When The World Seems On Fire
By Joe Sciarrillo
Yesterday afternoon I was going for a bike ride through San Francisco when I witnessed an unconscious man lying in the middle of the sidewalk on Mission St. No one seemed to know what to do. I always carry Narcan (Naloxone) with me because I’ve seen this scenario before. Thankfully, I was able to reverse the potentially fatal overdose and when the paramedics arrived, he agreed with them to go to SF General Hospital for follow up care.
When the whole world seems like it’s on fire, and many places are literally being bombed into rubble and flames, it can be overwhelming to walk our streets and not know how to find solutions to suffering in our own cities. We can feel lost in the chaos, lost in the fog.
When I got home I tried looking for detailed information about the city’s current street outreach team protocols, and got an error message saying, “We can’t find that page.” Maybe it got lost in the fog.
Last month, I left the job I had for two and a half years as a street based social worker and therapist at the Harm Reduction Therapy Center. It’s a wonderful organization, but like so many community based organizations it has experienced funding cuts from the city. I left the job due to the combination of funding cuts and programmatic cuts (cutting off most foot-based street outreach), in addition to my need to change my schedule. But, as I reflect on the last few years of witnessing the homelessness and overdose crisis on the streets, the main takeaways have been simple: folks who are suffering on the street seek care that is accompanied by compassionate, relationship-based programs. Many folks respond best to a harm reduction model in which city services (shelters or substance use treatment) involves meeting the person where they are at without judgement. Listen to their voice first, get to know their responses to their traumas, and how they are processing it all, without mandating them to immediately go into a program. Yes, some folks respond to abstinence-based programs, but that should be their choice.
Last year I witnessed the city use a ramped-up enforcement-first approach under Mayor London Breed. It has expanded under the new mayor Daniel Lurie. This has meant SFPD and the Department of Public Works (DPW) moving people off of the street, oftentimes using aggressive and violent means. Preliminary data for 2025 shows an increase in overdose deaths in the first three months with this strategy.
Whether or not we agree with someone having a tent on the sidewalk, do we want our city workers to take away people’s tents before they can retrieve their medications and personal belongings like phones, photos, clothes, or diaries? I spoke to one person who claimed that DPW took her tent despite, her pleas, while her cat was inside it.
More housing options, more types of shelters, more health outreach teams, clinics, harm reduction, and safe-use sites are needed. More rehab beds are needed to deal with the waitlists.
Looking at these issues as we walk outside, or as we follow the news, we end up absorbing a lot of secondary trauma as well as an overall sense of negativity. Staying socially conscious shouldn’t come at a cost that drains us, depresses us to the point of impairing our functioning.
Looking for answers shouldn’t leave us lost in the fog. For those who are marginalized, social injustice can take away the self-care tools that once helped them stay afloat. And for those less afflicted by systems of oppression, and even for those more privileged, trying to do things in solidarity with the marginalized can be paralyzing.
How do we get over that paralysis, especially during these Trumpian times?
We need to remember to take care of our soul, body and mind. Without coming across as a self-help author, I merely want to share points from conversations I’ve had with other social workers and therapists. One of the biggest factors for my moments of burnout, and I’ve seen this with coworkers too, is when the constant tension of the work and the traumatic injustice takes you away from the things that keep you grounded, and the values that got you involved in this work. We tend to absorb the stress, anger and numbness that we see around us to the extent that it becomes difficult to distinguish our own emotions and response from the responses we have absorbed around us.
We often think of the mind (how to make sense of what we’re experiencing) as the key to fixing our well-being. But body movement is such a good technique to calm and slow the mind down, wipe away the static, and to give you a clearer bird’s eye view of what you’re going through. It can be anything from rigorous exercise to breath work while you’re sitting. The spiritual is the foundation of all of this. It can be understood as what is transcendent, symbolic, and poetic in your life. Both the believer in the Divine and the atheist can focus on the root values of what you feel and think this world should be, and what the purpose is.
With that said, let’s look again at where we are in SF. Streets are being cleared by SFPD, DPW, and ICE’s actions are joining the terror. Our tax dollars are used to police people more and more while federal agencies cut social services and increase military activities.
Continue to speak out, protest, stay up to date, and organize. But as Kendrick Lamar said, don’t let it kill your vibe and take you away from your roots.
…
Why Did This Farmworker Die
By David Bacon
Jaime Alanis Garcia died of a broken neck in the Ventura County Medical Center on Saturday. He fell 30 feet from the roof of a Glass House Farms greenhouse, where he’d climbed in a desperate effort to get away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and National Guard soldiers during an immigration raid on Thursday.
In announcing his death, Alanis’ family called him, “not just a farm worker [but] a human being who deserved dignity. His death is not an isolated tragedy.” The raid, they said, inspired “chaos and fear” among hundreds of farmworkers in the company’s two cannabis farms in Camarillo and Carpenteria, an hour north of Los Angeles.
ICE announced that 319 people had been detained in the raid, and Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin denied responsibility for Alanis’ death. “This man was not in and has not been in CBP or ICE custody [and] was not being pursued,” she claimed.
Of course, Alanis was being pursued. All the workers were, by dozens of agents in battle gear as they fanned out inside the greenhouse. That pursuit was the reason he climbed to the roof.
Another worker was recorded in a video during the raid after climbing a tall scaffolding. “Do what you want. Say what you say. I’m not coming down,” she cried out. “They say they will come and get us. They are saying whatever they want to get us down. We ask them who they are but they won’t answer.” The video was uploaded onto a website, @mrcheckpoint, used to track raids. The woman’s fate is still not known.
Chaos and fear are deliberately used as weapons to terrorize workers and their families. At Glass House Farms, agents arrived in unmarked tan troop transports whose license plates had been removed. They were dressed in military camouflage uniforms reminiscent of the Afghan and Iraq wars, with balaclavas covering their faces.
Arrests were indiscriminate. After a security guard-a US citizen and US Army veteran-was detained, his family couldn’t even find out where he was being held. Jonathan A. Caravello, Ph.D., also a US citizen and professor at the California State University Channel Islands campus in Camarillo, was also arrested by ICE. A judge finally ordered him released from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center on July 14.
After the raid President Trump claimed the agents were under attack, and gave ICE “Total Authorization … using whatever means is necessary.” A few days earlier, after sending mounted agents and National Guard soldiers into Los Angeles’ Macarthur Park, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said no one could stop these military-style deployments. “You have no say in this at all,” he told Mayor Karen Bass. Miller has given DHS a quota of 3,000 arrests per day
Immigration authorities knew that a death like Alanis’ would happen sooner or later. There is a long history of people dying while fleeing from ICE. Santos Garcia and Marcelina Garcia were two indigenous Mixtec farmworkers killed when their car overturned, trying to escape from ICE agents in Delano in 2018. Agents had been staking out roads to stop laborers going to work-a terror tactic during Trump’s first administration, but not one he invented. Five migrants were killed in the 1992 crash of a van fleeing the Border Patrol in Temecula, and two years later another seven died in another truck pursued by agents in the same area.
Inspiring terror, as a tactic, is openly acknowledged. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the Southern California region, said “Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport. Now we’ll help things along a bit.” Bovino earlier led a January raid the day after Trump’s election victory was certified, targeting farmworkers in roadblocks and Home Depot parking lots in the San Joaquin Valley. “Self-deportation” is the euphemism used by immigration authorities when people are made so fearful that they leave their homes to return to their countries of origin, or simply to another safer place.
But the military deployment of ICE agents is also a response to rising protest that is defying this campaign of intimidation. Within minutes of the arrival of agents at the greenhouses, calls on cellphones brought family members and community activists to the sites. They were met with tear gas, “flash bang” grenades and smoke bombs.
Immigrant communities have been preparing for raids since Trump’s election. For months in the state’s farmworker towns young people (mostly documented and US citizens born here) have organized marches to defend their parents, in an inspiring demonstration of courage and determination. The conduct of the raids, by armed soldiers in combat fatigues, is an effort by ICE and Homeland Security to intimidate them into halting any action that might interfere.
In many communities activist groups like Union del Barrio and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles have formed teams to monitor the movements of ICE and Border Patrol agents. They carry bullhorns, and warn community residents not to open their doors when a raid seems likely. White House border czar Tom Homan was explicit about consequences. “The rhetoric keeps rising and rising and rising – someone’s gonna get hurt,” Homan told NBC News a month prior to the Glass House raid. “If this violence isn’t tamped down, someone’s gonna die, and that’s just that’s just a cold fact of life.”
The Trump administration was careful to target a marijuana-growing operation because it provides headlines appealing to its MAGA base, while not threatening its big ag supporters. Fox News accused California Governor Newsom of receiving big campaign donations from Glass House co-founder Graham Farrar. Like most big marijuana operations, Glass House Farms donates to state politicians from both parties because it depends on their votes for the license to operate. Marijuana is still illegal under Federal legislation, and Federal law enforcement has long made California cannabis a target.
