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February 15, 2013
In This Issue
Full Employment
Banks Too Big to Jail?
Cayman Hideouts?
KY Loves Mountains
Signs of Collapse
Philly School Closings
Global Student Surge
'No', a Film on Chile
Book on Steelworkers
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Sunday, Feb 24, 2013  
2:00 - 4:30 pm

Henry Winston Unity Hall
235 West 23rd Street New York, NY


The Majority Voted  
Against Racism  
Unity is the Mandate  
WE'RE NOT GOING BACK! 

Celebration of African American Culture & Struggle

Performances by: The People's Chorus Amiri & Amina Baraka Kahlil AlMustafa

Featured Speakers:
Pearl Granat, SEIU 1199 Vice President,
Maria Ramos, Labor Activist,
Chris Owens, Bkln. Reform Democrat

Keynote Address:
Jarvis Tyner, Communist Party USA

Wine & Cheese Reception Following Program
 

New 'Online University of the Left' Now at 2800+ Friends. 16,000 Vistors and reaching 100,000+ More...Check It Out and Be Amazed!


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Tina at AFL-CIO
Video: 10,000+ March vs Austerity in Ireland

 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...
Blog of the Week: 
Moyers & Co. 


Bill Moyers discusses drone warfare


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.

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Tina at AFL-CIO

...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...
  
Finance Capital vs.
Progressive Majority    
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, 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...


How HSBC Hooked Up with Drug Traffickers and Terrorists. And Got Away with It


By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone

The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice.

Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the largest drug-and-terrorism money-laundering case ever. Yes, they issued a fine - $1.9 billion, or about five weeks' profit - but they didn't extract so much as one dollar or one day in jail from any individual, despite a decade of stupefying abuses.

People may have outrage fatigue about Wall Street, and more stories about billionaire greedheads getting away with more stealing often cease to amaze. But the HSBC case went miles beyond the usual paper-pushing, keypad-punching� sort-of crime, committed by geeks in ties, normally associated� with Wall Street. In this case, the bank literally got away with murder - well, aiding and abetting it, anyway.

For at least half a decade, the storied British colonial banking power helped to wash hundreds of millions of dollars for drug mobs, including Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, suspected in tens of thousands of murders just in the past 10 years - people so totally evil, jokes former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, that "they make the guys on Wall Street look good." The bank also moved money for organizations linked to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and for Russian gangsters; helped countries like Iran, the Sudan and North Korea evade sanctions; and, in between helping murderers and terrorists and rogue states, aided countless common tax cheats in hiding their cash.

"They violated every goddamn law in the book," says Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate investigator who headed a major bribery investigation against Lockheed in the 1970s that led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. "They took every imaginable form of illegal and illicit business."

That nobody from the bank went to jail or paid a dollar in individual fines is nothing new in this era of financial crisis....(Click title for more)
Corporate America: Are You With
the USA or the Cayman Islands?


Speaking at a news conference on a new bill to shut down overseas tax havens, Sen. Bernie Sanders gestures toward a photo of a Cayman Islands building used by more than 18,000 companies to avoid paying taxes

By Sen. Bernie Sanders
Huffington Post

Feb 9, 2013 - When the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street drove this country into the deepest recession since the 1930s, the largest financial institutions in the United States took every advantage of being American. They just loved their country -- and the willingness of the American people to provide them with the largest bailout in world history.

In 2008, Congress approved a $700 billion gift to Wall Street. Another $16 trillion in virtually zero interest loans and other financial assistance came from the Federal Reserve. America. What a great country.

But just two years later, as soon as these giant financial institutions started making record-breaking profits again, they suddenly lost their love for their native country. At a time when the nation was suffering from a huge deficit, largely created by the recession that Wall Street caused, the major financial institutions did everything they could to avoid paying American taxes by establishing shell corporations in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens.

In 2010, Bank of America set up more than 200 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands (which has a corporate tax rate of 0.0 percent) to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It worked. Not only did Bank of America pay nothing in federal income taxes, but it received a rebate from the IRS worth $1.9 billion that year. They are not alone. In 2010, JP Morgan Chase operated 83 subsidiaries incorporated in offshore tax havens to avoid paying some $4.9 billion in U.S. taxes. That same year Goldman Sachs operated 39 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens to avoid an estimated $3.3 billion in U.S. taxes. Citigroup has paid no federal income taxes for the last four years after receiving a total of $2.5 trillion in financial assistance from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis.

On and on it goes. Wall Street banks and large companies love America when they need corporate welfare. But when it comes to paying American taxes or American wages, they want nothing to do with this country. That has got to change.

