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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New Issue of Mobilizer
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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...
 Militarism Abroad, Guns at Home...
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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By Amy Davidson
The New Yorker
It takes the National Rifle Association to build a campaign for guns around resentment toward children-specifically, resentment toward two girls named Sasha and Malia.
On Tuesday, a month after twenty first graders were shot dead in Newtown, Connecticut, and a day before President Obama was set to announce a set of proposals for curbing gun violence, the N.RA. released a video that opened with a cartoon image of an arm holding a lunchbox with the Presidential seal on it. "Are the President's kids more important than yours?" it asks.
 | | Protection For Obama's Kids, Gun-Free Zones For Ours? |
Obama's children, the narrator says, have armed guards at their school; why don't yours? Obama wants rich people's money-there is a shot of him gloating over a pile of cash-"but he's just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security." He gets guns, while ordinary Americans are shunted off into ominous gun-free school zones. Gun laws, apparently, are the new busing.
Perhaps the N.R.A. could have made a more frank play for fear and anger-maybe with an ad showing federal forces breaking into homes and melting down rifles. But it could hardly have been more transparent or, for an organization that works hard for the interests of gun manufacturers, more cynical. [Update: White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement that for the N.R.A. "to go so far as to make the safety of the President's children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly."] The personal animosity toward Obama is striking, but it is no longer entirely surprising; the N.R.A. will throw whatever it can get its hands on, even dirt, even things that are uglier. The White House will need to reckon with that or it will waste a moment in which there is an opening, however narrow, to get something done about gun control. Guns cannot be another area in which Obama underestimates the irrationality of the other side until it's too late for him to do anything but look like the sane one....(Click title for more)
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By Thom Hartmann
Truthout
Jan 15, 2013 - The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.
Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 - including physicians and ministers - had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband - or even move out of the state - those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether....(Click title for more)
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By Arianna Huffington
Huffington Post
Jan 15, 2013 - If President Obama's second term includes decision making as bold and intelligent as his nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, his presidency might finally fulfill the promise of audacity and change that rallied so many to his campaign five years ago. In fact, the more ridiculous the claims being made by Hagel's critics become, the more the real reasons they don't want him -- and the wisdom of the choice -- come into stark relief.
The latest canard is about Hagel's supposed "temperament." The charge was made this past Sunday by Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, appearing on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. "I think another thing, George, that's going to come up is just his overall temperament," said Corker, "and is he suited to run a department or a big agency or a big entity like the Pentagon?" Given that this was a new one, Stephanopoulos asked, slightly incredulously, "Do you have questions about his temperament?" Corker replied, "I think there are numbers of staffers who are coming forth now just talking about the way he has dealt with them."
Ah yes, his temperament. It's a modern-day male version of the old dig that used to be directed at women, that they might be "PMSing" and therefore shouldn't be put too close to big boy military equipment. It's also worth pointing out that this line of attack is coming from a party that thoroughly approved of that shrinking violet of a Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. It's further worth noting that the opposition to Hagel is being led partly by Senator John McCain, the same guy who thought it prudent to potentially put Sarah Palin second in line to the presidency -- and whose own "temperament" has often been called into question.
But if Hagel's temperament is somehow relevant, it puts me in mind of the quote by Lincoln who, when approached by some of Grant's critics about the general's drinking, is supposed to have said: "Let me know what brand of whiskey Grant uses. For if it makes fighting generals like Grant, I should like to get some of it for distribution."
In response to Corker's charge, Politico's Playbook quoted an email from a senior administration official: "This line of attack is a new low. By contrast, Sen. Hagel intends to take the high road in the confirmation process as he defends his strong record." Well, it's certainly a contemptible charge, but whether it's a new low is debatable. There's already been plenty of competition for that title.
Now, I'm not saying Chuck Hagel is perfect or that I agree with every position he's ever taken, but leadership isn't about conforming to a checklist. Hagel is being nominated for a particular job, and for that job, he has a strong record. And this is exactly why his critics are grasping for straws -- because they don't want to discuss that record, nor what this debate is really about: the Iraq War.
