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February 7, 2014
In This Issue
Full Employment
Public Worker Wages
Profs at Minimum Wage
Unions Jam Harrisburg
Danger on the Right
3rd Reconstruction
Feminism in China
Attack on Solar
Film: The Physician
Books: Jesus as Zealot
Alfre Woodard reads Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth on Fire: Alfre Woodard reads a Classic Speech on the Intersection of Race, Class & Gender


Jackson Rising:  
New Economies Conference


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Tina at AFL-CIO


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.
Blog of the Week...


'Gay Propaganda' and Russia's Shrinking Public Space
Radical Jesus:
A Graphic History of Faith


By Paul Buhle
Herald Press

Check out what CCDS has been doing...


Keep On Keepin' On

Why 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.
'They're Bankrupting Us!': And 20 Other Myths about Unions
Tina at AFL-CIO

New Book by Bill Fletcher, Jr. 

By Randy Shannon, CCDS

 

 

 "Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."

- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

I. Introduction

The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II.

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...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.
 
by Paul Krehbiel

Autumn Leaf Press, $25.64

Shades of Justice:  Bringing Down a President and Ending a War
Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War



By Giuseppe Fiori
Verso, 30 pages
Gay, Straight and
the Reason Why



The Science of Sexual Orientation


By Simon LeVay
Oxford University Press
$27.95



By Harry Targ



Essays on Mondragon, Marx, Gramsci
 and the Green and Solidarity Economies
Solidarity Economy:
What It's All About

Tina at AFL-CIO

Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei

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Tina at AFL-CIO

Introducing the 'Frankfurt School'

  • Foreword by Susan Brownmiller
  • Preface by Ken Wachsberger
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Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement




By Don Hamerquist

An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...

Our Wages Are
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Do you have friends who should see this? Pass it on...Do you have a blog of your own? Others you love to read every day? Well, this is a place where you can share access to them with the rest of your comrades. Just pick your greatest hits for the week and send them to us at [email protected]!

Most of all, it's urgent that you 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...
Another Drag on the Post-Recession
Economy--Public-Sector Wages



By Monique Morrissey

Economic Policy Institute

Feb 5, 2014 - The aftermath of the Great Recession has led to outright wage declines for the vast majority of American workers in recent years, resulting in a full decade of essentially stagnant wages.

Though you might expect public-sector wages to have weathered the recession and its aftermath better than private-sector wages, the opposite appears true: While the decline in real public-sector wages started later, it was steeper and ultimately more damaging. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Cost Index, public-sector wages have fallen by about 1.3 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2007, where private-sector wages have been essentially flat (an increase of 0.3 percent).



Unlike in previous recoveries, state and local government austerity has been a major drag on job growth and the broader economy. The number of public-sector jobs fell by almost 3 percent in the three years following the recession, while the number of private-sector jobs grew (albeit anemically). The fact that public-sector wages have lagged behind those in the private-sector exacerbates government's drag on the economy.

The recent divergence between public- and private-sector wage growth cannot easily be dismissed as a corrective to rapid public-sector wage growth, since the two series grew in tandem from 2001-the start of the series-to 2007 (not shown). It can, however, be attributed to rising benefit costs, as the costs of wages and benefits together has grown slightly faster in the public sector than in the private sector since 2007 (1.4 percent versus 1.0 percent in real terms). Some of this can be attributed to increasing employer contributions to public-sector pensions in the wake of the 2007-08 stock market downturn, which also battered 401(k) account balances but did not result in increasing employer contributions to these accounts. Though benefit costs have risen, we would nevertheless want real wages in the public sector to at least hold steady in a recession and weak recovery rather than contributing to weak aggregate demand, especially since, as previously noted, productivity growth has outpaced compensation growth. ...(Click title for more)


By Jim Hightower

Nation of Change

There's a growing army of the working poor in our U.S. of A., and big contingents of it are now on the march. They're strategizing, organizing and mobilizing against the immoral economics of inequality being hung around America's neck by the likes of Wal-Mart, McDonald's and colleges.

Wait a minute. Colleges? That can't be. After all, we're told to go there to go to college to get ahead in life. More education makes you better off, right? Well, ask a college professor about that - you know, the ones who earned PhDs and are now teaching America's next generation.

The sorry secret of higher education - from community colleges to brand-name universities - is that they've embraced the corporate culture of a contingent workforce, turning professors into part-time, low-paid, no-benefit, no-tenure, temporary teachers. Overall, more than half of America's higher-ed faculty members today are "adjunct professors," meaning they are attached to the schools where they teach not essentially a part of them.

