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KOCH BROTHERS EXPOSED: Full 2014 EDITION , 55 min
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 The new annual edition of our journal of discussion and analysis is now out. More than 170 pages, it includes 14 articles on strategy austerity, organizing, 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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Journal of the Black Left Unity Network
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New CCDS Book Reporting on Vietnam
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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...
 Rightwing
Populists
Working For
And Against
the Banksters
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... |
Dave Brat and the Triumph of Rightwing Populism
By John B. Judis
The New Republic via Portside
June 11, 2014 - Dave Brat's victory over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has been widely attributed to Brat's opposition to immigration reform. But in his campaign, Brat and his Tea Party backers gave equal weight to denouncing Cantor as a tool of Wall Street, the big banks, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. Brat's campaign reflected an old strain of rightwing populism that continues to be an important part of our politics.
American populism is rooted in middle class resentment of those who are seen as enjoying the benefits of the goods and services the middle class produces without having earned them through work. Its ideology is what historians call "producerism." It first appears in the Jacksonian Workingmen's Parties and then in the Populists of the late nineteenth century. But it takes a leftwing and a rightwing form.
Facing an ailing economy, leftwing populists from Huey Long to Paul Wellstone primarily blame Wall Street, big business and the politicians whom they fund. Rightwing populists from George Wallace to Pat Buchanan also blame Wall Street, but put equal if not greater blame on the poor, the unemployed, the immigrant, and the minorities, who, like the coupon-clipper on Wall Street, are seen as economic parasites.
The Tea Party is a heterogeneous movement, but many of its members, and many of the local candidates it champions, are rightwing populists. And that was certainly true of Brat. The Randolph-Macon College economics professor attacked Cantor for supporting what he called "amnesty" for illegal immigrants, but he also took aim at Wall Street and big business.
Speaking [2]last month before the Mechanicsville Tea Party, Brat tied Cantor to Wall Street and big business, whom he blamed partly for the financial crisis. "All the investment banks in the New York and D.C.-those guys should have gone to jail. Instead of going to jail, they went on Eric's Rolodex, and they are sending him big checks," he said. Brat echoed these charges in a radio interview [3]. "The crooks up on Wall Street and some of the big banks-I'm pro business, I'm just talking about the crooks-they didn't go to jail they are on Eric's Rolodex," he said.
Brat and local Tea Party leaders also criticized Cantor for attempting to water down the Stock Act [4], which banned members of Congress from profiting from insider trading. "One congressman changed the act so spouses could benefit from insider trading," Brat charged, referring to Cantor. (Cantor drew equal fire from Democrats for attempting to undermine the bill.)
Brat's case against immigration reform was directed at big business as much as it was directed at the immigrants themselves. "They get cheap labor," he said of big business, "but everyone in the 7th district gets cheap wages." He accused Cantor of following business's lead on immigration reform. "Eric is running on the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable principles," Brat told a Tea Party audience. "They want amnesty for illegal immigrants. They want them granted citizenship. And it's in the millions-40 millions-coming in. If you add 40 million workers to our labor supply, what will happen to the wage rate for the average American?"
Brat's appeal was frankly demagogic. Cantor was not supporting amnesty, and there are about 10 million illegal immigrants currently in the United States. Some of Brat's Tea Party supporters took it a step further. Larry Nordvig, the head of the Richmond Tea Party, told a joke at Brat rally. "A politician, a Muslim, and an illegal alien walk into a bar, and you know what the bartender said? Good evening, Mr. President."...(Click title for more)
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The Ayn-Rand Loving Billionaires and the
Vast Right-Wing Machine Behind David Brat
David Brat's 'surprise' win over
Eric Cantor was in the works for years By Thom Hartman
Alternet
June 11, 2014 - Dark money is flowing like water in Washington.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who has always been considered one of the more Conservative members of the House, lost in a primary to upstart Tea Party challenger David Brat.
Brat, an economics college professor, was vastly outraised by Cantor, and most polls leading up to the primary showed Cantor with a very comfortable lead.
