 | Nina Simone:
What Is Freedom? |
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Journal of the Black Left Unity Network
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New CCDS Book Reporting on Vietnam
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 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.
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Blog of the Week... 
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Radical Jesus:
A Graphic History of Faith  By Paul BuhleHerald Press
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Want to Know what CCDS has
been doing...Check it Out!
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 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
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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.
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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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Order Our
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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 KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press, $25.64 | | Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War |
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 By Giuseppe Fiori
Verso, 30 pages
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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
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- Foreword by Susan Brownmiller
- Preface by Ken Wachsberger
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Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement
By Don Hamerquist
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Class War Rising
on All Sides and
in All Arenas
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... |
Georgia Activists Confront GOP Rejection of Medicaid as Moral Mondays Spread Across South
March 20, 2014
"Medicaid expansion now!" was the rallying cry this week of a rising grassroots movement spreading across the South. Nearly 40 people were arrested at the Georgia State Senate on Tuesday protesting a bill that would bar the expansion of Medicaid.
Georgia has the fifth-highest number of uninsured people of any state in the country. Under the Affordable Care Act, an estimated 650,000 additional residents would be eligible for Medicaid.
But Georgia is one of a number of Republican-led states that have opted out of such Medicaid expansion. The protest at the Georgia State Senate was the largest to date by Moral Monday Georgia, an outgrowth of the Moral Monday movement that began in North Carolina.
We are joined by Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, which was the spiritual home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Rev. Warnock was among the protesters arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience on Tuesday. "Dr. King said that the time comes when silence is betrayal," Rev. Warnock says. "That time is now. The issue is affordable healthcare for all in the richest country in the world."
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to turn right now to Atlanta, Georgia.
MORAL MONDAY GEORGIA PROTESTERS: Medicaid expansion now! Medicaid expansion now! Medicaid expansion now! Medicaid expansion now! Medicaid expansion now! Medicaid expansion now!
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: "Medicaid expansion now!" That was the rallying cry this week of a rising grassroots movement that is spreading across the South. The protest at the Georgia State Senate was the largest to date by Moral Monday Georgia, an outgrowth of the Moral Monday movement that has staged regular rallies against state Republicans in North Carolina since last April.
At Tuesday's action in Atlanta, nearly 40 people were arrested protesting a bill that would bar the expansion of Medicaid. Georgia has the fifth-highest number of uninsured people of any state in the country. Under the Affordable Care Act, an estimated 650,000 additional residents in Georgia would be eligible for Medicaid, but the state is one of a number of Republican-led states that have opted out of such Medicaid expansion. Moral Monday protests have taken place at the Georgia State Capitol since January.
MORAL MONDAY GEORGIA PROTESTERS: [singing] Glory, glory, we need healthcare. Glory, glory, we need healthcare. Glory, glory, we need healthcare. Tell Governor Deal today....(Click title for more)
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The Untaxed Americans: The Speculators, Hustlers, and Freeloaders of Wall Street
There are at least 5 good reasons why our country is ready for a financial transaction tax (FTT).
By Paul Buchheit
Alternet.org
March 16, 2014 - Purchases of American products generally come with a sales tax, and often an excise tax, and possibly state and local add-on taxes. A consumer can avoid all this by limiting purchases to food and prescription drugs, or by shopping online. There's one more way -- by visiting a nearby financial exchange and buying a million dollars worth of derivatives. There is currently no U.S. tax on the purchase of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments. The rest of us pay up to a 10 percent sales tax on the necessities of daily life. A tiny financial transaction tax of perhaps a tenth of a percent on the trading of financial securities would begin to correct this inequity, while generating billions of dollars of revenue.
There are at least five good reasons why our country is ready for such a financial transaction tax (FTT) .
1. The Top Four "Freest Economies" All Have FTTs
As of March 2014, Hong Kong and Singapore and Australia and Switzerland were the top four countries on the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, and they ALL have FTTs (Table 2-9). Critics might argue that other non-FTT taxes are lower in Singapore and Hong Kong. But the World Bank dataset shows the U.S. with lower tax revenues as a percentage of GDP, and the CIA World Factbook shows little difference in the same measure. Economic freedom is not restricted by reasonable taxes on financial transactions. Economies may, in fact, be made freer by encouraging small-business investment over high-frequency trading.
