now that NATO has "proven" itself in Libya, the pressure to justify itself in Afghanistan might lessen. But the arrogance only seems to grow. For example, the NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, proclaims that there was not a single confirmed civilian casualty in NATO's onslaught against Libya. (New York Times, March 25, 2012), a lie topped only by the CIA's repeated insistence that there have been no civilian casualties from its drone strikes on Pakistan. Nevertheless, Western proposals being prepared for Chicago continue to assume the supremacy of "NATO's Secrecy Stance" -- the quote is from the New York Times' C.J. Chivers -- during the coming "transition" process through 2014 and beyond. The powers with real interests in stabilizing the region -- Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, China, India and Russia -- are marginalized to secondary roles in NATO's vision of the future....(Click title for more)
|
Hope 2.0: Inside Obama's Campaign
The president's reelection machine is gearing up to mobilize millions of volunteers. But are they too fed up to turn out?
By Tim Dickinson
Rolling Stone
March 29, 2012 - Pass through security into the headquarters of Obama 2012, and the effect is like stepping into the world's most high-tech dorm room. Spanning the entire floor of a Chicago skyscraper, the campaign's nerve center boasts a ping-pong table, a staff of 300 and a life-size cardboard cutout of the president dressed in a University of Montana jersey. They don't use phones up here; most of the digital team weren't even issued any. Instead, campaign workers communicate mostly by e-mail, G-chat and Twitter. Rows of young staffers, some perched on yoga balls, are quietly coding new online tools to engage supporters, tweaking a video of Sarah Palin attacking Obama, and tracking metrics of volunteers recruited and new voters registered. An energetic hum fills the room, punctuated only by mouse clicks.
Given Barack Obama's transformation from insurgent politician to establishment president, you might expect his re-election campaign to emphasize the benefits of incumbency, leaning on big-dollar donors and party insiders. But the campaign staff assembled in Chicago has a different plan to return Obama to the White House: They're building the mother of all field campaigns - one that is even more dependent on face-to-face organizing than it was four years ago. Obama 2.0 has been quietly re-engineered from the bottom up, powered by new high-tech organizing tools designed to mobilize volunteers and target new voters more quickly and efficiently. By the start of early voting in October, the campaign expects to transform college dorms and coffeehouses across the country into 20,000 all-volunteer, fully functioning field offices.
"To be honest, I'm amazed at what they're doing," says Temo Figueroa, who directed Obama's field operation against Hillary Clinton in 2008 but is not a part of the campaign this year. "It makes what we were doing look like a startup."
Obama and his team know that come fall, they will face an epic ad war backed by the nearly limitless funds being poured into Republican Super PACs. So the campaign is returning to the potent combination of cutting-edge technology and timeworn field techniques it deployed in 2008 - the president's one advantage that the GOP can't match. "The other side has decided this is a race about Super PAC ads," says Jim Messina, the campaign manager of Obama 2012. "We have a different theory about the whole deal. Both sides are going to have beautiful TV ads, and everyone is going to spend millions of dollars. But we're going to win this on the ground, person-to-person, volunteers talking to voters about the issues."
There's only one problem with running a people-powered campaign this time around: the people. Ever since he charged to victory in 2008 on a movement of his own creation, President Obama's relationship with his activist base has been an uneasy one. Instead of deploying his loyal army of 13 million citizen-activists to pressure Congress to enact his agenda, Obama essentially mothballed his massive campaign machine as soon as he took office. He also dispatched his top deputies - including Messina, a Beltway veteran of 17 years - to tell the "professional left" to sit down and be quiet. "The progressive community was better organized than I'd ever seen before, but they were all leaned on by the White House to not raise hell," says an insider from the '08 campaign. "That first year and a half, it was like, 'No, we'll take care of it.' You got a visit from Jim Messina or someone, saying, 'Don't rock the boat.'" (Click title for more)
|
Karl Marx at 193: The Man Who
Never Used the Word 'Capitalism'
 By John Lanchester
London Review of Books
In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist.
He didn't think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, 'data points' as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you've accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we're doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from 'facts', as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.
I, on the other hand, am an empiricist. That's not so much because I think Marx was wrong about the distorting effect of underlying ideological pressures; it's because I don't think it's possible to have a vantage point free of those pressures, so you have a duty to do the best with what you can see, and especially not to shirk from looking at data which are uncomfortable and/or contradictory. But this is a profound difference between Marx and my way of talking about Marx, which he would have regarded as being philosophically and politically entirely invalid.
Consider these passages from The Communist Manifesto, which Marx wrote with Engels in 1848, after being kicked out of both France and Germany for his political writings:
Capitalism has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities. Capitalism has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.
Capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'.
Capitalism has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Capitalism has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
Capitalism cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the capitalist epoch from all earlier ones. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed.