In the immediate aftermath of last night's shocker in Virginia, analysts have been saying Brat's victory was just a fluke.
They couldn't be more wrong.
Dave Brat's victory wasn't just a fluke, and he isn't just some Tea Partying economics college professor from Virginia.
Both he and his victory have dark money written all over them.
Back in 2008 during America's financial collapse, BB&T Bank was one of the many big banks that crashed. In order to stay afloat, that bank took a $3.1 billion bailout from the Bush administration.
At the helm of the bank at that time was John Allison, an Ayn Rand-loving CEO.
According to The Street, during his time as CEO of BB&T, Allison regularly used the BB&T Charitable Foundation, "to provide grants to schools that agree to create courses on capitalism that feature the study of 'Atlas Shrugged.'"
Meanwhile, according to New York Magazine, Allison gave $500,000 to Randolph-Macon College to hire Dave Brat, so that he too could teach the Ayn Rand libertarian philosophy as an economics professor.
Shortly after BB&T accepted $3.1 billion government bailout from the Bush Administration, Allison resigned as CEO, and was picked up by Charles Koch, to become the new president of the Cato Institute, formerly known as the Charles Koch Foundation, and to keep spreading the work of Rand.
Much like the BB&T Charitable Foundation, Koch-allied groups like The Cato Institute have spent millions of dollars, putting college professors in economics departments across the country, so that they can spread the good word of Ayn Rand, and help create a libertarian paradise in America. ...(Click title for more)
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The Senate voted Wednesday on the Massachusetts senator's bill to lower interest rates for student loans
By Patrick Caldwell
Mother Jones
June 11, 2014 - Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) can't catch a break. Senate Republicans voted Wednesday morning to block her latest piece of liberal reform. The Senate voted 56-38 in favor of Warren's bill to help ease the burden of student loan debt. Despite a majority of senators approving the measure, it failed to reach the 60 votes needed to overcome Republicans' filibuster of the measure.
Warren's bill is a simple concept. Current students can take out government loans at 3.86 percent interest, a cheaper rate than many of the loans held by past generations of students. The bill would also allow borrowers to refinance their current loans down to that lower rate.
Student loans have become a major drag on the economic fortunes of young Americans, hampering their ability to take risks in seeking jobs and delaying their ability to make the sort of purchases (cars, homes, etc.) that have typically defined a middle-class American life. More than 40 million people still owe money for their higher education. The total pool of loans still owed currently hovers over $1.2 trillion, more than the country's outstanding credit card debt. About 15 percent of student loans go into default within three years.
The main reason Republicans objected to the measure has less to do with the idea of easing student loan debt, and more with the mechanism Warren used to offset the cost of refinancing those loans. It would cost the government $51 billion over the next decade to allow borrowers to refinance. But Warren's bill would have actually reduced the deficit, bringing in $72 billion in new revenues by implementing the so-called Buffet Rule, an added surcharge tax on millionaires to ensure that they pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. "It's a basic question on our values," Warren told the Boston Globe this week. "Does this country protect millionaires' and billionaires' tax loopholes? Or does it try to help young people who are just starting their economic lives?"
But when even conservative fire-breathers in Republican leadership are tossed aside as RINOs, anything with the whiff of a tax increase is off the table for Republicans. Instead, it's easier to ignore the troubles of young Americans wallowing in debt.
Senate Democrats aren't finished pushing Warren's bill, though. Democrats up for reelection this year have been using the bill to hammer their opponents, and the party has rolled it into their wider push for aiding women, since women are more likely to attend college but earn less for their degrees than their male peers. ...(Click title for more)
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Armed with an approach that foregrounds social justice organizing, teachers' unions are redefining themselves -- and increasing their wider impact
By Bob Peterson
Common Dreams
June 3, 2014 - A revitalized teacher union movement is bubbling up in the midst of relentless attacks on public schools and the teaching profession. Over the next several years this new movement may well be the most important force to defend and improve public schools, and in so doing, defend our communities and our democracy.
