Most of all, it's urgent that you defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina (photo above), the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget' 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...

in Combating Austerity, War and the Right

Nearly 100 delegates, observers and friends gathered in Pittsburgh, PA for the 7th Convention of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism over the July 18-21, 2013 weekend. The goals of the gathering were to take stock of the political battles since their last convention in 2009, to assess the organization's strengths, weaknesses and ongoing challenges, and to chart a path of unity and struggle for the upcoming period.

The participants came from all sections of the country: from California to Florida, from Texas to Boston, and many points in between. Almost all were deeply embedded in mass struggles-trade unions and community organizations, women's groups, civil rights organizations and peace and justice coalitions. Many had also taken part in a variety of independent electoral battles against the GOP and the right, and everyone had been in the streets during the battles against the wars, the Occupy upsurge and for justice in the Trayvon Martin case.

Kicking off the meeting was a "School for Young People." That innovation started a day before the main sessions of the convention. The presence of 20 young activists-men and women, of several nationalities, fresh from many battles, especially in the South-added a dynamic quality to all the discussions for the entire weekend.

"We appreciated the steps CCDS has made to accept the need for youth leadership in the socialist left and progressive movements," said Will Emmons of Kentucky. The students saw the school as a "good first start," and looked forward to more and better efforts in overcoming the intergenerational divide in much of the socialist movement.

The convention itself was organized into five plenary sessions and 16 workshops, with a cultural event and dinner on Saturday evening. It opened for the youth school and other early arrivers Thursday evening with the showing of the new film, "Anne Braden: Southern Patriot," an inspiring story of the battles of Anne Braden and her husband, Carl Braden of Kentucky, in decades of battles against white supremacy and other fronts in the class struggle across the South. Filmmaker Anne Lewis from Texas was on hand to lead a discussion that followed.

All the convention's deliberations were organized around a "main resolution," with the various plenaries and workshops dealing with its different sections. The five plenary topics were 1) assessing the concrete conditions, 2) the terrains of struggle against austerity, 3) the climate change crisis, 4) strategic formations and the progressive majority, and 5) the quest for left unity.

"What time is it?" asked Mildred Williamson, a CCDS national committee member from Chicago, in her remarks opening the first plenary session, which was chaired by Randy Shannon of Western PA. "It's a time of economic, social, environmental, and racial injustice on steroids." she continued, "a time of no respect for humanity." She proceeded to spotlight the full range of current conditions with the lens showing the inter-connection of class, race and gender. "What time is it?" she repeated, "As long as Black and brown lives are thought of and treated as disposable, in a 21st century-three-fifths-of-a-person fashion, it will be impossible to achieve working class power in this country. Economic and social policies are literally destroying Black and brown lives, and simultaneously further weakening working class power.... we must fight with humility and purpose to strengthen and promote radicalized thought and action in the quest for social justice, human rights and working class power. This requires a fresh look at what it means to be 'Left' in this phase of capitalism."

Williamson concluding by posing the most poignant questions to the delegates:

"What is the winning strategy to reduce the number of white working class people from voting against their own class interests, especially since fewer are unionized and fewer live in integrated communities? What will be the winning strategy to achieve left unity - and just what does that mean today? How can we build respect for youth in leadership of social justice movements while still showing simultaneous respect for elders? How do we fully move our thought and action from the multiracial unity 'slogan' to normalized, genuine demonstrations of respect for multiple cultures, gender expressions and sexual orientations? These questions--and more tough ones--need answers in order to chart the path forward in the quest for working class power. Let's work on them at this convention and thereafter."... ...(Click title for more)

Thousands At 'Moral Monday' in Asheville, NC; Protests Spread to Chicago and Oakland

August 6, 2013 - Asheville police estimate 8,000 to 10,000 people attended Mountain Moral Monday, the first in a series of regional Moral Monday demonstrations. Above is an aerial shot of the crowd.

In other Moral Monday news, protests were held in Chicago and Oakland this week. Six people were arrested for civil disobedience at an anti-ALEC 'Moral Monday' sit-in in Chicago, while Oakland protesters held the first of a series of monthly 'Moral Monday' peace and justice rallies.

Via eNews Park Forest:

    The Chicago Moral Monday Coalition takes its name from the series of ongoing weekly protests in North Carolina.

