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:  Young Feminists Blogging, Organizing, Kicking Ass...
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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...
 After the Speeches, the Organizing Gets Intense!
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 Pam Spaulding
FireDogLake
"My dear friends, your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful, nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union." - Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
Sept 6, 2012 - As I've written before, the term "civil rights" covers all social justice issues, and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), an ally to the LGBT community, has literally taken body blows for equality. Today it is almost unthinkable that we're talking about the basic right to vote and the incessant attacks on the right to disenfranchise voters they believe will not cast their ballot for Republicans.
Lewis brought this up in a powerful speech at the Dem Convention today. Here are the remarks as prepared for delivery:
I first came to this city in 1961, the year Barack Obama was born. I was one of the 13 original "Freedom Riders." We were on a bus ride from Washington to New Orleans trying to test a recent Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination on buses crossing state lines and in the stations that served them. Here in Charlotte, a young African-American rider got off the bus and tried to get a shoe shine in a so-called white waiting room. He was arrested and taken to jail.
On that same day, we continued on to Rock Hill, South Carolina, about 25 miles. From here, when my seatmate, Albert Bigelow, and I tried to enter a white waiting room, we were met by an angry mob that beat us and left us lying in a pool of blood. Some police officers came up and asked us whether we wanted to press charges. We said, "No, we come in peace, love and nonviolence." We said our struggle was not against individuals, but against unjust laws and customs. Our goal was true freedom for every American.
Since then, America has made a lot of progress. We are a different society than we were in 1961. And in 2008, we showed the world the true promise of America when we elected President Barack Obama. A few years ago, a man from Rock Hill, inspired by President Obama's election, decided to come forward. He came to my office in Washington and said, "I am one of the people who beat you. I want to apologize. Will you forgive me?" I said, "I accept your apology." He started crying. He gave me a hug. I hugged him back, and we both started crying. This man and I don't want to go back; we want to move forward.
Brothers and sisters, do you want to go back? Or do you want to keep America moving forward? My dear friends, your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful, nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union. Not too long ago, people stood in unmovable lines. They had to pass a so-called literacy test, pay a poll tax. On one occasion, a man was asked to count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. On another occasion, one was asked to count the jelly beans in a jar-all to keep them from casting their ballots.
Today it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting. ...(Click title for more)
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By Laura Flanders
The Nation
The sixteenth anniversary of TANF 'Welfare Reform' hit this week, and the Republican presidential candidate spent his time lying about the president's position on it. President Obama, Mitt Romney insists, stripped the work requirements out of the temporary assistance program that replaced welfare for poor families under Bill Clinton in 1996.
Although every fact-check has shown he's wrong, Romney and the Romney-phile propaganda groups keep pounding away at their message with ads like this one:
Unidentified male: "Under Obama's plan you wouldn't have to work and you wouldn't have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."
The president's responded in typically Obaman fashion. Without wading into the welfare fray, he's wagged his finger at Romney's facts: "You just can't make stuff up...." On the campaign trail this week, the Democrat beat the drum for "more popular" government programs, like those for seniors and students. He's closing all his rallies with Bruce Springsteen's rousing paean to solidarity, "We Take Care of Our Own."
Good as it is, a bit of the Boss won't clear things up. As even NPR pointed out this week, the Romney campaign is dredging up the welfare debate because, as a piece of political hot button-pushing, it works like magic.
NPR's Ari Shapiro spoke to Peggy Testa and her husband at a Paul Ryan rally outside Pittsburgh:
PEGGY TESTA: You know, we think that the fact that the work requirement has been taken out of welfare is the wrong thing to do.
SHAPIRO: I told her that's not actually what happened.
TESTA: You know. I, at this point, don't know exactly what is true and what isn't, OK? But what I do know is I trust the Romney-Ryan ticket and I do not trust Obama.
At issue here is "trust" and that little matter of "we." As far as half the country's concerned, those whom government takes care of aren't "our own." They're certainly not "we." Mitt Romney knows that by uttering that one word "welfare" the phantom "welfare queen," is summoned into his campaign, along with Newt Gingrich's famous "food stamp President." With that one word "welfare"-hey presto-the Republicans are talking race, as in "not us." ...(Click title for more)
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His years at Bain represent everything you hate about capitalism
By Pete Kotz
The Village Voice
April 18 - It was the early 1990s, and the 750 men and women at Georgetown Steel were pumping out wire rods at peak performance. They had an abiding trust in management's ability to run a smart company. That allegiance was rewarded with fat profit-sharing checks. In the basement-wage economy of Georgetown, South Carolina, Sanderson and his co-workers were blue-collar aristocracy.