The most recent indication of this fresh upsurge was the union election in Los Angeles. Union Power, an activist caucus, won leadership of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the second-largest teacher local in the country. The Union Power slate, headed by president-elect Alex Caputo-Pearl, has an organizing vision for their union. They have worked with parents fighting school cuts and recognize the importance of teacher-community alliances.
In two other cities -Portland, OR, and St. Paul, MN - successful contract struggles also reflect a revitalized teacher union movement. In both cities the unions put forth a vision of "the schools our children deserve" patterned after a document by the Chicago Teachers Union. They worked closely with parents, students, and community members to win contract demands that were of concern to all groups. The joint educator-community mobilizations were key factors in forcing the local school districts to settle the contracts before a strike.
The St. Paul Federation of Teachers involved parents and community members in formulating their contract proposals, which emphasized lower class size, less time spent on test prep and testing, and increased early childhood services. Working with parents they staged a massive "walk-in" to schools when 2,500 people-educators, parents, community members and students-walked into school in unison in a show of solidarity.
The Portland Association of Teachers organized support from religious leaders, the NAACP, and the Portland Student Union. They conducted petition campaigns and generated public support. Ultimately the school board agreed to many of the PAT's proposals, including hiring 5% more teachers to reduce class size, and a substantive increase in planning time for elementary teachers.
Social Justice Unionism
For years a small but growing number of union activists, myself included, have promoted a vision of social justice teacher unionism that builds on the lessons of the past, but pushes the envelope well beyond traditional unionism. We promote an organizing model with a strong dose of internal union democracy and increased member participation. This contrasts to a business model that views union membership as an insurance policy where decision-making is concentrated in a small group of elected leaders and/or paid staff. ...(Click title for more)
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92-Year-Old Woman Loses Right to Vote
Due to Expired Drivers License in Alabama
By Brad Friedman The Brad Blog via Truthout
June 6, 2014 - Yesterday we covered the story of 93-year old Willie Mims, the African-American man who was turned away from the polling place in Alabama for lack of a Photo ID, after having voted successfully in nearly every election since WWII.
Mims had a drivers license, but it had expired. So, according to the polling place Photo ID restriction law enacted by state Republicans, even though Mims would have had his photo on it and even an address that matched his voter registration, he was not allowed to cast his vote during yesterday's primary election.
But Mims was hardly the only one who was kept from voting yesterday, under the first official statewide run of the AL GOP's polling place Photo ID law. (The law was passed in 2011, but didn't take effect until now, since the state was waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to knock down the section of the Voting Rights Act that would likely have blocked the racially discriminatory statute from taking effect.)
Kay Campbell of AL.com shared this story yesterday of another long time voter who lost her right to vote thanks to the same law...
A Huntsville woman, 92, who has lived in the same house in Huntsville for 57 years and voted in every election since she was eligible, was turned away from the polls today because her driver's license expired nine months ago.
The voter, a great-grandmother to five, was deeply embarrassed by the whole incident and declined to talk directly with AL.com, but she gave her go-ahead for her neighbor, who took her to the polls, to relay the incident, with the provision that her name not be used.
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The license had expired in August 2013. She had not renewed it because her eyesight is failing and she has made the tough decision to quit driving. But she thought since it was so recent, it would work. She uses it to cash checks and in other rare incidences when she is asked for an ID.
As we also noted yesterday, via MSNBC's Zachary Roth, Alabama has a loophole built into the law, which the NAACP Legal Defense fund describes [PDF] as "an illegal relic of the Jim Crow South". It allows a voter without the very specific state-issued Photo ID now required to cast a ballot, to vote anyway so long as two poll workers at the precinct can vouch for them....(Click title for more)
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.jpg) By An Huihou
China People's Daily Online
June 5, 2014 - The Syrian authorities opted to hold a presidential election on June 3. Bashar al-Assad is one of the three candidates. The international media generally assume that there is no doubt that Bashar al-Assad will win re-election. In spite of public discontent with the current situation and a desire for change, the essence of the Syria crisis is that foreign forces have tried to interfere in Syria's internal affairs, provoking a civil war in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.
