A Path Forward
By Max Elbaum
Only a new governing coalition capable of expanding political democracy and beginning a process of structural change can push MAGA back to the margins. Lessons from the 2020 election and the Biden years help show a path toward that goal.
We have a treacherous road to travel before we can push MAGA out of political power. But even as we prioritize resistance to the administration’s daily barrage we need an eyes-on-the-prize vision of a post-MAGA government. What kind of governing bloc is both possible to achieve and capable of providing more than temporary respite from fascism’s forward march?
For determining what is essential in such a government and charting a path to reach that goal, there is a lot to learn from the dynamics of the 2020 election and what did and did not happen during the Biden administration.
There is no going back
The Biden years and the 2024 election made it clear that an administration unable or unwilling to push through major political and economic changes cannot beat back authoritarianism. The pre-2016 status quo (neoliberalism anchored by U.S. global hegemony) was and is unsustainable. An exit from that order either in the direction of autocracy/fascism or robust democracy and people-over-profit economics has been on the agenda since the 2008 financial crisis.
The strategists and power-brokers who laid the groundwork for Trump 2.0 have understood this for at least a decade. That’s why the MAGA bloc, having captured all three branches of the federal government, has been able to move so quickly toward the goal of consolidating authoritarian rule.
The narcissistic obsessions of their demagogue-in-chief (tariffs, vendettas against Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift, etc.) are weak points in their blitzkrieg. There-emergence of the anti-MAGA majority and increasingly large protest actions are major obstacles in their path. With a further uptick in resistance—including non-compliance and other actions aimed at the “key pillars” of U.S. authoritarianism—along with heightened popular disapproval, it may be possible to preserve significant democratic space, including enough space for competitive elections and the basic right to protest.
If our resistance efforts achieve that goal, breaking MAGA’s grip on power at the federal level and weakening its strength at the state level is the next urgent step. But even that is not enough. If today’s Project 2025 regime is not replaced by a governing coalition that moves aggressively on a program of political democratization that prioritizes racial and gender justice, pro-working class economic reform, and an end to U.S. forever wars, MAGA will again brand itself as the change agent the country needs and come roaring back.
Elected officials and an energized mass base
The governing coalition we need must have clout both inside and outside the political system.
On the inside, its partisans need to be in elected office at every level. Wielding the power of the presidency and holding majorities in both Houses of Congress is essential, not least to break the power of the current MAGA majority on the Supreme Court. And given the extensive powers reserved for state governments in the U.S. federal system, eliminating some of the 23 GOP state trifectas and winning our own trifectas in 15-20 states by 2028 is a necessary target as well.
The capacity to exercise power outside the formal political system is equally important. No progressive program will make it from policy to law to tangible change on the ground (and no new coalition will come to power in the first place) without constant pressure and active participation by an energized grassroots base. And that energy can only be sustained by a cluster of combative, mass-based organizations implementing a common strategy which their members shape and “own.”
Only this combination of elements can sustain the kind of “co-governance” dynamic necessary for a durable and accountable governing coalition.
A short-lived glimpse in 2020
For getting to that kind of multi-leveled governing bloc, there are important lessons from the 2020 election. That contest put President Biden in the White House, flipped the Senate to Democratic control (with Vice President Harris able to break the 50-50 Senate tie) and expanded the Squad to six as Democrats retained control of the House.
Going into that election, mass protest was at a fever pitch. The day after Donald Trump’s first inauguration saw the massive Women’s March, at the time the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. Militant protests at airports across the country in response to Trump’s “Muslim ban” were the next high-water mark in the stream of anti-Trump protests. The George Floyd uprising at the height of the pandemic then surpassed the Women’s March and still stands as “very likely the largest collective action ever on U.S. soil.”
Much of the energy unleashed by all this grassroots ferment flowed into the electoral arena, the lion’s share fueling Bernie Sanders’s second presidential campaign. Most organized radical groups in the country backed Bernie’s insurgent effort, either participating directly in the campaign structure or using their own distinct structures for electoral work. The result was a leap in the sophistication with which existing and new formations approached electoral work and in the connection and cooperation among different groups.
