Jackson Rising:
New Economies Conference
|
 | |
Journal of the Black Left Unity Network
|
|
New CCDS Book Reporting on Vietnam
|
 The new annual edition of our journal of discussion and analysis is now out. More than 130 pages, it includes 20 articles on organizing, racism and the right. Cost is $10 plus shipping. Or get one by becoming a sustainer. Click the title to buy it directly.
|
|
Radical Jesus:
A Graphic History of Faith  By Paul BuhleHerald Press
|
Check out what CCDS has been doing...
|
 Keep On Keepin' OnWhy Socialists Run in Elections, Strategy and Tactics Slide Slow, Class and Privilege, the Green New Deal ...and other Short Posts on Tumblr by Carl Davidson
|
Edited by Carl Davidson Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
Changemaker, 273pp, $22.50
For the full contents, click the link and view 'Preview' under the cover graphic.
|
|
By Randy Shannon, CCDS
"Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."
- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
I. Introduction
The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II.
|
|
Order Our
Full Employment Booklets
 |
...In a new and updated 2nd Edition
Capitalism may well collapse under its own excesses, but what would one propose to replace it? Margaret Thatcher's mantra was TINA...There Is No Alternative. David Schweickart's vision of "Economic Democracy" proposes a serious alternative. Even more fundamentally, it opens the door to thinking about alternatives. His may or may not turn out to be the definitive "successor system," but he is a leader in breaking out of the box. |
We Are Not What We Seem:
Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century
By Rod Bush, NYU Press, 1999
|
 A Memoir of the 1960s
by Paul KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press, $25.64 | | Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War |
|
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...
|
- 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...
 Jobs, War and
the Safety Net:
Issues for 2014
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 oppose war on Iran, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! 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... |
Will Raising the Minimum Wage Become
a 'Wedge Issue' in the 2014 Midterms?
By Joshua HollandMeyers & Company via Crook & LiarsIn 2004, the campaign to re-elect George W. Bush encouraged socially conservative activists to put constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage on state ballots across the country. At the time, opposition to same-sex marriage was the majority position and the effort polled well. The move was widely seen as an effort to use a "wedge" issue to peel off some Democratic voters, fire up the Republican base and increase turnout among those likely to support the president against challenger John Kerry. It succeeded in 11 states. Writing in Friday's Washington Post, Harold Meyerson reports that Democrats are taking a page out of the Bush playbook in the 2014 midterm elections. But they plan to use a very different issue as their wedge - increasing the minimum wage.
Meyerson:
American liberalism and the Democratic Party - two partially overlapping but by no means identical institutions - have set themselves an unusually clear agenda for 2014: reducing economic inequality and boosting workers' incomes. These are causes they can fight for on multiple fronts.
Raising the minimum wage should offer the course of least resistance. Although congressional Republicans may persist in blocking an increase in the federal minimum wage, they do so at their own peril. Raising the wage is one of the few issues in U.S. politics that commands across-the-board public support. A CBS News poll in November found that even 57 percent of Republicans support such an increase.
Democrats have concluded that they can turn Republican legislators' opposition to raising the wage into an electoral issue by using state ballot measures. As states are free to set their own minimum-wage standards - though the rates take effect only when they exceed the federal minimum - Democrats are working to put wage-increase initiatives before voters in states that will have contested House and Senate races in 2014, including Arkansas, Alaska, South Dakota and New Mexico. Such ballot measures have proved an effective way to increase turnout of low-income and minority voters, which can translate into more ballots cast for Democratic candidates.
Immediately after the 2004 election, conventional wisdom held that the state marriage amendments had succeeded in nudging Bush across the finish line. Later, as political scientists dug deeper into the turnout results, that initial conclusion became the source of some controversy.
But the debate was based on comparisons of voting patterns between 2000 and 2004. Midterm elections represent a very different animal. Since 2008, we've seen a consistent pattern in which the midterm and presidential election cycles feature divergent electorates. In low-turnout midterms, the voting population has skewed older, whiter and more Republican. Key Democratic constituencies, on the other hand, tend to be less attached to politics. Younger voters, lower income voters, single people and people of color who are motivated to cast a ballot during a presidential election have proven less likely to come out to vote in midterm elections.
In 2014, the big political questions are where public opinion of Obamacare will stand in November, and whether Republicans will again provoke a debt ceiling standoff that might sour their brand. But the larger question is whether historic voting patterns will hold (the party in the White House typically lose seats in the middle of a president's second term).
