Chicago: May 16-17
on Police Crimes
in defense of democracy and
to end racist and political repression
Featuring Angela Davis University of Chicago
International House1414 E. 59th St, Chicago IL 60637
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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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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' OnHating the 'Middle Class,' 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
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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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...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...
 The Cities:
Capitalism's
Soft Underbelly
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... |
Ras Baraka's Victory in Newark Could
Revitalize New Jersey Progressives
By Bob and Barbara Dreyfuss The Nation
May 14, 2014 - If Bill de Blasio needs a partner in rebuilding America's urban core, he can now look west, just across the Hudson River, to Newark, where Ras Baraka was elected mayor yesterday.
Baraka's election means a lot to progressives, organized labor, teachers and others in Newark, New Jersey's largest city-and it is a significant defeat for Governor Chris Christie and his allies in the Democratic party, including former Newark Mayor Corey Booker and the Democratic party bosses George Norcross and Joe DiVincenzo. It might also represent a key tipping point for the next New Jersey race for governor, which-if Christie resigns in the scandal that is plaguing him or, alternately, if and when he resigns to run for president-could happen as early as 2015.
While Baraka was backed strongly by New Jersey's Working Families Alliance, the teachers union, the Communications Workers of America and the rest of organized labor, lots of money from Wall Street, hedge funds and the wealthy charter school movement poured into Newark on behalf of Shavar Jeffries, Baraka's opponent in the race. As The Wall Street Journal reported just before the election:
The two men have both looked to New York City for money, but their donor bases are different. Independent expenditure groups have poured money into the local race, with two groups spending more than $600,000 on network and cable television ads, according to a person familiar with the spending. Mr. Jeffries has been backed by a number of New York financiers-much as Mr. Booker was-along with lawyers and education leaders. Mr. Baraka has the support of artists such as Spike Lee and Ms. Hill and professors such as Princeton University's Cornel West, along with prominent alumni from his Howard University days.
And in another piece, the Journal noted:
One super PAC, Newark First, has raised more than $1.3 million to support Mr. Jeffries, according to its filing. Contributors included several financial executives and Education Reform Now, a New York City-based group begun by financial fund managers who support charter schools.
Newark First, of course, is a front for the charter-school movement, notes PolitickerNJ:
But the largest contribution to the pro-Jeffries Newark First group came from another group, Education Reform Now, who donated $850,000.
On the group's website, Education Reform Now defines itself as an organization in which "policy objectives are built around strengthening innovation, public charter laws, accountability, high-quality new school development, transparency on finance and student results, and best practices for turning around low-performing schools." Members of the group, including board members who have experience working at high-powered Wall Street hedge funds, are active in the Success Academies network of charter schools.
On the issue of education, the difference between the two is stark. Baraka is the principal of a Newark public high school. Jeffries started a charter school. Bob Braun, who writes the popular New Jersey blog Bob Braun's Ledger, described Baraka's victory like this:
Ras Baraka, a high school principal and the son of a poet, yesterday easily defeated a Wall Street-backed promoter of school privatization to become the next mayor of Newark. Baraka's victory repudiated the policies not just of his rival, Shavar Jeffries, but those of Gov. Chris Christie, former Mayor Cory Booker, and state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson who is trying to close neighborhood public schools and replace them with privately run charter schools....(Click title for more)
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Progressive Activism Seen as Key to
Democratic Turnout in Midterm Elections
Keith Elison, right, Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-chair
By Sam Knight
Truthout
May 8, 2014 - Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) warned that Democrats are likely to lose ground to Republicans this November if they continue to emphasize fundraising over organizing.
He told Truthout that midterm turnout is "killing us" and that the party needs to rally working- and middle-class families to bridge the enthusiasm gap.
"Republicans don't really vote more than us during the non-presidential years; they just vote the same as they always do. We've got to re-engineer our turnout," he said.
