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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 SYRIZA Victory
Inspires Youth,
Anti-Austerity
and Left Unity
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 a raise for low-wage workers, oppose militarized police and the ongoing 'long wars,' plan for 2016 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina and other states, 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... |
With Syriza's Victory, the Anti-Austerity
Movement is Going Mainstream
Big business and centrist and right-wing parties throughout the world have called Syriza "dangerous." Well, maybe it's time to get dangerous. By Kate Aronoff
Waging Nonviolence via In These Times
Jan 26, 2015 - Syriza's success, however, is about more than just material conditions. Emerging from various splits in Greece's communist left, as well as the alter-globalization and anti-racist movements, the party jolted from relative obscurity by mobilizing a younger, more populist base alongside trade unionists and older middle-class Greeks shaken by the country's financial crisis.
Yesterday, Syriza-a previously marginal, left-leaning coalition party in Greece-made history by winning the country's general election. Winning 149 of 300 parliamentary seats, the party fell just two votes shy of an outright majority. Syriza's leader, 40-year-old Alexis Tsipras, will become prime minister at the head of a coalition anti-austerity government, beating out the conservative New Democracy party and its now former prime minister, Antonis Samaras.
Many have attributed the party's meteoric rise to power as a product of the brutal austerity conditions imposed on Greece by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union in their 2010 bailout of the country. Such measures have destroyed a quarter of the country's GDP, and driven youth unemployment to an astounding 50 percent. At this point, the country's non-working population outnumbers the employed as national debt continues to skyrocket.
Syriza has offered Greece a hopeful alternative, focused on getting people back to work, "transforming the political system," and meeting basic needs. The party plans to immediately implement programs to guarantee housing and electricity as well as provide free medical and pharmaceutical care for the unemployed, among other measures aimed at reconstituting the country's social safety net-left to crumble under austerity. In Brussels, they also plan to push for a renegotiation of the country's debt, an infusion of capital for a "European New Deal," and quantitative easing. In confronting the Eurozone and the IMF, the party has grown into rather than shrunk from its radical-left, anti-capitalist roots. Speaking with the Guardian, Tsipras noted, "This crisis is not coincidental. It's a structural crisis of capitalism and of its neoliberal model."
Syriza's success, however, is about more than just material conditions. Emerging from various splits in Greece's communist left, as well as the alter-globalization and anti-racist movements, the party jolted from relative obscurity by mobilizing a younger, more populist base alongside trade unionists and older middle-class Greeks shaken by the country's financial crisis. The party has made a public alliance with the Spanish populist party Podemos, or "We Can," a largely decentralized formation out of that country's Indignados movement that, of late, has surged in popular opinion polls and predicts a strong turnout in the Spanish general election later this year.
Together, these two sister movements from the Mediterranean are looking to alter the course of European political, economic and social life, maintaining both left-patriotism for their respective nations and a defiant internationalism. Syriza's tagline is "Greece goes forward - Europe is changing." From their outset, each party has been staunchly anti-austerity, providing a political vehicle for both leftists and, perhaps more importantly, ordinary Greeks who felt abandoned by the political leaders who dumped them headfirst into a painful crisis....(Click title for more)
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Syriza is the Left's best chance at success in a generation. But for socialists, the hard part starts after election day.
By Sebastian Budgen & Stathis Kouvelakis
Jacobin Interview
Jan 21, 2015 - With Syriza approaching the gates of power in Greece, the Internet has been full of analyses, opinion pieces, and endorsements and denunciations. In this interview with Stathis Kouvelakis conducted earlier this month, we take a critical distance to understand the origins, trajectory, and possible challenges of this political formation.
To do this, we have not hesitated to delve into some of the internal complexities of the astonishingly diverse Greek radical left. But Kouvelakis also talks to us about some of the immediate and concrete challenges that will face the party once in power.
Kouvelakis is a member of the central committee of Syriza and a leading member of its Left Platform. He teaches political theory at King's College London and is the author of Philosophy and Revolution from Kant to Marx and coeditor of Lenin Reloaded and Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism. He was interviewed for Jacobin by Sebastian Budgen, an editor for Verso Books who serves on the editorial board of Historical Materialism.
Tell us about Syriza: when and how did this coalition of radical left parties come into being?
Syriza was set up by several different organizations in 2004, as an electoral alliance. Its biggest component was Alexis Tsipras's party Synaspismos - initially the Coalition of the Left and Progress, and eventually renamed the Coalition of the Left and of the Movements - which had existed as a distinct party since 1991. It emerged from a series of splits in the Communist movement.