    "Over the last three months, more than 900 North Carolinians have been arrested, and thousands upon thousands more have rallied to support them. Our brothers and sisters in Raleigh have been protesting cuts to public education and assaults on labor, attacks on Medicaid, unemployment and other social programs, and disenfranchisement through restrictive voter ID laws," said Chicago Moral Monday Coalition member Rev Marilyn Pagán-Banks, United Church of Christ.

    "While Moral Monday activists and community members have been targeting their state legislators, most of these new laws were originally written by ALEC. As North Carolinians take their protest to Asheville today to follow their congresspeople home after the end of the legislative session, we join them in solidarity as we take the Moral Monday protest to the authors of these and other immoral laws in Chicago," said Rev Pagán-Banks.

eNews Park Forest - Clergy, unions, community organizers take over Palmer House Hilton Lobby, demanding hotel rescind invitation to ALEC

More information about Oakland Moral Mondays can be found on the Moral Mondays Bay Area facebook page and the Oakland Moral Monday Rally for Peace and Justice facebook event page.

News & Observer - 'Moral Monday' protest in Asheville brings out thousands

    "You can't do wrong in Raleigh and then hide back home," said the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP.

    Several dozen of the more than 930 people - including at least 68 from Western North Carolina - arrested during the 13 weeks of protests in Raleigh were brought on the stage in Asheville as the crowd chanted "Thank you."

Blue Ridge Now - County residents add voices to Moral Monday protest

    "I'm frustrated that the state Republican Party has changed so much," the Hendersonville resident said. "I actually campaigned for Sen. (Tom) Apodaca and (Rep.) Chuck McGrady. Years ago, I thought that Apodaca was going to bring a liberal or moderate flavor to the Republican Party, but he has not done that."

Citizen-Times - Protest packs Asheville

    "It's nothing like being in the mountains with folks who know how to fight," Barber said.

    Organizers vowed the event is the start of rallies that will be held in all North Carolina congressional districts to protest legislation they say has disenfranchised voters, taken away women's rights and hurt people who are already down on their luck, among other things.

Mountain Xpress - 'We fight': Moral Monday brings thousands to downtown Asheville to protest legislature

    "We know what it's like to have those in power tell you you should wait an undetermined period of time for equal protection under the law; we can't wait and we won't," she said. "We are part of every single community represented here. When you attack any community, you attack us. When you attack us, you attack every community."

WRAL - NAACP, others seek sit-down with McCrory

    NC NAACP President Rev. William Barber asked McCrory in a letter last Thursday to veto House Bill 589, the elections omnibus that includes voter ID and host of other major changes to state voting and campaign laws.

    "We understand you are presently considering the Bill, to make what will be a historic decision to sign or veto it," Barber says in the letter "As you know, we, and perhaps 80% of North Carolina voters believe it to be one of the most restrictive and regressive attacks on minority, elderly and young people's voting rights seen in this nation since the end of Reconstruction and the implementation of Jim Crow at the turn of the 20th Century."

WUNC - As Moral Monday goes on the road, a new question surfaces: can this movement last?

    "Well I think the most critical moment in generating that coalition was his endorsement of gay rights," remarked Chafe, who teaches history and social change. He's been arrested himself in Moral Monday protests. Chafe says Barber's endorsement of marriage equality - as a Black minister - in the run up to the Amendment One vote last year broadened his base substantially.

Salon - Reconstruction 3.0: Can Moral Monday help counteract SCOTUS?

    "I felt a moral obligation to all of those people in the civil rights movement who had put their lives and jobs on the line," Mrs. Ritter explained. "I wanted them to know that what they did mattered." She joined her many colleagues in Monday protests at North Carolina's capitol building and went proudly to jail....(Click title for more)

It's not coincidental that at this very moment both the labor and racial justice movements stand at a crossroads in our nation's consciousness.

The people who fight to undo worker's rights and assault unions are often the very same folks who craft laws and policies that allowed Trayvon Martin's killer to walk free, that disenfranchise black voters and expand the use of racial profiling. Moreover, the public rhetoric of post-racialism is closely tied to the false promise of rampant corporate profiteering that casts the labor movement as an irrelevant "special interest."

In 2013, the landscape of the national labor movement could charitably be described as "receding." Last year the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a national union membership rate of 11.3 percent - down from 11.8 percent in 2011.The ever-declining number of union members in 2012 was 14.4 million, while in 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.

But there are other figures and in some ways they are even more revealing. In 2012, among major race and ethnicity groups, black workers had a higher union membership rate (13.4 percent) than white workers (11.1 percent), Asian (9.6 percent), or Hispanic (9.8 percent). And black men had the highest union membership rate - 14.8 percent.