The cochair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said that "issue-based campaigning" could facilitate organization and boost support for the party's candidates this November. He singled out minimum wage increases, immigration reform, equal pay and mandated paid sick leave as being crucial to this strategy.
"That will get voters to say, 'Oh okay, if that's what you're talking about, I'll show up,' " he said. "But if it's just 'Come vote' - it's like, for what?"
Ellison explained that an organizational strategy needs to be built on "progressive activism in the south" and in inner-cities, and described collaboration with organizers as part of an optimal left-leaning governing mantra.
"Trying to go dollar for dollar with these Republicans is a losing strategy."
"My whole political orientation now is as much about redefining progressivism as a strategy of reaching and gaining power as much as it's a policy agenda," he said. "We might say 'raise the minimum wage, equal pay, immigration reform,' and that's a policy agenda. But if you don't have a strategy to engage people, all across this country - who are working, who are the ones who make the profits for these corporations - then you're not really complete, right?"
The congressman made the comments about organization and campaign finance in response to a question from Truthout about an assertion made by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in October 2013. In an interview with Playboy magazine, the senator lamented that in six years of going to Democratic Caucus meetings, he has "never heard five minutes of discussion about organizing. It's about raising money."
"Trying to go dollar for dollar with these Republicans is a losing strategy," Ellison argued. "I'm not saying that money's irrelevant. What I'm saying is we've made it too important."...(Click title for more)
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By Thom Hartmann
Progressive America Rising via Alternet
May 13, 2014 - The Republicans have their strategy, and they're sticking to it, even though it involves destroying lives and even killing people.
It's working so well based on a simple statistical reality.
The majority of Americans - depending on which survey you look at, between 60 and 75 percent - cannot name which political party controls the House of Representatives, which party controls the Senate [3], or either.
Because most Americans don't know who controls Congress, when Congress misbehaves, as they have been doing for six years, most Americans aren't sure who to blame.
Enter the Republican Chaos Strategy, based entirely on this statistical and political reality.
And common sense suggests that well over 90 percent of Americans know that Barack Obama is the president and that he is a Democrat.
The Republicans know this, too, and it's the other half of their strategy.
Therefore, what the Republicans know, is that if they can cause damage to the American economy and to American working people, the average voter, not realizing it was exclusively the Republicans who did it, are going to assume that the president - and the Democratic Party he is a member of - must bear some or maybe even all of the responsibility.
It's a brilliant strategy: Damage the country and you damage the Democratic Party.
And just in time for the midterm elections....(Click title for more)
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Social democracy's retreat doesn't mean progressive politics is dying. Today's mass class - the precariat - is defining a new agenda
By Guy Standing
The Guardian, UK
April 20, 2014 - Next year is the 800th anniversary of one of the greatest political documents of all time. The Magna Carta was the first class-based charter, enforced on the monarchy by the rising class.
Today's political establishment seems to have forgotten both it and the emancipatory, ecological Charter of the Forest of 1217. The rising mass class of today, which I call the precariat, will not let them forget for much longer.
Today we need a precariat charter, a consolidated declaration that will respect the Magna Carta's 63 articles by encapsulating the needs and aspirations of the precariat, which consists of millions of people living insecurely, without occupational identity, doing a vast amount of work that is not counted, relying on volatile wages without benefits, being supplicants, dependent on charity, and denizens not citizens, in losing all forms of rights.
The precariat is today's mass class, which is both dangerous, in rejecting old political party agendas, and transformative, in wanting to become strong enough to be able to abolish itself, to abolish the conditions of insecurity and inequality that define it. A precariat charter is a way of rescuing the future.
Every charter has been a class-based set of demands that constitute a progressive agenda or vision of a good society. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. A radical charter restructures, being both emancipatory, in demanding a fresh enhancement of rights as freedoms, and egalitarian, in showing how to reduce the vital inequalities of the time. Since the crash of 2008 and during the neoliberal retrenchment known as austerity, many commentators have muttered that the left is dead, watching social democrats in their timidity lose elections and respond by becoming ever more timid and neoliberal. They deserve their defeats. As long as they orient their posturing to the "squeezed middle", appealing to their perception of a middle class while placating the elite, they will depend on the mistakes of the right for occasional victories, giving them office but not power.
