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October 12, 2012
In This Issue
Full Employment
Defeat Southern Strategy
The Ground War in W Pa
No on Prop 32!
New Song from Stones
Walmart Strike Wins
Victory for Chavez
David Amram's Profile
Film: Wuthering Heights
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Voices of China's Workers: 15 minute video with Leslie T. Chang
Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China's workers
Leslie T. Chang: TED Talk

New 'Online University of the Left' Now at 1800+ Friends and reaching 33,000 More...Check It Out and Be Amazed!


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Tina at AFL-CIO
 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:  
 


A 9-day solidarity ride through Occupied Palestine

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.
'They're Bankrupting Us!': And Twenty Other Myths about Unions
Tina at AFL-CIO

New Book by Bill Fletcher, Jr. 



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

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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.
Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion
Sex and the Automobile in the Jazz Age

Tina at AFL-CIO

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 Krehbiel

Autumn Leaf Press, $25.64

Shades of Justice:  Bringing Down a President and Ending a War
Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War

Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary

Tina at AFL-CIO

By Giuseppe Fiori
Verso, 30 pages
Gay, Straight and the Reason Why



The Science of Sexual Orientation


By Simon LeVay
Oxford University Press
$27.95



New Book: Diary of a Heartland Radical

By Harry Targ

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

Tina at AFL-CIO

Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei

 Buy it here...
Study! Teach! Organize!
Tina at AFL-CIO

Introducing the 'Frankfurt School'

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...
 
Defeating a Racial
2012 'Ground Game' 

We're the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism...Do you have friends who should see this? Pass it on...Do you have a blog of your own? Others you love to read every day? Well, this is a place where you can share access to them with the rest of your comrades. Just pick your greatest hits for the week and send them to us at [email protected]!

Most of all, it's urgent that you defend voter rights, get out the vote, 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 Bob Wing*

Progressive America Rising

*Bob Wing has been an organizer since 1968 and was the founding editor of ColorLines magazine and War Times/Tiempo de Guerras newspaper. He lives in Durham, N.C. and can be contacted on Facebook. Thanks to Max Elbaum for his always insightful suggestions. This article was posted on Oct. 11, 2012.

The 2012 election is a pitched battle with race at the center.

It may not be "polite" to say this, but far from an era of "post racialism", the United States is in a period of aggravated racial conflict. Though often denied and certainly more complex than the frontal racial confrontations of the past, race is the pivot of the tit-for-tat political struggle that has gripped the country for the past twelve years and, indeed, for decades prior.

The modern era of this conflict jumped off with the white conservative backlash against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and has been deepened by their decades-long fearful reaction to the dramatic change in the color of the U.S. that resulted from the civil rights-motivated immigration reform act of 1965.

The conflict heated to a boil when white conservatives flatly rejected the legitimacy of the "premature" victory of our first Black president in 2008. Nearly 40 percent of Republicans are so enraged they cannot even admit that Obama is a U.S. citizen. Isn't this really another way of saying they refuse to recognize a Black man as the president? Or perhaps it is the white conservatives' modern day Dred Scott decision declaring Obama a Black man that has no rights that they are bound to respect?

The bottom line is that we have now come to a point where voters of color are so numerous and so united behind Obama that, to be victorious, Mitt Romney must carry a higher percentage of the white vote than any modern Republican candidate has ever won. If recent trends among voters of color hold, he must carry about 63 percent of white voters. Not even Reagan won more than 61 percent.

The likelihood is that voters of color will continue to increase their percentage of the electorate by about two percent per election into the future. Political analyst Jonathan Chait concludes it is "2012 or Never" for the current bloc of white conservatives. (1) This is why they invested hugely in voter suppression legislation throughout the country (now largely but belatedly defeated by the courts. (2) This is why they have gone all out to unleash corporate money in elections....(Click title for more)


A few Aliquippa youth escape harsh life as football champions


On the Road With Working America

By Josh Eidelson
From the October 29, 2012 edition of The Nation.

One September night in the western Pennsylvania borough of Monaca, a disillusioned resident told a labor canvasser that he'd once "backed all of the Democrats all the way through," only to realize "both sides" were "really full of shit." Then he said something I heard often during my week in the region: "If all these factories were still running here, we'd all still have jobs."

In the mostly white, once unionized, postindustrial towns around Pittsburgh, outsourcing casts a long shadow over undecided or uninspired voters. As Working America, an AFL-CIO affiliate for nonunion employees, tries to mobilize working-class voters for the election and beyond, offshored jobs are the ever-present context. They underlie the strongest indictments of both presidential candidates, and they've shaped something else: a sense that the past outstrips the future. People in this depressed region feel there's a disconnect between the debates in Washington, DC, and the steady decline in Washington, Pennsylvania. "I'm not voting anymore," one woman told a canvasser. "I'm done." Her husband added, "Get the fuck off my porch."

