What the Heck Do We Do Today? – A UK Snapshot through an American’s Eyes
By Jay Youngdahl
On a muggy September Saturday I attended the Peace and Justice Project (PCP) Annual Conference in East London. The group, headed by former Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, is among the efforts of progressives in the UK to advance the interests “of the many, by the many.” The working class and left in the UK has problems very similar to ours, but the movement in the UK is ahead of us in many ways, both in theory and practice. Given my confusion about ways forward in the US, and armed with frequent flyer miles, I flew over to the UK to see what I could learn.
My friend and Stansbury Forum co-editor, Peter Olney, asked me to write a bit about the conference. Let me begin with two disclaimers: I did not attend every session over the two-day conference and second, I am not an expert on the UK left. I am sure there were many currents under the surface that I did not see.
Jetlagged, I got lost on my way to the conference and ran into a crew of workers erecting scaffolding around a job site. Because my legal job includes legal representation of representing unionized scaffold workers in the South, I felt an instant familiarity with their work. When I asked for directions to the conference site, they asked why I was there. I told them about the conference, but also asked if we could make a deal. Donald Trump was in town, and the UK King and Prime Minister were meeting him on bended knee. I proposed a trade: they could keep Trump and send us Corbyn. They laughed, thought about it a bit, and one guy agreed, but only if we took the current UK leader, Keir Starmer, too. Because Starmer, like those before him, foists neo-liberalism on the British working class, and his administration is genuflecting to the global coterie of tech billionaires, I wondered who was getting the better part of the trade. We all laughed; they gave me my directions; and I was on my way.
The conference was held in East London, part of which is predominantly Muslim. At the conference we were told that in the 1930s this area was a battleground over fascism. In response to a fascist march directed against the Jews and the Irish, the workers of the area held a larger anti-fascist march, essentially ending the open fascist activities in the neighborhood.
The Peace and Justice Project considers itself a “powerhouse of ideas.” Unionized powerhouse workers are another group I represent in the South, so I enjoyed the framing. Used here, the concept signifies a willingness to talk, to “cuss and discuss,” and to consider ideas that can move society toward a better future. The participants even look at certain US news, and are considering how to translate the wave of enthusiasm for the NYC Mamdani mayoral campaign.
The conference filled a large university lecture hall and was live-streamed as well. The crowd was diverse in age and gender, though mainly white. Many of the sessions consisted of panels of “experts.” University lecturers, authors, and others spoke on panels which considered humanitarian concerns of the left: climate justice, health, housing, AI, education, and other topics of concern.
The initial panel, “War and Building Peace,” focused on the Gaza Genocide. It was spectacularly good. We were treated to a live feed from a boat in the “Sumud Flotilla.” These hardy sailors, from over forty countries, know full well what the Israelis, backed by the US and EU, have in store for them. Their courage was exemplary. Next came a Zoom with Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. She gave a clear presentation on the various international law issues, such as the meaning of a nation’s “right to exist.”
Worker issues were always front and center at the conference. There was little of the carping of “why don’t unions” do this or do that, that is often heard from many left intellectuals in the US. But a number of contentious issues were openly considered, such as how to deal with the jobs of workers in the arms industry.
Years ago I represented UAW members at a plant in Tulsa which built B-1 bombers. I remember the conflicted feelings of workers then, and the same feelings are present today in this industry. At the recent meeting of the Trades Union Conference, the UK’s AFL-CIO, a resolution against the arms industry narrowly passed, with unions of metal workers generally voting against it and the academic unions in favor of it. How to deal with the arms industry is a tough question because the first goal of any worker is to earn what is necessary for a sustainable life. A “Just Transition” for these workers is on labor’s table; this lofty goal, however, has utterly failed in other areas in which working class life has been disrupted by large scale corporate changes. Advocates for Clinton’s NAFTA, for example, and those who promote a capitalistic “sustainable finance” response to climate change, have promised that workers would not be forgotten. Profit centered capitalism, however, will not allow this solution. It is unlikely to be different in the arms industry.
The UK conference highlighted the lives of gig workers. Throughout the world, these workers generally consist of marginalized people of color. One of the sorry exercises of the American union movement over the last decade has been the open submission to the Ubers and Doordash models by the Machinists in NYC and the SEIU in California on the issue of whether gig workers should have protection of what is left of the US social safety net. With some exceptions, like UC Irvine Law Professor Veena Dubal in California, many leftists have been silent on this capitulation. Outlets, like the New Labor Forum, have been weak as well, covering these submissive tracks.
Several issues which have organizational and programmatic components stood out in the sessions I saw. Considering workers as community members and as union members was a constant theme. Today, the UK movement is well ahead of the US on why and how to organize communities. Further, the Project hopes to help rebuild a progressive and creative culture in local communities. The Project sponsors poetry readings in many cities and has strong support among non-capitalist music makers. Its “Music for the Many” concerts have been a great success, and more are planned.
Recent events outside the conference were surely on the minds of the attendees. First, a huge right-wing demonstration, similar to US MAGA rallies, had been held in London the week before. Many were shocked at its size, and are still processing its meaning. The UK press spends an inordinate amount of time propping up the MAGA-type formations in the UK, a stance which magnified the fears from this rally.
Second, this Peace and Justice Project is loosely allied with a movement to start a new electoral party, now named “Your Party.” As in the US, the question of how to deal with a neo-liberal “center left” party is a topic of many conversations. Regular folks want something done about their problems. With few exceptions, no mainstream electoral party in the US or UK has done much here, unless it was on an issue that would also benefit the billionaires on their team. Finding real solutions within today’s capitalism is a complex endeavor, There is hope that Your Party can play a significant role in this effort.
In the US, we know that in the next few months we going to bombarded by forces, from Ezra Klein’s Abundance crowd to the Shumer/Jeffries Democratic Party leadership, telling us how we have to forego left politics to come together to beat Trump and his minions. Like the “long haired preachers” in Joe Hill’s song, The Preacher and the Slave, we are constantly assured that we will get “pie in the sky when you die.” I have heard this refrain dozens of times and it is clear what this philosophy has gotten the working class in the US: almost nothing.
In the UK there has been great enthusiasm for the Your Party. Over 800,000 people signed up on-line to be members. A founding conference well be held in November. Yet, on the day before the conference a leadership dispute became public between Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, a strong independent left MP. Unfortunately, Sultana tossed out a piece of media click bait while I was there; her issue was that Corbyn and his team were a “sexist boys club.” She provided little explanation of programmatic difference. This framing reminded me of one of the current problems in the US left today: the tendency to argue that when considering an important issue, it is not what is said, but who says it that matters. Certainly, one’s identity and history influences one’s experiences and positions, but to say that identity and history always predominates over the exact positions is wrong. On this question, we can all learn from the wonderful US intellectual Adolph Reed, Jr., whose sophisticated takes on race, class, and identity should be required reading for all who want change.
The mainstream UK media feasted on this kerfuffle, and is sure to repeat this “sexist boy’s club” line over and over. Because of this, the Your Party efforts are already a “shit show,” one paper gleefully bleated. Green Party membership is “surging” now, it said, as 1000 new members have joined. Even the left Novara Media piled on, predicting the demise of the party because of this one organization dispute. “Is the New Left Party Over Already?” it wrote. Maybe this media response reflects the nature of the UK news outlets and their brand of snarkiness, but the issue would have been handled differently in the US, I think.
Disputes on the left, properly advanced, are necessary. Making change against the oligarchic system is hard. There are bound to be disputes. The question is whether they can be approached in a principled manner. Watching from afar with little background, it seemed to me that Sultana had failed her first test. But by the evening of the second day of the conference she had changed her position, and seemingly rejoined the fold.
Also clear at the conference and within the Your Party preparations, there is a struggle over the question of how to have a democratic movement and also get things done. Party building is tough, and the difference between useful internal democracy and anarchistic non-organization is often not so easy to see. In the US, this contradiction arose in the Occupy movement and in efforts toward a Labor Party. A couple of weeks before the conference I had read a helpful piece in Sidecar exploring this tension in the UK.
To conclude: two lines stood out for me. The overall mantra of the conference — “for the many, from the many” – is a great starting point. Those in the US who believe division is the primary contradiction in the country facing progressives, should remember this slogan. For all the social media noise and the Drudge Report style of news, the vast majority of problems that concern the working class are the same for Trumpites as they are for anti-MAGA opposition. If a movement argues “for the many” and powerfully imbeds the “many” in the movement, progress can be made.
