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Do Marley's Redemption Song |
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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 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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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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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...
 Fighting Racism
with Solidarity:
Upsurge over
Police Killings
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 militarized police, the war on Gaza, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the fight for the Green New Deal, a just immigration policy and 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... |
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Crowds gathered at locations across the country. In NYC alone: Union Square, Times Square, Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens - for a National Moment of Silence in support of demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.
By Kerry Burke , Chelsia Rose Marcius , Bill Hutchinson
New York Daily News
August 14, 2014 - Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets Thursday night to show solidarity with protesters in the St. Louis suburb rocked by the police shooting of an unarmed black teen.
The demonstrators gathered in Harlem; Union Square; Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn; and Jamaica, Queens, for a moment of silence at 7 p.m. in support of protesters 1,000 miles away in Ferguson, Mo.
"I'm a parent and grandparent - I could not imagine if that was my child or grandchild," Toni Arenstein, 64, of Chelsea said in Union Square, of Michael Brown, 18, who was shot to death Saturday by a white cop in Ferguson.
NYC PAPERS OUT. Social media use restricted to low res file max 184 x 128 pixels and 72 dpi Demonstrators hold their hands up in Times Square after marching from Union Square.
Demonstrators in Union Square show solidarity with protestors in Ferguson, Mo. over the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Demonstrators in Union Square show solidarity with protestors in Ferguson, Mo. over the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The international hacker collective Anonymous sent out a call on the Internet for a "day of rage" to coincide with a National Moment of Silence across the nation Thursday.
More than 100 rallies were held throughout the country, including protests in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
The protests came a day after police in riot gear fired tear gas and stun grenades to break up a protest in Ferguson, where some people hurled bottles and Molotov cocktails at officers.
After congregating in Union Square, protesters began marching uptown, collecting supporters along the way. By the time they reached Times Square, demonstrators numbered in the low thousands.
Cops put up barricades on Seventh Ave. and formed a line to stop the crowd from marching north on Broadway.
Five protesters were arrested and charged with resisting arrest, inciting riot, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct, according to the NYPD. Their names had not been released early Friday....(Click title for more)
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By Jamala Rogers
JamalaRogers.com
Let's be real. You can't keep heaping injustice upon injustice on people and think they will stay calm and in control. Mike Brown, a young black teen, was executed by Ferguson police with arms raised. What we are witnessing in the aftermath is a predictable human response.
As part of the human chain that separated hundreds of protesters from well-armed cops, I saw pure, unfiltered rage and frustration in the faces and words of mainly young, black people. I don't think they were seeking blood, they were seekingjustice. They want justice for Mike Brown today but for themselves every day.They know they could be Mike Brown-we all are Mike.
Black and brown youth are sick and tired of seeing police exonerated. They don't want to hear about a police or FBI investigation. They don't want to hear about Rev. Al Sharpton coming to town. They don't want to hear that the Lord will take care of it. They have seen the ending of this movie and the young people don't like it.
As for the looting that took place, there's always opportunists waiting to take advantage of a situation so let's not get it twisted. Those folks represented a small minority of the thousands who came out to show their love and support for the Brown Family.
It's time for elected officials, faith leaders, activists and any others in positions of influence to re-write this script. Police are public servants who we pay with our hard-earned tax dollars. It's time to write an ending that guarantees black people equal protection under the law and those who use the badge to abuse their authority, who kill unarmed children and other citizens, will be held accountable. ...(Click title for more)
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By Alec MacGillis
The New Republic
First came the police officer's fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager on the way back from the convenience store with a friend. Then came the protests and looting.
Then came the astonishing police response, which by Wednesday night transformed the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, an inner suburb of St. Louis, into a scene out of Cairo, Kiev, or Tehran.
Which has led appalled onlookers to ask: Who has been outfitting local police departments to look like battle-hardened military units?
You have.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the American taxpayer has been providing the funding for an eye-popping influx of money from the Department of Homeland Security to state and local law enforcement agencies. The funding is all in the name of preventing "terrorism," but funds are fungible, and so are heavily-armored vehicles and high-powered weaponry.
As the Missouri Department of Homeland Security explains on its own website advertising one of the federal DHS grants it distributes to local agencies: "Activities implemented under [the State Homeland Security Program] must support terrorism preparedness by building or enhancing capabilities that relate to the prevention of, protection from, or response to, and recovery from terrorism in order to be considered eligible. However, many capabilities which support terrorism preparedness simultaneously support preparedness for other hazards." [Emphasis mine.]
