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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... Bill Fletcher, Jr. on 'The Left
and Labor Strategy'
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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
Full Employment Booklets
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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
Buy it here...
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- Foreword by Susan Brownmiller
- Preface by Ken Wachsberger
$37.50 + $6 shipping
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Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement
By Don Hamerquist
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 The Battle of
the Budgets, Us
versus Them
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... |
Ryan's Budget Prescription:
More for Us, Austerity for Them
By Robert Borosage
Campaign for America's Future
April 2, 2014 - Rep. Paul Ryan's fiscal 2015 budget will not become law. (Thank you, senators). It is a statement of values that is embraced this year, as it has been in the past, by virtually the entire Republican congressional caucus (the exceptions are a handful of dissenters who think it isn't extreme enough).
This is Ryan's fourth budget. Like an aging vaudeville act, the show has gotten tired. The tricks are old. The patter is dated. The punch lines are retreads. The big lies no longer convince. The magic asterisks - details to come later - no longer seem clever.
Once more Ryan parades out the Orwellian doublespeak, where slashing support for the vulnerable sets them free. Once more he reveals the top end and corporate taxes he would cut, but not the taxes he would raise to meet his promise to sustain revenue. Once more he tells us what shared security programs he would protect - Social Security, veteran's benefits, etc. - and not which ones he would savage to get $500 billion in cuts over 10 years. Once more he tells us how much he would save hundreds of billions in domestic spending, but not which programs be gutted to meet the target. What once dazzled now simply feels like an insult. He really ought to hang up the act.
Double Down on Failure
Ryan's budget document starts with a recitation of how lousy the economy is. He then urges that we double down on the failed policies and wrong-headed assumptions that brought us to these straits. This is a plan for those who think we just need a stiffer dose of the same medicine. It is bottled as change, but it is just a more potent version of the old moonshine. Consider these central assumptions of the Ryan budget.
The rich and corporations have too little money
The wealthiest 1% has captured 95% of the income growth coming out of the Great Recession; corporate profits are at a record share of the economy. But Ryan calls for even more tax relief for the rich and corporations, lowering the top rates and abolishing the alternative minimum tax. He asserts that this reform will not lower revenues, but refuses to specify what taxes he would hike or loopholes he would close to make up the difference. He ignores the fact that his conservative Republican colleague, Rep. Dave Camp, couldn't make the math work without retaining a 35% top bracket....(Click title for more)
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The Better Off Budget:
Unite the Many, Defeat the Few
8.8 MILLION JOBS BY 2017
$4 TRILLION IN DEFICIT REDUCTION
By the Congressional Progressive Caucus
During our economy's best decades, Congress invested in the American workforce and every family was better off for it. But recent years have been dominated by growing inequality and a Republican majority in Congress obsessed with slashing the budget, making it harder for working Americans to find decent jobs and save for the future. The Congressional Progressive Caucus' Better Off Budget reverses the damage budget austerity has inflicted on hard-working families and restores our economy to its full potential by creating 8.8 million jobs by 2017.
The Better Off Budget reverses harmful cuts that have hit working families the hardest-starting with repealing across-the-board budget cuts known as the "sequester." It creates a fairer tax code so that low and middle-income families no longer pay more than they should while the world's biggest corporations benefit from unnecessary loopholes. Our budget reverses harmful pay freezes, expands benefits for federal retirees and strengthens federal health care and retirement programs Americans rely on.
When the federal budget invests resources wisely, we can meet the needs of working families and shrink the deficit. The Better Off Budget not only creates jobs, it reduces the deficit by $4.08 trillion over the next 10 years. It's the right budget for the country, for working families and for our future.
MAKING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BETTER OFF
Creating Good Jobs - creates 8.8 million jobs by 2017.
Long-term Unemployed - provides access to training and employment services to match employee potential with employer demand.
Infrastructure - creates jobs in building and construction industries to repair and modernize our ailing roads, bridges and water infrastructure.
State Aid - provides assistance to states to allow them to hire and rehire public employees such as police, firefighters and health care workers.
Public Works and Education - a direct hire program that includes seven jobs corps to hire physicians, students, construction and community workers and an education program boost to hire more teachers and improve schools.
