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He was the last of the twentieth century's national liberators. He became a global symbol of righteousness and reconciliation. He led his beloved, tormented country from the howling darkness of apartheid to the promised land of democracy with shrewdness, courage, and visionary determination. It was a long and difficult trip, both for Nelson Mandela, who died on Thursday, and for South Africa.

When Mandela was born, in 1918, his parents named him Rolihlahla-"troublemaker," in Xhosa. He got the name Nelson at a mission school, where teachers handed out the names of British imperial heroes. Raised in the Transkei, a remote, hilly territory on the Indian Ocean coast, he had an old-fashioned rural African childhood, herding cattle and sleeping in a round, thatched-roof hut. His father was an adviser to the royal family of the Thembu tribe; a renowned orator, he was illiterate, polygamous, and, in his son's memory, a commanding figure. At sixteen, Mandela was shocked to hear a Xhosa chief rail against the treatment of black South Africans. "I was cross rather than aroused by the chief's remarks," he wrote, in "Long Walk to Freedom," his autobiography, "dismissing his words as the abusive comments of an ignorant man who was unable to appreciate the value of the education and benefits that the white man had brought to our country."

Mandela's political evolution was gradual. At the University College of Fort Hare, his goal was to become "an interpreter or a clerk in the Native Affairs Department." He was a country boy, a clotheshorse, a Xhosa chauvinist. He was also a natural leader and, while at Fort Hare, he made friends who would become lifelong political comrades, among them Oliver Tambo. Mandela was expelled from Fort Hare in a dispute over student rights, then fled the Transkei to escape an arranged marriage. He arrived in Johannesburg in 1941, worked as a night watchman on a mine, and then met Walter Sisulu, a political activist, who helped him get a job as an articled clerk at a law firm. He began to study law. Slowly, he was drawn into politics.

    I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not.

Mandela became conscious of "an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people." White-minority rule in South Africa did resemble, for its black majority, an open-air prison. Dispossessed, restricted in their movements, blacks toiled, voteless, at the bottom of a pitiless economic and political structure.

One of the few channels available for mass resistance was the boycott. In 1943, Mandela marched in an enormous bus boycott that succeeded in reversing a fare increase. Soon afterward, he joined the African National Congress. The A.N.C. had been campaigning for equal rights, to little effect, since 1912. Determined to inject new zeal into the old organization, Mandela, along with Sisulu, Tambo, and others, founded the A.N.C. Youth League. The Youth League tried, unsuccessfully, to expel Communists, whose intentions they suspected, from the A.N.C. The young men also mistrusted the propensity of their radical white, Indian, and mixed-race comrades to monopolize discussions and thus replicate the prevailing social order.

Mandela became a lawyer in 1952. He and Tambo opened the country's first African law firm. The political landscape had become dramatically harsher, though, after Afrikaner nationalists, propounding a fiercely racist program that they called apartheid, won a whites-only national election in 1948. The dispossession of black South Africans accelerated. The Communist Party was outlawed. The state took over the education of blacks, with malign intent and ruinous consequences. Resistance leaders, including Mandela, were "banned"-a peculiarly South African punishment under which a person could not be quoted, speak publicly, write, travel, or associate with more than one person at a time.

In 1956, Mandela, along with a hundred and fifty-five other dissidents, was charged with treason. Their trial lasted more than four years. Although it ended with acquittals, Mandela had grown disenchanted with the law.

    I went from having an idealistic view of the law as a sword of justice to a perception of the law as a tool used by the ruling class to shape society in a way favorable to itself. I never expected justice in court, however much I fought for it, and though I sometimes received it.

The A.N.C. was outlawed in 1960. Mandela's first marriage and his law practice had already fallen victim to the rigors of his political involvement. Now he, along with many others, was driven underground or into exile. In 1961, the A.N.C. launched an armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). Mandela, convinced that there was no peaceful alternative, became its first commander. He travelled through Africa and Europe, seeking support. He underwent military training in Ethiopia, and then returned, in secret, to South Africa, where he was captured on August 5, 1962.