Yes, then-Senator Hagel voted for the resolution to authorize the war. But even before the vote, he expressed more reservations than most of his colleagues. "You can take the country into a war pretty fast," he said in 2002, "but you can't get us out as quickly, and the public needs to know what the risks are." In his 2008 book America: Our Next Chapter he writes that he voted to authorize military force only as a last option, but the Bush administration had not tried to "exhaust all diplomatic efforts," and that "it all comes down to the fact that we were asked to vote on a resolution based on half truths, untruths, and wishful thinking."
And after the war began, he became one of the administration's most vocal critics. Among his statements over the course of the war:
That Iraq was "a hopeless, winless situation."
That Iraq was "an absolute replay of Vietnam."
That "Iraq is not going to turn out the way that we were promised it was."
That the Iraqi people "want the United States out of Iraq."
That the Iraq War was "ill-conceived" and "poorly prosecuted."
As I wrote back in 2006, criticisms like these were much stronger than what most Democrats were saying at the time. ...(Click title for more)
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Robert Greenwald and Cenk Uygur Drones
 | | Robert Greenwald and Cenk Uygur discuss U.S. Drone policy on Young Turks TV |
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By Douglas A. Blackmon
The Washington Monthly via Alternet
Jan 15, 2013 - On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. It had been mailed from the town of Bainbridge, Georgia, the prosperous seat of a cotton county perched on the Florida state line.
The sender was a barely literate African American woman named Carrie Kinsey. With little punctuation and few capital letters, she penned the bare facts of the abduction of her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, who a year earlier had been sold into involuntary servitude.
Kinsey had already asked for help from the powerful white people in her world. She knew where her brother had been taken-a vast plantation not far away called Kinderlou. There, hundreds of black men and boys were held in chains and forced to labor in the fields or in one of several factories owned by the McRee family, one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Georgia. No white official in this corner of the state would take an interest in the abduction and enslavement of a black teenager.
Confronted with a world of indifferent white people, Mrs. Kinsey did the only remaining thing she could think of. Newspapers across the country had recently reported on a speech by Roosevelt promising a "square deal" for black Americans. Mrs. Kinsey decided that her only remaining hope was to beg the president of the United States to help her brother.
"Mr. Prassident," she wrote. "They wont let me have him.... He hase not don nothing for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help."
Considered more than a century later, her letter courses with desperation and submerged outrage. Yet when received at the White House, it was slipped into a small rectangular folder and forwarded to the Department of Justice. There, it was tagged with a reference number, 12007, and filed away. Teddy Roosevelt never saw it. No action was taken. Her words lie still at the National Archives just outside Washington, D.C.
As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. In the same box that holds her grief-stricken missive are at least half a dozen other pieces of correspondence recounting other stories of kidnapping, perversion of the courts, or human trafficking-as horrifying as, or worse than, Carrie Kinsey's tale. It is the same in the next box on the shelf. And the one before. And the ones on either side of those. And the next and the next. And on and on. Thousands and thousands of plaintive letters and grimly bureaucratic responses-altogether at least 30,000 pages of original material-chronicle cases of forced labor and involuntary servitude in the South decades after the end of the Civil War.
"i have a little girl that has been kidnapped from me ... and i cant get her out," wrote Reverend L. R. Farmer, pastor of a black Baptist church in Morganton, North Carolina. "i want ask you is it law for people to whip (col) people and keep them and not allow them to leave without a pass."
A farmer near Pine Apple, Alabama, named J. R. Adams, writing of terrible abuses by the dominant landowning family in the county, was one of the astonishingly few white southerners who also complained to the Department of Justice. "They have held negroes ... for years," Adams wrote. "It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."
A similar body of material rests in the files of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the one institution that undertook any sustained effort to address at least the most terrible cases. Dwarfing everything at those repositories are the still largely unexamined collections of local records in courthouses across the South. In dank basements, abandoned buildings, and local archives, seemingly endless numbers of files contain hundreds of thousands of handwritten entries documenting in monotonous granularity the details of an immense, metastasizing horror that stretched well into the twentieth century.