ICE even claimed that its raid had “rescued” a handful of minors. A statement by the United Farm Workers responded, “detaining and deporting children is not a solution for child labor.”
The Trump administration, however, has been careful not to conduct raids targeting big corporate farms. California’s central coast, where Glass House Farms is located, is the nation’s biggest strawberry-growing area. While fear in the coast’s farmworker towns is endemic, the strawberry crop is getting harvested. In Washington State’s Wenatchee River Valley-the largest apple growing area in the U.S.-Jon Folden of Blue Bird farm cooperative says, “We’ve not heard of any real raids.” The Border Patrol’s Bovino says, “For us, targeting agricultural workers at their job, absolutely not.”
The Glass House raid didn’t even make it into the news section of the website of the Western Growers Association, which includes the country’s largest growers of fruits and vegetables. Their silence, in fact, is deafening. There is no WGA statement opposing raids, and its website reassures growers, “While enforcement activities have not targeted agriculture, here are some prudent proactive steps to respond appropriately to potential [ICE] visits.” Among them, it advertises, “Western Growers H-2A Services available to support growers during this complex labor environment … helping members secure a capable, reliable and legal workforce.”
Last year growers recruited 384,000 H-2A workers (a sixth of the country’s farm labor workforce), mostly from Mexico, under temporary work contracts. These laborers can only work for the grower who recruits them, and can be fired and deported for protesting, organizing or simply working too slowly.
In the fields surrounding Glass House Farms, central coast strawberries are picked because growers increasingly rely on this program. According to the Employer Data Hub of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, agribusiness has brought 8,140 workers to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, about a quarter of all the farm workforce.
Trump has promised to make this program even more grower-friendly, and big ag has supported him overwhelmingly. The current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she’d modernize the H-2A program “to do everything we can to make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement].”
At the end of June Trump scrapped the Farmworker Protection Rule, regulations put in place by Julie Su, Biden’s Secretary of Labor, that provided minimal protections for H-2A workers. By getting rid of it, growers can now bar outsiders (community groups or unions) from labor camps, give workers contracts in languages they can’t read, retaliate against workers who complain of bad conditions, and even stop using seat belts in the vehicles transporting laborers to the fields. In 2019 Trump froze the minimum wage for H-2A workers, and growers are calling on Congress to support a bill that would do that permanently.
Pushback against ICE, however, continues to win in court. The day after agents arrived at Glass House farms, U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong in Los Angeles made permanent two temporary restraining orders which would limit the ways ICE can conduct immigration raids. One prohibits agents from stopping and detaining people based on skin color, language or other general factors used to profile immigrants. The second mandates legal representation for detainees held in the notorious B-18 jail in downtown L.A.
DHS’s Tricia McLaughlin attacked Judge Frimpong for “undermining the will of the American people,” and claimed “”enforcement operations are highly targeted.” That was certainly how Jaime Alanis must have felt before he fell.
So who gained and who paid in the Glass House raid? The Trump administration hyped up the MAGA base once again with images of extreme force deployed against immigrant farmworkers. Big Ag growers, meanwhile, seem immune, continuing to pay wages at the bottom, with government-sponsored access to a labor program that has been described as “close to slavery.” Terrorized farmworker families risk deportation if they try to organize and raise those wages, while living in fear that parents will be picked up when their kids are in school.
The brutality of entrenching an agricultural system based on poverty and fear of deportation is the real price of raids.
…
This piece ran originally in The Nation
What California history has to say about the New York mayor’s race
By Fred Glass
One hundred and fourteen years ago a democratic socialist was poised to become Mayor of Los Angeles. Not yet the sprawling megalopolis of today, the city nonetheless ranked second largest in California, and was growing fast. A socialist in the top municipal office? The idea sent the L.A. ruling class into a freakout of red-baiting, lies, half-truths and an occasional accurate depiction of Job Harriman’s progressive positions.
The Socialist Party candidate—a labor attorney, and former vice-presidential running mate of Eugene Debs—had come out on top of an open primary, just short of the majority he needed to win outright. Now he faced off against the incumbent, a champion of the interests that had earned Los Angeles the moniker of “scabbiest town on earth” within the city’s unions. Adding spice to the mix, this would be the first major election in the Golden State in which women could vote, Proposition 4 having just squeaked by in a state referendum the same day Harriman won the mayoral primary.
The business elites threw everything they could muster into their effort to stave off the Apocalypse. The Los Angeles Times—a virulently anti-union publication owned by Harrison Gray Otis, leader of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, a close friend and business associate of corrupt Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz—warned every day with a creative variety of arguments that if Harriman were elected, the sky, along with the economy, would crash onto Angelenos’ heads. He editorialized that this election represented “the forces of law and order against Socialism; peace and prosperity against misery and chaos; the Stars and Stripes against the red flag.” What program so enraged and frightened the capitalist class of southern California? Harriman promised to:
· Reverse an anti-picketing ordinance that had filled Los Angeles jails with peaceful union members for the crime of walking on sidewalks with signs, singing labor songs, while on strike
· Investigate the real estate deals that had brought giant payoffs to Otis and his friends when the Owens Valley aqueduct terminated on land they had purchased via insider information (the real life backdrop to events depicted in the film Chinatown)
· Municipalize city services to save the taxpayers money and improve efficiency;
· Invest in building community centers, public pools and baths, and increase support for public schools;
· Oh, and modestly raise taxes on the rich and large businesses to pay for these reforms.
Pretty radical stuff.
Ultimately none of these political ideas or the opposition’s counters to them defeated Harriman. What did was an early historical appearance of the “October Surprise”. A year before the election, a bomb ripped through the Los Angeles Times building, killing twenty workers. When brothers James and John McNamara (a national leader of the Ironworkers union) were arrested and put on trial, Harriman, the top labor attorney in southern California, defended them, believing in their innocence. When he decided to run for mayor, he turned the defense over to crusading lawyer for the damned Clarence Darrow. Darrow had previously proven that labor leaders in Colorado accused of a bombing had been framed, and like Harriman thought the McNamara brothers trial was a rerun.
But the McNamaras were guilty, as Darrow ultimately found out. After secret negotiations with Otis and other Los Angeles business leaders, Darrow—a fervent opponent of the death penalty— unexpectedly changed his clients’ plea to “guilty” just days before the election. The timing was key to the agreement. In exchange the prosecution agreed to ask for prison instead of death sentences.
Although left out of the loop, Harriman suffered the consequences. Heavily favored to win a week before the election, but firmly tied in the public’s mind to the McNamara’s defense, he and the entire Socialist slate went down to defeat.
Today democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is in good position to win the New York City Mayor’s race. With a ferocious ground game, smart media, charisma to spare and a set of goals clustered under the umbrella of “affordability” popular with the working class and youth, his coalition will be a formidable force between now and November. He’ll likely confront a Republican rival, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and perhaps the disgraced former governor, whom he just defeated in the Democratic primary. If both run the latter two will split the anti-Mamdani vote sufficiently to get him elected.
But the climb will be slippery. The mud is already being flung by the usual suspects. One shouldn’t be surprised by Trump’s characterization of Mamdani as “a one hundred percent Communist lunatic.” That won’t be the deciding factor, as the unpopular former New Yorker POTUS will probably add more votes to Mamdani’s column than he removes.
The two biggest problems will come from the right-wing of the Democratic Party—intransigent Zionists and the city’s Wall Street and real estate sectors. Alongside mountains of cash from billionaire bank accounts, the leading edge of the anti-Mandami campaigns will comprise red-baiting and spurious charges of antisemitism.
What does card-carrying DSA member Mamdani actually stand for?
· A freeze in rents for stabilized apartments
· Free city busing
· Raising the city’s minimum wage to something close to livable: $30/hour by 2030
· A community safety department separate from police to deal with mental health related issues
· City-run grocery stores to bring down food prices
· Free childcare for children six weeks to five years old
· Oh, and modestly increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for the above.
Like Harriman’s wish list, not exactly the Bolshevik revolution here, but you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from what the other side is already saying, and what they will flood the airwaves with for the next few months. It’s the last item, of course—raising taxes on the rich and corporations—that, as in L.A. in 1911, especially infuriates the city’s plutocrats.
Currently most New York City residents pay around 3% of their income in city taxes. The wealthiest income earners pay closer to 4%, with an absurdly flat cap for people making $500K and above. New York City at last count is home to 350,000 millionaires. The richest 1 percent of New Yorkers tripled its share of the city’s total income from 12 percent in 1980 to 36 percent in 2022.