This retreat of the labourist left does not mean progressive politics is dying. Costas Lapavitsas and Alex Politaki, who wrote for this site earlier this month asking why Europe's young are not rioting now, are too pessimistic. Appearances deceive. The reason for the lack of conventional political activity reflects a lack of vision from the left.
This is changing, and quickly by historical standards. Let us not forget that the objectives and policies that emerged in the great forward march a century ago were not defined in advance but took shape during and because of social struggles.
I have been fortunate to witness the phenomenal energies within the precariat while travelling in 30 countries over the past two years. But a transformative movement takes time to crystallise. It was ever thus.
To make sense of what is happening, one must appreciate that we are in the middle of a global transformation. The disembedded phase dominated by the neoliberal Washington consensus led to the crisis of 2008 - fiscal, existential, ecological and distributional crises rolled into one. By then, the precariat had taken shape. Its growth has accelerated since....(Click title for more)
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Angela Davis: What's Radical in the 21st Century
By Patt Morrison
Los Angeles Times
May 6, 2014 - Forty-five years after her first UCLA teaching gig attracted the wrath of Gov. Ronald Reagan, Angela Y. Davis is back on campus this semester, as regents' lecturer in the gender studies department. Her Thursday address in Royce Hall, about feminism and prison abolition, sums up some but not all of her work - a long academic career paralleled by radical activism.
President Nixon called her a "dangerous terrorist" when she was charged with murder and conspiracy after a deadly 1970 courthouse shootout. She was acquitted, and since then, the woman born in the Jim Crow minefield of Birmingham, Ala., has written, taught and lectured around the world. Her iconic Afro has morphed from its 1970s silhouette; her intensity has not.
Congress is working on prison-sentence reform. Many states have banned capital punishment. Isn't this encouraging?
I've associated myself with the prison abolition movement; that does not mean I refuse to endorse reforms. There is a very important campaign against solitary confinement, a reform that is absolutely necessary. The difference resides in whether the reforms help to make life more habitable for people in prison, or whether they further entrench the prison-industrial complex itself. So it's not an either-or situation.
What would a just prison system look like to you?
It's complicated. Most of us in the 21st century abolitionist movement look to W.E.B. Du Bois' critique about the abolition of slavery - that it was not enough simply to throw away the chains. The real goal was to re-create a democratic society that would allow for the incorporation of former slaves. [Prison abolition] would be about building a new democracy: substantive rights to economic sustenance, to healthcare; more emphasis on education than incarceration; creating new institutions that would tend to make prisons obsolete.
You think prisons won't be necessary one day?
It is possible, but even [if it doesn't happen], we can move to a very different kind of justice that does not require a retributive impulse when someone does something terrible.
Do you watch the prison-themed comedy-drama "Orange Is the New Black"?
I not only saw the series but I read [Piper Kerman's] memoir. She has a much deeper analysis than one sees in the series, but as a person who has looked at the role of women's prisons in visual culture, primarily films, I think [the series] isn't bad. There are so many aspects that often don't [appear in] depictions of people in those oppressive circumstances. "12 Years a Slave," for example - one thing I missed in that film was some sense of joy, some sense of pleasure, some sense of humanity.
You are back this semester at UCLA, the campus from which Gov. Ronald Reagan had you fired.
This was an offer I could not refuse. The students are very different from the students of 1969, 1970. They're so much more sophisticated, in the sense of having more complicated questions. ...(Click title for more)
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 | | Occupy Activist Found Guilty of Assaulting Police Officer, but Was Justice Served? |
By Jessica Desvarieux
The Real News Network
May 8, 2014 - Attorney Kevin Zeese discusses how the judge hearing Cecily McMillan's case did not allow the defense to show images which would have proven that the activist was reacting to getting her breast grabbed.