On the other hand, Syriza also comprises much smaller formations. Some of these came out of the old Greek far left. In particular, the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE), one the country's main Maoist groups. This organization had three members of parliament (MPs) elected in May 2012. That's also true of the Internationalist Workers' Left (DEA), which is from a Trotskyist tradition, as well as other groups mostly of a Communist background. For example, the Renewing Communist Ecological Left (AKOA), which came out of the old Communist Party (Interior).
The Syriza coalition was founded in 2004, and at first it had what we might call relatively modest successes. Nevertheless it managed to get into parliament, overcoming the 3 percent minimum threshold. To cut a long story short, Syriza resulted from a relatively complex recomposition of the Greek radical left.
Since 1968, the radical Left had been divided into two poles. The first was the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which itself underwent two splits: the first, in 1968, under the colonels' dictatorship, which gave rise to the KKE (Interior), which was of a Eurocommunist bent, and a second one in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Eurocommunist party underwent a split in 1987, with its rightist wing constituting the Greek Left (EAR) and joining Synaspismos from the outset, and the leftist one reforming as the AKOA. The KKE that remained after these two splits was peculiarly traditionalist, clinging on to a Stalinist framework that became considerably more rigid after the 1991 split. The party was rebuilt on a both combative and sectarian basis. It managed to win a relatively significant activist base among working-class and popular layers, as well as among the youth, particularly in the universities.
The other pole, Synaspismos, opened out in 2004 with the creation of Syriza, which itself came from the joining together of the two previous splits from the KKE. Synaspismos has changed considerably over time. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was the kind of party that could vote for the Maastricht Treaty, and it was mainly of a moderate left coloration.
But it was also a heterogeneous party composed of various distinct currents. Very hard-fought internal struggles pitted the left wing of the party against the right wing, and the right wing gradually lost control. The foundation of Syriza sealed Synaspismos's turn to the left.
What is the influence of the Communist tradition on Synaspismos?
The Communist matrix is clearly perceptible in the majority culture of the party. One part came out of the Eurocommunist-influenced tendency that opened up to the new social movements from the 1970s onward. It thus proved able to renew its organizational and theoretical reference points, grafting the traditions of the new forms of radicalism onto its existing Communist framework.
It is a party that's at ease among feminist movements, youth mobilizations, alter-globalization, and antiracist movements and LGBT currents, while also continuing to make a considerable intervention in the trade union movement. Another part comes from the layer of cadres and members that left the KKE in 1991, the largest part of them being now in the Left Current, although many members of the majority group of the leadership and of the cadres, also come from that strand.
We should note that the party's cadres and activist base are mainly educated wage earners - people with degrees. It is a very urban electorate, a party with very strong roots among intellectuals. Until very recently Synaspismos had an absolute majority in the higher education union, unlike the KKE, which has lost since the 1989-1991 splits any kind of privileged relation with intellectual circles.
The party leadership also bears a Communist stamp. Don't be fooled by Tsipras's age: he himself started out as an activist in the KKE youth organization, in the early 1990s. Many of the oldest cadres and leaders fought side-by-side in the clandestine period, and are veterans of prisons and deportation camps.
For this very reason there is a fratricidal atmosphere on the Greek radical left, though currently it is the KKE alone who keeps it going - branding Synaspismos and then Syriza as "traitors" who thus represent its "main enemy." That's why when Syriza established bilateral relations with almost all the parties represented in parliament after the May 2012 elections - when it had the right to try and form a government - the KKE refused even to meet with them.
And how would you characterize Syriza's line? Would you also say that this coalition is following an anticapitalist line, or is its activity part of a more gradual, reformist approach?
In terms of its programmatic and ideological identity, Syriza has a strong anticapitalist line, and it has very sharply set itself apart from social democracy. That consideration is all the more important if we think about the history of the battles within Synaspismos that pitched tendencies who were favorable to allying with social democrats against other currents who were hostile to any sort of agreement or coalition, including at the local level or in trade union activity.
The "social democratic" wing of Synaspismos definitely lost control of the party in 2006 when Alekos Alavanos was elected its president. This right wing, led by Fotis Kouvelis, almost exclusively originating in the Eurocommunist right group coming from EAR, ultimately left Synaspismos and set up another party called Democratic Left (Dimar): a formation that claims to be a sort of halfway house between Pasok and the radical left.
So Syriza is an anticapitalist coalition that addresses the question of power by emphasizing the dialectic of electoral alliances and success at the ballot box with struggle and mobilizations from below. That is, Syriza and Synaspismos see themselves as class-struggle parties, as formations that represent specific class interests.