The US President Barack Obama announced on August: "The rule of Bashar al-Assad has lost its legitimacy and he must step down." However, far from falling, Bashar al-Assad has secured another three years in power, for many reasons. Most importantly, the United States has made no direct military strikes against Syria. Why did the U.S. military decide not to wield the big stick this time?
Boogged down by its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the peak of the United States hegemony is past. The U.S. economy crashed during the 2008 financial crisis, triggering further domestic issues. Coupled with the rise of the emerging economies, it is an indisputable fact that the dominance of the U.S.A. is in decline. Increasingly powerless to halt this decline, the United States is at a loss.Through his implementation of the "Asia-Pacific rebalancing strategy" in 2011, Obama adjusted his Middle East policy by reducing investment in the Middle East, slowing down the implementation of the "new interventionism" and seeking shelter in stability.
A war in Syria is now contrary to its global strategy, and it would leave the U.S. facing too many associated difficulties. In August 2013, the West contrived the Syrian 'chemical weapons' crisis. The United States schemed with the United Kingdom to threaten Syria, declaring its intention to carry out a limited military strike. But 59% of Americans were opposed to aiding the Syrian opposition....(Click title for more)
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 | IVORY TOWER (2014) Official HD Trailer
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Andrew Rossi tackles the college debt crisis head-on in this stimulating and wide-ranging documentary.
By Justin Chang
Variety Chief Film Critic
June 13, 2014 - After "Page One: Inside the New York Times," filmmaker Andrew Rossi continues his roving inquiry into the crises and changes that have rocked America's most respected institutions in "Ivory Tower."
Moving from the hallowed halls of the Ivy League to the rising movement of "hackademic" startups in Silicon Valley, this smartly packaged documentary offers a wide-ranging analysis of skyrocketing tuition prices (private and public), rapidly evolving social attitudes toward the value of a college degree, and the inevitable changes wrought by technological growth and economic disaster. Although stronger on breadth than focus, it's an appropriately stimulating take on a far-from-sustainable system, likely to stir debate among education-minded professionals in theatrical and cable play, though it will be most useful - and marketable - to high schoolers weighing the cost of their future.
"Ivory Tower" is at least the second documentary in two years, following Frederick Wiseman's artful and immersive "At Berkeley," to comment on the increasingly prohibitive costs of higher education and the implications for America's youth. Speaking with a broad array of authors, academics and administrators, and trotting out statistics when necessary, Rossi paints a dispiriting overall picture of a system that saddles students with crippling debt (totaling more than $1 trillion nationwide), which they are ill equipped to pay off in an increasingly pinched job market - a problem that, for many, calls into question the practical value of attending college to begin with.
One of the documentary's key points is that most colleges are no longer selling an education but an experience, happily spending millions of dollars on plush housing complexes and state-of-the-art recreational facilities in a bid to entice as many applicants as possible. It's the students who pay for these campus expansions, and not just financially: Too many schools, in the film's somewhat over-generalized estimation, have allowed academic rigor to fall by the wayside, a problem that can be attributed in part to an excess of administrators and a dearth of dedicated teaching faculty. One particularly alarming statistic - that 68% of students at public universities fail to graduate in four years - is introduced by way of a visit to Arizona State U., whose party-school rep is reinforced here by footage of a massive swimming-pool bacchanal that resembles an outtake from "Spring Breakers."
By contrast, at a time when the prestige of the Ivy League remains largely unassailable, Harvard is held up as the gold standard in terms of providing a world-class education and generous, need-based financial aid; one such beneficiary is freshman David Boone, a formerly homeless Cleveland teenager who's amazed to have a bed and a dorm room to call his own. And then there's Mark Zuckerberg, the most famous Harvard dropout this side of Bill Gates, whose astonishing success underlines both the questionable relevance of a college degree and the increasing emphasis on technology as a foundation of modern education....(Click title for more)
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As Free and as Just as Possible:
The Theory of Marxian Liberalism
By Jeffrey Reiman
Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2014.