By the first years after 1900, tens of thousands of African American men and boys, along with a smaller number of women, had been sold by southern state governments. An exponentially larger number, of whom surviving records are painfully incomplete, had been forced into labor through county and local courts, backwoods justices of the peace, and outright kidnapping and trafficking. The total number of those re-enslaved in the seventy-five years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War II can't be precisely determined, but based on the records that do survive, we can safely say it happened to hundreds of thousands. How many more African Americans circumscribed their lives in dramatic ways, or abandoned all to flee the South entirely, to avoid that fate or mob violence? It is impossible to know. Millions. Generations.
This is not an easy story for Americans to receive, much less accept. The idea that not just civil rights but basic freedom itself was denied to an enormous population of African Americans until the middle of the twentieth century fits nowhere in the triumphalist, steady-progress, greatest-generations accounts we prefer for our national narrative....(Click title for more)
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 Key Dems Say Unnecessary Defense Spending Is Crippling the U.S. and Should Be Part of Debt Debate
By Lisa Graves
Beaver County Peace Links via PRWatch
Jan 14, 2013 - The largest Democratic Party organization in the nation has called on Congress to support a 25% cut in Pentagon spending. The California Democratic Party -- which includes more than 2,000 representatives of the state's more than seven million Democrats -- adopted this policy in the past year in the face of threats by Republicans in Congress to refuse to allow the U.S. to increase its credit limit.
That policy provides in part:
[We] support a strong national defense that includes considerations for all aspects of defense, not just defense provided by the Armed Forces. We recognize that our national security depends primarily upon a strong economy, a stable federal budget, a stable environment and our perception in the world as a responsible member of the world community. ... [W]e recognize that the current level of military and security spending -- over $1 trillion per year -- is ... unsustainable and unnecessary, and is crippling our government's ability to deal with our many serious problems, including unemployment, massive debt and looming catastrophic global warming ...
Despite this mandate, the two most powerful Californians in Congress -- Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- have not advocated for what their core constituents have asked that they and the other 38 Democratic members of the California Congressional delegation put on the table: a 25% cut in defense spending.
CSIS DoD Budget Projection
Source: Center for Strategic and International Studies
Although California has a number of military installations and defense contractors, much of the money the Pentagon spends is on foreign bases and foreign wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The billions for the lengthy military actions in the Middle East are put on top of the Pentagon's core budget by calling this spending "Overseas Contingency Operations," which are counted as separate from regular appropriations for defense. The California Democratic Party is urging the 40 Dems in the state's 55-member congressional delegation to support cuts in the Pentagon's overall budget to "ensure that military spending prioritizes defense of the homeland and not the siting of numerous military bases on foreign soil as a substitute for robust diplomatic engagement."...(Click title for more)
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 The Sounds of Capitalism:
Advertising, Music and the Conquest of Culture
By Timothy Taylor
University of Chicago Press
By Elias Leight
Paste Magazine
Jan 15, 2013 - Timothy Taylor's latest book tracks the relationship between music and advertising from the early 20th century to the present. A professor of musicology-both ethnomusicology and the regular kind-at UCLA, Taylor has written several books on music, including Global Pop: World Music, World Markets and Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. He continues to examine the relationship between music and our economic system, especially the ways they contribute to and reinforce each other.
The Sounds Of Capitalism begins with the development of the radio, the first piece of technology that allowed the mass propagation of sound.
Initially, advertising companies didn't know how to handle radio; they focused almost exclusively on print until they eventually figured out that the two could supplement each other. In contrast to the highly data-driven, niche advertising of today (earlier this year, New York Times Magazine ran an article that suggested big-box store Target has become so expert at predicting consumption patterns that it can tell when women are pregnant from their purchases, then tailor advertising accordingly), early advertising focused on "appeal[ing] to large and diverse audiences while offending the fewest people."
As NBC put it, "Tell it to the masses, and the classes will understand." And since "the great common denominator of broadcasting" was music, tunes served to attract those masses, regardless of class divisions.
The masses occasionally had wild reactions to these new radio advertisements. A Dixie Cup Company advertisement from 1928 that used a calliope-an unusual, air-powered instrument-caused "A dozen listeners in a Massachusetts town" to write a "letter pleading for at least ten minutes of the calliope instead of a few shorts blasts." A farmer "drove twenty-five miles. . .to the brand office of a utility company to express his appreciation for its radio band."
