 | At Global Studies Association, Vancouver, May 4, 2012
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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:  The North Star's name is a conscious reference to the The North Star network set up by Peter Camejo in the 1980s after he left the U.S. Socialist Workers Party At the time, while he joined CCDS, Camejo concluded that the future of radical politics in this country lay not with the plethora of three-letter left groups but elsewhere; Occupy has born this out in way he could not have imagined, creating an entire infrastructure of ongoing protest and resistance almost overnight independently of the existing left.
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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
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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...
 Winning a Few While Romney Stumbles...
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 Robert Reich
RobertReich.org
Sept 20, 2012 - Can Romney possibly recover? A survey conducted between Sept. 12 and Sept. 16 by the Pew Research Center - before the "47 percent victim" video came to light - showed Obama ahead of Romney 51% to 43% among likely voters.
That's the biggest margin in the September survey prior to a presidential election since Bill Clinton led Bob Dole, 50% to 38% in 1996.
And, remember, this recent poll was done before America watched Romney belittle almost half the nation.
For the last several days I've been deluged with calls from my inside-the-beltway friends telling me "Romney's dead."
Hold it. Rumors of Romney's demise are premature for at least four reasons:
1. Between now and Election Day come two jobs reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics - October 5 and November 2. If they're as bad as the last report, showing only 96,000 jobs added in August (125,000 are needed just to keep up with population growth) and the lowest percentage of employed adults since 1981, Romney's claim the economy is off track becomes more credible, and Obama's that it's on the mend harder to defend.
With gas prices rising, corporate profits shrinking, most of Europe in recession, Japan still a basket case, and the Chinese economy slowing, the upcoming job reports are unlikely to be stellar.
2. Also between now and Election Day are three presidential debates, starting October 3. It's commonly thought Obama will win them handily but that expectation may be very wrong - and could work against him. Yes, Romney is an automaton - but when the dials are set properly he can give a good imitation of a human engaged in sharp debate. He did well in the Republican primary debates.
Obama, by contrast, can come off slow and ponderous. Recall how he stuttered and stumbled during the 2008 Democratic primary debates. And he hasn't been in a real-live debate for four years; Romney recently emerged from almost a year of them....(Click title for more)
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It's mistaken to write Occupy's obituary this first anniversary: the lesson of history is that movements for justice are irrepressible
By Frances Fox Piven
The Guardian UK
September 17 2012 - A good many observers wonder, is Occupy over? After all, the encampments that announced the movement a year ago have largely disappeared, and no obviously similar protest demonstrations of young people have taken their place, at least not in the United States.
Nevertheless, I think the ready conclusion that the protests have fizzled is based on a misconception of the nature of movements, a misconception influenced by the metaphors we rely on. We think of these eruptions as something like explosions, Fourth of July fireworks perhaps that shoot into the sky, dazzle us for a moment, and then quickly fade away. The metaphor leads us to think of protest movements as bursts of energy and anger that rise in a great arc and then, exhausted, disappear.
In fact, no major American movement of the past fits that description. The great protest movements of history lasted not for a moment but for decades. And they did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.
Movements that may appear to us in retrospect as a unified set of events are, in fact, irregular and scattered. Only afterwards do we see the underlying common institutional causes and movement passions that mark these events so we can name them, as the abolitionist movement, for example, or the labor movement or the civil rights movement. I think Occupy is likely to unfold in a similar way.
And it will not subside quickly. Like earlier great movements that changed the course of American history, Occupy is fueled by deep institutional lacunae and inconsistencies. The mainly young people who are Occupy represent a generation coming of age in societies marked by an increasingly predatory and criminal financial capitalism that has created mass indebtness and economic insecurity. At the same time, the policies that once softened the impact of economic change (which some commentators once thought were necessary for the "legitimation" of capitalism) are being rolled back.
Think of the bitter pill of the broken promises to young people who were told that education was the route to security and prosperity and who now graduate to unemployment and huge debts. And this is occurring in the context of amazing revelations of the corruption of always-flawed American electoral procedures.
Then, there is the looming threat of ecological disasters that threaten the future of the planet itself. These conditions reflect deep institutional problems: they are not likely to be solved or even much softened very quickly, and so long as they persist, they will fuel the protests that are an extension and continuation of Occupy, whether we give them that name or not.
A movement forceful enough to change the course of history must accomplish two great tasks. One is communicative. The movement must use its distinctive repertoire of drama and disturbance, of crowds and marches and banners and chants, to raise the issues that are being papered over by normal politics, for the obvious reason that normal politics is inevitably dominated by money and propaganda.
On this, Occupy has already made substantial headway. The slogans that assert we are the 99%, they are the 1%, named the historic increase in inequality in the United States during the past few decades as the main issue, and the movement dramaturgy of encampments and masks and general assemblies and twinkling fingers helped to give the message heft and appeal, even to the media that had at first simply disparaged the movement.
