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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:  Strategies for community survival programs
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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...
CCDS Discussion |
Sex and the Automobile in the Jazz Age
By Peter Ling in History Today: 'Brothels on wheels' thundered the moralists but Peter Ling argues the advent of mass motoring in the 1920s was only one of the changes in social and group relationships that made easier the pursuit of carnal desire.
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 A Memoir of the 1960s by Paul KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press, $25.64 | | Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War |
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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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Voices from the Underground Press of the 1960s, Part 2- Foreword by Susan Brownmiller
- Preface by Ken Wachsberger
$37.50 + $6 shipping
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 The Right's Hegemony: Can It Crack in 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...
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 As the Republicans moved ever further to the right... so too did the Democrats. This leaves the U.S. as the world's only rich capitalist state without a mass party left of center to at least offer some protection to working families.
By Jack A. Smith
The Rag Blog
July 15, 2012 - This year's presidential campaign is taking place within an extremely conservative era in American political history that will substantially influence the domestic and foreign priorities of the next administration, regardless of whether it's headed by Democrat Barack Obama or Republican Mitt Romney.
Romney and his party, of course, embrace rigid right wing politics influenced by Tea Party extremism, while Obama and the Democrats -- campaign rhetoric aside -- basically echo the now extinct "moderate Republicans" of a quarter-century ago in a number of particulars.
A case in point about our decades-long conservative era is the Obama Administration's major "progressive" achievement -- the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance plan, which was upheld by the Supreme Court two weeks ago.
The ACA, which congressional Republicans fought furiously to oppose when put forward by President Obama, was devised nearly 20 years ago by the conservative Heritage Foundation and implemented in Massachusetts by Romney when governor in 2006.
In his column in The New York Times June 29, the liberal Keynesian economist Paul Krugman pointed out that the act, which he supports, is "not perfect, by a long shot -- it is, after all, originally a Republican plan, devised long ago as a way to forestall the obvious alternative of extending Medicare to cover everyone."
A page one news analysis in the Times has referred to the measure as "the most significant piece of social legislation since the New Deal," ignoring Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and the civil rights achievements of the 1960s in order to embellish its significance....(Click title for more)
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By Ronald Brownstein
Progressive America Rising via National Journal
The new Quinnipiac University and ABC/Washington Post national surveys out this week converge on one key conclusion: as the election nears, President Obama is sinking to historic lows among the group most consistently hostile to him.
Throughout his career on the national stage, Obama has struggled among white men without a college education. But in these latest surveys, he has fallen to a level of support among them lower than any Democratic nominee has attracted in any election since 1980, according to an upcoming National Journal analysis of exit polls from presidential elections.
Though pollsters at each organization caution that the margins of error are substantial when looking at subgroups such as this, each poll shows erosion within that margin of error for Obama with these working-class white men. The new Quinnipiac poll shows Obama attracting just 29 percent of non-college white men, down from 32 percent in their most recent national survey in April, according to figures provided by Douglas Schwartz, April Radocchio and Ralph Hansen of Quinnipiac. The ABC/Washington Post survey found Obama drawing just 28 percent of non-college white men, down from 34 percent in their May survey, according to figures provided by ABC Pollster Gary Langer. Romney drew 56 percent of the non-college white men in Quinnipiac and 65 percent in the ABC/Washington Post survey.
No one expects Obama to win these blue-collar men, who are now among the most reliably Republican segments of the electorate. But even so, these numbers, if sustained through Election Day, would represent a modern nadir for Democrats. Since 1980, the worst performance for any Democratic nominee among these working-class white men was the 31 percent Walter Mondale managed against Ronald Reagan in 1984; the meager 39 percent Obama drew in 2008 was actually the party's best showing over that period. These new surveys show Obama that these non-college white men represent Obama's largest source of decline in the white electorate since 2008. ...(Click title for more)
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Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is
By Bill McKibben
Rolling Stone
July 19, 2012 - If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere - the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest ever recorded for our nation - in fact, it crushed the old record by so much that it represented the "largest temperature departure from average of any season on record." The same week, Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history.
Not that our leaders seemed to notice. Last month the world's nations, meeting in Rio for the 20th-anniversary reprise of a massive 1992 environmental summit, accomplished nothing. Unlike George H.W. Bush, who flew in for the first conclave, Barack Obama didn't even attend. It was "a ghost of the glad, confident meeting 20 years ago," the British journalist George Monbiot wrote; no one paid it much attention, footsteps echoing through the halls "once thronged by multitudes." Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989, and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly - losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in.
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious - our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless - position with three simple numbers.