It also means that these highly educated, fully credentialed professors have become part of America's fast-growing army of the working poor. They never know until a semester starts whether they'll teach one class, three, or none - typically, this leaves them with take-home pay somewhere between zero and maybe $2,000 a month. Most live in or on the brink of poverty. Good luck paying off that $100,000 student loan on such wages.

Adjuncts usually get no health care or other benefits, no real chance of earning full-time positions, no due process or severance pay if dismissed, no say in curriculum or school policies, no keys to the supply cabinet. Frequently, they don't even get office space at their schools. One adjunct prof says he used the trunk of his car as his office, until one day he found that the "office" got towed.

Like their counterparts at Wal-Mart and McDonald's, college presidents don't treat adjunct professors as valuable resources to be nurtured, but as cheap, exploitable, and disposable labor....(Click title for more)
Beaver County Blue via People's World

Jan 28, 2014 - HARRISBURG, Pa.- Thousands jammed the streets around the State Capitol building here today to protest the latest in a sting of attempts by state Republicans to kill union rights for public workers and eventually all workers in Pennsylvania.

Busload after busload of workers arrived from around the state, filled the streets and marched into the Capitol building itself where, reminiscent of the historic Wisconsin protests, they packed the rotunda in the center of the building.

They protested House Bill 1507, what the right wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and theKoch brothers call a "Paycheck Protection" bill. They have already been targeting direct mail into the state to spread lies in support of this bill, claiming that taxpayers are paying for union dues collection for public employees, and that teachers and state workers are forced to contribute to political and legislative activism.

The facts are clear, the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO says, even though you won't hear them in the commercials that the Koch brothers are financing. Automatic payroll deduction of dues is not mandated by any law, rather it is bargained for during contract negotiations. This deduction does not cost taxpayers money. Unions already agreed to reimburse the state for costs associated with deductions of PAC funds, but according to the State of Pennsylvania, there is no measurable cost to be reimbursed.

The Republican goal is obvious, unions say. The legislation would force unions to spend resources to collect union dues, and make it nearly impossible to collect the fair share fees that non-members must pay to cover their union representation. At the end of the day that means unions will be weakened, and have less ability to advocate for employees in the workplace and in the legislature. This would open the floodgates for a wide range of anti-worker legislation that would be sure to follow.

"There is no doubt that the passage of HB 1507 would mean that Pennsylvania would become the next right to work state" the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO said in a statement it issued. " Don't be silent on this issue. We expect this bill to move very quickly, with significant resources flooding into Pennsylvania to back this latest attack on the middle class."

Photo: Frank Snyder, Pennsylvania AFL-CIO


If They Win the Primary, Do Everything
We Can to Defeat Them in the General


 By C. J. Werleman
Alternet.org

Feb 4, 2014 - Not all that long ago, the establishment wing of the Republican Party had the power to demand obedience from its Christian Right flank, but thanks to Internet fundraising and changes to campaign finance laws, the 2014 elections could be a case of the tail wagging the dog.

The GOP establishment has always had a monopoly on money, thanks to its unfettered access to the Wall Street donor class. As a result of this power differential, the Christian Right, while energized and mobilized, would be forced to sit when told to sit by the party's big wigs. But those days are history.

Today, the Christian Right is armed with networks and pipelines of unprecedented levels of campaign financing. Its consortium of donor channels includes the Club for Growth, Senate Conservatives Fund, FreedomWorks, and a cadre of hyper-religious organizations such as the Christian Coalition, Christian Broadcasting Network, American Values, and the Family Research Council.

The Christian Right can now raise enough cash to compete and win in Republican primaries against Chamber of Commerce-sponsored establishment candidates. According to the Federal Electoral Commission, Tea Party and social conservative groups raised nearly three times as much as GOP establishment groups in 2013.

The Christian Right is not only an existential threat to the future of the Republican Party, it's also an existential threat to our secular democracy, for it wishes to transform America into a tyrannical theocracy governed by biblical law. With the warring Republican factions preparing to square off in a series of Senate and House primaries, here are the Christian Right's most favored candidates for the 2014 election cycle.

1. Matt Bevin: Republican Candidate for U.S. Senate in Kentucky

Matt Bevin, a self-employed businessman, is contesting the GOP primary for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's seat. Bevin, who describes his life as being "built on a bedrock of strong Christian values," is now leading McConnell by 4 according to the most recent Rasmussen Report poll.