Mandela, Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, and six others were charged with sabotage, a crime that carried the death penalty. They announced beforehand that they would not appeal a death sentence. Mandela gave a four-hour speech from the dock, tracing his own evolution from tribalism to African nationalism to a belief in nonracial democracy. He admitted to being the commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe but denied that he was a Communist. He praised "the ideal of a democratic and free society" and concluded, "It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." He and his main co-defendants were given life sentences.

Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison, including eighteen years on Robben Island, an infamous penitentiary near Cape Town. He was forced to work for years in a lime quarry without sunglasses, which permanently damaged his eyesight. He later contracted tuberculosis from a damp cell. For companionship, he had most of the A.N.C.'s senior leadership, including Sisulu and Mbeki. An influx of new political prisoners arrived after the uprisings of 1976. Most of them had grown up with little knowledge of Mandela or the A.N.C., whose words, ideas, and even images were banned in South Africa. Robben Island became known as Nelson Mandela University. The confluence of activists of different generations, and the lively debates between them, created new alliances and, with the eventual release of some of the younger leaders, reinvigorated A.N.C. networks. In 1985, the regime offered to release Mandela if he would renounce violence as a political instrument. He replied that it was the government that needed to renounce violence, and he declined the offer, issuing a statement through his daughter Zindzi, saying, "Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts."...(Click title for more)

The FBI COINTELPRO Program and
the Fred Hampton Assassination

On December 4th it will be 44 years since a select unit of 14 Chicago Police officers, on special assignment to Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, executed a pre-dawn raid on a west side apartment that left Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark dead, several other young Panthers wounded, and the seven raid survivors arrested on bogus attempted murder charges. The physical evidence soon exposed the claims of a "shootout" that were made by Hanrahan and his men to be blatant lies, and that the murderous reality was that the police fired nearly 100 shots while the Panthers fired but one.

But those lies were only the first layer of a massive cover-up that was dismantled and exposed over the next eight years -- a cover-up designed to suppress the central role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its COINTELPRO program in the assassination.

In the wake of the raid, the Minister of Defense for the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Rush, stood on the steps of the bullet riddled BPP apartment and declared that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were responsible for the raid, but at that time there was no hard proof and it was dismissed by the media as mere rhetoric.

The first documentation that supported Rush's insightful allegation surfaced in March of 1971 when the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into a small FBI office in Media Pennsylvania and expropriated over 1000 FBI documents. These documents exposed the FBI's super-secret and profoundly illegal COINTELPRO program and its focus in the 1960s on the black liberation movement and its leaders. Citing the assassinated Malcolm X as an example, Hoover directed all of the Bureau's Offices to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize" African American organizations and leaders including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King, Stokley Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown.

In Chicago, the first major breakthrough came in 1973 when U.S. Attorney James Thompson revealed that Chicago Black Panther Party Chief of Security William O'Neal was a paid informant for the FBI. At that time I was a young lawyer working with my colleagues at the People's Law Office on a civil rights lawsuit that we had filed on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the December 4th raid. We quickly subpoenaed the Chicago FBI's Black Panther Party files and a grand total of 33 documents were produced. However, an honest Assistant U.S. Attorney included in those documents an FBI memorandum that incorporated a detailed floor plan of the interior of the BPP apartment which specifically identified the bed on which Hampton slept. The face of the memo also revealed that the floor plan, together with other important information designed to be utilized in a police raid, was based on information communicated by O'Neal to his FBI control agent who later supplied it to State's Attorney Hanrahan before the raid.

We then focused on unearthing more details about the FBI's involvement in the conspiracy, identified the FBI conspirators, joined them as defendants in the lawsuit and sought the Chicago office's COINTELPRO file in order to establish a direct link between the FBI's illegal program and the raid. When the Government refused to produce the file and the Judge refused to compel them to do so, we turned to Senator Frank Church's Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations. The Committee, which was created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, was investigating rampant abuses by all U.S. Intelligence Agencies, including the FBI. In late 1975 a Church Committee staffer informed us that there were several Chicago documents which definitively established the link. Armed with the content of the still secret documents, we were able to embarrass the Judge, who had privately reviewed the documents and previously declared them irrelevant, into ordering the FBI to produce the file. Among the documents provided were several that revealed the FBI's efforts to foment violence against Fred Hampton and the Chicago Panthers, and one dated December 3, 1969 that claimed the impending raid as part of the COINTELPRO program. ...(Click title for more)