256pp., £20.50 pb
Reviewed by Huang Dongbo
Huang Dongbo is a PhD student in philosophy at Peking University. This year he is a visiting research student at the University of Kent.
June 2, 2014 - What aspects of Marxism, as it emerges in Marx's writings, can be combined with liberalism? What aspects of liberalism, as it emerges in Rawls's writings, can be combined with Marxism?
These are the basic questions of Jeffrey Reiman's new book, As Free and as Just as Possible. As he says in its Preface: 'I think that the time is ripe for a philosophical theory of justice that combines Marx's insights ... with the liberalism that the socialist states have lacked' (xii). The book is divided into seven chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1, 'Overview of the Argument for Marxian Liberalism', provides a brief introduction to the whole book, which helps readers to quickly grasp its main ideas. By doing this, Reiman actually offers a general account of what Marxian Liberalism is. He argues that Marxian Liberalism is a theory of justice that results from combining certain liberal beliefs with certain Marxian beliefs, in order to protect people from unwanted coercion and to make a society that is `as free and as just as possible'. As he puts it: 'In sum, liberalism indicates the goal of the theory, and Marxism characterizes the conditions for achieving that goal. Thus the theory is called Marxian Liberalism' (26).
Chapter 2, 'Marx and Rawls and justice', focuses mostly on the basics of Marx's theory of capitalism and of Rawls's theory of justice. Reiman claims that Marx revealed the ideology of capitalism: 'The normal perception of what goes on in exchange give rise to the ideological illusion that capitalism is uncoercive' (37). After offering a brief account of Rawls's theory of justice as fairness, he discusses Rawls's own quite sympathetic view of Marxism and suggests where Marxian Liberalism goes beyond Rawls's view: 'I shall go beyond Rawls and defend the use of the difference principle in light of the labor theory of value as a necessary means to evaluate the justice of any economic system' (55). Reiman argues that there is no intrinsic antipathy between Marxism and justice, and then explains how Marxian Liberalism interprets Marx's comments on justice in light of its historical conception of justice.
In Chapter 3, 'The Natural Right to Liberty and the Need for a Social Contract', Reiman presents a secular interpretation of Locke's argument for the natural right to liberty and proceeds to a Lockean contractarianism. Reiman argues that, because private property is coercive, in order for it to be justified, all people who exist or will exist must consent to it. Furthermore, theoretical consent is necessary, as he writes: 'it is rational for actual people to count that theoretical consent as morally equivalent to actual consent' (91). According to Reiman, Rawls's theory has often been attacked for presupposing moral rights while Locke's contract is not vulnerable to this objection. So, he claims that the social contractarianism that grounds Marxian Liberalism is Lockean rather than Rawlsian in nature, although he uses Rawls's original position.
Then, in Chapter 4, 'The Ambivalence of Property: Expression of Liberty and Threat to Liberty', Reiman mainly discusses Marxian Liberalism's understanding of the relationship between private property and liberty. He uses the 'ambivalence of property' to explain the two-sided nature of property's relationship to liberty, i.e. 'while ownership of private property promotes the liberty of the owner, it also threatens the liberty of the nonowner' (94). For Reiman, Locke and Kant (and Nozick and Narveson) already realized that the right to large and unequal property holdings is a threat to the liberty of nonowners, but he adds that 'this understates the nature of the threat' (11). Reiman argues that Marx went beyond Locke and Kant in revealing that property is not merely a threat to liberty, but a form of social coercion, which Reiman calls 'structural coercion'. He argues that the invisibility of coerciveness is the core of what Marx called ideology: 'structural coercion can operate through free choice' (117). Reiman thus criticizes libertarians for falling for capitalist ideology, and contends that Marxian Liberalism is liberalism 'without ideological blinders' (121)....(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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