Other hazards-like the disturbances that can spring up in the event of a police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old named Michael Brown.
To get a sense of just how much money is funneling to police departments like those in St. Louis County, of which Ferguson is a part, I dug into a federal spending database. In the past five years alone, I tallied:
More than $40 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to the Missouri Office of Homeland Security (which is housed within the Missouri Department of Public Safety) for "state and local programs."
Nearly $19 million in "emergency performance management grants" from DHS to the Missouri Department of Public Safety. The most recent of the grants, for $6.59 million, arrived on June 5.
Nearly $10 million from DHS to the Missouri Office of Homeland Security for the "urban areas security initiative." Here's how DHS describes that program: "to enhance regional preparedness and capabilities in 25 high-threat, high-density areas. The 9/11 Act requires states to dedicate 25 percent of UASI funds to law enforcement terrorism prevention activities." St. Louis is one of those 25 "high-threat, high-density areas." And even if the 25 percent is dedicated to true terrorism-related threats, the 75 percent left over from that leaves a lot to work with.
As the New York Times has reported, state and local law enforcement agencies are getting armored up from another source as well: the U.S. military. ...(Click title for more)
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Tom Wolf favored to unseat Tea Party governor in PA
By Steven Rosenfeld
Alternet
August 12, 2014 - It's become fashionable for politicos to predict that 2014 will be another boffo election for Republican candidates at all levels.
The New York Times this week reported [3] that the GOP is likely to emerge with new majorities in perhaps nine state legislative chambers. Republicans currently control 60 of America's 99 state assemblies or senates, and have monopolies on power in 36 states-the most since the 1950s.
But a closer look reveals that 2014 is not going to be a slam-dunk for the GOP in state legislatures. Instead, Democrats stand a good chance of breaking the Republican grip on power in five states-Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Arkansas, New Hampshire-while maintaining current partisan divisions in others. That's nowhere close to reversing 2010's Republican wave, but it's not merely holding the line, either.
"I think there are a lot of seats in play and a lot of chambers in play on both sides," said Kurt Fritts, Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee [4] national political director. "I don't think this is a year where Democrats are necessarily on the defensive. I know we have a lot of offensive opportunities out there."
On top of the five states where Democrats stand a good chance of winning state senate or house majority, Fritts said Democrats could make New Hampshire and Maine fully blue, where Democrats control the legislature and governor's mansion. That scenario was not in the Times' analysis [3]. He also predicted that there will be voter backlash in some states where Tea Partiers won since 2010-North Carolina, Georgia and Michigan-but those gains likely would not add up to new Democratic majorities.
"The interesting thing about this cycle is there is no overwhelming national narrative," he said. "What that means is these races are going to be fought based upon what's going on in these states, based against what the electoral landscape is at the top of the ticket in each of these states, and based upon the strength of individual candidates. That's partly why we feel very confident in states like Pennsylvania, where there's a very unpopular Republican governor at the top of the ticket. That bodes very well for us."...(Click title for more)
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Coops and Blacks: From Slavery to Civil Rights
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Laura Flanders InterviewsJessica Gordon Nembhard on Cooperative Economics
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Clinton vs. Obama, Iraq & 'The Long War' Theory
This photo is believed to be the ISIS forces moving into the Anbar province of Iraq in January 2014. (Photo: Associated Press, 2014)This article was republished by The Nation on August 13, 2014. By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via The Nation
Aug 12, 2014 - Hillary Clinton's flapping of her hawkish wings only intensifies the pressure on President Barack Obama to escalate US military involvement in the sectarian wars of Iraq and Syria. Domestic political considerations already are a major factor in forcing Obama to "do something" to save the Yazidis, avert "another Benghazi," and double down in the undeclared Long War against Islamic fundamentalism.
Clinton certainly was correct in arguing that Obama's statement "don't do stupid stuff" is not an organizing principle of US foreign policy. Instead of offering a new foreign policy, based for example on democracy, economic development and renewable energy however, Clinton lapsed into the very Cold War thinking she once questioned in the Sixties.
America's long war on jihadi terrorism should be modeled on the earlier Cold War against communism, Clinton said. We made "mistakes", supported many "nasty guys", did "some things we're not proud of", but the Cold War ended in American triumph with, "The defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism."
