| LiberalFix Interview with Tim Sheard |
An interview with CCDS's Tim Sheard on how Tim's Lenny Moss Mysteries are based on real healthcare workers and Tim's efforts to teach workers how to write their stories of work
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Visit Our New 'Online University of the Left' and Be Amazed!
Check out the various departments, study guides and archives
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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:  New Book on History of Worker's Control
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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
Full Employment Booklets
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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...
 Will Voters See Through The Fog of 'Whiteness'?
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 Andrew O'Hehir and Joan Walsh
Alternet.org
August 15, 2012 - Joan Walsh's family, as she writes in her new book "What's the Matter With White People? Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was," [4] participated in two of the great migrations of 20th-century American history.
Joan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., but mostly grew up in suburbia (first on Long Island and later in Wisconsin). As that happened she watched many of her Irish-American family members morph from bedrock New Deal-JFK Democrats into Nixon-Reagan Republicans. In her book, Joan tries to wrestle with this legacy as honestly and forthrightly as she can, without betraying either her family's complicated lived experience or her own passionate commitment to social, racial and economic justice.
"What's the Matter With White People?" is sure to provoke much discussion during the fall campaign, with its personal and historical approach to one of the most toxic issues in American politics: How and why the white working class became the Republican base, in defiance of its own economic interests, and whether the Democrats can ever win it back. Along the way it's also a family memoir that captures a specific period in the history of Irish-American assimilation, one that resonated strongly with me (and will also with you, if you have immigrant roots), and an account of Joan's somewhat improbable rise to fame as an MSNBC commentator, which came about in large part because she embraced her working-class, Irish Catholic roots. Joan revisits many of the questions of the bitter 2008 Democratic campaign between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton - which thrust issues of race and class back into the national consciousness - and argues that Obama now has the opportunity to embrace a broad, inclusive economic agenda that can both win this year's election and help to heal the nation's worsening caste divide.
But this isn't a book review, for obvious reasons. Across a dozen years or so as Salon colleagues, Joan has been my co-worker, my boss and then a co-worker again (as well as a TV personality). We have had a number of late-night political debates, mostly friendly and occasionally argumentative. (One of those was about the fate of Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election, which took place when we were barely schoolchildren.) To stereotype both of us ruthlessly, Joan's passion is the muddy trenches of politics, full of blood and compromise, while I've spent most of my journalistic career watching from the ivory tower of culture, with the other pointy-headed intellectuals. I am profoundly grateful to her for not mentioning, amid all the rough-and-tumble in her book, that Iwrote [5]a fervent Salon article defending my vote for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. (Want someone to blame for eight years of Bush? Mea culpa.)
Over the years we've picked up that we have strikingly similar Irish-American family histories, and strikingly dissimilar approaches to framing the major issues of the day. Joan's father and my father were both the children of recent immigrants, and were born two years apart in adjoining New York neighborhoods. Both were the first kids in their extended families to go to college and break through to the middle class, and both remained liberal Democrats as many of their relatives drifted into the Reagan coalition. While Joan was born in Brooklyn and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years, I was born in the Bay Area and now live in Brooklyn. That's where we met for lunch, in a lovely, tree-lined, multiracial neighborhood that looks like a 3-D Obama commercial, to talk about what in fact is wrong with white people....(Click title for more)
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Ryan a Pawn in Neo-Con Return
By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via TomHayden.com
August 20, 2012 - Dan Senor, left, at a briefing on Saturday for the Romney campaign on a plane en route to Israel. (Photo: Stephen Crowley)The neo-conservatives have consolidated their plan for control of US foreign policy with the vice-presidential nomination of Paul Ryan.
Ryan is being briefed by Dan Senor, described mildly in the New York Times as "an expert on Israel and the Middle East." Senor, however, is anything but expert. He was the spokesperson, or spin-doctor, for the initial Coalition Provisional Authority, which occupied Iraq in 2003 with promises about democracy blooming after weapons of mass destruction were removed. Not since Vietnam had state propaganda so completely dominated the narrative, in keeping with the Pentagon/neo-con view that "the liberal media" caused the fall of Saigon.
