Blog of the Week:
Lair of Hunter Bear 
A Remarkable Collection of Postings and Links on Native American Culture and Politics by a Noted Activist
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Lost Writings of SDS..
Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson
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
choice "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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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. |
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Quick Links...
CCDS Discussion
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Solidarity Economy:
What It's All About
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Lenin Rediscovered:
What Is To Be Done in Context
By Lars T. Lih
Haymarket Books
880 Pages
$58.95
Why 'What Is To Be Done' Is a Champion of Democracy. Appendix includes a new translation of the original work.
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Tropic of Chaos
By Christian Parenti 
Nation Books $18.95 at Powell's |
Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Verso
Paperback
List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $8.00
Buy Now
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Carl Davidson's Latest Book:
New Paths to Socialism
Essays on Mondragon, Marx, Gramsci and the Green and Solidarity Economies |
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Occupy! Fanning the
Flames of Discontent...
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 austerity, make solidarity and end the wars! 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... |
Rebellion: Why the Elites Are in Trouble
By Chris HedgesTruthdig | Op-Ed
Oct. 10, 2011 - A group of people listen to a man talk about economic theories as the Occupy Wall Street protest continues in Zuccotti Park in New York, on October 9, 2011. The movement has inspired more than 200 Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, seeking volunteers for protests and fostering discussion.
Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars' worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and a sleeping bag. She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.
The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them. The elites consider everyone outside their sphere marginal or invisible. And what significance could an artist who paid her bills by working as a waitress have for the powerful? What could she and the others in Zuccotti Park do to them? What threat can the weak pose to the strong? Those who worship money believe their buckets of cash, like the $4.6 million JPMorgan Chase gave a few days ago to the New York City Police Foundation, can buy them perpetual power and security. Masters all, kneeling before the idols of the marketplace, blinded by their self-importance, impervious to human suffering, bloated from unchecked greed and privilege, they were about to be taught a lesson in the folly of hubris.
Even now, three weeks later, elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, continue to puzzle over what people like Ketchup want. Where is the list of demands? Why don't they present us with specific goals? Why can't they articulate an agenda?
The goal to people like Ketchup is very, very clear. It can be articulated in one word-REBELLION. These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back....(Click title for more)
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It's a Tremor, Not a Quake. Yet.
By Tom Hayden
Huffington Post
Oct 12, 2011 - The Occupy Wall Street movement is barely born and the mainstream media is already in the delivery room, asking questions about demands and plans, pontificating on whether it's "good for Obama," or an "alternative to the Tea Party," etcetera ad infinitum.
The newborn movement needs breathing space. Breathing space and basics like port-a-potties and supplies in Zuccotti Park, which I visited last Thursday night. In Los Angeles, yesterday, Oct. 11, with the encampment outside City Hall's windows, the City Council held a three-hour hearing on a resolution to support Occupy Wall Street/LA and specifically urge the police not to intervene. The non-binding resolution was introduced by Councilmember Bill Rosendahl and amended by Councilmember Richard Alarcon, will be voted on Wednesday by the full Council. The movement is "bringing new life into the progressive movement," Rosendahl said. "I was there in Chicago in 1968 when I was 18, and in the McGovern campaign in '72, and this is the kind of movement we need."
Personalities and districts divide the Council itself, and the City has done regular business with many Wall Street firms. Just last year, the Council majority voted 10-2, with Rosendahl voting against granting development rights at the controversial Playa Vista complex to Goldman Sachs. This changed a previous allowance of 100,000 square feet for commercial space to 2.6 million square feet for luxury development, a step that gave the Wall Street giant a $145 million windfall on its property, and created a project larger than Chicago's Trump Hotel and Towers. On the other hand, just this week local LA labor and community groups finally succeeded in preventing an eviction and renegotiating lease terms with a bank. It was the result of a months-long campaign, and the outcome was influenced by the climate of Occupy LA.
Similar events are occurring all over the country, and from the local energy generated a national protest agenda may surface. Sometimes the demands of social movements grow after the movement is initiated, after the police and establishment responses are measured, and depending on the level of public support. In time, the whole can become more than the sum of its parts.
Franklin Roosevelt did not campaign for the presidency on a New Deal program. The elements of that program -- Social Security, the Wagner Act recognizing collective bargaining, the WPA, anti-sweatshop regulations -- arose separately in response to separate battlefronts, and were implemented piecemeal after many compromises. The driving forces were the men and women occupying factories, going on strikes and generally raising hell.