Ignoring the new Cold Wars with Russia and China, Clinton's nostalgic vision is sure to be widely accepted among Americans, including many Democrats. She ignores, or may not even be familiar with, the actual Long War doctrine quietly promulgated during the past eight years by national security gurus like David Kilcullen, the top counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq.
Put simply, the Long War theorists have projected an eighty-year military conflict with militant Islam over an "arc of crisis" spanning multiple Muslim countries. Starting with 9/11, the Long War would continue through twenty presidential terms. In Kilcullen's thesis, Iraq is only a "small war" within a larger one. Since a war of such duration could never be declared officially, the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force [AUMF] stands as its feeble underlying justification.
Obama has made cautious attempts to separate himself from the Long War doctrine and even seeks to narrow or revisit the AUMF. But Obama has never named and or criticized the doctrine, presumably for fear of being accused of going soft in the War on Terrorism. Obama's true foreign policy leaning is revealed in his repeated desire to "do some nation building here at home", which many hawks view as a retreat from America's imperial role. They prefer, in Clinton's words, the posture of "aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward," rather than being, "down on yourself."...(Click title for more)
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Kurdish YPG fighters, Rojava.
By Dave Holmes
Links /Green Left Weekly
August 12, 2014 - The Kurdish people are facing an unprecedented challenge. Across a vast swathe of northern Syria and Iraq, the region's Kurds are locked in a desperate and heroic struggle with the genocidal forces of the so-called Islamic State (IS). Fighting is raging from Aleppo and Kobane in Syria to Mosul and Kirkuk in Iraq - and all points in between. (The "front" is enormous: for example, the direct distance from Aleppo to Kirkuk is over 650 kilometres.)
Flush with money seized from banks in Mosul and armed with US-supplied heavy weapons abandoned by the fleeing Iraqi army, the IS (formerly ISIL - the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) now has a formidable military capability. The relatively lightly armed Kurds are now up against a murderous and determined opponent equipped with armoured personnel carriers, tanks, artillery, heavy mortars and rocket launchers.
With financial support from the Iraqi government no longer coming through, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has even had trouble securing sufficient ammunition and paying their peshmerga fighters (who still have to support their families).
A big loser from the post-World War I big-power settlement, the Kurds are the world's largest ethnic group without a state of their own. They are divided between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran with a large diaspora in Europe (mainly Germany). Whether directly or indirectly, the entire Kurdish people is being drawn into the conflict.
Kobane resists IS assault
In Syria the Kurds mainly live in the north of the country. Over the last few years the Syrian army has largely pulled back from the area and last year the Kurds declared an autonomous region there called Rojava (West Kurdistan).
A militia called the Peoples Defence Units (YPG) has been established. With more than 45,000 fighters, strongly linked to and supported by the community, disciplined and well led, it has proven to be a very effective force. It includes the Women's Protection Units (YPJ).
The dominant Syrian Kurdish political group (though not the only one) is the Democratic Union Party (PYD), co-chaired by Saleh Muslim and Asiyah Abdullah. It has strong links with the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) of Abdullah Öcalan (currently jailed for life in Turkey).
For some two years the Kurdish area has been under sustained attack by IS forces, now strengthened with its captured US weaponry. A flashpoint of the fight is the town of Kobane (Arabic name: Ayn Al-Arab), hard up against the Turkish border, 135 kilometres north-east of Aleppo. The town and about 100 surrounding villages are under sustained attack by 5000 IS fighters. The district's normal population is about 200,000 but today holds perhaps 500,000 due to an influx of refugees.
Kobane is important to the IS because it wants to be able to freely move between areas it control, especially Raqqa in the east and Aleppo in the west. At the moment the IS has to make a big detour. Also, if Kobane falls, the IS will move in force against other Kurdish towns.
The YPG-YPJ has so far held off the IS gangs and dealt them some very heavy blows (claiming to have killed almost 700 jihadis in July alone). But many Kurdish fighters have also fallen....(Click title for more)
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A World to Build
New Paths toward Twenty-first Century Socialism
By Marta Harnecker
Forthcoming in November 2014
e-book available!