Dec 6, 2013 - Dawn Moore was on "strike" Thursday. It was more a protest than a conventional attempt to stop all work at her job site, but it still packed a punch.  She took a day off from her work at a McDonald's in Chicago to join more than 150 protestors who marched from one fast-food or retail store to another in both the downtown "Loop" and several outlying neighborhoods. Chanting "we are the 99%" and carrying a giant Grinch puppet, they were there to demand that employers in those low-wage businesses pay employees $15 an hour and respect their right to organize a union freely.

"I think we all deserve a fair living wage," says Moore, 41, a 7.5-year veteran McDonald's worker. A divorced mother of two, she struggles to pay off $9,000 in student loans she incurred during less than a year at a "scam" college and has to move back and forth between apartments of a friend and a sister.

"Eight dollars and sixty-five cents is unacceptable," she said, standing in the morning cold near a McDonald's in an office tower. "Not only are we the backbones of these companies, we bring the corporations the money, but out of all the people at the corporation and franchises, we get paid the least. They'd rather give more money to the people who have a lot than to the little people who run their stores."

Similar protests marked the rough one-year anniversary of a campaign that kicked off last fall in New York, then Chicago, before spreading across the country. In some 100 cities throughout the country, marchers from unions, community groups and other sympathetic organizations turned out to demonstrate on behalf of the workers-and in most locations, fast-food workers joined in, usually a minority of leaders from most workplaces, many workers did risk illegal retaliation by their bosses.

One of the cities that saw fast food demonstrations for the first time was Baltimore. Local labor activists staged modest protests at two separate McDonald's franchises, though there were no instances of McDonalds' employees actually walking off the job.

John Fariani, a student at Johns Hopkins University and a local spokesperson for the Low Pay Is Not OK campaign-the name under which the one-day strike was organized-said the demonstrators at a McDonald's near the city's famed Fort McHenry national park had been organized through on-line promotions and local networks of labor activists. Of the dozen protestors at that site, most came from a local pro-labor group called Workers Assembly, while a smattering of other picketers represented the hospital workers union 1199SEIU or other organizations.

"Too many people view these [fast food] jobs as just for kids. That's just not true anymore. ... I'm glad to see the picketing for a better wage. Now it looks like it is taking off," says 1199SEIU member Marjorie Taylor.

The campaign-called Fight for 15 in Chicago and Fast Food Forward in New York, with other names in other citieshas succeeded in provoking a national debate over the growing dominance of low-wage, precarious work in the American economy, much as the Occupy movement led to a greater public focus on the gulf between the increasingly, spectacularly wealthy 1% of households and the stagnating or declining fortunes of the rest of the workforce.

While it has generated support for proposals to increase the minimum wage from the current rate of $7.25 to $9 by 2015 (from President Obama) or to $10.10 an hour (from Democrats such as Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller), the $15 goal has set the bar higher. Along with OUR Walmart's target of $25,000 a year, it is beginning to transform the debate from an arbitrary "minimum" that barely surpasses the poverty level to a "living wage." Also, Trish Kahle, a leader of workers at a Whole Foods store, notes that, after Occupy's successful effort to highlight the social problems of growing inequality, the Fight for 15 moved the battle over inequality into the workplace. Workers at her store struck before Thanksgiving, winning a guarantee that Thanksgiving will be a paid holiday next year and that the store will pay time-and-a-half for the day before Thanksgiving.

Coming out of the Great Recession, the number of low-wage jobs is growing 2.7 times faster than that of middle- or high-paid jobs, according to a 2012 report from the National Employment Law Project. As inequality grows, there is a greater social and economic need for improving the quality of jobs in retail and other low-paid sectors to provide family-supporting wages. In a speech on Tuesday, President Obama called growing inequality "the challenge of our time," arguing that it not only damages society-increasing illness, social immobility, distrust and threats to democracy-but is "bad for our economy."