2. The Top "Sin Tax" Candidate is Not Taxed At All
Cigarettes and beer are understandably taxed a lot, and then taxed some more. But the most dangerous product out there -- derivatives -- has a ZERO sales tax on it. The trading of high-frequency securities and derivatives and commodities is a quadrillion dollar industry without a sales tax. A quadrillion dollars. That's a billion times a million. It represents the notional value of trading, which is like a trip to Strawberry Fields, where nothing is real. With regard to derivatives it's the sum total of the transitory high-frequency trading that gets so convoluted that no one knows who owns anything anymore. It's the high-risk type of financial chicanery that nearly brought down the entire economy. But purchases are not taxed.
While average Americans pay up to a 10% sales tax on necessities, millionaire investors pay just a .00002% SEC fee (2 cents for every thousand dollars) for a financial instrument. And some Wall Streeters claim, inexplicably after the disastrous trading frenzy in 2008, that an FTT would increase volatility....(Click title for more)
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By Michelle Chen
In These Times
For California's farmworkers, toiling all day in the brutal, sun-scorched fields is hard enough; the homes they return to each night are often in even worse conditions. Though the reforms won by previous generations have extended basic labor and safety protections to seasonal and immigrant farmworkers, many remain shut out of the right to decent accommodations.
According to a new report published by California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), the housing crisis in the agricultural workforce has worsened over the last generation. Despite the locavore fads and slow-food diets that have infused today's farm-fresh produce with an air of glamour, as a workplace, the fields still echo the social marginalization and scandalous poverty that sparked the groundbreaking grape boycott of the late 1960s.
Don Villarejo, the longtime farmworker advocate who authored the report, tells In These Times that growers have "systematically" reduced investment in farmworker housing over the past 25 years in order to reduce overhead costs and to avoid the trouble of meeting state and federal regulations, which were established as part of a broader overhaul of agricultural labor, health and safety standards during the 1960s and 1980s. According to Villarejo, workers' modern material circumstances are little improved from the old days of the Bracero system. That initiative-the precursor to our modern-day guestworker migrant program-became notorious for shunting laborers into spartan cabins, tents and other inhospitable dwellings on the farms themselves, beset with entrenched poverty and unhealthy, brutish conditions.
Even today, however, surveys and field reports have revealed that a large portion of workers are squeezed into essentially unlivable spaces. Some dilapidated apartments and trailer parks lack plumbing or kitchen facilities, much less any modicum of privacy; others are exposed to toxic pesticide contamination or fetid waste dumps. Workers can "live in a single-family dwelling with perhaps a dozen to 20 [people] crowding in," Villarejo says. In some residences, "mattresses are lined up against the wall because during the daylight hours you could not be able to walk through the rooms owing to all the mattresses on the floor at that time." Though many such dwellings house single male laborers, whole families with children are also known to live in crowded multiple-household units....(Click title for more)
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An Injunction Against the First Amendment
By Walter Brasch
Beaver County Blue via Moderate Voice
March 20, 2014 - Vera Scroggins of Susquehanna County, Pa., will be in court, Monday morning.
This time, she will have lawyers and hundreds of thousands of supporters throughout the country. Representing Scroggins to vacate an injunction limiting her travel will be lawyers from the ACLU and Public Citizen, and a private attorney.
The last time Scroggins appeared in the Common Pleas Court in October, she didn't have lawyers. That's because Judge Kenneth W. Seamans refused to grant her a continuance.
When she was served papers to appear in court, it was a Friday. On Monday, she faced four lawyers representing Cabot Oil and Gas Corp., one of the nation's largest drillers. Seamans told the 63-year-old grandmother and retired nurse's aide that to grant a continuance would inconvenience three of Cabot's lawyers who came from Pittsburgh, more than 250 miles away. He also told her she might have to pay travel and other costs for the lawyers if she was successful in getting a continuance.
And so, Cabot presented its case against Scroggins.