"We were doing very good," says Sanderson, president of Steelworkers Local 7898. "The plant was making money, and we had good profit-sharing checks, and everything was going well."
What he didn't know was that it was about to end. Hundreds of miles to the north, in Boston, a future presidential candidate was sizing up Georgetown's books.
At the time, Mitt Romney had been running Bain Capital since 1984, minting a reputation as a prince of private investment. A future prospectus by Deutsche Bank would reveal that by the time he left in 1999, Bain had averaged a shimmering 88 percent annual return on investment. Romney would use that success to launch his political career.
His specialty was flipping companies-or what he often calls "creative destruction." It's the age-old theory that the new must constantly attack the old to bring efficiency to the economy, even if some companies are destroyed along the way. In other words, people like Romney are the wolves, culling the herd of the weak and infirm.
His formula was simple: Bain would purchase a firm with little money down, then begin extracting huge management fees and paying Romney and his investors enormous dividends.
The result was that previously profitable companies were now burdened with debt. But much like the Enron boys, Romney's battery of MBAs fancied themselves the smartest guys in the room. It didn't matter if a company manufactured bicycles or contact lenses; they were certain they could run it better than anyone else.
Bain would slash costs, jettison workers, reposition product lines, and merge its new companies with other firms. With luck, they'd be able to dump the firm in a few years for millions more than they'd paid for it.
But the beauty of Romney's thesis was that it really didn't matter if the company succeeded. Because he was yanking out cash early and often, he would profit even if his targets collapsed.
Which was precisely the fate awaiting Georgetown Steel.
When Bain purchased the mill, Sanderson says, change was immediate. Equipment upgrades stopped. Maintenance became an afterthought. Managers were replaced by people who knew nothing about steel. The union's profit-sharing plan was sliced twice in the first year-then whacked altogether.
"When Bain Capital took over, it seemed like everything was being neglected in our plant," Sanderson says. "Nothing was being invested in our plant. We didn't have the necessary time to maintain our equipment. They had people here that didn't know what they were doing. It was like they were taking money from us and putting it somewhere else."...(Click title for more)
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With rank-and-filers outraged over the DNC being held in anti-union North Carolina, the AFL-CIO makes an uphill case for Obama
By Mike Elk
In These Times
"A worker voting for Mitt Romney is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders," says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.
Earlier this month, when thousands of union members gathered in Philadelphia for the AFL-CIO's "Workers Stand for America" rally, labor leaders tried to pull off a difficult balancing act: firing up a weary, embattled labor movement while presenting an endorsement of Barack Obama as the lesser of two evils.
Out of fear of the Republicans' all-out war on unions, labor leaders found themselves in the awkward position of having to champion the reelection of Obama, whose actions toward organized labor have ranged from indifferent to hostile. Touting Obama at the August 11 rally posed additional difficulties because the event had been initially seen as a sort of "shadow convention" in protest of the Democratic National Convention being held in heavily anti-union North Carolina.
At moments, the rally felt like a church revival, with people singing labor's praises; at others, the sense of siege was oppressive.
Road rage
The day kicked off with an opening rally of approximately 1,000 Verizon workers, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and Communications Workers of America (CWA).
Both unions are making very serious noise about going out on strike after Verizon has refused to budge at the bargaining table for nearly 15 months. CWA District 1 Vice President Chris Shelton read off the names of 37 Verizon strikers who were fired-the union claims illegally-in the midst of a three-week Verizon strike last August. Union leader after union leader came onstage to exhort the workers to redouble their fight against Verizon for the sake of the casualties already suffered.
"They are making example of the 37 Verizon workers ... but we need to make an example of them," shouted an emotional CWA President Larry Cohen.
Fired up by Cohen's saber-rattling, the workers surged into the street for a march to Eakins Oval, nearly a mile away. The chanting workers received honks of support. A postal worker stopped his truck, got out, and told the workers how much he supports what they are doing.
A few blocks later, however, they began to encounter some of other attitudes the public holds toward the labor movement, ranging from indifference to animosity. As traffic stalled, frustrated drivers yelled at the marchers to get out of the way. At one cross street, a thirtysomething climbed out of his car and shouted, "You assholes bitching about your jobs are stopping me from getting to my job," gave the marchers the finger, and went on, "Oh you crybabies, pay for your healthcare like everyone else." Several workers shouted back, but moved on.