Indeed, many economists have argued that inequality tends to slow economic growth by, among other things, increasing social conflict and depressing effective demand. Jared Bernstein, former economic advisor to Vice-President Biden, disagrees with some of those arguments in a new paper, but nevertheless concluded that "the channel through which inequality hurts growth is asset bubbles and financial -market instability."

Low-wage jobs are a drag on the economy-as well as an injustice to workers--because they don't even sustain the lives and labor of workers who perform them. ...(Click title for more)

Dec 1, 2013 -- Socialist Resistance --  The first indication that Left Unity is different from most other left-wing organisations came very early in its November 30 founding conference. Ken Loach, the person who is seen as having given the inspiration for the launch of the new party, proposed that we shouldn't take a decision on which of the political platforms to endorse. Ken lost the vote and conference moved on to next business. There was no dramatic tension, no sense of impending crisis. It would have been hard to imagine a similar scene at a Respect conference. It was a very promising omen.

Around 400 people attended the event. The morning sessions was given over to a discussion on platforms - documents which were intended to establish the general framework of Left Unity's politics. Socialist Resistance was strongly behind the Left Party Platform which we think defines Left Unity as a radical socialist party with strong positions on ecology and feminism. To various degrees the other platforms wanted to define the new party as an explicitly revolutionary one.

The existing interim leadership received what was effectively a vote of confidence. Members voted to allow it to remain in place until a new leadership is elected at a conference to be held by the end of March.

The Left Party Platform (LPP) won convincingly with 295 votes in favour and 101 against. The Socialist Platform was supported by 122 members and opposed by 216. The significance of this is that it failed to win much support beyond the list of people who had originally signed the statement proposing it. By contrast the LPP got the endorsement of the majority of Left Unity's members in the hall.

Another thing that made the conference rather different was that it was impossible to predict which way any of the votes would go. This was hardly surprising as most of the participants were strangers to each other. A vigorous debate on the safer spaces policy saw conference agree to refer it back for further discussion. While most participants understood the need for guidelines on protecting members from harassment and abuse the conference clearly felt that such a complex policy needed more time spent on it.

The afternoon was taken up with a long and intricate discussion on the constitution. From our perspective a crucial clause here was one which would have enabled Left Unity to organise in the north of Ireland. This emblem of the weight of British imperialism on the country's labour movement was removed.

More explicitly than other attempts to launch new political parties Left Unity has set out to tackle issues of gender imbalances. It has a commitment to women comprising at least 50% of its leadership and speeches in defence of male privilege were received cooly, this despite the fact that men were over-represented in the hall. Left Unity is set to be a self-consciously feminist organisation.

Although the party only formally launched on November 30 it already has over 1200 members, 400 of whom were sufficiently committed or able to attend its first conference. That is a small but significant base which already makes it one of the largest organisations on the British left. It has come into being at a tricky time. There are local government elections in May 2014 and a general election the following year. Labour will win most of the anti-coalition votes as people want to punish the Tories and it will be hard to win a big audience for a new left-wing party. But there is an audience for such a party. Many people will vote Labour with no great enthusiasm and will want a party that articulates something better, different, radical and socialist. Now Left Unity is there for them.

Dec 1, 2013 -- New Left Project -- Based on the votes, I would estimate that somewhat over 400 people gathered in Bloomsbury on Saturday to launch the new left party first suggested by Ken Loach some months ago.  The attendees were disproportionately veterans of the Left, older and white, but there were a lot of them.

There were few real surprises.  The 'platforms' debate was settled-although only a fool would say 'finally'.  Putting it schematically, the debate was between those who favoured a 'broad left' party and those who wanted a more traditional hard Left organisation based on a programme redolent-to my eyes-of the sort of 'where we stand' programme that Trotskyist organisations sometimes publish.

The Left Party Platform, representing the 'broad left' option, passed overwhelmingly with some positive but relatively minor amendments.  It gained about three quarters of the votes. Approximately another quarter aligned with alternatives such as the Socialist Platform.  This reflected what one would have thought was the balance of opinion in Left Unity. 

