NEW CCDS Pamphlet
on Climate Change.
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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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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 and 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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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 |
- 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...
 Climate Change,
Capitalism and Transformations
to a Socialist Path
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 support low-wage workers, 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... |
By Rebecca Solnit
Tom Dispatch via Alternet
Sept 18, 2014 - There have undoubtedly been stable periods in human history, but you and your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents never lived through one, and neither will any children or grandchildren you may have or come to have. Everything has been changing continuously, profoundly, from the role of women to the nature of agriculture. For the past couple of hundred years, change has been accelerating in both magnificent and nightmarish ways.
Yet when we argue for change, notably changing our ways in response to climate change, we're arguing against people who claim we're disrupting a stable system. They insist that we're rocking the boat unnecessarily.
I say: rock that boat. It's a lifeboat; maybe the people in it will wake up and start rowing. Those who think they're hanging onto a stable order are actually clinging to the wreckage of the old order, a ship already sinking, that we need to leave behind.
As you probably know, the actual oceans are rising-almost eight inches [4] since 1880, and that's only going to accelerate. They're also acidifying [5], because they're absorbing significant amounts of the carbon we continue to pump into the atmosphere at record levels. The ice that covers the polar seas is shrinking, while the ice shields that cover Antarctica [6] and Greenland [7] are melting. The water locked up in all the polar ice, as it's unlocked by heat, is going to raise sea levels [8] staggeringly, possibly by as much as 200 feet [9] at some point in the future, how distant we do not know. In the temperate latitudes, warming seas breed fiercer hurricanes. The oceans are changing fast, and for the worse. Fish stocks are dying off, as are shellfish. In many acidified oceanic regions, their shells are actually dissolving [10] or failing to form, which is one of the scariest, most nightmarish things I've ever heard.
So don't tell me that we're rocking a stable boat on calm seas. The glorious 10,000-year period of stable climate in which humanity flourished and then exploded to overrun the Earth and all its ecosystems is over.
But responding to these current cataclysmic changes means taking on people who believe, or at least assert, that those of us who want to react and act are gratuitously disrupting a stable system that's working fine. It isn't stable. It is working fine-in the short term and the most limited sense-for oil companies and the people who profit from them and for some of us in the particularly cushy parts of the world who haven't been impacted yet by weather events like, say, the recent torrential floods in Japan [11] or southern Nevada [12] and Arizona, or the monsoon versions [13] of the same that have devastated parts of India and Pakistan, or the drought [14] that has mummified my beloved California, or the wildfires of Australia.
The problem, of course, is that the people who most benefit from the current arrangements have effectively purchased a lot of politicians, and that a great many of the rest of them are either hopelessly dim or amazingly timid. Most of the Democrats recognize the reality of climate change but not the urgency of doing something about it. Many of the Republicans used to-John McCain [15] has done an amazing about-face from being a sane voice on climate to a shrill denier-and they present a horrific obstacle to any international treaties.
Put it this way: in one country, one party holding 45 out of 100 seats in one legislative house, while serving a minority of the very rich, can basically block what quite a lot of the other seven billion people on Earth want and need, because a two-thirds majority in the Senate must consent to any international treaty the U.S. signs. Which is not to say much for the president, whose drill-baby-drill [16] administration only looks good compared to the petroleum servants he faces, when he bothers to face them and isn't just one of them. History will despise them all and much of the world does now, but as my mother would have said, they know which side their bread is buttered on.
As it happens, the butter is melting and the bread is getting more expensive. Global grain production is already down [17] several percent thanks to climate change, says a terrifying new United Nations report. Declining crops [18] cause food shortages and rising food prices, creating hunger and even famine for the poorest on Earth, and also sometimes cause massive unrest. Rising bread prices were one factor [19] that helped spark [20] the Arab Spring in 2011. Anyone who argues that doing something about global warming will be too expensive is dodging just how expensive unmitigated climate change is already proving to be.