What they want to do is advance a fundamental antagonism against the current system. That's why it's called "Syriza": meaning, "coalition of the radical left." And this assertion of radicalism is an extremely important part of the party's identity.
What are the relations of force among Syriza activists, and how many people are there in each of the formations that make up this coalition?
In 2012, Synaspismos had around 16,000 members. The Maoist KOE had about 1,000-1,500 activists, and you can say more or less the same for AKOA. Synaspismos's practice and organizational form have developed in tandem with its ideological positioning. Traditionally it was not an party of activists at all, instead it had a lot of big names and an essentially electoral orientation. But the party's organizational substance and activism have changed considerably, at two different levels.
Firstly, a very dynamic youth wing developed during the alter-globalization and antiracist movements. This allowed the party to strengthen its youth presence, particularly among students, an area where it had traditionally been lacking. Its youth organization now has many thousands of members. Indeed, cadres who have come from this youth wing make up a good part of Tsipras's entourage. They are characterized by real ideological radicalism, and they identify with Marxism, mostly of an Althusserian hue.
Secondly, trade unionists took on more of a role in Synaspismos in the 2000s, becoming the anchor of the party's left wing. Largely coming from the KKE, this left wing is a more working-class element that stands for relatively traditional class-struggle positions and is very critical of the European Union.
That is not to say that there are no longer any moderates in the party today. In particular we could think of leading economics spokesman Yannis Dragasakis and some of the cadre who used to be close to Fotis Kouvelis but refused to follow him out of the party into Dimar....(Click title for more)
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Klein talking with Tsipras
Naomi Klein Interview with EnetEnglish
By Lynn Edmonds
EntEnglish
According to bestselling author Naomi Klein, the systemic use of shock and fear by the power elites to undermine vulnerable communities is very much evident in post-bailout Greece. From the rise of racism to the sell-off of the country's oil and natural gas resources - much of what will shape Greece's immediate future are, she argues, predictable consequences of the politics of austerity
Naomi Klein is the author of controversial New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine, which has been referred to as "the master narrative of our time".
The book argues that business interests and powerful nations exploit shocks in the form of natural disasters, economic problems, or political turmoil, as an opportunity to aggressively restructure vulnerable countries' economies. She posits that because ultra-capitalistic policies are harmful to the majority of citizens, they cannot be implemented without a shock, ranging from media-hyped anxiety to police torture, that squashes popular resistance. In this exclusive interview, Klein explains to EnetEnglish how she believes the Shock Doctrine relates to Greece today.
Naomi Klein: To me it is a classic example of the things I wrote about. It's heartbreaking to see the same tricks and the same tactics being used so brutally. And there's been enormous resistance in Greece. It's particularly distressing to see the violent repression of the social movements that were resisting austerity. And it's just been going on for so long now. People get worn down.
What I've been following recently is the sell-off of natural resources for mining and drilling. That's the next frontier of how this is going to play out - the scramble for oil and gas in the Aegean. And it's going to affect Cyprus as well. This is a whole other level of using austerity and debt to force countries to sell off their mining and drilling rights for fire sale prices.
When you add the climate crisis on top of that it is particularly culpable that you have an economic crisis being used as leverage to extract more fossil fuels, especially because Greece itself very climate vulnerable. And I think its possible that, as the scramble for oil and gas heats up, there will be more resistance because it's a huge threat to Greece's economy
How much does climate change affect your argument?
Because I am working on a book and a film on climate change, that's why I've been following the extractive side of the shock doctrine in Greece, which has gotten a lot less attention. Understandably, people are focused on having their pensions cut, and the layoffs - and those definitely are more immediate. Although in the case of the [Skouries] goldmine, there is an immediate threat to safety, to livelihood, and to economy, and so people are extremely vocal about that.
But the part of this that I find so culpable, and so deeply immoral, is that the rise of fascism in this context is entirely predictable. We know that this is what happens. And this is supposedly the lesson of the Second World War: If you impose punishing and humiliating sanctions on a country, it creates the right breeding grounds for fascism. That's what Keynes warned about when he wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, regarding the Treaty of Versailles. To me it's so incredible that we continue to allow history to repeat in this way.
Greeks have this particular fear that's being exploited, around the fear of becoming a developing country, becoming a third world country. And I think in Greece there's always been this sense of hanging on to Europe by a thread. And the threat is having that thread cut. That fear plays out in two ways: One that you can't leave the eurozone because that will be the end of your status as a developed country. And then on attacks on migrants and in the anti-immigrant backlash.
Just because something bad is happening doesn't mean you're going to go into shock. Shock is what happens when you lose your narrative, when you no longer understand where you are in time and space. You don't know what your story is anymore.