One thing to watch on that front is some recent evidence that seniors - who have skewed Republican in recent elections - are shifting away from the Grand Old Party. And if the campaign to raise wages for those at the bottom gains steam in 2014, another is whether low-income voters who typically stay at home during midterms can be motivated by self-interest to get out and vote. If they do, they could - as Meyerson notes - put more money in their pocketbooks and more Dems in office. ...(Click title for more)
|
|
By Lynn Stuart Parramore
Alternet.org
Jan 8, 2014 - Fifty years ago today, LBJ threw down the gauntlet on poverty in his famous State of the Union address of 1964 [3]. Fired with passion and buoyed by bipartisan support, his anti-poverty team kicked off new health insurance programs for the old and the poor, increased Social Security, established food stamps and nutritional supplements for low-income pregnant women and infants, and started programs to give more young people a chance to succeed, like Head Start and Job Corps.
Americans have greatly benefited from big-picture economic changes like the minimum wage; investments in worker training and education; civil rights policies; social insurance; and programs like food stamps and Medicaid. As Georgetown University's Peter Edelman pointed out in the New York Times, without these programs, research shows that poverty would be nearly double [4] what it is today. According to economist Jared Bernstein, Social Security alone has reduced the official elderly poverty rate [5] from 44 percent, which it would be without benefits, to 9 percent with them.
Some of our most prominent citizens have enjoyed protection from life's vagaries through one or another of these measures. President Obama's family once survived on food stamps. Congressman Paul Ryan was able to pay for school with Social Security survivor benefits when his dad died. A mere generation before, the workhouse or the orphanage might have been their fates.
Yet middle-class Americans are increasingly in danger of learning about poverty firsthand.
Middle-Class Tightrope
The gaps between the rich and poor are the widest they have been in a century, and the middle class is disappearing into the chasm. According to research by economist Emmanuel Saez, the share of income that goes to the top 1 percent has more than doubled since 1964. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the top 1 percent has sucked up nearly all of the income gains in the first three years of the "recovery" - a stupifying 95 percent. The fluidity of American society used to be taken for granted, but now the U.S. lags behind Europe in measurements of mobility.
Not only is the climb to middle-class stability increasingly steep, the fall into poverty is more likely. The Great Recession brought home an ugly reality: nowadays it only takes one pink slip, foreclosure notice or catastrophic medical bill to push economically secure people into the ranks of the poor - even people with college diplomas and impressive resumes.
Why is this happening? Not because of some cosmic forces beyond our control, but because of misguided policies put into place by our elected officials and paid for by an increasingly out-of-touch business elite.
Energized by Ronald Reagan's famous declaration that government is the problem, not the solution, conservatives in recent decades have sought to reduce the government's vital role in creating opportunity and keeping hard-pressed Americans afloat. Simultaneously, they have unleashed the wild horses of deregulated capitalism, which have trampled working people. Labor unions have been crushed, wages have declined, safety nets have frayed, medical expenses have risen, and millions of Americans are now teetering on the edge of poverty.
It gets harder and harder to work your way out of dire straits. A mom with two kids toiling full-time for minimum wage at a grocery store would make about $15,000 a year, well below the poverty line of $18,498 for a family of three. But just looking at poverty figures doesn't tell the whole story. A far larger group of Americans - around 100 million - is considered low-income, which would mean about $45,000 in income for a family of four. When you include the low-income category, census data show [6] that the number of economically distressed Americans jumps to 50 percent. Half of us!
Former President Jimmy Carter has said [7] that the American middle-class is beginning to look like those who lived in poverty when he occupied the White House. He attributed this reduced quality of life to the rise in tax breaks for the wealthy, an insufficient minimum wage, and electoral districts drawn to maximize political polarization.
Poverty For All?
New research [8] shows that four out of five U.S. adults will struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives. What's especially interesting is that the face of poverty is changing. You are still more likely to be poor if you are black or brown, but census data show that race disparities in the poverty rate have significantly narrowed since the 1970s. By the time they turn 60, a whopping 76 percent of whites will experience economic insecurity, defined as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government assistance like food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line.
You read that correctly. Three out of four white people will get a chance to know economic panic before they reach retirement age....(Click title for more)
|
Despair is Not an Option
By Bernie Sanders
Common Dreams via Portside
'We can no longer allow the billionaires and their think tanks or the corporate media to set the agenda. We need to educate, organize and mobilize the working families of our country to stand up for their rights. We need to make government work for all the people, not just the 1 percent.'
Dec 30, 2013 - The Congress has just ended one of the worst and least productive sessions in the history of our country. At a time when the problems facing us are monumental, Congress is dysfunctional and more and more people (especially the young) are, understandably, giving up on the political process. The people are hurting. They look to Washington for help. Nothing is happening.
In my view, the main cause of congressional dysfunction is an extreme right-wing Republican party whose main goal is to protect the wealthy and powerful. There is no tax break for the rich or large corporations that they don't like. There is no program which protects working families -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, affordable housing, etc. -- that they don't want to cut.
But the Democrats (with whom I caucus as an Independent) are most certainly not without fault. In the Senate, they have tolerated Republican obstructionism for much too long and allowed major legislation to fail for lack of 60 votes. They have failed to bring forth a strong and consistent agenda which addresses the economic crises facing the vast majority of our struggling population, and have not rallied the people in support of that agenda.
As we survey our country at the end of 2013, I don't have to tell you about the crises we face. Many of you are experiencing them every day.
The middle class continues to decline, with median family income some $5,000 less than in 1999.
More Americans, 46.5 million, are now living in poverty than at any time in our nation's history. Child poverty, at 22 percent, is the highest of any major country.
Real unemployment is not 7 percent. If one includes those who have given up looking for work and those who want full-time work but are employed part-time, real unemployment is over 13 percent - and youth unemployment is much higher than that.
Most of the new jobs that are being created are part-time and low wage, but the minimum wage remains at the starvation level of $7.25 per hour.
Millions of college students are leaving school deeply in debt, while many others have given up on their dream of a higher education because of the cost.
Meanwhile, as tens of millions of Americans struggle to survive economically, the wealthiest people are doing phenomenally well and corporate profits are at an all-time high. In fact, wealth and income inequality today is greater than at any time since just before the Great Depression. One family, the Walton family with its Wal-Mart fortune, now owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In recent years, 95 percent of all new income has gone to the top 1 percent.
The scientific community has been very clear: Global warming is real, it is already causing massive problems and, if we don't significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet we leave to our kids and grandchildren will be less and less habitable.
Clearly, if we are going to save the middle class and protect our planet, we need to change the political dynamics of the nation. We can no longer allow the billionaires and their think tanks or the corporate media to set the agenda. We need to educate, organize and mobilize the working families of our country to stand up for their rights. We need to make government work for all the people, not just the 1 percent.
When Congress reconvenes for the 2014 session, here are a few of the issues that I will focus on. (By the way, I'd love to hear from you as to what your priorities are).
WEALTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY: A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little. It is simply not acceptable that the top 1 percent owns 38 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while the bottom 60 percent owns all of 2.3 percent. We need to establish a progressive tax system which asks the wealthy to start paying their fair share of taxes, and which ends the outrageous loopholes that enable one out of four corporations to pay nothing in federal taxes.
JOBS: We need to make significant investments in our crumbling infrastructure, in energy efficiency and sustainable energy, in early childhood education and in affordable housing. When we do that, we not only improve the quality of life in our country and combat global warming, we also create millions of decent-paying new jobs.
WAGES: We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. We should pass the legislation, which will soon be on the Senate floor, to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour, but we must raise that minimum wage even higher in the coming years. We also need to expand our efforts at worker-ownership. Employees will not be sending their jobs to China or Vietnam when they own the places in which they work.
RETIREMENT SECURITY: At a time when only one in five workers in the private sector have a defined benefit pension plan; half of Americans have less than $10,000 in savings; and two-thirds of seniors rely on Social Security for more than half of their income, we must expand and protect Social Security so that every American can retire with dignity.
WALL STREET: During the financial crisis, huge Wall Street banks received more than $700 billion in financial aid from the Treasury Department and more than $16 trillion from the Federal Reserve because they were "too big to fail." Yet today, the largest banks in this country are much bigger than they were before taxpayers bailed them out. It's time to break up these behemoths so that they cannot cause another recession that could wreck the global economy.
CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM: We are not living in a real democracy when large corporations and a handful of billionaire families can spend unlimited sums of money to elect or defeat candidates. We must expand our efforts to overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move this country to public funding of elections.
SOCIAL JUSTICE: While we have made progress in recent years in expanding the rights of minorities, women and gays, these advances are under constant attack from the right-wing. If the United States is to become the non-discriminatory society we want it to be, we must fight to protect the rights of all Americans.
CIVIL LIBERTIES: Frankly, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies are out of control. We cannot talk about America as a "free country" when the government is collecting information on virtually every phone call we make, when it is intercepting our emails and monitoring the websites we visit. Clearly, we need to protect this country from terrorism, but we must do it in a way that does not undermine the Constitution.
WAR AND PEACE: With a large deficit and enormous unmet needs, it is absurd that the United States continues to spend almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. The U.S. must be a leader in the world in nuclear disarmament and efforts toward peace, not in the sale of weapons of destruction.
This is a tough and historical moment in American history. Despair is not an option. We must stand together as brothers and sisters and fight for the America our people deserve. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. Elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt., by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont's at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Read more at his website.
|
By Andrew Sernatinger & Tessa Echeverria
TheNorthStar.info
Jan 6, 2014 - Just a few short weeks after Kshama Sawant emerged victorious running as a socialist for the Seattle City Council, we interviewed Anh Tran, Sawant's assistant for the campaign. Tran also served as the volunteer coordinator for Sawant when she ran for the Washington State Legislature in 2012, so talking to Tran we were able to get a sense of the wider arc of the Seattle election.
For the interview, our main focus was trying to obtain a clear understanding of the campaign for the wider public; the Sawant election seems to have the attention of a wide swathe of US radicals (with greatly differing impressions) and it seemed important to have some basic interaction with the campaign to understand what was happening. One thread that continues through the interview is a discussion trying to understand how the campaign worked and why the participants thought that it was able to succeed.
Andrew Sernatinger: Why you start by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Anh Tran: For this last campaign, I worked as Kshama's assistant. I came on because I was on the last campaign as the events coordinator and the volunteer coordinator. I started as a member of Socialist Alternative. I'm also a former student of Kshama's when she taught macroeconomics as Seattle University.
AS: Can you tell us about what you did in the campaign this time around?
AT: I was in charge of managing Kshama's schedule, politically preparing her for her speeches, interviews, debates, and pretty much all of her public appearances. I would accompany her to many of them, just to make sure she was getting everything done that she needed to. I made sure she took care of herself, took care of any extra tasks that she had that would be overwhelming to her, kind of like being her right-hand person.
Tessa Echeverria: I was kind of curious because the last time I heard of Kshama's campaign she was running for state assembly and came out here to Madison to give a talk about that. How did this campaign for city council come about?
AT: I would have to start by talking about how the last campaign started. When the Occupy movement was winding down, we wanted to continue the spirit of the movement somehow, so we wanted to take Occupy to the elections-it was a Presidential election year and all eyes were focused on the elections. We thought, "Why not Occupy the elections?"
We brought the message of Occupy to the Washington State House of Representatives race. We usually don't run campaigns, its not what Socialist Alternative has traditionally done, but we felt that there was an unprecedented opening that existed for third-party politics to be built and for the ideas of socialism to spread on a mass scale, beyond small study groups or whatever we're all used to.
There was an unprecedented success and we got a historic vote for a socialist. Because of that, we felt that we had a responsibility to the movement to continue another election to build working class politics this year. It was a responsibility to the success we had last year to continue.
There were a bunch of immediate needs in Seattle that we wanted to address as well. The burgeoning fast food struggle nationwide was very vibrant in Seattle, so we have played a very critical part in that in terms of raising the demand for a $15 an hour minimum wage. We had that demand in the last election before it became cool, and that demand kind of took on a life of its own and we felt like we had to bring that into the forefront of the debate in Seattle politics.
There have been unprecedented cuts to transit in Seattle: metro's facing 17% cuts. Rents have been rising at about 6% every year, which is one of the highest rent hikes for all metropolitan areas in the US. The campaign also started because of the context of a prolonged economic recession, the betrayal of Obama and the Democrats, and I think the situation was really ripe for the spread of socialist politics as an alternative to the two-party system. That was what really drove the campaign, the immediate needs and the broader context.
AS: When I talked to Kshama a year ago, what she said was that the reason she ran for House of Representatives was because no one was challenging the seat and it seemed like a good opportunity to "occupy the space", as you were saying. Can you talk a little about why after that race against Frank Chopp you guys decided to get involved in a city council race? You had said that you don't really get involved in elections, so how did this come about? Why do this?
AT: The city council elections were happening this year where the mayor of Seattle was going to be elected, so it was going to be a big race. Seattle is a city of over 600,000 people, so there was a very broad audience that we would have access to and we didn't want to miss that opportunity to talk about the ideas of socialism.
There were also a lot of incumbents on city council who have been warming their seats for a very long time: our opponent Richard Conlin has been on the council for sixteen years and he did nothing during that time. We wanted this to bring a new sort of debate into the political discussions that were happening, to bring the $15 demand into the race and some other issues as well....(Click title for more)
|
North Carolina: Battleground State
 | |
Bill Moyers: the Fight for Justice and the Vote
|
|
|
Hint: It's Not Dead
By Devin Burghart
Tea Party News and Analysis
Part One: The Tea Party in 2013
Jan 9, 2014 - During the month of January 2014, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) will publish a multi-segment special report on the current status of the Tea Party movement. We will publish a track the membership of the principal organizations in the movement-a task undertaken by no organization or agency other than IREHR. We will look at geographic regions where this membership is concentrated. And we will look at some of the money that keeps this movement in the public eye. In the piece below, we follow the Tea Parties over the course of 2013.
It was a year of countervailing winds and storms. A drive against the great gap in income equality was mounted by fast-food and retail organizing, and it reached into the top policy centers of the country. At the same time, the Supreme Court cut into the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act, and the state-by-state drive against voting rights by anti-democratic forces gained ground. The Tea Party movement rose and fell across the year. Though battered and bruised, the core membership of the Tea Party's national factions continued to expand in 2013, even as public opinion waxed and waned. The Tea Party cemented its status as an institutional force driving a significant sector of the far right. Moreover, 2013 made it crystal clear that this movement is not about debt and taxes, or even healthcare. It is filled with racists and racism, xenophobes and bigots, and it has had a deleterious effect on political and social questions. And the portfolio of issues, particularly guns and nativism, expressed a (false) sense of white dispossession.
1. After the 2012 Election
Back in November 2012 the stage was set for difficulties to come in 2013. Despite significant success on Election Day, Tea Partiers were not celebrating as they had in 2010.[1] Of the thirteen U.S. Senate candidates endorsed by national Tea Party groups, eleven had lost. Most glaringly, the Tea Party was unable to defeat its arch-foe, President Obama. Further, Tea Party gains in the House of Representatives did not translate into statewide victories at the ballot box.[2]
A significant sector of Tea Partiers, disillusioned with campaigning and the entire electoral process, loudly called for revolt or secession. In the days after the election, hundreds of thousands of people signed secession petitions at whitehouse.gov. For all their talk about their love of country and "American exceptionalism,"fully half of the national Tea Party factions used their websites to entertain the idea of breaking apart the country to suit their political aims.
During the first days of 2013, their strength was tested again. Tea Party organizations, despite a churlish propaganda effort, were unable to prevent a last minute Congressional deal that walked the country back from the "fiscal cliff." The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 passed the Senate in the early hours of January 1, and passed the House of Representatives later in the day. Both the Tea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks vehemently opposed the compromise legislation.
As they had done with the debt ceiling fight in 2011, Tea Partiers dug in their heels. In the post-election climate, however, such obstinacy did not hold back the forces willing to compromise. Undeterred, the Tea Party Patriots began calling for a secret vote amongst members of the Republican caucus in the House to remove Rep. John Boehner as Speaker of the House.[3]
It should be noted that the Tea Party was able to influence public opinion, even as it lost the specific battle. Indeed, virtually the entire budget discussion was framed by the movement's draconian fiscal agenda. The public discussion was not whether austerity was the right path for the country, but how dramatically deep the cuts should be.
In February 2013, national Tea Party groups faced a conflict within conservative ranks. Former Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush, Karl Rove, announced new fundraising efforts to oppose Tea Party candidates. Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots lashed back at Rove's efforts, "Instead of returning to conservative principles, Rove and the consultant class are pouring millions into picking off conservative leaders. Watering down conservative ideas is not a winning strategy."[4] [Emphasis in Original]
As a result of this series of defeats and obstacles, the movement struggled with its agenda, chased the news cycle, and foundered in its efforts to remain relevant within the national conversation.[5] The Tea Party movement was, once again, written off by liberal opinion-makers as either dead or dying.
Noted columnist E.J. Dionne, writing in the October 25, 2012 edition of Real Clear Politics, declared, "tea party thinking is dead." A January 28, 2013 story on Daily Kos by "ProgressiveLiberal" began and ended with the simple declarative statement, "The Tea Party movement is dead." By July 13, David Graham, writing at Reuters under the title of "Reports of the Tea Party's Death Have Been Endlessly Exaggerated," rendered a list of 18 times the Tea Party had been declared dead since 2011. IREHR can add to the Reuters list.
It should be noted that the inability of liberals and progressives to figure out whether the Tea Party movement is alive or dead is the major reason that no non-partisan, non-electoral effort to counter this movement's racism has been funded or mounted. Promoting health care reform or comprehensive immigration reform or organizing fast food workers is good and necessary in IREHR's analysis, but it will not by itself pull the Tea Party movement into the abyss. That must be done consciously and intentionally. Indeed, it must be done if human rights advocates are going to win their fights across this country. ...(Click title for more)
|
|
Can Mao and Deng Be Merged into One Path?
By David Cohen
China Brief Volume: 14 Issue: 1
via Online University of the Left
Jan 9, 2014 - Chinese President Xi Jinping honored the 120th anniversary of Mao Zedong's birth on December 26, using the occasion to speak at length about the significance of the founder of the People's Republic in Chinese and Party history (Xinhua, December 26).
The speech was generally laudatory but made brief references to his "mistakes": launching the Cultural Revolution and, in a possible reference to the Great Leap Forward, "simply copying Leninist theory and imitating the experience of Russia's October Revolution, causing grave harm to the Chinese Revolution." However, Xi quoted Deng Xiaoping's verdict on the legacy of Mao to argue that his failures came second to his achievements: uniting the Chinese nation and achieving its independence, solving "difficult problems about the relationship of the Party and the people," and establishing the "basic socialist system."
The speech is Xi's most detailed effort yet to explain the legacy of Mao, and it demonstrates two important aspects of his vision for China: first, that his alternating evocations of Mao and Deng do not represent vacillation, but an effort to reconcile the "two undeniables" of Chinese politics. As Xi put it in the speech, deploying a slogan: "Without Reform and Opening, there could be no China today; if we abandon this path, China can have no tomorrow" (for more on the speech, see "Xi invokes Mao's image to boost his own authority" in this issue of China Brief).
Second, the speech-and, even more, its explication in the Party's ideological journals-suggest strongly that Xi's vision of China's future has been shaped by the group of academics known as the "New Left." The group is associated with nostalgia for Mao and especially with Bo Xilai's experiments in Chongqing-making the resurgence of the New Left's ideas after Bo's downfall all the more interesting. In attempting to understand his plans for China's future, his borrowings from Mao should be read not as ersatz efforts to justify policy, but as belonging to an established discussion about the future of China's social and political systems.
The New Left-a controversial name rejected by many of the academics to whom it is applied-emerged in the 1990s as a criticism of unfettered capitalism, and emerged as a major player in the Hu Jintao-era debates about the idea of a "China model." Essays such as Wang Hui's (Tsinghua University) "Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity" expressed reservations about the dislocations of rapid economic change, while Pan Wei's (Peking University) "Toward a Consultative Rule of Law Regime in China" examined Hong Kong and Shanghai to envision a future without Western-style democracy (Tianya, Issue 5, 1997; Journal of Contemporary China, Volume 12, Issue 34, 2003)....(Click title for more)
|
 By Dan Roberts
The Guardian, UK
Jan 7, 2014 - Strained relations between the White House and its military leaders have been laid bare by former US defense secretary Robert Gates, who accuses President Barack Obama and his top civilian advisers of lacking faith in their own strategy for conducting the war in Afghanistan.
In a forthcoming memoir leaked to the New York Times [3] and Washington Post [4] that threatens to exacerbate current criticism of US policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gates - who was first appointed to his post by former President George W Bush - reveals, in a series of swipes that are surprisingly combative coming from such a senior former official, problems between the White House and the Pentagon that have made for troubling relations at the very highest levels.
"All too early in the administration," adds Gates, "suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials - including the president and vice-president - became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders."
Perhaps most damagingly, he also alleges that Obama did not believe in his own strategy for ending the war in Afghanistan, which he was "skeptical if not outright convinced ... would fail," and that he was skeptical at best about the leadership of the country's president, Hamid Karzai.
"The president doesn't trust his commander, can't stand Karzai, doesn't believe in his own strategy, and doesn't consider the war to be his. For him, it's all about getting out," writes Gates.