Right-wing blogger and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson says Democrats are "squealing like a stuffed pig" because of polling data that shows Bevin leading Democrat Allison Grimes, while McConnell only draws out a statistical tie. "If the GOP does not gain the Senate in 2014, it will probably be because they lose Kentucky. They only lose Kentucky if Mitch McConnell is the Republican nominee," says Erickson.

Like all those on the far right, Bevin, who is a Southern Baptist, is obsessed with controlling all matters related to sex and abortion. Earlier this month, on the 41st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Bevin penned an op-ed that read, "The fight for the unborn could not be any more important. Since that dark day in 1973, America has seen more than 55 million babies killed under the guise of 'choice....Being pro-life is more than simply a slogan to us. It is a belief that every life, born and unborn, is so precious to our Creator, that it compels us to action."

In case you missed it the first time, he's leading McConnell and the Democrats by a handy margin....(Click title for more)
Old South vs. New South: The 3rd Reconstruction

Old South vs. New South: The 3rd Reconstruction
Behind the 'Moral Monday' Movement

China's New Feminist 'Long Marcher'   


Xiao Meili, right, walks with her volunteer companion Maizi down a stretch of road near Zhengzhou, capital city of Henan Province. Photo: CFP

By Liu Sheng
Global Times

Feb 7, 2014 - Sleazy inns, swollen feet and constant diarrhea caused by unsanitary food.

The skinny 25-year-old hiker never expected a journey quite like this.

Xiao Meili began her 2,150-kilometer-long walk from Beijing to Guangzhou in September last year.

But the 25-year-old bears all the discomfort to call attention to sexual assault and gender equality along the road.

Labeling herself a feminist, Xiao gathers signatures wherever she arrives and sends them to the local government seeking information disclosure about child sexual abuse. She asks the local education bureau to set up an anti-sex abuse system in schools to protect minors.

Xiao was thrilled when she hit upon the idea of a long walk.

Most outdoor walkers are male, and the possibility of being raped or robbed on the road haunted her.

"China's traditional idea is that it is dangerous for females to travel alone outside. But conversely, so many sexual abuse cases take place in places we thought were safe like schools and buses.

"Females have the freedom to do what they want, and my walk could be a powerful rebuke to the outdated opinion that women are more easily sexually abused when they travel alone," Xiao told the Global Times.

"This is not an arduous walk. Each step represents a female protest at society."

One-of-a-kind

Xiao Meili, born Xiao Yue in Sichuan Province in 1989, has been promoting feminist activities since she entered the Communication University of China in Beijing.

In 2012, she wore a wedding dress tainted with blood to protest domestic violence on Valentine's Day in Beijing. She wanted to remind couples that violence also exists in intimate relations.

She protested the inappropriate proportion of male and female public toilets by occupying male toilets in Guangzhou.

To protest gender inequality in university enrollment, Xiao shaved her head to draw attention to the fact that female enrollment is higher than male in some majors.

"I'm tired of people saying that females are the weaker sex. We need more equality," she said. 

Her protests, combined with other's appeals, began to take effect....(Click title for more)


Identical bills would end 'net metering' deal of one kilowatt credit for every kilowatt put back on grid


By Andy Marso
[email protected] via SolidarityEconomy.net

Feb 4, 2014 - A bill to cut the reimbursement rate utility companies pay customers who feed energy back to the grid has gotten the attention of solar advocates.

Mark Moser, of Manhattan, is the inventor and owner of the Konza Solar Tracker, a device that moves solar panels with the sun to make them more efficient. He told legislators that if they end the "net metering" billing practice that reimburses customers one kilowatt hour of electricity for every kilowatt hour they send back to their utility company it will make Kansas one of the worst states for him to do business in.

"I would be left with few options," Moser said, noting that 43 states have net metering. "As the proverbial solar tracking mustard seed, the Konza Solar Tracker will have to find more fertile ground to grow in elsewhere."

Bills to end net metering have been introduced in the House and Senate and are supported by utility companies like Westar Energy and Kansas City Power and Light.

Mark Schreiber, Westar's executive director of government affairs, told legislators that under current law his company "is paying net-metered customers a retail price for a wholesale commodity" and that the 1-to-1 kilowatt credit doesn't account for infrastructure costs like power plants and power lines.

"When a customer generates some of his or her own power and gets paid the full retail rate of 10 cents, the result is that other customers pay his share of the cost of the entire infrastructure that he continues to use," Schreiber said. "Rooftop solar systems don't remove a customer's reliance on the utility grid of power plants - they just save fuel."