At several intersections, streams of cars began to succeed in breaking through, disrupting the march. Eventually, some of the marchers began to tire, and a few diverted into a nearby bar.
But when they reached the plaza to join the 35,000-person crowd, the sense of siege began to lift. The river of red Verizon shirts merged into a sea of blue AFT shirts and green TWU signs. Everything was okay; labor was back together.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka addressed the assembled workers, to cheers: "Anyone who says that we have to downsize the American Dream doesn't know what this country is all about, and they better get out of our way cause we are going to run up their chest, tap dance on their head, and run down their back."...(Click title for more)
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Cartoon of Socialist Party leader Emile Roemer that appeared in Quote, a Dutch business magazine. Caption reads: "If Roemer becomes prime minister, we'll all move to Switzerland."
September 1, 2012 - Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal --
Although parliamentary elections are often billed as "historic", and results hailed as "landslides" and "political earthquakes", it usually turns out not to have been quite that dramatic when the dust settles. But the September 12 national elections in the Netherlands really do seem to be living up to expectations of that magnitude.
The unexpectedly early fall of the previous minority cabinet-the most right wing in living memory, and hostage to the support of xenophobic demagogue Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV)-has triggered an election that seems likely to usher in a radical realignment of the landscape on the left, and could realistically produce an outcome that poses some fundamental strategic questions for socialists in the Netherlands and beyond, while presenting an uncomfortable reality check for the country's economic and political establishment.
At the time of writing the Netherlands's most left-wing party, the Socialist Party of the Netherlands (SP), is leading opinion polls, with 23.3% support (35 seats in the 150-seat lower house), as against its nearest rival, the ruling neoliberal People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), on 21.3% (32 seats).
Could this large, strong, well-resourced and genuinely left-wing party really win elections in a wealthy country at the heart of the neoliberal project of the European Union? Could the established political system be forced to accept seasoned, hard-nosed, non-careerist socialists playing the leading role in government? Or might it all prove a premature - and potentially damaging - foray into managing capitalism with a human touch in a time of deep crisis?
Will Wroth reflects from Rotterdam on what, for socialists, might well be the most encouraging-yet challenging-election result in a generation.
* * *
In March this year the Dutch media celebrated the 10th anniversary of what is surely the country's most famous-or infamous-post-election television debate. Openly gay anti-immigration populist Pim Fortuyn, well spoken and wel dressed , wiped the floor with a handful of national leaders of the establishment parties. Fortuyn , who was assassinated two months later on the cusp of an historic national election victory, had just recorded an unexpected, overwhelming victory in the Rotterdam council elections, and he rubbed the noses of the visibly depressed career politicians firmly in it, with obvious relish.
This gripping display was watched by all of political Netherlands, conscious they were witnessing an historic watershed, whatever their party affiliation. What Fortuyn had seemingly managed single-handed was to finally break through the impenetrable institutional wall that had sheltered "The Hague" from the disappointments and frustrations of a generation of voters who saw themselves as outsiders-on the right or the left, or just politically unaligned and non-voting.
Traditional politics under pressure
Historically, post-war Dutch politics had operated within a system of political "pillars"-most importantly the Social Democrats, Catholics, Liberals, and Protestants-which broadly defined the social network into which one was born. Schools, clubs and newspapers were largely affiliated to one or other stream, and political representation and government coalitions were relatively predictable within a limited range of possibilities.
The social movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s steadily undermined this comfortable arrangement, and the final chapter was reached in the 1990s when a succession of "purple" coalitions between the VVD and an increasingly Blairite Labour Party (PvdA) ruled with broad, if sometimes grudging, support in the context of some "good" economic years. Fortuyn put his finger on the democratic bankruptcy and social failure of that cosy alliance, even while scapegoating non-European immigration into the Netherlands as the key factor in the decline of Dutch social cohesion.
But there was another player in the accelerating breakup of politics-as-usual at the beginning of the century-the SP. It had steadily been making inroads into the traditional electoral and campaigning territory of established Social Democracy, and by the time of the 2006 national elections, was rewarded for its political honesty and consistency, and refreshingly direct campaigning approach, with no fewer than 25 seats (16.7%). Although the SP would - temporarily, it now seems - lose electoral support in the next elections, the national political landscape had been changed once and for all.