Perhaps the most telling moments in the conference concerned the resolution of the new organisation's gender politics.  The practical questions were these: should there be "at least 50%" representation for women in any leadership, and should the organisation have caucuses and sections for oppressed groups? 

Not all participants acquitted themselves admirably on this question.  One man complained that "at least 50%" representation for women would result in women being numerically dominant most of the time.  He indicated that he thought this was "nonsense," but didn't seem to be able to say why.  Others suggested that to have a quota would result in people not being selected on the basis of their politics.  This seemed to carry the implication that the present over-representation of men is in some sense politically meritocratic.

However, these delegates were fighting a steep uphill battle.  They had lost before the debate began.  Conference gave the most heartfelt and animated reception to those who spoke for feminism, and voted by mountainous majorities for "at least 50%" and for caucuses and sections.  These may seem like baby steps.  Of course they are.  But the signal sent by this conference is clear: the culture of the Left is changing and feminism is winning the argument.

At one point as the vote tallies were announced, and as if to dramatise the urgent relevance of 'intersectionality', a man griped from the floor: "what about class politics?" 

A woman nearby rose in heroic fury, and demanded: "Who said that?" 

 "Er...?" 

 "Who said that!?"

"What about class politics?"  The luckless man reiterated, to jeers and a few desperate, scattered hand claps.

"Right.  I'm a woman, and I'm working class-how about that?"  she snapped.  Exuberant applause....(Click title for more)

Bernie Sanders on 2016: His Candidacy,
Elizabeth Warren and the Clintons

    1

Dec 4, 2013 - Senator Bernie Sanders recently announced that he's considering entering the 2016 presidential race if a strong progressive doesn't. He also mention (in passing) that he likes Elizabeth Warren.

He's not alone. Seems like the rest of us Democratic voters like her a lot as well.

Josh Eidelson at Salon has a wide-ranging interview with Sen. Sanders about the state of the nation, the state of the issues he cares about, the peace initiative with Iran - and naturally, his candidacy and the potential candidacies of Sen. Warren and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

I found the 2016 part of the conversation fascinating. Here are a few segments of it. Be sure to read it all, though, if you're interested in this stuff. There's a lot of there there.

First, Sanders talks about why he might run:

    Well, let me just tell you, Josh, I don't wake up every morning with a huge desire to be president of the United States. I gather there are people who do. I don't.

    But what I do wake up believing is that this country is facing more serious crises than we have faced since the Great Depression. And if you include the planetary crisis of global warming, the situation today may even be worse. And given that reality, what distresses me enormously is that there is very little discussion about these major crises, and even less discussion about ideas that can resolve these issues.

    The nature of media is that presidential campaigns and candidates are a means, to some degree at least, of getting these issues out there. And I think that you can give all the speeches you want on the floor of the Senate, that's great, but I think being involved in debates and being out there around the country allows - gives you the opportunity to talk about these issues in a way that you otherwise could not.

Forcing the progressive discussion, in other words. And that discussion is being had (thank you, Noam Scheiber). Even by the right (thank you, Wall Street Journal).

Elizabeth Warren's name always comes up in these discussions, doesn't it. Sanders:

    Oh, Elizabeth Warren is, you know, clearly one of the smartest people in the Senate. She is a true progressive. I've known Elizabeth for many, many years. She is doing a great job, and understands fully the issues facing the middle class and working class in this country. She is a very strong proponent in defending the working families in this country.

    Why don't you give her a ring?

You could give her a ring too. Her number is 202-224-4543 (DC) or 617-565-3170 (Boston). Don't ask her to run (she already knows you want her to), but you could thank her for her support for expanding Social Security and ask her what she thinks about Medicare for all.

I use the phrase "the Clintons" because Eidelson does. Also because they really are a formidable team. Sanders again (my paragraphing):

    Well, actually that was a - a) You don't know and I don't know whether Hillary Clinton is running for president. And b) if she decides to run for president, we don't know the issues that she will be focusing on.

    I have known Hillary Clinton for a number of years, not terribly well, but I knew her when she was first lady and I knew her when she was in the Senate. I like her. She is extremely smart. But it's - we will have to see what she has to say, so - but based on the kind of centrist positions that we have seen her take in the past, it remains to be seen - although I may be wrong - it remains to be seen whether she will be a forceful advocate for working families.

By the way, check here for an update on that Clinton money situation. And I see the going rate for speeches has not gotten worse since I stopped giving talks at the kitchen table. The going rate for the special few at Goldman Sachs, is mentioned here. It's nice to see the economy recovering, at least in some sectors. ...(Click title for more)

Dec 2, 2013 - Deeply shocking and continually surprising, "Kids for Cash" examines the scandal surrounding a Pennsylvania judge's draconian imprisonment of kids for minor hijinks, in exchange for kickbacks from a juvenile detention center. Helmer Robert May sometimes lessens the impact of his points through overemphasis; a tighter edit of this 104-minute docu might boost its dramatic momentum and widen its appeal. Still, the film represents a scathing critique of America's juvenile justice system, the privatization of penal institutions, and the whole notion of "zero tolerance." Skedded for a February 2014 release, "Kids" should inspire audience outrage and build positive buzz. 

WBRE TV Interviews Larry Hohol about Judicial Corruption and Kids for Cash

As May's docu makes clear though testimonials and newspaper headlines, juvenile court judge Mark Ciavarella was once highly respected by the Pennsylvania community he served. In the widespread paranoia that followed the Columbine shootings, his hugely disproportionate sentencing - five or six years in lockup for a small-scale offenses that normally would have merited visits to the principal and/or three-day suspensions - was seen as a positive step toward making schools safer. Ciavarella is shown warning students what they can expect if they deviate even slightly from the straight and narrow, any disregard of this warning providing sufficient reason for immediate incarceration.

John Paino's production design somewhat artificially revs up the pathos with atmospheric cutaways to low-lit, stick-and-paper figures of children and homemade dollhouses against a gloomy backdrop. Lined-up dossiers and stacks of portfolios illustrate segments of voiceover, while reams of typewritten data recount the manifold inconsistencies and dubious practices visited upon those who wound up in Ciavarella's court.

In-depth interviews with articulate young men and women - who, at age 12 or 13, were torn from parents and friends and locked away for years - unleash tales of depression, post-traumatic stress and stolen childhoods. They received extended jail time as punishment for such "crimes" as writing a satirical MySpace page, unknowingly buying a stolen scooter, or briefly fighting in the schoolyard. Parents are still trying to come to terms with their guilt over having trusted the authorities and not having fought harder to save their offspring from bald injustice. In the film's most electrifying moment, one mother, whose son committed suicide soon after leaving prison, confronts Ciavarella outside the courtroom and castigates him as a heartless murderer.

Dismayingly, it is only when Ciavarella's punitive sentencing is linked to kickbacks that the community turns against him; his manifest cruelty is apparently acceptable practice when it's merely part of "The War on Kids," to cite Cevin Soling's 2009 documentary about zero tolerance.

Frequently sampling news clips, May follows the story as Ciavarella and fellow judge Michael Conahan are indicted on money-laundering charges, having profited from the closure of the rundown state juvenile detention center and the construction of a private facility. (Astoundingly, both judges agreed to be extensively interviewed for the documentary, their self-justifications only damning them further.) The film charts the trial in exhaustive detail, exposing in the process the disastrous effect of the privatization of penal institutions and the corresponding growth of a profit-making industry that seeks to solve all social problems through imprisonment.

May opens his film with the statement that 193 countries ratified the United Nations' "Convention on the Rights of the Child."  Only three countries refused to sign: Somalia, South Sudan and the U.S.  "Kids for Cash" paints a somber picture of the mindset that led to this refusal and its tragic consequences.

Books: Simone de Beauvoir, Anti-Philosopher

     I am a writer ... I have written novels, philosophy, social criticism, a play - and yet all people know about me is The Second Sex. Granted, I am pleased that that book has had such an impact, but I want people to remember that I am a writer. A feminist certainly, and I do not deny the importance of feminism in my life, but first of all I am a writer! (227)

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