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Radical Ideas for Radical Change
Nov 27, 2015
In This Issue
Trump's Fascist Path
Trump's Big Lie
Seattle Times Calls Out Trump
Rightwing Attacks on Mosques
Killer Mike Backs Bernie
Sanders on Immigration
Idaho Rallies for Refugess
China Plans for the Future
Books: Shadow Cold War
Film: Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq'
Arlo Guthrie's 'Alice's Restaurant'
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By Ryan Cooper

The Week

Nov 24, 2015 - I made the case just a couple months back that Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is a sort of fledgling Mussolini, nurturing an incipient fascist movement. As the first primaries approach, and Trump's lead in the polls is actually widening, his development toward outright fascism is progressing faster than I feared.

As of August, Trump had most of the ingredients for a fascist movement: the victim complex, the fervent nationalism, the obsession with national purity and cleansing purges, and the cult of personality. He was missing the organized violence, a left-wing challenge strong enough to push traditional conservative elites into his camp, support for wars of aggression, and a full-bore attack on democracy itself. He's made much progress on all but the last one.

It's clear now that the Paris attacks enormously energized the Trumpist movement. He's now speculating openly about invading Syria. Trump's proposals have gone from overt prejudice to things literally taken out of late Weimar history - closure of mosques and a national Muslim database. The rank-and-file have both fed off and stoked this behavior. When a lone protester started chanting "black lives matter" at a Trump rally, Trumpists jumped him (he was luckily not badly injured). Trump later said, "Maybe he should have been roughed up." Hours later he lied about witnessing Muslim crowds celebrating 9/11, and retweeted nonsense racist garbage from a literal neo-Nazi.

Conditions are clearly fertile to start organizing a Trumpist paramilitary wing, a key fascist institution. A pack of heavily armed white nationalist militants recently popped up at a mosque in Irving, Texas, announcing their intention to intimidate local Muslims. Trump's personal security squad is already made up of goons, assaulting people and threatening reporters. With an incomprehensible number of guns floating around the country, all Trump needs is a Röhm to get the organizing started - except probably with Carhartts and camouflage instead of imitation military uniforms. (After that, watch for the next step: starting fights at Bernie Sanders rallies.)

The attacks also increased Trump's effective elite support. Many mainstream reporters have been working hard to normalize Trumpist ideas by attacking their colleagues for "unfair" treatment of Trump (like seeing what sort of Nazi ideas he'll disagree with). CNN's editorial practices are basically overt anti-Muslim bigotry. Other reporters, like Chris Cillizza, shrug and argue that refugee-baiting is simply smart politics. As Carl Diggler explained, "it would be a death sentence for any candidate to abandon these voters by coming out against the pogroms and race war they fervently want."

However, conservative elites are still pretty suspicious of Trump. Barring a recession (gulp), he probably would not do well in a general election, and so most conservative elites seem to be hoping that Marco Rubio will eventually consolidate the anti-Trump Republican vote to challenge Hillary Clinton. But should Trump win, and I see absolutely no reason at this point to think he is not the tentative favorite, things could change quickly. Should Clinton win the nomination, her milquetoast, status quo platform will be quickly internalized on the right as a devious plot to destroy (white) America. I would thus wager that most of the elite conservative power structure would back Trump versus Clinton if they each secure the nomination.

That brings us to Trump himself. As the pseudonymous blogger Billmon observes, Trump has instinctively discovered the Joe McCarthy sweet spot for maximum attention and momentum. ...Click title for more

People gather in shock and grief in Jersey City, watching the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks

By Allegra Kirkland

Talking Points Memo

Nov 23, 2015 - Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump has been characteristically unapologetic about his claim that "thousands and thousands" of New Jersey residents cheered as the World Trade Center fell on Sept. 11, 2001, even though contemporaneous news reports don't support it.

And his insistence on that recollection, which has no basis in fact, shows just how expert he is at roping together conspiracy theories, urban legends, and rumors that lurk on the fringes of the Internet and bringing them into the mainstream.

Rumors of groups of people celebrating the attacks in "tailgate-style parties" popped up in national publications like The Washington Post and Associated Press, but were never confirmed as true. A highly publicized video of Muslims cheering and flashing victory signs on the day of the attack was shot in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of Palestine, not in the Garden State. A video of American Muslims celebrating the terrorist attack doesn't appear to exist and none of the unconfirmed reports of such an incident comes anywhere near the scale that Trump describes.

