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: New Journal from OWS
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Lost Writings of SDS..
Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson 
Changemaker, 273pp, $22.50
For the full contents, click the link and view 'Preview' under the cover graphic.
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By Randy Shannon, CCDS
"Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."
- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
I. Introduction
The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II.
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Order Our
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...In a new and updated 2nd Edition
Capitalism may well collapse under its own excesses, but what would one propose to replace it? Margaret Thatcher's mantra was TINA...There Is No Alternative. David Schweickart's vision of "Economic Democracy" proposes a serious alternative. Even more fundamentally, it opens the door to thinking about alternatives. His may or may not turn out to be the definitive "successor system," but he is a leader in breaking out of the box. |
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Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion |
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...
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 New Surge: Spring Offensive On the Rise!
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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OWS' 'Spring Awakening' in Central Park
Will Kick Off a Season of Activism
This Saturday's (Apring 14) family-friendly event will draw some new individuals into the movement while also energizing existing Occupiers and facilitating cross-organizational cooperation.
By Simran Sachdev
Alternet.org
April 11, 2012 - The Spring Awakening 2012, a day of rejuvenation, celebration, and intense movement-building, will take place this Saturday, April 14, in Central Park.
For Occupy supporters who may have been disheartened by any struggles over the winter, this event will help propel Occupy Wall Street forward over the next six months. It is designed to welcome new people into the life of activism and strengthen existing ties of those already embedded in the movement.
With a background in international affairs and human rights, I came to OWS in early October to see what it was all about. I was intrigued by the alternative world the movement had created in Liberty Plaza in such a short time. I knew I had to be a part of it. After attending numerous general assemblies and marches, and floating through various working group meetings, I chose the Spring Awakening citywide assembly as one of my first major projects. Having attended the project's first planning meeting in December, I have been an organizer for the event ever since. ...(Click title for more)
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The Fewer, the Better: Rightwing 'Patriots'
Work to Suppress 2012 Voter Turnout
By Jerry Landay
Nation of Change
As far near the edge as you can get on the far-out right wing, "super-patriots" are working overtime to poke a stout stick through the spinning spokes of this democracy - or, what's left of it.
They have been hard at work, over a year before the 2012 presidential election, pushing hard to get new laws through state legislatures to suppress the votes of citizens who tend to vote the Democratic line.
At least a dozen states will insist that voters display photo IDs at polling places before they can cast ballots. Other states are busily attempting to shorten voting hours, as well as the number of days voters may cast early ballots. Both strategies are devised to curb the voting of the jobless, the young, minority voters, the needy, the ill, the elderly, all folks who lack the funds to pay for photo IDs, or the time to spend on voting lines on election day.
This tactic has been on the books of ultra-con orthodoxy since Republican politics went extreme in the 1980s during the Reagan years. That's when a pioneering far-right organizer, the late Paul Weyrich, got hefty donations from the likes of the Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife, big spenders off their beer profits and the Mellon banking fortune respectively. Weyrich began building a popular-front of hundreds of far-right activist organizations whose activities media have yet to begin reporting on. Here's what Paul Weyrich told a meeting of the religious right in Dallas in 1980 about the power of suppressing voter turnouts:
"Many of our Christians have what I call the Goo Goo Syndrome: Good Government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been, from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Weyrich's first creation was the Heritage Foundation, the faux-academic think tank, in 1973. Next he founded the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) of Washington, DC. ALEC's mission, as Weyrich designed it, was to spread ultra-con orthodoxy to GOP legislators of the 50 states....(Click title for more)
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Why 99% Spring? 100,000 New Organizers!
During the week of April 9-15, 100,000 people will train to engage in non-violent direct action in the name of a new economic vision.
By George Goehl
Alternet.org
April 8, 2012 - There are moments in civic life when our political system completely fails to address extreme moral crises. And within these instants generations of warriors for justice have been called to take action that involved risk and ridicule.
We are in one of those moments right now. And while engaging in the most basic form of democratic practice, voting, is essential, it is clearly not enough to address the steady and strong attack on poor and middle class families in this country.
That is why this spring, during the week of April 9-15, 100,000 people will train to engage in non-violent direct action in the name of a new economic vision. This will be learning for action: an opportunity to grasp what's at the heart of our economic crisis, crossed with the lessons learned across centuries of movements that came before us. It will be a training that names names, and calls on the trainees to take action to expose those who created and perpetuate the extreme poverty and injustice that so many Americans are experiencing.
We live in an America where more than 46 million Americans live below the poverty level. This is the highest poverty rate since the Census Bureau began publishing such figures. Nearly 15 million children in the United States - 21 percent of all children - live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level- an average of $22,050 a year for a family of four. To make matters worse, six million families have already lost their homes, and 11 million homeowners have mortgages that cost more than the home is worth.
The numbers are so staggering that they can lose meaning. But behind each number is a child wondering if there will be enough food today; a young person with incredible debt and limited opportunities; a neighbor being evicted from their home; a widowed grandmother struggling to make ends meet.