In The Shock Doctrine you talk about how countries the IMF lent money to were said to have sick economies, and specifically, to have 'cancer.' But with Greece we talk about 'contagion.' What are the implications of this change in metaphor?
'Cancer' is already a violent discourse. When you diagnose a country with cancer whatever treatment you go with is justified, it's necessarily lifesaving. That's the whole point of the cancer metaphor. Once you have that diagnosis, you, as the doctor, are not culpable for the negative affects of the treatment.
But calling it a contagion of course means that this is about keeping it contained, and preventing whatever rebelliousness is being incubated from spreading, particularly to Cyprus, Portugal and Spain.
When you have these fears of a contagion, when investors are afraid of a whole region, it means that that region has power to come together as a block with a much stronger hand. This is what I wrote about in the book about Latin America in the 1980s, with the so-called debt-shock. Where it would have been next to impossible for individual countries to stand up to the power of the IMF. But if Latin America as a block had organised themselves and stood up to the IMF together, then they actually would have had the power to break them. And then you would have had a much more even negotiation. I've always thought that this is one of the answers to the idea of contagion. If that's what your opponents are afraid of, organise into a negotiating block.
So the countries of southern Europe should come together negotiations with the troika?
I would think so, yes. It's called a debtors' cartel. But it never happens. As far as I know it hasn't been tried.
There is a concerted attempt to create the false equivalency between an individual who went into a little bit of consumer debt, and a bank who leveraged themselves 33-1. It's an outrageous comparison
Former deputy prime minister Theodoros Pangalos said, "We all gorged together" - as in every Greek was complicit to causing the crisis. In contrast, Alexis Tsipras, the head of main opposition party Syriza, has pointed the finger at Angela Merkel and her followers. How should the way that the crisis came about affect the way we try to solve it?
If you accept the premise that everybody created this crisis equally, then you have created the context where collective punishment is acceptable. That is the whole point of this false equivalency.
There is a concerted attempt to create the false equivalency between an individual who went into a little bit of consumer debt, and a bank who leveraged themselves 33-1. It's an outrageous comparison. But unfortunately this is the way economics is discussed in our culture where you always have these equivalencies. Between family debt and the debt of a nation. 'Would you run your house this way?' It's a ridiculous comparison because the way you run your house is not the way you run your country. We all gorged together ... that means everyone has to starve. But of course we know everybody won't starve. ...(Click title for more)
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Too often eclipsed by more famous Civil Rights leaders, Bob Moses rarely gets the credit he deserves as one of the movement's most successful organizers.
By Nicolaus Mills
The Daily Beast
Jan 23, 2015 - On January 24, Bob Moses will be honored with an 80th birthday party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his home since 1976. In contrast to Martin Luther King Jr., whose January birthday is a national holiday, Moses is not widely known for his role in the civil rights movement. He should be. He was the driving force behind the historic Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.
Unlike the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March, Freedom Summer was not a short-term undertaking in which massive crowds were crucial for success. Freedom Summer lasted from June to August and depended on a black-white alliance working together on a series of planned, civil rights projects.
The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an amalgam of civil rights groups, of which the most prominent was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), provided the leadership for Freedom Summer. Volunteers, primarily northern college students, were in turn the foot soldiers for Freedom Summer.
The volunteers, who numbered under a thousand, taught in Freedom Schools designed to supplement the meager educations of most black children in Mississippi, helped register black voters, and lent their support to the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as it sought to unseat the segregated Mississippi Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.
From the outset, Freedom Summer faced the hostility of a state in which Governor Paul Johnson Jr., considered a political moderate, prided himself in saying that the initials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) stood for "Niggers, Alligators, Apes, Coons, and Possums."
Those who took part in Freedom Summer, whether they came from inside or outside Mississippi, paid a steep price for doing so. Three Freedom Summer workers-James Chaney (a black Mississippian), Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman (white Northerners)-were killed in June shortly after arriving from their Freedom Summer orientation session in Ohio. In August their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and by the end of Freedom Summer, COFO would report four additional shootings, 52 serious beatings, and 250 arrests.
But long before "The Whole World Is Watching" became the slogan of the antiwar movement, Freedom Summer showed how the media, particularly television, could be mobilized to expose longstanding social problems. The president and the FBI became involved in Mississippi as a result of the publicity surrounding the murdered Freedom Summer workers. Previously unregistered black Mississippians made it onto voter rolls that they had been kept off for years, and the Democratic National Convention, although it never seated the Freedom Democratic Party, rewrote its rules so that segregated delegations were banned from future conventions.
