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.
|
New Issue of Mobilizer
Check out what CCDS has been doing...
|
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...
 Real Progressives Oppose Austerity
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...
|
'Fiscal Cliff' Bridged, but Threat to
Working People's Welfare Still on Track
By Carl Bloice
BlackCommentator.com
The wealthy are joining hands without regard to political affiliation to cut benefits that enjoy broad bipartisan support among everyone who is not rich.
"The deal that the Obama administration struck this week with Congress to avoid sending the country over this so-called fiscal cliff did little more than push the tough bargaining off for another day, when the stakes may actually be higher," the Los Angeles Times said editorially last week. That qualifies as an understatement. What happened in Congress soon after the ball fell in Times Square settled? Very little. It meant only that we could watch the rest of the endless Bowl games without constantly switching channels to check on the speed of our fall into the abyss.
Yes, the reactionary right Republicans suffered a setback but it's not that uplifting when you consider that people earning $50,000 a year will pay about $1,000 more in payroll taxes this year. That's because the "deal" hatched last week on Capitol Hill means payroll taxes are going up and over three quarters of the country's working people will experience a decline in their take home pay this year.
Yes, expanded unemployment benefits will be extended in hard hit states but that seems like the least the knuckleheads could do.
All in all, 2013 is shaping up as a year of precariousness for the nation's working people, seniors and the poor. The threats of last year are being carried over and the stakes are indeed higher.
"Once more, Washington is fixated on what and how to cut," Robert Borosage wrote last week on the Our Future blog. "Once more, the media is clamoring for a deal, for 'shared sacrifice.' Once more, Republicans have indicated that they are prepared to hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage to exact deep cuts in spending, with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid their primary targets. Once more, the president has indicated that he wants more deficit reduction, with a 'balanced' program mixing spending cuts with tax hikes."
It is important to keep in mind what is at stake here.
A couple of days into the New Year, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius harshly excoriated President Obama for unwisely playing "a poker game of incremental bargaining" with an incompetent House Speaker John Boehner. Nothing new here. Numerous critics at both ends of the political spectrum have registered the same complaint. What's notable is the policy content of Ignatius's complaint. That is: the President didn't come forward with his own "grand bargain," he didn't embrace "Simpson-Bowles." More specifically he didn't offer cuts in Social Security. "It's Obama's job to lead the party toward entitlement reforms and other policies that will be painful but necessary," he wrote. Beware of overemphasis on Obama's style of operation. It's cover for the real beef: that the tycoons of Wall Street, and the Washington elite that front for them, haven't secured what they want - so far....(Click title for more)
|
|
What's Needed to Prevent Right
Wing from Destroying Unions?
 Report on a talk by Bill Fletcher, Jr.
By ED FINKELSTEIN
Labor Tribune - St Louis
If anyone in Organized Labor thinks we can try to talk and/or reason with the Republican Party, which has now been taken over by the radical right, or reach some kind of an accommodation with them, they are "living in an illusion." That's because "they are not taking prisoners...they simply want to annihilate Organized Labor."
With those frank comments, author and labor activist Bill Fletcher Jr., launched into a startling presentation as to the need, the desperate need, for Organized Labor to rebuild itself "or we'll be history."
In St. Louis last month to talk about his new book, They're Bankrupting Us! And 20 Other Myths About Unions, Fletcher took a bolder, broader approach to the survival of the labor movement, which he characterized as "absolutely essential because there is no democracy without a real labor union, an independent democratic movement. A lot of people don't get that. We have to reintroduce that discussion."
LITTLE KNOWN ABOUT UNIONS
"They're bankrupting us"'. Fletcher began his presentation with making it clear that the general public really knows little about unions today.
This is the result of:
* A wholesale assault on labor that has been underway for years, funded by billionaire reactionary Republicans who see labor unions as "an obstacle to their economic agenda."
* An unrelenting assault on unions in the media, both directly through the massive control of radio talk shows by the radical conservative right, Fox News and subliminally through TV shows.
He gave an example of two Law and Order SVU episodes in which it appeared that a teachers union was trying to protect a murderer and construction unions were featherbedding the remodeling of a police station.
* The passiveness of our unions to challenge anything in the media that's negative about unions. "You can bet if there was something positive about unions, the Koch brothers and their ilk would be flooding the network and program producer with complaints."
