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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 sustainer. Click the title to buy it directly.
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Blog of the Week:  Share by Design.
A site for community organizers looking for ideas to change their cities
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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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Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement
By Don Hamerquist
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 GOP Running on Big Lies, Lots of 'Em
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 Jonathan Cohn
The New Repbulic
August 29, 2012 - You're going to read and hear a lot about Paul Ryan's speech on Wednesday night. And I imagine most of it will be about how Ryan's speech played-with the party loyalists in Tampa, with the television viewers across the country, and eventually with the swing voters who will decide the election.
I'd like to talk, instead, about what Ryan actually said-not because I find Ryan's ideas objectionable, although I do, but because I thought he was so brazenly willing to twist the truth.
At least five times, Ryan misrepresented the facts. And while none of the statements were new, the context was. It's one thing to hear them on a thirty-second television spot or even in a stump speech before a small crowd. It's something else entirely to hear them in prime time address, as a vice presidential nominee is accepting his party's nomination and speaking to the entire country.
Here are the five statements that deserve serious scrutiny:
1) About the GM plant in Janesville.
Ryan's home district includes a shuttered General Motors plant. Here's what happened, according to Ryan:
A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: "I believe that if our government is there to support you ... this plant will be here for another hundred years." That's what he said in 2008.
Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that's how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.
It's true: The plant shut down. But it shut down in 2008-before Obama became president.
By the way, nobody questions that, if not for the Obama Administration's decision to rescue Chrysler and GM, the domestic auto industry would have crumbled. Credible estimates suggested that the rescue saved more than a million jobs. Unemployment in Michigan and Ohio, the two states with the most auto jobs, have declined precipitously.
2) About Medicare.
Ryan attacked Obama for "raiding" Medicare. Again, Ryan has no standing whatsoever to make this attack, because his own budget called for taking the same amount of money from Medicare. Twice. The only difference is that Ryan's budget used those savings to finance Ryan's priorities, which include a massive tax cut that benefits the wealthy disproportionately.
It's true that Romney has pledged to put that money back into Medicare and Ryan now says he would do the same. But the claim is totally implausible given Romney's promise to cap non-defense spending at 16 percent of gross domestic product.
By the way, Obamacare's cut to Medicare was a reduction in what the plan pays hospitals and insurance companies. And the hospitals said they could live with those cuts, because Obamacare was simultaneously giving more people health insurance, alleviating the financial burden of charity care.
What Obamacare did not do is take away benefits. On the contrary, it added benefits, by offering free preventative care and new prescription drug coverage. By repealing Obamacare, Romney and Ryan would take away those benefits-and, by the way, add to Medicare's financial troubles because the program would be back to paying hospitals and insurers the higher rates.
3) About the credit rating downgrade.
Ryan blamed the downgrading of American debt on Obama. But it was the possibility that America would default on its debts that led to the downgrade. And why did that possibility exist? Because Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling, playing chicken not just with the nations' credit rating but the whole economy, unless Obama would cave into their budget demands.
4) About the deficit.
Ryan said "President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him" and proclaimed "We need to stop spending money we don't have." In fact, this decade's big deficits are primarily a product of Bush-era tax cuts and wars. (See graph.) And you know who voted for them? Paul Ryan. (Click title for more)
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By Adele M. Stan & Peter Montgomery
Alternet.org
August 26, 2012 - TAMPA, FLA. -- It was to have been the day before the commencement of the Republican National Convention, but the hand of divine providence swept in, batting a storm called Isaac toward the site where the G.O.P. is to gather, delaying the convening for at least a day. But that didn't stop leaders of the Republican right wing from hosting no fewer than four events meant to rally the faithful to turn out the vote for presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whose name was barely mentioned from any of the four podiums.
In fact, there was one name that was mentioned far more than all others: that of President Barack Obama.
Two of the events were called by Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, an organization dedicated to turning out the vote among both religious and secular members of the Republican right -- a melding of the religious right with the broader Tea Party movement.
Reed kicked off the day with a $50-a-plate V.I.P. luncheon that brought together such secular players as the renowned and powerful anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist with religious luminaries like Pastor Jim Garlow, one of the activists who helped quash same-sex marriage in California via the Proposition 8 ballot measure.
The other two events -- a prayer rally and a "Unity Rally" -- featured former G.O.P. presidential candidate Michele Bachmann as a headliner, and took place in a non-denominational evangelical megachurch on the outskirts of town. The prayer rally at River Church enjoyed sponsorship from the Florida Family Policy Council and Citizenlink [4] (both affiliates of Focus on the Family*) and Salem Communications [5], a religious right radio network.
Bachmann made a return engagement in the evening for a "Unity Rally" at which she and her former presidential primary opponent, Herman Cain, were the big draws. Tea Party Nation, together with the Western Representation PAC and Cain's new venture, Job Creators Solutions [6], co-sponsored the event.
While each event had its own distinct character, there was unity aplenty in the overarching theme: Defeat Barack Obama, not simply because his policies stand in opposition to right-wing ideology, but because, speakers said, he is a very dangerous man.
At an exhibit table inside River Church, a painting in an elaborate frame featured an image of an angry-looking Obama with a copy of the Constitution in flames in the foreground. The signs held by attendees inside the church for the evening rally were largely home-made, and several people waved large flags, both the U.S. flag, and the yellow Gadsden flag that has become the trademark of the Tea Party movement.
But downtown, inside the ornate, Art Nouveau-style Tampa Theater in which Reed held his rally, activists had a more uniform look, with preprinted signs that read: Pro-Family, Pro-Faith, Pro-Freedom, while in the grottos that flanked the stage, statues of scantily-clad goddesses looked on.
Here are some highlights from a Sunday spent among the foot soldiers of the right, and those who seek to lead them to the polls on November 6th. ...(Click title for more)
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By Steven Rosenfeld
Alternet.org
August 24, 2012 - I was nervous getting onto the flight to Denver. Since 2004, I have been a national radio producer, investigative reporter, author and consultant-writing about how elections are won, lost, bungled and improved, with a big focus on voter registration.
But I had never snuck into a meeting of right-wing voting vigilantes who are the frontline of a national voter suppression strategy, and where the main speaker was a man whose new book I'd aggressively debunked days before, in an AlterNet article [3] lauded by a leading election law blog [4] and Washington Post [5].
The meeting was a state summit organized by a group called True The Vote [6]. The author was John Fund, who absurdly claims that more than 1,000 felons voted illegally in Minnesota in 2008, sending Democrat Al Franken to the U.S. Senate, where he was the final vote that passed Obama's health care reform.
I didn't want to be outed or bullied. I support citizen activism and was intrigued, even if I knew I was heading into the heart of the GOP election fraud brigade at the Colorado summit. On the plane, I wondered why many of the right-wing activists I hoped to meet in Denver believe as they do-eyeing almost all phases of the voting process with suspicion and mistaking errors as political conspiracies. The group's Web site was very thin, but as knowledgeable people told me, they had big money behind them and were organizing on a scale that recalled the early days of the Christian Coalition [7].
The next day, Saturday, August 18, I got up early, ate quickly and took my props-a copy of Fund's 2004 book, Stealing Elections, one of the first Republican tirades to make outsized and false claims that Democrats were involved in vast conspiracies to illegally vote, and a blog post [8] saying the summit was open to walk-ins. I looked like I was going golfing and headed for the Sheraton conference center. A few minutes before 9, I got in line behind a manicured middle-aged man wearing an Americans for Prosperity T-shirt, the group [9] founded and still funded by the Koch Brothers, and a few retirees, all white, and asked if they any room left. They nodded. When time came for pay, a perky woman at the welcome desk asked my name for a badge. Next to her sat Fund, selling and signing his book. I quickly replied, "Steve Rose," what my friends call me. No one blinked. Then I bought the book for $20. He signed, "Keep Fighting. John Fund."
Once inside, the meeting began with the Pledge of Allegiance, a prayer "for truth in America" in Jesus' name, and then some of the most incredible tirades against liberals I'd ever heard, including Fund's messianic exhortation to work against all those who "bear false witness," which, ironically, is exactly what he and True the Vote does....(Click title for more)
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By Bill Morlin
Southern Poverty Law Center
August 27, 2012 - Four members of secret militia group, now facing murder charges in Georgia, operated inside the ranks of the U.S. Army and discussed blowing up a dam and poisoning fruit crops in Washington State, authorities said Monday. The motives of the alleged plotters remained murky.
The revelation came as Army Pfc. Michael Burnett, 26, struck a plea bargain with prosecutors in Long County, Ga., agreeing to testify against three other soldiers who called themselves the FEAR militia (Forever Enduring Always Ready).
Burnett pleaded guilty to manslaughter, illegal gang activity and other charges as part of a plea deal, The Associated Press reported. Other members of the militia group include the group's reported leader, Isaac Aguigui, of Cashmere, Wash., and Sgt. Anthony Peden and Pvt. Christopher Salmon, whose ages and hometown weren't available, The Associated Press reported.
The four soldiers, stationed at Fort Stewart in Georgia, spent at least $87,000 buying guns and bomb components, and now face charges in the execution-style murders last December of former soldier Michael Roark and his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany York. The pair was shot to death in the Georgia woods, near the U.S. Army base. The killers apparently believed the militia group had been betrayed by Roark, who left the military two days before he and York were shot "to be silenced," The AP reported.
Aguigui, who was home-schooled before being accepted at West Point preparatory school, funded the militia using $500,000 in insurance and benefit payments from the death of his pregnant wife a year ago, The AP reported. Aguigui was not charged, but Long County Prosecutor Isabel Pauley said the young woman's death "was highly suspicious." It was not disclosed where she died.
"This domestic terrorist organization did not simply plan and talk," the prosecutor said at Burnett's court hearing. "Prior to the murders in this case, the group took action" and possessed the "knowledge, means and motive to carry out their plans." ...(Click title for more)
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Museum director, writer calling for
efforts to clear men's names
By Dana Beyerle
Times Montgomery Bureau
August 26, 2012 - MONTGOMERY - It began 81 years ago, with young black and white men and boys, a white woman and a girl on a train between Chattanooga and Paint Rock in Northeast Alabama.
Within days, eight of the nine young blacks would be convicted of raping the woman and girl and sentenced to death in Alabama's electric chair. A 12-year-old black boy would be sentenced to life in prison.
Eventually no one was executed and all were released from prison, their lives ruined by the miscarriage of justice. In 1976, after decades of hiding, one of the nine, Clarence Norris, was pardoned by the state of Alabama.
Now, a north Alabama woman and a writer want final closure to the travesty known to history as the Scottsboro Boys Case, which awakened a nation to just how things were done in the Jim Crow system of the Deep South.
Norris was the last known living Scottsboro Boy at the time of his pardon, which came following efforts by the NAACP, two black Alabama lawyers and former Attorney General Bill Baxley. The pardon was signed by former Gov. George Wallace. Norris died in 1989.
Fast forward to 2010, when Shelia Washington opened the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center in Scottsboro, where the trials for the nine were held.
Washington, the museum's director, and Huntsville graduate student and writer Thomas Reidy are pushing to clear the other eight posthumously.
"Closure is what I'm looking for," Washington said in a recent telephone interview. "It shouldn't go on and on."...(Click title for more)
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Reviewing 'Why Americans Hate Welfare' by Martin Gillens and 'The Little Blue Book: Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic' by George Lakoff and Elizabeth Weiling
By Joshua Holland
Truthout.org
August 26, 2012 - Scientific research into the way we think explains the reasons decent people wind up supporting horrific policies.
Earlier this year, Democratic operatives looking for the best way to define Mitt Romney discovered something interesting about Paul Ryan's budget. The New York Times reported that when the details of his proposals were run past focus groups, they found that the plan is so cruel that voters "simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing."
In addition to phasing out the Earned Income Tax Credit that keeps millions of American families above the poverty line and cutting funding for children's healthcare in half, Jonathan Cohn described the "America that Paul Ryan envisions" like this:
Many millions of working-age Americans would lose health insurance. Senior citizens would anguish over whether to pay their rent or their medical bills, in a way they haven't since the 1960s. Government would be so starved of resources that, by 2050, it wouldn't have enough money for core functions like food inspections and highway maintenance.
Ryan's "roadmap" may be the least serious budget plan ever to emerge in Washington, but it is reflective of how far to the right the GOP has moved in recent years. According to a recent study of public attitudes conducted by the Pew Research Center, in 1987, 62 percent of Republicans said "the government should take care of people who cannot take care of themselves," but that number has now dropped to just 40 percent (PDF). That attitude was on display during a GOP primary debate last fall when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul what fate should befall a healthy person without health insurance who finds himself suddenly facing a catastrophic illness. "Congressman," Blitzer pressed after Paul sidestepped the question, "are you saying that society should just let him die?" Before Paul had a chance to respond, the audience erupted in cheers, with some shouting, "yeah!"
Ryan's motives aren't purely ideological; he's been a magnet for dollars from big GOP donors for years (the $5.4 million in his House campaign account is among the largest war-chests for any representative this cycle). But what about the ordinary people who embrace this kind of 'screw 'em, I got mine' ideology? How can presumably decent people on the Right - people who care about their families and their communities - appear to be so cruel? Don't they grasp the devastating real-world consequences of what it means for a society to just "let him die"?
While some answers to that question are relatively straightforward, even intuitive, research into the interplay between cognition and ideology offers a deeper understanding of what appears on its face to be an extraordinary deficit of basic human empathy.
Drilling Down
The simplest explanation for this apparent disconnect is the increasing polarization of our media consumption. People on the right tend to consume conservative media, and if you get your news from Fox and listen to Limbaugh, you too would think that Ryan's roadmap is simply a "serious" proposal to cut the deficit (never mind that it would cut taxes at the top by so much that the budget wouldn't be balanced for decades to come).
But it goes a bit deeper than that. The contempt a good number of Americans hold for the social welfare state has long been understood through the prism of race. In his classic book, Why Americans Hate Welfare, Martin Gilens found that while significant majorities of Americans told pollsters that they wanted more public spending to fight poverty, many were opposed to welfare programs because of widespread "perceptions that welfare recipients are undeserving and blacks are lazy."
That finding has been confirmed in a number of studies since then. But more recently, psychological research - and some neurobiological studies - have found something else: Liberals and conservatives don't just differ in their opinions, they have fundamentally different ways of processing information, which in turn leads them to hold markedly divergent sets of facts.
Even more frustrating for those who view politics as a rational pursuit of one's self-interest, facts don't actually matter that much. We begin evaluating policies emotionally, according to a deeply ingrained moral framework, and then our brains often work backward, filling in - or inventing -- "facts" that conform to that framework.??
Dueling Morality Tales??
It's long been understood that people evaluate policy ideas through partisan and ideological lenses. That's how, for example, a set of conservative, market-oriented healthcare reforms cooked up at the Heritage Foundation and pushed by Republicans for years can suddenly become a Maoist plot when embraced by a Democratic administration.??
But according to George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at UC Berkeley, one has to look beyond mere partisanship to really get the differences in how we process information. Lakoff describes what might be called a hierarchy of understanding, beginning with our conceptions of morality and then evaluating the details through that lens.
In The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, Lakoff and co-author Elisabeth Wehling explain that the human "brain is structured in terms of what are called 'cascades.'"??
A cascade is a network of neurons that links many brain circuits. All of the linked circuits must be active at once to produce a given understanding.
Simply put, the brain does not handle single ideas as separate entities: bigger context, a logical construct within which the idea is defined, is evoked in order to grasp its meaning.
Cascades are central to political understanding, because they characterize the logic that structures that understanding.?
While liberals and conservatives often see their counterparts as horrible people these days, the reality, according to Lakoff, is that they're processing information through very different, and often diametrically opposed moral frameworks....(Click title for more)
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Cosmopolis
Robert Pattinson
Directed by David Cronenberg![Cosmopolis (2012) - Official Trailer [HD]](https://thumbnail.constantcontact.com/remoting/v1/vthumb/YOUTUBE/681027c8f92645ae8b7ed763e79a2343) | | Cosmopolis (2012) - Official Trailer [HD] |
By Peter Travers
Rolling Stone
August 16, 2012 - If you can get past the psychological density of the source material (Don DeLillo's 2003 novel) and the tabloid noise around the star (RPatz leaves KStew!), this mesmerizing mind-bender ought to prove two things: (1) Robert Pattinson really can act; (2) Director David Cronenberg never runs from a challenge.
Pattinson stars as Eric Packer, a master of the universe at 28 but still helpless to stop his financial world from collapsing as he rides around Manhattan in a white stretch limo.
Destination: haircut. That's it: one day, one limo. But DeLillo crowded that day with incident. And Cronenberg, a master recalling his surreal work on eXistenZ and Naked Lunch, adapts the novel with a poet's eye and a keen ear for language. Eric has hermetically sealed himself inside a limo designed to block out every trace of the outside world. Inside, Eric can ignore the Occupy Wall Street-like protests from the 99 percent, consult with his geek chief (Jay Baruchel) and his money guru (Emily Hampshire), submit to a prostate exam, have sex with his mistress (Juliette Binoche), and get out for disturbing meetings with his wife (Sarah Gadon) and a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti).
Working with gifted cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, Cronenberg creates a crumbling world in microcosm. In this fever dream of a movie, Pattinson is incendiary, notably in a climactic gun scene with the great Giamatti. Cosmopolis, demanding as it is daring, is no easy ride. I mean that as high praise.
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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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