The Bain legacy of offshoring is costing Mitt Romney the support of voters who have been primed against President Obama. Outsourcing also presents a hindrance to Working America, the labor movement's largest effort to engage nonunion employees outside the workplace. Like Obama's canvassers, those for Working America tout the president's accomplishments and assess public support for him. But they also probe grievances, swap stories and promote engagement. Working America wants to be a voice for these voters' frustration, a challenge to their cynicism and an avenue for their mobilization. In the former steel towns of western Pennsylvania, where many have soured not just on this president but on all politics, Working America is trying to do something unions once did: bind working-class voters to progressive populism and to each other.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Pennsylvania has lost 41 percent of its manufacturing jobs over the past twenty-two years, a figure that indicates-but can't do justice to-the impact on the hardest-hit regions. Among Obama's unenthusiastic supporters is Bob Kepics, the mayor of Monongahela, who was laid off by US Steel in 1981. "I fought my way back twenty years later to get back in that mill," said Kepics. After retraining as an electrician, he became one of 900 workers in a building that used to hold 4,500.

Sitting in his office, Kepics slammed Obama from the left on trade and stimulus, and from the right on coal and welfare. His grievances shared a common theme: if only Obama had visited the region more and spent more time listening to the people who live there, he would have done more to get Americans back to work.

Seventy miles north of Monongahela is Aliquippa, whose population has shrunk by more than half since 1970. At a diner there, I met a 19-year-old who chairs the mayor's youth committee. Before the mills shut down, he told me, "they say our downtown was so busy that it would take you two hours to get from one end to the other." Today? "If you get caught at a red light, maybe two minutes."...(Click title for more)



By Carl Bloice

Black Commentator

Quiet as it's kept while the nation's attention is focused on the November 6 Presidential election, a ballot box battle is underway in California, the implications of which extend far beyond the borders of the country's largest state. Here, rightwing big business operative have launched an effort that, should it succeed, would seriously undermine the political strength of working people and undermine democratic decision-making.

Attempts to restrict labor unions' ability to engage in political campaigns have been on the ballot in California more than once and each time they have gone down to defeat. This time, the effort is masquerading as an attempt at electoral reform. In fact, it would mean that three million members of labor unions would be unable to contribute to political campaigns while large corporate financiers would be exempted from any restrictions at all.

While the referendum measure, Proposition 32, on the November ballot proposes to end labor unions' use of funds collected from members through dues, and bars corporations from using their operating funds for backing candidates and parties, the illusion of equal treatment is a fraud. No restriction is placed on the ability of billionaires, either individually or collectively, to contribute any amount they wish to political campaigns, which is their usual route. Furthermore, the framers of the measure wrote in special exemptions for corporate-linked super PACS.

John Logan, a professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University and member of the California Teachers Association warns that, "If Prop. 32 passes in November, right-wing activists will promote a tsunami of ballot initiatives in 2013 at the local level and in 2014 at the state level designed to drive down working conditions in both the public and private sectors. Lacking the ability to oppose these reactionary measures under the new election rules, California's workers could soon face some of the weakest labor standards in the country."

"Prop. 32 is not campaign finance reform, but a billionaires' bill of rights, one that would be a game-changer in California politics," Logan wrote recently. "When it comes to ballot initiatives, Prop. 32 is the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing."

The hardly pro-labor San Jose Mercury-News says Proposition 32 is "a deceptive sham that would magnify the influence of wealthy interests while shutting out many middle-class voters."

"First they silence our voice, then they will come after our jobs, wages and retirement

The Proposition 32 campaign is being run by a superpac that operates mostly in the shadows but is linked to the notorious Koch Brothers and others who have bankrolled anti-union campaign in other parts of the country. ...(Click title for more)
'Doom and Gloom' - The Latest from the Stones

The Rolling Stones -- Doom And Gloom (Lyric Video)
Rolling Stones -- Doom And Gloom (Lyric Video)




By Curtis Black

Newstips

Oct 7, 2012 - Striking warehouse workers at Walmart's distribution center near Joliet, IL have won an agreement for an end to retaliation against employees protesting working conditions, and are returning to work with full pay for the three weeks they were out, Warehouse Workers for Justice [3] reports.

"We forced the company to respect our rights," said striker Ted Ledwa.  "We showed that when workers are united, we can stand up to the biggest corporations in the world and win."

Members of the Warehouse Workers Organizing Committee walked out September 15 to protest the firing by the Roadlink employment agency of a plaintiff in a new lawsuit  - the sixth filed against Walmart subcontrators in Elwood, Illinois - charging wage theft.  They won widespread support.