* The "holding ground" mentality of the labor movement since the '40s that we were secure in our position, not appreciating that the other side "is relentless. They have no intention of stopping."......(Click title for more)
The program was held at the Painters and Allied Trades District Council 2 hall.
|
Truck Drivers Clinch New Power
with First Union Contract at L.A. Ports
By Grim Truth
via Portside.org
Jan 9, 2013 - They did it again, and this time it paid off in a huge way. L.A's Toll Group drivers, who made national and international headlines in April by overwhelmingly voting to become Teamsters, cemented their place in history by ratifying the first union contract in the drayage industry in 30 years.
And boy is the contract a good one! The agreement is highly regarded as a standard-setting first union contract, and viewed as a huge win for any union and a definite game-changer for U.S. port drivers.
The drivers who haul apparel and merchandise shipped to our shores for America's brand name stores will kick start 2013 with a contractual raise of more than $6 per hour along with paid overtime, sick leave and holidays, a far more affordable health care plan with zero change in coverage, guaranteed shift hours and other provisions to provide job security - plus a pension plan.
"Justice...it's sort of an indescribable feeling, but it is overwhelming and incredible to finally have the American Dream at our reach," said Jose Ortega Jr., a driver for global logistics giant Toll Group who served on the bargaining committee for his co-workers along with representatives from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and Local 848 in Long Beach, Calif. The Australian corporation operates near the nation's largest port complexes on both coasts and handles accounts for Guess?, Polo, Under Armour and other fashion and sportswear lines sold at big box and department retailers like Walmart and JC Penney.
The landmark agreement culminates more than 24 months of worker struggle and employer resistance in which these truckers - aided by a community coalition, their children, and clergy - borrowed bullhorns, leafleted consumers, gathered signatures practiced their picket lines, staged noisy protests, crashed shareholder meetings in a dogged campaign to end the Third World-like working conditions they once routinely endured.
U.S. port drivers are the most underpaid in the trucking industry: A typical professional earns $28,873 a year before taxes. Their net incomes often resemble that of part-time fast food or retail workers though they clock an average of 59 hours a week. They must possess specialized skills and licensing to safely command an 80,000 lb. container rig, but they fit the profile of America's working poor. Food stamps, extended family, or church pantries are needed to get by; their children often lack regular pediatricians or only receive care at the public ER....(Click title for more)
|
Rosa Parks Unchained: It's Time
to Free Rosa Parks from the Bus
Editor's note: Danielle McGuire is the author of "At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance-a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power." She is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She lives with her husband and two children in metro Detroit.
By Danielle McGuire
Special to CNN
(CNN, DEc1, 2012) - In 2011, Rosa Parks was in the news, six years after her death. An excerpt from a breathtaking essay she wrote in the 1950s about a "near rape" by a white man in Alabama was released to the public. The handwritten narrative detailed Parks' steely resistance to a white man, "Mr. Charlie," who attempted to assault her in 1931 while she was working as a domestic for a white family.
It was late evening when "Mr. Charlie" pushed his way into the house and tried to have sex with her. Having grown up in the segregated South, she knew all too well the special vulnerabilities black women faced. She recalled, for example, how her great-grandmother, a slave, had been "mistreated and abused" by her white master.
Despite her fear, she refused to let the same thing happen to her. "I knew that no matter what happened," she wrote, "I would never yield to this white man's bestiality." "I was ready to die," she said, "but give my consent, never. Never, never." Parks was absolutely defiant: "If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body," she said, "he was welcome, but he would have to kill me first."
Civil Rights icon dies at 92
Does that sound like the Rosa Parks we know?
Some of the guardians of Parks' legacy have said it is not, and insist the essay was fiction. But by dismissing the writings as fiction, it retains the popular image of Rosa Parks as a simple seamstress whose singular and spontaneous act launched the civil rights movement that brought down the walls of segregation.
This popular presentation of Parks as a quiet but courageous woman, whose humble righteousness shamed America into doing what was right has become a mythic fable present in nearly every high school history textbook, museum exhibit, and memorial.
December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks arrested
She has been imprisoned by this tale, frozen in time as a silent and saintly icon whose only real action was to stay seated so that, in the words of her many eulogists, "we could all stand up."...(Click title for more)
|
Is There an Alternative for Capitalist Economics
and Politics? Richard Wolff Says Yes
By Mark Karlin
Truthout Interview
"Imagine a country where the majority of the population reaps the majority of the benefits for their hard work, creative ingenuity and collaborative efforts. Imagine a country where corporate losses aren't socialized, while gains are captured by an exclusive minority. Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book, Democracy at Work, he details how we get there from here - and why we absolutely must."