TRANSCRIPT:
JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.
So you may have heard of Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan. She was allegedly assaulted by a New York police officer on the six-month anniversary of the Occupy movement two years ago. That night, police moved in to clear the park and make arrests, and during the chaos, McMillan's defense says that an officer grabbed her breast from behind, swung her around, and threw her to the ground. You can see here a picture of some of what her defense says were bruises from that night.
Now her trial has come to a close, and Cecily was found guilty of assaulting an officer, which is a felony. She faces up to seven years in prison.
Now joining us to get into this case and discuss more is an attorney, Kevin Zeese. He's been following the case closely, and he's one of the original organizers of the national occupation of Washington, D.C.
Thanks for joining us, Kevin.
KEVIN ZEESE, ORGANIZER, POPULARRESISTANCE.ORG: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
DESVARIEUX: So, Kevin, just quickly, what was your reaction to the verdict?
ZEESE: Disappointment, severe disappointment. Worry for Cecily. And not totally surprised, because the judge in the case was very aggressive on the side of the prosecutor throughout the case, pretrial and trial. And so it wasn't totally surprising that it turned out the way it did. But, really, disappointment.
And, also, thinking about the context of our times, you know, with the police abuse all of the country--I saw--the same say that I saw her conviction, I saw a tape of in Albuquerque City Council meeting where the citizens came in and took over the council meeting, so angry about police abuse. The same day also, articles about the Supreme Court refusing to hear the Hedges case against the NDAA, you know, which allows military to hold people without charges.
So it's a lot of these things coming together. It's a real attack on dissent. But mostly I felt for Cecily.
DESVARIEUX: So you mentioned that the judge really wasn't allowing the defense to show some really strong evidence that would have helped Cecily's case. Can you speak little bit more about that?
ZEESE: Well, the judge, Judge Zweibel--and, you know, I looked him up before I wrote about this case. And one of the first things you see when you look him up is he's a prosecutor in robes. So we know where his bias is.
And you saw in some of the pretrial motions one of the key issues was getting to use the personnel file of the police officer involved, Grantley Bovell, and the judge refused to allow that. He only allowed a small portion that was before the jury, which was about his fixing tickets in the Bronx as part of the Bronx ticket-fixing scandal, which many--that should have undermined his ethics right there, but I guess that wasn't enough for the jury. But there's more in his history of police abuse. In fact, that same night, there was a guy who had his head hit against the ground by Bovell, and he was in court, and [he was ready to testify about that]. The judge wouldn't let that in. But he wouldn't go into the personnel files and let the defense see any other kind of reprimands he's said, any other kind of problems he's had. He's facing a number of--at least two lawsuits for abusing citizens. And so none of that got in before the jury, so the jury didn't hear any of that.
Then, throughout the trial, whenever the government would make an objection, it was upheld. The judge agreed with the government whenever they said they object to that, they object to that question, that videotape, whatever, that line of questioning. But whenever the defense made an objection, it was almost always overruled. He always denied the defense. In fact, at one point, Marty Stoler, the defense lawyer, said, you know, what's going on here? You always believe what the prosecutor says; you never believe what I say. And so it was pretty evident. And people in the courtroom were Tweeting out about how the judge is just obviously against Cecily the whole way through.
And my hope was that the jury would see that. And sometimes you get a reverse reaction and the jury says, oh, boy, this judge is making it impossible. What's going on here? This is, a railroading. But that didn't work with this jury, that didn't come across with this jury, and so the jury allowed it to go the way it was.
And so it was a very hard case for the defense to present their defense. There was no good videotape. That was one of the big problems. The only videotape that was had was after the breast grabbing, the alleged breast-grabbing, which--people saw pictures of her breast bruised with fingerprints on them. But they did have videotape of her hitting him....(Click title for more)
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 Citizen Strangers
Shira Robinson
Stanford University Press
By Rod Such
The Electronic Intifada
May 7, 2014 - If anyone still believes that the apartheid label applies only to Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and not to present-day Israel itself, they need only read Shira Robinson's Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State (Stanford University Press) to be disabused of the notion.
