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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: Occupy Theory.org
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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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Quick Links...
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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...
 Jobless Recovery, Low Wages, Crushing Debt
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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The United States is a Low-Wage Nation
By Laura Clawson
Daily KOS
April 24, 2012 - The United States is a low-wage country. (Here a chorus of Republicans pipes up: Yes, but it's the greatest low-wage country in the world, and don't you forget it!) In fact, in 2009 the United States led developed nations, with 24.8 percent of workers earning less than two-thirds of the median income. By comparison, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland and Germany all came in at between 20 and 21 percent of workers earning less than two-thirds of their respective median incomes. (Republicans: We're number one!!!) low-wage workers by country
(John Schmitt/CEPR)
John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research offers a set of policy conclusions stemming from this observation. A key problem is that the United States has set its minimum wage too low, so that the minimum wage doesn't exert upward pressure on low wages defined in relation to the median: "In France in the mid-2000s, for example, the minimum wage was set near the country's low-wage threshold and that country had among the lowest levels of low-wage work in the OECD." In the United States, though, that's not the case even in states with minimum wages set well above the federal level.
The growing prevalence of low-wage work in the United States contributes to income inequality from the bottom, just as the increasing wealth of the top 1 percent, and especially the top 0.1 percent, adds to inequality from the top. The middle is a shrinking place, and you can bet that, without a major shift of economic and political direction, its future is not only to shrink but to be be squeezed downward.
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The Real Cure for the College Tuition Bubble
The Need to Raise Wages and Abolish Student Debt
By Keith Joseph
CCDS in New Jersey The rise in student debt is commonly attributed to the rising cost of tuition. But this mistakes the chain of cause and effect. Rising tuition did not cause us to go into debt. Thirty years of falling real wages caused us to go into debt. And debt causes tuition to rise. In other words, student loans cause tuition to rise. If no student were given access to a student loan next year then tuition would dropped dramatically; the tuition bubble would burst. This is the crucial point: tuition rises because we are being forced into debt. That is the law of supply and demand. As demand rises relative to supply the price (tuition) rises. The easy credit of student loans functions the same as sub-prime mortgages. Sub-prime mortgages, and easy credit, created a housing bubble - a dramatic rise in the price of housing caused by a rise in "effective demand" i.e. demand backed by the ability to pay. When interest rates rose a bit there were some defaults. Defaults create a higher interest rate by increasing "risk." Defaults continue to rise and housing prices have been falling ever since. Like housing prices during the bubble tuition is inflated. We are in a tuition bubble, i.e., tuition increases because student debt creates an artificial ability to pay. Why do you need an artificial ability? Since no one in your family has ever earned enough to save for your college education, because the 1% were cutting wages since the 1970's and replacing those wages with credit cards, we would never be able to afford college. If we can't afford tuition the price of a college education must fall or the schools will empty. The struggle against tuition is the struggle against debt and the struggle against debt is the struggle against tuition. They are one, cause and effect. Without debt a rises in tuition is not possible. The struggle of current students against tuition hikes must take the same path as the movement to abolish debt if it is to be successful. We must abolish student debt and college tuition. Yes, we must have free public college education paid for, in its entirety, by an education sur-tax on the 1%. The problem is relatively simple. Average citizens are not paid enough in wages or salaries to save for their children's education. Educated citizens are obviously the only people capable of self rule. Educated citizens are self evidently the only possible basis for democratic society, for, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, to put it in the formulation favored by Lincoln. The current method of funding our education on the backs of our future wages has failed and this failure is about to cause a deepening of the current economic crisis. To prevent a furtherance of the crisis and to put the economy in position to turn the corner the Federal government must cancel existing student debt and eliminate tuition by putting an education sur tax on the 1% equal to the costs of educating every 18 year old who wants to go to 4 years of college. In this way we will have a public education system worthy of a democracy and a citizenry capable of self-rule. We need a debtors union to impose this plan on the 1%. Debtors Unite! Tax the 1% for the costs of education!
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Debunking The Self-Made Myth
 The Conservatives' Favorite - And Most Dangerous - Fiction
By Sara Robinson
AlterNet.org
April 29, 2012 - The self-made myth is one of the most cherished foundation stones of the conservative theology.