That's what wrong with trying to impose overly specific demands at this point. What the nascent movement needs is spurts of growth, to move beyond a tremor, to rattle foundations -- to quake....(Click title for more)
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Debating Strategy and Tactics:
A New Insurgency Can Only Arise Outside the Progressive and Labor Establishment
By Stephen Lerner
New Labor Forum
We live in a dangerous time when large corporations and the super-rich are restructuring the nation's economy. There is a crisis for most Americans, but not for the elites who dominate the political economy of the country. Unfortunately, organized labor can be as much of an obstacle as it is a solution to mounting a movement for social justice that might reverse this trend and offer hope for the future.
Unions have the money, members, and capacity to organize, build, and fuel a movement designed to challenge the power of the corporate elite. But despite the fact that thousands of dedicated members, leaders, and staff have worked their hearts out to rebuild the labor movement, unions are just big enough-and just connected enough to the political and economic power structure-to be constrained from leading the kinds of activities that are needed.
Campaigns challenging corporate power can't be held in check by institutions with too much to lose. Unions with hundreds of millions in assets and collective bargaining agreements covering millions of workers won't risk their treasuries and contracts by engaging in large-scale sit-ins, occupations, and other forms of non-violent civil disobedience that must inevitably overcome court injunctions and political pressures.
This isn't an abstract or theoretical problem; we are already living it every day:
--In city after city, a project labor agreement-or a collective bargaining agreement covering a small percentage of a corporation's total workforce-can make a union want to veto any demonstrations and actions that might upset its relationship with a particular employer.
--A recent demonstration in the Northeast-against corporations that damage the economy by not paying taxes-ended up taking place in an isolated area, where nobody could see it, because a number of unions feared that a more visible site would offend an employer.
--In Ohio, a set of unions actively worked against a recent multi-state mobilization at a JP Morgan Chase shareholder meeting. The unions said the planned demonstrations seemed "too anti-corporate," with the potential to turn off independents and buoy conservative fundraising efforts. They feared all of this would undercut the passage of a ballot initiative to regain bargaining rights for public employees. ... (Click title for more)
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2012 Rightwing Wedge:The Fear of a Sharia Planet
While laws preventing Islamic legal codes from supplanting American jurisprudence are often thrown out, that isn't stopping Sharia from becoming a wedge issue in the 2012 election.
By Arsalan Iftikhar
Miller-McCune Features
Some national conservative political figures have convinced more than a dozen American states that "Sharia," or Islamic law, is somehow on the verge of toppling the American way of law. (asterix611/Flickr)
The "supremacy clause" of the U.S. Constitution is one of the first things taught in many first-year law school courses. Article VI, Clause 2 states quite clearly that the "Constitution and the laws of the United States ... shall be the supreme law of the land" and that no other law (foreign or domestic) can pre-empt or supersede it.
While that seems pretty clear, some national conservative political figures have convinced more than a dozen American states that "Sharia," or Islamic law, is somehow on the verge of toppling the American way of law.
While that's unlikely, some observers believe it will be the wedge issue of 2012. "Will anti-Sharia law initiatives be in future election cycles what anti-gay marriage initiatives were before [in the 2004 presidential elections]?" Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic cogently asked last year. "That is, a cultural wedge issue the GOP uses to ensure that hard-core conservatives enthusiastically flock to the polls?"
American Muslims represent far less than 5 percent of the national population; only two Muslims are currently members of Congress (Democratic congressmen Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Andre Carson of Indiana). Despite those low numbers, reading sites like shariafreeuse.com, creepingsharia, and antisharia.com or even the more mainstream JihadWatch one might think that America is on the verge of being overrun by falafel carts and hookah bars. Even Republican presidential candidates like Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich make public statements such as, "Some people would infuse Sharia Law in our courts system if we allow it. I honestly believe that," (Cain) or "Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it." (Gingrich)...(Click title for more)
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Report from 'Rebuild the Dream':
Progressives Talk Politics, and Protest Politicians
Rep Barbara Lee (D-CA), a major voice at the 'Dream' Conference
By Jo Freeman
SeniorWomen.com
What a difference a little opposition makes.
Last year's progressive conference was down in the dumps - disappointed by Obama and without direction. This year's progressive conference, held October 3-5 in Washington, DC, was girding for battle.
For years it called itself Take Back America. After the Democrats captured the federal government in 2008, many thought progressives had done just that. But after calling itself "Our Future, Now" for two years it has returned to oppositional mode with a demand to Take Back the American Dream.
The motivator was the Tea Party - seen as a grass roots social movement that stands for almost everything progressives are against. Impressed with how the Republican candidates for President pander to its power, progressives displayed a grim determination not to let them take over all branches of government.