Offshore tax abuse is not just limited to Wall Street. Each and every year corporations and the wealthy are avoiding more than $100 billion in U.S. taxes by sheltering their income offshore.

Pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have fought to make it illegal for the American people to buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe. But, during tax season, Eli Lilly and Pfizer shift drug patents and profits to the Netherlands and other offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Apple wants all of the advantages of being an American company, but it doesn't want to pay American taxes or American wages. It creates the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod, and iTunes in the United States, but manufactures most of its products in China so it doesn't have to pay American wages. Then it shifts most of its profits to Ireland, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands and other tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes. Without such maneuvers, Apple's federal tax bill in the United States would have been $2.4 billion higher in 2011.

Offshore tax schemes have become so absurd that one five-story office building in the Cayman Islands is now the "home" to more than 18,000 corporations.

This tax avoidance does not just reduce the revenue that we need to pay for education, healthcare, roads, and environmental protection, it is also costing us millions of American jobs. Today, companies are using these same tax schemes to lower their tax bills by shipping American jobs and factories abroad. These tax breaks have contributed to the loss of more than 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs and the closure of more than 56,000 factories since 2000. That also has got to change.

At a time when we have a $16.5 trillion national debt; at a time when roughly one-quarter of the largest corporations in America are paying no federal income taxes; and at a time when corporate profits are at an all-time high; it is past time for Wall Street and corporate America to pay their fair share.

That's what the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act (S.250) that I have introduced with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) is all about.

This legislation will stop profitable Wall Street banks and corporations from sheltering profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It will also stop rewarding companies that ship jobs and factories overseas with tax breaks. The Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated in the past that the provisions in this bill will raise more than $590 billion in revenue over the next decade.

As Congress debates deficit reduction, it is clear that we must raise significant new revenue. At 15.8 percent of GDP, federal revenue is at almost the lowest point in 60 years. Our Republican colleagues want to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the children, the veterans and the most vulnerable by making massive cuts. At a time when the middle class already is disappearing, that is not only a grossly immoral position, it is bad economics.

We have a much better idea. Wall Street and the largest corporations in the country must begin to pay their fair share of taxes. They must not be able to continue hiding their profits offshore and shipping American jobs overseas to avoid taxes.

Here's the simple truth. You can't be an American company only when you want a massive bailout from the American people. You have also got to be an American company, and pay your fair share of taxes, as we struggle with the deficit and adequate funding for the needs of the American people. If Wall Street and corporate America don't agree, the next time they need a bailout let them go to the Cayman Islands, let them go to Bermuda, let them go to the Bahamas and let them ask those countries for corporate welfare.....(Click title for more)


By Stu Johnson

Kentucky Public Radio

FRANKFORT, Ky. - Kentucky's capital steps were the scene Thursday afternoon for an annual rally of Appalachian activists.  The 'I Love Mountains Day' event brought hundreds to Frankfort.

Besides residents, the annual 'I Love the Mountains' rally also attracts supporters from outside the region.  Sydney Bernstein came to Frankfort from Kansas City.

"And I think it's important to preserve what was originally here, when this is just for money.  It's just for money and not to for anything else.  Money and energy and there are obviously alternative ways to get energy," said Bernstein.

Accompanying a chanting crowd of marchers with his guitar was Matthew Parsons of West Virginia.  Along with other activists, Parsons talks about transitioning Appalachia's economy away from coal.

"What we need to see is new businesses moving into these areas and to see the coal move out because they're killing the area, killing the economy.  They're creating a mono-economy.  They've got a monopoly on the work for us," said Parsons.

Representatives of the coal industry also came to the state capital.  With its high-paying jobs, Kentucky Coal Association President Bill Bissett says coal remains an essential part of Appalachia's economy, and should be protected.

"When people suggest that tourism jobs or Walmart or things like that are gonna replace coal mining jobs which pay much better and have much better benefits.  There's a real concern that you're again gonna really destabilize the livelihoods and essentially force people out of eastern Kentucky," added Bissett.

One of the slogans chanted by activists was 'M-T-R has got to go.'  It's a reference to mountaintop removal mining.  Bissett says surface mines cover half the coal shipped out of eastern Kentucky.  He argues banning half of coal production would negatively impact region's economy.
20 Min Video: 7 Causes Of US Empire's Collapse
American Collapse
Prof. Jerry Kroth reviews the causes of a civilization's collapse and how the U.S. scores on these factors, introducing us to The American Dystopia Index.


By Kristin Rawls
Alternet.org

Feb 15, 2013 - On Dec. 13, 2012, Philadelphia became the latest major American city to recommend sweeping school closures for the next academic year. Under this new proposal, a total of 37, or about 16 percent, of the district's 237 public schools will be shuttered this June.