It's only a question of whether the very wealthy or the very poor will pay....(Click title for more)
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Author and activist Naomi Klein argues that climate change deniers have a better grasp of the political implications for the radical change needed to address the problem than many green groups downplay, especially those she calls "big, slick centrist green groups".
The first chapter in Naomi Klein's new book is titled "The Right is Right" about climate change. Not about the science -- which they're completely wrong about-- but the political implications such radical interventions in the economy would have, transforming how we live.
Interview with Amy Goodman
AMY GOODMAN: That was Marc Morano of Climate Depot. Naomi Klein, in your book, This Changes Everything, you talk about him. In
fact, you talk about a number of these groups. You open with them in a chapter called "The Right is Right."
NAOMI KLEIN: OK, well, let's be clear: They are not right about the science. They're wrong about the science. But I think what the right understands, and it's important to understand, that the climate change denier movement in the United States is entirely a product of the right-wing think tank infrastructure, the groups like Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute. The Heartland Institute, which people mostly only know in terms of the fact that it hosts these annual conferences of climate change skeptics or deniers, it's important to know that the Heartland Institute is first and foremost a free market think tank. It's not a scientific organization. It is-just like the other ones I listed, it exists to push the ideology, the familiar ideology, of deregulation, privatization, cuts to government spending, and sort of triumphant free market, you know, backed with enormous corporate funding, because that's a very, very profitable ideology.
And when I interviewed the head of the Heartland Institute, Joe Bast, for this project, he was quite open that it wasn't that he found a problem with the science first. He said, when he looked at the science and listened to what scientists were saying about how much we need to cut our emissions, he realized that climate change could be-if it were true, it would justify huge amounts of government regulation, which he politically opposes. And so, he said, "So then we looked at the science, and we found these problems," right? So the issue is, they understand that if the science is true, their whole ideological project falls apart, because, as I said, you can't respond to a crisis this big, that involves transforming the foundation of our economy-our economy was built on fossil fuels, it is still fueled by fossil fuels. The idea in this-we hear this from a lot of liberal environmental groups, that we can change completely painlessly-just change your light bulbs, or just a gentle market mechanism, tax and relax, no problem. This is what they understand well, that in fact it requires transformative change. That change is abhorrent to them. They see it as the end of the world. It's not the end of the world, but it is the end of their world. It's the end of their ideological project. So, that is unthinkable, from Marc Morano's perspective and Joe Bast's perspective. So, rather than think about that, they deny the science.
So when I say "the right is right," I think that they have a better grasp on the political implications of the science, of what it means to how we need to change our economy and what the role of the public sphere is and the role of collective action is, better than some of those sort of big, slick, centrist green groups that are constantly trying to sell climate action as something entirely reconcilable with a booming capitalist economy. And we're always hearing about green growth and how it's great for business. You know, yeah, you can-there will be markets in green energy and so on, but other businesses are going to have to contract in ways that requires that strong intervention....(Click title for more)
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By Chuck Collins
YES! Magazine via Truthout
Sept 17, 2014 - As the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City approaches, efforts to address climate change through money-moving campaigns are growing.
For the past few years, this work has mostly been about divestment-people and organizations pledging not to invest in fossil fuel companies. First, students concerned about the future of the climate pressed their colleges and universities to divest from stocks in coal, gas, and oil. More than 10 small schools, including the University of Dayton, Hampshire College, and the College of the Atlantic, have complied. And, in the largest divestment in the sector, Stanford University pledged in May 2014 that its $18 billion endowment would not be invested in coal.
But it's not just colleges and universities that are divesting. Pension funds, municipalities, philanthropies, and hospitals have joined in too-as well as individual investors.
Those divestments haven't directly hurt the finances of companies like Exxon Mobil, but that was never the strategy. Instead, the campaign has isolated fossil fuel companies, weakened their political power, and commented on the failure of governments to take action on climate change.