Ever since, Senor, often armed with "fat briefing books under his arm," has supplied Republicans with spin in furtherance of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and hawkish pro-Israeli forces represented by Sheldon Adelson. It was Senor who traveled with Romney to London, Israel and Poland on his recent foreign policy tour, and it was Senor who told the traveling media that Romney would support an Israeli strike on Iran.
Senor has achieved more respectability than Bush or Dick Cheney in Washington power circles, apparently by indefatigably showing up with briefing books, by his marriage to former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, his ties to wealthy hedge-fund investors, and political connections across the Beltway. He is the chief spokesman for a neo-con circle advising Romney, one including more controversial hard-liners such as Bush's UN ambassador John Bolton. Senor's sister, Wendy Singer, is the AIPAC representative in Israel. ...(Click title for more)
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By Al Hart
UE News Managing Editor via Beaver County Blue
August 20, 2012, Pittsburgh, PA - Since the founding of the United States, working people have had to fight to win, and to keep, the right to vote. And through American history, rich and powerful people, often calling themselves "conservatives", have tried to maintain their privileges by depriving other Americans of the right to vote.
The story of the long struggle for voting rights in America is thoroughly and brilliantly told in 'The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,' by Alexander Keyssar, who teaches history and social policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. This highly- readable account was first published in 2000, and the 2009 revised edition brings the story up to nearly the present, when voter suppression has again become a national issue.
Before and immediately after the American Revolution, the right to vote in most of the 13 original states was limited mainly to white men, and in most states, only those who owned a certain amount of property. Free blacks who owned property had voting rights in some Northern states and, for a while, North Carolina. The most common property qualification was a freehold of 50 acres (among others, this disqualified tenant farmers who leased land.) In some states the requirement was property of a certain monetary value, such as 50 pounds, or a taxpaying requirement. When Vermont gained statehood in 1791, it was immediately the most democratic state, with no property or tax requirements for voting. ...(Click title for more)
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Writers and warehouse workers, janitors and business consultants, truck drivers and graphic designers -- none have a social safety net.
By Steve Wishnia
Alternet.org
August 20, 2012 - Almost one-third of American workers now do some kind of freelance work, and they lack almost every kind of economic security that permanent full-time workers traditionally have had. Though exact figures are impossible to find, many experts and labor organizers estimate that about 30 percent of U.S. workers are "contingent." That means they don't have a permanent job. They work as freelancers, temporary workers, on contract, or on call, or their employers define them (often illegally) as "independent contractors."
Their ranks include writers and warehouse workers, janitors and business consultants, truck drivers and graphic designers-and their number is rising. Richard Greenwald, a sociologist of work and professor at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, estimates that their share of the U.S. workforce has increased by close to half in the last 10 years. In July, Staffing Industry Analysts reported that the average share of contingent workers at companies it surveyed had gone up by one-third since 2009, to 16 percent. Last year, a different survey found that contingent workers averaged 22 percent of the workers at 200 large companies.
These workers are often called the "precariat," a combination of "precarious" and "proletariat," because the traditional social safety nets for workers don't cover them. They have no job security as they hustle from one gig to the next, and they often don't know where their next job is coming from or when it will come. They very rarely get paid sick days or vacation. They don't get paid extra for working overtime. They are usually not eligible for unemployment benefits. They generally have to pay both the worker's and the employer's share of Social Security taxes. They have to pay for their own health insurance, and Obamacare won't change that. (Beginning in 2014, people will be able to buy private insurance at group rates, and lower-income and working-class people will get some subsidies to help them pay for it.) ...(Click title for more)
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By Sidney Gluck
Online University of the Left via Political Affairs
August 18 2012 - The 21st century is witnessing an epochal change, something to be noted in the emergence of two economic poles-one dominated by Western capitalism and the other in the process of forming an association of former colonial countries in various levels and forms of economic development. Socio-economic changes have taken place in history similarly, but not with such an explosive and defining character. As an exception, capitalist colonial domination was part of its industrialization impinging on resources and cheap labor for greater personal gain.
There are now three forms of capital accumulation: privately owned industry, stocks, enterprises and financial capital; socially owned government accumulation utilized for industrial development, infrastructure, and forms of social obligations; and, social security wealth belonging to retired workers. Economic growth differs under the control of private and social forms of capital. The former is concerned with private individual accumulation. The latter is concerned with economic growth and improvement of the conditions of the working population, which creates the wealth in industrialized society.