As early forms of market research developed (the first audience survey purportedly occurred in 1928), advertising grew more sophisticated, and radio big shots increased their efforts to command audience loyalty. Certain radio personalities, like the crooner Rudy Vallee, put their talents to use in the service of various products with programs such as "The Fleishmann's Yeast Hour." (Those interested in finding out more about Vallee should watch the 1942 screwball comedy The Palm Beach Story-he plays a vital and amusing role.)
When the Depression hit, a quicker, cheaper, and upbeat musical advertising pitch-the jingle-came into being.
The first classic jingle came from General Mills:
Have you tried Wheaties?
. . .
They're crispy, and crunchy, the whole year through
The kiddies never tire of them and neither will you.
In addition to being quick and catchy, jingles also proved easily adaptable. When Pepsi reduced the sugar level in their product, they alerted people with: "Pepsi-Cola's up to date, for modern folks who watch their weight."...(Click title for more)
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 Film Review:
On the Road
Directed by Walter Salles
IFC Films
By Nick Pinkerton
Village Voice
Two sacred texts of the '50s proto-counterculture have escaped the rapacious machine of cinema adaptation for a half-century.
One is J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, which probably only would have worked starring Salinger himself, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road, that ecstatic recount of crossings and recrossings of North America undertaken in the late 1940's by Kerouac and his muse, Neal Cassady (or "Dean Moriarty," in the book), an honest-to-God western tramp fresh out of the reformatory with a vengeful hard-on.
![On the Road - Official Trailer 2012 [HD] Kristen Stewart Movie](https://thumbnail.constantcontact.com/remoting/v1/vthumb/YOUTUBE/1d1b7edccd2746a9a3bc50f62282eedd) | On the Road - Official Trailer 2012
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Watching Bob Dylan recite Kerouac's "The only people for me are the mad ones" run from memory in Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home tells you everything of On the Road's scriptural status with his generation. Forty years Mr. Dylan's junior, I first read that passage in a question on the SAT verbals section. Most recently, Katy Perry cited it as the inspiration for her single "Firework."
So On the Road has lost much of its secret society thrill, making it the inevitable screen adaptation's job to resuscitate. And now Kerouac's discover-America story has been filmed, written for the screen by Puerto Rican Jos� Rivera, directed by Brazilian Walter Salles-his Motorcycle Diaries cohort-and made with an Englishman, Sam Riley, as Kerouac's alter ego Sal Paradise. This perspective is not necessarily a disadvantage, for Kerouac, a Northeasterner of French-Canadian stock-we see him speaking Quebecois to his mother at the Ozone Park, Queens, apartment that they share-self-identifies as an awed outsider, hanging on to cowboy Cassady and black jazz musicians to submerge himself into the enigma of America.
Riley doesn't seem like he would have landed Kerouac's football scholarship. But beefy blond Garrett Hedlund, as Dean, has a swinging-dick panther prowl and gives off something of Moriarty's itchy go-go compulsion-though he more often suggests Levi's-ad Americana than a wired dude you'd find hanging around a Greyhound station at 2 a.m. A feeling of reckless chance is difficult to achieve on a $25 million period piece, for the vintage sedans must be acquisitioned, and the signs must be hung on the streets in New York and San Francisco and then shot from just the right angle. The filmmaker's solution is to give more attention to polymorphous bedroom and backseat experimentation than to exploration of the landscape. Playing Dean's on-again, off-again jailbait nympho wife, Marylou, Kristen Stewart is a boon; Viggo Mortensen also shows up as "Bull Lee"-code name of William S. Burroughs-doing what seems like a long-honed party-trick impersonation of Burroughs's adenoidal drawl.
Salles's On the Road does build to a certain rueful poignancy. The film ends with a last, guilty meeting, Paradise's fortunes beginning to rise as Moriarty's fall; he's a burned-out firework, precisely because he has put into practice the irresponsible, footloose philosophy that Paradise is making an artistic commodity. Here is one glimmer of truth in what's otherwise a deliberately unfinished fraud-another "primitive" postwar antique repurposed for boutique sale.
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time is long past for 'Lone Rangers'. Being a socialist by your self is
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