The lawyers claimed she blocked access roads to Cabot drilling operations. They claimed she continually trespassed on their property. They claimed she was a danger to the workers.
Scroggins agreed that she used public roads to get to Cabot properties. For five years, Scroggins has led tours of private citizens and government officials to show them what fracking is, and to explain what it is doing to the health and environment.
But she was always polite, never confrontational. And when she was told to leave, she did, even if it sometimes took as much as an hour because Cabot security often blocked her car. Cabot personnel on site never asked local police to arrest her for trespassing.
But now, Cabot executives decided to launch a mega-attack, throwing against her the full power of a company that grosses more than $1 billion a year and is the largest driller in the region.
In court, Scroggins tried several times to explain that while near or on Cabot drilling operations, she had documented health and safety violations, many of which led to fines or citations. Every time she tried to present the evidence, one of Cabot's lawyers objected, and the judge struck Scroggins' testimony from the record. Cabot acknowledged Scroggins broke no laws but claimed she was a "nuisance."
Scroggins tried to explain that she put more than 500 short videotapes online or onto YouTube to show what fracking is, and the damage Cabot and other companies are doing. Again, Seamans accepted Cabot's objection, and struck her testimony.
And that's why Cabot wanted an injunction against Scroggins, one that would forbid her from ever going anywhere that Cabot has a lease. It had little to do with keeping a peaceful protestor away; it had everything to do with shutting down her ability to tell the truth.
Four days after the hearing, Seamans issued the temporary injunction that Cabot wanted. It forbid Scroggins from going onto any property that Cabot owned, was drilling, or had mineral rights, even if there was no drilling. The injunction didn't specify where Scroggins couldn't go. It was a task that required her to go to the courthouse in Montrose, dig through hundreds of documents, and figure it out for herself. ...(Click title for more)
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Young Chicago Poets Take on Mayor Emanuel
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"Hide Your Schools, Hide Your Homes, Hide Your Children, Cause He's Wrecking it All"
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The Truth about Venezuela: A Revolt
of the Well-off, Not a 'Terror Campaign'
John Kerry's rhetoric is divorced from the reality on the ground, where life goes on - even at the barricades By Mark Weisbrot
Theguardian.com, UK
March 20, 2014 - Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people's consciousness without them even knowing it. I thought that I, too, was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion.
But I wasn't prepared for what I saw in Caracas this month: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city. I, too, had been taken in by media imagery.
Major media outlets have already reported that Venezuela's poor have not joined the right-wing opposition protests, but that is an understatement: it's not just the poor who are abstaining - in Caracas, it's almost everyone outside of a few rich areas like Altamira, where small groups of protesters engage in nightly battles with security forces, throwing rocks and firebombs and running from tear gas.
Walking from the working-class neighborhood of Sabana Grande to the city center, there was no sign that Venezuela is in the grip of a "crisis" that requires intervention from the Organization of American States (OAS), no matter what John Kerry tells you. The metro also ran very well, although I couldn't get off at Alta Mira station, where the rebels had set up their base of operations until their eviction this week.
I got my first glimpse of the barricades in Los Palos Grandes, an upper-income area where the protesters do have popular support, and neighbors will yell at anyone trying to remove the barricades - which is a risky thing to attempt (at least four people have apparently been shot dead for doing so). But even here at the barricades, life was pretty much normal, save for some snarled traffic. On the weekend, the Parque del Este was full of families and runners sweating in the 90-degree heat - before Chávez, you had to pay to get in, and the residents here, I was told, were disappointed when the less well-to-do were allowed to enter for free. The restaurants are still crowded at night.
Travel provides little more than a reality check, of course, and I visited Caracas mainly to gather data on the economy. But I came away skeptical of the narrative, reported daily in the media, that increasing shortages of basic foods and consumer goods are a serious motivation for the protests. The people who are most inconvenienced by those shortages are, of course, the poor and working classes. But the residents of Los Palos Grandes and Altamira, where I saw real protests happening - they have servants to stand in line for what they need, and they have the income and storage space to accumulate some inventory.
These people are not hurting - they're doing very well. Their income has grown at a healthy pace since the Chávez government got control of the oil industry a decade ago. They even get an expensive handout from the government: anyone with a credit card (which excludes the poor and millions of working people) is entitled to $3,000 per year at a subsidized exchange rate. They can then sell the dollars for 6 times what they paid in what amounts to a multi-billion dollar annual subsidy for the privileged - yet it is they who are supplying the base and the troops of the rebellion.
The class nature of this fight has always been stark and inescapable, now more than ever....(Click title for more)
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By Steven Rosenfeld
Alternet.org
March 19, 2014 - Once again, right-wing Republican politicans and Republican-appointed federal judges have undermined the right to vote.
In a U.S. District Court ruling Wednesday that could dramatically upend the voter registration process if it spreads across the country, a Kansas judge found [3] that his state and Arizona can force new voters to show citizenship documents when registering to vote-as opposed to signing a legal oath on the federal voter registration form.
"State election officials maintain authority to determine voter eligibility," wrote District Judge Eric Melgren, appointed [4] by President George W. Bush, in a GOP-backed suit that went after an obscure agency, the Election Assistance Commssion, which designs the federal voter form found in post offices and used in registration drives. "Arizona and Kansas have established that their state laws require their election officials to assess the eligibility of voters by examining proof of their U.S. citizenship beyond a mere oath."
The documentation, if upheld by higher courts, would mean that residents in these and other states with similar laws, like Georgia and Alabama, would have to present either a passport, birth certificate, naturalization or tribal papers to become a legal voter. A driver's license, college ID, or signature given under penalty of perjury would no longer suffice. Thus, if Melgren's decision-which follows [5] a template laid out last June by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in an earlier phase of this case-stands, the GOP's right wing will have created a new barrier to voting.
"This is a really big victory, not just for Kansas and Arizona but for all 50 states," Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach boasted to the Associated Press on Wednesday. "Kansas has paved the way for all states to enact proof-of-citizenship requirements."
Kobach is best-known as the architect of 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's self-deportation immigration policy, which he said was a "more humane [6]" way for the federal government to remove illegal immigrants. He and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican and former secretary of state, have been among the country's most strident advocates of tougher immigration laws.
Kobach also has falsely proclaimed that fraud in the voter registration process is rampant. Voter registration fraud-impersonating someone else to vote more than once-is rarer than getting killed by lightning, experts have found [7]. But it is cited as a belief among Republicans who believe that Democrats will do anything to win. Thus, they embrace a policing-oriented "solution" that happens to tilt the electoral playing field in their favor by complicating voting for their political opponents.
Judge Melgren's ruling is the latest twist in a decade-long legal battle over adding proof of citizenship to the voter registration process. Republicans in many states have toughened [8] voter ID laws in recent years, by narrowing forms of acceptable ID that otherwise eligible voters must present to get a ballot. In Texas, for example [9], college IDs are not accepted at polls while gun permits are. But the proof of citizenship requirement would erect a new barrier that is closer to the starting gate of the process-by barring registration....(Click title for more)
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Who makes U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century?
By Harry Targ
The Rag Blog
March 4, 2014 - I have been teaching courses on United States foreign policy for about 40 years now and my sense of outrage at the enduring ruthlessness of that policy never abates.
We are just a few months away from what was a threatened U.S. attack on Syria which was beaten back by popular pressures. However, the hawks from scholarly, journalist, and political communities are ratcheting up pressure to return to the war option against that country; hoping that the American people's capacity for resistance will have dissipated. In related demands, many foreign policy influentials are calling for the U.S. to withdraw from serious negotiation of differences with Iran.
And now, the United States government and its compliant media are mobilizing the citizenry to accept economic and even military interventions in Ukraine and Venezuela. We are reminded that in all four cases over the years - Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Ukraine - there have been street protests and violence against alleged authoritarian rule. Although the complaints of protesters have had varying degrees of validity, the accuracy of claims by protesters has been of little consequence to U.S. policy makers.