The inspiration was Occupy Wall Street, which was into its third week. This spontaneous uprising by young people which has filled the streets of lower Manhattan prompted a bad case of protest envy among the older crowd attending the DC conference. Pretty much everyone wished they were there.
The heros of the conference were the public employees of Wisconsin and Ohio, several of whom told a couple hundred attentive listeners what they were doing to take back their state governments.
Last August Wisconsin voted to recall two Republican state legislators for voting for a law to limit the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers. In November the unions will start petitioning to recall Governor Scott Walker.
In Ohio, where a similar law was passed, 1.6 million people signed a petition to put a repeal measure on the ballot. Voters will decide its fate in November.
There were a lot of speeches on what the American Dream meant, with one common theme - this isn't it. Like the Tea Party, the torpid economy is seen as the primary problem. Unlike the Tea Party, the cure is seen as "Jobs, Not Cuts."
This year, conference organizers did not have to cope with disruptive protests from the floor, as has happened in the past.
President Obama and his promises were among the missing. Robert Reich, Clinton's first Labor Secretary, told everyone that they need to re-elect Obama and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he approved of the Obama jobs bill. Those were among the few mentions the President got. ...(Click title for more)
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Supreme Court: Mumia Death
Sentence Is Unconstitutional
By Joe Sims
Peoples World
Oct12 2011 - Political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal won a reprieve this week when the Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal by Philadelphia prosecutors of a lower court ruling that an earlier death penalty sentence was unconstitutional. The journalist and author is on death row in Pennsylvania.
In April, a Philadelphia federal appeals court reaffirmed a prior decision that improper sentencing instructions occured when jurers were not told to consider mitigating circumstances when consideirng setencing. The city's district attorney then appealed to the high court.
Four judges have ruled that the sentencing instructions were flawed.
Philadelphia prosecutors now have a choice of holding a new sentencing hearing or allowing the former Black Panther to serve a life sentence without parole.
Mumia Abu Jamal was convicted of the 1981 shooting of police officer Mark Faulker. In the most recent appeal he was represented by Attorney Judith Ritter and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
The president of the fund John Payton in a statement said, "At long last, the profoundly troubling prospect of Mr. Abu-Jamal facing an execution that was produced by an unfair and unreliable penalty phase has been eliminated.
Attorney Ritter stated, "Our system should never condone an execution that stems from a trial in which the jury was improperly instructed on the law."
According to news reports Philadelphia prosecutors did not comment on the Supreme Court's ruling. The court's decision leaves open the possibility the district attorney may once again seek the death penalty.
A worldwide campaign has called for Mumia Abu Jamal's release and sought to prevent the death sentence.
The appeal over the sentencing instructions have lasted 30 years. The campaign to end the death penalty in the U.S. has reached a new stage recently as a result of the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia.
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A Better Life: Film Review
 The Bottom Line: The search for a stolen truck brings a father and son closer in this fine film by Chris Weitz set in East L.A.
Director
Chris Weitz
Screenwriter
Eric Eason
Cast: Demian Bichir, Jos� Juli�n, Chelsea Rendon, Dolores Heredia
Reviewed by Kirk Honeycutt
The Hollywood Reporter
By keeping things simple and understated, director Chris Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason have crafted a little gem where humanity is observed with compassion, not condescension.
The Bicycle Thief, directed by Vittorio De Sica and written by Cesare Zavattini in 1948, long considered one of the classic films of Italian neo-realism, tells the story of a poor man and his son. Their search for a stolen bicycle the father desperately needs for work becomes a journey that explores poverty and desperation. A Better Life from the always surprising director Chris Weitz employs the same strategy to open up the lives of a Mexican gardener in East Los Angeles and his Americanized son.
Their search for a truck becomes an odyssey of powerlessness and anxiety that creates greater understanding between father and son, who are virtually unaware of each other's lives. Meanwhile the movie tracks the hard reality of what it means to be without documents in American society. By keeping things simple and understated, Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason (working from a Roger L. Simon story) have crafted a little gem where humanity is observed with compassion, not condescension.
You don't make a film like this expecting the kind of grosses Weitz's films such as New Moon orAbout a Boygenerated. But with targeted marketing and promotions, Summit Entertainment could have a modest box-office hit in A Better Life following its L.A. Film Festival premiere. Who knows - it may even pick up a nomination or award at year's end.
Veteran Mexican actor Demian Bichir plays Carlos, an illegal immigrant whose wife long ago abandoned him to raise their young son by himself. While the two haven't exactly prospered, they get by in borderline poverty with Luis (Jos� Juli�n) going to school - sometimes - and more or less staying out of trouble with gangs- so far - while Carlos scrapes together money as a helper to a gardener with steady clients....(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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