The Democracy Caucus is a group within the new SDS/Movement for a Democratic
Society. Our name itself suggests that something is deeply wrong. MDS Inc.
(no kidding!), a corporation overseen by former Weatherperson Bruce
Rubenstein, has
substituted itself for an actual MDS and is governed, as corporations are,
from the top down, without member input: indeed there are no members. Its
function is to raise money and to surrender all critical sense while
cheerleading youth, particularly anarchist youth, whose approval they seek.
This self-appointed leadership has, among other things:

unilaterally appointed a Board, including Bernardine Dohrn and various other
Weatherpeople (see my "Weather Underground Rises from the Ashes: They're
Baack!, New Politics, Summer 2006 www.newpol.org); a man who advocates
assassination of people who are cruel to aniimals; and Ward Churchill of
"little Eichmanns" fame (until opposition within the board appparently put
the kibosh on the latter);

Refused President Al Haber's request for documents pertaining to the MDS
treasurer's unilateral solicitation of board members;

Shut down a lively discussion list that got out of their control, and
destroyed the list's archives.

Attacked dissenters on psychiatric grounds and ridiculed them for
disabilities (with one woman attacked as "sugartits");

Attacked Maurice Isserman and me as syphilis within the left ("the fake left
is the syphilis of the Movement and must be discredited and discarded"), and
responded to my criticisms by displaying themselves in a "Fuck Jesse
Lemisch" t-shirt (see my "Sectarian Rage in the New SDS," History News
Network www.hnn.us/articles/29922.html)

Falsified and exaggerated membership figures, with many SDS "chapters"
existing only on paper, and with memberships via internet;

the MDS Inc. treasurer, as well as other leaders and officers have made
anonymous obscene/threatening phone calls, and enraged off- and on-list
attacks

SDS leadership has endorsed the strategy of storming the stage, in imitation
of the action against the Minutemen at Columbia; nobody in SDS/MDS has any
memory of a time when the ACLU defended the right of Nazis to march in
Skokie.

The above is just a very partial list of what the Democracy Caucus is
opposing in its quest for what was once called "participatory democracy": as
Paul Booth once said, we seek to build, not burn. Now Paul Buhle
(http://antiauthoritarian.net/NLN??p=111) has left the world of history and
crossed over into sectarian propaganda, likening the Democracy Caucus and
its supporters to the League for Industrial Democracy, out of which original
SDS emerged by lock-out. On no evidence, Buhle insists that the Democracy
Caucus, like LID, has attacked SDS as "far too radical." Not so. We simply
urge democracy within these organizations. Personally, I fear a catastrophic
future for SDS/MDS Inc., with damaging effects on the larger left. We seem
to be arriving at 1969 again.