But where should organizations put their money, if they aren't putting it into fossil fuel companies?
Climate in Our Hands: Inside the Ideas and Actions of a MovementThat's the question behind the movement's new strategy, known as "divest-invest," which seeks to make divestment more effective by taking funds previously invested in fossil fuels and reinvesting them in renewable energy and sustainable economic development.
And it's more than just a strategy-"Divest-Invest" also refers to a growing coalition of foundations who've made the pledge, as well as to an online portal of activity that provides information about doing so.
The approach is catching on. This past January, 17 foundations with combined assets of nearly $2 billion pledged to divest from fossil fuels and invest in clean energy as part of the Divest-Invest Philanthropy initiative. Since that time, dozens more have committed to do the same. Their names are scheduled to be released on September 23, during the United Nations Climate Summit.
An ethical and financial strategy
Pension funds, municipalities, philanthropies, and hospitals have joined in too-as well as individual investors.
Back in 2012, climate change's "terrifying new math"-as 350.org founder Bill McKibben called it-brought new urgency to the climate crisis. Scientists had demonstrated that 80 percent of the world's current fossil fuel reserves needed to stay in the ground to prevent the worst scenarios, in which the planet warms by more than 2 degrees Celsius. Yet the oil, gas, and coal sectors intend to burn them all, and continue to invest more than $600 billion a year finding new ones.
After the collapse of 2009 U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen and the failure that same year of the United States Congress to pass legislation to reduce carbon emissions, activists called for a re-evaluation of strategies.
Divestment has emerged as one of the most promising. An indirect approach to reducing carbon emissions, divestment sidesteps a political system captured by oil, gas, and coal corporations. Similar strategies were essential to the regulation of the powerful tobacco industry in the 1990s.
The case for divestment is both ethical and financial. A number of studies indicate that divesting a portfolio from fossil fuels can be done without damaging financial returns (for example, see this analysis by the investment management firm Aperio Group ).
In fact, the risky thing to do may be retaining investments in fossil fuels. If movements succeed in pressing for carbon regulation, assets in the sector could become "stranded" and worth less, driving down investment returns.
Financing renewables
Global investment in clean energy peaked in 2011 at nearly $318 billion, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, but has declined since then. Some in the climate movement believe that a focus on reinvesting funds could change that....(Click title for more)
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Photo: Lesley McSpadden, right, the mother of 18-year-old Michael Brown, watches as Brown's father, Michael Brown Sr., holds up a family picture of himself, his son, top left in photo, and a young child during a news conference, Aug. 11, in Ferguson, Mo. (AP/Jeff Roberson)
The following remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka to the 2014 Missouri AFL-CIO Convention in St. Louis on Sept. 15 were released to the media as prepared for delivery and reprinted here.
 By Richard Trumka
AFL-CIO via Beaver Blue
Sept 15 2014 - It's great to be here in St. Louis-and I'm grateful to be here at such a critical time for Missouri, for our nation and for our movement.
This hall is filled with leaders who have done so much to protect working people-all working people-in Missouri. You have built strength through unity-across industries and crafts, across the length and breadth of this state and-this is the hard one in America in 2014-across party lines.
As a labor movement, we once again face concerted attacks by those who have enormous wealth. The far right is trying to divide us in many ways. But here in in America the power and dignity of working people will always win-as long as we stay united.
Now, I'm going to stray from my usual convention speech. I'm going to talk about something that may be difficult and uncomfortable but I believe what I'm going to say needs to be said.
You see, the question of unity brings up a hard subject, a subject all of us know about but few want to acknowledge-race.
I'm talking about race in America, and what that means for our communities our movement, and our nation.
Because the reality is that while a young man named Michael Brown died just a short distance from us in Ferguson from gunshot wounds from a police officer other young men of color have died and will die in similar circumstances in communities all across this country.
It happened here but it could have happened and does happen anywhere in America. Because the reality is we still have racism in America.