Reversing Harmful Cuts - repeals the Budget Control Act and Sequester, restores Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, restores unemployment insurance, fully funds the Prevention and Public Health Fund, and ends the federal worker pay freeze.
Equity for Women and People of Color - enhances federal programs targeted at creating equity and improving outcomes for women, people of color, and their families.
Protecting Veterans and Workers through Retirement -adopts a cost-of-living adjustment that takes into account realistic retiree expenses and fully funds veterans programs in advance....(Click title for more)
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By Alan Pyke
ThinkProgress
March 31, 2014 - Almost half a million college graduates are working minimum-wage jobs, according to new government statistics.
There were 260,000 Americans with bachelor's degrees earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less in 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' newest annual snapshot of minimum wage workers. Another 200,000 associate's degree holders also worked for that wage.
These figures are sure to understate the total number of people with higher education degrees who are working minimum wage jobs because data does not factor in state minimum wage laws that are higher than the federal floor. That means that likely thousands of workers in the 21 states with higher minimum pay rates are likely also degree-holders.
The quarter-million minimum wage workers who hold bachelor's degrees is down from a high of 327,000 in 2010, CNN notes, and is also the lowest number recorded by the agency since 2008. But it is more than double the number of four-year degree holders who worked for minimum wage in 2005, underscoring how gradual progress has been since the recession ended. Labor experts attributed the high number of overqualified minimum wage workers to the fact that those are the job categories that have seen the most growth in the sluggish recovery.
The glut of overqualified workers in minimum wage jobs is another piece of evidence against the common stereotype that such work is mostly done by teenagers who need to build a resume more than they need to earn an independent living. In fact, the vast majority of workers who would benefit from a minimum wage hike are adults who work to pay rent, cover hospital bills, and feed families. One in five American children has a parent in that group. Fast food workers - one of the largest subsets of minimum wage workers - are disproportionately black and female compared to the overall population.
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By Al-Jazeera America
March 31, 2014 - A protest over deadly police shootings in Albuquerque, N.M., turned from a peaceful demonstration to "mayhem," the city's mayor said late Sunday, as officers in riot gear clashed with protesters.
Objecting to what they say is an increasingly violent police force, hundreds of city residents marched through the streets of Albuquerque on Sunday, blocking traffic and shouting slogans. A social media campaign and an apparent hours-long takedown of the Albuquerque Police Department's (APD) Web page by the activist group Anonymous, coincided with the demonstration.
But the confrontation between police and protesters escalated, with reports of Albuquerque police and Bernalillo County sheriff's deputies using tear gas and charging at the crowds, which had mostly dispersed by late Sunday.
Richard Berry, mayor of Albuquerque, said one police officer was injured. At one point, protesters trapped police in a vehicle and tried to break the windows, The Albuquerque Journal reported. Berry didn't know of any arrests, and multiple messages left for the APD weren't immediately returned. Video by KRQE-TV showed people being led away in restraints, but it was unclear if those people were arrested.
The protest came a little more than a week after KQRE posted a video to YouTube showing city police officers fatally shooting James Boyd, a 38-year-old homeless man they confronted for unauthorized camping in the city's foothills.
The video, which has drawn nearly 900,000 views, was taken by a lapel camera worn by an APD officer and shows a defiant Boyd talking to police from a distance. At one point an officer throws a flashbang, or stun grenade, at Boyd, who then, according to police, pulls out a knife. Then officers fire several shots into Boyd's back and he falls to the ground.
Police Chief Gordon Eden added to the controversy when he said the shooting was justified.
The video and Eden's defense of the officers prompted harsh words from Albuquerque citizens, rights groups and some city officials. On Friday the FBI announced is would investigate the shooting, a move praised by Albuquerque's mayor.
"I think it's the right thing," said Mayor Richard Berry. "We need answers as a community. I want answers as a mayor."
But the shooting is only one of many incidents that show the APD is too quick to resort to violence, protesters said.
Days after Boyd's shooting and hours after the protest, police shot another Albuquerque resident dead.
APD officers have been involved in 37 shootings - 23 of them fatal - since 2010. There is no national record of how many times police departments throughout the United States use deadly force, but according to Micah McCoy with the ACLU of New Mexico, the APD's deadly force rate rivals the New York Police Department's. New York City has 15 times as many residents as Albuquerque.