Nurtured by Horatio Alger and generations of beloved boys' stories, It sits at the deep black heart of the entire right-wing worldview, where it provides the essential justification for a great many other common right-wing beliefs.
It feeds the accusation that government is evil because it only exists to redistribute wealth from society's producers (self-made, of course) and its parasites (who refuse to work). It justifies conservative rage against progressives, who are seen as wanting to use government to forcibly take away what belongs to the righteous wealthy. It's piously invoked by hedge fund managers and oil billionaires, who think that being required to reinvest any of their wealth back into the public society that made it possible is "punishing success." It's the foundational belief on which all of Ayn Rand's novels stand.
If you've heard it once from your Fox-watching uncle, you've probably heard it a hundred times. "The government never did anything for me, dammit," he grouses. "Everything I have, I earned. Nobody ever handed me anything. I did it all on my own. I'm a self-made man."
He's just plain wrong. Flat-out, incontrovertibly, inarguably wrong. So profoundly wrong, in fact, that we probably won't be able to change the national discourse on taxes, infrastructure, education, government investment, technology policy, transportation, welfare, or our future prospects as a country until we can effectively convince the country of the monumental wrongness of this one core point.
The Built-Together Realty
Brian Miller and Mike Lapham have written the book that lays out the basic arguments we can use to begin to set things right. The Self-Made Myth: The Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed is a clear, concise, easy-to-read-and-use summary that brings forward a far more accurate argument about government's central role in creating the conditions for economic prosperity and personal opportunity.
Miller, the executive director of United For a Fair Economy, and Lapham, a co-founder of UFE's Responsible Wealth project, argue that the self-made myth absolves our economic leaders from doing anything about inequality, frames fair wages as extortion from deserving producers, and turns the social safety net into a moral hazard that can only promote laziness and sloth. They argue that progressives need to overwrite this fiction with the far more supportable idea of the "built-together reality," which points up the truth that nobody in America ever makes it alone. Every single private fortune can be traced back to basic public investments that have, as Warren Buffet argues in the book, created the most fertile soil on the planet for entrepreneurs to succeed.
To their credit, Miller and Lapham don't ask us to take this point on faith. Right out of the gate, they regale us with three tales of famous "self-made" men -- Donald Trump, Ross Perot and the Koch brothers -- whose own stories put the lie to the myth. (This section alone is worth the price of admission -- these guys so did not make it on their own!) Once those treasured right-wing exemplars are thoroughly discredited, the middle of the book offers a welcome corrective: interviews with 14 wealthy Americans -- including well-known names like Warren Buffet, Ben Cohen, Abigail Disney, and Amy Domini -- who are very explicit about the ways in which government action laid the groundwork for their success. Over and over, these people credit their wealth to:
* An excellent education received in public schools and universities. Jerry Fiddler of Wind River Software (you're probably running his stuff in your cell phone or car) went to the University of Chicago, and started his computer career at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Bookseller Thelma Kidd got her start at Texas Tech and the University of Michigan. Warren Buffet went to the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Nebraska as an undergrad. And beyond that: several interviewees paid for their educations with federal Pell Grants and Stafford loans.
Over and over, the point gets made: public universities -- and the good public schools that feed them, and the funding programs that put them within financial reach -- have hatched millions of American entrepreneurs who might not have been fledged without that opportunity to get an education.
* The support of the Small Business Administration and other government agencies. Ben Cohen notes that almost all the business training he and Jerry Greenfield had came from extension courses at the University of Vermont and Penn State, and small brochures produced by the SBA. And as they spun up, they also got an Urban Development Action Grant from the federal government. Other interviewees started their businesses in incubators or other quarters provided or arranged by their local city governments.(Click title for more)
* A strong regulatory environment that protected their businesses from being undercut by competitors willing to cut corners, and ensured that their manufacturing inputs are of consistently high quality. Glynn Lloyd of Boston's City Fresh Foods points out that nobody in the food business can get by without reliable sources of clean water; and that the USDA inspection process is an important piece of his quality control. (Click title for more)
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How Lenin's Era Resisted Austerity
By Florian Wilde via John Riddell
April 26, 2012 - Economic collapse drives workers into hunger and destitution. Foreign powers extort huge payments, forcing the national economy toward bankruptcy. The government forces workers to pay the costs of capitalist crisis.