Here are four possible sources for Trump's mistaken recollection.

The five "Dancing Israelis"

On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, five young men were stopped by FBI agents while crossing the George Washington Bridge. As The New York Times and many other outlets reported at the time, they were carrying $4,000 in cash, box cutters, and, in one man's case, two passports. The group had been spotted snapping photos of the burning Twin Towers from the roof of their van by onlookers on the Jersey side of the bridge, who had contacted authorities. The Times reported that FBI agents found images of the smoldering buildings on their cell phones. In one image, one of the men, Sivan Kurzberg, held up a lit lighter with the ruins of the towers in the background.

As it turned out, the five men were Israeli Jews who worked for Urban Moving Systems, a household moving company that operated in New York and New Jersey. None of them had any connection whatsoever to the day's attacks. They were held for 27 days at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center before being deported for overstaying their visas.

The Times pointed out that contemporary news reports left "the wide impression that the authorities had detained a group of suspicious men taking pictures or rooting for the terrorists from the New Jersey side of the bridge." Those reports also were exaggerated and perpetuated on fringe blogs that took to calling the men the "dancing Israelis."

Rooftop parties

Several news reports in the aftermath of the attacks made vague reference to "rooftop parties" in New Jersey where people were allegedly celebrating the catastrophic event. The allegations recall the general state of paranoia and Islamophobia that became a hallmark of post-9/11 life.

A Washington Post article from Sept. 18, 2001 mentioned an investigation into people throwing "tailgate-style parties" in New Jersey in the hours after the attacks. The article said law enforcement "detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks."

Trump drew attention to the Washington Post's 2001 story on Monday, asking the newspaper for "an apology" on Twitter. ...Click title for more
By Seattle Times Editorial Board
The Seattle Times

Nov 24, 2015 - DONALD Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate is, in Trump parlance, a huge demagogue. Button-pushing lie after button-pushing lie, he diminishes the public sphere.

It's time for Trump's fellow Republicans to speak truth to narcissism. Race-baiting and xenophobia, ignited by fabrication, reflect the worst in human nature. And Trump's self-financed platform makes his rhetoric a menace to the social and political health of the nation.

Recent Trump-isms nearly trump earlier ones, including his insistence that the government of Mexico dumped rapists and murderers into the United States. After the Paris terrorist attacks, he said that he would implement a registry for Muslims. Trump was asked by a reporter how this approach would differ from Germany registering Jews in the 1930s. "You tell me," Trump said.

OK. There's zero difference.

Trump said that he saw "thousands and thousands of people cheering" in Jersey City on 9/11. That was a lie, designed to provoke. At a Trump rally in Birmingham Saturday, a Black Lives Matter activist was punched by a white Trump supporter. Trump's response? "Maybe he should have been roughed up."

Enough. Trump needs to be called out and condemned for what he is.

We have seen lesser-angel populists before. Running as an independent, George Wallace, the consummate bigot who later renounced his record of discrimination, actually won five states and 10 million votes in 1968.

Trump has an Archie Bunker rhetorical style, which resonates with Americans who might not agree with him but who furtively embrace his assault on political correctness. Unisex toilets and cops who give away Doritos at Hempfest? Trump would have a field day in Seattle.

When assessing what Trump means, more people in public life should revive the question attorney Joseph Welch asked U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings: "Have you no sense of decency?"

There is a bottom line, and it's simple: Trump's campaign message reflects a kind of creeping fascism. It needs to be rejected. ...Click title for more


By Zaid Jilani

AlterNet

Nov 24, 2015 - Since the attacks in Paris, Islamophobia has increased in the European Union, with a 300 percent increase [3] in hate attacks against Muslims in the United Kingdom. But this wave of hate is also taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, in the U.S.

Here's a roundup of recent incidents.

Connecticut: Someone shot at the Baitul Aman mosque [4] in Meriden, leaving its exterior riddled with bullet holes. No one was hurt.

Virginia: In Fairfax County, a man left a hoax explosive [5] device outside a mosque. And in Spotsylvania, local Muslims presenting a plan for a mosque were met with angry protests [6], including a muscular man who screamed at the presenters, telling them to shut up. "Every Muslim is a terrorist," he frothed.

Watch the footage of the meeting below:

Texas: In Pflugerville, a mosque was vandalized with a torn-up Quran covered in feces found outside. A seven-year old boy responded [7] to the vandalism by giving the contents of his piggy bank to the mosque. In Irving, a group of armed men (and Ted Cruz supporters) showed up outside a mosque [8] to protest the "Islamization of America."

Wyoming: In Gillete, militia members visited [9] one of the four mosques in the state, seeking to inspect it for signs of radicalism.

Showing Tolerance

Though mosques have been facing hate, they have been responding with tolerance. The Mubarak Mosque in Chantilly, Virginia, held a blood drive to respond to the violence of the Paris attacks.

"We wanted to bring them together to commemorate the loss through action and in a way respond with action to the terrorists-that however many lives they will try to take from us, we will try to save more lives than they will ever take," said Iman Rizwan Khan [10]. "In this way, where there are a very small minority of extremist Muslims who are trying to take the lives of people, we wish to represent the peaceful and moderate Muslim majority who are here trying to save lives and are trying to promote and establish the peaceful teachings of Islam." ...Click title for more
Killer Mike Introduces Bernie Sanders in Atlanta
Support Growing among African Americans
Support Growing among African Americans

By THE NYT EDITORIAL BOARD

NOV. 26, 2015

Senator Bernie Sanders released his immigration plan on Tuesday. To read it - and every citizen should - is to be yanked back in time, to an America that not so long ago was having a reasonable immigration discussion and a time when major reform had strong bipartisan support and a shot at becoming law.
But since the immigration reform bill was killed, in 2013, the party that killed it - the Republicans - has dragged the immigration debate to grotesque depths that go well beyond the usual nativist bigotry. Republican presidential candidates are arguing, in all seriousness, about sealing the border with fantastical 2,000-mile fences and weaponized drones; merging state, local and federal authorities and private prisons into one all-seeing immigration police state; forcibly registering American Muslims; mass-deporting 11 million Mexicans and others in a 21st century Trail of Tears; and turning away thousands of refugees fleeing war and terrorism in the Middle East.

Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, turns away from the insanity. His plan starts with the right premise: that immigrants should be welcomed and assimilated, not criminalized and exploited. His proposals seek to uphold American values, bolster the rule of law, bolster the economy and protect and honor families.

Recognizing Congress's chronic inaction on immigration, Mr. Sanders promises to use executive authority well beyond what President Obama has done. He would protect young immigrants and their parents from deportation, and give "broad administrative relief" to young immigrants, to the parents of citizens and legal permanent residents and to others who would have been allowed to stay under the 2013 Senate bill. This affirms the humane and sensible principle behind that legislation - that 11 million unauthorized immigrants should stay and contribute, not be isolated and expelled. (Continued)

The Sanders plan tackles an ugly truth - that racial profiling and the nation's vast deportation and detention machinery have made suspected criminals of millions of people who don't fit the definition. His promise to "decouple" federal immigration enforcement from local policing would be a sharp break from dragnet policies that expanded under President Obama. Mr. Sanders rightly defends "sanctuary city" policies that protect public safety by building trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement.Mr. Sanders's promise to increase immigrants' access to the justice system, with more funding for courts and lawyers, stands in sharp contrast to the Republican view of unauthorized immigrants as a shadow society of criminals who haven't been deported yet. Mr. Sanders instead sees them as parents, breadwinners, taxpayers, bulwarks of the economy and of the communities they live in, aspiring Americans trapped by unjust laws and oppressive policing.

Is that so radical? It may sound that way, in today's climate. But it is a vision that lawmakers of both parties once embraced without question. Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush spoke movingly of immigrants as assets to the country to be welcomed through assimilation and citizenship.

Mr. Sanders has done more than most of the other candidates to seed the campaign with good ideas. But he is still trailing Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose own immigration agenda delivers a similar list of worthy proposals, but with fewer specifics and less breadth than that of Mr. Sanders. We hope she is inspired to match his boldness.

In this bizarre campaign season, Republican candidates are playing reality-TV versions of themselves, filling the air with lies and irrational promises, while the Democrats - Mr. Sanders especially - are depicted by TV comics as cranks and loons. Mr. Sanders's immigration plan is a powerful counterpoint to that stereotype. It is reality-based, moderate, practical and hopeful. ...Click title for more


By David Neiwert

Crooks and Liars

Nov 24, 2015 - The scene last weekend on the steps of the Idaho state Capitol in Boise was a portrait of America in the wake of the Paris terrorism attacks: On one side, a gathering of interfaith allies voicing their support for refugees from Syria and the plans to help thousands of them resettle in the United States; on the other, a gathering of opponents, many of them clad in black clothing emblazoned with the logo of the antigovernment "III Percent" movement, shouting and chanting their opposition to the program.

The pro-refugee crowd heavily outnumbered the contingent of opponents who gathered across the street.
The pro-refugee crowd, about 1,000 strong, significantly outdrew those opposed, who numbered just over a hundred - roughly the same turnout the group had achieved three weeks before in Boise in an anti-refugee rally of their own.

"Turning women and children away, cast out of their homes with nothing but the clothes on their back is just not an acceptable thing for us as Americans, you know, champions of liberty, to do," Tara Foster, one of the organizers of the "Rally for Solidarity With Refugees in Idaho," told the assembled crowd.

Across the street, the anti-refugee crowd chanted: "Veterans first! Veterans first!" and "USA! USA! USA!"

A number of speakers stood up during the rally to defend the refugee program. A young Muslim woman named Noora Muhamad, a leader of Boise State University's Muslim Student Association, explained that she was born in a refugee camp in Turkey to Kurdish parents who had fled Iraq, and that she arrived in the United States as an infant.

"I grew up learning to be open minded and strong and independent," she said.

Across the street, the opponents shouted: "Idaho first! Idaho first!" A couple of the demonstrators yelled: "Go home!"

On the pro-refugee side, demonstrators carried signs reading "Idaho Is Too Great For Hate," "Refugees Welcome!", and "Hope, Not Hate."

"I know how painful, how struggling, how challenging the life of a refugee is," said Freddy Nyankulinda, a Congolese refugee who is now a student at BSU. "That's why today I am standing here to (raise) my voice to others who are crying out on the borders." ...Click title for more


Why Comrade Xi Studies Jeremy Rifkin

By Pepe Escobar
TomDispatch News Analysis

Nov 23, 2015 - The US is transfixed by its multibillion-dollar electoral circus. The European Union is paralyzed by austerity, fear of refugees, and now all-out jihad in the streets of Paris. So the West might be excused if it's barely caught the echoes of a Chinese version of Roy Orbison's "All I Have to Do Is Dream." And that new Chinese dream even comes with a road map.

The crooner is President Xi Jinping and that road map is the ambitious, recently unveiled 13th Five-Year-Plan, or in the pop-video version, the Shisanwu. After years of explosive economic expansion, it sanctifies the country's lower "new normal" gross domestic product growth rate of 6.5% a year through at least 2020.

It also sanctifies an updated economic formula for the country: out with a model based on low-wage manufacturing of export goods and in with the shock of the new, namely, a Chinese version of the third industrial revolution. And while China's leadership is focused on creating a middle-class future powered by a consumer economy, its president is telling whoever is willing to listen that, despite the fears of the Obama administration and of some of the country's neighbors, there's no reason for war ever to be on the agenda for the US and China.

Given the alarm in Washington about what is touted as a Beijing quietly pursuing expansionism in the South China Sea, Xi has been remarkably blunt on the subject of late. Neither Beijing nor Washington, he insists, should be caught in the Thucydides trap, the belief that a rising power and the ruling imperial power of the planet are condemned to go to war with each other sooner or later.

It was only two months ago in Seattle that Xi told a group of digital economy heavyweights, "There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves."

A case can be made - and Xi's ready to make it - that Washington, which, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya to Syria, has gained something of a reputation for "strategic miscalculation" in the twenty-first century, might be doing it again. After all, US military strategy documents and top Pentagon figures have quite publicly started to label China (like Russia) as an official "threat."

To grasp why Washington is starting to think of China that way, however, you need to take your eyes off the South China Sea for a moment, turn off Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and the rest of the posse, and consider the real game-changer - or "threat" - that's rattling Beltway nerves in Washington when it comes to the new Great Game in Eurasia.

Xi's Bedside Reading

Swarms of Chinese tourists iPhoning away and buying everything in sight in major Western capitals already prefigure a Eurasian future closely tied to and anchored by a Chinese economy turbo-charging toward that third industrial revolution. If all goes according to plan, it will harness everything from total connectivity and efficient high-tech infrastructure to the expansion of green, clean energy hubs. Solar plants in the Gobi desert, anyone?

Yes, Xi is a reader of economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, who first conceived of a possible third industrial revolution powered by both the Internet and renewable energy sources.

It turns out that the Chinese leadership has no problem with the idea of harnessing cutting-edge Western soft power for its own purposes. In fact, they seem convinced that no possible tool should be overlooked when it comes to moving the country on to the next stage in the process that China's Little Helmsman, former leader Deng Xiaoping, decades ago designated as the era in which "to get rich is glorious." ...Click title for more


A landmark study shows that the bipolar conflict was a myth: the US, Russia and China all battled for influence across the globe

By Julia Lovell
The Guardian / UK

Nov 21, 2015 - In 1990, as a surprised world emerged from the cold war, the Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer expressed his fears at the passing of the bipolar world order. For the 45 years that the United States and Soviet Union had stalemated each other across the battleground of Europe, he argued, terror of mutually assured destruction had more or less kept the peace. But the fall of the Soviet Union from superpower status might well bring back the "untamed anarchy" of the pre-1945 world.

Mearsheimer was substantially right about what the future held. Through the 1990s, the emergence of ultra-nationalisms tore parts of the old communist world apart. But his analysis of the cold war balance of power was less convincing - a glance back at history reminds us that the cold war was not really a Eurocentric, bipolar conflict. It was, rather, a confrontation that drew in every continent, and in which ambitious state-makers in Africa, Asia and Latin America often played the two superpowers off against each other to maximise material support from both.
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Neglecting the dynamics of the cold war in these areas is problematic for many reasons. For one, a politically motivated amnesia may be at work. The sudden collapse of the Soviet world between 1989 and 1991 led some ideologues to assert American moral supremacy: if the Soviet empire imploded due to internal failings, the assumption went, the US must have triumphed due to the overwhelming virtue of its strategies. This conclusion overlooks the cynical brutality with which the US tried to advance its interests. Many of the ongoing tragedies of underdevelopment and violence that trouble Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East today have their roots in conflicts in which the cold war superpowers were once enmeshed.

Another drawback of the bipolar analysis of the cold war is that it ignores the role played by the People's Republic of China in the conflict. For years, the stereotype of a closed-off, isolated China, shunned by the international community, has dominated popular impressions of the Mao era. Memoirs such as Jung Chang's Wild Swans described the deranged xenophobia of the early Cultural Revolution. Yet outside the years from 1966 to 1969 (in which the foreign policy of the People's Republic did indeed self-destruct), Mao's China poured hard work, money and considerable skill into extending its influence throughout the world.
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Some of these initiatives garnered rich political dividends, meaning China enjoyed perhaps its greatest international soft power since the Enlightenment. Mao and his ideas of continuous peasant revolution appealed to leftwing rebels, and to civil rights and anti-racism campaigners in the US, Australia, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Norway and Sweden. Across the developing world, Maoist politics inspired postcolonial nations with ideals such as self-reliance, party rectification and revolutionary spontaneity. The list of those who found in favour of Maoist China is a bewilderingly various one: Quakers, sinologists, French philosophers, Venezuelan pirate revolutionaries, West German dadaist hippies, Congolese feminists, Algerian guerrillas - and Shirley MacLaine, who in 1975 wrote an adulatory account of a six-week visit to China during which she found her way out of a mid-life crisis.

During the cold war, while access to communist documents was very limited (and classification made access to US perspectives at best patchy), historians could tell barely one side of the story - a manoeuvre that George Gaddis Smith memorably described as "one hand clapping". The explosion in archival access during the past two decades means that there is no longer any excuse for such a narrow focus. The Cold War International History Project has led the way in translating and making available once-secret documents. Visitors to this digital archive can consult sources on topics ranging from the Korean war, the Berlin Wall and the Brazilian nuclear programme to international ice hockey. Between 2003 and 2013, even still-communist China joined the declassification game, releasing thousands of documents archived by the ministry of foreign affairs. Outstanding historians of the cold war inside and outside China - Chen Jian, Li Danhui, Sergey Radchenko, Shen Zhihua, Odd Arne Westad, Yang Kuisong, Xia Yafeng - took advantage. They were right not to hang about: in 2013, a clawback began and in 2014 the archive of the ministry of foreign affairs closed its doors again.

Jeremy Friedman's meticulously researched Shadow Cold War draws extensively on sources gathered during the brief window of openness to illuminate China's part in the conflict. His findings underline the crucial importance of the Sino-Soviet split in escalating Soviet and American interference in developing countries.

When China's new communist government allied itself with the USSR in 1949, a shiver travelled up the spines of western governments. It was, Odd Arne Westad wrote, "the greatest power to challenge the political supremacy of the western capitals since the final expansion of the Ottoman empire in the 16th century". The alliance immediately created domino-theory panic in the US: "I believe," noted Eisenhower in 1950, that "Asia is lost with ... even Australia under threat. India itself is not safe!"...Click title for more

The filmmaker is back at the top of his game with this incendiary look at life in a gang-ravaged Chicago.


By Jordan Hoffman
The Guardian / UK

Nov 25, 2015 - Don't come to Chi-Raq looking for a carefully articulated, plot-driven exposé into America's gang and gun cultures. Oh, a message gets out, but this a Spike Lee joint and, as his mid-career has shown, he's shrugged off the cloak of the "prestige film-maker" and fully embraced the more risky title of Artist.

Recent projects Red Hook Summer and Da Sweet Blood of Jesus have been near-misses; "stylish" and "interesting". With Chi-Raq, his big, go-for-broke swing finally fully connects with the ball and knocks it out of the park. While formally quite different from his more universally-respected early work, Chi-Raq has the exuberance and wit you'll find in Do The Right Thing and Crooklyn. It's the best film he's made in a very long time.
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It's also working from a tried-and-true source: Aristophanes' Lysistrata, the bawdy Greek classic in which women from warring sides refuse their husbands sex in pursuit of an armistice. Or, as it's chanted in this version: "No Peace, No Pussy."

Chi-Raq's urgent J'accuse at gun and gangster culture bleeds with sorrow and boils with rage, but is also lit with solutions, if only people would wake the hell up and listen. But of equal excitement to the urgency of its message is its function as a debut for a major new superstar, Teyonah Parris, a subversive mix of Hollywood bombshell and self-assured feminist; bold, intelligent, sensual and a million miles from her previously best-known role as Dawn, the secretary from the later seasons of Mad Men....Click title for more
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Why I Joined CCDS

By Paul Krehbiel

I joined the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism because:

1.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that was bigger than myself.  I had been involved in many progressive, labor, anti-war, anti-racist and left campaigns but I felt a need to work together with other like-minded people to multiply my efforts.

2.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that I agree with and feel at home within.  There are many organizations on the left, and many do good work.  But I felt at home in CCDS because it is an organization that is guided by principles and analysis that I agree with.  CCDS is guided by Marxism but is not dogmatic, and is open to and supportive of the ideas of many other thinkers, and the actions of a wide array of social justice activists.

3.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that is thoughtful, and encourages deep probing and questioning, and lively but friendly debate and discussion.

4.    I wanted to be a part of an organization where members are rooted in mass movements and constituencies, and are really rooted among and with the American people and their organizations.

5.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that gives special attention to the most exploited and oppressed, African Americans and other people of color, women and others who suffer discrimination.  I want to be a part of an organization that is multi-racial, and reflects the diversity of the people of our country, knowing that it is right and makes us stronger.

6.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that gives special attention to the working -class, especially the labor movement and all working people.

7.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that believes in coalitions, knowing that the left and people's movements are stronger when we work together in alliances, and is actively working to bring these alliances into being.

8.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that believes in democracy, and uses deeply democratic practices, inclusiveness and transparency in all areas of its work.

9.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that knows how to link reform and revolution, that understands how to fight for immediate popular reforms today in a way that lays the groundwork for achieving something better, ultimately a socialist society.

10.     I wanted to be a part of an organization that believes in international solidarity, especially with working people and the oppressed all over the world, and those who have freed themselves from the domination of oppressors, both foreign and domestic.

11.     I wanted to be a part of an organization that has a general path forward and is creative.  It's important to have a plan to achieve a better society, and also to recognize that it is a work in progress.  CCDS encourages creativity, and testing different ideas and approaches as necessary steps to progress along the road to real freedom.  

12.    I wanted to be a part of an organization that is made up of a lot of nice people, people who have mutual respect for each other, help each other, and become good friends with each other.  CCS respects the individual, and the collective.  It's a lot easier and more enjoyable to work in that kind of organization.

That's CCDS.  Join me and many others.  Join CCDS today.


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