Tensions between citizens and police were stoked further when the APD announced a new training program earlier this month, which critics say will further emphasize the use of force.
In justifying the new program, New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy Director Jack Jones said, "Evil has come to the state of New Mexico. Evil has come to the Southwest. Evil has come to the United States."
The Justice Department launched an investigation into the ADP in 2012 but has yet to issue a report....(Click title for more)
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Unions In Missouri Rally Against Right-To-Work Bill
Jordan Shapiro Associated Press
March 31m 2014 - JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon's condemnation of so-called right-to-work legislation as unnecessary and misguided drew applause from about a thousand Missouri union members who gathered Wednesday at the state Capitol.
The measure to prohibit labor contracts from requiring that all employees pay union fees, regardless of whether workers are union members, is a top priority of House Republican leaders this year.
But some union members attending the annual rally sponsored by the Missouri State Building and Construction Trades Council said it would weaken a union's ability to collectively bargain and secure protections for workers.
"This is not an issue we need. It will do nothing but harm the middle class and is about lowering wages," said Glenn Lindsey, a Fulton-based Local 36 sheet metal worker for 32 years and third generation union member.
The measure's backers, including House Speaker Tim Jones, R-Eureka, argue the measure would allow Missouri to successfully compete for new jobs. Jones has said the 24 states that currently have right-to-work policies generally have the greatest economic prosperity.
Those arguments were dismissed by Nixon, who reiterated his opposition to the bill at Wednesday's rally. The governor's objections have caused Republican supporters to consider sending the issue to voters this year for approval instead of legislation he might veto to his desk. But Nixon said that approach wouldn't keep him on the sidelines.
"This is wrong and would move our state backward," he said at the rally. "If they go around me, I will stand and fight and we will win."
The House sponsor of the legislation said he understands the heightened emotions about the issue but insisted the bill would help individual workers and the state's economy....(Click title for more)
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Not that certain Democrats should be off the hook, but the GOP and the South can't stand the fact that Obama seeks diplomacy.
By CJ Werleman
Beaver County Peace Links via Alternet.org
March 28, 2014 - "Southerners are a military people. We were back then, still are today," says a North Carolina Civil War enthusiast in 1998's Confederates in the Attic.
That's why the Republican Party is piling on President Obama as he seeks a diplomatic peace in Ukraine. The United States is acting like a nation in decline in its dealings with Russia rather than projecting strength, say former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, while Sen. John McCain has criticized Obama's diplomatic efforts on so many occasions in a way that suggests if we don't start bombing Russia in the next 72-hours, the senator from Arizona will chew through a lamp post.
On Tuesday, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that even a "trained ape" has better foreign policy skills than President Obama. Mind you, Rumsfeld also said in 2002, "That even a trained ape knows Iraq has weapons of mass destruction." Just kidding, but that's the guy we're dealing with here.
The Republican Party is the party of the South. The Republican congressional delegation is disproportionately southern, and unsurprisingly a majority of the party's leaders talk with a southern accent. If you want to know why there has never been a war the Republican Party didn't want another person's kid to fight, it's the Republican Party's slavish devotion to the monolithic South. In Better off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, Chuck Thompson writes, "The southerner's enthrallment with war and bloodshed, his veneration of defeat and disaster, his zeal for religious crusade, and easy compliance with the corporate profit motive, has repeatedly dragged the nation into unnecessary wars."
The GOP and the South can't stand the fact that Obama seeks diplomacy, or occasionally walks back from his own self-imposed "red lines." They view his hesitancy to use military force as weakness, while at the same time forgetting the blood and treasure this country has forfeited in its previous rush to war; an invasion and occupation that cost 186,000 Iraqis and 5,000 Americans their lives. While also not forgetting that misadventure came with a $3 trillion pricetag and an immeasurable moral cost.
Interestingly, a 2003 Pew Research Poll showed that Southerners were by far the most supportive of the Iraq invasion, with 77 percent believing it was the right choice, as opposed to barely half of Americans in general. In fact, Southern whites expressed the strongest support for military action in Iraq with 83 percent saying it was the right decision.