What is most puzzling to observers is why the United States still regards itself as the legitimate source of resolving disputes and transforming political institutions virtually everywhere. Of course, as the preeminent imperial power (in the tradition of Rome, Spain, France, Great Britain, Germany, the former Soviet Union, and others) economic advantage, political power, geographic positioning, the acquisition of resources and cheap labor, figure prominently as causes.
The contradiction that still needs an explanation is the fact that for the most part the American people oppose wars and intervention. This is particularly so in the 21st century when so much pain and suffering has been caused by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2008 Americans elected Barack Obama, in part because he had opposed the war in Iraq and had called for a new American foreign policy based on respect for other nations and peoples. He promised to use diplomacy not war as the primary tool of international relations and in some instances has tried to do that. He probably wanted to end the two awful wars and show some respect for others, even while promoting a neoliberal global agenda in a world of diverse centers of power and wealth.
But why have Obama's cautious efforts to promote United States economic and political interests been contradicted by the patterns of interventionism and the rhetoric of military globalization so common over the last few years?
The answer can be found in a variety of explanations of United States imperialism that emphasize what Mike Lofgren calls the "deep state." Lofgren defines the "deep state" as "...a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process." (Mike Lofgren, "Anatomy of the 'Deep State': Hiding in Plain Sight," Online University of the Left, February 23, 2014).
Others have examined invisible power structures, including class, that rule America (from C. W. Mills' classic The Power Elite to Robert Perrucci, Earl Wysong, and David Wright, in The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream?)....(Click title for more)
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By Calum Marsh
Village Voice
Feb 26 2014 - The first thing I saw when I arrived in the Netherlands for this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam was a glossy print of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, blown up and sprawled across an arrival gate wall. It took me a moment to realize, through the muddle of encroaching jetlag, that this was not some token of Dutch iconography designed to boast of local culture to tourists.
Instead, it was an ad for biscuits, a box of which had been cannily penciled into the corner of the frame. What was extraordinary was that, despite the advertiser's best efforts, the beauty of the painting wasn't diminished by the snack food crammed into it. It suggested an axiom that would prove true by the end of the festival: Great art can survive anything.
The legacy of the Dutch and Flemish masters seemed to loom over my time in Rotterdam, perhaps only by coincidence. But it struck me as somehow significant that the greatest film I saw during the festival should be so conspicuously informed by their influence.
 | | Hard to Be a God - Science fiction film |
Based on a novel published in 1964, first adapted as a screenplay in 1968, shot intermittently between 2000 and 2006, and painstakingly assembled until the day of its director's death in February 2013, Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God finally premiered, literally half a century in the making, at the Rome International Film Festival in November. At Rotterdam, its unceremonious and sparsely populated press screening on the first Saturday evening was nevertheless the definitive event of the festival. Few attended, and many who did walked out. But those who remained enjoyed the privilege of experiencing a masterpiece firsthand.
'Hard to Be a God' is an adaptation of a well-known Russian science-fiction novel by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who also wrote Roadside Picnic, the book on which Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker was based. The Strugatsky story concerns a group of men in the near future who discover a planet identical to Earth as it was 800 years ago; they attempt to surreptitiously ingratiate themselves among its inhabitants, forbidding themselves from using their knowledge to accelerate this alter-Earth's development. Stranded on this familiar alien world, the travelers become the gods of the title: men doomed to trudge eternally through the muck of a backward civilization, advanced but ineffectual, possessed of peerless intelligence but resigned to suffer history anew. It's hard indeed to be a god.
German unloads all this context in a few lines of expository narration at the outset of the film, more or less abandoning the specifics of the Strugatskys' story and retaining the setup only as a platform from which to speculate about the nature of the human condition. The film plays out like a period piece in which the hero is an anachronism: He wanders the place as if he's been teleported back to the fifteenth century, adopting the manners and conventions of the day as a pretense of normality while occasionally quoting modern literature or hammering out a bit of jazz. That hero is Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), esteemed by those around him as a merciless warrior and apparent descendant of a deity, and nearly every second of the film's 177-minute running time is spent in his intimate company - meandering through squalor, claymore in hand, impatiently eyeing those around him, and occasionally lopping off a head....(Click title for more)
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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
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