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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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...
 Michigan Class Warfare Is Only the Beginning
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 carld717@gmail.com!
Most of all, it's urgent that you defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, 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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10,000 Protesters Converge on Michigan Capitol as Gov. Snyder's Assault on Workers Signed Into Law
Things got dicey in Lansing when protesters took down a tent erected on Capitol grounds by the Koch-funded Americans For Prosperity, as lawmakers passed a law designed to eviscerate union membership rolls.
By Jane Slaughter
Labor Notes
Dec 11, 2012 - Union protesters in front of the Michigan Capitol today knocked down an enormous tent erected by Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-brothers-funded group that helped bring right to work to the state. State troopers arriving on horseback were helpless, bringing to mind images of Humpty Dumpty and all the king's men.
Several dozen protesters were sitting down in the Capitol Rotunda, risking arrest, and more were outside the governor's office. Three school districts were forced to close schools because so many teachers called off for the day.
 Four giant inflatable rats in the 10,000-person crowd were named for prominent Republican politicians and their richest backer.
But despite the anger and the chants, the legislature made it official. Gov. Rick "The Nerd" Snyder was expected to sign right-to-work bills tomorrow.
Shocked
Michigan unionists were shocked last Tuesday when Snyder announced his support for right to work. His legislative allies quickly did their part, passing the needed public and private sector bills last week as police used Mace to clear the Capitol of protesting union members.
Snyder had previously said right-to-work was too divisive and not on his agenda. Such laws outlaw union contracts that require all represented workers to pay dues, allowing members to resign and depleting union treasuries. United Auto Workers President Bob King, who has 151,000 members and 190,000 retirees in the state, said the governor's about-face "blind-sided" him.
But the plan to make Michigan the 24th right-to-work state was long brewing. With 17.5 percent union density, the fifth-highest in the country, and a record of voting for Democratic presidents, Michigan was a tempting target for such billionaire-funded national groups as Americans for Prosperity (the Koch brothers) and for the state's home-grown billionaire, Richard DeVos of the Amway fortune.
Writing in a blog for The Nation, Lee Fang shows that Americans for Prosperity's Michigan chapter quadrupled its spending in 2010, the year Snyder was elected, to $1.1 million. The Mackinac Center, a longtime right-wing think tank in the state, spent $5.7 million last year, and stepped up its game last week to support Snyder's move. DeVos funds both groups.
Long Time Coming
Michigan Democratic Party Chair Mark Brewer dates the campaign for right to work to at least 2007. A video shows former Michigan Republican Party Chair Ron Weiser speaking to a Tea Party meeting in August. Weiser, now finance chair of the Republican National Committee, describes meeting with DeVos, former Michigan Governor John Engler (now with the Business Roundtable), representatives from Americans for Prosperity, and Frank Keating, former governor of Oklahoma, which passed right to work in 2001 ...(Click title for more)
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Michigan's New Corporate Servitude Law:
Defunding Unions in a Race to the Bottom
By George Lakoff
Progressive America Rising via Reader Supported News
Dec 13, 2012 - Michigan has just passed a corporate servitude law. It is designed to take away many of the worker rights that unions have conferred throughout their history: the right to a living wage. The right to equal pay for women. The right to deferred payments in the form of pensions. The right to negotiate workplace standards and working conditions. The right to overtime pay.
The law is intended to destroy unions, or at least make then ineffective. It says simply that workers do not have to pay union dues to take a job - even if they get benefits previously negotiated by a union. Most workers who don't have to pay dues won't pay, and that will defund the unions, killing them and taking away rights unions have fought hard for over generations. Without workers negotiating as a unified group, corporations will not have to grant those union-created rights. Corporations will have take-it-or-leave-it power over individual workers. In short, this is corporate servitude: You do what you are told and take what you are offered.
The deeper truth about unions is that they don't just create and maintain rights for workers; they work for and create crucial rights in society as a whole. Unions created weekends, the eight-hour workday and health benefits. And through their politics, they have been at the center of support for civil rights and other social justice issues. In short, unions don't just work for their members. They work for all of us. Including businesses: Workers are profit creators.
Since Democratic candidates tend to support the same progressive views, defunding unions would take away their power to campaign for Democratic candidates. The new Michigan law is thus also a partisan law supporting the Republican party.