Last Monday, strikers and their supporters shut down the Elwood warehouse - Walmart's largest distribution center on the continent - with hundreds rallying as clergy and community and labor leaders blocked the road.  On Friday, strikers delivered a letter demanding an end to retaliation and improvement of conditions signed by 100,000 supporters to the Walmart store in Presidential Towers.

During the teachers strike, CTU members joined warehouse strikers in a march to the new Walmart in Chatham, noting support by the Walton Family Foundation for anti-union "school reform" groups like Stand For Children.

A new phase of labor challenges to Walmart seems to be unfolding. Last month a group of Walmart warehouse workers struck in Southern California, returning to week last week after their demands were met.  Last week, employees of two Walmart stores in Southern California walked out [4], again in protest against retaliation.

Noted for its low wages, forcing many workers onto Medicaid and food stamps, Walmart has aggressively fought back unionization attempts for 50 years; at its warehouses, workers say, the company uses subcontractors to insulate itself from responsibility for abuses.

Now, by forming nonunion associations modeled on the workers' center movement, Walmart workers seem to have found a strategy for advancing their interest and protecting their rights.  In a period when union rights are under wide attack, it's a development with dramatic potential.

Caracas rally 'a marvelous finish for the Chavez campaign'
Caracas rally 'a marvelous finish for the Chavez campaign'

October 9, 2012 -- Green Left Weekly/Venezuelanalysis.com -- Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez has won the October 7 Venezuelan elections with over 54% of the vote against 45% of the vote for right-wing opposition candidate Henrique Capriles. The National Electoral Council's Tibisay Lucena announced more than 80% of the 19,119,809 registered voters in Venezuela participated in the election. Venezuelanalysis' Ewen Robertson reports from Merida:


Hugo Chavez has won the Venezuelan presidential election with 54.42% of the vote against 44.97% for opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski. Chavez has made his victory speech, while Capriles has recognised his defeat.

The "first bulletin" results were announced by the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Tibisay Lucena, at around 10 pm Venezuelan time, with 90% of the votes totalled, enough to give Chavez an irreversible victory.

The CNE president said, "Once again we've had a calm electoral process, without problems, with the joy of this people who decided to vote massively today".

A spontaneous street party immediately kicked off in the centre of the Andean city of Merida, and a massive crowd of Chavez supporters began celebrating in front of the presidential palace, Miraflores, in Caracas.

"Venezuela will never return to neoliberalism and will continue in the transition to socialism of the 21st century", Chavez declared to supporters from the "People's Balcony" of the presidential palace, after his victory was confirmed.

"I want make a recognition to the whole Venezuelan people, the whole Venezuelan nation. Today the country of (Simon) Bolivar was reborn", added the socialist president, while congratulating the country "for a civic and democratic day".

The re-elected Venezuelan president also congratulated the Venezuelan opposition for recognising the CNE's result, saying "they've recognised the truth, they've recognised the victory of the people".

Meanwhile, Henrique Capriles, who was the candidate for the opposition Roundtable of Democratic Unity Coalition (MUD), recognised his defeat, stating to supporters "to know how to win, you need to know how to lose!"

He added, "We began the construction of a path and on it there are more than 6 x million people who are looking for a better future... I'm convinced that this country can be better and I'm convinced that Venezuela is going to be better".

Chavez received a total of 7,444,082 votes to 6,151,154 for his right-wing rival. He will govern for the 2013 - 2019 presidential term, his third constitutional term in office under the 1999 National Constitution.

Turnout was one the highest in Venezuela's history, with 80.94% of the 19,119,809 registered voters in Venezuela participating in the election....(Click title for more)


Amram with Willie Nelson

By Thorne Webb Dreyer

The Rag Blog

Oct 8, 2012 - David Amram, a virtuoso composer and musician who has been a trailblazer in the American arts scene for decades and was a pioneer of what became known as the Beat movement -- and who was called "the Renaissance Man of American Music" by The Boston Globe -- was in Austin for the September 29 Texas premiere of This Land is Our Land, his folk-inspired Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie.

The orchestral work, which was commissioned in 2007 by Guthrie's daughter Nora and son Arlo through the Woody Guthrie Foundation, was performed by the Austin Civic Orchestra under the spirited direction of Lois Ferrari as part of the year-long, nationwide Woody Guthrie Centennial celebration.


Amran with Pete Seeger, Odetta and Toshi Regan

Amram was also Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 28, from 2-3 p.m. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio show produced in the studios of KOOP-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer radio station in Austin, Texas. On the show Amram discussed his storied career and performed live on several instruments.