That's down from the 40 schools the city designated for closure back in May, but still represents an unprecedented move in Philadelphia's history. The School Commission Reform, an outside body appointed to govern Philadelphia schools, has scheduled its final vote for March 7.

Overall, 44 schools will be affected by the shakeup: Of the 37 to be closed, three will relocate by merging with other Philadelphia schools. Beyond this, seven other schools will face major restructuring - i.e., though these school programs will remain intact, the schools themselves will be uprooted and moved to other buildings, merged with other schools, and/or forced to add or subtract grade levels. About 15,000 students will be affected by the proposed changes. And though official numbers have not been released, hundreds of teacher and staff layoffs are also expected.

There is nothing democratic about how this happened to the City of Brotherly Love. Though officials gave lip service to the idea of "parental empowerment" through " school choice," in the end, parents had no role in deciding what policies would be enforced. Everything was outsourced. ...(Click title for more)

By Zachary Bell

Waging Nonviolence via Truthout

Feb 7, 2013 - On Nov. 14, 2012, tens of thousands of students flooded the streets of Montreal to express opposition to the proposed tuition hikes.

Iain Brannigan, one of approximately 65,000 participants, often took part in the city's frequent, massive student protests - but this day was uniquely exciting for him. As the University of Ottawa international-development student marched to the tune of "� qui la rue?" (Whose streets? ) "� nous la rue!" (Our streets!), he knew that the words were being chanted simultaneously - in a dozen different languages - by students around the globe.

It was the first day of the week-long Global Education Strike, during which thousands of students refused to attend school in Quebec, France and Belgium, while thousands more participated in solidarity demonstrations in Thailand, England, Indonesia, Italy and California. Only some of Brannigan's comrades knew about the synchronicity, but he was well aware of it. For four years he had been a user of the little-known, unglamorous website where the global demonstration had been coordinated: ism-global.net, better known as the International Student Movement.

For all students, everywhere

The website has served as a communication platform since 2008, where activists have coordinated eight international actions. The International Student Movement has active members in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Balkans, and functions as a rich reservoir of multimedia news on the ever-expanding global student movement. Although the International Student Movement is explicitly a platform for autonomous coordination and not an organization itself, most of its users have united around a joint statement that lays out the community's shared values.

"[We] have been protesting against the increasing commercialization and privatization of public education, and fighting for free and emancipatory education," it explains. "We strive for structures based on direct participation and nonhierarchical organization through collective discussion and action."

If the International Student Movement as a collective has an agenda of its own, it is to help students in many different places realize that they are part of the same struggle.

It's an idea that is already in the minds of many student leaders: that their protest is not only to reclaim their own education from profit-seeking institutions, but also to reshape the community of students that they are fighting for - all students, everywhere.

A history of tech-roots organizing

The International Student Movement is riding a wave of global education protests. In 2010, British students struck back against austerity measures. In 2011, Chilean students frightened university administrators around the world by sparring with security forces in protest of neoliberal education policies.

In 2012, Quebec universities organized the largest student strike in the country's history: a successful six-month protest, including a 300,000-person demonstration, which halted proposed tuition hikes. Over the last few years, less-recognized student movements in Russia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Croatia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Italy and Swaziland have helped fill in a now finely-pixelated picture of an emerging anti-austerity global student movement.

And while the website wasn't central in the organization of all of these actions, its developers hope that the site will increasingly help connect these national efforts, allowing more people to see how social ills from New York City to Athens share conspicuously similar symptoms....(Click title for more)
No
Directed by Pablo Larrain
SONY Picture Classics

By Nick Pinkerton
The Village Voice

Feb 13, 2013 - In 1988 the fate of Chile and its dictator came down to a ballot as simple as a middle-schooler's do-you-like-me? note. A referendum offered citizens a simple choice: a "yes" for allowing President Augusto Pinochet to return to office for another eight years, having clung to power since his 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, or a "no" for something-anything-else.

Tyrants control their media, of course, but the opposition wasn't entirely shut out. The national "debate" platform was two 15-minute television slots in which opposing viewpoints could be voiced, after which regularly scheduled programming-that is, flagrantly pro

NO | Film Trailer | Participant Media
NO | Film Trailer | Participant Media
 
Pablo Larrain's ad-world political thriller 'No' takes place during that referendum. Like Zero Dark Thirty, which opened with an audio collage of actual 911 calls from 9/11, No uses the actual commercial material the opposition created for its anti-Pinochet campaign and-re-creating the behind-the-scenes filming-deftly appropriates mediated history for fiction.