-- Nomi Prins, Author of It Takes a Pillage and Black Tuesday
Jan 8, 2013 - Few are better equipped than economist Richard Wolff, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, to address the massive failings and inequalities of capitalism as he does in his latest book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism.
He also describes Workers' Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs) as an alternative to the capitalism that broke the US economy and has resulted in massive economic redistribution to the ruling elites.
Mark Karlin: In your book, what is the distinction between capitalism and welfare state capitalism?
Richard Wolff: Capitalism, like all other economic systems, displays a variety of forms. There are, for example, largely private, laissez-faire kinds of capitalism that differ in many ways from forms of capitalism in which the state plays more significant roles, such as market regulator or social welfare guarantor (as in "state welfare capitalism"), or as a close partner of capitalists as in fascism. What remains the same across all such forms - why they all deserve the label "capitalist" - is the exclusion of the mass of workers that produces the output and generates the profits from receiving and distributing that profit, and from generally participating democratically in enterprise decisions. Capitalism excludes workers from deciding what is produced, how it is produced, where it is produced and how profits are to be used and distributed. Democracy at Work is a critique and alternative aimed at changing that exclusion shared by all these forms of capitalism.
Mark Karlin: In that regard, what do you think about the contention that FDR was not at all an opponent of capitalism, but simply saw that some government intervention was necessary in the US economy in order to save capitalism during the depression of the '30s?
Richard Wolff: What FDR saw was the political might of the coalition of unionists (galvanized by the CIO in the middle 1930's), socialist and communist parties demanding that government not only bail out the banks and corporations, but also directly help the mass of people suffering the Great Depression. Elements within that coalition threatened that Washington's failure to respond to do so would turn many millions of US citizens against capitalism. FDR got the message and crafted a deal in response. The government would both tax and borrow from corporations and the rich to fund the new Social Security system, national unemployment insurance, and a vast program of federal hiring. In return, the coalition would downplay its anti-capitalism and celebrate instead the achievement of a welfare state type of capitalism. The coalition mostly accepted this New Deal. FDR went on to win four consecutive presidential elections making him the most popular president in US history. The New Deal saved the capitalist system by changing its form from a relatively more laissez-faire [form]to a welfare-type state....(Click title for more)
|
A Closer Look at Oliver Stone's
'Untold History of the United States'
 Stone and Kuznick's 10-part series is a brilliant and entertaining narrative of the United States' role in the world since the onset of World War II.
By Harry Targ
The Rag Blog
Jan 9, 2013 - Oliver Stone has made an enormous contribution to discussions of the United States role in the world. His films have described the horrific consequences of United States foreign policy for the people of El Salvador and Vietnam, the American political system, and the U.S. soldiers victimized by wars not of their making. While his films, such as JFK, raise controversial claims, they have stimulated important public conversations.
This television season, Showtime, a cable channel, is showing a 10-part series written and produced by Stone and his academic collaborator, historian Peter Kuznick. The series, The Untold History of the United States, is a brilliant and entertaining narrative of the United States' role in the world since the onset of World War II.
It warrants broad distribution within educational institutions and among communities of political activists. Because of our ahistorical culture people do not have a sense of the critical decisions that were made 50 or 100 years ago which have structured the political and economic life of the country ever since.
Critical moments in United States history have channeled the prospects for progressive social change today and tomorrow. From the arrival of colonial armies to the "new world," to the introduction of slavery to the Western Hemisphere, to revolution against British imperialism, to the civil war and the defeat of post-war reconstruction, the American experience has been shaped by class and race in the context of burgeoning industrial and financial capitalism. The Spanish/Cuban/American war stimulated the rise of the United States as the preeminent empire from the Philippines to the Western Hemisphere.
Most of us have received a sanitized history of these earlier historical moments. In addition, our understanding of the rise of socialist movements in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression and the global fascist threat, the realities of World War II, and the emerging U.S. hegemony after the war which led to the "Cold War" between global capitalism and socialism have been limited as well.
Oliver Stone's 10-part "untold history," in collaboration with Professor Kuznick, fills in some of the void. Several themes about the onset of the Cold War are particularly important:
First, while the series overemphasizes the role of elites in shaping U.S. history Stone and Kuznick do point out that these elites always perceived the threat workers, radicals, and other rank-and-file activists meant to ruling class dominance. Much of foreign policy was designed to crush revolutionary ferment overseas and at home.