Dutch political system and culture
A key factor facilitating the rise of the SP has been the Dutch electoral system, where proportional representation applies at all three levels of government (national, provincial and municipal) and there is no threshold other than a single seat-for the lower house requiring a very low 0.67% of the vote. At the same time local councils play a comparatively important role in the day-to-day running of public affairs and are a significant factor in national political sentiment. ...(Click title for more)
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The five-star disc is streaming for free on iTunes
Fred Tanneau/AFP/GettyImages
By Andy Greene
Rolling Stone
September 5, 2012 - Bob Dylan's 35th studio album, Tempest, doesn't hit shelves until next Tuesday, but you can head over to iTunes right now and listen to a free stream of the whole thing here.
Rolling Stone recently gave Tempest - which was recorded in Los Angeles with Dylan's touring band - five stars. "Lyrically, Dylan is at the top of his game," writes Will Hermes. "Joking around, dropping wordplay and allegories that evade pat readings and quoting other folks' words like a freestyle rapper on fire."
On Tuesday, Dylan played the opening night at Port Chester's New York Capitol Theater - though he didn't play a single cut from the new disc. He tends to wait until the album is officially released before he breaks into the new material. This leg of the tour wraps on September 9th, and when it picks back up again on October 5th in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he'll likely be sprinkling the songs into his set.
Tempest may share a title with Shakespeare's final play, but Dylan steadfastly rejects any connection between the two works. "Shakespeare's last play was called The Tempest," Dylan recently told Rolling Stone. "It wasn't called just plain Tempest. The name of my record is just plain Tempest. It's two different titles."
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Abel Meeropol watches as his sons, Robert and Michael, play with a train set.Courtesy of Robert and Michael Meeropol
By Elizabeth Blair
NPR's Morning Edition
One of Billie Holiday's most iconic songs is "Strange Fruit," a haunting protest against the inhumanity of racism. Many people know that the man who wrote the song was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. But they might not realize that he's also tied to another watershed moment in America's history.
The man behind "Strange Fruit" is New York City's Abel Meeropol, and he really has two stories. They both begin at Dewitt Clinton High School, a public high school in the Bronx that has an astonishing number of famous people in its alumni. James Baldwin went there. So did Countee Cullen, Richard Rodgers, Burt Lancaster, Stan Lee, Neil Simon, Richard Avedon and Ralph Lauren.
Meeropol graduated from Dewitt Clinton in 1921; he went on to teach English there for 17 years. He was also a poet and a social activist, says Gerard Pelisson, who wrote a book about the school.
Evolution Of A Song: 'Strange Fruit'
In the late 1930s, Pellison says, Meeropol "was very disturbed at the continuation of racism in America, and seeing a photograph of a lynching sort of put him over the edge."
Meeropol once said the photograph "haunted" him "for days." So he wrote a poem about it, which was then printed in a teachers union publication. An amateur composer, Meeropol also set his words to music. He played it for a New York club owner - who ultimately gave it to Billie Holiday.
When Holiday decided to sing "Strange Fruit," the song reached millions of people. While the lyrics never mention lynching, the metaphor is painfully clear:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
 | | Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit |
In 1999, Time magazine named "Strange Fruit" the "song of the century." The Library of Congress put it in the National Recording Registry. It's been recorded dozens of times. Herbie Hancock and Marcus Miller did an instrumental version, with Miller evoking the poem on his mournful bass clarinet.
Miller says he was surprised to learn the song was written by a white Jewish guy from the Bronx. "Strange Fruit," he says, took extraordinary courage both for Meeropol to write and for Holiday to sing.
"The '60s hadn't happened yet," he says. "Things like that weren't talked about. They certainly weren't sung about."
Queen Esther stands in front of Billie Holiday's gravesite in New York City.
New York lawmakers didn't like "Strange Fruit." In 1940, Meeropol was called to testify before a committee investigating communism in public schools. They wanted to know whether the American Communist Party had paid him to write the song. They had not - but, like many New York teachers in his day, Meeropol was a Communist.
Journalist David Margolick, who wrote Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, says, "There are a million reasons to disparage communism now. But American Communism, one point it had in its favor was that it was concerned about civil rights very early."
Meeropol left his teaching job at Dewitt Clinton in 1945. He eventually quit the Communist Party.
And that's where the second part of Meeropol's story begins. The link is the pseudonym he used when writing poetry and music: Lewis Allan. ...(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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