Language matters. Republicans understand this better than Democrats. Republicans have called their corporate servitude law a "right to work" law, as if the law conferred a right instead of taking many away. The first principle of political and social communication in cases of conflict is: avoid the other side's language. The Democrats keep violating this principle, using the Republicans' name for this law. In this way they are helping Republicans, because using the Republican language activates Republican framing, not just for this law, but for conservative ideology at the deepest level. ...(Click title for more)
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Kansas: Storm Against the Future for Women
From left to right, Rannfrid Thelle, Amber Lockner and Molly Rattler at the South Wind Women's Center on December 7, 2012.
By Tom Hayden
Huffington Post
WICHITA, Dec 12, 2012 -- The clinic where Dr. George Tiller performed abortions until being shot and killed during worship at his church on May 31, 2009, will be open for services in two or three months. In the opinion of several people I interviewed last week, the clinic "probably will be bombed again."
The one-story clinic, located in a non-descript Wichita neighborhood, is a windowless sand-colored bunker that looks suited for a war zone. On the bulletproof glass entrance door is a sticker depicting a handgun with a red line crossed through it. Two volunteers, both from Oklahoma, answered questions at the door. The group Trust Women, led by Julie Burkhart, a former associate of Dr. Tiller, purchased and refurbished the building, once ground zero for the violent protests that gave rise to Operation Rescue a decade ago. The clinic, then Women's Health Care Services, was bombed in June 1986; Dr. Tiller was shot twice in the arm outside of a health center in 1993.
The convicted killer of Dr. Tiller, Scott Roeder, boasted that he made Kansas "abortion free." The nearest clinic is a three-hour drive; women often travel south to Norman, Oklahoma, or east to Boulder, Colorado. Eighty-seven counties in the United States, where 35 percent of women in their reproductive years live, currently lack any facility where abortions are performed.
America's divisions are worsening, despite national election results, with one America progressing in its diversity, the other receding. Here in Kansas, most people do not seem to accept the November election of Barack Obama, who received only 38 percent of the state's popular vote. The governor, Sam Brownback, is a Catholic convert and fervent advocate of a more Christian America, cleansed of abortions and same-gender marriage equality. He backs legislation requiring that women be taught that abortions cause cancer, and that doctors may withhold information regarding health risks of a pregnancy, with immunity from malpractice charges....(Click title for more)
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Is Education a Right or a Privilege for the Wealthy?
 By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers
Truthout News Analysis
Dec 13, 2012 - Over the last 40 years, higher education in the United States has been transformed into a commodity that produces automatons to serve big-finance capitalism, prevents campuses from being a source of societal transformation and creates modern indentured servants through debt slavery.
Today, there is over $1 trillion in college debt with graduates entering a job market that cannot fully employ them, resulting in rapidly rising defaults. In fact, while tuition has grown 72 percent since 2000, employment for graduates with bachelor degrees has declined by almost 15 percent over the same time period.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed on December 10, 1948, and ratified by the United States, declares that, "Everyone has the right to education" and declares higher education "shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit." The purpose of education is broader than creating workers for big business; it is to "be directed to the full development of the human personality."
Unfortunately, rather than treating education as a right, the United States has moved in the opposite direction to treat it as a commodity. As a result, education has become entangled with big finance. Author Danny Weil describes private for-profit educational institutions such as Phoenix University as behaving like a criminal cartel that target poor and working-class students who are eligible for federally insured student loans, writing: "They set up at welfare offices, hang out at laundromats in low-income neighborhoods, recruit at public housing units, and their 'recruiters' patrol the streets of distressed neighborhoods in automobiles or on foot, looking for vulnerable working-class bodies they can register for government cash."
Once entangled in the debt trap, student debtors are kept there by big finance's deceptive and dirty tricks. Accountant Lynn Petrovich described some of big finance's tricks: holding payments made online for two to four business days, which adds thousands of dollars in interest paid by borrowers over the life of the loan; if there is more than one loan, the one with the lowest interest is paid off first while the other accumulates interest; and they tell people that they are delinquent when they aren't so that they can charge penalties. Petrovich reported that in the last nine months, Sally Mae, which is a private corporation named SLM and is the largest student loan provider, had over a half billion in profits....(Click title for more)
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China: International Conference on Lenin's Thought
Paul Le Blanc presents the keynote address to the international conference on "Lenin's thought in the 21st century: interpretation and its value", held October 20-22, 2012.
