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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:  California Gov. Jerry's Browns Resource Page to Oppose the Deniers
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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...
 Election Debates Getting Hotter...
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 defend voter rights, 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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By Joshua Holland
Alternet.org
August 13, 2012 - For 28 years, since Ronald Reagan's first term, Mike Lofgren served as a Republican Congressional staffer on Capitol Hill. He was one of the many people who work behind the scenes on the nitty-gritty of governing while the politicians they work for are out making speeches and raising campaign funds.
But in 2011, after a wave of Tea Party ideologues had stormed the Hill, Lofgren had seen enough. A few months after quitting his job, he wrote that the party he had belonged to for his entire career had become dominated by "lunatics." The big problem, in Lofgren's view, was the pervasive fundamentalist theology that had gained so much influence in the GOP over the years Lofgren served in Congress. Last year, he wrote [3]:
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th-century Europe.
Lofgren has penned a new book, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted [4], that offers an insider's view of the extremism he saw among his colleagues. Lofgren appeared on this week's AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion (you can listen to the whole show here [5]).
Joshua Holland: Mike, in the book you argue that the Republican party's extremism these days is fueled by politicized religion, by the religious right. Before we get into that, I kind of want to locate you on the political spectrum. These days you're writing things that are somewhat similar to what those of us on the left have been saying. Have your political views changed, or to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, has the Republican party simply left you? Do you still identify yourself as a moderate conservative?
Mike Lofgren: Well, I would say that in today's GOP, Ronald Reagan would be considered too moderate. After all, he pleaded with Congress to pass a clean debt relief bill when the deficit threatened to get out of hand. He passed several tax increases. So I think maybe the GOP has maybe passed me by.
JH: He also of course signed an amnesty bill for undocumented immigrants. I agree with you very strongly that in today's party, Ronald Reagan would probably be called a RHINO (Republican in name only).
We should be clear that we're not talking about people of faith who are in politics. you're writing about fundamentalists, biblical literalists.
ML: Right. I am not criticizing religion per se. I'm criticizing the fusion of politics and religion, which debases both politics and religion.
JH: It seems to me, and it comes through very clearly in the book, that religious fundamentalism is by definition incompatible with democracy, because democracy requires some compromise. When you believe your position is the word of God and the other guy's position is the work of Satan you can't really meet in the middle, can you? How did this ideology play out when you were working on the Hill?
ML: You kind of saw that and it was one of the reasons that led me to retire from the Hill. In early 2011, I saw that this whole new infusion of Tea Party Republicans, particularly in the House, they were going to use the debt limit increase issue -- which had been passed without too much crisis something like 87 times previously since World War II -- use it to ransom the government of the United States to their ideology. That little stunt caused Standard & Poor's to downgrade the nation's credit rating. According to the Government Accountability Office, it cost $1.3 billion in transaction costs alone.
The reason I bring that into the religious discussion is that if you believe in Armageddon, and that we will all sleep in the bosom of the Lord, by and by, then it really doesn't matter if you blow up the government or cause some terrible crisis, because of what you consider to be your principles. Well, that accounts for some of the behavior. I think Michele Bachmann, who was a darling of the religious right, basically said "bring it on" in terms of a default of the United States government....(Click title for more)
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By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Carl Davidson
Alternet.org
August 9, 2012 -Let's cut to the chase. The November 2012 elections will be unlike anything that any of us can remember. It is not just that this will be a close election. It is also not just that the direction of Congress hangs in the balance. Rather, this will be one of the most polarized and critical elections in recent history.
Unfortunately what too few leftists and progressives have been prepared to accept is that the polarization is to a great extent centered on a revenge-seeking white supremacy; on race and the racial implications of the moves to the right in the US political system. It is also focused on a re-subjugation of women, harsh burdens on youth and the elderly, increased war dangers, and reaction all along the line for labor and the working class. No one on the left with any good sense should remain indifferent or stand idly by in the critical need to defeat Republicans this year.
U.S. Presidential elections are not what progressives want them to be
A large segment of what we will call the 'progressive forces' in US politics approach US elections generally, and Presidential elections in particular, as if: (1) we have more power on the ground than we actually possess, and (2) the elections are about expressing our political outrage at the system. Both get us off on the wrong foot.