Labor's stake in fighting racism
Now, some people might ask me why our labor movement should be involved in all that has happened since the tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. And I want to answer that question directly: How can we not be involved?
Union members' lives have been profoundly damaged in ways that cannot be fixed. Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown's mother who works in a grocery store, is our sister, an AFL-CIO union member and Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, is a union member too, and he is our brother. Our brother killed our sister's son, and we do not have to wait for the judgment of prosecutors or courts to tell us how terrible this is.
So I say again how can we not be involved? This tragedy and all the complexities of race and racism are a big part of our very big family as they always have been. A union is like a home. And in any home, good and bad things happen. We have to deal with all of them honestly.
But that's a philosophy. We can't leave it at that. We have to look at real life today. We cannot wash our hands of the issues raised by Michael Brown's death. That does not mean we prejudge the specifics of Michael Brown's death or deny Officer Darren Wilson or any other officer his or her rights on the job or in the courts.
But it does demand that we clearly and openly discuss the reality of racism in American life. We must take responsibility for the past. Racism is part of our inheritance as Americans. Every city, every state and every region of this country has its own deep history with racism. And so does the labor movement.
But it does demand ... that we clearly ... and openly discuss the reality of racism in American life ... We must take responsibility for the past ... Racism is part of our inheritance ... as Americans ... Every city... every state... and every region of this country ... has its own deep history with racism ... And so does the labor movement.
Here in St. Louis, in 1917 ... powerful corporations replaced white strikers ... with
African American workers ... recruited from the Mississippi Delta ... with offers of wages far higher ... than anyone could make sharecropping ... In response ... the St. Louis labor movement ... helped lead a blood bath against the African American community ... in East St. Louis ... No one knows how many men ... women ... and children were killed ... and how many houses and businesses were burned.
The NAACP estimated up to 200 died ... and 6,000 were left homeless ... Eugene Debs ... the founder of the National Railway Union ... called the East St. Louis massacre-and I quote-"a foul blot on the American labor movement."
It was one of the single most violent events ... in the history of American racism ... and it scarred this city ... our labor movement ... and our country.
When I think about an event like that ... and there are plenty in our history... all over this great country... and not all of them so long ago... I wonder what those white workers would say ... if they could stand where we stand today ... What would they say ... about the choices to embrace hatred and division ... over unity and strength?
What would they say ... about corporate bosses playing the race card ... over and over and over again ... in the years after 1917-breaking unions ... crushing hopes and dreams ... Yet remember ... we are here today ... because labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph ... and Walter Reuther ... showed us there was a better way ... not just for our unions, but for our country.
But this not just about leaders of the past... and tragedies of yesterday.
If we in the labor movement truly want to act ... as a positive force for change around issues of racism and classism ... we have to acknowledge our own shortcomings....(Click title for more)
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Ferguson Background: Militarization and Police
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How 'Protect & Serve' Became 'Search & Destroy
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Chevron Sounds Alarm vs. Electoral 'Anarchism'
Chevron mailer targeting Richmond Democrat Eduardo Martinez By Steve Early
Richmond Progressive Alliance via Beyond Chron
Sept 16, 2014 - One of the great things about living near Chevron's big East Bay refinery-yes, the one that caught fire and exploded two years ago-is its system of early warnings about new disasters about to befall the city of Richmond, CA.
In our post-Citizens United era, the nation's second largest oil producer is now free to spend $1.6 million (or more, if necessary) on direct mail and phone alerts, designed to keep 30,000 likely voters fully informed about threats to their city.
During the last week, glossy mailers from a Chevron-funded group called "Moving Forward" have been flowing our way, at the rate of one or two per day-almost seven weeks before Election Day.
And, then, just to make sure that Chevron's urgent message is getting through, we've also been called by pollsters. They claim to be surveying opinion about Richmond politics, but actually just recite the contents of these same Moving Forward mailers over the phone.