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
Commercial crises put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire capitalist society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.
It's hard not to conclude from these selected sentences that Marx was extraordinarily prescient. He really did have the most astonishing insight into the nature and trajectory and direction of capitalism. Three aspects which particularly stand out here are the tribute he pays to the productive capacity of capitalism, which far exceeds that of any other political-economic system we've ever seen; the remaking of social order which accompanies that; and capitalism's inherent tendency for crisis, for cycles of boom and bust.
I should, however, admit that I haven't quoted these sentences exactly as Marx wrote them: where I wrote 'capitalism', Marx had 'the bourgeoisie'. He was talking about a class and the system which served its interest, and I made it sound as if he was talking only about a system. Marx doesn't use the word 'capitalism'. The term never occurs in the finished first part of Das Kapital. (I checked this by doing a word search and found it three times, every time an apparent mistranslation or loose use of the German plural Kapitals - in German he never talks of Kapitalismus.) Since he is widely, and accurately, seen as capitalism's greatest critic, this is quite an omission. The terms he preferred were 'political economy' and 'bourgeois political economy', which he saw as encompassing everything from property rights to our contemporary idea of human rights to the very conception of the independent autonomous individual. I think he didn't use the word 'capitalism' because that would have implied that capitalism was one of a number of competing possible systems - and Marx didn't believe that. He didn't think it was possible to move past capitalism without a fundamental overturning of the existing social, political and philosophical order....(Click title for more)
|
Counter-Culture's Paul Krassner Nears 80
 The Inspiration for John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Aging Yippie Founder Still Mixes the Political With the Absurd
By Rex Weiner
Jewish Daily Forward
April 06, 2012 - Los Angeles - Decades before Jon Stewart brought his popular admixture of satire and journalism to the mass media on Comedy Central, the unique hybrid of the two genres could be found regularly in only one very hip and often outrageous media outlet.
But Paul Krassner, the self-described "investigative satirist" who pretty much invented the form in his late 1950s magazine, The Realist, did not stop at being just an entertainer. Krassner, whose 80th birthday will arrive on April 9, was also a child prodigy classical violinist; a stand-up comic who learned his craft at the knee of Lenny Bruce; a fellow traveler with novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on their path-breaking, hallucinogenic cross-country tour in Kesey's psychedelic painted bus, and a cofounder, with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, of the Youth International Party, which in 1968 nominated a pig for president in Chicago's Grant Park, amid clouds of tear gas and hails of nightsticks from Chicago's finest during the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention.
Krassner still does stand-up - though these days he stands up with a cane. And he still plays peek-a-boo with his Jewish identity, flashing a now-I-am-now-I-ain't iconoclasm that may belie a deeper ambivalence.
"Whenever somebody says 'Oy,' I automatically say 'Vey,' but I'm not Jewish," he steadfastly maintained in a telephone interview from his home in Desert Hot Springs, Calif. There, in late April, friends and relatives will celebrate the official arrival of octogenarian status for the Yippie whose party's slogan was "Never Trust Anyone Over 30."
From 1958, when Krassner launched The Realist from the offices of Mad magazine, through the early 1970s, the magazine mixed truth, fiction and outrage in a blender designed to fuse all three at a molecular level. For example, it published some of the earliest Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. But some were more serious than others, and after a while it was hard to tell which was which. Which was kind of the point.
Krassner is credited with naming the political activist group known as the Yippies (aka Youth International Party), whose members once attempted to levitate the Pentagon. The party's other founders, Rubin and Hoffman, stood trial as two of the Chicago Seven for their roles in mass protests during the Democratic convention. All were ultimately acquitted, and a federal investigative commission later concluded that the turmoil and disorder that took place there were, in part, "a police riot."
Designated a "raving, unconfined nut" in FBI surveillance files, Krassner's destiny was anything but foreordained for someone growing up during the postwar era in the Astoria section of Queens. He was, he noted, the product of a typically assimilated Jewish family that belonged to the Astoria Center of Israel ("Formerly known as the Astoria Center of Palestine," Krassner cracked).
"My family had dinner at a Chinese restaurant every Friday. My parents went to synagogue, but only on the High Holy Days, and they would light the candles in memory of dead grandparents, but that was about it. On Sunday we had bacon and eggs for breakfast," Krassner said.
"
Krassner went to Hebrew school, he said, "but only to please my parents." Even there, he played the trickster, questioning the rabbi who instructed his class that circumcision was a covenant with God. "I challenged him, saying if circumcision wasn't voluntary, it wasn't a covenant," Krassner recalled. "He agreed, and said: 'Okay, it's not a covenant anymore. It's an obligation.' ...(Click title for more)
|
|
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 |
|
|