'The absence of math literacy in urban and rural communities throughout this country is an issue as urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippi was in 1961.'
"When you come South, you bring with you the concern of the country-because the people of the country don't identify with Negroes," Moses told the predominantly white volunteers during their summer orientation session. The volunteers' presence, he correctly believed, would put a spotlight on the racial violence white Mississippians felt they could get away with-and did get away with. Seven of the men responsible for the deaths of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were eventually sent to prison in a case brought by the Justice Department.
Since 1960, Moses had been a presence in rural Mississippi, working on voter registration, seeking out the young Mississippians who would become the backbone of a home-grown, voter-rights movement, and it was during this early period, when few outside of the civil rights movement were interested in Mississippi, that Freedom Summer had its genesis.
As Moses later observed in Radical Equations, the book he co-wrote with journalist and civil rights activist Charles Cobb Jr., "The great campaigns of protest so identified with Martin Luther King Jr., were swirling around us, inspiring immense crowds in vast public spaces. But along with students from the sit-in movement, in Mississippi I became immersed in and committed to the older but less well-known tradition of community organizing."
For Moses the key to community organizing was not being the most spellbinding orator in the room. The key was being the organizer who helped future civil rights leaders find their own voices. As he later observed during a tribute to Ella Baker, the veteran civil rights worker who played a crucial role in the founding of SNCC, "You don't have to worry about where your leaders are... The leadership is there. If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge."
In a 1961 letter that he wrote after being put in the Magnolia, Mississippi, jail for his part in a voter registration drive, Moses described the challenges he faced in Mississippi in prose that was a match for the bib overalls and white T shirt he so often wore at the time. In its concreteness and detail, Moses's letter is very different from Martin Luther King's more famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail" with its memorable declaration, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
In his letter Moses did not offer an overview of the civil rights movement or theorize about its future. Instead, he evoked the vulnerability of himself and those with him in the Magnolia jail, even as he saw their presence as a crack in the edifice of segregationist Mississippi. "Twelve us are here, sprawled out along the concrete bunker," Moses wrote. "We lack eating and drinking utensils. Water comes from a faucet and goes into a hole. This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg... This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg-from a stone that the builders rejected."
Today, King's and Moses's jail letters are as moving and significant as when first written, but we have given the author of only one of them his full due. That needs to change. Moses, who has now lived more than twice as long as King, has not used the time since Freedom Summer to romanticize the '60s or the role he played in them. "I'm really lucky that way," he says when he talks of how he managed to survive the beatings and shootings he experienced in Mississippi.
After Freedom Summer ended, Moses became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and since 1982, when he received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, he has devoted himself to developing the Algebra Project, a nationwide effort to teach poor and minority students math and science.
Convinced that students without a knowledge of math and science are destined to be "serfs of the information age," Moses sees the Algebra Project as an extension of the goals of Freedom Summer. "I believe that the absence of math literacy in urban and rural communities throughout this country is an issue as urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippi was in 1961," he wrote after starting the Algebra Project. "And I believe that solving the problem requires exactly the kind of community organizing that changed the South in the 1960s."
Moses does not underestimate the enormous problems currently facing the Algebra Project and its offshoot, The Young People's Project, but now, as in Mississippi, he remains an organizer with the temperament of a long-distance runner.
Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964-The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.
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Liberate 41 Million Young
Americans From Student Debt
By Mary Green Swig, Steven L.Swig and Richard Eskow Campaign for America's Future
Jan 27, 2015 - President Obama's proposal for tuition-free community college education, and the broader discussion that it has inspired, confirms our belief that it is time for a comprehensive solution to a $1.3 trillion problem: student debt in the United States.
We strongly support the concept of tuition-free public higher education, and are encouraged by renewed arguments in its favor. But we must also confront what has been done to the last several generations of students. They have been forced to take on debt that is crippling to them, to our economy and our society.
A student debt "jubilee" would reflect both the values upon which this nation was founded and the economic principles that have sustained it through its greatest periods of growth and prosperity.
It is time for a truly transformative idea: Let's abolish all student loan debt in America.
Jubilees Then and Now
The Liberty Bell represents our nation's core values, combining personal freedom with community action. The words inscribed on the Bell - "Proclaim liberty throughout the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof" - are from the Book of Leviticus and refer to a Biblical "Year of Jubilee," when all debts were periodically forgiven by the nation's rulers.
Those Jubilee years - proclaimed at 49-year intervals for over 4,000 years - were both moral and practical in nature. On one hand, they were an acknowledgement that prolonged and excessive debt was an unconscionable burden. That morality is woven into the ethical foundation of Western civilization, which accepts the notion of fair debt but rejects indebtedness which is usurious or impinges on human freedom.