Obama's policies toward both Afghanistan and Iraq are under fresh scrutiny this month, as Karzai has refused to sign a deal to retain a US military presence after the bulk of troops are withdrawn this year, andIraq has faced renewed al-Qaida militancy [5].
On Tuesday, the White House defended its strategy, insisting it was up to both countries to ensure their own future stability. And in a statement released about the book, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said:
Deliberations over our policy on Afghanistan have been widely reported on over the years, and it is well known that the President has been committed to achieving the mission of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda, while also ensuring that we have a clear plan for winding down the war... As has always been the case, the President welcomes differences of view among his national security team, which broaden his options and enhance our policies. The President wishes Secretary Gates well as he recovers from his recent injury, and discusses his book.
In a short essay based on the book and published on Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal [6], Gates endorses Obama's troop surge in Afghanistan but casts doubt over the president's overall commitment to the fight there.
"[Obama's] fundamental problem in Afghanistan was that his political and philosophical preferences for winding down the US role conflicted with his own pro-war public rhetoric (especially during the 2008 campaign), the nearly unanimous recommendations of his senior civilian and military advisers at the Departments of State and Defense, and the realities on the ground," he says....(Click title for more)
|
Amiri Baraka's Gift To Us All
By Eugene Holley, Jr.
A Blog Supreme / NPR Jazz
July 26, 2013 - The year 1963 saw the March on Washington, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers, the bombing of the Birmingham church that resulted in the deaths of four black girls and the passing of W.E.B. Du Bois.
That same year, LeRoi Jones - a twentysomething, Newark, N.J.-born, African-American, Lower East Side-based Beat poet - published a book titled 'Blues People': a panoramic sociocultural history of African-American music. It was the first major book of its kind by a black author, now known as Amiri Baraka. In the 50 years since, it has never been out of print.
"The book was originally titled Blues: Black and White," says Baraka, now 78, by phone from Newark, while he was working on his son Ras Baraka's mayoral campaign. "But I changed it because I wanted to focus on the people that created the blues. And that was the real intent of that title: I wanted to focus on them - us - the creators of the blues, which is still, I think, the predominate music under all American music. It cannot be dismissed, even though you might give it to some pop singer, they change it around. But it will come out. It will be heard."
Blues People argues that in their art, Louis Armstrong, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and countless other black bards confronted the forces of racism, poverty and Jim Crow. This gave birth to work songs, blues, gospel, New Orleans jazz, its Chicago and Kansas City swing extensions, the bebop revolution (which in turn spawned the so-called cool and hard bop schools), and the then-emerging avant-garde of the late '50s and early '60s, characterized by the forward-thinking artistry of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. For Baraka, jazz is "the most cosmopolitan of any Negro music, able to utilize almost any foreign influence within its broader spectrum" - a cultural achievement Baraka says was downplayed and ignored by Eurocentric whites.
"They have to do that to make themselves superior in some kind of way: that everything has come from Europe, which is not true," Baraka says. "And if you study, you'll see [the Africanisms] even in the way Americans talk; it's quite unlike English [from Great Britain]. And certainly the music has been one abiding register of Afro-American influence."
Baraka wrote that Blues People was a "theoretical endeavor" that "proposes more questions than it will answer" about how descendants of enslaved Africans created a new American musical genre and turned "Negroes" into "African Americans" in the process. That message still resonates deeply with many scholars, including Ingrid Monson, a professor of African-American music at Harvard University and author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa.
"I assign portions of this book in virtually every course I teach," Monson wrote in Blues People: Amiri Baraka As a Social Theorist, a speech she delivered in 2004, "to remind my students that cultural studies and critical race theory didn't begin in the academy, but in 20th-century African-American thought and intellectual practice from DuBois to Garvey, Locke, Ellington, Ellison and Baraka."
You've Got To Be Modernistic
Baraka was certainly not the first black writer to write about African-American music. But it was his modern stance, propelled by the momentum of the Civil Rights Era, that made his analysis unique.
"[Early works by black authors] primarily focused on the written tradition of African-American music, as part of the Western art music tradition," says University of Pennsylvania professor Guthrie Ramsey, author of Bud Powell: Black Genius, Black History and the Challenge of Bebop. "The goals of those books were to position black music within Western culture. There weren't many black writers who had the platforms like Baraka was developing at that time. He wrote that book from [a contemporary] African-American perspective. And that's what made it unique at that time. ...(Click title for more)
|
|
Start 2014 With a Red Resolution...
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
|
|
|