Finally, in the first panel, an Irish political leader from Galway, referencing Irish struggles against English colonialism, reminded us that, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t realize we were seeds.” Oppression and exploitation have always brought resistance. It will be no different today.
…
Rhode Island AFL-CIO is fighting for the Revolution (Wind Farm)
By David Helvarg
A legal Victory on Monday Sept. 22 but the struggle continues says Erica Hammond
As part of Blue Frontier’s Rising Tide Ocean Podcast, I recently interviewed the AFL-CIO’s Legislative Director for Rhode Island Erica Hammond. Erica is also a member of ‘Climate Jobs Rhode Island,’ a coalition of labor, environmental, and community groups working for an fair and equitable pro-worker blue economy. Which makes sense given Rhode Island is “The Ocean State.”
Our Blue Frontier is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
One of the projects they support is Revolution Wind the almost 80 percent completed $5 billion dollar 704-megawatt offshore wind farm built by the Danish company Orsted slated to power 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut starting next year. That was until the Trump administration issued a stop-work order August 22nd. Then, on Monday September 22, after a month of protests and lawsuits, a federal judge in D.C. issued an injunction allowing the wind farm’s construction to resume.
Earlier this month, after the Trump administration canceled $679 million in federal funds to support the growing offshore wind industry it took the extraordinary next step of instructing half a dozen federal agencies to find ways to thwart the country’s growing offshore wind industry.
Trump has been against offshore wind since 2013 when Scotland approved a wind farm off of his Aberdeen golf resort. Plus, he promised big oil executives that if they’d contribute a billion dollars to his 2024 campaign, he’d do their bidding including ongoing attacks on their wind and solar competition. So what does your typical (or exceptional) labor advocate think?
David Helvarg (DH): So, Erica how did your professional career come about?
Erica Hammond (EH): After college I found my way to the local ‘Jobs with Justice’ here in Rhode Island, an organization that works very closely with community and labor organizations. And from there I met many different individuals in the labor movement and I became very interested in working with them.
So, I found my way to the Institute for Labor Studies and Research, that’s the training and education arm of the labor movement here in Rhode Island. And then we launched our ‘Climate Jobs Rhode Island’ coalition. And when that launched, I said ‘I wanna be working on that.’
So, I shifted over as their field director. And that coalition is really where I learned much more about the environmental movement. I had so much background on the labor movement and workers’ rights and social justice campaigns but for me, a lot of environmental campaigns were new.
DH: A lot of the history of politics in this country is ‘divide and conquer’, and there’s certainly been a historic division that’s been pushed by those in power between environmental activism and labor activism. So how did the climate jobs coalition come together in Rhode Island?
EH: That’s exactly why it came together. It came together back in 2021 when some labor leaders here in Rhode Island got together with some legislators and environmental advocates who had been doing this work for a long time. And it was just agreed that, you know, we could be getting so much more done if we’re working together rather than focusing on the things we disagree on. There’s so much that we do agree on. So, the coalition came together focusing on climate justice and jobs. Is it good for the climate? Is it good for increasing local jobs and are we making sure that the work we’re doing is decreasing economic injustice throughout the state?
DH: So that triple bottom line of environment, economy, and equity.
EH: Exactly.
DH: So, was Revolution, the offshore wind farm, a precipitator of this? What specifically in 2021 got this coalition rolling?
EH: Really our work with offshore wind started back in 2007, 2008. And it was largely pushed by labor leaders, specifically our Rhode Island Building and Construction Trades Council on the Block Island Wind Farm (the first commercial offshore wind farm in the U.S. that generated 30-megawatts). But then when you fast forward to the Climate Jobs Coalition, it really centered around the first campaign for the Act on Climate. The Act on Climate law was passed in 2021 and it sets (greenhouse gas) emission reduction mandates for the state to meet in 2030, 2040, and then ultimately net zero by 2050.
We had really three pillar campaigns that we worked on in our first two years. The first was the labor standards on all renewable energy projects. We wanted to make sure that those jobs are not a race to the bottom, so strong labor standards. And then make sure they pay prevailing wages. And we want to have partnership utilization (with the state, employers, unions and community groups training a clean energy workforce), which is how we bring more individuals into the trade from different communities.
DH: So, your coalition came together. When did Orsted and Revolution come on the scene?
EH: They had been on the scene when the coalition formed. And both labor, specifically the building trades, had a very good relationship with them, has been an avid supporter of that work. So, Revolution Wind was 80% complete, but they’d been working on this project for about 9 years.
DH: And of course, being a Danish company, they realized, unlike a lot of American companies, that organized labor is a benefit in doing construction, not something to oppose.
EH: Yeah. And Orsted was the first developer of offshore wind to form an agreement with the national building trades unions as well, and to make sure that they’re using strong labor standards in all of the work that they do. And that was a perfect example of how we can do this together.
DH: I’ve been on a number of offshore oil rigs and the skills of roughnecks and roustabouts also translate pretty easily to linemen and you know, wind turbine technicians and so forth.
EH: There’s a lot of transferable skills. Absolutely.
DH: So what crafts are involved in building large scale offshore wind facilities and their onshore power links?
EH: So many. We have the laborers, the painters, the iron workers, the carpenters, and the millwrights. There’s also work for the elevator constructors who are part of the building trades as well. There’s the cement masons also have work there. There’s just so many.
DH: How many workers are engaged in this particular project?
EH: So far, Revolution Wind specifically has had over 2 million work hours. That’s for union workers alone. So, it translates to about 1000 local union jobs, not including plenty of other workers on the job who are not union.
DH: So, are rate payers going to save money by switching from fossils to offshore wind?
EH: This seems like it gets lost in a lot of the misinformation, how low the electricity rate came in for Revolution. When Revolution Wind was permitted it came in at just under 10 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity. And that’s for a 20-year power purchase agreement. So last year alone, our winter rates, which in Rhode Island runs from October to May were at just over 16 cents per kilowatt hour. And the year before that, the winter time rates were just over 17 cents per kilowatt hour. So, we’re saving a lot of money at 10 cents. And that’s for a 20-year agreement. With the volatility of the global fossil fuel market, we don’t know what our cost of fossil fuels are going to be in 20 years. But in 18 years with Revolution Wind, we know it will (still) be at 10 cents.
DH: The rates would be as consistent as offshore wind is consistent.
EH: Exactly (although to be fair even wind patterns are beginning to change – as they have off of South Africa – with fossil-fuel fired climate change – dh).
DH: Were there warnings before this work stop order?
EH: Yeah. I keep saying anyone that’s surprised by this wasn’t paying attention for long enough. Since before he was elected, Trump had been talking about his disdain for offshore wind. Of course we were all, you know, hopeful because of the cost of the electricity and because of the significant amount of work that has gone into this, the job opportunities, the investments in our local communities. We were all hopeful that this would continue moving forward. But then on Friday, August 22nd the federal government issued a stop work order.
So, we had several hundreds of trades workers who were working on Friday night and then woke up on Saturday, because when you’re offshore, you work seven days a week (seven on, seven off). They woke up on Saturday morning to phone calls saying you’re not working today. And more (workers) had their bags packed to go out on Thursday, the following week, ready to go for their turn.
DH: Seven days out there, seven days off onshore. A lot like the oil industry.
EH: And so now they have to wait for a phone call. ‘Which port are we going to? Where are we leaving out of? When are we leaving, when are we getting picked up?’ (by boat or helicopter). And they never got that call…We have people who’ve been shifted to other jobs because you can’t simply keep waiting, not knowing when you’re going to go out. So, people are still waiting (actually waited a month until the judge just ruled they can start working again).
DH: Before we get to how people are able to respond, let’s talk a little more about how the coalition came together.
EH: So, for climate jobs, something that we often talk about is moving at the pace of trust. It’s incredibly important. We all have our own priorities. For the labor movement our number one priority is our members. We have to make sure we keep our members working, not just today, not just tomorrow, but five years from now. And for our environmental partners, depending on the different organization that they work for, they have their own priorities as well. We all know that a cleaner, healthier future for all of us is incredibly important.
So, there is a way that we can get to that while maintaining each of our priorities. It was difficult because there was a lot of learning opportunities. Our environmental partners, many of them didn’t know what an apprenticeship was, didn’t know what a project-labor agreement was or a labor peace agreement or labor neutrality. Many of our environmental affiliates didn’t know what it meant to be a union member and have the labor movement supporting you.