But they were also an economic necessity, preserving social harmony while ensuring uninterrupted production. The practical value of debt forgiveness has been explored by scholars who note that it reinforces social cohesion and prevents large groups of people from falling into poverty or oppression.
These goals remain as important today as they were in ancient times. A vibrant middle class is the engine of a functioning economy. A sustainable future is impractical without it.
While "jubilee years" were created long ago, the concept lives on today in different forms. Most modern Western societies have drawn on similar moral and practical arguments to end usury, indentured servitude and slavery. Bankruptcy laws extend a kind of individualized "jubilee" to people who are overburdened with debt. (Ironically, student debt is exempted from most forms of bankruptcy relief.)
Now we face a new moral challenge. We need a new and transformative movement, one which echoes the struggles of recent history while drawing its inspiration from ancient traditions. Our massive student debt burden is a moral and ethical challenge. This debt draws upon the as-yet unearned wealth of each new generation, mortgaging tomorrow's wealth and inhibiting the prosperity of the future.
How did we get here?
The Rise of Student Debt
There was a time in living memory when many Americans could obtain public higher education at little or no tuition cost. Today a college degree has become prohibitively expensive for many, while millions of others are required to borrow extensively in order to meet its soaring costs.
Rather than address the cost of education, the root cause of the problem, the government became the primary lender for student debt, a move that contributed to runaway costs and crippling indebtedness. As a result, student debt is now the second-largest form of personal debt in this country, exceeding credit card debt and trailing only home mortgages.
Student debt is a dark betrayal at the heart of the American promise, and it must come to an end.
The statistics paint a clear picture: Student debt has soared and continues to rise. The total amount owed is now $1.3 trillion. Approximately 41 million Americans now carry student debt, a figure that rose 40 percent between 2004 and 2012. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average amount owed for each graduating borrower has risen from less than $10,000 in 1993 to more than $30,000 in 2014 (in inflation-adjusted dollars). This debt has disproportionately affected lower-income Americans, but has affected households at all but the very highest income levels.
It gets worse. Unscrupulous "educators" and loan servicers in the private sector have exploited unwary students and their families. For the last six years, debt-burdened college students have entered the worst employment environment for young people and graduates in modern history. Politicians who have been too timid to tax hedge fund billionaires the same way they tax their personal assistants are ironically using the money from debt-burdened students and their families to offset the loss....(Click title for more)
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By Lance Campa
The American Prospect via Portside
Jan 27, 2015 - Labor advocates and scholars often feel like we won't be taken seriously unless we say how awful things are. The more dire our analysis, the more listeners will nod and say it must be right, with labor insiders so self-critical. But our critical thinking shouldn't devolve into despair.
Workers won't join a movement that constantly proclaims it is going down the tubes and is going to disappear in ten years. Legislators won't pass pro-labor laws because they feel sorry for unions. Workers want to see power, and legislators need to feel power. Unions won't regain it by complaining.
Get a grip; the labor movement is stronger than it looks. We can't deny or minimize problems and challenges. But we often go too far in decrying unions' fate. Get a grip; the labor movement is stronger than it looks. A lot of good organizing is going on, and most unions are doing an effective job at the bargaining table. Unions are a force in important regions and industrial sectors, still politically potent, and still bringing new groups of workers into their ranks.
Most headlines cite national "union density" figures-the percentage of union members in the labor force-as evidence of labor's decline. Latest figures show it at 11.1 percent, down from a high of 30 percent in the 1950s. But the United States is a big country. Union density is in many ways a regional phenomenon with big variations, from 25 percent in New York to 2 percent in North Carolina. In New England, around the Great Lakes, on the West Coast, and other states, union density is substantially higher than the national average.
California has seen a big increase in unions, led largely by health-care employees and Latino workers. As in many areas of American life, California is a harbinger for labor. As the health-care sector continues to grow and policy changes increasingly squeeze health-care workers, the organizing option will grow in importance. As the Latino population grows, so will union membership. And immigration policy shifts that bring millions of undocumented workers out of legal shadows could lead to solid union growth.
Official union density data are also skewed by the millions of workers in the labor force who have no possibility of organizing and collective bargaining. They are self-employed workers, supervisors and managers, independent contractors, public employees in states that prohibit collective bargaining, farmworkers, household domestic workers, labor supply agency employees dispersed among many workplaces, even college professors who are "Yeshiva-ed" (an ungainly reference to the 1980 Supreme Court case ruling that full-time faculty-unlike adjuncts-are "managers" who cannot organize). If we take these tens of millions of workers out of the denominator, the percentage of union-represented workers among those who can organize is substantially greater than the official figure, probably closer to 20 percent.