My favorite manifestation of this negative campaigning involves a Latino candidate for Richmond City council. His name is Eduardo Martinez and remembering the Eduardo part is important. By some strange coincidence, Moving Forward-the Chevron-backed "Coalition of Labor Unions, Small Businesses, Public Safety and Firefighters Associations"-is backing another Martinez for city council whose first name is Al and who is apparently not a public safety threat.
One Martinez Too Many
Eduardo, the dangerous Martinez, is a retired public school teacher and registered Democrat. He's silver-haired, soft spoken, neatly dressed, and rather distinguished looking. For years, he has devoted himself to good causes in Richmond, including serving on the city planning commission. On that body, he has been an influential voice for Richmond's Environmental Justice Coalition.
Earlier this summer, for example, he voted to impose additional air quality and safety requirements on Chevron, in return for city approval of its long-delayed $1 billion refinery modernization plan. This project was finally OKed by the city council majority in July after some improvements were obtained, plus $90 million in Chevron-funded "community benefits."
Chevron did not forget that Martinez-Eduardo, not Al-helped to challenge and change its original blueprint for "modernization," a project that will employ 1,000 building trades workers. And that's why Richmond voters have just discovered, via expensive mass mailers and phone calls, that Eduardo Martinez is really a wolf in sheep's clothing.
This alarming news first arrived in the form of a lurid four-color mailer, with a cover picture of "Black Bloc" demonstrators wearing face-masks and brandishing shields on behalf of the "99%" three years ago. Inside, 65-year old Martinez is fingered as a fellow "Occupy Oakland member, who believes that anarchy is the highest form of government." In a second "hit piece" a few days later, Chevron-through its "Moving Forward" front group-claimed that, after enlisting in Occupy, Martinez urged others "to join the group, which has been blamed for violent protests that cost Oakland more than $5 million, hurt local businesses, and drove away new business."
Abolish The City Council?
This mailer again displayed a glowering, angry-looking headshot of Martinez-one of three appearing in the first piece (which made him look a little bit like the late Leon Trotsky, who was no anarchist). The second brochure noted that "Richmond needs new businesses and jobs" but, with a card-carrying "anarchist" on its council, the city won't be able to attract either. The bottom line: "Eduardo Martinez is too radical for Richmond." For more details, readers are directed to a Moving Forward website- www.NoEduardo.com-where we learn that Martinez is "so radical that he does not think the city council should exist"-a truly unusual stance for any city council candidate anywhere....(Click title for more)
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Al Jazeera via Portside
Sept 14, 2014 - Sweden's Social Democrats and their centre-left allies are poised to return to power after defeating the centre-right government, in a general election that also resulted in strong gains for the anti-immigration party.
With all voting districts tallied by Monday morning, the Social Democrat-led bloc won 43.7 percent of the vote while the ruling centre-right coalition, led by the Moderate Party, gained 39.3 percent.
But the anti-immigration far-right Sweden Democrats were celebrating large gains as the party won 12.9 percent of votes cast - more than doubling the 5.7 percent of votes won in the 2010 election.
"Sweden friends, party friends, now we're Sweden's third-largest party," party leader Jimmie Akesson told cheering supporters late on Sunday.
PARTIAL RESULTS
Social Democrats 31.2%
Moderate Party 23.2%
Sweden Democrats 12.9%
Green Party 6.8%
Centre Party 6.1%
Left Party 5.7%
Liberal Party 5.4%
Christian Democrats 4.6%
Voter turnout: 83.4%
With no majority reached, a complicated process of forming a government is expected as the centre-left pledged not to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats. The outgoing coalition has made the same promise.
The Social Democrats' leader and prime minister-designate, Stefan Lofven, a former union leader, reiterated this pledge in his midnight victory speech.
BACKGROUND: Parties and issues in Sweden's elections [2]
His party has said it would team up with the Greens, and in his speech, Lofven said he was "extending a hand" to "democratic parties", stressing that Sweden is facing a new parliamentary situation.