Though Bernie did not win the nomination, the scale of his support (and to a lesser degree, Elizabeth Warren’s) moved the party leftwards and forced most primary candidates to support Medicare for All. It put Bernie in position to represent U.S. progressives in negotiations with the winning Biden team over the character of the general election campaign and at least some components of administration policy. This took the form of joint task forces which produced a detailed policy statement that included recommendations for funding universal pre-kindergarten, expanding Social Security, raising the national minimum wage, and eliminating cash bail, among many other long-sought progressive programs.
A second factor that produced what amounted to a Biden-Bernie alliance was recognition by at least some sectors of Democratic Party establishment that a shift away from neoliberalism was in their own class and political interest. The Hewlett Foundation’s 2020“ Economy and Society Initiative to support growing movement to replace neoliberalism” was the clearest expression of that sector’s viewpoint.
The result of these two factors was a general election campaign that did not rely exclusively on an anti-MAGA message. The prospect of winning changes that would benefit the majority of workers, poor people, and constituencies facing special oppression was also present. As a result, almost all the organizations that had backed Bernie (or Warren) threw down against MAGA in the general election and provided a big part of the margin of victory in battleground states.
And after the election victory, the Biden administration’s initial legislative priority—the Build Back Better plan—included numerous provisions long advocated by progressives, drawing from, among other efforts, the extensive grassroots organizing for a Green New Deal.
Falling short leads to falling back
The political trajectory after that, however, was downhill. Any brief summary is over-simplified. But the central dynamic is clear enough.
Quick to recover from the wave of disapproval that followed January 6, MAGA practiced all obstruction, all the time. The Biden administration, still trapped in the fantasy that the “traditional norms” of U.S. politics were operative, tried to reason with GOP so-called “moderates” and the reactionary Manchin-Sinema duo within the Democratic ranks. The narrowness of the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate was a real problem; conciliating the obstructors didn’t work and the Inflation Reduction Act and other measures that finally passed were a shadow of the original “Build Back Better” proposal.
The Biden team proved inept even at promoting what they did achieve. And then, starting two years in, Biden made a whole series of right turns. Administration messaging on rebuilding the economy shifted from benefitting the majority to competing with China. Biden and other mainstream Democrats capitulated to MAGA’s anti-immigrant crusade. The President bear-hugged Netanyahu and became the main enabler of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Though increasingly unpopular and frail, Biden refused to withdraw until it was too late for a competitive presidential primary, thereby preventing the launch of a campaign that might have energized increasingly alienated progressives as Bernie did in 2016 and 2020. By the time of the 2024 general election, Harris and mainstream Democratic candidates for the House and Senate had little to run on besides anti-MAGA sentiment and abortion rights.
The political situation today is worse than 2016. A cadre of loyal MAGA operatives is running the federal government and implementing a well-prepared plan. Mainstream Democrats, with a few individual exceptions, are in near-total disarray, unable to formulate much less agree upon or carry out a serious opposition strategy. The broad Left has grown in both size and sophistication compared to 2016, and important sections of it are working together and utilizing the “Block and Build” strategic framework. But we are still playing catch-up and only since the Hands-Off demonstrations in April that we are able to draw strength from an outpouring of bottom-up protest. Yet intensifying climate change and the rapid deployment of AI are speeding up the things-must-change calendar.
Stay grounded and go beyond 2020
Digging ourselves out of this hole requires a process that accurately assesses the difficult balance of forces, learns from what worked to drive politics forward in 2020, and goes a lot further.
Turning public disapproval into enough actions and votes to stop MAGA’s advance is the immediate priority…we are in a tougher spot than we were in 2020, so we need to reach for the additional types of protest in our arsenal, such as strikes and other workplace actions, civil disobedience, disruptive protests, and organized noncompliance.
MAGA’s drive for unlimited power is moving fast. But one of the reasons for MAGA’s haste is that its program is unpopular and grows more so by the week. Turning public disapproval into enough actions and votes to stop MAGA’s advance is the immediate priority. Every rapid response to an ICE raid, every town hall calling out those who vote to cut Medicaid, every lawsuit/picket line combination to defend federal workers, every protest against sending arms to Israel makes a difference by energizing those already opposed to MAGA, exploiting the fissures among Trump voters, or both. But we are in a tougher spot than we were in 2020, so we need to reach for the additional types of protest in our arsenal, such as strikes and other workplace actions, civil disobedience, disruptive protests, and organized noncompliance.