Collective bargaining is still deeply rooted in transportation, communications, food processing, health care, manufacturing, service, entertainment, hospitality, and many other sectors-even the public sector, notwithstanding recent travails in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Unions are a political force in many states, too. President Barack Obama owed his re-election in part to on-the-ground efforts of trade unionists in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and other battleground states. Unions are also a fighting force for social policies benefiting all workers, not just union members. They are leading movements to raise the minimum wage, protect pensions, advance health insurance, reform corporate governance, ensure labor protections in trade agreements, and more.
Workers Are Responding
This is not meant to minimize the challenges that unions face. Obviously there is no going back to a Golden Age of stable jobs in huge mass production sites making union organizing easier than it is today. Unions now have to respond to workers' concerns in a more fluid economic environment.
The labor movement's embrace of non-traditional sectors of the workforce augurs well for such a change. New forms of "alt-union" collective action are surely an exciting and important development. We need a scorecard to tell the players: National Day Laborers' Organizing Network (NDLON), National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), National Guestworkers Alliance (NGA), Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), United Workers Congress (UWC), and local and regionally based groups like Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROCs) in many cities, Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ), Southwest Workers Union and more.
But let's be frank: Even with great people doing great work, converting these movements into sustainable, self-financing membership-based organizations is still a work in progress. In most cases, the established labor movement is a major source of financial, logistical, and organizing support for these new formations. Trade unions and their 15 million members are still an indispensable base for these organizations and for others that will emerge in years ahead....(Click title for more)
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By Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo
Grass Roots Organizing via Portside
Jan 26, 2015 - It started with a conversation.
Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor [1] in Madison, WI, had heard about Spain's Mondragon cooperative complex and their union cooperatives in the U.S. He researched how labor could support cooperative development in this country. During his research, Gundlach read about the city of New York investing a million dollars for worker cooperative development. It sparked an idea for Madison.
Then he bumped into the mayor, Paul R. Soglin, at a community picnic. Gundlach told Soglin about his idea to have the city help with cooperative development, not just to create good jobs, but to support neighborhoods. The mayor, Gundlach, responded with: "This is something I'd been interested in as well."
Soon after that conversation, Soglin initiated Madison's Capitol Improvement Plan, "Co-operative Enterprises for Job Creation & Business Development." This plan would authorize the city to spend $1 million each of five years starting in 2016 to fund "cooperative/worker-owned business formation for the purposes of job creation and general economic development in the city."
The Madison Common Council, known as city councils or commissions in other cities, approved the initiative on Nov. 11, 2014. This allocation is the largest by a U.S. municipality. Earlier last year, New York allocated $1.2 million to help worker cooperative development.
City and community planners hope to use the money to not only create jobs and cooperatives, but to boost poor neighborhoods, form union cooperatives, create group entrepreneurship and to develop cross-sectoral cooperative collaboration.
Soglin, an activist mayor who has been elected mayor of the city seven times and who in his first term helped one of the city's oldest cooperatives, Union Cab, to get funding from the Madison Development Corporation, said that Madison is excited to take the lead on the program.
"We know that worker-owned businesses are more likely to provide living wage jobs and profit sharing to their members, and are less likely to leave the community they are in," he said.
"Planning is just getting underway, but we will be working with leaders, both in the labor movement and with established cooperatives in the area, to promote and grow the number of worker-owned businesses in Madison," he said. "I can't think of a better jobs program than this and I look forward to its long-term success."
City of Madison officials have been meeting with the local group representing worker cooperatives MADWorC [2], the Dane (County) Cooperative Alliance, the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives, the Cooperative Network, and the National Cooperative Business Association to start formulating plans for how best to use the money. The first funds are expected to be approved for expenditure in 2016.
"It will be a cooperative cross-sectoral push," said Ole Olson, of MadWorC, and a worker-owner of Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing, one of the city's oldest worker cooperatives. For example, he said, producer and consumer cooperatives will be involved as well as unions that may leverage training opportunities.
Producer cooperatives are owned by farmers, fishers, foresters, or crafts people who cooperate by buying equipment, insurance, organizing sales and marketing services, and distribution networks. Consumer cooperatives are owned by the consumers and include grocery stores, housing cooperatives, and financial services (which usually are called financial cooperatives or credit unions)....(Click title for more)
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By Holly Near
Monthly Review
Jan 15, 2015 - Pete Seeger was bigger than life. And like a character in a mythological tale, before long his shoe size will grow to such a degree that he will scale snowy mountains and wade across oceans. He will look over the tops of Redwood trees and when he dips his hand down into the Hudson River, the water up to his elbow, his fingers will reach down to the bottom of the deepest pool and pull up a giraffe and a baby grand and we will forever sing about the magic river.