These statistics are not lost on labor leaders wishing to reverse their movement's declining numbers. Said Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO:

"There's no evil that's inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism-and it's something we in the labor movement have a special responsibility to challenge.... Because we know, better than anyone else, how racism is used to divide working people."

In the aftermath of the Zimmerman trial Trumka's words should remind those of us who are working for economic justice that we must not do so in isolation, but build a vision that is tied to broader questions of social justice, paying particular attention to racial justice - or run the risk of becoming irrelevant to large swaths of our base.

Trumka's charge that the labor movement has a "special responsibility to challenge" an intrinsically racist system, is a call to action, a blueprint to address racism by championing policies that are aimed directly at relieving the plight of African Americans - whose unemployment rate has stood at double the national rate for the last four decades. The statistics illustrating black loyalty to the labor movement show that behind the numbers lies a reality that often goes either ignored or not properly exploited to the benefit of that movement.

The historic turnaround in the labor movement to include black workers in its ranks was both an ethical and pragmatic decision, as must be our commitment to pay consistent and fervent attention to America's current conditions.

"The labor movement must step up our fight for economic justice for all," Leo Gerard, the international president of the United Steelworkers has said. "It is our duty to make that issue a priority if we truly want to create a more perfect union."

Unions can no longer afford to adhere to the failed "rising tide lifts all boats" rhetoric. Such an approach ignores the specific conditions under which the vast majority of black people arrived in this country, the legacy of chattel slavery, the assignment of non-personage and super-exploitation of black labor, not to mention the earlier role of organized labor in perpetuating such conditions.

If labor cannot utilize everything in its toolkit to turn the tide, then it and the aspirations of millions of black, brown, yellow, red and yes, white people will be tragically marginalized.

"The labor movement must step up our fight for economic justice for all. Statistics show that these problems inflict a disproportionate amount of pain on African Americans and on young black men in particular. It is our duty to make that issue a priority if we truly want to create a more perfect union." -Leo W. Gerard, International President, USW

Cuba's First Solar Farm:
A Step Toward Clean and Green Energy

August 1, 2013, CANTARRANA, Cuba (AP) - It's like a vision of the space age, carved out of the jungle: Thousands of glassy panels surrounded by a lush canopy of green stretch as far as the eye can see, reflecting the few clouds that dot the sky on a scorching Caribbean morning.

Cuba's first solar farm opened this spring with little fanfare and no prior announcement. It boasts 14,000 photovoltaic panels which in a stroke more than doubled the country's capacity to harvest energy from the sun.

The project, one of seven such farms in the works, shows a possible road map to greater energy independence in cash-poor Cuba, where Communist leaders are being forced to consider renewables to help keep the lights on after four failed attempts to strike it rich with deep-water oil drilling and the death of petro-benefactor Hugo Chavez.

"For us this is the future," said Ovel Concepcion, a director with Hidroenergia, the state-run company tasked with building the solar park 190 miles (300 kilometers) east of Havana in the central province of Cienfuegos.

"This is just like having an oil well," he told The Associated Press on a recent tour of the facility.

Outside experts have chastised Cuba for missing an opportunity to develop alternative energy sources; just 4 percent of its electricity comes from renewables. That lags behind not only standard-setter Germany (25 percent) but also comparable, developing Caribbean nations such as the Dominican Republic (14 percent).

Located on rural land unfit for farming, the solar park at Cantarrana, which translates roughly as "where frogs sing," is a tentative step toward redressing that oversight.

Construction began at the end of last year, about the same time that officials announced that a fourth exploratory offshore oil well drilled in 2012 was a bust and the only rig in the world that can drill in the deep waters off Cuba under U.S. embargo rules set sail with no return date.

In April, the solar farm came online and began contributing the first solar power to the island's energy grid. Cuba already had about 9,000 panels in use, but all of them were for small-scale, isolated usage such as powering rural hamlets, schools and hospitals.

The solar farm now generates enough electricity to power 780 homes and had saved the equivalent of 145 tons of fossil fuels, or around 1,060 barrels of crude, through the end of July. Peak capacity is expected to hit 2.6 megawatts when the final panels are in place in September.

That's just a drop in the energy bucket, of course.

Cuba gets about 92,000 barrels of highly subsidized oil per day from Venezuela to meet about half its consumption needs, according to an estimate by University of Texas energy analyst Jorge Pinon.

But hopes are high that solar can be a big winner in Cuba, which enjoys direct sunlight year-round, allowing for consistent high yields of 5 kilowatt-hours per square meter of terrain.

"The possibility of solar energy on a large scale could contribute to the island's future energy security," said Judith Cherni, an alternative energy expert at the Imperial College London Center for Environmental Policy who is familiar with Cuba's efforts.

Six other solar parks will come online in the coming months in Havana and the regions of Camaguey, Guantanamo, the Isle of Youth, Santiago and Villa Clara, though Concepcion did not specify their size.

Concepcion did not say how much the Cantarrana park cost, but said the industry standard for a facility of its size is $3 million to $4 million. The government, which controls nearly all economic activity in Cuba, financed construction, and the panels were manufactured at a factory in the western province of Pinar del Rio.

Cantarrana is already saving the island around $800 a day and Concepcion said it should pay for itself after a little more than a decade into its 25-year expected lifespan.

The project is a notable change in mindset for a country that relies on imports for half its energy consumption and is vulnerable to the political ebb and flow in other countries.

After the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s, a loss of Soviet subsidies plunged Cuba into a severe crisis. Blackouts sometimes darkened Havana for 12 hours at a time.

Chavez's election in Venezuela in 1998 helped ease the crunch, but his death this March made clear that Havana can hardly depend on the tap staying open forever....(Click title for more)

July 19, 2013 - It's become fashionable to say that political music is either dead or irrelevant. "Because of the '60s, part and parcel of being a 'serious music fan' is lamenting that music isn't political enough," wrote communications scholar Michael Barthel in Salon last year, in an article called "Protest Songs Are Pointless." The pop sound that's churned out these days by top-grossing industry producers, even when it's edgy or raging, is rarely political. But some of us secretly long for the solidarity that comes from belting out an old anthem together, without embarrassment. We wish it were possible for such a small act to foment revolutions.

As the music industry grows more consolidated, it supports few of the fiercely independent voices that define political folk music.

It's never been quite that simple. Protest songs tend to grow from existing social movements, not the other way around. They nourish and reinforce the emotional strength necessary to confront political problems. And they remind us that we aren't alone in our convictions-this is how I felt when I first heard Dar Williams' music in 1998, when I was still a student. She reached into my Gen X angst, not with a political rant but with something far more personal. "I'm so glad that you finally made it here. You thought nobody cared, but I did; I could tell," she sang in "You're Aging Well," a song that seems to call, much in the way Gloria Steinem did, for a revolution based on self-esteem.

Today, Dar Williams is the torchbearer for a set of musical sensibilities that have deep roots in America's history of dissent-from the abolition songs of the 19th century and the labor anthems of the early and mid-20th to the folk revival of the 1960s. The small-framed, 46-year-old guitar player, vocalist, and mother of two has, for the past two decades, established herself as "one of America's very best singer-songwriters," in the words of the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg.

I recently talked to Williams, several hours before she performed at a show in downtown Seattle, about the shape of today's folk music and how her political life intersects with her songwriting. In conversation, she is warm and unpretentious-her blond hair was swept up casually on top of her head, and she wore purple fleece and blue jeans. And also probing-she asked me about cycling, vegetarianism, renewable energy, and Seattle transportation politics.

Williams notes there's a "direct line" of influence from the 1960s folk revival to her own music, and this isn't just theoretical. Legendary folk singer Joan Baez got her start playing at the famous Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass., where she performed with other stars of the era, including Pete Seeger. Beginning in the 1980s, a second, albeit smaller, folk revival produced stars like Tracy Chapman, John Gorka, Suzanne Vega, and Ani DiFranco in New York and Cambridge. "In the early 1990s ... the re-emergence of the singer-songwriter movement coming out of Cambridge was my scene. It was open-mikes; it was late nights; it was song circles and tip jar gigs," says Williams-all against the backdrop of third-wave feminism and the gender movement.

"In the '80s, it was come out ... be open about your sexual orientation. In the '90s, so many people are out; that's when we discover this huge spectrum of ways of being sexual-the flexibility of orientation and, by extension, many ways of being a woman and ways of being a man." Williams became known for several songs that were subtly gender-bending, including "When I Was a Boy" ("I was a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike. Riding topless, yeah, I never cared who saw") and "Iowa," which leads with the line, "I've never had a way with women," though it's never clear whether the narrator is male or female....(Click title for more)

 
By Inquisitr.com

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