The First Number: 2° Celsius
If the movie had ended in Hollywood fashion, the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 would have marked the culmination of the global fight to slow a changing climate. The world's nations had gathered in the December gloom of the Danish capital for what a leading climate economist, Sir Nicholas Stern of Britain, called the "most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake." As Danish energy minister Connie Hedegaard, who presided over the conference, declared at the time: "This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we get a new and better one. If ever."...(Click title for more)
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 My stint doing "on demand" grunt work for one of America's hottest growth industries.
By Gabriel Thompson
Mother Jones
This story was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
July 16, 2012 - It's still dark when I show up at the Labor Ready storefront in downtown Oakland, California, just a few blocks from the plaza where the Occupy crowd threw up its tents against the one percent. From the sidewalk, the place looks vaguely illicit, with minimal signage and floor-to-ceiling shades that remain drawn 24/7. Later, I will come to think of this as the company "look"-unwelcoming and easy to miss-often tucked alongside a check-cashing business or payday lender.
The office opens at 5:30 a.m., but job seekers start appearing an hour early, hoping to snag a top spot on the sign-in sheet. By the time I arrive, 20 people, all but one of them men, are already inside-the space is essentially a waiting room with a long counter-standing or slouching in white plastic chairs. Behind the counter sits an African American woman with short hair and a bearing that suggests a low tolerance for bullshit. "I can't remember the last time I got eight hours sleep," a bleary-eyed man behind me announces to no one in particular.
After signing in, I grab a chair from a stack in the corner and take a seat, studying a sign that implores me to be "true" and "passionate" and "creative." In reality, passion and creativity have nothing to do with it. Labor Ready provides warm bodies for grunt work that pays minimum wage or thereabouts. "Here's a sledgehammer, there's the wall," is how Stacey Burke, the company's vice-president of communications, characterized the work to Businessweek back in 2006.
It's not a pretty formula, but it works. With 600 offices and a workforce of 400,000-more employees than Target or Home Depot-Labor Ready is the undisputed king of the blue-collar temp industry. Specializing in "tough-to-fill, high-turnover positions," the company dispatches people to dig ditches, demolish buildings, remove debris, stock giant fulfillment warehouses-jobs that take their toll on a body. (See "I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.") And business is booming. Labor Ready's parent company, TrueBlue, saw its profits soar 55 percent last year, to $31 million, on $1.3 billion in sales. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that "employment services," which includes temporary labor, will remain among the fastest growing sectors through 2020. TrueBlue CEO Steve Cooper, who took home nearly $2 million last year, predicts "a bright future ahead."
The woman behind the counter, whom I'll call Natalie, turns on a television and pops in a video that job-seekers must tolerate every morning no matter how many times they've seen it. On the screen, a man who lost his arm in a workplace accident reminds us to be safe. A sign on the wall to my left states the number of consecutive days the branch has remained accident-free-330, which, given the physical nature of the work, almost seems too good to be true.
At one end of the room, a slender black man with a shaved head is leading an animated discussion of current events. "If it was a brother coming across the border, they would have sealed that shit up," he says. The people around him nod. Someone comments that Latino immigrants have it easy.
"No, I wouldn't say that," the man responds. "Don't forget: They have no recourse if they get hurt." And "they get 10 bucks an hour, but the men picking them up on the corner are going to get 30 or 40 bucks an hour out of them."...(Click title for more)
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Food Assistance Lineup in Los Angeles
By Joan McCarter
Daily KOS
July 9, 2012 - Poverty is never a life status to aspire to, but it seems to be getting harder and harder to avoid, and increasingly punishing if you're there. With austerity so in vogue these days, it's getting even worse. Last month, the Senate passed a Farm Bill that slashes food assistance through the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) by $4.5 billion over the next decade.
"Oh, yeah?" said the House Agriculture Committee. "We'll just up that by about about $12 billion more." In that post, Laura Clawson explained who exactly this would hit. If you're a family of three, and have total income of more than $24,100 annually, you'd be out of luck. And food.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities expands on that.
The proposed cuts would cause significant hardship to several million low-income households.
The bill would terminate SNAP eligibility to several million people. By eliminating categorical eligibility, which over 40 states have adopted, the bill would cut 2 to 3 million low-income people off food assistance.
Several hundred thousand low-income children would lose access to free school meals. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 280,000 children in low-income families whose eligibility for free school meals is tied to their receipt of SNAP would lose free meals when their families lost SNAP benefits. Some working families would lose access to SNAP because they own a modest car, which they often need to commute to their jobs. Eliminating categorical eligibility would cause some low-income working households to lose benefits simply because of the value of a modest car they own. These families would be forced to choose between owning a reliable car and receiving food assistance to help feed their families.
The CPBB also points out that the argument that making sure people in the U.S. simply have enough to eat on a regular basis is breaking the country is bullshit. Except they don't say bullshit.