Second, in the first two episodes emphasis is placed on the lost opportunity for the left that resulted from the successful efforts of political elites, particularly in the Democratic Party, to force Henry Wallace, President Roosevelt's third term vice president, and 1948 candidate for president on the Progressive Party ticket, from power. Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture during the New Deal was an economic populist, anti-racist, and pro-union sympathizer and after World War II an advocate for United States/Soviet Union collaboration.
Stone and Kuznick probably exaggerate Wallace as an alternative to the imperial, counter-revolutionary, and racist path the United States took after the war but correctly make it clear that CEOs from massive corporations and banks and political elites from both political parties were committed to crushing those left forces that flowered in the United States in the 1930s and grew in popularity all across the globe. ...(Click title for more)
|
Film Review: The Central Park Five
Director: Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon
Writer: Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon
Starring: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Release Date: Nov. 23, 2012
By Shannon M. Houston
Paste Magazine
Jan 3, 2013 - Critically acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns (along with co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon) is almost deceptive in his approach with his latest documentary, The Central Park Five.
Audiences may be prepared for a movie about a group of young black and Hispanic men, wrongfully convicted of one of the crimes of the century-raping and nearly killing a woman (known famously as the Central Park Jogger) out on her nightly run in Central Park.
However, this brilliant documentary is actually about the human psyche-specifically the ego-and the lengths to which all members of society (police, lawyers, members of the media, the innocent and the guilty) will go to preserve it.
 | The Central Park Five Official Trailer
|
The Central Park Five opens with a haunting and unforgettable recorded confession. As the true rapist, Matias Reyes, describes his vicious crime (while serving a life sentence for other crimes, including rape), viewers are simultaneously introduced to the names of the Central Park Five-Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam-all teenagers when they were convicted of another man's crime. With a mosaic of family photos and touching narratives from the men themselves, Burns carefully introduces his subjects (one of whom refused to appear on camera, desperate to maintain his current life) and their families and the audience almost immediately aligns with them. Raised in poor, but pleasant homes (some by single mothers, others not), they all went to school, had their close friends, and occasionally got into some harmless trouble. On one night in particular, they were truly in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of the five admitted to the one crime he did commit that night-hopping a subway turnstile.
The Central Park Five pays due diligence to the story of the true criminal and the woman who survived the attack (Trisha Meili), and also gives a long-overdue voice to the five men. However, one could still argue that the documentary is primarily concerned with the ignorant, vicious, racially charged political and social atmospheres that worked to convict this group of innocent men. The movie really begins to take off with stark depictions of the reactions of city- (and nation-) wide reactions to the jogger's brutal attack. Cultural theorists and members of the media who were firsthand witnesses of the events that unfolded following the arrests of the young men explained that the true source of public outrage must primarily be attributed to the fact that the woman was a white investment banker jogging in Central Park. (Ed Koch, who was acting mayor of New York City at the time of the attack, even goes so far as to describe the park as the holy land of the city.) Burns brilliantly juxtaposes the story of a young black woman who was raped, then thrown off of a building to her death around the same time as the Central Park Jogger's attack. Unlike Meili, she had not graduated from Yale and she did not work on Wall Street; her story received little press. Burns includes footage of people like Donald Trump, speaking out and demanding swift and hard justice for the victim (all of which added pressure to the police on the case). Headlines in the news were eerily similar to headlines from Jim Crow South, as readers were warned of the dangerous black men in their midst. In many ways The Central Park Five is a portrait of New York City in 1989, a portrait that bears a horrifyingly striking resemblance to Mississippi or Alabama in the 1940s.
The Central Park Five is such a moving piece of work, it is difficult to watch at times. Viewers are witnessing, for all intents and purposes, a modern-day lynching that actually took place in the '90s. In his unflinching tale of crime, punishment, racial hysteria and ego, Burns holds an entire society, an entire way of thinking, accountable for its role in the true crime of the century-the collective effort to imprison five innocent young men. Journalists, critics, police, jurors, teachers and citizens who remained silent in the midst of strong evidence and gut instinct all participated in the destructive mob mentality that destroyed young lives. Although the story of the Central Park Five has a seemingly happy ending-in 2002 the men were exonerated when the actual rapist confessed-the warning is still there for our generation and for the next: Beware.
Director: Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon Writer: Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, David McMahon Starring: Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Release Date: Nov. 23, 2012
|
|
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 |
|
|