These statistics represent a flashing red sign about the city’s lack of affordability—along with an “X marks the spot” for the buried treasure that can pay for decent public services for the 95 per cent of the city’s inhabitants who aren’t millionaires. The slight tax increase Mamdani is calling for—2% on individuals making a million dollars a year—will not crimp the lifestyle of the rich in the least.
When socialists run for public office, or when measures to reduce economic inequality are placed before the voters (e.g., taxing the rich, a raise in the minimum wage, help for renters), you can count on the most reactionary sectors of the ruling class to spend freely to convince everyone to see the world through the same warped lens they do. You can also bank on the same tired tropes at the core of their argument. Behold: these tax increases are going to hurt everyone; small business can’t afford it; the wealthiest New Yorkers (mislabeled “job creators”) will flee the city and go to a more welcoming business environment; and all the jobs will leave with them.
In the real world, these things never happen. Take the California example, 101 years after Harriman’s defeat. In 2012, over the dire predictions that the “job creators” and their jobs would flee California, voters passed a progressive tax bumping top income earners up a couple percentage points. The tax, Proposition 30, has brought in seven to nine billion dollars a year, and prevented public services from going over a fiscal cliff in the aftermath of the Great Recession. In the years following its passage, the state minted ten thousand new millionaires, and 1.4 million new jobs.
In New York, where much of the wealth is clustered in finance and real estate, the former creates relatively few working-class jobs and the latter can’t move. The lies may be countered with clear messaging explaining the real problems, how to address them, and who should pay to fix them. Which is what Mamdani has been doing.
But there is another weapon in the anti-Mamdani arsenal: the charge of anti-semitism—which for AIPAC and its candidates means the duplicitous conflation of ‘anti-Zionist’ with ‘antisemitic’. A deluge of these talking points and ads in support of Cuomo failed to take Mamdani down in the primary, but that doesn’t mean that the stream of invective will stop during the next stage of the campaign. For a recent example we could turn our gaze across the Atlantic to England, where another democratic socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, who achieved a surprise momentary capture of leadership in the Labor Party, was brought low principally by a combination of the highly organized repetition of the lie (mostly by the right-wing of his own party) and a fumbled response to it.
Two big things are different in this regard in New York 2025 compared with the England of a few years back: the war in Gaza and its impact on Jewish opinion about Israel, which means the deception in the equation of Jewish and Zionist is much clearer to many more people; and the charismatic Mamdani is not the curt Corbyn, despite similarities in their democratic socialist politics.
What would a Mamdani victory mean at this moment in our history?
A democratic socialist mayor in the largest city in the United States would be a tremendous boost to anti-fascist morale as the mass movement to oppose Trump and MAGA is slowly gaining steam. It would arguably provide a programmatic roadmap to victory in the 2026 elections (presuming they are going to be held, and held fairly).
Yes, we are aware that New York City is not the rest of the country. But the largest urban centers are farther to the left than any other stash of votes, and they are where the resistance to Trump and MAGA has been and will likely continue to be strongest—an important indicator of possible electoral victory, if the coalitions emerging from organization of the mass demonstrations are able to develop the necessary synergy between street and ballot box forms of activism. A sclerotic neoliberal politics as usual will not mobilize this base.
Here in California municipal democratic socialist politics have gained ground over the last few election cycles. In all, there are more than three dozen DSA-affiliated officeholders in the state—the most since the heyday of the Socialist Party more than one hundred years ago—including four mayors, fifteen city council members, a state assembly member, a county supervisor, and occupants of various down ballot offices, all of whom push for progressive policies shunned or feared by the rest of their fellow officeholders.
If Mamdani loses, the leadership of the Democratic Party will redouble its push to field empty neoliberal suits in 2026. Harriman’s defeat in LA in 1911 set back the cause of working-class politics for decades. A high-profile loss like that today would make it that much harder to remold the Democratic Party as a majoritarian progressive force. Alternatively a win will provide wind in the sails to the anti-MAGA movement, on the strength of which Democrats can reclaim power. That’s why it’s necessary to forcefully demonstrate the viability of Mamdani’s politics now.
California DSA members may be three thousand miles away from this historic battle but we can nonetheless help. Mamdani needs every penny he can raise to fight the onslaught of right-wing lies propelled by billionaire funding. Send him your hard-earned dollars here.
…
Bloody Thursday
By Nairobi Williese Barnes
Every year on July 5, ILWU Local 10 holds a commemoration of the 1934 bloody attack of the police and National Guard on maritime workers striking on the Embarcadero. Their attack resulted in the deaths of two maritime workers. This year’s celebration was particularly vibrant in light of the Trump administration attacks on immigrants and all working people.
The closing address was by Poet Nairobi Williese Barnes, the daughter of a Longshore clerk. Her dramatic reading roused the crowd to sustained applause and acclamation.
We thank her for allowing us to publish her poem.
Bloody Thursday
Brothers and Sisters,
Do you hear the horns in the harbor?
Do you feel the rumble in the rails, the cry in the crane?
There was a time when they told us to carry the weight—
But not the power.
To bleed for the profit—
But never touch the throne.
Brothers and Sisters,
The docks remember.
The waters recall the names.
Bloody Thursday, 1934—
When the hands that built this nation
Stood still in defiance.
Not in weakness—no,
But in will.
Brothers and Sisters,
Let me tell you about July 5th,
When bullets rang out like betrayal in the wind.
Let me tell you about fallen Brothers,
Struck down not for violence—
But for daring to dream of something just.
Their blood stained the streets
So we could walk free with dignity.
Brothers and Sisters!
This wasn’t a riot—
This was a rising.
This was Labor shouting back:
We are not your machines.
We are men.
We are women.
We are more.
Brothers and Sisters, Can I get a witness?
A witness to pain, yes—
But also to power.
To the hands that fed ships and stitched sails,
That dug in, locked arms, and said:
We will not move until you see us.
We remember Bloody Thursday
Not for defeat—
But for the victory that came after.
For the general strike that shut down a city
With nothing but solidarity
And the sound of boots refusing to march alone.
Brothers and Sisters,
This is sacred history.
And the pulpit isn’t just in the church—
It’s in the union hall,
The breakroom,
The picket line.
It’s in the mother feeding three kids on one paycheck.
It’s in the old man whose back gave out to finish the job.
Brothers and Sisters,
We are not just workers.
We are the ones who make the world move—
And we can make it stop if we stand still!
Can I preach a little longer, Brothers and Sisters?
They’ll try to divide us:
Black against white, young against old,
Dockworker against teacher,
Nurse against patient—
But solidarity doesn’t speak the language of division.
Solidarity doesn’t care what the color of your collar is
When your hands are calloused just the same.
Solidarity is gospel, Brothers and Sisters!
And the gospel says:
An injury to one is an injury to all.
The gospel says:
You touch one, you fight us all.
The gospel says:
From every port, every factory, every school, every field—
We rise together or not at all.
I ask you, Brothers and Sisters—
Are you ready to lock arms again?
To shoot down injustice,
To know when to walk off to a better world?
This isn’t nostalgia—this is a torch.
Carried from 1934 to today,
Pass the torch in remembrance, Brothers and Sisters,
In memory, and In might!
For every soul who dared say, no!
So we could one day say yes to fair wages,
Say yes to dignity!
Say yes, to the unbreakable union of the working class!
Say yes, to the ILWU!
…
From Florence, Referenda Revisited!
By Nicola Benvenuti
On June 13 the Stansbury Forum published an analysis of the Italian vote on the 5 Referenda that took place on June 8-9.
Frequent Stansbury Forum contributor Nicola Benvenuti[1] wrote up his own brief analysis from his political perch in Florence, Italy
The difficulty in defining a political and trade union strategy
It’s my opinion that the Italian political crisis of the left-wing does not stem from contingent factors, like neglecting old class conquests or avoiding a tough fight for crucial objectives. I think it stems from today’s power relations between classes, but also from a lack of understanding of reality and the misunderstanding of social conflict, and therefore from the difficulty in defining a political and trade union strategy.
In the history of the workers’ movement there are constituent moments of a new identity dictated by changes in objective conditions. I think of Togliatti’s[2] 1944 Svolta di Salerno when national unity was a priority for the construction of the new Italian democracy; or to the SPD’s (German Social Democratic Party’s) 1959 opening to market logics (Bad Godesberg)[3], at a time when economic development made it possible to exchange work quality and intensity, and cooperation (Mitbestimmung) for work stability and high wages. Even Berlinguer’s Compremesso Storico (historic compromise) had the characteristics of a politically mediated social pact, aiming to overcome the dualisms of Italian society (north and south, rich and poor, pre-capitalist relations and advanced industry, cities and countryside) through the full democratic integration of the subordinate classes and a program of social reforms (healthcare, public housing, price controls, schooling etc.)
Attempts to formulate responses at this level, in a moment like ours marked by financial capitalism, a declining rate of industrial profit, and a massive concentration of wealth and power through technology and artificial intelligence, have not been seen either inside or— outside of Italy. This new phase of capitalism is truly disruptive and puts the defense and development of democracy and fundamental freedoms at the center of reflection, because it calls into question the very possibility of coexistence based on dialogue and debate, rather than mere force. This will certainly be the key battleground in the coming decades, and we look with hope to the opposition mounting in the U.S. against Trump, which Olney and Wilson vividly portrayed in a recent article in Sinistra Sindacale.[4]
The Italian labor movement, however, is now fragmented and divided into a myriad of interests, with no political mediation capable of regrouping a majority of citizens around the workers’ program. The construction of hegemony has been replaced by the pursuit of particular interests of one sector or another. As a result, politics is weakened and impoverished, and political participation collapses.
Within this roughly outlined context, the political activism launched by the CGIL through the proposed referendums of June 8-9 needs to be situated. These appear to be initiatives to build a relationship between the union and politics—especially in the absence of a party that would take on this task.
It is worth noting that the last attempt to establish a wide-ranging platform of social and economic agreements was made by the Matteo Renzi[5] (a man who was an outsider from the socialist tradition but able to arouse enthusiasm in the Partito Democratico (PD) electorate) government. While one may disagree with some of its elements, the initiative nonetheless had the stature of a foundational and structured pact. Its main pillars were: a political agreement with the opposition (Berlusconi[6] met Renzi at the PD headquarters), moderate liberalization of labor relations (fewer restrictions on dismissals, increasing protections for newly hired workers, tax incentives for hiring, reform of precarious employment, etc.), and institutional reform to streamline the decision-making process of an inefficient political system (differentiating the roles of the Chamber and Senate, a radical rethink of regionalization, etc.)—all under the benevolent eye of President Giorgio Napolitano[7]. It’s true that hiring decreased once tax incentives ended, that the promised “increasing protections” never materialized, and that layoffs significantly increased. But it’s also true that after Parliament approved the reforms, the “right” withdrew its support and effectively allied with the “left” to reject the constitutional reforms and bring down the Renzi government.
Avoiding blame and oversimplification, the substance is that the pact failed. Since then, Italian politics has largely been characterized by tax amnesties, security propaganda, xenophobia, clientelism, and the dismantling of the welfare state. In the political vacuum that has followed, several political initiatives have been tried, including the populism of the yellow/green government (5-Star Movement and League), and politically discredited: the PD after Renzi’s exit, is divided between a moderate/centrist party apparatus and the followers of the voters’s choice General Secretary Elly Schlein; the Northern League’s shift under Salvini toward building a southern client base; the 5-Star Movement, whose only real ambition seems to be replacing the PD; Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, which aspired to unify the “right” in the groove of a moderate right-wing line, now exists only as a subordinate part of the Fratelli d’Italia (Meloni) government. And finally the current “majority-of-the-minority government” led by the true winner of this political period, Giorgia Meloni, the last political force to try to govern but politically extremist and equipped by a low-quality ruling apparatus. And after that?
Returning to the specific issue, the union referendums were abrogative and thus lacked positive, detailed proposals. They were necessarily constructed with technical language that made even their actual effects hard to grasp—a bit weak to mobilize an electorate disillusioned by the lack of alternatives to the current state of affairs. Perhaps the union was also held back by its role and didn’t want to encroach too much on the territory of its “friendly” parties, the PD and the 5-Star Movement—or maybe this political task is simply too much at odds with the nature of a union.
However, these referendums also reveal an ideological approach: the defense of prerogatives won in very different contexts, as seen in the:
1. First referendum—against the Jobs Act—which, among other things, eliminated the union’s key instrument for protecting workers: Article 8, which prevented unjustified dismissals, introduced under Renzi. The other referendums concerned:
2. eliminating the cap on compensation for workers dismissed by small businesses, allowing judges to apply stricter penalties in the case of unjustified dismissals;
3. fighting precarious employment—especially temporary contracts that never lead to stable work;
4. workplace safety—by making the commissioning entrepreneur accountable for the often inadequate working conditions of subcontractors.
Given their abrogative nature, these referendums couldn’t propose comprehensive reforms; they were limited to adjusting the system by repealing measures considered harmful.
Sadly, the fifth referendum was also disappointing. This one was proposed by Più Europa, a political group in Parliament rooted in the old Radical Movement of Marco Pannella[8]. It aimed to halve the residency requirement for foreign residents and their families to apply for Italian citizenship—from 10 years to 5—once good conduct was established. Unfortunately, this referendum confirmed the widespread mistrust Italians have toward non-EU immigrants, and underscores the need to move beyond vague ethical attitudes toward concrete policies for legal integration and matching labor supply and demand, eliminating the utility of undocumented workers.
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[1] Nicola Benvenuti is an Italian political historian who resides in Florence
[2] Palmiro Togliatti 1893-1964 – Leader of the Italian Communist Party for 40 years
[3] Bad Godesberg is a town near Bonn Germany where the SPD convention took place
[4] https://www.sinistrasindacale.it/
[5] Matteo Renzi – Italian Prime Minster 2014-16
[6] Silvio Berlusconi was an Italian media tycoon and Prime minister from 1994-95, 2001-2006 and 2008-11.
[7] Longest serving Italian President and member of the Italian Communist Party from 1945-91.
[8] Marco Pannella 1930-2016 – Italian politician, journalist and activist and leader of the Radical Party
The Oligarchy Is Not Invincible
By Eric Blanc
Zohran’s Historic Win: 16 Takeaways
After decades of defeats for working people and the Left, it almost felt like a dream to witness Zohran Mamdani make history on June 24th. Sometimes the good guys win. As David Hogg wrote last night, “BREAKING: Not everything has to suck.”
Absorbing the key lessons of this campaign is essential for the fights ahead, not just in New York City, but across the United States. Here’s an initial list of the biggest takeaways.
1) Zohran’s victory is a nationwide political earthquake. Huge numbers of voters are sick of the Democratic establishment, and there’s no good reason why his playbook can’t be widely repeated elsewhere. The party’s decrepit “old” guard is vulnerable, its unpopularity delivered us Trumpism, and it deserves to be displaced everywhere.
2) By stubbornly hammering on proposals to make the city affordable, Zohran was able to break beyond the Left’s college-educated base. He won all across the city, including in neighborhoods like Sunset Park and Woodhaven that swung rightwards towards Trump in 2024. Economic populism is our best weapon to win back the working people and to overcome Trumpism. Blame the billionaires, not immigrants or transgender people.
3) We should always ignore the pundits and political hacks who try to convince us that transformative change is impossible — or that the best we can do is chase after a mythical political center, rather than winning the battle of ideas and ambitiously raising voters’ expectations.
4) Billionaires tried to buy this election and they lost badly. It turns out that the oligarchy is not invincible.
5) Pundits will try to spin this as purely the result of Cuomo’s unpopularity or Zohran’s charisma. That’s part of the story, but only part. In addition to the resonance of his policies and crystal-clear message on affordability, there’s no way he could have won without the tireless ground game of 50,000 volunteers and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and other allied organizations. Knocking 1.5 million doors is an astounding feat.
6) Young people were the heart of this campaign. The night of June 24th tens of thousands of them got to experience the ecstatic feeling of making history through collective organizing. Feeling that even once is enough to make you an organizer for life. This youthful social movement has the energy and ambition to make New York social democratic again.
7) Social media is extremely important for capturing the attention of wide layers of voters, and Zohran’s media team was amazing. But the secret sauce for good comms is not primarily technical — it’s political: you need an authentic messenger armed with a compelling platform. Hack Democrats can’t post themselves back into relevance.
8) It’s a very big deal — with nationwide and international implications — that Cuomo’s cynical smears about anti-Semitism fell flat. It turns out that opposing genocide and acknowledging the humanity of Palestinians is not necessarily an electoral dealbreaker. AIPAC should be very worried.
9) Despite what his opponents claim, Zohran is not a dogmatic extremist, but a radical pragmatist. He could not have gotten this far had he not focused on bread-and-butter economic issues, spoken in a commonsense language, ran as a Democrat, dropped his support for defunding the police, and endorsed Brad Lander. Zohran refused to drop his support for democratic socialism or his opposition to Zionist apartheid, but performative ultra-leftism was anathema to this campaign.
10) It took a liberal-Left alliance to defeat Cuomo. A huge amount of credit is due to Brad Lander for being a man of principle who refused to punch Left. At the same time, Zohran smartly rejected a widespread leftist tendency to treat liberals and liberalism only as ideological competitors to be fought. Look at how he adopted the best parts of the “abundance agenda,” how he cross-endorsed Lander, and how he framed his criticisms of Israel in the language of liberal equal rights. Leftists can’t defeat the old establishment — let alone overcome the Right — on their own. And mutuality cuts both ways: we can’t ally with liberals only when we’re in the lead.
11) Zohran’s inroads within organized labor were crucial steps towards legitimizing his campaign. The unions who took a risk and stood by working people by endorsing Zohran include AFSCME DC 37, UAW Region 9a, Doctors Council SEIU, CIR/SEIU, UNITE HERE Local 100, IATSE Local 161, PSC-CUNY, OPEIU Local 153, and Teamsters Local 804.
Every union that endorsed Cuomo should be embarrassed by their narrow-mindedness. The good news is now they have a chance to make things right by endorsing Zohran in the general election.
12) The fight has really just begun. Establishment Democrats, Trump, and their billionaire funders are going to do everything possible to prevent Zohran from taking office in November or, if that fails, from implementing his agenda. Expect an unprecedented, billionaire-funded scaremongering onslaught to convince New Yorkers that a Mamdani City Hall will bankrupt the city, unleash crime sprees, and persecute Jews.
13) Faced with claims that his project will lead to urban ruin and chaos, Zohran can lean on the progressive, technocratic competence of Lander’s crew and point to thriving social-democratic cities across Europe as well as strong historical precedents of success in the US. Before they named an airport after him, as Waleed Shahid notes, New York City’s wildly successful socialist mayor Fiorello La Guardia was also first denounced as an impractical radical.
14) The experience of La Guardia, like Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists,” shows that winning office is not enough. When you’re up against such powerful opponents, you need lots of organized grassroots power outside the state to actually implement your agenda. The most challenging obstacle on the road ahead is that Zohran’s electoral success has significantly outpaced the scale of working-class and socialist organization in New York City. Building widespread organization in workplaces and neighborhoods is hard, essential, and urgently needed. So join DSA. Unionize your workplace through EWOC. Reform your union. Salt a strategic company. Or build a tenant union in your building.
15) DSA’s membership is about to surge. And the organization is going to come under intense scrutiny from Fox News, Trump, and the Democratic establishment. It’s time to tighten our ship and to make a concerted nationwide turn away from self-marginalizing leftism. Members should study and emulate NYC DSA’s mass politics orientation. If this campaign didn’t fit all of your ideological priors, maybe those priors are wrong.
16) There are going to be all sorts of major setbacks in the months and years ahead. But after yesterday, it’s so much easier to see — and so much easier to feel — that a better world actually is possible if we fight like hell for it. The future is unwritten. Let’s write it together.
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Zohran Mamdani’s Electrifying Upset in NYC:#RankTheSlate – “Don’t Rank Cuomo”
By Nan Faessler
So much ink (literal and virtual) has been spilled on the electrifying upset in the NYC mayoral primary race. Zohran Mamdani wins and Andrew Cuomo, the former disgraced NY governor, had to concede on election night. Every media outlet has weighed in from NY Times, to every substack, and every celebrity who supported Mamdani.
This is not an analysis of Zohran’s mighty win but just a few observations from a New York City resident and more precisely someone living in Central Harlem.
As a volunteer member of the NY Working Families Party (NY WFP) I fully supported the brilliantly executed strategy of “Rank the Slate”. Ana Maria Archila and Jasmine Gripper, the co-directors of the NY WFP, analyzed the failing of the progressives in the 2021 NYC mayoral race that allowed NYC mayor Eric Adams to win by just over 7,000 votes. Given that Ranked-Choice Voting would be used again during this Democratic primary, they presented a program to build a true coalition of progressives who would support each other with the ultimate goal of denying Andrew Cuomo the win in the primary. And it worked.
Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), for those not familiar, is a system used during the primaries in NY State to allow a primary voter to choose up to five candidates on their ballot in descending rankings. If a candidate receives 50% plus 1 of the 1st-choice votes, they are the winner. If no candidate earns more than 50% of the 1st-choice votes, then counting continues in rounds. At the end of each round, the candidate with the fewest votes will be eliminated. This process will continue until there are only two candidates left and the candidate with the most votes wins. (Zohran Mamdani on election night had over 43% of the first choice votes, the final tally will be announced by the NYC Board of Elections on Tuesday July 1st and Zohran’s final numbers will be higher.)
The beauty of RCV is that more diverse candidates win elections. Cities that have implemented ranked choice voting have elected more women and more people of color, making their elected officials more representative of their communities.
Earlier in the year, NY WFP leadership held mass calls with members and supporters to talk about the strategy and pulling together progressives who would unite around a strategy that supported the full slate – a slate where any of the candidates who were endorsed by the NY WFP would be fighters for working people of NYC and most importantly a slate that would not split the vote of our base.
Many mayoral candidates came forward asking for the endorsement of NY WFP. Our process included an all day meeting at the Make the Road headquarters in Queens. While each of us had our own favorites, each candidate had a sit down with NY WFP leadership – where candidates had to agree to support the other NY WFP endorsed candidates in a spirit of unity. If they did not agree to this principle then we would not include them on the NY WFP Slate.
At the end of the endorsement process the NY WFP ended up with four great candidates who agreed to be presented as a slate – a slate with no rankings (#1, #2 etc.) until the end of May: Adrienne Adams (no connection to Mayor Adams); Brad Lander; Zohran Mamdani and Zellnor Myrie. These candidates represented a diverse mosaic of NYC, all with a vision to make NYC safe and affordable, and all with the courage to stand up to Donald Trump.
#RankTheSlate was our rallying cry during canvasses and phone banks, along with our adjacent Don’t Rank Cuomo. When I talked to voters I talked about the full slate, encouraging voters to list all four candidates on their ballots, ranking them by voter’s preference. My candidate was The Slate. Encouraging voters to rank the full slate and not to rank Cuomo meant we had a shot at defeating our corrupt former governor and his billionaire funders who had dropped over $25 million into his “Fix the City” SuperPac.
Of course each individual candidate had their own campaign and their own canvassers who were out on the streets, at green markets, door knocking, at local events, and when NY WFP members and volunteers ended up in the same spaces we embraced and hugged – we knew we were on the same team.
Two months before Election Day, June 24th, NY WFP had members and volunteers in the field canvassing, and full poll site visibility during early voting.
Along with the incredible turnout of 50,000 volunteers who embraced the Mamdani campaign, the NY WFP, in two months prior to Election Day achieved the following:
Knocked 7,750 doors; made 126K phone calls; organized 300 early voting poll site visibility shifts; and over 200 election day poll site visibility shifts
At the end of May, NY WFP ranked the slate as follows: #1 Zohran Mamdani, #2 Brad Lander, #3 Adrienne Adams, #4 Zellnor Myrie.
Combatting the manosphere toxicity was the absolute bromance between our number 1 and 2 picks. Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander cross endorsed. It was electric – they appeared together at events, made sure that their own supporters knew who to rank second, they even showed up on “Late Night with Steven Colbert”. It made my heart sing. It showed that the strategy laid out by Jasmine Gripper and Ana Maria Archila would work and even before the final vote, I and many others knew we could beat our disgraced former Governor.
Later Zohran and Michael Blake, another Dem candidate on the ballot cross endorsed, proving that Zohran had the capacity to broaden his coalition. Michael Blake had been an NY State Assemblyman from the Bronx and worked in the Obama White House. Blake became my number five.
I put in lots of leg work – in the best of two ways – the hard work of canvasses making sure folks knew about 1) Ranked-Choice Voting 2) Our #RankTheSlate ballot, and 3) How we could defeat Andrew Cuomo (and eventually the morally corrupt Mayor Eric Adams in the general in November) our legs got a workout knocking doors, climbing stairs, running around green markets, and any event where we could be in front of the public.
I am not your typical canvasser – why? Because I love it. (Not a fan of phone banking, but will do it when asked.) Getting to talk to voters, even non-voters, excites me. It gets one out from the bubble of one’s own like-minded friends. And I am over the top when I am able to hear someone’s concerns and persuade them to vote for the Slate. Though I would add that here in NYC it was not all that difficult. Free buses, free childcare, affordable housing is top of mind for all but the cruel 1% and their allies.
During our early voting, and on Election Day itself, while doing poll site visibility, I would shout to folks on their way in to vote, “#RankTheSlate and No Cuomo”. Inevitably the rejoinder from the voter to me was so sweet as they would yell as they turned around to face me, “Don’t Rank Cuomo”. This meme/slogan broke through. Everyone (well 99% of everyone) said “Don’t Rank Cuomo”.
Central Harlem is where I live. Harlem, while gentrifying is still an African American neighborhood, and Black politicians hold sway – but that is changing. If you look at the data of who voted for Zohran Mamdani vs. Andrew Cuomo, Cuomo held much of the Black vote in the Bronx, parts of Harlem and Brooklyn, but but but, my experience on the streets, knocking doors, poll site visibility – African Americans under 60 were clearly in the Don’t Rank Cuomo camp, with an attitude of “why would you even think I would vote for that sleaze”.
June 24th, Election Day, I ran into Keith Wright, the Manhattan Democratic County Party leader, whom I have known, and worked with a bit over the past 9-10 years. Keith is one of the old establishment Black leaders in Harlem/Manhattan. He shocked me as I was doing my “Zohran is going to win” happy dance at the corner of Malcolm X Blvd and 134th, the PS 175 poll site. Keith says to me “Zohran is going to win and I voted for him”. Like Popeye I could have said back “Blow me down”. I was stunned. I did not expect this from him. A couple days later on the streets near our Harlem Trader Joe’s, I ran into Keith’s son, Jordan Wright, who is a recently elected NY State Assemblyman from Harlem. Giving Jordan a bit of a hard time for supporting Cuomo, Jordan could not wait to pull out his phone and show me a photo of Zohran and himself. Glad to see Jordan and electeds in NYC realizing that they need to be on the right side of history – even if it is late. (Other electeds need to stop their vile attacks on Mamdani – but that is another article and being addressed by the Mamdani campaign.)
Please see below the statement about Mamdani’s historic win by the two co-directors of the NY WFP, Jasmine Gripper and Ana Maria Archila:
“Tonight, we showed that organized people can defeat the billionaires and corrupt politicians of the past—and together, we can win a more affordable future for New York. New York City showed the country it’s time to usher in a new era of leadership — one that puts working families at the center of their vision. NYWFP—alongside Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, Adrienne Adams, and Zellnor Myrie—built a true coalition that represented all New Yorkers. When we run on the dignity and the power of working people, we win.”
“Zohran built a multi-racial movement of working families, powerful and energized enough to defeat the billionaire class and their hand-picked candidate, Andrew Cuomo. The Working Families Party is ready to roll up our sleeves and support Zohran all the way to City Hall.”
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Who Counts, Not Who Casts,Determines Who Gets the Vote
By Mike Miller
Poll counters like the usually reliable Norman Podhoretz see gains for the Democrats in the forthcoming 2026 House election. Here’s a consensus count on their current thinking about those races:
Democrats 205
Republicans 208
Further, among the remaining “too close to call” races the numbers lean toward the Democrats.
I’ve seen little commentary about what is omitted from the surveys: legal and illegal theft of votes. There are three major sources for potential robbery:
1) Trump committed Secretaries of State.
A March, 2024 CBS TV report by John J. Martin, University of Virginia research assistant professor of law says:
“They may be the most important government officials you can’t name. Their decisions have the potential to alter election results. Scholars have referred to them as the ‘guardians of the democratic process‘.
“Who are these unknown, but essential, officials? “State secretaries of state [who] serve their individual states, overseeing numerous crucial state functions.”
Experience in 2024 suggests that holders of this office are pretty principled people, and their staffs are even more-so. They tend not to be cheaters. But two additional observations are required:
First, strict enforcement of the law can lead to rejection of a legitimately cast ballot. If I’m registered as “Michael James Miller”, but sign in at a polling place as “Michael J. Miller”, my ballot can be legally rejected. And if I moved since I registered without re-registering, my ballot can be rejected as well.
Second, it only takes a few cheaters among the 50 AGs to change the national outcome of what looks like another tight race.
Further, the actual counting of votes takes place locally, beginning in a precinct. Things aren’t as bad as they once were: Means of Ascent, Robert Caro’s second volume on LBJ, makes it irrefutably clear that Johnson stole his first Senate race. Things have been cleaned up since those days, but clever cheaters find ways to subvert honest policy makers.
2) What About Voter Registration?
The process of registering voters is even more complex. Numerous requirements can prevent a citizen from voting. A National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) report characterizes the U.S. as:
“a highly decentralized election administration system. County or municipal officials typically do the rubber-meets-the-road functions of running an election, but the state and federal government each have roles, too.”
The details are dizzying. If you want to check them out, go to the website.
NCSL’s report continues:
“The result is that no two states administer elections in exactly the same way, and quite a bit of variation exists in election administration even within states. Each state’s election administration structure and procedures grew organically over many decades as times changed and administering an election became an increasingly complex task.
“The diversity of election administration structures between and within states can be seen as a positive or a negative quality, depending on who is looking, and when. Critics say the level of local control can lead to mismanagement and inconsistent application of the law. This often comes into focus in large federal elections, especially when the media and the public focus on how different the voting experience can be depending on where a voter lives.
“Even so, the structure of election administration in the states today is still largely decentralized and contains a great deal of variation, although far less so than a century ago.”
We’ve come a long way since the Chicago Daley Machine and its Democratic and Republican counterparts in other major American cities…and we have a long way to go. As hackers daily remind us, computers make the whole thing more complicated.
3) Don’t Forget Voter Intimidation!
In the recent past, there have been local versions of right wing thugs changing the outcome of Federal elections. Al Gore was defeated by them in Florida. A Wikipedia report offers a skeleton account of what happened:
“The Florida vote was ultimately settled in Bush’s favor by a margin of 537 votes out of 5,825,043 cast when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been initiated upon a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. Bush’s win in Florida gave him a majority of votes in the Electoral College and victory in the presidential election.”
The Supreme Court’s role in undermining democracy is a long-standing one.
I watched on television Republican intimidators hovering around a Dade County polling place and successfully stopping a hand count of the ballots there.
This is from a New York Times account of the episode: “Counting the Vote: Miami-Dade County –Protest Influenced Miami-Dade’s Decision to Stop Recount.” By Dexter Filkins and Dana Canedy. November 24, 2000:
“The Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board’s decision on Wednesday to shut down its hand recount of presidential election ballots followed a rapid campaign of public pressure that at least one of the board’s three members says helped persuade him to vote to stop the counting.
“Republican telephone banks had urged Republican voters in Miami to go to the Stephen P. Clark Government Center downtown to protest the recount, which began there on Monday and which Democrats hoped would help swing Florida’s 25 electoral votes to Vice President Al Gore.
“The city’s most influential Spanish-language radio station, Radio Mambi, called on staunchly Republican Cuban-Americans to head downtown to demonstrate. Republican volunteers shouted into megaphones urging protest. A lawyer for the Republican Party helped stir ethnic passions by contending that the recount was biased against Hispanic voters.
“The subsequent demonstrations turned violent on Wednesday after the canvassers had decided to close the recount to the public. Joe Geller, chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, was escorted to safety by the police after a crowd chased him down and accused him of stealing a ballot. Upstairs in the Clark center, several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. Sheriff’s deputies restored order.
“When the ruckus was over, the protesters had what they had wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off the hand counting.”
Across the country there are Trump-supporting militias that we should have every reason to believe are available for this kind of intimidation—both of people intending to vote who are driven away from polling places by thugs, and of voting officials.
Is There An Adequate Response?
It is clear that the majority Republican, and in some cases Trump-appointed, Supreme Court will not intervene to stop Republican fraud—legal or illegal—with, perhaps, the exception of the most egregious cases.
I wish I had something to propose here to counter this legal theft. I don’t. I hope you do.
On its illegal companion, there are things that can be done. Preparation needs to begin. NOW!
- Citizen guardian teams for honest elections should be formed, in particular in precincts with a high propensity to vote Democratic. Recruiting can take place in religious congregations, labor union locals, community organizations, athletic teams and other places. While they shouldn’t carry arms, they should be prepared for violence.
- News media should be approached now to get them geared up to cover polling place intimidation. Where they can’t be persuaded to assign reporters, people with smartphones should gather at these polling places to record what happens there. Actually, they should gather there in either case. Think about the difference their filming made in the George Floyd police-murder case.
Where We Are As A Country
If you had told me in 1964 when I was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (“Snick”) that I would be writing these words 60 years later, I would have said something like, “you’re living on other planet.”
We are in a bleak place. Elections are one arena for the fight back. But they are a place where our side is most on the defense. The inspiring results from the New York City Mayor’s race shouldn’t distract us from this fact.
Others need to be widely discussed, and the discussion should begin now. Among them: boycotts (Tesla’s is exemplary); general strike, or workplace sick-outs, slow-downs, work-to-rule, sit-downs; shop-ins at stores (CORE tied a Berkeley Lucky Store in knots with one) and other nonviolent tactics.
Don’t underestimate the President. Opposition to him should not blind us to his cleverness and will to power. As Tom Paine wrote in The Crisis on December 23, 1776, 250 years ago:
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
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This dumpster fire of a Reichstag fire
By Fred Glass
At this moment you might be forgiven for asking, “So where are we at now with the fascism thing?” You will probably not be surprised by my answer: “Well on the way.”
Think of the moment after World War II, with fascism crushed, and the allies—Capitalist Democracy and Soviet Communism—standing briefly side by side over its inert body, each believing with differing forms of relief that this thing had been put away for good. Then imagine the big screen slo-mo in reverse of something broken in pieces, at first slowly and then with a rush coming back together, whole again.
That’s what the past few months have felt like to me here in MAGA America. Let’s summarize: the president freeing convicted violent right wing insurrectionists; a furious scapegoating of immigrants, in a formerly proud nation of immigrants, to draw attention away from the looting of the public sector and destruction of government services by billionaires; armed masked men seizing people off the street, from homes, in workplaces, shopping centers and courtrooms, and taking them away in unmarked vehicles to privately operated detention centers, or to their countries of origin where they face harm, or to countries they hadn’t come from—more than fifty thousand people newly behind borders, bars and fences; a judge arrested; a union leader arrested; a mayor from the opposition party arrested; a U.S. Senator from the opposition party arrested—each while peaceably defending immigrants against state-sanctioned kidnapping; and a massive ongoing chorus of right wing media spewing a toxic smokescreen of lies to reshape reality into a public narrative greasing the skids to fascism.
And now, the murder of elected leaders of the opposition party. No, I’m not fantasizing this act resulted from a direct order from Trump; it didn’t need to be. It’s the logical outcome of his continuous encouragement of violence within his MAGA movement base and amplification in the conservative media ecosphere.
Note: I wrote this article a week ago. So the “now” of the last paragraph has been quickly shoved into the rear view mirror, because “now” the United States has gone to war, and this new step pretty much completes the fascism checklist. (Is there such a thing? Yes and no. No, because a list doesn’t capture the dynamism of historical development. Yes, because while fascism is notoriously difficult to define, it does seem that the graphic accompanying this article provides a pretty good snapshot of what shows up in fascist regimes. It only took five months to get to the last item on the list.)
Throughout, some of us have kept thinking, “There’s a path out of this nightmare. We have four tests. If the courts don’t hold, there’s the 2026 elections. If the elections don’t hold, there’s mass action in the streets. And finally, if the streets fail us, the American military won’t let their old enemy—fascism—prevail…will they?”
The question of the military
The question of the military, however, is a fraught one. Although legally and (mostly) historically neutral on American soil, it is the foundation of American imperialism abroad and has never been constrained in that role by the democratic pieties to which it proclaims allegiance here. Since the end of World War II and about-face on former ally Soviet Union, during which Communism was essentially refashioned as the replacement ideological “ism” for vanquished fascism, every international military adventure by the United States has been draped in the robes of Democracy against Communism, or some other form of authoritarianism—even when all too obviously it was democratically elected forces that the US itself was overturning.
So that’s a key question: what does democracy mean to US military forces inside the country today? Despite local (city and state) government objections, including a star turn by Gavin Newsom on prime-time national TV, muted oppositional muttering within the National Guard, and a temporary restraining order by a judge (on hold at the moment), we have yet to see the reversal of Guard deployment to L.A.. Trump’s dispatch of a contingent of Marines—as if Los Angeles were Iwo Jima—has pushed the boundaries of acceptable military usage on American soil (along with our willing suspension of disbelief) out to the vanishing point. Juxtaposed with that you have the president encouraging soldiers on duty to jeer his hallucinatory perceived enemies (including a former president) and cheer as if they’re at a campaign rally—which, due to the presence of a vendor selling MAGA paraphernalia to the soldiers—it was.
All of this is real, in real time.
Dumpster fire of a Reichstag fire
The fascist president of the United States and his followers have been working overtime to set up a plausible illusion of lawless chaos and rebellion—a right-wing media-fueled dumpster fire of a Reichstag fire—in order to justify bringing the iron fist of the state repressive apparatus onto downtown Los Angeles. But what Trump is trying to do is much bigger than that singular local action.
In a political democracy that sits on top of a coercive economic foundation—capitalism, which does not require political democracy to reproduce itself—the fragile edifice of control by the people over the plutocrats has always faced deep challenges and in fact can never be fully realized. People power versus money power, especially after Citizens United, has become a race against time, and with Trump in the White House and MAGA control over the other branches of federal government, we—the people, the climate, the future, the immigrants who built and continue to build America—are at this moment losing that race.
Well on the way to fascism
Trump and MAGA are testing how far they can push the membrane of political democracy before it breaks. Ultimately, he can ignore the courts, and he may be able to shut down the 2026 elections. But if they are large enough, he cannot ignore the demonstrations in the streets, at which point he needs to know the military’s inclinations. He is probing now, with his illegal military deployments and his immoral political speeches to the troops, and sickening encouragement of MAGA violence, whether that key portion of the membrane is his or democracy’s.
This is no longer an early stage of the process. We are well on the way to fascist America. History says that it’s not inexorable. The direct action of thousands of ordinary people—as we saw on April 5, May 1, and June 14, on “No Kings Day”—establishes a bump in the road that, with continued organizing, can enlarge itself to millions of people and thus a powerful barricade to the dismantling of our incomplete but essential political democracy. It takes me and you; there’s no one else, and now is the time. It will continue to be time until the job is done.
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How can reproductive rights help save the planet?
By Mariana Mcdonald
Introduction
Flames filled the Los Angeles sky as the apocalyptic fire storm raged, ravaging neighborhoods with stunning celerity. People, animals, and homes were lost in what seemed only minutes. Tens of thousands suddenly joined the ranks of Los Angeles’ homeless, while firefighters from around the country and volunteers from California prisons and Mexico battled the flames and fought to contain them. Just months before, the power of hurricane Helene shattered long-held assumptions that people in the mountains were safe from extreme weather, as the storm’s flooding tore whole towns to shreds and destroyed the lives of thousands in Western North Carolina.
In light of these horrors, you might think the climate crisis spotlight should be exclusively focused on urgent immediate needs of mitigation and adaptation, to halt the accelerating climate crisis while helping communities prepare for the worst. It might seem ridiculous, even irresponsible, to pose the question: How can reproductive rights help save the planet? You might scratch your head and wonder, what do reproductive rights have to do with confronting the climate crisis?
The answer is simple: everything.
And the world changed: the Dobbs Decision
On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, ruled that the US Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, overturning Roe v. Wade and ending nearly 50 years of the right to abortion. The decision immediately angered and frightened millions of women in the United States and threatened abortion rights around the world.
The Dobbs decision was the result of an increasingly political US Supreme Court, growing rightwing movements, and Christian Nationalist political influence. The decision is part of a broader effort to turn back the clock and reverse women’s rights, including access to birth control and protection from domestic violence. The overturning of Roe v. Wade targets not only women; it is also an attack on democracy. The vast majority of US people believe that abortion should be legal and available. Therefore SCOTUS’ action goes against the will of the people and imposes the will of a minority.
Women, Climate Change, and Gender Inequality
The impact of climate change on women has become part of the climate crisis dialogue, often focusing on women’s role in disaster response and in the forced migration process that accompanies climate change. The direct impacts on women’s health, and reproductive health in particular, are often overlooked. A welcome exception is Grist Magazine’s recent series looking at reproductive issues women currently face in the climate crisis.
Attention to women and climate change is linked to the growing international focus on global inequalities. The assessment of global gender inequality has highlighted inequalities faced by women in many aspects of social, economic, and family life, including access to education, role in agriculture, marriage and divorce practices, and legal rights, including land ownership and inheritance. These issues are all important. Some of the most insightful and well-informed efforts addressing global gender inequality place bodily autonomy at the heart of the work for women’s equality.
Bodily Autonomy
Bodily autonomy is the fundamental right of an individual to have control over and make decisions about their own body without external interference or coercion. Bodily autonomy is a foundational principle of human rights and a core principle in bioethics.
Bodily autonomy is protected by international law. In 1969 the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was formed to ensure sexual and reproductive rights and choices for all. UNFPA explains, “Not only is bodily autonomy a human right, it is the foundation upon which other human rights are built. It is included, implicitly or explicitly, in many international rights agreements, such as the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.”
Bodily autonomy includes a range of issues related to an individual’s self-determination. Key elements of bodily autonomy are choice and consent regarding sexual activity, freedom from violence and other bodily harm, personal identity, informed consent in healthcare, and reproductive rights.
Reproductive rights are at the heart of bodily autonomy for women, ensuring women’s decision-making about contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion. They emphasize women’s right to make choices about their reproductive health without external interference. Bodily autonomy requires women’s unconditional self-determination regarding control of their reproductive capacity, deciding about each and every pregnancy they may experience. Yet sadly, over half the world’s women do not enjoy bodily autonomy.
Abortion Rights: Why are they important?
Abortion rights are essential to bodily autonomy and central to reproductive rights.
To understand why, it’s helpful to examine the potential for pregnancy during women’s time of reproductive capacity,* often referred to as “childbearing years,” a problematic term we’ll examine shortly. It’s important to note upfront that worldwide, half of all pregnancies are not planned. This happens for a range of reasons, including birth control failure, birth control sabotage (e.g., man removes condom), birth control is unavailable, and the prevalence of sexual assault, rape, and incest. Additionally, society does not make men responsible for their sperm, and does not seriously entertain policies or practices that limit male fertility.