If the next 18 months of resistance efforts succeed in protecting the electoral process, big gains are possible in 2026 and then 2028 with an all-out “margin of effort.” For a new governing coalition to be more than a holding action, winning the presidency and larger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate than were won in 2020 are necessary—but not sufficient. The strength of progressives relative to the corporate and centrist factions in the Democratic Party must be significantly greater than in 2020. Protecting every incumbent who will be targeted by AIPAC and the Crypto lobby, and replacing several incumbents with Squad-like progressives, are realistic goals.
It will take longer than four years to build an organizing and media infrastructure and financial base strong enough to make progressives a majority of non-MAGA Representatives and Senators. But we can and should aim to punch above our weight in numbers seated in Washington. Key planks in our program for structural change (Medicare for All, expansion of voting rights and an end to the Citizens United role of money in politics, overhaul of the tax system to tax the rich, PRO-Act and related expansions of trade union rights) command majority support.
As struggles against authoritarianism intensify, participants and their supporters move toward more combativeness and more openness to radical ideas. And though it is dormant, the willingness among mainstream Democrats to explore a shift away from neoliberalism has not completely disappeared.
Toward synergy: a presidential run, Left unity, and grassroots organizing
These factors could give us leverage in contending with the corporate and centrist forces for influence in the anti-MAGA front. A key tactic will be finding a progressive to make a serious bid for the presidential nomination.
Win or lose, an insurgent campaign promoting an anti-oligarchy, pro-working class program will be essential for gaining more influence on the 2028 Democratic election campaign and incoming administration than progressives had in 2020. It will allow us to define the election as a chance to both repudiate MAGA and make the shift away from neoliberalism that was glimpsed but not accomplished in 2020-2021. An insurgent campaign is also needed to increase our influence on U.S. foreign policy, immigration, racial justice, and other issues which are crucial for putting any new governing coalition on a durable foundation.
Maximum Left unity behind the candidate running in the “progressive lane” of the 2028 Democratic primary will be critical. This is another lesson from 2020 (and from Bernie’s 2016 campaign and Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 Rainbow efforts) that is applicable in 2028 and beyond. Given the undemocratic structure of the U.S. electoral system, a presidential campaign is one of the very few ways to galvanize united action by different sectors of the broad Left and project a distinct vision and program before the country.
Thus, it is no surprise that informal discussions are already underway in progressive circles about potential candidates, with many speculating that AOC is positioning herself to fill that spot.
An equally important lesson from Bernie and Jesse’s runs is that grassroots-based organizations with a clear political strategy operating at scale are needed to consolidate the energy unleashed by any insurgent campaign. It is therefore urgent to seize the opportunities that now exist to make leaps forward on that front. The new stirrings of labor militancy and the shift among major unions toward embracing a broader progressive agenda—including opposition to U.S. backing for Israeli genocide—is especially promising. The UAW-led initiative to align contract expiration dates and conduct united labor actions on Mayday 2028 is a potential focal point for activity that starts today. It also holds out the prospect of synergy with a progressive presidential campaign in spring 2028.
There is also potential for accelerating the motion toward strategic alignment and organizational cooperation in the broad Left, especially between groups that already have adopted a power-building strategy that meshes electoral and non-electoral work.
Everything we have will be needed to protect the results of elections if they are competitive and if anti-MAGA wins. Trump did not accept defeat in 2020 and there is no reason to expect today’s GOP to accept defeat in 2026 or 2028.
Putting the pieces together
The challenges we face are daunting. Progressives alone do not have the strength to prevent MAGA from consolidating authoritarian rule. Even the much broader gathering of all anti-MAGA sectors needs to become more combative and united to accomplish that task. And if we succeed in ousting MAGA, the coalition that comes to power will need to have enough strength inside and outside government to kick-start significant changes that are felt on the ground. It is unrealistic to expect that every part of our agenda can be won quickly. But we must win enough to spark the enthusiasm in the majority of the multi-racial and gender-diverse U.S. working class and broader population while at least neutralizing a sizable number of 2024 Trump voters.
All we can say with confidence today is that the strands that could produce such an outcome exist. The anti-MAGA majority is re-emerging. There is motion toward revitalizing the labor movement at both the leadership and rank-and-file levels. Strategic ideas drawn from the experience of fighting authoritarianism in other countries are taking hold within the anti-MAGA opposition. Power-building progressive organizations have grown in sophistication and are united on most elements of a program that could kick-start a cycle of political and economic change. Important voices within the progressive world are locating that program within the deep patterns of U.S. history, promoting the framework of a Third Reconstruction which highlights the synergy between democratic and working-class struggles and the special role of the Black Freedom Movement.
If all these strands mature, we can achieve what today’s circumstances allow and make 2028 a turning point in the long march toward a different world.
…
All photos: Robert Gumpert
This piece originally ran on Convergence, a site well worth checking out
A “No Kings” Snapshot
By The Editors
Kurt Stand from Greenbelt, Maryland
We gathered by Greenbelt’s community center, walked along the town’s streets, past a community garden, past our Honk band – with a tuba, tambourines, and other instruments welcoming all as we arrived – then reaching an overpass where we were chanting, waving signs, cheering on as motorists below greeted us with honking horns.
It would be a fool’s errand to pretend to count numbers – people were constantly coming and going, but hundreds took part, a significant number when you consider that similar rallies at overpasses and in communities throughout Prince George’s and Montgomery County.
Significant too was that it was diverse in age, diverse in background and – though far from fully representative of the City of Greenbelt – more racially diverse than other recent local anti-MAGA events.
Those handmade posters were diverse as well reflecting the range of concerns that brought people out – immigrant rights, trans right, support for Medicare, for peace, defense of federal workers and defense of science with a tone that was alternately mocking: No Kings, No Clowns and angry ICE = SS.
At the core of “No Kings Day,” however, was opposition to illegitimate authority and that was reflected in a sign quoting Book of Samuel 8:18, which, for those not so well-versed in the Bible, proclaims:
When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
Another, reminding us that megalomania in power is nothing new, recalled Louis XIV’s L’etat c’est Moi (I am the state), by providing the appropriate rejoinder:
Tu n’est pas l’etat (“You are not the state”).
Key to the rally and critically important to this moment and the future, was reclaiming our nation’s conflicted heritage. Opposition to illegitimate authority runs like a thread through U.S. history from the time of the American Revolution and the Battle of Lexington and Concord on June 14, 1775, up to the present. It has defined every struggle in recent memory for social, racial and economic justice and is a heritage we ought to acknowledge and defend even as we seek to expand its meaning.
That was in plain view in Greenbelt on June 14, 2025, as lots of U.S. flags were carried along with signs that declared:
Yes to the Magna Carta
We did it 249 years ago — we can do it again
The Constitution Separates Powers for a Reason
I’m old enough to remember “Liberty and Justice for All” was a thing
Perhaps the most important words were on a signs directed at all attending this and other rallies, words to remember in these dangerous times:
Don’t Trust Authority
Trust Each Other.
And, last but not least:
You are the “Solid” in Solidarity.
Molly Martin from Jackson, WY
Longtime community activists in Jackson, Wyoming told me that the “No Kings” protest on June 14 was the largest demonstration the town has ever seen. On a warm, sunny day, hundreds of people filled the sidewalks around the town square.
My friend and I, tourists on our way from the San Francisco Bay Area to Yellowstone National Park, were glad to join the rally. We found a welcoming crowd gathered beneath Jackson’s iconic antler arches.
A speaker addressed the crowd with somber news of lawmakers assassinated in Minnesota. He warned that the Trump regime had made violence a tool of its agenda, and urged everyone present to remain peaceful and safe.
Jackson, a gateway to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, depends heavily on tourism. Locals are deeply concerned about cuts to the National Park Service. NPS workers told me about layoffs and unfilled positions. With summer just beginning, the park system is already stretched thin.
A couple of police cars were parked nearby, but officers only intervened to remind demonstrators to stay on the sidewalks. At one corner, two older women sat calmly on horseback, representing the Jackson police as volunteers. They said the horses were their own, serving no role that day except to receive a steady stream of affectionate pats from passersby.
Douglas Marshall from Bell and Montebello, California
I called this event. Few people showed up, some for fear and some because my rule about no foreign flags “did not align with my values.”
Our mayor, a leader of our large Muslim community, and our Chief of Police, son of immigrants, both expressed their support but did not attend. The Mayor is a Bernie guy.
…
The Italian Labor and Citizenship Referenda of June 8-9
By Salvo Leonardi and Lepoldo Tartaglia
A note from Peter Olney, co-editor of the Stansbury Forum
On Sunday June 8 and Monday June 9 Italians went to the polls nationally to vote on 5 Referendum propositions placed on the ballot by the largest Italian labor federation, the Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Lavoratori (CGIL) and immigrant and citizenship advocacy groups. Four of the referenda concerned labor employment rights and the fifth was an important initiative to speed up the timeline for obtaining Italian citizenship. Two Italian labor leaders, Salvatore Leonardi and Leopoldo Tartaglia have written a very comprehensive summation of the referenda and the disappointing election result for The Stansbury Forum.
June 10th 2025
A resounding, bitter defeat
It’s not easy to explain what happened in Italy on June 8–9, when Italians went to the polls to vote on five referendums, four of which were promoted by the largest trade union confederation, the Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Lavoratori (CGIL). Three would have abrogated previous statutes that were conceived to relax the rules for firing and hiring in favor of the employers. One dealt with subcontracting and social responsibility in the case of accidents at work. The fifth would have reduced from ten to five, the years for resident and regular migrants to obtain full political citizenship.
Italian law sets a 50%+ threshold (quorum) of eligible voters to consider a consultation valid. The proponents and supporters knew that this would be an uphill battle. Recent precedents were not at all encouraging. We live in times when the average turnout at elections has almost everywhere been getting lower, year after year. Aware of that, all the right-wing Italian parties, which have since 2022 ruled the country, called their voters and sympathizers to boycott the consultation. And the support from centre-left parties was not enough to overcome the combination of natural and overt political abstention. At the end of the day, on June 9th, only 30% of those having the right to vote had gone to the urns (around 14 million voters, out of a total number of 46 million eligible electors), with the result that the whole campaign failed.
Despite the CGIL’s mobilizations and organizational effort, witnessed by a massive and generous return to militant action all over the country, from members and activists, the target at the end was largely missed. No quorum, no victory!! It was clearly a lost battle. The substantial silence from the mainstream broadcast and media, during the campaign, had for certain contributed to such a demoralizing result, but it alone cannot serve as a satisfactory explanation. There is in fact a wider problem with the general functioning of our democracy, like other democracies too, with worrying widespread forms of apathy and mass disaffection for whatever concerns are in the political sphere. This occurs even when key social rights are questioned or, as in this case, potentially reestablished to the benefit of wide sectors of the society, who have been long penalized by years of neoliberal and anti-working class policies.
It’s small consolation, but it should be remembered anyway, that the 14 million voters is a much larger number than the membership of 5 million in the CGIL. And it is more votes than what the Meloni right-wing coalition obtained in the last political elections (12,5 million) It was more than what all the centre-left parties, lined up in support of the five referendums, got one year ago, at the European elections (11 million). But one should not make too much of comparisons and draw incorrect conclusions. [1]
The path to the referendums and their substance
In order to qualify a referendum, Italian law can only be abrogative – partial or total – of norms –existing legislation. Promoters have to collect at least 500.000 officially certified signatures, now facilitated by the possibility of electronic signing. CGIL went far beyond that threshold, getting something like 1.3 million signatures for each of the four questions and requests, whereas the promoters of the citizenship’s referendum – a coalition of civil society organizations – were able to quickly collect 630.000 signatures, thanks to the very new opportunities enabled by electronic democracy.
Once delivered, the abrogative claims must be validated by the Italian Supreme Court, which is required to check whether the questions are sufficiently coherent and legally compatible in their formulation. Originally, the consultation should have also included the request to abrogate the so-called “regional differentiated autonomy”, a law that gave to the Regions many powers and responsibilities previously under the purview of the central State. For technical reasons, which would take too long to describe, this additional request was rejected by the Constitutional Court. This was a big detriment to all the other five questions, since this last issue is extremely sensitive in large parts of the Country, and especially where it is considered detrimental, as in the less economically developed regions of the South. Cut off from it, the remaining five issues had lost the main potential draw, in terms of number of voters.
What were these five referenda about, exactly? With regard to the four concerning firing and hiring at work, the intention of the promoters (CGIL) was to drastically reduce precarity, making dismissals more costly than they’ve become after the reforms of 10 years ago, with the return to some old limitations in the use and abuse of the fixed term contracts, as they are not now required to be somehow justified, for the first year, by some technical or organizational need from employers. Furthermore, in order to strengthen the social responsibility and due diligence of all companies, when outsourcing and subcontracting parts of their production cycle, they’d be called on to support extra costs when a worker suffers from an accident at work, in addition to what mandatory coverage exists from the National Institute of Insurance against the Accidents at Work (INAIL).
Surprisingly enough, most of these existing measures, aimed at relaxing the old labor protections and at increasing the work flexibility, were introduced by centre-left Governments, in times when they were inspired by a neoliberal ideology and leadership of the pivotal Democratic Party (PD). Matteo Renzi, Premier at the time (2014-15), and his encompassing labor reform (known as the “Jobs Act”), were the main target of the referendum campaign. Importantly, with the solid support of the new leadership of the PD, after its leftward turn, under the new secretary, Elly Schlein.
More in Detail
1. The first referendum aimed to abolish the legislative decree derived from the Jobs Act (2015), where it replaced the workers’ right to be reintegrated in his job and workplace, in a case where a judge rules that the worker’s dismissal is not based on performance or economic downturn and reorganization This right was guaranteed by the old, famous Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute of 1970, amended in 2012 and then completely abrogated in 2015. Thereafter, for all the employees hired since then, the protection will only consist in getting a monetary compensation, between a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 36 months salary[2], considering seniority, with the only exclusion of discriminatory dismissals, for de facto gender, racial, religious, political, etc. reasons, where the right to be reintegrated remains in force. Voting “yes” aimed to reinsert the right to rehire, as the normal remedy in case of unfair dismissal, with the monetary compensation as the exception.
2. The second question was about the unfair dismissals in small enterprises with less than 16 employees, where the law – considering the close personal implications in the work relationships and the minor financial capacities of the entrepreneurs – has never provided for the reintegration but only for some monetary compensation, between 2 and 6 monthly salaries. Voting “yes” aimed to give the judge the possibility to mandate compensation in excess of 6 months, in consideration of various circumstances, such as the worker’s family composition or the firm’s ability to pay. In the past, the small size of the firm was assumed as an undeniable feature of the limited financial capacity of the business. This is not always the case any longer, as in an era of digital and smart start-ups of a new generation, it’s perfectly possible to formally hire a small number of employees, outsource a lot of freelancers and to produce stratospheric turnover. See the story of the Silicon Valley economy, as an example in this regard.
3. The third referendum aimed to limit the proliferation of the fixed-term contracts, abolishing the laws that, from 2014 onwards, allowed the employer to use this contract for the first 12 months, without giving any technical or organizational justification. For the CGIL, fix-term contracts are today a true plague of the labor market and employment relationships. Most of them have an extremely short duration, especially in the tertiary, service and low pay sectors, with the result of depriving the workers of any possibility to manage their life and making them too vulnerable to get organized or ask for the respect of their rights. Voting “yes” aimed to reintroduce a cause, technical or organizational, since the beginning, when hiring with a fix-term contract. In other words, the objective was to make open-ended, stable contracts, the normal and predominant form of employment.
4. The fourth question asked to eliminate the norms that leave out the culpability by the buyer and contractor for a labor accident occurring in subcontractor facilities. Italy is a country with a very large number of accidents at work, with a tragic daily national average of three fatal accidents. The majority of these fatal accidents occur in small enterprises, usually part of a chain of subcontractors.
5. Not less important was the fifth referendum, aiming to give migrants the right to attain Italian citizenship after five, years as in most of the comparable European countries, instead of the ten years required today. This is a very sensitive issue, affecting something like 2.5 million foreigners regularly living in Italy with their children, attending school, sport activities and everything but excluded from being considered “Italians”.
In the first four questions the number of “yes” was massively prevailing over the “no”, with majorities ranging between 87 and 89 per cent. Of course, don’t forget that most of those against opted for boycotting the consultation, by not going to vote. Remarkably, this was not the case for the fifth question, about migrants and citizenship, where the “No” reached 34.5%.This is a very disappointing result, which leads to some critical and preoccupying reflection about the incidence of xenophobia, also within wide segments of the working class, including the unionized blue collar and centre-left electorate. It’s a worldwide and well-know trend; certainly in the US, in times of mounting Trumpism, but not only there.