This description of Greece in 2012 applies equally to Germany in 1921.
How should a workers' party respond to such a breakdown? The proposals of the German Communist Party (KPD) included a simple approach to fiscal policy: tax those who own the country's productive wealth.
The KPD was then a member of the Communist International, whose leadership included V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Gregory Zinoviev.
The KPD's tax proposal received lip service from the country's two Social Democratic parties and trade union leaders. The Communists, however, called on all workers' organizations to unite in concerted action to win this demand. Since Germany's currency was undermined by galloping inflation, the Communists proposed taxing wealth and material assets.
The KPD's approach to taxation is explained in the following article by German historian Florian Wilde. - John Riddell
Not the poor, but the rich should pay! German Communists' taxation proposals 90 years ago
By Florian Wilde
The story is always the same: the state's coffers are empty. In Germany, 90 years ago, that raised the question of who should pay for the burgeoning public debt, which had been caused by the reparations payments to the victors of the First World War stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles.
Towards the end of 1921, an attempt was made to shift the burden of debt to the working class through higher sales taxes. The German Communist Party opposed this, demanding instead an increase in the tax on wealth and the seizure of assets. To realize these demands, the KPD employed their United Front strategy, which had been adopted at the Jena Party Congress in August 1921.
The guiding principle behind the Communist's tax policy, wrote KPD chairperson Ernst Meyer in Rote Fahne, the party newspaper, was the "to prevent the deterioration of the living standards of the broad masses," and "to shift the entire tax burden to the owning class." For that reason, the KPD's parliamentary deputies would "resist all taxes that worsen the living standards of the proletariat." In contrast to the other parties, they would primarily try to "pressure the government and the bourgeoisie to prevent the [sales] taxes by all extraparliamentary means." (Click title for more)
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Is Obama Tilting Toward Peace? Not Yet, But...
Taliban Peace Talks: U.S. Eyes
Options To Restart Negotiations
By Missy Ryan
WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration, seeking to revive stalled Afghan peace talks, may alter plans to transfer Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay prison after its initial proposal fell foul of political opponents at home and the insurgents themselves.
As foreign forces prepare to exit Afghanistan, the White House had hoped to lay the groundwork for peace talks by sending five Taliban prisoners, some seen as among the most threatening detainees at Guantanamo, to Qatar to rejoin other Taliban members opening a political office there.
In return, the Taliban would make its own good-faith gestures, denouncing terrorism and supporting the hoped-for talks with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
While that plan has not been scotched entirely, several sources familiar with preliminary discussions within the U.S. government said the United States may instead, as an initial gesture meant to revive diplomacy, send one of those detainees directly to Afghan government custody.
The sources identified the detainee as a former Taliban regional governor named Khairullah Khairkhwa, who is seen by American officials as less dangerous than other senior Taliban detainees now held at the U.S. military prison in Cuba.
No final decision appears to have been made on Khairkhwa's fate.
A senior Obama administration official, while not disputing that Khairkhwa's unilateral transfer had been suggested, cautioned that it was still at a "brainstorming" level. The onus was still on the Taliban to show it is interested in Afghan reconciliation, he said.
"It's most definitely not policy," said the senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "At the moment we've made clear what we expect from reconciliation ... and the Taliban understand that, full stop." (Click title for more)
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GOP War on Women: Our Bodies, Their Politics
 The last few months have made abundantly clear what women must do: Rid America's capitols of misogynists.
BY Marilyn Katz
In These Times
In the first half of 2011, close to 1,000 measures related to reproductive health and rights were introduced into state legislatures.
The first "women's group" that I was involved in was not born out of feminist theory or organized by intellectual women on campus. Rather it was in 1966 in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, and its members were poor African-American moms on welfare and thirtysomething (looking 50) Appalachian women, newly arrived from Kentucky and West Virginia.