240 pages, Price: $19
 By Monthly Review
Over the last few decades Marta Harnecker has emerged as one of Latin America's most incisive socialist thinkers. In A World to Build, she grapples with the question that has bedeviled every movement for radical social change: how do you construct a new world within the framework of the old? Harnecker draws on lessons from socialist movements in Latin America, especially Venezuela, where she served as an advisor to the Chávez administration and was a director of the Centro Internacional Miranda.
A World to Build begins with the struggle for socialism today. Harnecker offers a useful overview of the changing political map in Latin America, examining the trajectories of several progressive Latin American governments as they work to develop alternative models to capitalism. She combines analysis of concrete events with a refined theoretical understanding of grassroots democracy, the state, and the barriers imposed by capital. For Harnecker, twenty-first century socialism is a historical process as well as a theoretical project, one that requires imagination no less than courage. She is a lucid guide to the movements that are fighting, right now, to build a better world, and an important voice for those who wish to follow that path.
With her characteristic combination of optimism and patience, concrete analysis and utopian longing, Marta Harnecker has provided us with an essential guide for both assessing Latin America's left turn-its groundbreaking accomplishments and often overwhelming impediments-and more importantly for charting a path forward. This book is of global importance.
-George Ciccariello-Maher, author, We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution
Practice has without a doubt surpassed theory in Latin America, therefore Marta Harnecker's analysis based on developments in the region comes at the right moment. She works through the main social struggles and the construction of alternatives in many countries of Our America to develop a theoretical analysis of twenty-first century socialism. As one of the actors building Buen Vivir in Ecuador, I am happy to find in Marta's book this theoretical reflection, based on the practice of a true militant and activist.
-María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés, poet and Minister of National Defense of Ecuador
A theoretical reflection rooted in the problems and struggles of the people; one that accompanies their struggles and provides them with weapons to help clarify their problems, resolve them, and advance along the path of building a socialist society.
-Carmen Bohórquez, coordinator of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity, Venezuela
Marta Harnecker is the author of over eighty books and monographs in several languages, including Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution. She has been director of the Memoria Popular Latinoamericana research center in Havana, Cuba and the Centro Internacional Miranda in Caracas, Venezuela. Harnecker was born in Chile, studied with Louis Althusser in the 1960s, and edited the magazine Chile Hoy (Chile Today) during Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government.
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Russian helmer Yury Bykov's forceful social drama pits an idealistic plumber against a system of corrupt bureaucrats, putting his life and those of 800 unsuspecting citizens on the line.
By Peter Debruge
Variety
Frank Capra would have approved of "The Fool," a forceful Russian drama in which a lone plumber stands up to a corrupt system on behalf of the people living in a squalid apartment building.
With giant cracks running from the foundation to the roof, the crumbling structure could be a metaphor for the country itself, insinuating that decades of embezzling and all-around mismanagement have left things in a precarious state. After playing Cannes with his previous feature, "The Major," writer-director Yury Bykov delivers another major work, this one even more deserving of international attention, in festivals and commercial venues.
In a city where scarce financial resources are routinely diverted to benefit the bureaucratic fat cats at the top, one man risks upsetting the rickety house of cards to save a commune of ungrateful citizens. When a water pipe bursts in a 38-year-old apartment building, naive young handyman Dima Nikitin (Artem Bystrov) is called in to fix it. Instead, he discovers that after decades of neglect - during which officials rerouted renovation funds into their personal housing projects - the walls are likely to collapse before the day is done.
At first, Dima does what any of his colleagues would, leaving the problem for someone else to solve. (It's not his district, after all. Why not let his drunken supervisor deal with it in when he sobers up?) But Dima finds that he cannot sleep, and after performing a few alarming calculations, he decides that the building's 800-plus residents - a mix of deadbeats and addicts, like the loafers who haunt the halls of the Indonesian action movie "The Raid" - will likely perish in a massive cave-in if he doesn't act immediately.
And so, acting against the objections of his protective wife (Darya Moroz) and nagging mother (Olga Samoshina), the idealistic young man resolves to track down the mayor, Nina Galaganova (Natalya Surkova), at 2 a.m. on the night of her 50th birthday party - the foolhardy equivalent of trying to confront an agitated lion in its lair. Though she listens with what appears to be genuine concern, Nina didn't rise to her position by helping others. Rather, she is the most ruthless and jaded player in a hierarchy where corruption runs rampant, and in the end, she will do what she must to protect herself....(Click title for more)
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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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