This is not an accident. But rather the culmination of a 40-year plan to undermine the role of government, deregulate the financial markets and the corporate sector, rewrite the tax code in favor of the wealthy and corporations, and erode the right for workers to organize. ...(Click title for more)
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Springsteen: 'We Take Care of Our Own'
 | | 4 Minute Video - We Take Care Of Our Own |
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Why Washington's Iran Policy
Could Lead to Global Disaster
What history should teach us about blockading Iran.
By Juan Cole
via TomDispatch.com
April 12, 2012 - It's a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians -- and possibly in the long run among Americans, too. It might, in the end, even deeply harm the global economy and yet, history tells us, it will fail on its own.
Economic war led by Washington (and encouraged by Israel) will not take down the Iranian government or bring it to the bargaining table on its knees ready to surrender its nuclear program. It might, however, lead to actual armed conflict with incalculable consequences.
The United States is already effectively embroiled in an economic war against Iran. The Obama administration has subjected the Islamic Republic to the most crippling economic sanctions applied to any country since Iraq was reduced to fourth-world status in the 1990s. And worse is on the horizon. A financial blockade is being imposed that seeks to prevent Tehran from selling petroleum, its most valuable commodity, as a way of dissuading the regime from pursuing its nuclear enrichment program.
Historical memory has never been an American strong point and so few today remember that a global embargo on Iranian petroleum is hardly a new tactic in Western geopolitics; nor do many recall that the last time it was applied with such stringency, in the 1950s, it led to the overthrow of the government with disastrous long-term blowback on the United States. The tactic is just as dangerous today.
Iran's supreme theocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly condemned the atom bomb and nuclear weapons of all sorts as tools of the devil, weaponry that cannot be used without killing massive numbers of civilian noncombatants. In the most emphatic terms, he has, in fact, pronounced them forbidden according to Islamic law. Based on the latest U.S. intelligence, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has affirmed that Iran has not made a decision to pursue a nuclear warhead. In contrast, hawks in Israel and the United States insist that Tehran's civilian nuclear enrichment program is aimed ultimately at making a bomb, that the Iranians are pursuing such a path in a determined fashion, and that they must be stopped now -- by military means if necessary.
Putting the Squeeze on Iran
At the moment, the Obama administration and the Congress seem intent on making it impossible for Iran to sell its petroleum at all on the world market. As 2011 ended, Congress passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that mandates sanctions on firms and countries that deal with Iran's Central Bank or buy Iranian petroleum (though hardship cases can apply to the Treasury Department for exemptions).
This escalation from sanctions to something like a full-scale financial blockade holds extreme dangers of spiraling into military confrontation. The Islamic Republic tried to make this point, indicating that it would not allow itself to be strangled without response, by conducting naval exercises at the mouth of the Persian Gulf this winter. The threat involved was clear enough: about one-fifth of the world's petroleum flows through the Gulf, and even a temporary and partial cut-off might prove catastrophic for the world economy....(Click title for more)
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Front de Gauche: Massive Support
for Melenchon in French Elections
 By Greg Oxley
in Paris, 11 April 2012
via Marxist.com
The most striking feature of the presidential election campaign in France is the massive support shown for the Front de Gauche (Left Front) under the leadership of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Long before the campaign was really underway, there were clear signs that the most conscious and active layer of the working class was mobilising around the Front de Gauche.
Mélenchon art at 18 March rally-cyberien 94Mélenchon supporter at March 18 rally. Photo: Cyberien.On January 14th, for example, 6,000 workers and youth turned out to hear Mélenchon in Nantes. The official launch of the campaign in Paris, on March 18th - the anniversary of the Paris Commune - took the form of a mass demonstration of more than 100,000 people on Bastille square. The meeting organised in Toulouse drew anything between 45,000 and 60,000 participants. Something like 300,000 copies of the brochure outlining the policy of the Front de Gauche have been sold.
France has never seen such massive enthusiasm for an election campaign since the historic victory of François Mitterrand in 1981. Opinion polls credited Mélenchon with between 4% and 7% towards the end of last year. But he is presently credited with between 13% and 15%. Between now and the first round of the elections on April 22nd, his ratings could well increase to even higher levels.
The Front de Gauche is essentially an alliance between the Communist Party (PCF) and the Parti de Gauche organised by Mélenchon and his supporters after their break with the Socialist Party. The Parti de Gauche is weaker than the PCF in terms of membership and apparatus, but it is steadily growing in both support and membership.
The phenomenal progress of the Front de Gauche is taking place against a background of profound social and economic crisis. French capitalism is in an impasse. The decline of industry and trade has led to a trade deficit of 75 billion euros. Unemployment has risen sharply. Some 11 million people are living in various degrees of poverty. In all aspects of life - health, education, wages and working conditions, housing, pensions - society is being thrown backwards. The rule of the banks and capitalist interests in general is ruining the state and the economy....(Click title for more)
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Bruce Springsteen's Political Voice
This article is adapted from The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, coauthored by Eric Alterman, recently published by Viking.