Not much older than me, many of the women in the group provided physical testament to the possible effects of multiple childbirths while young and poor. The work of the group ranged from food co-ops to welfare reform, from rent strikes to learning to read. The impetus for the group, however, was a clear-eyed view that welfare was a "women's issue," and the need - among the Appalachian women in particular - for protection and camaraderie in the face of their husbands' explosive anger upon learning that "their" women were seeking information about birth control from government VISTA volunteers. Back then the outraged cry from men was not about "religious freedom," but about male prerogative and the duties of women.
I have been reminded of those meetings in recent months by the series of controversies surrounding the contraception mandate in the federal healthcare reform law - from the exclusion of Sandra Fluke's testimony at congressional hearings (GOP Rep. Joe Walsh said the birth control debate is "not about women") to Rush Limbaugh's virulent rant (and limp apology), to the barely audible denouncements of his statement by the Republican presidential candidates.
Contrary to the posturing of politicians and bishops alike, religious freedom is not the core issue. Consider, for example, the Catholic hospitals, schools and universities that have, for many years and with little fuss, provided insurance that covers birth control in the states that require them to do so.
The reality is, as it was 40 years ago in Uptown, that the debate about birth control is firstly and fundamentally about women - their rights and their lives. From Biblical times on, women - who bear the brunt as well as the joy of childbearing - have struggled to curtail unwanted pregnancies, often resorting to extreme measures in the face of possible death or the poverty that another child might bring.
More than 500,000 women die around the world each year from pregnancy-related causes, according to the World Health Organization. A majority of those deaths occur in developing countries, but only a century ago American women faced similar fates. It was not until the 20th century that pregnancy-related death rates in the United States declined - a result of modern medicine, better sanitation and the advent of modern female contraception. According to a 2011 study, more than 99 percent of "sexually experienced" American women, including 98 percent of such Catholic women, use or have used non-natural (i.e., not abstinence or the "rhythm method") birth control.
In the past year, as elected Tea Partiers have aligned themselves with religious fundamentalists, Republicans in the House have introduced eight anti-choice bills, each of which received the support of the same 225 GOP representatives. In the first half of 2011, close to 1,000 measures related to reproductive health and rights - from those curtailing contraception to those mandating transvaginal ultrasounds - were introduced into state legislatures. Of the 28 states controlled by Republicans, 26 have passed laws that limit women's reproductive choices. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 55 percent of American women of reproductive age lived in states characterized as "hostile" to abortion in 2011 - up from 31 percent in 2000.
The danger is to women, but among us also lies the remedy. Perhaps we owe a debt of gratitude to the Limbaughs of the world - they have brought to public view and hopefully to public attention the attack on women's reproductive health and rights that has been steadily building over the past years. And while it would be uplifting to get Limbaugh off the air, the real task is ridding our nation's legislative bodies of misogynists. Women fought for and won a great deal in the last century. It's time to say on the Web, in the streets, and of most importance and effect, in the ballot box: We're not going back.
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Pioneer Chicano Artist Still Going Strong in Bay Area
 New American Media
April 29, 2012 - Xavier Viramontes is a nationally renowned printmaker whose prints impacted many political movements and social justice campaigns during the 1970's. His prints are also part of the revolutionary canon of Chicano art produced at Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco.
His most famous print, "Boycott Grapes, Support the United Farm Workers Union" from 1973, which depicts an Aztec warrior smashing grapes with his fists as the grape juice and blood drip over the title, is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Yet, despite his body of work, few people in the Bay Area know that Xavier Viramontes was born, raised and still lives in the San Pablo/Richmond area.
 Richmond Childhood Memories
"The Richmond I refer to is this one, the old Richmond," says Viramontes as he places the Richmond Museum's photographic history book "Images of America: Richmond" on the café table. The book contains photographs of Richmond during the first half of the 20th Century, from the Californio period up to World War II and the city's de-industrialization in the 1950's. The photographs, especially those of MacDonald Avenue, remind Viramontes of his childhood and family.
"They used to have a number of theaters like the UA or the Fox (on MacDonald Avenue). There was the Rio Theater where they used to show Mexican movies. My grandmother and aunts used to love going there because my grandmother only spoke Spanish and would be able to see her movies," remembers Viramontes.
Born on September 16,1943 in Richmond Hospital, Viramontes describes his household as a typical Mexican-American and Catholic family, where social gatherings revolved around baptisms, first communions, and religious festivities out at Saint Paul's Church on Church Drive. His was a large family living near 1st street and MacDonald Avenue. In addition to his six siblings, Viramontes also had seven cousins living next door. They were a multigenerational family. Made up of immigrants, first and second generation Americans, all were workers at Richmond's cannery and factories. In 1949, his family moved from MacDonald Avenue to Merritt Avenue and Broadway in San Pablo, across from the now non-existent Broadway Elementary in a neighborhood comprised mostly of Mexican American and White Southern families.
According to Viramontes, there was mostly interracial harmony, even during the heyday of the Pachuco and Zoot Suit youth subcultures during the war era. The Pachuco culture involved Chicano youth dressed in draped and perfectly creased pants, cuffed long sleeve shirts and pompadour style hairdo's. It was seen as a clear exaggeration of excess at a time when the United States government had placed rations on commercial items. The Zoot Suit culture in the Richmond and San Pablo suburbs, says Viramontes, was never as intense as it was in Los Angeles, yet it was still discouraged by the older generation of Mexican parents. "My friends and cousins were taking on that style, although 'zoot-suitors' were considered hooligans and parents discouraged it," says Viramontes. "I have some photographs of my cousins wearing zoot suits," he chuckles.
Art and Politics
Xavier Viramontes' nourishment in the visual arts began early in his childhood by way of drawing his surroundings, and only it continued as he took art classes at Helms Middle School and later at Richmond Union High School. Viramontes graduated from RUHS in 1961, and was enrolled in Contra Costa Community College until he was drafted into the military and stationed in Germany. Being in Europe, Viramontes says he visited high-profile museums such as El Prado in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris. At seeing the contemporary and classical artworks, Viramontes felt encouraged to be the artist he always was.
Upon his return in 1969 and supported by the American GI Bill to attend college, Viramontes immediately enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and left San Pablo for the Mission District in San Francisco. Viramontes completed his studies at SFAI in 1973, and continued at San Francisco State, where he earned an MFA in Printmaking in 1977. Viramontes was also taking printmaking courses at San Francisco City College, and following his graduation from SF State, he began to teach printmaking and etching at City College. As his focus on printmaking sharpened, Viramontes found himself inspired by the Romanesque movie posters for Hollywood films like Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments, that were so prominent on the MacDonald Avenue theaters of his childhood.
"The thing about the posters were that they were very colorful movie posters, exciting and exaggerated. I like this exaggerated imagery," says Viramontes. "I started with painting but I went into printmaking because of the fact that you could duplicate the images and share them with people. I could never sell my paintings because I wanted to keep them," explains Viramontes.
The accessible distribution of printmaking intertwined with the political when Viramontes became involved in San Francisco's legendary Galeria de la Raza on 24th and Bryant in the Mission District, during his time as a student at SFAI and SF State. It was powerful and reassuring to work with Latino artists interested in establishing their presence through a gallery and political involvement in the Mission community. At Galeria, Viramontes became one of the pioneers in Chicano art. His political artwork addressed a wide range of local issues -- from resisting the closure of the International Hotel in Chinatown with his prints, commemorating the unjust murder of Danny Trevino by cops on an interactive and public billboard, to his prints for the United Farm Workers union. Every weekend, he recalls, Galeria artists would have art parties and produce works for political campaigns.
Viramontes would regularly visit his family in San Pablo, but he noticed the city remained quiet, seemingly untouched by the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and people of color movements such as the Chicano, Black Panther Party, and Asian American movements that were occurring in Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco.
Full Circle
It wasn't until the mid-1990s, after living in San Francisco's Mission District for 25 years, that Viramontes returned home to San Pablo, where he still lives and remains politically engaged through his art and community work. Still teaching at City College, Viramontes is now designing works for Occupy Oakland that focus on Medicare and social security. He is also a member of the San Pablo Community Alliance and a steering committee member for the Helms Community Center in San Pablo. (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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