By Paul Le Blanc
Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal
December 8, 2012 - The People's Republic of China was the location of a remarkable international conference on "Lenin's thought in the 21st century: interpretation and its value", held October 20-22, 2012. It was jointly sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and several components of Wuhan University - the School of Philosophy, the Institute of Marxist Philosophy and the Institute of Western Marxist Philosophy. Almost all papers were made available in both languages, and simultaneous translation was carried out in English and Chinese.
In attendance were approximately 100 scholars - a majority from China, but roughly one-fourth from outside, including a cluster of European students studying in China. Among the countries represented, one way or another, in addition to the host country, were Austria, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia and the United States. The effort was headed by Professor He Ping, an outstanding scholar responsible for a similar international conference on Rosa Luxemburg at Wuhan in 2006. (For a report on the earlier conference, see: http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article4928.)
Conference organisers explained: The aim of this conference is to develop the study of Lenin, Marxist thought and contemporary issues in the today's world and enhance the academic exchanges between Western and Eastern scholars.
Among the themes explored by speakers and panels were the relationship of Lenin to Marx, the Marxism of the Second International, Russian Marxism, Chinese Marxism, and the Western Marxist tradition. Attention was also given to the relationship of Lenin's thought to issues of imperialism and international economic development, nationalism, democracy and feminism, and also to official domestic and international policies of the People's Republic of China.
Plans exist to publish the conference proceedings both by Wuhan University in China and by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Germany. There were diverse perspectives, among the Chinese scholars and the scholars from other countries, and the nature and quality of the presentations varied - some were quite good. Informal discussions were also quite interesting. In the future, I hope to write a more substantial report. Here I must restrict myself to sharing the keynote address that I had been invited to prepare for the conference. Keynote address to the international Lenin conference, Wuhan University: New trends in scholarship on Lenin -- impacts of the quest for revolutionary democracy
This international conference on "Lenin's thought in the 21st century" reflects a worldwide phenomenon. There have been increasingly intense stirrings of discontent in the face of the deepening problems of global capitalism. Yet despite considerable protest and insurgency, there is a sense of disappointment and frustration as those deepening problems persist.
Conservative and neoliberal policies, social-liberal and social-democratic reformism, religious fundamentalism, the individualist dissidence of libertarians and anarchists, and ideologies less defined have all failed to eliminate the problems - so the discontent persists, spreads, deepens. This is the case in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas. It is the case throughout Europe. It is the case from South Africa to Egypt and throughout the Middle East. It is the case in India and right here in China. There is a need - a market - for ideas that address this reality. This has caused a significant uptick, a renewal among scholars and intellectuals and activists, of interest in and studies of the ideas and long-ago activities of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - known to the world as Lenin - and of his close comrades.[i] ...(Click title for more)
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Chasing Ice: New Film on Climate Change
By Jay Antani
Paste Magazine
The Earth is dying. Not in a metaphorical way and not dying over a geologic timescale of billions of years. But dying in a very real and observable way. Chasing Ice from director Jeff Orlowski offers striking evidence of a dying Earth in footage of events that have rarely ever been seen, much less recorded. Orlowski's documentary profiles famed environmental photographer James Balog who, together with a small and dedicated team, has sought to capture on film the retreat of Earth's glaciers using an army of time-lapse cameras positioned across the globe-from Alaska and Glacier National Park in Montana to Iceland and Greenland.
Following Balog on his quest to document glacial retreat, Orlowski interviews several scientists who speak pressingly of the need for immediate policies addressing global warming. And the data that they've compiled-mirroring much of the evidence presented in An Inconvenient Truth (2006)-is startling. Data that points to the escalation of carbon dioxide in our air over the past 200 years, mapped out across animated graphics, is particularly lucid and fascinating. The scientists' forecast of draughts, wildfires and floods occurring with increasing frequency and intensity is already being borne out for those paying attention.