To be sure, there were lots of complaints that Occupy had failed to issue its own policy proposals - which I think it was wise not to, since to do so would have ensnared the activists in endless disputes about particulars. But that is quibbling. It is far more important that we can see the influence of the movement's main issue - extreme inequality - on the speeches at the Democratic convention, for example, or on the ongoing strike of 29,000 school teachers in Chicago who have been joined by students and parents in their demands not only for salary increases, but for a roster of improvements in the public schools. So far, good.
However, movements that make an imprint do more than communicate. They also threaten to exert a distinctive kind of power that results from refusing co-operation in the routines that institutionalized social life requires. That is the power that workers wield when they walk off the job, or that students muster when they refuse to go to class, or that tenants have when refuse to pay the rent, or that urban crowds exert when they block streets and highways. In principle, it is also the power that debtors might mobilize if they threatened to default on their loans. This sort of disruption - in essence, the strike writ large - is harder to organize than a rally or a march because people will fear reactions, which are likely to be swift and harsh. So, the protesters have to figure out how to defend themselves.
This is also the problem that other great protest movements confronted: the abolitionists had to work out how to sustain the "underground railway" in the face of southern posses, and the sit-down strikers of the 1930s had to figure out how to defend their factory occupations in the face of company police and sometimes state militia. I suspect that Occupy is struggling with that problem now, as an expanded Occupy begins to try to organize campaigns against mortgage foreclosures, student and credit card debt, and even the public debt saddling municipalities.
The stakes are large, for the 1%, and for the rest of us.
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 | | Two Powerful Sister's @ Riverside Church NYC, Part 1 CCDS's Angela Davis, Sept 14th 2012 |
By Dr. Boyce Watkins
KultureKritic.com
Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, Cornel West and Marc Lamont Hill all gathered at the Riverside Baptist Church to call for an end to mass incarceration. The US prison population has grown dramatically over the last three decades, and has had a disproportionate impact on the black American family. Millions of us are affected, as our children are growing up without fathers, and women are having trouble finding adequate husbands.
The growth in the prison industrial complex has had an impact on the rate of STD transmission in the black community caused, in part, by reduced marital rates for women in their thirties, the spread of disease through prison rape, the imbalance in the black male and female populations, and many other factors. It has led to a spike in youth violence from all the young people being raised without fathers. It has also impacted the black unemployment rate, due to the disenfranchisement of men who can't get jobs after serving time in the penitentiary.
The gathering of these outstanding scholars is an important step toward solving an important problem. The prison problem has many of its roots in the structure of a capitalist society, which now finds that it's clearly profitable to incarcerate as many people as possible. Major corporations fill their coffers by charging exorbitant rates for families to speak with their loved ones or for inmates to buy the things they need. Some companies are able to compete in a global labor market by using cheap prison labor, which is a dangerous addiction in a capitalist society. The goal of shareholder wealth maximization in most capitalist models dictates that the final objective will be to put as many people in prison as we possibly can.
Finally , the prison torture issue should concern us as well. There is nothing in a prison sentence that says a man deserves to be raped. There is nothing that says that he/she should receive inadequate healthcare, unhealthy food or lose his rights to better his life through education. We don't want prisons that torture people to the point that they are worse human beings after they are released than they were when they were arrested. The truth is that when we truly work to rehabilitate those who come home from prison, we are all better off as a result. A short prison sentence should not be a life sentence for the inmate and his/family, but that is the mess that it's become.
If he gets a second term, President Obama needs to put the mass incarceration epidemic on his short list of presidential priorities. He's stated that he agrees that the War on Drugs was a failure, and it's time for him to put his money where his mouth is. Our children need their parents to come back home, and many of the long sentences given during the 1980s for drug convictions should be commuted. It's time to end this national disaster altogether.
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Defend the gains of the working class: Take responsibility for the national democratic revolution
Speech delivered by SACP General Secretary, Comrade Blade Nzimande, to COSATU's 11th National Congress
On behalf of the SACP, I bring you revolutionary greetings from our Party, which has just emerged from a very unified 13th Congress; a unity we have pledged to use to contribute to the unity of our Alliance and its components.
This Congress meets in the shadow of an intensified offensive against the working class in SA. It is an offensive directed primarily against the best organized detachment of our working class - this federation, this COSATU, especially the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and all these affiliates. The intensified offensive is born partly out of desperation on the part of our class enemies. Capitalism continues to be enmeshed in a deep-seated crisis. Everywhere global capitalism seeks to defend its profits and its power by displacing the impact of its crisis onto the workers, the poor, and the Third World. It violently foments civil war and destabilization of countries with an anti-imperialist track-record. It embarks on mass retrenchments, casualization, budget cuts and suffocating austerity measures at home and abroad. To carry through this butchery, global capitalism everywhere seeks to defeat the organized working class - a powerful barrier to its anti-popular strategies.