You can listen to the show here.

David Amram's symphonic composition, This Land is Our Land, was first performed in 2007 by the Symphony Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, and was performed on September 21, 2012, by the internationally renowned Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and recorded for later release as a Master Recording.

In his "Symphonic Variations," Amram draws from what Guthrie might have experienced traveling around the country, tapping a range of musical genres including a Cherokee "Stomp Dance," gospel music, a "Texas barn dance," Mexican music rooted in Guthrie's time as a farm worker, a "Dust Bowl Dirge," and ethnic music Woody would have encountered while living in New York City, including Caribbean and Middle Eastern sounds and the rhythms of a jazz block party.

"And," David told us, "in each variation you hear, snuck in there, the 'This Land is Your Land' melody in counterpoint to everything else." "Creating the work," he said, "was almost like building a boat inside a bottle."

Amram first met Woody Guthrie in 1956 and remembers that "he spent the whole day talking about politics, about traveling around the world as a merchant seaman, about Bach and Beethoven and Shakespeare, and country folks and Cajun music."

"He was like an encyclopedia," Amram said. "A wonderful, vital guy."

David Amram, who will turn 82 in November, was a major figure in the early Beat movement. In December 1957 Amram participated with novelist Jack Kerouac in the historic first jazz-poetry reading at the Brata Art Gallery in New York City, which was, according to writer Paul A. Bergin, "the moment most chroniclers of the period regard as the birth of the Beat Generation." (Amran said he didn't even know there was such a thing as a Beat movement, "until I began to read about it.") ...(Click title for more)


By Maryann Koopman Kelly
Paste Magazine

Oct. 1, 2012 - It's a tale as familiar as Romeo and Juliet-a disadvantaged orphan boy is brought into a farmer's household and is raised alongside the man's own children. The boy, Heathcliff, forms a passionate bond with the farmer's daughter, Catherine, and together the two face complicated lives of love, jealousy, pain, betrayal and grief.

Wuthering Heights in its newest form is undeniably a work of art. The photography and overall mood of the piece are unforgettably beautiful in their bleakness.

But while none would claim Emily Bront�'s single Gothic novel to be in any way cheerful, this particular retelling of the story of doomed lovers is overwhelmingly dreary. Wuthering Heights is a classic tale worth its melancholy state, but this film at times is hard to keep watching. From the endless rain, wind and mud of the moors to the strange, selfish characters themselves, the film weighs on the soul.

Wuthering Heights Official Trailer #1 (2012) - Sundance Movie HD
Wuthering Heights Official Trailer #1 (2012) - Sundance Movie HD


Directed by Oscar-winning Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank), Wuthering Heights' pacing is reminiscent of Terrence Malick's The New World, where instead of Heathcliff and Catherine, it was John Smith and Pocahantas who slowly, silently wandered fields and rolled about the grass. Robbie Ryan, the director of photography, has been a long-time partner with Arnold, and together they have developed a unique style of storytelling, one that includes the landscape as a character in itself. Ryan has won four awards to date for his work on this film, and deservedly so. His perspective through the lens is both sensitive and bold, and very, very honest.

The acting cannot be faulted. Every role is played impecably well, making the period believability nearly infallible. Both Kaya Scodelario (Clash of the Titans, Skins) as the adult Catherine and Shannon Beer as the younger version were utterly convincing as the coy, love-torn heroine. It is James Howson, however, the adult Heathcliff himself, who steals the show. In his first-ever film role, Howson could have been plucked right off the pages of Bront�'s novel, with all the angst, confusion, awkwardness and beauty of the original protagonist. He makes the audience empathize with him, yet he still holds them at a distance, keeping the attention solely on himself to the very last reel.

The strange thing about Wuthering Heights is how uncomfortable the relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine is to watch, particularly when they are children. It does not feel sweet or innocent, but rather dark, sensuous and disturbing. It is clear that writers Arnold and Olivia Hetreed (Girl With A Pearl Earring) wanted to present a very unique, even modern, interpretation to the 1847 book, and embellished the story in ways that, though not unimaginable, are rather unorthodox. One could just as easily have set the entire film on a contemporary English council housing estate, and it would have the same unsettling, gray feeling to it.

English teachers everywhere are probably clasping hands and thanking the heavens that a fresh version of the story has appeared in the public eye for discussion. But for some, however, this take may be a step too far. Wuthering Heights was a dark enough story in which to lose oneself; this latest telling is darker still.

Director: Andrea Arnold Writer: Andrea Arnold, Olivia Hetreed Starring: James Howson, Kaya Scodelario, Shannon Beer, Solomon Glave, James Northcote, Nichola Burley Release Date: Oct. 5, 2012 (limited)

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Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS