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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 130 pages, it includes 20 articles on organizing, racism 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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New Issue of Mobilizer
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Blog of the Week:  Keep On Keepin' OnThe Green New Deal ...and other Short Posts on Tumblr by Carl Davidson
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Edited by Carl Davidson Revolutionary Youth the the New Working Class: The Praxis Papers, the Port Authority Statement, the RYM Documents and other Lost Writings of SDS
Changemaker, 273pp, $22.50
For the full contents, click the link and view 'Preview' under the cover graphic.
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By Randy Shannon, CCDS
"Everyone has the right to work, to free of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment."
- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948
I. Introduction
The "Great Recession" that began in 2007 has caused the greatest percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is the end of an era of unrestrained 'neo-liberal' capitalism that became public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II.
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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. |
We Are Not What We Seem:
Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century
By Rod Bush, NYU Press, 1999
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 A Memoir of the 1960s
by Paul KrehbielAutumn Leaf Press, $25.64 | | Shades of Justice Video: Bringing Down a President, Ending a War |
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Essays on Mondragon, Marx, Gramsci
and the Green and Solidarity Economies |
Solidarity Economy:What It's All About
Edited by Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei
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- Foreword by Susan Brownmiller
- Preface by Ken Wachsberger
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Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement
By Don Hamerquist
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An Invitation to CCDSers and Friends...
 Tea Party Digging In as GOP Split Deepens
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 [email protected]!
Most of all, it's urgent that you oppose war on Syria, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...
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The Tea Party Is an Anti-Populist Elite Tool
 This is not some spontaneous uprising of white workers. It's the newest incarnation of a rich, elite, right-wing tradition By Michael Lind
Salon.com
Oct 22, 2013 - In recent essays for Salon I have argued that progressives and mainstream pundits are making a profound mistake by treating Tea Party radicalism as an outburst of irrationality by moronic "low information" yokels, rather than understanding it as a calculated (if not necessarily successful) strategy by the regional elite of the South and its allies in other regions. In an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal titled "The Tea Party and the GOP Crackup," William Galston presents data that reinforces this conclusion:
Many frustrated liberals, and not a few pundits, think that people who share these beliefs must be downscale and poorly educated. The New York Times survey found the opposite. Only 26% of tea-party supporters regard themselves as working class, versus 34% of the general population; 50% identify as middle class (versus 40% nationally); and 15% consider themselves upper-middle class (versus 10% nationally). Twenty-three percent are college graduates, and an additional 14% have postgraduate training, versus 15% and 10%, respectively, for the overall population. Conversely, only 29% of tea-party supporters have just a high-school education or less, versus 47% for all adults.
I have also argued that the Tea Party is not a new movement that sprang up as a result of spontaneous populist anger against Wall Street bailouts in the Great Recession, but rather the "newest right," the most recent incarnation of an evolving right-wing tradition that goes back beyond Reagan and Goldwater to mostly Southern roots. Galston notes the high degree of overlap between the Tea Party and mainstream Republican conservatives:
Nor, finally, is the tea party an independent outside force putting pressure on Republicans, according to the survey. Fully 76% of its supporters either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Rather, they are a dissident reform movement within the party, determined to move it back toward true conservatism after what they see as the apostasies of the Bush years and the outrages of the Obama administration.
Against progressives and pundits who insist on blaming the white working class for Tea Party radicalism, I have argued that the radical right agenda serves the interest of the economic elites of the South and some areas in the Midwest and other regions - particularly those whose business models are threatened by unions, high minimum wages and environmental regulations. Here, too, Galston understands what most commentators miss:
Many tea-party supporters are small businessmen who see taxes and regulations as direct threats to their livelihood. Unlike establishment Republicans who see potential gains from government programs such as infrastructure funding, these tea partiers regard most government spending as a deadweight loss. Because many of them run low-wage businesses on narrow margins, they believe that they have no choice but to fight measures, such as ObamaCare, that reduce their flexibility and raise their costs-measures to which large corporations with deeper pockets can adjust.
I have high regard for Galston's abilities as a political analyst, and no small regard for my own. But this is not rocket science. All of this has been obvious to anyone who bothered to examine the polling and voting data, since the term "Tea Party" first entered the national dialogue following the crash of 2008.
Why, in the face of all of this evidence, are so many progressives and pundits convinced that the white working class, rather than affluent and educated conservative elites, are the driving force behind the right? Why do so many American progressives blame the masses for a movement of the classes? The answer is that the American center-left has been misled for half a century by the bad scholarship of the historian Richard Hoftstadter (1916-1970) and by German Marxist emigres of the Frankfurt School....(Click title for more)
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Interview with Frances Fox Piven on Occupy, the Tea Party, Obama, and why young people "may be our salvation"
By Josh Eidelson
Salon.com
Frances Fox Piven is one of the nine most dangerous people in the world - according to Glenn Beck, who in recent years has foisted a new wave of notoriety on the eighty-one year-old academic. Now a professor of political science at sociology at the City University of New York, Piven's five decades of scholarship include the 1977 book "Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail" (with her late husband Richard Cloward). In an interview last week, she considered how Occupy and the Tea Party approach electoral politics, compared Obama to Hoover, and shared her theory about what made neoconservatives resent her. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
What have the shutdown and debt ceiling fight revealed about who has power in Washington and how they wield it?
As crazy as it seems, you've got a kind of intersection of movement politics and electoral politics. Movement activists seek out conflictual issues and to try to polarize those situations because that's how movements grow. Elected politicians are always pursuing alliances. So you had the really strange phenomenon of the right wing of the Republican Party defying the business interests that fund it.
There really is a right-wing movement - or several - at work in the United States, and they're making difficult, if not impossible, the sorts of compromises and coalitions at which politicians are usually adept. I compared that to the 1850s: after several decades in which intersecting political parties crafted one compromise after another, their efforts were completely fractured by the rise on the one hand of the abolitionists who demanded emancipation immediately, and on the other hand, the ferocious reactions of the slaveholding south. It's a different kind of politics, and it produces some wild and unexpected consequences. I don't know if the business leadership of the Republican Party is going to be able to hold it together.
The Tea Partiers in the Congress - movements do this - they're reviving ancient themes. In 18th century Britain, when the working class was beginning to organize you got a lot of sloganeering about preserving the rights of freeborn Englishmen. What rights? An imagined set of rights. In the same sort of screwball way, this movement is reviving the language of past movements: Nullification. States' rights. The reactive movement trying to defend the right of the South to not only hold slaves, but go after fugitive slaves in the North.
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Business is acting like an interest group, a series of interest groups. I read a comparison between the attempt of American business leaders to use the Tea Party and the way the big German cartel owners thought they could use the Nazi movement. There are a lot of strains between interest groups, electoral politics, and movement politics.
[The Tea Party] polarizes by raising issues that will inevitably create an opposition, and that's the way they build support. The basic dynamics are exposing the rifts that are exposed when you bring up issues that are suppressed by elected politicians trying to build majority coalitions.
There's been debate on the Left about whether the Tea Party represents an astro-turf rebranding effort by the same Republicans activists, or a significant shift in US politics. What do you think?
I think it's both. They have attracted the some of the same people that were attracted by movements from the John Birchers to the Christian Right. But the Tea Party is also I think a little bit different. They're not a religious movement. They are better educated than the public at large. They are not the people who are hurting as a result of this economic crisis - although they may be alarmed by some of the instability caused by the financial crisis. And they are terrified by their loss of status and political centrality as the country changes demographically.
For a long time, pollsters on the Democratic side have been looking forward to the demographic changes that would make minorities so important. Well, they have occurred, and not only minorities, but poor people turned out in large numbers for both Obama elections. [Tea Partiers], they've always had standing and authority in their little communities. And that's being challenged. Not just by Obama - Obama is the symbol. That's being challenged by these broad shifts that are occurring in the population and in electoral politics.
How do they react? They scream at their rallies. They say, "Take it back!" That's a scream that reflects, I think, the loss or threat to the sense of ownership. Leaders in the business community, most of them are rational, sane, self-interested, greedy. But some of them have some other kind of Tea Party emotionalism. I'd put the Koch brothers in that category: rich, powerful people who are scared because they've stolen so much from the country, and electoral changes signal the possibility that they may lose what they've stolen.
The New York Times this week quoted the CEO of Deloitte saying, "The extreme Right has ninety seats in the House. Occupy Wall Street has no seats." Lots of people have made that kind of comparison over the past couple years - what do you make of it?
Well, it's obviously accurate. But Occupy - although it didn't have either the inclination or the capacity to set out to win the state legislatures and gerrymander all the congressional districts - had a large impact on American political discourse. It had a big impact on Obama's campaign rhetoric - he started talking about extreme inequality and fat cats - and even the Republican rhetoric changed, so they talked about jobs. On many, many issues, Occupy has a kind of majority - the anger toward the rich, towards Wall Street, toward the 1%. The Tea Party expresses that, but then they act to save the tax cuts for the rich, or to increase them. Occupy has been consistent.
Even though [the Right] seems always to be winning, it could change. And it's that sense that somehow elected Democrats could score a win - that I think explains the hysteria of people like the Koch brothers.
"Score a win" of what kind?
There are actually quite a few left-leaning Democratic House members now, but they can't move anything. In the aftermath of a run-up in inequality, such as we've had over the last thirty years, there have been times when electoral politics put enough people in positions of authority, backed by movement politics on the outside, to introduce which reduced inequality. The 1930s produced a very substantial reduction in inequality, a result of the election of FDR and a lot of liberal Democrats who were fueled by the movements that were emerging of the unemployed and the aged and ultimately workers. The same thing happened after the 1960s.
I don't underestimate the extent to which the craziness on the Right, and the money that pays for that craziness, is driven by fears - it may sound quaint - fears of the people. They're trying to take away the right to vote for a lot of people. I think the brashness reflects this latent fear that they could lose at the ballot box....(Click title for more)
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7000+ young activists turn out for Powershift 2013 in Pittsburgh. The nation's largest labor unions are ready and willing to help fight global warming, but are cautioning environmentalists that workers need new clean-energy jobs before existing industries are shut down.
By Kevin Begos
Associated Press via Portside.org
PITTSBURGH (AP) Oct 20, 2013 - The nation's largest labor unions are ready and willing to help fight global warming, but are cautioning environmentalists that workers need new clean-energy jobs before existing industries are shut down.
The four-day Power Shift conference in Pittsburgh is training young people to stop coal mining, fracking for oil and gas, and nuclear power, but organizers also want workers to join the battle against climate change.
Union leaders say their workers want to help build a new, green economy.
"Global warming is here, and we can work and get it fixed together," United Steel Workers president Leo Gerard said in a Friday night address at Power Shift.
But other labor groups note that while they share the same long-term clean energy goals with environmentalists, there are challenges.
"It's not just as simple as 'No Fracking'" or other bans, said Tahir Duckett, an AFL/CIO representative who spoke at a Saturday Power Shift panel that sought to promote dialogue between environmentalists and workers.
Duckett said workers need new jobs to make a transition to clean energy, noting that shutting down industries such as coal "can turn entire communities into a ghost town. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend like people aren't fighting for their very survival."
Richard Fowler, a Power Shift moderator, said that instead of talking about a "ban" on a particular industry, environmentalists should talk about solutions that provide jobs.
"That's what is missing," said Fowler, a radio host and member of Generational Alliance, a Washington, D.C. based coalition of community youth groups. "It's always a ban, or a fix, or a cap, or a trade" instead of just straight-up campaigns to build cleaner energy sources like wind and solar.
The overwhelming consensus among top scientists from around the world is that they're about as certain global warming is a real, man-made threat as they are that cigarettes kill, and pollution from fossil fuels is the biggest problem.
The organizers of Power Shift say a green economy is the only way to head off catastrophic global warming and build a healthier future for everyone, including workers and their families. Pittsburgh was chosen for the biannual conference partly because it's at the crossroads of old and new energy. The city itself has banned fracking, yet the surrounding county recently signed a huge drilling lease for land under the Pittsburgh International Airport. Western Pennsylvania is also the birthplace of the oil and steel industries, but tech firms are attracted by students from Carnegie Mellon University and other schools....(Click title for more)
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Roughly 2,000 people attended the 10th week of Moral Monday in North Carolina. (Photo: Jenna Pope, 2013)
By Tom Hayden
Peace Exchange Bulletin
Oct 23, 2013 - Since the posting of "Becoming Two Countries in 2014", many readers have argued that we actually are becoming three or more Americas, while others cling to the dream of becoming One America again. The purpose of the original posting was not to propose breaking up the country, but to focus progressives on strategic questions of how to live and work through the political polarization paralyzing the country for the foreseeable future.
The Tea Party and most Republicans are succeeding in defensive warfare, using gerrymandering, voter suppression, anti-abortion laws and the gaping loopholes of Citizens United to carve out an entire bloc of states where reactionary policies can be implemented despite majority opinion in America. This bloc is mislabeled as "red", formerly the color of the Left, when in fact it is the right-wing homeland of the Tea Party, Christian fundamentalists, and the sordid descendants of the Confederacy and the Wild West frontiersmen. It is a vast "laboratory of reaction" for those in Corporate America who wish to repeal the Thirties and the Sixties, and build a renewed market fundamentalism.
Twenty-four states delivered 206 Electoral College votes for Romney in 2012. Due to reapportionment, Republicans were able to gain a decisive majority in the House of Representatives despite losing a large majority of the overall votes cast for the House. In addition, the right-wing most likely has a lock on the US Supreme Court until the post-Obama era.
Given the recent Republican debacle over linking Obamacare to the debt ceiling, many hope the tide has turned against the Tea Party and Republicans in general. The new whiz kid of number crunchers, Dr. Sam Wang of Princeton, is promoting a computer model purporting to show that the Democrats will win back the House if their overall popular vote margin is 6.8 percent above the Republican showing in 2014.
But electoral math cannot win elections easily in the face of gerrymandering, voter suppression and unlimited right-wing funding of elections. Additionally, today's nadir of public support for the Republican Party, hovering around 20-25 percent, doesn't predict where the parties will be in November 2014. If there is a likely scenario, it is that the Democrats will keep the Senate, pick up seats in the House, and thus "send a message" of warning to Republicans to steer away from the Tea Party extreme.
In this scenario many progressives will feel themselves stranded or taken for granted with nowhere to go. That helplessness rests on a misperception of the importance of the progressive base in electoral outcomes. The fight to make "every vote count", for example, will make all the difference in several swing states. And whether or not the Dreamers' current right to vote is preserved by Obama's executive order means a critical edge in certain states, while a larger immigration-reform package remains in doubt. Candidates "behind enemy lines", like Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis, will make the right's agenda more difficult to pursue. All of these efforts will not only hold off the right, but strengthen progressive Democrats against Wall Street ones.
The current battle lines are drawn most sharply over the fate of Obamacare, with defenders of the law losing ground due to the debacle of the rapid rollout. Evidence of strong success for the exchanges in California, Connecticut, New York, Kentucky and other states is an indicator, however, that Obamacare can move forward, if only more slowly. The intense battle over Medicaid, set in motion by the Roberts Court, is another example of the raging civil war, with 25 states -half the total - still refusing to sign on. Last week's agreement on Medicaid by Ohio's Republican governor John Kasich, following that of Arizona Republican governor Jan Brewer, were critical steps forward in a strategy of one state at a time.
The fight over Obamacare is an example of how the fact of a civil war is camouflaged under surface arguments over federalism and spending. Properly understood, Obamacare, including the expansion of Medicaid, is a major initiative against continuing discrimination and denial towards people of color, women, the poor, and the elderly, whose numbers will surpass thirty million new enrollees if the law is implemented.
Many thousands of progressives are still hurting from the rejection of single-payer by the administration and Congress. Rather than join the defense of Obamacare, some of these progressives continue to objectively weaken support for the law from the Left, as if the collapse of Obamacare somehow would lead to a Canadian-style health care system. It is more likely that a defeat of Obamacare would cause another decade of delay before any revival of progressive political will.
Similar concerns arise in the immigrant rights debate, where the promise of a "path to citizenship" is projected to take longer than a decade, and deliver the right to vote for only a portion of the immigrant class, while an unprecedented military surge of troops and drones along the border is supposed to be "secure" long before any new voters enter a ballot box.
The same issues arise around the climate change controversy, where President Barack Obama has toughened emissions standards, increased investments in renewables, and held off on the XL pipeline while also opening the gates to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Half the Democratic Party's elected officials want to push for drilling and pipelines, and thus the slightest change in the Senate balance in 2014 would embolden them.
These dilemmas are sharply posed in foreign and military policies too, where the Obama administration so far refuses to make a total break from Afghanistan, or end its drone attacks as part of an Afghanistan peace settlement. Most progressives are alienated by Obama's policies on Guantanamo and whistleblowers. Few appreciate his opaque maneuvering to avoid wars in Syria or Iran. But there is no doubt that a Republican capture of the Senate or White House would lead to multiple wars at the urging of Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham.
The historic role of the Left is not to shore up the center of American politics, though that often occurs in the wake of once-radical reforms. But success on the Left inevitably leads to a partial influencing of that center; for example, the House Progressive Caucus membership fluctuates around seventy-five members. The role of the Left is to open the center to alternative visions and policies, and to build the institutional power to force serious debate and acceptance of those positions. In the present situation of near-civil war, the federal government is especially important in attempting to enforce voting rights and environmental regulations, to take only two examples. In such a situation, however, the offense often lies with the progressive states; for example, in the investments in green energy made during the past generation by many states led by California. The emergence of Medicare-For-All may also arise from state initiatives on health care and insurance as well. The right is not alone in its ability to build power at the state and local levels. Such a potential exists on the left too.
In a country so closely divided, the Left is never as marginal as many often feel...(Click title for more)
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Based on the 1962 novel by American literary icon Jack Kerouac, BIG SUR recounts the events surrounding Kerouac's three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, owned by Kerouac's friend and fellow Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The story departs from Kerouac's previous fictionalized autobiographical series in that the self-inspired character is shown as a popular, published author; Kerouac's previous works are restricted to depicting Kerouac's days as a bohemian traveler.
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South African Unionists in Mississippi
Fighting for Nissan Workers
By John Wojcik
People's World
Oct 18 2013 - JACKSON, Miss - In a stunning reversal of what many would think is the way things work, a support group from "third world" South Africa is in Mississippi this week helping Americans secure one of their most basic democratic rights - the right to form a union.
"You can win this," said Cedric Gina, president of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), when he met this week with workers who have been trying for years to form a union at the Nissan plant in Canton.
The impoverished Mississippi Delta residents listening to him have had to battle Nissan every step of the way in a long and difficult quest to win recognition of the United Auto Workers as their bargaining agent. They have been harassed, harangued with anti-union propaganda, have had their hours slashed and some have even been fired, they say, as Nissan retaliates regularly against anyone it identifies as being pro-union.
"Our visit is very symbolic given the immense contribution made by the U.S. anti-apartheid movement to our own struggle for national liberation and freedom," Gina said, commenting on his visit to Canton this week. "Our own union is a proud product of solidarity and working-class internationalism. It was our friends in the U.S. civil rights and labor movements that helped us secure the release of the founding general secretary of our union who had been jailed by the heinous apartheid regime 26 years ago."
"We are proud to have NUMSA with us in Mississippi," said UAW President Bob King. "It is great for workers in Mississippi to see South African workers who struggled under intensely difficult circumstances. They fought hard, overturned apartheid and have won impressive social gains for workers. They have proven and they show us how strong unions can build a more just society."
One of the community groups supporting the Nissan workers and playing a leading role in hosting the South Africans in Canton is the Mississippi Student Justice Alliance. Tyson Jackson, the group's executive director, and a student at Tougaloo College, described the visit of the South Africans as "totally awesome.
"You had to see workers at the plant, opening their eyes wide and smiling, as the South Africans told them in detail about the things they are allowed to do at work because they have a union, as they listened to what it is like to work at a place where you are respected as a human being," Jackson said.
"For me," Jackson added, "It was like listening to a story about the old days when there was a powerful UAW organizing and winning victories at big plants all over the country. I came up after the great civil rights movement but I can see, once again, from this visit how important that movement was."
Tyson said the effort to organize the plant in Canton, in the heart of a "right to work for less state," is critically important to the future of the UAW. Foreign automakers are coming into the south, he said, looking for cheap labor and unless plants in southern states are unionized wages will be driven down all across the country.
The battle in Canton is one to organize 5,200 workers in a plant that builds 450,000 vehicles a year. Nissan is now the state's second largest private sector employer.
Right to work for less states don't do well at all for their citizens, Tyson said.
Mississippi, which enacted right to work in 1954, ranked 50th in per capita income last year.
The Economic Policy Institute has said that Mississippi has the highest poverty rate and the lowest test scores in the country.
Photo: Keashaun Jones with President Gina. President Gina said he will closely monitor the situation to make sure none of the workers who met with him will face retaliation from Nissan. Do Better Together Facebook page.
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BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhuanet) -- The filthy air clogging the skies over Beijing is not expected to clear anytime soon, according to forecasters.
A strong wind would do the trick, but no cold air movement is expected in the coming week, they say.
Since late June, murky brown air has been blanketing the capital, with the city's air pollution index reaching 244 on Monday afternoon, marking another heavily polluted day, according to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center.
"With no cold air movement, the stable atmosphere and high humidity level may worsen the haze across Beijing," Sun Jisong, chief weather forecaster at the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, told China Daily on Monday.
He said rain might clean the air for a short period, but the haze will not clear unless a strong wind blows.
Haze usually occurs in winter in Beijing, but as pollutants are increasing in the air, smoggy summers may become more frequent, Sun said.
The early summer haze has led to an increase in people in hospitals complaining of respiratory ailments.
Zhang Shunan, deputy director of the department of traditional Chinese medicine and lung disease at Beijing Hospital, said the number of patients visiting the department has increased by up to 20 percent in the past few days compared with the same time in previous years.
"But summer should be a season when there are fewer people with respiratory symptoms," he said.
When there is heavy pollution, experts suggest that people avoid outdoor activities and even refrain from exercising in gymnasiums.
Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said excessive emissions of pollutants are partially responsible for the frequent haze in the capital.
Wang Yaqiang, deputy director of the atmospheric composition institute at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, previously told China Daily that only when pollutants are reduced will the number of smoggy days fall.
Song Guojun, an environmental science professor at Renmin University of China, suggests an odd-and-even license plate rule should be introduced in Beijing to reduce pollution and the number of vehicles on the roads.
Beijing adopted such a rule during the 2008 Olympic Games to ensure clean air and reduce traffic jams. But the rule, which banned half of the cars from the city's roads according to the day of the week, was controversial as it affected car owners' rights. "Automobiles substantially are contributing to the air pollution," Song said.
In the capital, there are about 5 million cars on the roads every day, causing traffic jams and emitting huge amounts of exhaust, contributing 22 percent of PM 2.5 - small particles which enter the bloodstream via the lungs - according to the municipal government.
Beijing issued an emergency response plan for hazardous pollution for the first time last year. This calls for construction sites to limit activity that creates large amounts of dust and for industrial enterprises to reduce emissions during days of hazardous pollution.
The plan also requires the traffic authority to reduce the use of government vehicles on hazy days by 30 percent compared with normal days. Education authorities are told to instruct students to stay indoors on such days.
However, few people are wearing face masks on the capital's streets despite the constant smog.
Bill Milewski, an expatriate from the United States who has lived in Beijing for years, said he is not checking the air quality index as often as before because the pollution is so frequent.
"It made me unhappy to see the figure go beyond the index, so I simply stopped reading it," he said.
But Milewski said he installed air purifiers in his apartment years ago when he moved to the capital from Hong Kong....(Click title for more)
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Film: What Hollywood Gets Wrong About
Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso in their younger days
A new crop of films portrays their lifestyle as rebellious, adolescent fun. But what made the Beats so influential in the first place was that they were radical, free-thinking adults.
By Jordan Larson
The Atlantic
Oct 16, 2013 - John Clellon Holmes, author of the seminal Beat Generation novel 'Go,' wrote in 1952 that for the free-spirited rising stars of American literature known as the Beats, "how to live seems to them much more crucial than why." In those years, young people in the U.S. were in the process of inheriting both economic prosperity and stifling societal mores from their parents. So for many, the Beat Generation of writers-with their stupendous refusal of social and cultural norms and their way of life governed by the pursuit of pleasure, belief, and truth-was a godsend.
Today's young people experience problems of a bit of a different ilk. Feeling free and adventurous won't avail you of your student loan debt, poems penned in the days between drug-fueled nights probably won't make it into your favorite lit mag-and, if they did, you'd probably be asked to write for free anyway, you know, "for the exposure." But this hasn't stopped a veritable resurgence over the last few years of Beat obsession, beginning with the film Howl (2010), and continuing with On the Road (2012) and two new films, Kill Your Darlings, in theaters today, and Big Sur, opening November 1. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg-the authors of On the Road and Howl, respectively-have been the focus of two films each.
Given what the Beats meant to young people of the 1950s, perhaps it isn't so surprising that their culture has been revived for millennial consumption. What teenager or 20-something doesn't long to drop everything and take a road trip to wherever, with friends and booze and drugs and sex? And in an age when many young people are discovering that young adulthood isn't all it's cracked up to be, we could use some fun, right? But the current Beat revival arguably goes too far with its re-imagination of the Beat writers' livelihoods as simple adolescent goofing around-its most prominent writers were, after all, well into their grown-up years when they wrote many of their most notable writings. This crop of films diminishes what was so radical about the Beat Generation in the first place: their iconoclastic approach to life, which extended far beyond their 20s and into adulthood proper.
Conspicuously absent from the latest revival is the third heavyweight of the movement, William S. Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch was adapted into a disturbing and gritty film by David Cronenberg in 1991. The omission perhaps isn't so surprising: Burroughs credited his awakening as a writer to a 1951 incident in Mexico when he accidentally killed his wife while playing "William Tell," a bar trick Burroughs invented that involves shooting a glass off someone's head, so his legacy would likely be a bit harder to spin as one of harmless and youthful adventure.
The exclusion of Burroughs from the Beat revival isn't the only way the movement has been crafted for optimal consumption, though: Howl and Kill Your Darlings focus on Allen Ginsberg at his most youthful and promising. Kill Your Darlings, in which a baby-faced Daniel Radcliffe plays Ginsberg, tells a little-known tale of murder in the Beats' group of friends at Columbia University, which ends up bringing the group together. The appeal of the story seems to be that it's about a set of famous people who may have been involved in a possible murder during their youths, the occurrence of which may or may not explain their genius, or art, or something. In Howl, however, Ginsberg's collection of poems are the subject of an obscenity trial, and though you'd never guess from James Franco's youthful appearance as Ginsberg in the film, the author was actually 30 years old when Howl was published....(Click title for more)
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 | | Exposing The Truth Radio with Hiphop Trio; Rebel Diaz |
By Brian Chidester
Village Voice
"Art that is controlled and funded by corporations is keeping people contained and controlled," implores RodStarz, a founding member of Rebel Diaz. "Art that is made for and by the people, especially art that comes from oppressed communities, will reflect the struggles of that community." Off 149th Street near Hunts Point in the South Bronx, the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective (RDAC-BX) boasts the second-floor warehouse of a formerly abandoned candy factory. The space is covered in fractal murals that mix social realism, graffiti, and protest imagery every bit as romantically passionate as Secret Project Robot is self-consciously hip. RodStarz (Rodrigo Venegas) and his brother, Gonzalo (a/k/a G1), were born in England into a Chilean activist family, and raised on the North Side of Chicago. They opened RDAC-BX in 2009 as a multidisciplinary arts studio, where a steady parade of painters, MCs, and filmmakers with names like Vithym, DJ Illanoiz, and YC the Cynic make their way on a daily basis to create, perform, and attend workshops on political education. On the first Friday of every month, Rebel Diaz hosts an open-house party where artists and audience co-mingle in the performance of live hip-hop, fist-pumping a call-and-response of social outrage that drives the crowd into an unrestrained frenzy. By the early morning hours, when the nighttime haze reaches its peak, core members like Starz, G1, and MC Elijah Black step up to the mic and deliver with such intensity that attendees are practically frothing at the mouth from the conduction of positive over negative energy. "A group like Rebel Diaz is important, 'cause kids in the Bronx relate," Starz notes. "They're getting stopped-and-frisked like it's an after-school activity. So when we make music about that, they feel it. It becomes more than Rebel Diaz as a group." "We create our own lanes," Starz reflects with wide-eyed sincerity. It's a view shared by many here-that art can be a means to political capital in the Occupy environment....(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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