Here in SA we are no strangers to this offensive. Here, too, the anti-union offensive has intensified and grown more desperate in recent months. It is an offensive also supported by sections of imperialism. We have even seen the DA attempting to out-Malema Malema by leading a march on the COSATU head-quarters with a rag-tag army of suburbanites and desperate and misguided township youth.
This middle-class flirtation with anarchy is partly the result of the all-round capitalist crisis, in which it is also deeply affected. Much as the working class is bearing most of the brunt of this crisis, the middle classes are now also increasingly feeling the pinch. Unlike some of the middle classes in other parts of the world who have joined workers in protest against neo-liberal capitalism, our middle class, especially its white sections, has turned its venom against the ANC government, including racist attitudes rearing their ugly head anew, especially through the internet.
Equally, small and often elitist sections of the black middle class which also feels the economic hardship are working with some of their white counterparts to blame government, even for their own failures to make use of narrow BEE to accumulate wealth. In fact the common ideological platform for both sections of the white and black middle classes is that of the so-called lack of leadership in society. This is no honest debate but a rightist putsch and an ideological fad, aimed at discrediting the ANC and its government. It must be treated and dismissed as such.
But desperation by the elites is also rooted in the fact that since at least 2007 and the defeat of the 1996 class project, we have an ANC ruling party that (however unevenly) is committed to our tripartite alliance, and an ANC-led government that has abandoned (however unevenly) neo-liberalism, privatization, anti-communism, and anti-worker positions. Of course this progress within the ANC itself, and within government is not something to be taken for granted. It is contested space - and WE MUST, comrades, CONTEST it....(Click title for more)
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 America's hydraulic fracturing gold rush portends the greatest environmental disaster of a generation
By Denise Grollmus
The Village Voice
Sept 19, 2012 - Ask someone like Jon Entine, a science writer for Ethical Corporation, to describe the sort of person who claims hydraulic fracturing presents a pollution nightmare in waiting, and you quickly find yourself pummeled with talk radio invective: "ideological blowhard," "leftist loony," and "upper-middle-class lefties."
But none apply to Fred Mayer.
When a reporter arrives at his 200-year-old farmhouse on a cloudy June day, one of the first things Mayer asks is: "Do you know who Glenn Beck is? You should really listen to him. Now that man knows what he's talking about."
The 62-year-old Vietnam vet's yard in Newark Valley, New York, is full of patriotic flags. His rotund body is covered in tattoos, with barbed wire wrapped around his thick arms and an Iron Cross on his left fist.
The first time he heard of fracking was in 2008. It's a natural gas drilling process in which millions of gallons of water-mixed with sand and more than 596 toxic chemicals-are pumped into shale formations 8,000 feet belowground, the pressure fracturing them to release the natural gas they hold inside.
Decades ago, Shell Oil attempted to drill on Mayer's property in hopes of retrieving the river of black crude that resides just under the rock formation. "They never were able to do it," he says. "They couldn't get through the rock, so they gave up."
Shell eventually sold its lease to Fortuna Energy. Mayer thought nothing of it until 2008, when his neighbors started getting leasing offers from gas companies that had a new way of drilling that could get through the thick layers of shale just fine. Only this time, they were in search of natural gas, often heralded as the greenest fossil fuel.
Mayer gave Fortuna a call, only to find that his father had leased their property for just $4 an acre. Since Dad had passed away, Mayer told Fortuna that the agreement was null and void. Fortuna countered with a new offer: $600 an acre. Mayer soon received a check for $58,200, with a promise of more to come.
But it wasn't long before Mayer received another surprise-this one less pleasant. One morning, he turned on his kitchen sink. Instead of water, the tap hissed with gas. Mayer grabbed his lighter, held it to the faucet, and watched it burst into flames.
Although Fortuna had yet to drill on his property, the company was already at work six miles to the west. Mayer called the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to file a complaint in January 2009. His case was assigned to an investigator, though no one actually came out to investigate.
"[Our] staff concluded that the gas in Mr. Mayer's well was naturally occurring and that no investigation was warranted for several reasons," says Emily DeSantis, a department spokeswoman. Not only was Mayer's residence more than a mile away from the nearest drilling, DeSantis says, but also "naturally occurring methane is commonplace throughout the state."
Mayer knew better, of course. His water hadn't become flammable until Fortuna began drilling nearby. More than three years later, he can make every faucet in his house dance with flames. He can't drink from his own tap. Sometimes the gas pressure builds up so much that it blasts coffee cups from his hands while he does the dishes....(Click title for more)
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 By Michelle Crentsil
Labor Notes
Aug 29 2012 - I started reading Bill Fletcher's "They're Bankrupting Us!" and 20 Other Myths about Unions on my way to Miami to sign up new members for the union. Florida is a right-to-work state and I was looking to recruit members in a largely conservative workforce in a big public hospital. I was inclined to believe I was in a scorched-earth situation.
As a union organizer, I'd heard these myths before. I had traumatic flashbacks with practically every page, and I started guessing which myths I'd hear from the workers first. "Unions are corrupt and mobbed up"? "Unions were started by communists and other troublemakers"? Or the title myth: "They're bankrupting us and destroying the economy."
These myths aren't heard just by those of us knocking on doors for a union. They permeate popular culture. FletcherBankruptingCover"They're Bankrupting Us!": And 20 Other Myths about Unions [1], 224 pages, $15, Beacon Press: 2012. I told a friend I was a union organizer once and he asked me if I was out breaking people's legs. He was joking, but he got the idea from somewhere. And he certainly wasn't able to tell me what I actually do.
As organizers, we're equipped to have one-on-one conversations where we educate others on what a union actually is and the power solidarity can bring to a workplace. But this book is a great reminder of the sheer magnitude of what we're up against. It isn't a few people with some misinformation. It's a complete rewriting of history based on an opposing interest.
The loudest narrative about organized labor comes from the other side. Fletcher critiques the mainstream media, using mogul Rupert Murdoch as just one example to show how business interests dominate the news and create hostility toward unions.
Fletcher's book is an accessible and entertaining read that clearly outlines why unions are (still) relevant and, in fact, critical to movements for social justice, by dispelling the myths with compelling arguments rooted in history and personal experience.
His use of history goes beyond answering tough questions or dispelling myths in a tit-for-tat manner. Rather he takes the time to educate the reader on the impact that workers have had throughout our history and today in the fight against power imbalance and injustice....(Click title for more)
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Film Review:'Democracy Now' Look at 'Detropia'
 | | Detropia: New Film Takes Look at Detroit's Struggle With Manufacturing Collapse, Urban Decay |
AMY GOODMAN: We're broadcasting from Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the PBS station WGVU. I'm Amy Goodman, as we turn now to a new documentary about one of Michigan's hardest-hit cities, Detroit. Once known as the Motor City, where the middle class was born, Detroit's auto industry and manufacturing sector have collapsed. Today the city is on the verge of bankruptcy, facing a thinning population and massive cuts to basic services.
Well, the new film Detropia takes an intimate look at some of the city's former members of the middle class as they struggle to make ends meet and refuse to abandon hope. I want to turn for a moment to a clip of Detropia.
REPORTER: This is the downsizing of Detroit. You're watching it live. These are houses that are never coming back. It's going back to the prairie, and these houses are just disappearing from the landscape.
GEORGE McGREGOR: I want to show you something. All this is empty. They built a new plant in Mexico and took all the work to Mexico.
NICOLE: For factory support, which is the guys that are making $14.35, their new proposal is $11 an hour, which means they would lose $3.35 an hour on their wage.
AUTO WORKER: Why? What do you think you're going to feel every day going into work?
REPORTER: One of the big hot-button issues in Detroit is the layout of the city, and right now there's questions about what parts of the city may be shrunk.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I don't know if y'all understand, but they're shutting down schools. They're shutting down futures, basically.
DETROIT RESIDENT: We're not going to accept any more downsizing. We want to hear about upsizing, big-sizing, super-sizing Detroit.
MAYOR DAVID BING: It's going to be difficult. The city is broke. I don't know how many times I have to say that.
STEVE COY: I mean, we looked at Baltimore. We were looking into New York City. And Detroit came up. We can experiment here.
TOMMY STEPHENS: What happened in Detroit is now spreading throughout. There's no buffer between the rich and the poor. Only thing left is revolution.
AMY GOODMAN: That's a part of the trailer for the new documentary called Detropia.
Well, for more, we're joined by the film's co-director, Rachel Grady. She is joining us from New York City-the film is airing all through Michigan now-private investigator turned filmmaker who, along with her co-director Heidi Ewing, has made several films, including the Academy Award-nominated Jesus Camp.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Rachel.
RACHEL GRADY: Thanks.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about why you chose to focus on Detroit and why you called your film Detropia.
RACHEL GRADY: Sure. We chose Detroit, first of all, because my co-director Heidi is from the area, and it's a very personal film for her. But as you said, as the birthplace of the middle class, as a place that's been hard hit by a lot of issues in this country for the last 20, 30 years, we picked Detroit to look at and to try and humanize and hear from the man on the street what's happening there, what it's like to live there.
We picked the name "Detropia" - we invented a word, which is always fun - because we wanted to kind of pose the concept, is it a utopia? Is it a dystopia? Was it a utopia? What is the future for Detroit? What is the future for this country? Where are we headed?...(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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