Going back further, C. Vann Woodward noted in The Burden of Southern History, "Not only had the strongest support for the Vietnam War come from the South, but so also had the President and the Secretary of State who led the crusade."...(Click title for more)
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By Brian Lowry
Variety TV Columnist
March 14, 2014 - Television news frequently uses personal stories to shed light on broader issues, an approach that works to varying degrees. While the message in "Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life & Times of Katrina Gilbert," comes through loud and clear, it's rendered slightly numb via this collaboration of HBO and Maria Shriver, which focuses on the struggles of one single mother to illuminate those of the 42 million women living near or below the poverty line, along with the 28 million children who depend on them, according to the show. Spare and troubling though the documentary may be, its anecdotal strategy produces the feeling in this instance that less is, indeed, less.
Filmed over the course of a year, Gilbert's story is designed to put a face on the issue of poverty - and to provide a not-so-thinly-veiled rejoinder to the conservative media's message that most poor families headed by single moms are welfare slackers. Far from that here, Gilbert, a 30-year-old mother of three living in Tennessee, is working at an extended-care facility as a nursing assistant while trying to further her education, and relying on subsidized day-care for her kids.
As for her job tending to the sick and elderly, Gilbert sums it up with resignation but not bitterness: "$9.49 an hour, for what we do."
With so many still struggling, "Paycheck to Paycheck" provides an unvarnished look at the working poor, and women in particular, seeking to pull themselves up but seemingly held back by a system that doesn't offer much hope beyond mere sustenance. The docu shows that Gilbert has little margin for error, with any setback - financial or otherwise - having the potential to throw the family into a tailspin.
Such advocacy pieces, however, need to be actually seen to generate maximum impact, and the storytelling style here (as produced and directed by Shari Cookson and Nick Doob) feels more designed for screenings at progressive think-tanks than an attempt to reach out beyond the Beltway.
By that measure, "Paycheck to Paycheck" is solidly executed - the sort of longform personal account only HBO or PBS seemingly have much appetite to provide. As constructed, though, it's not apt to have much impact, or be acknowledged, in today's age of self-selecting media, by many of the people who most need to see it....(Click title for more)
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This green doc focuses on one small battle in a larger war against the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
By Geoff Berkshire
Variety @geoffberkshire
March 28, 2014 - Looking to shed light on one small part of a larger hot-button environmental debate, documentarian John Fiege's "Above All Else" chronicles a 2012 grassroots fight in East Texas to halt TransCanada's controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
While the Obama administration continues to delay a critical decision on whether or not to allow the pipeline (which would transport oil extracted from Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast) to cross the U.S.-Canada border, the project's opponents and supporters remain locked in a passionate battle. So it's somewhat disappointing that the limited scope of Fiege's verite docu doesn't have a whole lot to add to the current conversation. Nevertheless, the pic's central David-and-Goliath conflict and romanticized portrayal of environmental activism should attract enough interest from green-leaning audiences to secure a niche release.
 | Above All Else Trailer
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The literal David here is David Daniel, a former competitive gymnast, circus performer and stuntman who puts up a mighty fight against corporate titan TransCanada when he discovers the planned pipeline would cross his property. Far from the only resident to raise objections, Daniel instead proves to be one of the most ornery and committed.
Working in collaboration with volunteer activist group Tar Sands Blockade, Daniel helps construct an elaborate tree-sit on his property to prevent construction crews from clearing the area and moving forward. With a plainspoken family man demeanor and unforced love of nature Daniel is a prototypical Everyman hero, and an obvious choice to build a movie around, at least initially.
"Above All Else" is most effective at detailing the alternately dispiriting and frightening fashion in which Daniel, and many of his neighbors, are intimidated and manipulated into giving up some or all of their rights as property owners. Given the never-ending assault of financial incentives, legal threats and declarations of eminent domain from their deep-pocketed opponents, it clearly takes considerable determination - and perhaps a degree of naivete - to even attempt to fight back.
What's less clear is exactly what the protestors are fighting for. Fiege keeps information about the pipeline and the murky science involving tar sands oil to a minimum, relying mostly on an oft-quoted line from NASA scientist James Hansen that tar sands extraction means "game over for the climate." That approach works when the film is focused on the personal stories of Daniel and his fellow residents, who are upset with TransCanada's duplicitous behavior, the project's impact on their land and the negative consequences for the environment. There's a righteous anger to their actions, summed up by Daniel's observation, "TransCanada considers our lives 'low consequence.'"...(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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