Robinson is an associate professor of history at George Washington University, and her scholarship in this work is impressive, drawing extensively on Israeli state archives, oral history interviews with Palestinian citizens of Israel, and numerous other primary sources. Citizen Strangers joins a host of studies focusing on Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Ilan Pappé's The Forgotten Palestinians (2011).
What distinguishes Robinson's study is her in-depth look at the period of military rule over the largely rural Palestinian population from 1948 to 1966 and her analysis of the settler-colonial mentality that guided the Israeli state's attempt to recast Palestinians as strangers in their own land.
Robinson sets out to examine the contradictions that emerged from Israel's foundation as a colonial state that had to expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in order to establish a "democracy" for the new Jewish majority. Her thesis is that "Israel's attainment of sovereignty did not alter the fundamental status of the local Jewish population as settlers."
Facade of democracy
She defines Israel as a "liberal" settler state because it had to grant voting rights and other limited rights to those Palestinians who escaped being forcibly expelled. The need to gain admission to the United Nations and present a façade of liberal democracy to the rest of the world was behind this.
But Robinson makes clear that the "handful of rights" Palestinians with Israeli citizenship did enjoy could only be determined by the Jewish settler community, which at the same time guaranteed an "array of social and political privileges" for themselves alone....(Click title for more)
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'Tomboy' director Celine Sciamma nonjudgmentally examines another young woman searching for her identity, this time amid a teenage girl gang.
By Peter Debruge
Variety's Chief International Film Critic
May 15, 2014 - An engrossing look at the way a young woman of color defines her own identity vis-a-vis the various spheres of support in her life - family, school, friends and so forth - Celine Sciamma's "Girlhood" advances the French helmer's obsession with how society attempts to force teenage girls into familiar categories, when the individuals themselves don't conform so easily. As in "Water Lilies" and "Tomboy" before this, Sciamma pushes past superficial anthropological study to deliver a vital, nonjudgmental character study, this time following 16-year-old Marieme as she seeks her path amid a "girl gang" (a better translation of the French title, "Bande de filles").
Coincidentally, under its English-language title, "Girlhood" suggests a certain kinship with Richard Linklater's "Boyhood," another sensitively observed coming-of-age feature making the festival rounds this year. Though Sciamma's film speaks to roughly the same audience, the writer-director doesn't set out to capture the cumulative experience of a prototypical adolescent the way Linklater did. Rather, she resolves to consider the inner lives of characters typically overlooked in French film - namely, the black teens who congregate in shopping centers, subways and courtyards, drawing attention as they "kiki" among themselves.
Clearly divided into four distinct sections, "Girlhood" illustrates the circumstances leading up to several major turning points for Marieme, who lives in the projects in northwest Paris and desperately wants to sort out her adult persona. At the end of each, the screen cuts to black, electro music (by "Water Lilies" composer Para One) swells and the character re-emerges with an entirely new identity: braided hair as a student, a straightened weave to match her fellow dropouts, a kinky blonde wig when running errands for a local crime boss, and finally, "herself" in the final segment.
From the very first scene, which shows an all-girl sports team participating in a school-sanctioned football match, "Girlhood" depicts Marieme (Karidja Toure) surrounded by other young women. Whereas Sciamma's last two films challenged sexual taboos by acknowledging LGBT themes among underage characters, in this case, race is a more powerful factor than attraction (which, when it does arise, is complicated by the fact that Marieme desires one of her abusive older brother's best friends, played by Idrissa Diabate). Tall and yet still quite youthful-looking, Toure appears in every scene, giving auds plenty of time to psychoanalyze her character. By the end, it's clear that she is simply most comfortable being part of a social group - which explains the significance of the last shot, in which the character is finally shown to be independent enough to branch out on her own....(Click title for more)
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Greet Freedom Summer's 50th 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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