And our environmental partners were able to teach many of our labor partners about this industry. Not just the industry of offshore wind, but many different environmental fights that they’re working on as well (like) the renewable energy standard, which sets a standard for Rhode Island of 100% electricity generated by renewable energy by 2033. There were a lot of question marks about what that even means. There was a lot of question marks about what net zero means, decarbonization, you know? So, there’s been a lot of opportunities for learning and there’s been a lot of trust built in that.
We also have some community organizations that have been working with us. We’ve always had a very close relationship with Fuerza Laboral that specifically worked on exploitation of migrant workers throughout the state. They are a part of our coalition. We work with Groundwork Rhode Island, which is a community organization working with so many different communities on environmental projects and even workforce development. There’s a lot of overlap between some of our labor partners and some of our environmental partners that we didn’t even know already existed.
DH: So, what’s the thinking strategically now with this stop-work order? (This interview was conducted before the court injunction allowing work to continue was issued) How is the coalition going to move forward?
EH: Since the night it happened, we’ve been working with our congressional delegation, the governor’s office, our labor affiliates and Attorney General Peter Neronha, who had a press conference and issued a new lawsuit with the Connecticut Attorney General about this specific project’s stop work order (as did Orsted whose suit is the one the DC Judge responded to).
DH: I assume your two senators and two Congress members are also fairly outraged about what’s happening here (Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed and Representatives David Cicilline and Seth Magaziner).
EH: They are very outraged and I would put our congressional delegation up against anyone’s congressional delegation across the country. We have the best!
DH: What’s Orsted’s position? Are they saying anything about how long they’re willing to stay in the game now that they’re under attack?
EH: Just as they’ve been throughout this whole project process, they’ve been a great partner. We are now doing everything that we can as a labor movement to mobilize our membership and really, share the nitty gritty details about what’s happening here so we can show this collective outrage around this decision. Orsted have already issued their own lawsuit so, we’re still working in lockstep with them. They have not issued any sign of backing down.
They’ve put so much investment across three ports, one in Connecticut, two in Rhode Island. And also, in workforce development. Investments that they’ve put into Rhode Island whether it’s the Global Wind Organization training at CCRI (Community College of Rhode Island) so that Rhode Island can be a hub for training is really something to be proud of. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Building Futures. They’re an amazing organization here in Rhode Island that has been working on apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship they were able to (carry out) with investments from Orsted and the state and the labor movement.
They were able to train 220 tradespeople on global wind certification, training on basic safety helicopter underwater training (for how to escape when your transport helicopter overturns in the ocean as they always do when they hit the water), all these things to be able to send people offshore. Orsted’s commitment to Rhode Island and commitment to our workforce has never wavered.
DH: This is all about an attack on a needed and economically beneficial transition from dirty fossil fuels to clean energy, no?
EH: Yeah, even our energy grid (utility), ‘ISO New England’ issued a statement about their disappointment in this decision because they were relying on this energy to come onto the New England grid next year. They’ve been planning on it.
I’ll be honest, this stop work order is just another punch. We’ve been rolling with the punches since January. We knew that they were going to come when the election went the way that it did in November. So, we said we’re not getting out of election mode, talking to members as much as possible about what’s at stake come the midterms because we have nothing to lose at this point.
What’s happening at the federal level has a direct impact on their work. And not just in the construction industry, in every industry. We see what’s happening with healthcare and our healthcare workers. So, we are continuing to do what we do best, which is get boots on the ground and mobilize our members to turn out.
And with our climate jobs team they’ve been working to figure out what’s next. We want to make sure that we don’t lose the momentum …because there’s so much misinformation that’s generated and fueled by social media and just trying to break through that noise, it’s really difficult. You see well-intentioned people who are maybe in opposition to offshore wind because of some misinformation that has been shared with them about its impact on marine life (whales) and our oceans. And we need to figure out how to cut through that noise because the science continues to point otherwise.
DH: As labor’s legislative director for Rhode Island what’s your next battle?
EH: Our next legislative battle is seeing how the impacts of this one big ugly bill (Trump’s giant spending package) is going to hit Rhode Island. We’re gonna have a lot of work to do when it comes budget time next year. There’s a lot of uncertainty around how hard Rhode Island will be hit. Not just with things like Medicaid and Medicare, but also our workforce.
There’s been a significant number of attacks on workers at the federal level. But we have very strong state labor relations with our ‘Baby Wagner Act’ (Public Employees Collective Bargaining Act). We were able to really shore that up last year during the legislative session, but there’s a new ruling that’s coming out of the federal government that may impact that.
So, I think we are going to have to make sure we do everything we can to continue to protect workers here in the state and across the country, really.
We will work on what we can control here in the state. And I think we’ll be fighting, pushing against a lot of the crap, really, that’s coming out of the federal government.
…
Between the Rivers: A brief history of resistance
By Stewart Acuff
Running from protest to protest as I do weekly, and standing holding signs with neighbors and talking — sometimes deeply with smart, principled, committed people I respect — the conversation always turns to: how did all this chaos and destruction happen? Where did the violence come from? And the desire to dominate and control others?
The violence and threats of violence began at the beginning of American history as Europeans began to move across the American continent.
The natural landscape as America grew seemed empty, inviting desperately poor people to try to farm it with their families.
Conflict erupted, continued and turned into all-out war on the plains and in the western deserts.
Driven by white supremacy and the Monroe Doctrine declaring U.S. colonization of this continent, the US Army attacked more savagely as the conflict moved westward with white pioneers and settlers.
Between the War for Independence and the genocide of indigenous Americans, our nation was born and grew in violence and struggle, as well as the desire for freedom and democracy.
We are a product of white supremacy that led us literally to slaughter and imprison indigenous people, including the horrific Trail of Tears, when all southeastern tribes were forced to walk or herded to Oklahoma, losing any way to make a living or practice their culture, destroying entire societies of native people. Ten thousand indigenous people died in the forced march across half our continent.
That same white supremacy led to building an agrarian economy and white wealth on the evil practice of African enslavement. That white supremacy still envelops us. I’m still shocked at white supremacists who condemn John Brown, who raided the Harpers Ferry armory for weapons to arm a slave rebellion. They call him a terrorist as if three centuries of working and “owning” people with the consequent casual rape, murder, vicious whippings and separating families were not terrorism.
Our most vicious and violent war was our own Civil War, which took the lives of some 700,000 of our people in the horrific conflict to free enslaved people.
Our history has been a struggle to overcome our flaws and faults amongst a people who were and are armed and proficient with firearms.
Abolitionists, both Black and white, toiled tirelessly generation after generation for an end to slavery.
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison became heroes.
After the end of chattel slavery, abolitionists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony moved to the freedom struggle for women, especially the right to vote, the suffrage movement. They struggled for decades and generations until American women won the right to vote.
The American Industrial Revolution started with the technology improvements and rapid manufacturing of war materiel for the Civil War. Workers began to organize in the new railroads, mines and factories. Again American workers suffered greatly to win union organizing and collective bargaining.
Ours is the most violent labor history in the industrial and post-industrial world.
The massacres cover our massive landscape with workers’ blood. Homestead, Pa.; Ludlow, Colo.; Chicago at Republic Steel; The River Rouge fight. All the sit-in strikes were to win the right to organize and bargain collectively. Workers in America still must struggle for human rights and livable wages. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting a strike for union recognition and collective bargaining. Cesar Chavez died in part because of the cost to his body of the fasts he endured for a farm workers union and improving conditions.
Through it all, freedom lovers fought, sacrificed, lived and died for freedom, democracy, equality, equity and peace. All our generations have struggled.
All our victories have come at a great cost.
Our government and private wealth have used brutality, vicious violence and blood lust to subjugate some of us to serve and sacrifice for the rich and powerful.
Now the story of domination, greed and violence is being played out again.
We will resist as we have constantly since the inauguration until we strengthen our tattered democracy and defeat the latest of American violent charlatans.
…
This commentary was originally published in The Spirit of Jefferson, West Virginia’s oldest newspaper based in Charles Town, W.Va.
Why Los Angeles Must Resist
By Max Benavidez
The city that raised me—this dazzling, sprawling place of freedom and invention—is under siege
I was born in Los Angeles. My mother was born here. Her father and grandfather were born here. Four generations of my family have called this city home. We are Los Angeles.
And now I see soldiers on our streets. ICE vans in our neighborhoods. Federal agents in unmarked cars are seizing citizens and activists in broad daylight. Marines and the National Guard deployed not to protect, but to control. The city that raised me—this dazzling, sprawling place of freedom and invention—is under siege.
Los Angeles has always been more than a city. It is the great experiment of America itself: the most diverse county in the nation, home to immigrants from every corner of the world, more than 200 languages spoken on its streets, one of the largest LGBTQ+ communities in the country. Its economy is vast, its cultural power unmatched. It is a place where reinvention has always been possible—where anyone, no matter their past, can become someone new.
“When whole neighborhoods live in fear of masked agents—it is no longer policing. It is the machinery of authoritarianism grinding into place.”
That freedom is now being choked. When citizens are “disappeared” into unmarked vans, when a nurse monitoring ICE raids is dragged away without rights read, when a teenager is seized walking his dog, when whole neighborhoods live in fear of masked agents—it is no longer policing. It is the machinery of authoritarianism grinding into place.
The poet and prophet James Baldwin warned us long ago:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
What we are facing now in Los Angeles is not simply a crisis of law enforcement. It is a crisis of democracy. Because if the most diverse city in America, the living embodiment of freedom and reinvention, can be occupied and silenced, then no city in this country is safe.
Brian Wilson once described the “California ethos”: a place where no one is in your business, where everyone is free to follow their own choices. Joan Didion wrote that Los Angeles is “a place that belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”
For generations, my family has claimed Los Angeles in that way. We have loved it radically. But today, the image being remade is not freedom—it is fear.
Ice-T put it plainly: “Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls.”
That is the truth we must face. The occupation of Los Angeles is not a local story. It is the rehearsal of a national tragedy.
But this city has a history of resistance. From Zoot Suiters who refused to be erased, to Chicano students who walked out demanding education, to the countless organizers who built solidarity across languages, colors, and neighborhoods—Los Angeles has never accepted silence. We cannot start now.
Los Angeles must resist. Not only for itself, but for America. For all that this country claims to stand for—freedom, equality, and the right to be. If democracy is to survive, it must be defended where it is most under attack. And today, that place is here.
…
The Democrats’ Death Wish?
By Les Leopold
The New York Times recently released a report showing what we already know – the Democrats are in decline as more voters now register as Republicans or Independents. This is especially the case for young voters.
It’s not hard to figure out why. Just ask yourself this simple question: What is the Democratic Party vision for our country? What message of economic justice do they have for working people who have suffered mass layoffs and job insecurity in recent years and are finding themselves left behind? What is their plan to help hard-working undocumented immigrants secure citizenship? How will they keep the wealth of the nation from gushing to the top one-tenth of the one percent?
Epstein!
That seems to be the current plan. The Democrats believe they can gain ground against Trump by forcing the release of the Epstein files. Supposedly this will split Trump from his conspiratorial base.
But what’s the chance of that helping the Democrats attract more registrants and votes?
Zilch.
And how about those record-breaking congressional speeches? Can anyone recall anything Corey Booker said during his 24 hours and 18 minutes on the Senate floor, or what Hakeem Jeffries said during his 8 hours and 44 minutes on the House floor? I sure can’t, and I suspect neither can those leaving the Democratic Party. Historic marathon elocution is surely an improvement on Biden’s difficulties forming sentences, but does it even attempt to put forth a vision for secure jobs and incomes for working people?
The Democratic Party establishment is so fearful of “moving to the left” (meaning they do not want to attack the interests of their wealthy donors) they are having a tough time supporting Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City, who is breathing new life into the party with a progressive and popular appeal to regular people and their economic concerns. How can party elites not support the man who won the Democratic primary and is leading in the general election?
If the party isn’t rallying around a bright new face with a knack for pitching attractive economic policies, please tell me why new voters should register as Democrats?
The Democrats have become conservatives. They want to protect the way things were from the Trump wrecking ball. And in many cases, they are on point. There are good reasons to protect public programs from drastic cuts, protect badly needed public servants from wasteful layoffs, stop cruel and unlawful deportations of immigrants, and save critically important programs like Medicaid.
But the Democrats also want to preserve the financialized Wall Street-driven economy that has moved wealth from working people into the hands of the few. They want to attract, not repel, donations from the wealthy. As a result, they have little to say to the working people who have lost their jobs due to private equity buyouts, mergers and stock buybacks. After all, stopping that Wall Street gravy train would certainly piss off their doners. In short, they have no vision for a world in which working people, rather than their bosses, are front and center.
It is particularly disheartening to watch the Democrats all but abandon hard-working immigrants who are being deported rather than being moved into citizenship. As I’ve written before here and here, 63 percent of the voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin support, “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of felony crimes.” Only 34 percent are opposed.
How did the multitude of millionaire Democratic pollsters and consultants miss this? Oh, they saw it, but it would be too risky to defy Trump on this, they have no doubt warned party leaders.
Many of my friends and colleagues, nevertheless, truly believe that the Democratic Party can come to its senses and once again appeal to the economic needs of working people. If only we show them enough data about how attractive progressive populism is, they will put out powerful messages about halting mass layoffs and curbing corporate power.
But that is unlikely to happen for two key reasons. First, most of the party leadership doesn’t believe in those messages. They don’t think we should interfere with corporate decision making, and they don’t want to put out messages that will offend the donor class. In fact, they see nothing wrong with economic inequality and have no desire even to refrain from trading their stocks and bonds while in office.
The second reason is that even if they give up on the Epstein messaging and instead promote progressive populism, few voters will believe the Democrats are for real. It’s too late. Forty years of kissing Wall Street ass cannot be undone by a PR campaign. As our Rust Belt survey will show when it is fully released, the vast majority of voters, including Democrats, don’t trust the Democratic Party to deliver, even when they say the right things.
So, I’m trying to convince my friends and colleagues that it’s time for a new party of working people totally independent of the Democrats. It’s precisely what Rust Belt voters want. These poll findings have already been released:
In our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in the Rust Belt States of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, 57 percent of the respondents supported a new political formation outside the two major parties. Only 19 percent opposed. This finding is especially notable because these voters were asked to support a very radical statement of anti-corporate populism.
Would you support a new organization, the Independent Workers Political Association, that would support working-class issues independent of both the Democratic and Republican parties?
Independent Workers Political Association would run and support independent political candidates committed to a platform that included:
■Stop big companies that receive tax dollars from laying off workers who pay taxes.
■Guarantee everyone who wants to work has a decent-paying job, and if the private sector can’t provide it, the government will
■Raise the minimum wage so every family can lead a decent life
■Stop drug company price-gouging and put price controls on food cartels
Every demographic group supported this proposal, led by 71 percent of Rust Belt voters less than 30 years of age, and 74 percent of those who feel very insecure about losing their job.
How about a new second party instead of third party?
I’m told repeatedly that third parties are impossible in America. The best they can do is spoil elections, as Ross Perot likely did for the Republicans in 1996, and Ralph Nader may have done for the Democrats in 2000.
But we’re not talking about a third party. We’re talking about a second party. In more than 130 congressional districts the Republican in 2024 won by 25 percent or more. There is no viable second party in these one-party districts. An independent working-class candidate could hardly do worse. These one-party districts are the crucibles where a new political association of working people can cut its teeth.
But wait – don’t we need to elect a Democratic Congress to tame Trump’s rampage? Sure. There’s no contradiction between supporting Democrats and building a new independent party of working people. The two should function in entirely different Congressional districts. Independent worker candidates should not run in purple areas where elections are close. They should run in one-party Republican districts and states, just like the labor candidate Dan Osborn is doing in Nebraska.
But building a new independent worker political association will be a heavy lift, and it will take time. Most importantly it will take commitment and the energy of young people fighting for a new way, rather than those of us who are running our final laps.
It’s time for a real second party of working people that is willing to turn trickle-down economics on its head. Working people, not Wall Street, should be the center of all economic policy. The people who do the vital work of this country need decent wages, universal health care, and protection against incessant job destruction.
If that seems like too much to ask, it’s only because long ago the Democrats stopped asking.
…
Labor Day 2025
By Len Shindel
Roosevelt wasn’t a fan of fawning. “It does not mean to stand by the president … It is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
I know I wasn’t alone in my anger when I saw the banner of Donald Trump unfurled on the face of the U.S. Department of Labor. Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer encouraged fellow cabinet members to “see the president’s big, beautiful face on a banner,” celebrating him as the most “transformational president of the American worker, along with an American flag and President [Theodore] Roosevelt.”
After I calmed down, I contemplated the sick brilliance of whichever White House propagandist(s) conceived this banner. They know this president has: Gutted federal unions… Attacked the independence of the National Labor Relations Board… Fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the crime of telling the truth… Decimated the regulation of health and safety in the workplace… Reversed the prior administration’s granting of overtime to federal contractors and undermined the enforcement of laws protecting workers and the right to organize. But see, that’s not all these sycophants and manipulators know. They also know that 68% of Americans approve of unions, including 90% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 41% of Republicans. And they know their “Big, Beautiful Bill” is unpopular even in some red regions because it will hurt millions of people the DOL is supposed to protect. So, the banner is really doing more than feeding one man’s narcissism. It’s a brazen, vulgar attempt to obliterate history. The very building it defiles was named in 1980 for Francis Perkins, the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet. As FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Perkins helped implement Social Security, the first minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and many pieces of the New Deal. Francis Perkins was passionate about worker safety, having witnessed New York City’s 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, where employer neglect killed 146 workers. She also defended the rights of immigrant workers to be free from illegal apprehensions. What a contrast she was to the groveling current secretary! During my own first days in the labor movement, I saw aggressive, young staffers from DOL challenging Bethlehem Steel’s racially discriminatory seniority systems, implementing changes that ended up benefiting all workers, black and white. Today, this proud history is being reversed or, in the current secretary’s words, “transformed.” I’m reminded of the words of Howard Zinn: “History is important. If you don’t know history, it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.”
Those of us who weren’t born yesterday, might also wonder how President Theodore Roosevelt would feel being paired with Trump on the wall of a building that was once charged with establishing a more level playing field between managers and workers. Roosevelt wasn’t a fan of fawning. He said, “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president … It is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
The struggle continues. Happy Labor Day, friends.
…
Photos: Robert Gumpert
BETWEEN THE RIVERS: A Bernie Sanders Mountain State Tour
By Stewart Acuff
With the music pumpin’, the drums and bass bottom thumpin’, Senator Bernie Sanders strode onto the stage like a rock’n roll show in Wheeling’s historic and iconic country music venue, the Capitol Theater.
And the West Virginia progressive crowd went wild like the last time Johnny Cash played the Capitol.
Though the event was planned as a rally, it played like a town hall. Every time the Senator shouted a rhetorical question, the crowd roared the response.
As you might say of a concert of Tyler Childers or Molly Tuttle, the hall was electric.
Our fantastic activist Danielle Walker and Democratic leader and Senate candidate Zachary Shrewsbury and grassroots folks brought the crowd to its feet with passion and compassion, and Bernie took the podium, calling and naming the sins causing our common miseries and their corporate sponsors: punishing poverty, opioid crisis caused by Morrisey industry, the stealing of resources while exploiting our people, the insanity of MAGA.
Then he thundered the starting place for an agenda that serves the working class:
■ – National healthcare for all
■ – Paid family and medical leave
■ – Raise the minimum wage to at least $17 an hour
■ – Free daycare
■ – Free trade school and college education
■ – Huge housing investment
■ – Full, unabridged right for workers to freely organize unions,
work collectively and bargain collectively
It was Friday evening, Aug. 8, at the beginning of the Bernie Sanders “Fighting Oligarchy” Tour over two days.
As soon as the first rally was over but before the cheering stopped, my partner and I got our car quickly as possible to head for the next event four hours away in Mingo County and the town of Lenore.
We drove a couple hours and stopped at a place along the highway for the night. We ate Wendy’s in our room before crashing after the adrenaline, excitement and fervor finally wore down.
Sunday morning, Aug. 9 we were headed soon as we could to Lenore. We got turned around on the long way there and I had to back out over 100 yards out of a one way tunnel through a mountain.
But Lenore was worth it all.
The new Democratic County Executive Chairman is a young, brilliant political activist named Johnny Nick Hager. He told all the truths about Mingo County, southern West Virginia, deprivation of life in the coal fields and poverty in families who’ve never known enough.
No wonder Johnny Nick and his folks could turn out four or five hundred people.
Bernie really wanted to listen to folks, so it was town hall. It all involved Bernie listening. He would ask a question. And someone would answer. Then someone from the crowd would ask about some horror story about no clean water or leaking gas wells or no healthcare and Bernie would outline national solutions.
Like good West Virginia neighbors, the folks in Lenore offered a free barbecue dinner with baked beans and other fixings. They are very proud of their young, local boy made great leader, Hager.
As soon as the town hall ended, we hustled hard to Charleston’s Civic Center where a huge overflow room crowd of 3,000-plus standing room only closed by the fire marshal was already rocking to ground up, grassroots speakers.
Once again Shrewsbury introduced Senator Sanders who demonstrated his physical stamina along with his compassion for us regular folks and his passion for economic and political democracy with a speech that was still given with his serious powerful energy.
Those of us who followed Bernie and Shrewsbury over those two days know how hard they both worked and the energy they expended.
All 6,000-plus of us who attended any part of the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour saw our future in politics: energetic young folks and all ages, union folks, clergy and people of faith, civil rights and political and human rights activists, women and feminists, American patriots who still stand for democracy and freedom for all.
In the wake of Bernie’s tour, it is important in West Virginia and other rural red states to keep pushing against MAGA, resistance to Trump cultism and fascism.
We need to roll into 2026 and the midterms riding a social/political movement of human values that translate into democratic politics and bury the MAGA politics of division, injustice, hate, prejudice, white supremacy and racism.
We have security and a future to win for our children, our grandkids, our people, our state and our country.
…
BETWEEN THE RIVERS: A Bernie Sanders Mountain State Tour
was originally published in The Spirit of Jefferson Newspaper
Pushing MAGA Out: The Resistance Ramps Up”
By Max Elbaum
Zohran Mamdani wins big, outrage mounts at Israel’s genocide, and new projects take off, including One Million Rising and the Battleground Alliance PAC—all building momentum against MAGA’s drive toward authoritarian rule.
In my previous article,A Path to Pushing MAGA Out of Power, I offered a set of ideas about what is needed to block MAGA in a way that offers more than temporary relief from authoritarian rule. The goal is to put in place a new governing coalition in 2028 that will start on the road toward deep structural reform.
To achieve that we need to:
■ Build a powerful synergy of mass resistance and electoral work: scale up public protests, workplace actions, civil disobedience, and organized noncompliance to block MAGA attacks and defend democratic rights, including the right to elections that are at least minimally free and fair; and
■ Defeat MAGA candidates at all levels in the 2026 and 2028 elections so that an anti-MAGA coalition gains governing power at the federal level and increases its strength in blue, purple and red states.
■ Strengthen the progressive wing of the broad anti-MAGA coalition so it can:shape the politics of electoral campaigns against MAGA at all levels of government; Shape the politics of electoral campaigns against MAGA at all levels of government;
····shape the politics of electoral campaigns against MAGA at all levels of government;
····put its stamp on both the domestic and foreign policy of a post-MAGA federal government; and
····play the leading role in state-level governing coalitions in at least a few blue states while increasing its political weight in purple and red states. If we don’t gain this leverage and end up with a government that doesn’t deliver substantial change, MAGA will have an opening to come roaring back.
(A discussion guide for examining these points is available.)
New initiatives and Mamdani’s big win
An uptick in opposition to MAGA was already underway at the timeA Path to Pushing MAGA Out of Power was published (June 16, 2025). It showed in spontaneous as well as organized local actions against ICE kidnappings; enthusiastic crowds atAnti-Oligarchy events featuring Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other prominent progressives; protests against US military aid to Israel and repression of the Palestine solidarity activists; organizing by the Federal Unionists Network; the nationwide Hands Off mobilization and then thehuge turnout at the No Kings demonstrations on June 14.
Since No Kings Day, the Trump administration has accelerated its full-spectrum effort to consolidate authoritarian rule. The Texas GOP’s move to follow Trump’s “advice” andsteal five House seats via racist gerrymandering, and the federal government taking over the DC police and deploying the National Guard in the nation’s capital are only the most blatant of their actions.
Fortunately, resistance momentum has accelerated in both numbers and militancy as well. For example,anti-ICE rapid responses have become larger and more sophisticated.MoveOn added its weight to the campaign to get young progressives to “Run for Something.” Trans rights were a special focus at Pride marches across the country, which generally displayed a “defiant stance” against MAGA efforts to roll back LGBTQ+ rights. Black and other anti-racist formations led the way in the nationwide Good Trouble Lives On actions on July 17, the five-year anniversary of SNCC leader and Congressman John Lewis’ death. A host of national organizing networks launched The Big Betrayal: How We Fight Forward initiative in response to the Big Ugly Bill with a mass call on July 30.
In response to the Texas gerrymander, a Fight the Trump Takeover National Day of Action saw protests in dozens of cities. Spontaneous protests by DC residents against the government’s move are being reported as this article is being written and denunciations of the move are coming in from across the country.
Amid the uptick in resistance, the new Battleground Alliance PAC and One Million Rising initiatives are aiming to scale up coordinated progressive action on both the electoral and non-electoral fronts. Meanwhile Zohran Mamdani’s shellacking of Andrew Cuomo to become the Democratic Party nominee for mayor of New York City has energized (and educated!) progressives nationwide by taking an approach that is both transformative and immensely popular. Mamdani’s win has had an especially important impact on the fight to move Palestinian rights central to the progressive agenda, making a big contribution to what is now a “dam has burst” moment, according to key Palestine solidarity fighters Yousef Munayyer and Mouin Rabbani.
Strategic non-cooperation and flipping the House
On July 16, Indivisible held the first mass call in its ambitious new initiative, “One Millon Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism.” Aiming to train one million people in the strategic logic and practice of non-cooperation, this effort draws from the work of the Horizons Project and others onhow civil resistance can undermine the pillars of authoritarian rule.
One Million Rising doesn’t intend to compete with or replace the many nonviolent resistance efforts already underway in communities across the country. Rather, organizers hope to tap the energy of the surge of new people being drawn to activism and to increase the scale, sophistication, and coordination of anti-authoritarian actions by orders of magnitude. The second and third mass calls also drew thousands of participants; recordings of each, as well asresources and action toolkits, can be found here.
On the electoral side, on the same day as the first One Million Rising call, a labor-backed coalition launched a major working-class effort to flip 35 or more House seats in the 2026 mid-terms. Initiating organizations of the Battleground Alliance PAC include the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); Communication Workers of America (CWA); Working Families Party; Planned Parenthood Votes; Indivisible; MoveOn; American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); Peoples Action; and Popular Democracy in Action. Main Street Action has since joined the effort.
This $50 million effort will “target their efforts toward mobilizing voters who have been hit the hardest by the Republican agenda … parents who will lose healthcare for their kids, families struggling after [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] cuts, seniors not being able to afford their medication, people struggling with higher utility bills, and workers who’ve watched billionaires get tax breaks while their wages stay flat. They’re not just participating; they’re at the center of leading this effort to take back control and make their voices heard at the ballot box,” according to the PAC’s launch statement.
Like several other recent initiatives launched by social justice partisans (for example, The Medicaid Union and Standing for Democracy) and the upcoming Workers Over Billionaires Labor Day protests and Make Billionaires Pay actions sponsored by The Women’s March – Our Feminist Future, these efforts are focused on the fight against MAGA. They demonstrate with on-the-ground activity that progressives are the most combative sector of the anti-MAGA coalition and the most capable of engaging people alienated from mainstream politics. This is a crucial component of expanding the base and influence of progressive politics.
Another crucial component of our block and build work is direct contention with the centrist and pro-corporate wings of the anti-MAGA coalition whose main political vehicle is the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. On that front, the most dramatic breakthrough for the progressive movement and the US Left since at least 2020—Zohran Mamdani’s big win in New York City—models a path with tremendous strategic potential.
Mamdani shows how it’s done
Numerous assessments have been offered of how Mamdani pulled off his earthquake victory, and the resulting lessons for progressives and socialists across the country; among the best are Waleed Shahid’s piece in The Nation and Eric Blanc’s in Jacobin.
Shahid notes how the ground was prepared for Mamdani’s effort by a decade of organizing starting with Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign and continuing with the rise of New York City DSA and the Justice Democrats’ work to elect AOC and Jamaal Bowman. He stresses in this paradigm the rise of “a new kind of Muslim American politics—rooted in solidarity, visible in public, and grounded in power, not just presence.” Many of the details of that development, such as the deep community organizing done by Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), DRUM Beats, and CAAAV-Organizing Asian Communities, are covered by Jasmine Gripper and Lena Pervez Afridi in the June 21 episode of Convergence’s Block & Build podcast, “How Zohran Won.”
Blanc summarizes many of the ingredients that Mamdani wove together into a winning campaign: a commitment to economic populism and laser focus on making New York City affordable; a “tireless ground game of 50,000 volunteers and the New York CityDemocratic Socialists of America (DSA) and other allied organizations;” a brilliant attention-grabbing social media campaign whose “secret sauce” was not primarily technical but “political: an authentic messenger armed with a compelling platform;” successfully building a left-liberal coalition largely via the cross-endorsement of Brad Lander; and crucial inroads into organized labor (with almost all the unions that endorsed Cuomo switching to Mamdani since the primary). Overall, Blanc argues:
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 ultraleftism was anathema to this campaign.
There are few other places where political conditions and the broad Left’s level of development allow for duplicating Mamdani’s achievement. Even in New York City the fight with establishment Democrats is far from over, with all too many joining Republicans, Wall Street and real estate moguls, and apologists for Israeli genocide in a crusade to defeat Mamdani in November’s general election.
But the impact of Mamdani’s breakthrough win in the primary cannot be undone. Progressives and socialists across the country are wrestling with ways to apply the lessons of Mamdani’s experience to the specific conditions (including the level of development of the Left) in their localities. And the fight ahead in New York, even with all its dangers, has the potential to expand Mamdani’s base of support, build cooperation among unions that were on opposite sides in June, and yield even more lessons for the bitter contention within the Democratic Party that lies ahead.
A tectonic shift in support for Palestine
One thread from Mamdani’s campaign deserves special attention. Cuomo centered antisemitism in his attacks on Mamdani, trying to tar him with that label for terming Israeli actions a genocide and refusing to exempt Israel from his belief that only states in which all citizens have equal rights have a “right to exist.”
That Mamdani overcame this smear in the city with more Jews than any other except Tel Aviv marks a political earthquake. It demonstrates how much attitudes about Israel and Palestine are shifting—and in turn it has spurred them to shift further. Mamdani’s win shows that a pro-Palestine stance is not only morally just but politically forward-looking. A bombshell poll released by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project on July 29 reinforced the point. It showed that Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian rights stance was an important factor in his getting the votes of more than 60% of his supporters, and that among primary voters overall, 78% said Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and 79% supported restricting US weapon shipments to Israel. A poll by Zenith Research and Public Progress. Solutions shows Mamdani with a 17-point lead among New York Jewish voters going into the general election.
These New York results are part of a massive shift underway nationwide. A new Gallup poll shows support for Israeli dropping to unprecedented lows. Only 32% of all those polled support Israel’s military action in Gaza, and this only because 71% of Republicans do. Among Independents, support has dropped to 25% and among Democrats the figure is a mere 8%. For the first time, a majority of US people disapprove of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Especially striking is the breakdown by age. Among all respondents 18-34, only 6% have a favorable view of Netanyahu and 9% approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
This long-overdue tectonic shift is already having an impact on the national discourse and politicians’ votes. Mainstream media coverage in the last week or two has started to use the term genocide without scare quotes and run stories explicitly blaming Israel for the human catastrophe in Gaza and contrasting Zionist values with liberal democratic ones. And a majority of Senate Democrats for the first time voted to support restricting arms sales to Israel.
It’s infuriating that it has taken so long to get to this point. But more importantly, it is a tribute to the work of all those who have participated in the movement for Palestinian rights, which has refused to bow to repression, slander, and racist and Islamophobic demonization. Now it is urgent to intensify that movement: to combine protest and education on a mass scale to stop the escalation in killing now being promised by the Israeli government and end every aspect of the genocide currently underway. And to go further by making defense of Palestinian human and national rights an integral part of the progressive action agenda, taking that stance into the 2026 and 2028 electoral campaigns, and fighting like hell for it to be a key component of the program of a post-MAGA government.
…
“Pushing MAGA Out: The Resistance Ramps Up” ran originally in Convergence Magazine.
What Follows A Stolen Election? Not Much!
By Mike Miller
Preface
“Not much” seems to be the answer to my question above. Bush Jr. and a friendly Supreme Court stole Florida from Al Gore, which gave Bush the Presidency. Richard Daley, Sr. and his Democrat and Republican counterparts in “machine” cities across the country used to steal elections regularly. Robert E. Caro’s impeccably researched biography of Lyndon Johnson details how LBJ stole his first Texas Senate race.
The evidence is abundant that Trump and his allies (Republican secretaries of state, majority Republican state legislatures and governors, the supreme court, vigilantes to intimidate people at polling places, etc) will seek to steal the ’26 election. In response, there are cries of outrage but no one has a contingency plan for action if, in fact, that theft becomes reality.
A contingency plan would say:
— If “A” (electoral victory by the center/left despite Trump, et al’s effort to steal the election), celebration and pursuit of a people’s agenda that Trump will veto leading to a strong movement for a “progressive” Democratic Party presidential nominee in 2028. (I see almost no evidence for this possibility.)
— If “B” (anticipated defeat becomes a reality that was anticipated and planned for so that our side isn’t off balance as a result of it). Defeat will make abundantly clear that our formal, Constitutional ELECTORAL, democracy IS NOT WORKING. That possibility was envisaged when the first Ten Amendments–the Bill of Rights–were fought for and won in 1791.
Such a plan would be made public now so that significant numbers of Americans can adopt as their own the out-of-the-box framework of non-electoral action to accomplish electoral purposes.
In fact, the threat of a tactic can be worse than its implementation. Let the MAGA forces ruminate on how to deal with it. The military might shoot demonstrators in public squares; it doesn’t know how to run street cars and buses, operate supermarkets or teach high school.
A Lesson from the Past
The pre-election drive for voter participation is now gaining momentum. What happens to momentum when it is defeated?
In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) defeat at the national Democratic Party Convention was followed by disarray in “The Movement”: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC’) collapse (except for Lowndes County) was irreversibly underway: individuals dropped out (drugs, alcohol, withdrawal, radical rhetoric, super-militancy). SNCC’s legendary Mississippi Project Director Bob Moses dramatically withdrew from SNCC, telling his comrades at a late ’64 staff meeting (I was there), “you can have ‘Moses’; I will from now on be ‘Parris’–adopting his mother’s maiden name.
MFDP Convention delegates returned to Mississippi and campaigned for the Lyndon Johnson/Hubert Humphrey ticket. They also adopted a January campaign targeted at the House seating of the newly elected Mississippi Congressmen because Blacks had been denied the right to vote. It had no chance of success.
In 1968, an integrated Mississippi Convention delegation was celebrated as a victory. It was a partial one. MFDP delegates constituted only one quarter of the them. MFDP’s 1964 program for radical economic reform (in addition to formal democratic reform) was omitted from the ‘68 state reform platform.
In retrospect, the 1964 Convention Challenge may have been a premature effort from the outset. Maybe it wouldn’t have ended in disaster if there had been a contingency plan based on the possible refusal to seat the MFDP delegation. A contingency plan might have lead to something else already adopted as an alternative strategy–and readied people for the possibility that defeat would take place. (When you anticipate a failure/defeat and have a strategy to respond to it, the result is not so devastating, and may even open new possibilities. For example, a union leadership might propose to the membership a contract agreement the leaders know will be defeated by the rank-and-file. That defeat is used to build unity behind a strike that can be won.)
Contingency Planning
There is now, as far as I can tell, no contingency plan for the ‘2026 national election being stolen. To meet after defeat and then plan a next step is not sufficient to anticipate and contain disillusionment that otherwise happens after major defeat—negativism, defeatism, factionalization, crazy militancy, dropping out and on-and-on.
Such a contingency plan could include non-electoral mass-based action that the people of the country wisely anticipated as a balance against political corruption, namely the Bill of Rights— adopted by three-fourths of the states by December, 1791.
For such a contingency plan to be put into operation the day after a stolen election requires widespread discussion of its potential necessity beginning yesterday. A center-left alliance against autocracy can now be created that would engage non-electoral political groups in voter education, (attempted) registration and get-out-the-vote action. That would require of “the left” that it participate in electoral activity that it might otherwise disdain.
The trade off for that participation would be pre-2026 election agreement by centrists on a strategy of mass disruption to bring the system to a halt until a new election or some equivalent is held. The non-electoral campaign’s central elements would be nonviolent direct action and economic action (general strikes that begin with 10 minute work stoppages and escalate, slowdowns, sick-outs, boycotts, etc until the election results are thrown out).
Success in persuading centrists to enter such an agreement in effect moves them away from their present compulsive centrism (as Texas Populist Jim Hightower put it, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”) Failure to so persuade them makes self-evident their lack of an effective response to MAGA.
The Current Warnings Don’t Go Far Enough
In his New York Times Opinion piece (8/14/25), James Bouie writes, “for reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.”
In the letter to supporters, “How does a man like this get elected,” Bernie Sanders writes, “[D]espite his horrific…policies, …Trump has become the ‘agent of ‘change’.”
So far, so good.
Sanders then lists the outrageous housing, health care, education, food system, income and wage, tax, foreign policy (he could have added climate change and environment) policies that are leading us to disaster, and proposes new directions in these and other areas.
So far, so good.
He asks, “[W]here do we go from here?…[W]e need to think big…But how?”
Not so good.
Having “courage to fight back” is not enough. He doesn’t tell us how he thinks we can do that.
The 8/13/25 Hartmann Report concludes, “Our best hope is that, when the crackdowns come, enough of us can mobilize [emphasis added] to bring about a rebooting of our democracy like average people did in South Korea last year as they restored democracy to that nation.”
“Mobilize” to do what?
Polls showing Trump’s declining voter support are irrelevant if the election is stolen and there is no plan to retrieve what was illegally taken.
Conclusion
Think outside the box. That’s what Trump and his allies have been doing. What many observers consider his irrationality is, in fact, the rational plan of a man and movement who/that recognizes tearing down the formal democratic system requires the activities in which they (including the Supreme Court) now engage.
It takes Trump about five minutes to make a statement that engenders an almost-endless response in mainstream and progressive media, from Democratic politicians, and from public interest groups. He moves on to his next outrage. His strategy is to stir chaos.
It is important to recognize that narcissists and otherwise mentally disturbed people can also think rationally about what we might understand as irrational ends. Assassins make careful plans to kill.
The time for action outside the electoral framework and inside the Bill of Rights framework is near; its possibility should be widely discussed now so that the broad base of support it requires can be built.
Postscript
Several concerns have been raised regarding what I wrote above. Below are the principal ones, and my responses.
1. My piece doesn’t respond to the actual time, place and conditions of our current political realities.
The present reality is that Trump and his allies are well on the way to stealing the 2026 election and as far as I can see there is no place in our formal political system to stop him: not Congress, not the Judiciary, and certainly not the Executive. Fighting on those battlegrounds is fighting on his turf.
2. Now’s the time to get out and work to defeat Trump and his allies.
I agree. We can chew gum and walk at the same time.
Without a contingency plan, sectarianism and/or withdrawal are the likely outcomes of defeat. I think 1964-1980 is filled with examples of that. Electoral victories were followed by elected politician betrayals of promises made during the election. The betrayals lead to disillusionment, especially because nothing independent of electoral politics was being built before, during and after voting.
Further, the identity politics agenda subordinated a majority rule/minority rights and economic justice program because the latter was overwhelmed by the former.
In the last 50-or-so years I’ve voted for lesser-of-two-evils Democrat (and some good ones too). I also spent most of my time trying to build community organizations that could shape politician’s platforms–like the civil rights movement did in its day, and enforce those platforms if endorsed politicians won elections. We lack those mechanisms for enforcement which, in turn, leads to the disillusionment that is expressed in the Trump vote.
To state my principal point in a different way, you have to have options, especially when the other side cheats. Those options are to be found in mass nonviolent disruptive action and in economic action like strikes, boycotts, slow-downs, sick outs, work-to-rule and other tactics. My favorite is general strikes beginning with widespread 10 minute work stoppages, and rapidly escalating to strikes that last hours, days or weeks until victory is won (or defeat certain).
If there isn’t a powerful, believable, option, a stolen election will be followed by the defeats our side underwent beginning in the mid-1960s. They were expressed in slogans like, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh…” or “Burn, Baby, Burn”; in activities like burning bras, draft cards and neighborhoods They contributed to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.
We have been on a slow, steady, painful, road to where we are now. Doing what we did, only better, isn’t sufficient to change and reverse directions. As Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
That’s true even if the repeat performance is a better one.
…
Why Lelo Juarez Chose Self-Deportation
By David Bacon
Copyright David Bacon
When I spoke with Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, known as “Lelo,” while he was imprisoned in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, he had to be very careful about what he said. Calls to detainees are monitored. “My freedom of speech here is very limited,” he warned me. Lelo had been held there since his detention in March, and I interviewed him in July.
Two weeks after our conversation Lelo agreed to “voluntary departure”-the term used by immigration authorities for self-deportation. In early August, by telephone from Santa Cruz Yucucani, his hometown in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, he was able to describe the conditions in this enormous immigrant detention center, which today holds more than 1,500 people awaiting deportation.
“It’s a really terrible place,” Lelo told me. He said bad food was probably the worst problem: The Geo Group, a private corporation that runs the detention center, is supposed to provide three meals a day, but often the last meal would come at one or two in the morning. “The rice was hard, like it never touched hot water, and the beans were never cooked all the way,” Lelo said. “That was the main food they gave us. Chicken was so undercooked that sometimes it dripped blood, and people got sick during the night. One time everybody turned in their trays and we wouldn’t take the food.”
The second week he was there, Lelo started having vision problems because the lights were always on at night, making it hard to sleep. He signed up for the “sick call” list to get eye drops. “I waited a long time to see a doctor,” he recalled, “and finally an officer told us to go back to our unit. They only had one doctor, and we weren’t going to be seen. After that I didn’t sign up again, but other folks in my unit would wait hours and hours and still not get seen. I’d share an apple or something sweet for people who were diabetic. But day after day it was the same thing. Sign up and maybe tomorrow somebody will see you.”
The Tacoma immigrant detention center is run by the Geo Group, founded as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation, with ties to U.S. intelligence agencies going back to the Cold War. Since discovering in the 1980s the huge profits to be made in federal contracts, the company has become one of the two largest corporations running immigrant detention centers in the United States. Much of those profits are earned by keeping operating costs at a minimum; as a result Geo has been repeatedly charged with short staffing at the prisons it runs. “Geo does this on purpose to make it hard for folks, while maximizing their profit by not having more employees,” Lelo said. Bad conditions serve to coerce people detained at the Northwest Detention Center into self-deportation.
Self-deportation is an important arm of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy. According to Mark Krikorian, executive director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies, “Any successful strategy to cut the illegal population significantly will have to combine two things: ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arresting and removing illegal aliens, and other illegal aliens leaving on their own . . . . Preliminary data suggest nearly one million illegal aliens have departed the country since President Donald Trump’s Inauguration.”
That number is highly questionable, and the center provides no data to support it. It is undeniable, however, that the government is pressuring people to self-deport. Fear of deportation and family separation, as well as hopelessness about any prospect for legal status, has led many people to leave the United States.
In a highly-publicized immigration raid at Glass House Farms on California’s central coast, chaos and fear were deliberately used as weapons to terrorize workers and their families. One man, Jaime Alaniz Garcia, fell to his death desperately fleeing ICE agents. The terror produced by the raids is also a weapon to get people to leave on their own. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the Southern California region, responded to criticism of the Glass House raid. “Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport,” he said. “Now we’ll help things along a bit.”
“They are trying all they can to get folks out of the country,” Lelo said, “whether through deportation or asking folks to self deport.” Inside the Tacoma detention center, ICE agents took another tactic. “They went to my unit three times, saying that if people gave up their right to fight their case and self-deported, they’d send them $1,000 after sixty days. People got really mad because a lot have lived here for many years. We have families and we’re part of the community. What is $1,000 compared to twenty years of your life?”
Nevertheless, the constant pressure took its toll on his family, and eventually on Lelo himself. In early March his family decided to return to their hometown, Santa Cruz Yucucani. At that point, Lelo had not yet been detained. Later, as he languished inside, he described their reasons.
“It was a hard decision because my parents had lived in Washington for eighteen years,” he explained. “My siblings were born in the United States. They were going to school there. All their friends are there. But as we saw ICE begin to round up more and more folks, we did not want to put my family through the trauma of separation. So we decided they would leave, which they did on March 16 from Santa Maria, [California, a town from which many people leave to go back to Mexico] on the bus. It’s hard to describe the feeling. We always had this plan for my siblings to go to school and have a better life, more opportunity than my parents had. It was like we had to start all over again.”
Then, on March 25, as he was driving his compañera to work in the tulip fields of the Washington Bulb Company, in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle, he was stopped by immigration agents. When he asked for a warrant, they broke the car window and dragged him out. Within hours he was in the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, and in line for a flight back to Mexico. Only a wave of public outrage, including calls from U.S. Representative Rick Larson, Democrat of Washington, and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, also a Democrat, kept him from being loaded onto a deportation plane.
Those protests acknowledged that Lelo’s arrest was not random. ICE later said he had been detained because of an earlier deportation order, but Lelo called the charge a pretext. “Before my detention, I had no idea that there was a removal order for me from 2017, under the first Trump Administration. If they’d really wanted to remove me, they could have, but they didn’t. They waited until Trump was President again to go after me. I was never given the opportunity to respond or fully defend myself. There was never any due process.”
Lelo was targeted because of his history as a farmworker organizer. He was a cofounder of Washington’s new union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and helped organize many of the campaigns by Community to Community, the state’s advocate for agricultural workers. One of these was for a cap on rents, and another for the Keep Washington Working Act to protect the rights of farmworkers.
But it was his public criticism of the H-2A contract labor program that earned Lelo the greatest hostility among growers. That program allows growers to recruit workers in Mexico for a season’s work, after which they must return. Workers are very vulnerable, and can be fired and blacklisted for organizing, or simply for failing to meet production quotas. Almost one-third of farmworkers in Washington state have now been replaced by contractors using the H-2A program.
“Growers like WAFLA [the Washington Farm Labor Association-a large labor contractor] know me very well,” he recalled, “and were very upset at our opposition to the H-2A program. I would talk to local workers about losing jobs because of it, and to the H-2A workers themselves when they called to report abuses. That made me a big target. But I don’t regret anything I’ve done. It was all supporting workers.”
In the end, however, months in detention took their toll. In mid-July Lelo decided to leave the country voluntarily. He and many others faced the same situation, worn down by the impact of dehumanizing conditions and hopelessness for any solution to their cases. “It’s very hard to bring legal cases from within this place,” he explained during our conversation while he was still in Tacoma. “There are many people here and they’re all losing [their cases] and getting deported. Two people even won their cases, and they’re going to be deported anyway. A lot of people here have legal status. They have good jobs. They’ve been paying taxes for many years. But at the end of their last hearing, they get removed from the country anyway.”
In that sense, Lelo’s case was no different. “Winning from within just doesn’t seem possible,” he said. “Even if I went through all the legal steps and had a decision in my favor, there is no guarantee I will be released after that. Signing the voluntary departure is the only option I have.”
At the end of the ordeal, however, Lelo found himself in Santa Cruz Yucucani, an Indigenous Mixtec community that he only remembered as a child, but which still remembered him. “I went to town a couple of days ago and people recognized me and invited me to eat,” he told me. “I’ve had a lot of really good food here. There are other families in Santa Cruz that have come back as well, and folks are excited that we’re back.”
Lelo’s family are farmers, and on his return he began going out to the fields with his father and grandfather, where they plant corn, green beans, pumpkins, and bananas. “My grandpa sells a little bit of it, but it’s mostly just for the family. We clean the fields and take care of the crops.”
As a union organizer of farmworkers in the United States who labor for wages in industrial agriculture, it has been a revelatory experience. “The big difference is that here we don’t work for anybody, because the fields belong to the family,” he says. “We can take a break whenever we want, and when it gets hot we just go find shade. It’s a huge change from being a farmworker working for a boss.”
But he doesn’t forget the union and the community from which he was taken by force. “I haven’t stopped feeling part of an immigrant community that’s trying to defend itself. As a farmworker it’s heartbreaking to see pictures of the military chasing us in the fields. We’ve never been able to legalize, and now we have to leave. It’s not right. People have to pay attention to what’s happening and speak up. Don’t look the other way.”
In the meantime, though, Lelo simply has to live. “Tomorrow I’m going to the banana field. It’s going to be the first time in eighteen years,” he says.
…
This piece originally ran in The Progressive Magazine