The US electoral system is among the most undemocratic on the planet. Constructed in a manner so as to guarantee an ongoing dominance of a two party duopoly, the US electoral universe largely aims at reducing so-called legitimate discussion to certain restricted parameters acceptable to the ruling circles of the country. Almost all progressive measures, such as Medicare for All or Full Employment, are simply declared 'off the table.' In that sense there is no surprise that the Democratic and Republican parties are both parties of the ruling circles, even though they are quite distinct within that sphere.
The nature of the US electoral system--and specifically the ballot restrictions and 'winner-take-all' rules within it--encourages or pressures various class fractions and demographic constituency groups to establish elite-dominated electoral coalitions. The Democratic and Republican parties are, in effect, electoral coalitions or party-blocs of this sort, unrecognizable in most of the known universe as political parties united around a program and a degree of discipline to be accountable to it. We may want and fight for another kind of system, but it would be foolish to develop strategy and tactics not based on the one we actually have.
The winner-take-all nature of the system discourages independent political parties and candidacies on both the right and the left. For this reason the extreme right made a strategic decision in the aftermath of the 1964 Goldwater defeat to move into the Republican Party with a long-term objective of taking it over. This was approached at the level of both mass movement building, e.g., anti-busing, anti-abortion, as well as electoral candidacies. The GOP right's 'Southern Strategy' beginning in 1968 largely succeeded in chasing out most of the pro-New Deal Republicans from the party itself, as well as drawing in segregationist Democratic voters in the formerly 'Solid South.'...(Click title for more)
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By Mark Engler
Dissent
July 30, 2012 - Organizations that usually demand cancellation of the crippling debts owed by impoverished countries in the global South are now calling for debt forgiveness for a different group of borrowers: U.S. students.
With soaring tuition, poor job prospects, and loans that take decades to pay off, there's no question that students need a year of jubilee. Yet, the idea that groups accustomed to running international solidarity campaigns have taken up their cause is an unexpected twist.
I've always liked the Jubilee debt campaign. For a couple of decades now, it has been an impressive and truly international drive, with strong leadership from the global South. In this country, the Jubilee USA Network has done a great job doing interfaith organizing and bringing in non-religious allies as well. Also, importantly, the campaign has been winning.
One of the great accomplishments of the global justice movement that exploded internationally around the year 2000 was to convince the world that onerous debts owed by poor countries were an unjust and prohibitive barrier to sustainable development. In many cases such debts were accumulated by dictators that had since been overthrown; moreover, developing countries had already paid back more than the original amounts of the loans. Belief in the injustice of this, as well as the idea that wealthy creditor countries and international financial institutions should cancel debts, represented radical fringe ideas in the first half of the 1990s. But Jubilee folks were dogged. They lobbied, educated, and protested. I remember many thousands of people turning out for a Jubilee march in Seattle, just before the main day of action against the World Trade Organization's 1999 ministerial meeting. It was a rainy night, and it would have been easy to stay home; instead the packed protest foreshadowed what would become a historic week of action.
Pundits often accuse social movements-especially ones driven by highly visible protests-of emerging from nowhere and then disappearing without impact. Sometimes it is true that momentum-driven movements have short life cycles. But just as often, a "here today, gone tomorrow" analysis reflects the ignorance of a mainstream media commentator more than anything else. If you don't bother to follow social movements until they're too loud to ignore, and then you promptly resume disregarding them once they're no longer making top headlines, it's no surprise that you'll miss the precedents and the legacies. "Flash in the pan" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy....(Click title for more)
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Ryan on Rand: 3 Minute Video Says a Lot
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 By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
New American Media
Aug 16, 2012 - On August 3, 1980 GOP Presidential contender Ronald Reagan picked his campaign starting point at the Neshoba County Fair, near Meridian Mississippi. The virtually lily-white, wildly enthusiastic throng that lined Reagan's motorcade route waved Confederate and American flags.
Reagan didn't disappoint them. He punched all the familiar code attack themes, big government, liberals, welfare, and law and order. He punctuated his blast with the ringing declaration "I believe in states' rights."
Three decades later GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney with his freshly minted VP pick Paul Ryan in tow picked their joint campaign starting point and their audience just as deliberately. His spot was a retired battleship draped in red, white and blue docked in Norfolk, Virginia. The virtually lily-white audience cheered as Romney and Ryan punched the same familiar code themes: out of control spend thrift, bloated government. They punctuated it with the hard vow to take back America.
Romney and Ryan can't openly espouse states rights as Regan did. But they update the code themes by lambasting Democrats, wasteful big government, run-away deficit spending on entitlement programs, and their full-blown assaults on the so-called Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security programs, and labor unions. The majority of the recipients of these programs have always been white seniors, retirees, women, and children, and white workers. But these programs have been artfully sold to many Americans as handouts to lazy, undeserving blacks, Hispanics and minorities.
Romney and Ryan, like Reagan before them, rip a page directly from the time tested Southern Strategy playbook of Richard Nixon for GOP presidential candidates. The strategy has always had two prongs. One is to attack the liberal and bloated and tax-and-spend big government. The second is to firmly lock down the majority popular and electoral vote in the 11 old Confederate and Border states.
Without all or most of these states electoral votes, GOP presidential challengers Nixon, Reagan, and now Romney-Ryan would have had an even steeper climb to defeat the LBJ surrogate Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Carter in 1980, and now President Obama. These states hold more than one-third of the electoral votes needed to bag the White House....(Click title for more)
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By Travis Waldron
ThinkProgress.org
Aug 8, 2012 - The group behind the 'Nuns On A Bus' tour that highlighted the ill-effects of the House Republican budget in congressional districts across the country is now setting its sights on the party's presidential candidate, inviting Mitt Romney to spend a day with the nuns to learn about the plight of America's poorest citizens.
NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby, is inviting Romney to "spend a day with Catholic Sisters who work every day to meet the needs of struggling families in their communities," according to a release. The group is specifically targeting Romney a day after his campaign released a misleading ad about welfare reform that Sister Simone Campbell, NETWORK's executive director, said "demonize[s] families in poverty" and shows Romney's "ignorance about the challenges" the poor face in America:
"Recent advertisements and statements from the campaign of Governor Romney demonize families in poverty and reflect woeful ignorance about the challenges faced by tens of millions of American families in these tough economic times," stated Sister Simone Campbell. "We are all God's children and equal in God's eyes. Efforts to divide us by class or score political points at the expense of the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters reveal the worst side of our country's politics."
Romney has endorsed the House GOP budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). It was that plan, which includes deep cuts to food stamps and other safety net programs that benefit the middle class, that NETWORK's Nuns On A Bus tour targeted, with Campbell and other sisters blasting it as "immoral" at the tour's conclusion in Washington D.C. Romney has also proposed massive tax cuts for the rich that would likely come at the expense of lower- and middle-class families, which would see higher taxes or significant cuts to the programs they depend on.
Those policies, Campbell told ThinkProgress, show that Romney "doesn't have clue" about the struggles the poor face. "The fact is, his policies shift wealth to the upper class," she said. "Yes, it hurts the middle class, but it devastates those at the margins of our society." If Romney were to accept their invitation, Campbell said she would take him to places like St. Augustine's in Cleveland, where food programs "provide a hand up" to the community's neediest members. "He thinks they're lazy," Campbell said, in reference to Romney's misleading welfare reform ad. "It is hard work to keep things together when you're poor. He doesn't have a clue. Let him talk to them, and maybe they'll touch his heart. And his mind too."
The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Campbell said she "lives in hope" that he will accept, even if he spends only an hour with the group. "I'll take whatever I can get," Campbell said. "He should accept."
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'Part Swiss Family Robinson, part dystopia, and part revolutionary utopia, Beasts... is a visionary film that features poor people living together in interracial, intergenerational harmony.'
By Mountain Girl
KasamaProject.org
"As post-Katrina New Orleans is proving, it's not simply a matter of building levees; far more important is constructing the basic political architecture to decide who will be protected, and how." John McQuaid, "Storm Warning: The Unlearned Lessons of Katrina," Mother Jones, August 2007
"In the fall of 2007 the number of active trailers still numbered more than 50,000. By February 2008, when CDC tests confirmed high levels of formaldehyde in FEMA trailers across Louisiana and Mississippi, FEMA began an aggressive push to shut down its trailer parks and 'relocate families into safer and more permanent housing.'" Deepa Fernandez, "Three Years after Hurrican Katrina, Homelessness Looms," Mother Jones, September 2008
"Beasts of the Southern Wild," the visionary film by Benh Zeitlin which projects a post-Katrina world outside the protection of the levees, rejects the notion of a "basic political architecture" and instead depicts a society of outsiders which embodies that rejection.
Part Swiss Family Robinson, part dystopia, and part revolutionary utopia, Beasts has met with high critical praise (at Sundance and Cannes, two major film festivals), wild enthusiasm on the part of early audiences, and negative criticism from some on the left who are concerned about parental physical and emotional abuse, negative stereotyping, and alcoholism.
One established film critic declared that the Republicans must be jumping for joy because the film is all about people being self-sufficient and thus not needing government handouts. These are very narrow interpretations, and I hope to refute them and encourage Kasama readers to get out and see the movie ... SOON.
The main promotional Website, complete with soundtrack and live Twitter feed, is at www.welcometothebathtub.com.
In spite of its critical acclaim and glowing praise in social media outlets, distributors are not booking the film broadly, at least not yet. It opened in the Chicago area at two art houses, and some weeks later, it has yet to open at any theater in either the south or west side neighborhoods, where the vast majority of Black Chicagoans live.
The filmmakers are encouraging grassroots support, asking people to work on outreach through their event Website, www.beastsofthesouthernwild.com. And even though esteemed film critic emeritus Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and predicted it to be among the top nominees for Best Picture, it has been a slow process of expansion.
The event Website features accounts of the film getting wildly enthusiastic reception in Guanajuato and the Ukraine, and also lists all the new venues where the film will be starting, and all the ones that continue to show it.
What is the power of this small indie film? Why are so many people not simply liking it, but seeing it numerous times?
It's a visionary film that features poor people living together in interracial, intergenerational harmony. They band together to create a communal life in an area south of New Orleans that they call The Bathtub, and they fight the system in a variety of ways - including violence - to avoid getting sucked into the sterile, controlled environment of a state-funded shelter. This is a film that celebrates resistance. Combined with a stirring soundtrack largely written by the filmmakers themselves but also featuring indigenous music of the southern Bayou, the film stirs powerful emotions. In celebrating resistance, can it also inspire to action?...(Click title for more)
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 Working in a Weapons Plant The Maker or the Tool?
By STEPHEN SOLDZ
CounterPunch
Did you ever demand any answers?
The who, the what or the reason why?
Did you ever question the setup?
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Did you settle for the shoddy?
Did you think it right
To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight,
never make a fight, never make a fight?
-From Ballad of Accounting, words and music by Ewan MacColl
Suddenly jobs are on the political agenda. Politicians from the President on down state that creating jobs for American workers is their top priority. Often any jobs, as with the low-wage jobs that Texas Governor Rick Perry brags he "created." Sometimes they want to create "good paying" jobs. But in this discourse having a job is everything, because it allows one to pay the bills and avoid poverty.
Those who worked with Jean Alonso making missiles in a Massachusetts defense plant - referred to as American Missile and Communications Corporation but sounding suspiciously like Massachusetts-based Raytheon - knew how important it was to have a job in this society. But they also recognized that "good jobs" should mean far more than good-paying ones. And they knew, from their own bitter experience, that many jobs can be toxic, destroying the mind and soul, and sometimes the body as well of those who work them.
Alonso's book The Patriots: An Inside Look at Life in a Defense Plant begins as the missiles fly at the start of the first Gulf War. The fragile community in the plant is strained by tensions between the patriotic workers and Alonso with her antiwar views and activities. Alonso copes with her own anguish by conducting an informal survey of how her coworkers feel about their work. She learns that these coworkers are filled with a profound sense of hopelessness and despair:
"I feel like a zero."
"Inferior."
"Empty."
"Helpless."
"I'm very depressed and anxious."
"I'm so unhappy here I get aches and pains from it."
"Apathetic. I can't do anything at home anymore but watch TV."
"I was a musician, you know, so I still need to write everyday - if you don't you have no soul. But I go home and I'm too tired."
"I feel like there's something crushed inside - I feel really defeated. It's like giving up on your whole self in order to make a living - you can't figure a way out." (pp. 10-11)....(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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