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.
|
Blog of the Week:  What's Militarism Got to Do with It...
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
Order Our
Full Employment Booklets
 |
...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. |
|
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.
|
 A Memoir of the 1960s by Paul KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press, $25.64 | | Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War |
|
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...
|
Voices from the Underground Press of the 1960s, Part 2- Foreword by Susan Brownmiller
- Preface by Ken Wachsberger
$37.50 + $6 shipping
|
|
Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement
By Don Hamerquist
|
|
|
|
An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Fierce Battles Now Part of the Campaigns
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...
|
By Diane Ravitch
New York Review of Books
According to most news reports, the teachers in Chicago are striking because they are lazy and greedy. Or they are striking because of a personality clash between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and union president Karen Lewis. Or because this is the last gasp of a dying union movement. Or because Emanuel wants a longer school day, and the teachers oppose it.
None of this is true. All reports agree that the two sides are close to agreement on compensation issues-it is not money that drove them apart. Last spring the union and the school board agreed to a longer school day, so that is not the issue either. The strike is a clash of two very different visions about what is needed to transform the schools of Chicago-and the nation.
Chicago schools have been a petri dish for school reform for nearly two decades. Beginning in 1995, they came under tight mayor control, and Mayor Richard Daley appointed his budget director, Paul Vallas, to run the schools; Vallas set out to raise test scores, open magnet schools and charter schools, and balance the budget. When Vallas left to run for governor (unsuccessfully), Daley selected another non-educator, Arne Duncan, who was Vallas's deputy and a strong advocate of charter schools. Vallas had imposed reform after reform, and Duncan added even more. Duncan called his program Renaissance 2010, with the goal of closing low-performing schools and opening one hundred new schools. Since 2009, Duncan has been President Obama's Education Secretary, where he launched the $5 billion Race to the Top program, which relies heavily on student test scores to evaluate teacher quality, to award merit pay, and to close or reward schools; it also encourages the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.
This is the vision that Washington now supports, and that the Chicago school board, appointed by current mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, endorses: more school closings, more privately managed schools, more testing, merit pay, longer school hours. But in Chicago itself, where these reforms started, most researchers agree that the results have been mixed at best. There has been no renaissance. After nearly twenty years of reform, the schools of Chicago remain among the lowest performing in the nation.
The Chicago Teachers Union has a different vision: it wants smaller classes, more social workers, air-conditioning in the sweltering buildings where summer school is conducted, and a full curriculum, with teachers of arts and foreign languages in every school. Some schools in Chicago have more than forty students in a class, even in kindergarten. There are 160 schools without libraries; more than 40 percent have no teachers of the arts.
What do the teachers want? The main sticking point is the seemingly arcane issue of teacher evaluations. The mayor wants student test scores to count heavily in determining whether a teacher is good (and gets a bonus) or bad (and is fired). The union points to research showing that test-based evaluation is inaccurate and unfair. Chicago is a city of intensely segregated public schools and high levels of youth violence. Teachers know that test scores are influenced not only by their instruction but by what happens outside the classroom....(Click title for more)
|
|
By Leah Nelson
SPLC HateWatch
Sept 13, 2012 - Steve Klein, [1]the California ex-marine identified as a consultant for the anti-Islam film that apparently triggered violent protests in northern Africa and the Middle East, is finally seeing the fruits of his labor.
For years, Klein has been cultivating relationships with Middle Eastern Christians in California - in particular, Joseph Nasralla, a California Coptic Christian who spoke at an anti-Muslim rally hosted by hate group leaders Pam Geller [2] and Robert Spencer [3] on Sept. 11, 2010.
Now, Nasralla has been identified as president and CEO of Media for Christ, a California nonprofit that allegedly [4] produced "The Innocence of Muslims." An unnamed spokesman for Media for Christ told the Long Beach Press Telegram that his organization was not involved with the film, but area officials confirmed to the paper that the company did take out a permit to produce it.
Meanwhile, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, [5] another Copt from California, acknowledged that he has connections to the film as well.
This is exactly what Klein has been hoping for. The Vietnam veteran, who says Muslims have "no choice but to hunt Jews and Christians down, torture us and murder us," has been pushing Coptic Christians to join his anti-Muslim crusade for years. A hard-line Christian nationalist who conducts paramilitary trainings with Christian groups across the country, he believes that Copts have a divine destiny to "save" America from the twin evils of secularism and Islam.
In an undated essay titled "Why are you here in America" Klein compared secularism to an oppressive Islamist regime and said God guided Copts to America to help the country reclaim its supposed Christian roots.
"The Revolution was fought for YOU. So you could flee oppression and YOU could share the wisdom of your ancestors to improve this land," Klein wrote in the essay, which appears on an anti-Muslim online "ministry" called "The Pen Vs. The Sword." ... (Click title for more)
|
State Board goes Birther,
Considers Removing Obama From Ballot
By Evan McMorris-Santoro & Ryan J. Reilly
Talking Points Memo
September 13, 2012 - Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an informal advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said on Thursday he and his fellow members of a state board were considering removing President Barack Obama from the Kansas ballot this November.
Kobach is part of the State Objections Board along with Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, all Republicans. The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that on Thursday the board agreed consider whether to take Obama off the ballot because they said they lacked sufficient evidence about his birth certificate.
"I don't think it's a frivolous objection," Kobach said, according to the Capital-Journal. "I do think the factual record could be supplemented."
The board is looking at a complaint filed by Joe Montgomery, of Manhattan, Kan., who claimed the Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen and so is ineligible to be president. The man appears to be part of a group of conspiracy theorists known as "birthers," who deny Obama's birth certificate is real.
Late Thursday, Kobach told TPM in an email conversation that he made his "frivolous objection" comment at the end of the meeting and was responding to a specific question. ...(Click title for more)
|
 | | Journalist, Plaintiff Chris Hedges Hails "Monumental" Ruling on NDAA Indefinite Detention |
AMY GOODMAN: A federal judge Wednesday struck down part of a controversial law signed by President Obama that gave the government the power to indefinitely detain anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial, including U.S. citizens. The ruling came in a lawsuit challenging the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, filed by a group of journalists, scholars and political activists including Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Naomi Wolf and Cornel West [correction: Wolf and West are not plaintiffs but in the process of becoming plaintiffs]. Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York struck down the indefinite detention provision, saying it likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens. The judge rejected the Obama administration's argument that the NDAA merely reaffirmed an existing law recognizing the military's right to perform certain routine duties.
In late March, Cornel West was among the plaintiffs who appeared in federal court to give testimony.
CORNEL WEST: I am full of joy to be a plaintiff in this particular case. Why? Because we're at a turning point in the history of this nation. We need to stand for freedom. There's an escalating authoritarianism and even a creeping fascism. Freedom is precious. If we don't fight for it, you lose it.
AMY GOODMAN: The judge's ruling comes as lawmakers in the House are debating a slew of controversial amendments to the NDAA. A bipartisan group of Congress members are expected to offer an amendment to the NDAA challenging its indefinite military detention provision.
For more, we're joined now by one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Chris Hedges, senior fellow at the Nation Institute, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, part of a team of reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terror. He's the author of a number of books, including Death of the Liberal Class and The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. And we're joined by Chris Hedges' attorney Bruce Afran, who filed the litigation on his behalf.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Chris Hedges, were you surprised? And what is the significance of this judge's ruling?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, it, in essence, invalidates that provision, Section 1021, that permits the U.S. government to use the military to hold American citizens, strip them of due process, and detain them in military facilities, including our offshore penal colonies, until, in the language of that section, the end of hostilities. So, it's monumental, because she threw the whole thing out. She invalidated the law. It was quite a courageous decision-I think, clearly, a correct one. But we have watched the federal courts, in particular, file opinion after opinion as to sort of why they can't implement the law-rather, why they can or why they should. And so, this becomes, yes, a really important decision.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris, why did you, as a journalist, sue President Obama?
CHRIS HEDGES: Because I, as a foreign correspondent, had had direct contact with-when Bruce and Carl Mayer and I went through the list, the State Department terrorism list-17 organizations that are on that list, from al-Qaeda to Hamas to Hezbollah to the PKK, and there's no provision within that particular section to exempt journalists. The language is amorphous: anybody who "substantially supports" - whatever that means - not only the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but what they term "associated forces." And so, the decision to file the lawsuit was made by Bruce and Carl, who came to me because they thought that I would be a particularly credible plaintiff, and it turns out, I think, and the judge acknowledged that that was the case.
AMY GOODMAN: Bruce Afran, talk about the significance of the extent to which she struck down this statute.
BRUCE AFRAN: Well, it's quite incredible, in a sense, because it's rare that statutes are struck down completely. Judge Forrest struck down the entire provision of the NDAA governing indefinite detention of civilians and U.S. citizens. She said this provision is overbroad. She said it clearly embraces speech, even if it doesn't intend to. And she criticized the government severely, because it refused to acknowledge in court that First Amendment activities would not bring someone into a state of indefinite detention. And five times, Judge Forrest asked the U.S. attorney, "Will you agree that First Amendment activities will not bring someone under the scope of this law?" And the government five times said, "We can't answer that question."...(Click title for more)
|
Freeport, IL Sensata Workers To Camp Outside Factory In Effort To Save Jobs From Outsourcing
By Africa Flowers
Progress Illinois
Time is ticking for the 170 workers set to lose their jobs to outsourcing by Bain Capital-owned Sensata Technologies, which manufactures and develops sensors and controls for airplanes, automobiles and motors. The company's Freeport, IL factory is scheduled to close in November, with the jobs and equipment headed overseas.
After months of protests, visiting campaign offices, and delivering a 35,000-signature petition, the workers are trying yet another tactic to try to save their jobs: Setting up camp outside the Freeport factory in protest of Sensata shipping their jobs to China.
<--break->The workers have made several attempts to call on Republican presidential nominee and former Bain CEO Mitt Romney to help save their jobs, even traveling to the Republican National Convention last month to get the candidate's attention. But thus far, their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
"Mitt Romney refused to meet us in Tampa, but as a presidential candidate, he can't keep ignoring American workers," said Bonnie Borman, who has worked at the plant for 23 years. "We're asking him again to come to Freeport and help us save our jobs. If he wants to show leadership, he should stand with the middle class-not companies like Bain that want to ship our jobs overseas. And we're not leaving until he does."
The workers are not the only ones who have called on Romney, who coins himself as a job creator, to come in and help save the jobs. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has publicly voiced his support of the requests to have Romney visit Freeport to see the potential effect the factory closing would have on the small town of 26,000. The Freeport City Council even passed a resolution unanimously calling on Romney to come to town to meet the workers set to lose their jobs and assist in any way that he can. The Sensata layoffs have also become an issue in the race between Democrat Cheri Bustos and Tea Party Republican incumbent Bobby Schilling in the 17th congressional district, which includes the town of Freeport.
Romney, who still profits from Bain Capital, has ignored all calls for his assistance in the Freeport Sensata controversy up to this point, despite national and even international attention. Meanwhile, despite growing profit margins Sensata is marching forward with its plan to send the jobs overseas, having already starting shipping equipment to China while also paying for Chinese workers to fly into Freeport to be trained by the people whose jobs they will soon take over.
The Freeport workers say their camp effort, which is set to begin this evening, will "make the reality of Romney's vision for our economy clear to Freeport residents and voters across the country."
|
Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, New York City, late '50s. Image from The Duluoz Legend. Inset below: Joyce Johnson.
Joyce Johnson: A Portrait of the Biographer as Ex-lover
By Jonah Raskin
The Rag Blog, September 5, 2012
"I don't really like labels, but if I had to label Jack I'd say he was bisexual. He was mostly attracted to women, though he had some sexual relationships with men, including Allen Ginsberg, and, of course, he had very close friendships with men." -- Joyce Johnson
An interview with Joyce Johnson, the author of The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. (2012: Viking); Hardcover; 489; $32.95.
Do lovers make the best biographers? Yes and no. Intimacies can provide insights but they can also warp perceptions and distort the story itself. The question isn't easy to answer when it comes to Joyce Johnson and Jack Kerouac, the subject of her new biography, The Voice Is All (Viking).
 Joyce met Jack on a blind date in New York in 1957. Allen Ginsberg, who was in ecstasy about the publication of his epic poem, Howl, played matchmaker. She was Jewish, 22, and had been a teenage Beatnik even before the term Beatnik was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. He was Catholic, 35, and known as the "King of the Beats."
As the saying goes, they hit it off from the start though the sex was more fraternal than erotic, Johnson says. Their intermittent romance lasted nearly two years. At one point, he even proposed to her. "We ought to get married," he told her. Joyce Johnson very much wanted to have a husband. A marriage to Jack Kerouac seemed ideal, though he had a reputation for kissing girls and making them cry.
"We were both writers," Johnson said recently from her apartment in Manhattan where she has lived most of her life and where she's gearing up to go on the road to talk about her lover, Kerouac, once again. About the marriage that might have been she added, "I thought that Jack and I could have been two comrades together, supporting one another's work."
It was not meant to be, if only because of Kerouac's furtive ways and unwillingness to settle down. Then, too, there was his impossible, demanding mother. "Jack could not have brought a Jewish wife home to her," Johnson explained. "I met her when she and Jack were living in Northport on Long Island. I asked him what I could bring her and he said, 'rye bread from the Lower East Side.' When I handed the loaf to her she said, 'Jewish bread!' She had a thing about Jews." Indeed she did, as almost all previous Kerouac biographers have noted.
Allen Ginsberg wasn't welcome in Gabrielle Kerouac's house, either. Of course, Jack could fulminate against the Jews nearly as well as his mother -- though he had Jewish friends and Jewish lovers. He thought of Jews as exotic and described Joyce as a "Jewess."
"At the time, I didn't realize that it was hip to have a Jewish girlfriend," she said. "Who would have thought that Jews were exotic?"
Joyce Johnson -- born Joyce Glassman in Brooklyn, New York in 1935 -- says that she never expected to write a book about her Catholic boyfriend, Jack Kerouac. As a young woman, she wanted to become a novelist and turn out fiction in the vein of her literary idol Henry James.
The fact that she never graduated from Barnard College has never really troubled her, nor did it stop her from writing books and working for New York publishing houses. For years she was the executive editor at Dial Press and published books by zany characters such as Abbie Hoffman, the author of Revolution for the Hell of It.
If there was one thing she learned from Kerouac's On the Road, it was that there was a market for countercultural books. Her own first novel, Come and Join the Dance, appeared in 1962 under her maiden name. Bad Connections followed in 1978. Neither is still in print, though Johnson isn't bitter about that fact, nor is she bitter about her two marriages. The first was to the artist James Johnson who died in a motorcycle accident. The second was to the painter Peter Pinchbeck and ended in divorce. Their son Daniel Pinchbeck also writes.
For decades, Johnson's memories of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and their friends wouldn't leave her alone, though she insists that she was never "haunted" or "obsessed" by them. In the 1980s, she poured her memories into a memoir entitled Minor Characters, a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the Beat Generation. Along with Brenda Knight's Women of the Beat Generation, it was one of the first books to make readers aware of the fact that the Beat Generation wasn't just male territory. There were women around, too, like Carolyn Cassady, and Joan Vollmer Adams as well as Johnson's best friend Elise Cowen, who committed suicide by jumping from a window....(Click title for more)
|
 By Tyler Chase
Paste Magazine
Sept 6, 2012 - The Western outlaw and the Mafia gangster are two of America's most outsized cinematic antiheroes, and while they share a lot of characteristics (and clich�s), the few times they have coincided on screen usually involved a DeLorean.
But after a long production delay and a splashy debut at the Cannes Film Festival, Australian director John Hillcoat's 'Lawless' has finally arrived, and it is the closest thing to a combination of the two archetypes that we've seen yet. And while it isn't the perfect marriage, Lawless blends stylish originality with genre standards into a mixture as potent and explosive as Virginia moonshine.
The tale of the bootlegging Bondurant brothers is a family crime saga designed, it would seem, to mirror that of the Corleones. Their story is one adapted from the historical novel written by the grandson of the youngest brother, culled from anecdotes and newspaper stories, with the gaps filled in by fiction. And while those violent, fraternal dynamics are hard at work here, Lawless feels like a film trying so hard to be excellent in every individual facet that it ends up lacking a clear, cohesive tone.
 | | Lawless - Official Trailer (HD) |
What is clear is that the film's cast, from top to bottom, give performances that infuse this gritty Western with meaning and pathos. Each of the three Bondurants shine in their own way. As Forrest, the eldest, Tom Hardy blends a deep, minimalist quietude with a powerful physical presence, the latter no doubt aided by his preparation for the role of Bane. (Filming for The Dark Knight Rises began a few months after the filming of Lawless.) Shia LaBeouf, as Jack Bondurant, shows the most range he has yet, displaying a deep need for love and acceptance that drives him and the family business to new heights and into new dangers (and does a bit to drive away the memory of his involvement in the Transformers franchise). The two women in the film, Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain, play the saint and sinner, respectively, and do their best to lend depth to roles without much to them. Despite a very short stay on screen, homage must be paid to the brilliance of Gary Oldman. Cinema's ultimate chameleon puts on pinstripes as big city badass Floyd Banner, the idol of wide-eyed Jack and a harbinger of the violence these men must endure to protect their way of life.
The imminent threat to that life is Special Agent Charlie Rakes, played with slippery, fastidious malice by Guy Pearce. Equal parts J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes, his severely parted hair, shaved eyebrows and immaculate suit belie an obsessive desire to purge the filth from everywhere but inside himself. Pearce crawls inside this snakeskin and lets his disdain for the wettest county in the world seep out onto cops and criminals alike. While Jack is the narrative voice of the film, Rakes is its force, declaring war on the Bondurant boys once they become the only game in town, and escalating the visceral violence to cringe-worthy levels....(Click title for more)
|
|
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 |
|
|