Contrary to proponents' claim that the bill's SNAP cuts are needed to rein in program growth, CBO has found that SNAP's expansion in recent years primarily reflected the severe recession and that SNAP spending will fall significantly as the economy recovers. CBO projects that the share of the population that participates in SNAP will fall back to 2008 levels in coming years and that SNAP costs as a share of the economy will fall back to their 1995 level by 2019.
So this amounts to just punishing people for the sake of punishing people. Punishing children. The $4.5 billion cut by the Senate Democrats was too much. The $16 billion proposed by the House is insane, as will be any "middle ground" they might come to in conference when they reconcile the two bills. Any cuts to this critical program, while unemployment is still above eight percent and wages remain totally stagnant, are criminal.
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Film Review: Marley
By Jonah Flicker
Paste Magazine
It's not entirely clear why director Kevin Macdonald decided to make a documentary about the musician Bob Marley, a cultural icon whose life has been recounted countless times through a variety of mediums.
Whatever his reasons, he's clearly up to the task.
Marley offers an expansive and at times fascinating perspective on the man through interviews with his fellow former Wailers, family, and childhood friends. The film is fairly detailed concerning Marley's songwriting and musicianship from his early ska days up through the release of Catch a Fire.
 | | Marley Trailer # 2 (Documentary Film 2012) |
After this, however, it skips through his catalogue, choosing to focus more on his personal life, conversion to Rastafarianism, the tumultuous state of Jamaican politics, and his prolific womanizing-all of which are important elements of the artist's character.
This makes for an interesting journey, although music geeks will surely miss the behind-the-scenes insight about classic albums and songs that might have appeared.
Marley, which is beautifully shot for a documentary (the Jamaican locations help immensely), begins not in the Caribbean, but in West Africa. This fades into live footage from the 1970s of Marley performing the song "Exodus." Vintage concert performances are peppered liberally throughout the film, showcasing Marley as a whirling dervish of spinning, sweaty dreadlocks, possessed of an energy that feels boundless. Marley's personal life was tumultuous, to say the least, and the film's interviewees are happy to talk about it. Just when it seemed that he was poised to crack the elusive black American audience he so desired, he was stricken with cancer.
When its a story of someone as profoundly interesting and influential as Bob Marley, there's just so much things to say.
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 An Unfinished Revolution Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln
By Robin Blackburn
Verso Press, 272 pages, $19.95.
By Derrick Morrison
Solidarity
"Marx did not support the North because he believed that its victory would directly lead to socialism. Rather, he saw in South and North two species of capitalism - one allowing slavery, the other not. The then existing regime of American society and economy embraced the enslavement of four million people whose enforced toil produced the republic's most valuable export, cotton, as well as much tobacco, sugar, rice, and turpentine. Defeating the slave power was going to be difficult. The wealth and pride of the 300,000 slaveholders (there were actually 395,000 slave owners, according to the 1860 Census, but at the time Marx was writing this had not yet been published) was at stake. These slaveholders were able to corrupt or intimidate many of the poor Southern whites, and they had rich and influential supporters among the merchants, bankers and textile manufacturers of New York, London, and Paris. Defeating the slave power and freeing the slaves would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black. Marx portrayed the wealthy slave owners as akin to Europe's aristocrats, and their removal as a task for the sort of democratic revolution he had advocated in the Communist Manifesto as the immediate aim for German revolutionaries." (12, 13)
SO WRITES ROBIN Blackburn in his excellent overview of the Civil War and its aftermath. The book is 260 pages, but Blackburn's 100-page introduction provides the key to approaching the book's other sections: the inaugural addresses of President Abraham Lincoln; the writings of Karl Marx; and a speech by labor activist Lucy Parsons to the founding convention in 1905 of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Lincoln was not unaware of Marx. He was an avid reader of the weekly national edition of Horace Greeley's New York Daily Tribune, and Marx was the London correspondent for the paper from 1852 to 1861 on European affairs. After Marx left the Tribune in late 1861, he continued his commentary on the then-expanding Civil War in Die Presse, a daily published in Vienna, Austria.
Lincoln and Greeley got to know each other from their brief stint in 1848 in the U.S. Congress. Lincoln was anti-slavery, as was Greeley and his newspaper. And when Marx drafted the address of the International Workingmen's Association to president Lincoln, applauding his reelection in 1864, Lincoln responded through the U.S. ambassador in Britain. The Times of London, a daily, printed the response. (211-214)
In a letter from Marx to Frederick Engels on August 7, 1862, Marx ends it by capturing the essence of the war, "The long and short of the business seems to me to be that a war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines, while the Yankees have so far been trying to conduct it constitutionally." (197)
Blackburn lays open the process by which a war to "preserve the Union," a war to defend the Constitution, became a war for revolutionary democracy, a war to overturn the system of chattel slavery....(Click title for more)
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Become a CCDS member today!
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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,
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