The social security form of capital belongs to the people who have paid in during their productive years to support retirement and is a form of accumulation from their earnings placed in trust with the government for administration. For the past few years, this capital has been used and safely invested in the country and the proceeds added to the accumulation of the retirees.
The emergence of social capital reflects a major change in society, just as the emergence of private capital posited the change from feudalism to capitalism as an economic system and basis of social relations. The growth of social capital is inevitable as private capital ceases to expand domestic growth and job creation in developed Western countries, which comprise one third of the world's population and where labor has succeeded through historic struggles to increase wages and living standards. Hence, industrial growth in developed countries has diminished or ceased. Investments have shifted to former colonial countries, including China, for the past thirty years, with incredible rates of accumulation reflected in the highest earnings of Wall Street despite the 2008 economic crisis, which ended for private capital in mid-2009 but persists in its fourth year with fifteen million still jobless and 17% poverty stricken....(Click title for more)
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![*Red Hook Summer* Official Trailer (2012) [HD]](https://thumbnail.constantcontact.com/remoting/v1/vthumb/YOUTUBE/3173aeedb3c348b2af0c4e6c8619c943) | *Red Hook Summer* Official Trailer
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By Shannon M. Houston
Paste Magazine
August 10, 2012 - One could argue that Spike Lee's strength as a director lies in his ability to construct a compelling story, where other great directors (and writers) are adept at surrendering themselves, in a way, to their work.
Lee does not do this; his filmography shows that he is an activist through his art (Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, When The Levees Broke, etc.) and-knowing this-viewers and critics allow his hand to bear down on his work far more than would normally be acceptable for a "good" film.
For that very hand, Lee is revered and by that hand, his movies sometimes suffer. Red Hook Summer, Lee's latest project about a boy who spends his summer in the Brooklyn Red Hook housing projects with a bible thumpin' grandfather, may be the strongest example of why so many viewers and critics have a love/hate relationship with Lee and his movies.
Red Hook Summer begins much in the same way as Crooklyn and Do The Right Thing, two of Lee's earlier works: the camera pans about a particular neighborhood, introducing the viewer to its everyday inhabitants. Instead of Mother Sister and Da Mayor, Red Hook Summer has characters like Mother Darling and Deacon Zee. The religious setting adds a slightly different element, but the characters are all-too familiar. We see this neighborhood through the eyes of Flik Royale (played by newcomer Jules Brown) a skateboarding pre-teen boy who shows up rocking a faux-hawk, his iPad ever in hand. Many of the first images of Red Hook are, in fact, shown through the lens of the Apple tablet, highlighting the generational, social and economic gap between Flik (who comes from a black middle class family in Atlanta) and this Brooklyn neighborhood, of which his grandfather (played by Clarke Peters) is a sort of patriarch....(Click title for more)
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 Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers
By Ellen E. Schultz
Portfolio/Penguin 2011
216 pages, available in hardcover and paperback
By UE News via Portside.org
August 20, 2012 - We already knew that employers are stealing workers' pensions, and that they've doing it for more than 20 years. But in this well-researched and well-argued book Ellen Schultz, an award- winning investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, documents the complex ways in which they've been doing it, how they profit from these crimes, and how gaping loopholes in laws and regulations let them get away with it.
Interestingly for UE members, the first corporate leader Schultz mentions is Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, recounting a speech he gave to investors in December 2010. Immelt told them that the GE pension "has been a drag for a decade," and that to relieve itself of this financial burden, GE was going to keep future employees out of the pension. But Immelt's presentation was fundamentally untrue, says Schultz - the company's pension and retiree plans, huge and well-funded, "had contributed billions of dollars to the company's bottom line over the past decade and a half", and the company had not contributed a cent to the workers' pension plan since 1987.
One of the ways GE made money from the pension fund was by selling chunks of it when it spun off a division of the company. For example, Schultz writes that when GE sold an aerospace unit to Martin Marietta in 1993, it transferred 30,000 employees and $1.2 billion in pension assets - $531 million more than was needed to cover the pension liabilities. But all that was included in the sale price, so "GE effectively got to put half a billion dollars from its pension plan into its pocket."...(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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