By Eric Alterman
The Nation
April 11, 2012 - When I caught Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Philadelphia in late March, it was the eighth night of the band's US and European tour, which would go on for another six or seven months. While the songs change with the release of new albums, like this year's Wrecking Ball, the structure of the show has remained relatively constant for nearly three decades now. It is, as Springsteen told 60 Minutes, "part circus, dance party, political rally and big tent revival." The sum of these parts forms an incomparably larger whole, one that has no equivalent in American life and culture.
During the course of a nearly three-hour show in Philadelphia, for instance, the 62-year-old performer:
§ shared two choruses of "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" with a frog-voiced little girl plucked from the audience;
§ allowed himself to be held aloft and passed from midway in the arena back to the stage by his fans, while lying on his back, singing;
§ played a rarely heard but much beloved song in response to a sign reading: Please play Thundercrack for my dad in Iraq;
§ gave a short speech on the political, social and psychological dangers of economic inequality, in which he suggested his audience focus not on "which side of the 99 percent you're on but on which side of history you're on";
§ brought his "almost 90"-year-old mom, Adele Springsteen, onstage to dance.
Across town, the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall was hosting an exhibition titled "From Asbury Park to the Promised Land: The Life and Music of Bruce Springsteen," in which Springsteen's old clothing, guitars, cars and lyric sheets were treated alternately as holy relics and fodder for scholarly studies-which for many fans and scholars, they are. Drummer "Mighty" Max Weinberg paid a visit to it after giving a lecture at the new National Museum of American Jewish History down the Mall, in which he spoke of his work in the band as his way "of living a life of tikkun olam." (And if all this is a bit too much for you, then take heart in the cover of the alternative Philadelphia Weekly, on which Springsteen was pictured beneath a halo and above the headline, Enough Already.)
I could go on, but you get the point: each Springsteen concert is an event so unique in our cynicism-besotted culture that relatively sane people like yours truly keep going back for more, after 200 shows and counting. (This is not a lot by true fan standards, trust me.) In 2003 Springsteen decided, after more than thirty years of touring, to keep adding stadium show after stadium show at the Jersey Meadowlands until fans finally felt they got enough. He stopped at ten, selling 600,000 tickets-more than any one artist has ever sold in a single place anywhere, anytime, and he could have kept going.
It's hard to find an analogue for Bruce Springsteen anywhere in American history. ...(Click title for more)
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Legacy of a Lonesome Death: Looking Back at
Bob Dylan, Hattie Carol and William Zantzinger
Had Bob Dylan not written a song about it, the 1963 killing of a black servant by a white socialite's cane might have been long forgotten.
By Ian Frazier
via Mother Jones
Do you know the Bob Dylan song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"? Put it on now and listen to it, if you happen to have it on a CD or an album. If you don't, or you don't remember it, it's about a young society swell named William Zantzinger who, in 1963, killed a black serving-woman named Hattie Carroll at a ball at a Baltimore hotel by striking her with a cane.
 | | Bob Dylan - The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll (live) 1964 |
Dylan was just 22 when he wrote it, and the lyrics show him at his high-energy, internal-rhyme-spinning peak:
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger...
[She] Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room,
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle...
Zantzinger's motive, Dylan sings, was that he "just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'." When Zantzinger came to trial, charged with first-degree murder, the judge "spoke through his cloak, so deep and distinguished," and then gave Zantzinger a six-month sentence. At this last injustice, the song ends,
But you who philosophize disgrace
And criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face,
For now is the time for your tears.
The song contains errors of fact. Dylan misspells the perpetrator's name, omitting the t-perhaps deliberately, out of contempt, or perhaps to emphasize the Snidely Whiplash hissing of the zs. Zantzinger's actual arrest and trial were more complicated than the song lets on. Police arrested Zantzinger at the ball for disorderly conduct-he was wildly drunk-and for assaults on hotel employees not including Hattie Carroll, about whom they apparently knew nothing at the time. When Hattie Carroll died at Mercy Hospital the following morning, Zantzinger was also charged with homicide. The medical examiner reported that Hattie Carroll had hardened arteries, an enlarged heart, and high blood pressure; that the cane left no mark on her; and that she died of a brain hemorrhage brought on by stress caused by Zantzinger's verbal abuse, coupled with the assault. After the report, a tribunal of Maryland circuit court judges reduced the homicide charge to manslaughter. Zantzinger was found guilty of that, and of assault, but not of murder.
The judges probably thought they were being reasonable. They rejected defense claims that Hattie Carroll's precarious health made it impossible to say whether her death had been caused, or had simply occurred naturally. The judges considered Zantzinger an "immature" young man who got drunk and carried away, but they nevertheless held him responsible for her death, saying that neither her medical history nor his ignorance of it was an excuse. His cane, though merely a toy one he got at a farm fair, they considered a weapon capable of assault. They kept the sentence to only six months because (according to the New York Herald Tribune) a longer one would have required that he serve it in state prison, and they feared the enmity of the largely black prison population would mean death for him. Zantzinger served his six months in the comparative safety of the Washington County Jail. The judges also let him wait a couple of weeks before beginning his sentence, so he could bring in his tobacco crop. Such dispensations were not uncommon, apparently, for offenders who had farms....(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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