Ad exec Ren� Saavedra (Gael Garc�a Bernal) is introduced pitching a campaign for a cola called Free. Though Saavedra's father was a political exile, he's established a comfortable middle-class home for his own son. All of this is put at risk when Saavedra, approached for his expertise by a representative for the 17 motley opposition parties, agrees to act as a consultant on their "No" TV spots, streamlining their dissent into a single cogent message to crack the dictatorship's calcified consensus and sell, yes, freedom.

Saavedra jettisons the mostly leftist opposition's po-faced, old-school agitprop-montages of police crackdowns, figures on disappeared dissidents, checklists of the Pinochet regime's abuses. "Happiness is our concept," he says, then proceeds to manufacture the most inanely positive campaign for "No" imaginable: a rainbow logo! Insipid stock images of future bliss! Choice of a New Generation fizz! A clap-your-hands, sing-along jingle! Celebrity endorsements!

By comparison, the stodgy pro-Pinochet campaign is out-of-date, all red-baiting and fearmongering. A child endangered by an oncoming steamroller evokes memories of Lyndon Johnson's 1964 golden oldie "Peace Little Girl (Daisy)" ad, while the general has all the on-screen magnetism of a mattress-warehouse owner in a local-market commercial. Though Pinochet was a despot of the right, the phenomenon that No dramatizes is the same that eroded the dictatorships of the Communist left in Eastern Europe at the same time: the triumph of youth-catering MTV showmanship over the old line of father-knows-best propaganda.

While Saavedra uses the grammar of commercial advertising to sell Chileans democracy, Larrain's film works within an aesthetic template of its own: the language of contemporary hand-held cinematic realism. By shooting on three-quarter-inch Sony U-matic magnetic tape, the standard format of pre-1990 television news, Larrain can seamlessly mesh staged material with vintage 1988 footage of actual police crackdowns and pro-democracy assemblies.

What stays with you from No-certainly more than the scenes of Saavedra's home life, which don't register as more than the obligatory establishment of "something to fight for" motivation-is the film's sense of living in history that's mediated even as it's made. For some of the old guard in the opposition, including Saavedra's estranged wife, the seductive vapidity of the "No" campaign is an unconscionable betrayal of the bloody legacy of resistance. The ambivalence stirred up by these voices hangs over No until the triumphant conclusion, curiously muted, in which Chileans, like the former residents of the Soviet Union and its satellites, step out of dictatorship . . . only to find themselves citizens of a whole new simulacra.
MIT anthropologist's new book recounts the painful aftermath when steel plants suddenly closed in the American heartland...Click title above for remarkable photo slide show

By Peter Dizikes
MIT News Office

Jan 18, 2013 - In March 1980, when the industrial firm Wisconsin Steel abruptly closed its main mill in southeast Chicago, longtime employee Charles Walley was among 3,400 people who lost their jobs. The plant closure - which led to protests, controversy and lawsuits - had an enormous impact on Walley, a third-generation steelworker. He found intermittent employment as a tollbooth attendant, a janitor and a security guard, among other things, but never landed a better job, and remained bitter and depressed about his situation until his death in 2005.

"Yeah, we thought we were middle class there for a while," one of his daughters once overheard him musing aloud. "We were almost middle class."

The daughter who heard that comment, Christine Walley, is now an associate professor of anthropology at MIT and author of a new book, "Exit Zero," about the impact of deindustrialization on the lives of blue-collar workers in Chicago. In the book, published this month by the University of Chicago Press, Walley explores the lasting economic and psychological toll of such plant closings on her father and other working-class people like him.

In the book, Walley also builds an argument that rapid deindustrialization in the United States was not simply the result of seemingly inevitable shifts in the global economy, but a consequence of corporate-friendly policies, and a new emphasis on raising short-term share prices, that pitted the interests of management against the long-term interests of companies and their workers.

"If you really want to understand why there is this expanding class inequality in the United States, one of the places you have to look is the long-term impact of deindustrialization," Walley says. "We have to think historically about how we got into this position and how we can come out of it."

While the steel industry is a notable sector in which American industry has downsized, the same issue has been borne out in many areas of manufacturing and many parts of the country. As Walley notes, in 1960, one-third of all American laborers not working on farms had jobs in manufacturing, while in 2010, only one-eighth worked in the sector.

"The stories from Chicago are so similar in so many other communities that have experienced deindustrialization, I think it does have resonance with a lot of other places in the U.S.," Walley says.

The paycheck and self-respect

Most anthropologists do their research by immersing themselves in other cultures. But in Walley's case, she was immersed in the working-class neighborhoods of industrial southeast Chicago from birth. It was an area, Walley writes in "Exit Zero," where "neat lawns and never going on public assistance were quintessential points of pride." ...(Click title for more)

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