Perhaps most eloquent of all-the most frightening and heartbreaking proof that something is wrong-lies in the documentary's incredible imagery. As the climate warms, meltwater creates torrential channels beneath the glaciers, causing them to decompose and retreat. Chasing Ice needs to be seen on as large a screen as possible (IMAX if possible), if only to allow viewers to witness the collapse of our environment in all its perverse glory. By luck and pluck, Balog and his field coordinators, Adam Levinter and Svavar Jónatansson, capture footage of titanic glaciers-varying from several football fields in length to the size of Manhattan-being ripped apart. One marvels at the sight of skyscraper- and cruise ship-sized blocks of ice upturned, toppling and capsizing as they deteriorate in a grand and catastrophic display. Orlowski plays out this footage for an extended time, and it's like being witness to giant animals dying in sacrificial agony.
Balog comes through as a brilliant, fearless, compassionate environmental artist and activist. The results of his project are epic in scale and startlingly eloquent, complementing the overwhelming evidence from leading climate scientists of fast-rising greenhouse gas levels worldwide. Yet, as much as Chasing Ice wants to be the straw that breaks the deniers' backs, the final exhibit in the science community's urgent prosecution, the documentary won't sway fence sitters or counter the noise of denial and skepticism perpetrated by right-wing media outlets determined to suppress the debate. Their presence is felt keenly in a couple of montage sequences featuring Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other climate change deniers. Overcoming this resistance is the real challenge, as Balog himself points out. We've got the policy and technology worked out. What remains is to win the hearts and minds of the unconverted.
Director: Jeff Orlowski
Writer: Mark Monroe
Starring: James Balog, Svavar Jónatansson, Louie Psihoyos, Kitty Boone, Sylvia Earle, Dennis Dimick, Adam Lewinter, Jason Box, Tad Pfeffer, Suzanne Balog
Release Date: Nov. 9, 2012
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Book Review: How Neo-Nazis and
Gangs Infiltrated the U.S. Military
'Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror' by Matt Kennard. 288 pp. Verso. $27.
By Michael Thomsen
The Daily Beast
Dec 13, 2012 - Did the Bush administration's desperate need to build up the military for the Iraq War lead recruiters to turn a blind eye toward supremacists and gangs? Matt Kennard's 'Irregular Army' deals with how the wars reshaped the character of the armed forces.
Fears of white supremacists infiltrating the U.S. military date back at least decades. In the 1970s, a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was discovered operating at California's Camp Pendleton. It was not until 1986 that then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger issued a directive requiring everyone in the military to "reject participation in white supremacy, neo-Nazi, and other such groups which espouse or attempt to create overt discrimination." Recruiters were asked to screen potential recruits for incriminating tattoos and associations with potentially troubling groups. Yet as recruiting levels during the first years of the Iraq War continually failed to meet targets, incentives to look the other way were huge. irregular-army-matt-kennard-thomsen
Matt Kennard's Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror is an angry account of how the Bush administration's handling of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have necessarily reshaped the essential character of the armed forces-very often for the worse-by imposing operationally untenable political ideals on them.
Irregular Army begins by focusing on the prevalence of white supremacists and former gang members, groups that have had an increasingly easy time slipping through the military application process. "I get into fights myself twice a month because I'm a Nazi ... I'm completely open about it," one subject admitted to Kennard. Forrest Fogarty served in Iraq as a military police officer in 2004 and 2005, and had previously been associated with the National Alliance, the largest neo-Nazi organization in the country founded by The Turner Diaries author William Pierce. Fogarty is also the lead singer in the neo-Nazi hardcore band Attack, whose album Survival featured a photo of Fogarty in uniform and on duty in Iraq.
Many white-supremacist groups informally encourage people to enlist, not necessarily because of love for the government, but in order to gain weapons and combat training for the inevitable racial holy war, or RaHoWa. After the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida, a heavily armed group of National Socialist Movement members patrolled the streets anticipating retaliatory attacks on white people. The group has also sent volunteers with camouflage uniforms and assault rifles to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. In a 2009 report to the Department of Homeland Security, analyst Daryl Johnson focused on these groups, writing that the "greatest fear is that domestic extremists ... [carry] out a mass-casualty attack." ...(Click title for more)
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Become a CCDS member today!
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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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