"It's time to put party interests aside," he said. "Our country is too small for conflicts."
The Social Democrats dominated Swedish politics during most the 20th century and its single-party government ruled the country from 1994 to 2006 with support from allies.
The current prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who led the country during eight years of tax reductions and pro-market reforms, said he would hand in his resignation on Monday and also leave the leadership of the Moderates in spring.
Rising refugee numbers
Xenophobia and racism have been high on the election agenda, and polls predicted a rise by the far-right. Sweden has some of the most generous asylum policies in the world, and 80,000 refugees from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries are expected to arrive this year - the highest number since 1992.
The Sweden Democrats want to cut immigration by 90 percent and have campaigned against the "mixing of cultures" - especially lashing out at Muslim immigration.
Najat Mahamed, who moved to Sweden from Eritrea about 25 years ago, told Al Jazeera: "It's sad that so many people share their opinions, but we live in a democracy, so people need to be allowed to vote how they want." ...(Click title for more)
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REVIEW: Jacobin, A Marxist Rag
Run on a Lot of Petty-Bourgeois Hustle
For Bhaskar Sunkara, the success of Jacobin as a magazine is an unlikely means to a political end. By Caroline O'Donovan
Neimanlab.org
 Jacobin Magazine was founded by Bhaskar Sunkara in 2010 while he was still a student at George Washington University. Sunkara had self-identified as a socialist since middle school - or, in his own words, "way too young to make those kind of decisions." Accordingly, his magazine is a journal of democratic socialist thought - one that's been creeping closer to mainstream over the last four years.
Jacobin, which posts a few essays online everyday and prints a magazine three times a year, has 6,400 active subscribers. Renewal rates are around 70 percent. The website gets between 300,000 and 400,000 visits in an average month, and about 10 to 12,000 visits on an average day. (Sunkara says this is a little less than a third of the audience of The Nation, and greater than the average web traffic of In These Times.)
As publisher and editor, Sunkara draws a small salary for Jacobin-related work, but works another job around 20 hours a week. The magazine's only full-time staffer is creative director Remeike Forbes. For digital pieces, contributors get 50 dollars; for print pieces, they get $200. The majority of them are graduate students or young professors. Interns at Jacobin get paid 15 dollars an hour, while the people who help with shipping and other "grunt work" get around $16 an hour. Says Sunkara: "There's not a place on the masthead for that work, and also, that's the hidden labor, so we try to pay for that first."
CTUJacobin is involved with projects beyond publishing analytical essays. They coordinate a nonfiction series via Verso Books. They've also done a lot of work around the Chicago Teachers Union, including some political organizing and printing a pamphlet. Jacobin has a clearly stated political mission - for Sunkara, the goal has always been to centralize and inject energy into the contemporary socialist movement. To that end, he's interested in expanding local Jacobin reading groups nationwide, including the hiring of two full-time organizers.
These auxiliary activities were not conceived of with revenue in mind. "For the events and the organizing, the reading and events, those are actually loss-generating," says Sunkara. "It's kind of like the magazine is the efficient thing that's being taxed by the other work."
Little magazines gone digital: How the late-adapting literary press has made its way in the web agen+1: Learning that print and digital can peacefully coexistJacobin: A Marxist rag run on a lot of petty-bourgeois hustleThe Baffler: The anti-innovation magazine embraces digitalThe New Inquiry: Not another New York literary magazine
Jacobin does pull in some ad revenue, around $10,000 a year in total. Clients include the New Left Review and university presses, including Duke and Stanford. Though online inventory sells well, Sunkara says he'd ideally like to hire a sales person to work on commission. (He also wants to hire a grant writer, but says Jacobin's political bent tends to exclude it from consideration for popular arts grants.)
Sunkara acknowledges that Jacobin's reputation is outsized in comparison to its resources. It didn't hurt that major figures on the left came out early to support the project, or that then-New York Times reporter Natasha Lennard intentionally imploded her career in the mainstream media via a Jacobin panel. Occupy Wall Street also brought more attention to the project.