This mythology will be enjoyed by the living for generations to come. A next generation of troubadours will sing deep into the little faces who, with wide eyes, imagine such a music man.
Pete? He may roll his eyes and hope everyone returns quickly to the truth OR he may enjoy becoming part of a new "Abiyoyo," a tale that will sprout banjos of unprecedented size and color and confront the mean fearful spirits of a creature named "houseofunamerianactivitiescommittee"-a wild and inexplicable society of exaggerated creatures with a name so long that only Mary Poppins will attempt its unraveling.
Other mystical visions will dance across the mountain: a Chilean troubadour who nightly passes over the walls of a great stadium and returns to the snow-capped Andes; a Spanish painter who puts limbs and breasts and horses' heads where none have ever been before; an African American contralto who defies freezing temperatures with simply the sound of her voice and invites a nation to put on its Sunday best.
So it will go, until Pete is no longer a man. In truth, we who have come to mistrust our challenging species, feel relief to know that he was not quite made of the same stuff as the rest.
The sweet children left standing on the sides of playgrounds, last chosen for the teams, will find solace in odd stringed instruments and drums made of garbage cans. They will scale rock so as to wander up behind the banjo now carved into the big stone mountain alongside the heads of presidents. They will survive the bully or the drunken uncle by flatpicking "Freight Train" left-handed and right-handed and Elizabeth Cotton-handed and may someday come to ask, "Who was this Pete fellow?"
And because of who they are, they will find the rough edges, the moments of doubt, the facts of privilege, the courage of political conviction, the actor who knew the power of theater and mythology.
In amazement, they will read the disappointed ramblings of aging folk critics who declare, "Pete was the last of the great political folk singers so let's name bridges after him." The children will laugh and, without hostility, they will have the good sense to say, "Really? What about me? I know the same chords. I know how to tell a really good story. Only I am living NOW rather than THEN. And those of us living now are seldom seen until we are invited into that part of memory that is called then."...(Click title for more)
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 By Rod Such
The Electronic Intifada
Jan 28, 2015 - Few historians give credence to conspiratorial theories of history, knowing that myriad economic, political, social and cultural factors shape historical development. Nevertheless, conspiracies do occur in history.
The professor emeritus of international relations at Oxford University Avi Shlaim (who was born in Baghdad to Iraqi Jewish parents and grew up in Israel) documented one. He shows how Britain, France and Israel conspired to start the 1956 Suez Canal War in his sweeping account of Israel's relations with the Arab world, which was first published in 1999 as The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
The story bears repeating because its lessons recur as a kind of leitmotif throughout an updated, newly expanded and republished version of The Iron Wall.
Angered by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal and his support for Algerian independence, Britain and France enlisted Israel in a plot to regain control of the canal and simultaneously destroy Nasser and any pan-Arab nationalists who might succeed him.
Israel was to play the role of "fall guy" by initiating an invasion of the canal zone, supposedly in anticipation of an Egyptian attack. To secure the zone and restore stability, Britain and France would then intervene, overthrowing the Nasser government in the process.
Realignment and control
Israel's prime minister David Ben Gurion was not content with only being rid of a regional rival, however. At the secret conference in Sevres outside Paris, where the plot was hatched, Ben Gurion proposed a plan for a Greater Israel and a comprehensive realignment in the Middle East.
As if he was negotiating a new Sykes-Picot agreement, Ben Gurion argued for dismantling Jordan by giving Iraq the East Bank of the Jordan River and Israel the West Bank. Israel would also control southern Lebanon, up to the Litani River, turning Lebanon into a Christian state. As Shlaim remarks, the proposal revealed a "craving for an alliance with the imperialist powers against the forces of Arab nationalism" and "an appetite for territorial expansion."
Unfortunately for the conspirators, the plot was committed to writing in the Protocol of Sevres, which was eventually exposed in 1996, thoroughly undermining the Israeli narrative that it had invaded Egypt only because it faced an imminent threat. Even more unfortunate for the plotters, of course, was that their scheme unraveled in real time when the administration of US President Dwight Eisenhower, seeking to burnish an image as an anti-colonial power and angered that it had not been consulted, forced all three countries to withdraw from Egypt unconditionally....(Click title for more)
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Keep up with the Moral Mondays 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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