The Vote Solar Initiative, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that helped push for California's net metering law, said the benefits outweigh the costs in that state by $92.2 million per year. ...(Click title for more)
Philipp Stoelzl's epic film, set in medieval Europe and Persia, stars Tom Payne, Ben Kingsley and Stellan Skarsgard and is based on the bestseller by Noah Gordon.

By Boyd van Hoeij
Hollywood Reporter

Feb 6, 2014 - BERLIN -- A Christian orphan from an 11th-century English mining town disguises himself as a Jew so he can study medicine in Islamic Persia in The Physician (Der Medicus), a lavishly mounted period epic that often has more lofty pursuits on the brain than simply drifting from one CGI battle to the next -- though this doesn't mean it manages to avoid every screenwriting clich� in the book.

The Physician (Der Medicus) Official Trailer #1 (2013) - German Movie HD
The Physician (Der Medicus) Official Trailer

Based on the eponymous work of Massachusetts-born novelist Noah Gordon, which was not a big hit stateside but became a colossal bestseller in especially Germany and Spain, The Physician stars Ben Kingsley as Ibn Sina, the Persian philosopher and medical scholar whose treatises were so influential they were still taught in European universities five centuries later. German director Philipp Stoelzl, who brought a refreshingly modern swagger to the romantic and largely fictitious biopic Young Goethe in Love, is a good fit for the material and it helps that the young leads, Tom Payne and Emma Rigby, are easy to root for and easy on the eyes.

The 2.5-hour film, which also exists as a two-part mini-series, has made a combined $44 million in Germany and Spain since it opened there theatrically on Christmas Day. But selling a period film that juxtaposes anatomy lessons and religious clashes will be tough in territories where the book isn't a known quantity, so numbers there will be more in the range of Alejandro Amenabar's equally brainy Agora rather than star-studded battle epics such as Gladiator.

The pic opens with the traumatic passing of the mother of the young and now parentless Rob Cole (Adam Thomas Wright), who might look like a street urchin but who discovers he's got a gift: he can tell when people are close to death. He's apprenticed to a grouchy barber (Stellan Skarsgard), who not only cuts hair but acts as a rudimentary physician of sorts, though this being the year 1021, crude amputations and the use of leeches are about as sophisticated as it gets. Thankfully, the idea of his mother's death fuels Cole's interest in healing and medicine emerges organically, and his telepathic gift is only a minor part of the plot.

Once he's absorbed the little medical knowledge of his teacher, the grown-up Cole (Payne) decides to travel to Isfahan, Persia, to study with the "doctor of doctors," Ibn Sina (Kingsley). The trip's an arduous one full of sacrifices that include his own foreskin: In Egypt, kneeling in front of a scenic, moonlit stretch of desert sand near the pyramids, Cole circumcises himself so he can pass for a Jew, as Christians aren't welcomed in the Muslim lands but Jews are tolerated, if barely. ...(Click title for more)
Reza Aslan's Zealot could have been called 'Jesus Against Empire'

By Paul Buhle
Truthout via The Rag Blog

Feb 6, 2014- A better title for this best seller would be: Jesus Against Empire. If the devil can quote scripture, according to tradition, and if the recovery and analysis of assorted versions of what became Bible text (or did not) have become a scholarly big business, then we can hardly expect any version to be accepted by all.

Still, Reza Aslan himself is by now the kind of major media personality who appears on "The Colbert Report" (and what could be more major?) with views on subjects ranging from Iran (where he was born) to the silliness of Fox News on Christmas.

Lionsgate has purchased the film rights to his new book, Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and he is reportedly scripting a television series for FX. Conservatives gripe at his Jesus, while senior Biblical scholars seem to be complaining that they never got the earthly attention and rewards now ladled upon him.

Zealot strikes me as the most radical version of the Christian story since C. Osborne Ward's massive two-volume The Ancient Lowly appeared in the Gilded Age (1888 to be exact). Older brother to famed sociologist Frank Lester Ward, C. Osborne argued that Christianity was the "slave religion" taken up by those miserable Roman masses who craved a decent funeral and a happier afterlife.

Read by every literate radical who could lay hands on a copy (the Charles H. Kerr Company reprinted it in 1907 for a new generation of socialists), the tome showed religion co-opted by the rich and, above all, by the servants of empire. In the process, Christianity's original promise got turned inside out.

Ward's interpretation could not easily withstand evidence that some of the very rich adopted Christianity along with the very poor, from the get-go. Still, could there be a hidden truth in the argument? ...(Click title for more)
Start 2014 With a Red Resolution...
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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