But another major facet, according to Sunkara, has been his dedication to "creating a visual identity for the new left." The idea was to move away from the "Courier New typeface" and "iconography around SDS" or the WPA murals of the 1930s toward something "more fresh and up to date." It was for this reason that Sunkara made creative director Reimecke Forbes Jacobin's first full-time employee. In addition, Sunkara says he budgets around $2,000 dollars per issue for freelance art commissions. "Right now, a lot of Jacobin's success is based on aesthetics and feel," says Sunkara....(Click title for more)
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By Brian Lowry
Variety's TV Columnist
In "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History," Ken Burns and writer Geoffrey C. Ward have a topic every bit as big as their canvas, and a subject that feels especially timely given the U.S. political dynasties of the modern age.
Admirers of Burns' documentary epics surely need no more incentive than seeing his name affixed to the Roosevelt name, and the documentary miniseries is a meticulously crafted and wonderfully executed effort that represents a very good new deal for PBS and its viewers.
Subtitled "An Intimate History," "The Roosevelts" has the time to fulfill its promise, oscillating between the stories and lives of Theodore Roosevelt, his beloved niece Eleanor and distant cousin Franklin. Those principals' personal correspondence, moreover, is given voice by Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep (who remarkably replicates Eleanor's distinct delivery) and Edward Herrmann, who played FDR in the landmark miniseries "Eleanor and Franklin."
For those who have studied the Roosevelts, many of the stories will be familiar. But the beauty of the writing ("No other American family has ever touched so many lives") and eye-opening video nevertheless make much of this feel fresh. Nor should the parallels between the Roosevelts and the Clintons be lost on viewers, with the filmmakers describing Eleanor and Franklin's marriage as "one of the great partnerships in the history of the world," despite his betrayal of their vows with Lucy Mercer.
Early chapters are, not surprisingly, dominated by Teddy, described by historian David McCullough as "a high-intensity light bulb that burned out quickly." His stratospheric political career was also characterized by near-unimaginable personal tragedy, including the deaths of his first wife and mother on the same day.
Teddy's third-party run for the presidency is documented at some length, as well as his warlike tendencies and determination that his sons fight in World War I.
Even though Franklin and Teddy represented different parties, the younger Roosevelt, born to a doting mother who was more than 30 years the junior of his ailing father, was also extremely ambitious, having set his eye as a very young man on following in his famous kin's footsteps.
The most resonant parts of the docu, perhaps inevitably, involve FDR's stewardship of the nation during World War II - as columnist George Will notes, furtively using his influence and initiatives like the Lend-Lease Program to assist England, while maneuvering to "trick the country into going in a direction it did not want to go." There is also the matter of how Franklin departed with George Washington's precedent in seeking a third (and eventually, fourth) term; as well as his ailing health, and how the country was misled about his condition.
A final installment, meanwhile, is devoted to Eleanor - throughout FDR's presidency, his "liberal conscience" - and her remarkable work (and interesting personal life) in the years after his death. A particularly moving anecdote involves her trip to the Pacific during the war, noting that she brought the soldiers something many of them had not had access to for several years: An American mother.
In an age where dramatic reenactments have lazily become more the norm than the exception, Burns continues to demonstrate just how unnecessary that is. While much of the footage unearthed is arresting, in the early going he gets by with still photographs, music and voiceover to convey more than any assemblage of actors in Rough Riders garb possibly could.
For PBS, "The Roosevelts" is not only a classy showcase, but also the kind of production sure to grab larger-than-usual audiences, as "The Civil War" and "The War" did before it. And while the demographics will inevitably skew toward an older crowd, that, too, reinforces public TV's reason for being: catering to the under-served fringes of the ad-supported broadcast space, in much the way PBS' preschool offerings do....(Click title for more)
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