Spontaneous abortion, commonly known as miscarriage, happens within nature. Miscarriage is not planned or wanted or done by choice; it’s a spontaneous result of the interaction between the developing pregnancy, the person’s body, and environmental factors.
Abortion, on the other hand, is intentional, purposeful, planned, and chosen.
A look at “childbearing years” terminology reveals a lot about the reproductive responsibility women take on. A woman enters the “childbearing years” or “reproductive age” at puberty. Depending on what source is used, the childbearing or reproductive years are defined as 15 to 44 years of age, 15 to 49 years, 18 to 44 years, or 18 to 49 years. These vastly different definitions are troubling, since it means it is difficult to compare data collected using different parameters.
Even more troubling is that none of these ranges is appropriate for 2025. The lower age should be no higher than 12 years, the US national average age for menarche, and 44 years is too low for current childbearing realities, with women having children in their 40s. (The author understands that not all women have a uterus or are able to conceive, and not all people who can get pregnant are women. Trans men may retain the ability to get pregnant. In this essay I refer to women and pregnancy with this understanding in mind.) Even 12 may not be an early enough age to consider. The global trend of early puberty has been noted with alarm; some children are experiencing puberty as early as age 7 and menstruation by age 8.
I am exploring this seeming tangent about childbearing years and ages and standards as a way of underlining the challenge of knowing how many people in the United States have been directly and quite possibly immediately affected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the subsequent criminalization of abortion.
We can examine some numbers at our disposal regarding women of childbearing age in the United States. “March of Dimes” reports data stating there were 65,974,992 women between the ages of 15 and 44 in 2023. So we can say, conservatively, that currently there are at least 65 million women of childbearing age in the United States.
What does pregnancy mean for them? Looking at the reproductive potential of women of childbearing age, and doing the math using the 15-44 years range, we discover that the “childbearing years” of a woman in the United States are at least 29 years. Most women’s cycles are every 4 weeks, though it varies considerably. That makes for approximately 13 cycles per year, for a total of 377 cycles in the childbearing years, or hundreds of potential chances to become pregnant, to have one’s life changed irrevocably if the pregnancy is unplanned, unwanted, and/or unsustainable.
I have wracked my brains to come up with something that could have an impact in any way comparable to an unwanted pregnancy in the lives of most persons who do not get pregnant, i.e., men. What I came up with was job loss, divorce, forced dropping out of school, loss of housing, imprisonment, disabling injury, or serious illness. I quickly realized that even if a person who does not get pregnant experiences a number of these events, it is unlikely they would experience such life-changing events repeatedly.
The second unsettling realization is that a pregnant person could experience any of those same events, in any single pregnancy. Indeed, a pregnant person with an unplanned and/or unwanted pregnancy could lose their job, be forced to quit school, lose their home, have a serious injury, or suffer a life-threatening pregnancy-related illness, as is the case for many Black women. They could also lose their life as a result of an unsafe abortion, or become imprisoned for having a miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, or an incomplete miscarriage requiring medical attention.
Globally, at least 68,000 women die from unsafe abortions annually, making it one of the leading causes of maternal mortality. In the United States, punitive abortion laws increasingly are leading to deaths of ailing pregnant women who are refused care by intimidated health care providers and institutions frightened to intervene.
A woman may in their lifetime experience many times when they face an unwanted pregnancy that could seriously and potentially negatively impact their life and liberty.
That is why abortion rights are central to reproductive rights. Abortion is needed as an essential part of health care for women, consistently and over a period of decades. It is not a trifling, rare, or dismissible need. Abortion must be an ever-present and realizable option for women for half their lives. It is the keystone of reproductive rights and women’s health, and a foundational right among women’s rights.
The indisputable biological reality is clear: as long as there is pregnancy, there will be abortion. Whether abortion is safe, accessible and legal is a matter of social and political reality.
Of course women also need a wide range of other reproductive rights, because women’s lives are directly and profoundly affected by practices and policies that impact the body. Other reproductive rights women need include: access to quality health care; safe, effective, and accessible contraception; safe and carefully monitored pregnancy; safe birth with options chosen by the birthing person; postpartum mental health care; access to reproductive technologies to treat infertility; access to reproductive technologies to enable LGBTQ parenthood; affordable infant and child care; culturally competent parent education and support; and freedom from child removal, forced adoption, and forced sterilization.
Medication Abortion
One of the ways women have responded to the Dobbs decision is through efforts to expand access to medication abortion. This growing movement educates women about how to use abortion pills for a self-managed abortion, and how to obtains pills through options that include telemedicine and shipment of pills from Europe, Mexico, and other countries.
Medication abortion has been available worldwide for over two decades. It’s on the approved medicine list of the World Health Organization, which views abortion as an essential aspect of health care. It has been used in the United States since 2000, and as of June 2022, it made up 54% of all abortions in the United States. Medication abortion is a safe and accessible method of ending a pregnancy, and can be used up to 12 weeks. Abortion pills are helping women who live in states where abortion has been banned or restricted.
Abortion, Sterilization, and Population Control
It is not possible to talk about abortion without talking about sterilization. The same forces and laws that limit abortion have historically been quick to promote sterilization for low-income women of color who, since the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976 outlawing the use of federal funds for abortion, have been denied access to abortion. The horror stories of Puerto Rican, Black, Chicana, and indigenous women who were sterilized without their knowledge or consent are an echo of the Tuskegee experiment and other US practices here and abroad that have violated the bodily autonomy of individuals and the sovereignty of peoples.
Population control has been touted as an effective response to numerous global problems, including climate change. Shifting the responsibility for our damaged atmosphere from the fossil fuel industry and global corporations to women and their families is a cynical and doomed approach. Making family planning education and methods available to people who have not had access to them can be a welcome contribution to individuals, communities, and nations, but only when such programs are voluntary and without economic or social coercion.
Reproductive rights, abortion, and the climate crisis
The climate crisis is the human race’s existential challenge now and for the foreseeable future. It requires the attention and participation of all who live on Earth.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade stymies that participation, both by its direct harmful impact on millions of women, and by tainting the image and influence of the United States. The end of Roe has caused alarm around the world. The political direction represented by the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade has given fuel to rightward trends in Europe, India, and Latin America, and threatens reproductive rights globally. This trend is entrenched in climate denial and the refusal to respond to the climate crisis, as was made painfully clear with the inauguration day executive order declaring the US exit from the Paris Agreement.
The climate crisis requires women’s full participation on the community, national, and world levels. But women are disadvantaged in this regard. We know that women are more likely to be negatively impacted by natural disasters, given multiple family roles and scant resources. Women are forced to migrate due to climate change’s impact on crops, food supplies, and habitability of regions scorched by heat and drought. A serious problem migrant women experience is violence and sexual assault. The challenge of managing a family in the midst of such violence, in the turmoil of climate change, underscores the need for reproductive health care that has abortion at its core.
The benefits of abortion access accrue beyond the individual. For communities, abortion access means less strain on health systems, less poverty, fewer maternal deaths, and more opportunities for children. For countries, abortion access means less strain on public resources, lower rates of teen pregnancy and marriage, and more people working, with subsequent prosperity and a reduction in crime.
Women’s leadership in the climate crisis
Bodily autonomy, with abortion access at its core, can help create the conditions for the flourishing of women’s leadership in the battle to address climate change.
We have an impressive history that demonstrates women’s leadership in defending Earth and confronting global warming. From Rachel Carson to Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, women have led the way to greater awareness and action defending the environment. Greta Thunberg’s defiant leadership helped launch the global movement of youth demanding changes to address climate change. Brave indigenous land defenders like Berta Cáceres have defied corporate threats and paid with their lives. Today Nemonte Nenquimo of the Waorani people leads efforts to save the rainforest in Ecuador from corporate destruction that would devastate her people and damage the lungs of the planet. By supporting and defending abortion rights for women, we help clear a path for the Wangaris, Gretas, and Nemontes of the future.
Conclusion
All humans need to come to terms with the realities of climate change and consider what they will do about it in their own lives. Supporting the ability of women to participate fully in fighting the climate crisis, and offer indispensable leadership to it, is critical. If you are up against a formidable opponent and half your team is handicapped, you are not going to win.
Abortion rights are not a “women’s issue” that can be dismissed. They are not “simply” a health issue. Abortion rights are a requirement for women. Just as the fight to address the climate crisis is an existential battle, so is the fight for women’s freedom to engage in that battle. When we defend abortion rights it is everyone’s future we are defending.
What, then, do reproductive rights have to do with confronting the climate crisis?
Everything!
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