Exultation vs. dejection
It’s too early to fully understand and evaluate the consequences of this heavy defeat. Obviously, the right wing Government, parties and media have been exulting, pretending to deduce that “the Italians” approve their politics, against the “ideological” CGIL positions, ignored or rejected by a large majority of the electorate. They flaunt some good employment data, ignoring the true quality of many jobs, terribly affected by precarity and very low wages. Some “reformist” commentators, from neoliberal positions and inspirers or makers of the under scrutiny reforms of 10-15 years ago, such as the former Premier Renzi in person, contested the contents of the referenda, accused it of being outdated and anachronistic, since the true problem today are very low wages, and not job stability. Concern for which, of course, is of great importance to the CGIL too, which is engaged on that topic in collective bargaining. But the CGIL is also aware that workers precarity and worker blackmail are some of the main reasons for such a long-lasting wage stagnation.
Even the referendum instrument itself as it is conceived today is now under question, in the days following the vote Utilized more than in other comparable country in Europe, Italian referenda have always failed to reach the quorum since 1999 – with just one single exception in 2011 (on the water as a public good) – with a very low average participation (below 30%) of those having the right to vote. The threshold of 500.000 signatures, set in a time when the population was of 30 million, seems to be too low and easily reachable, especially now that electronic signatures are allowed, and disproportionate to the millions of votes required to be valid. One of the discussed solutions could be to double the number of signatures and to lower the quorum (40%+1) for the result to be valid.
The mood in the world of the promoters, the day after, is understandably of delusion and dejection. The effort of the big organizational machine had been huge and thus the high hopes, at the eve of the vote. Nevertheless, the willingness to keep on fighting is for certain not dead and buried, as the referenda issues can be considered as a step, though missed, in the everyday struggle to achieving better jobs and workers’ rights. The outcome of this battle has been undoubtedly negative, but its objectives are not deleted from our agenda. We can and must in fact capitalize on some of the good things we achieved with this campaign. The reputation, for instance, of the CGIL and its reliability in representing and advocating the weaker and most vulnerable sectors of our society has been enhanced. To bring the workers’ rights and dignity back again to the top of the list in the public discourse, in a time saddened by wars and epochal challenges, can be also considered a positive. The energy and the enthusiasm was profuse from a new generation of militants and activists who campaigned, street-by-street, house-by-house. The practice of a new model of social movement unionism, open and in alliance or in coalition with other associations of civil society, students and NGOs, as for instance in the intersectional battle for justice on the side of the migrants or young precarious worker women. It was no small feat to have stimulated and pushed the centre-left parties to gather and share a common political campaign – with finally the workers’ rights and conditions as a key identitarian issue – can be listed on the column of the partial success of this story.
Lost is the immediate battle for changing bad laws, what remains is to use the traditional tools and battlefields in the field of industrial relations. With collective bargaining at all levels, as the key arena for union action and the members’ militancy. We don’t give up. La lotta continua
.
[1] The 14 million voters refers to the total turnout for the vote, not the number of voters that supported the abrogative referenda which of course will be less because within that total turnout are voters who voted “no” on some or all of the questions.
[2] The original formula of the 2015 reform was a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 24,but a new Centre-left government increased the formula to its present status in 2018.
…
The Power of Showing Up
By Evie Frankl, Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
“A lot of the people I served with are 100 percent disabled. What if they lose their care? What if they served the country but can now no longer make ends meet?” Reed Radcliffe, 68, who spent two decades in the Navy, told the Washington Post on June 6th, 2025
I’m Evie Frankl
I took the pics at the “Unite All Vets” demo on the National Mall in DC today, the 6th of June 2025.
It was great to be in such a politically, demographically and multigenerational crowd. People were eager to have their photos sent so I texted or email each one.
Drop Kick Murphy played lots of raucous rock versions of old favorites including Which Side are you On and We Shall Overcome.
We heard Cecil Robert’s (UMW).
Big crowd, great weather, lots of flags, angry Republicans
What could be better?
Defending VA Veterans Health Care on D-Day – Thousands of veterans mobilize to oppose the gutting of direct care and the move toward privatization.
By: Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early
The D-Day anniversary on June 6 is a pretty irresistible date for scheduling a protest related to veteran benefits. Eighty-one years ago, American soldiers and their allies stormed ashore in Normandy, establishing a critical beachhead in the military campaign to defeat Adolph Hitler and Nazism.
In World War II’s aftermath, hundreds of thousands of injured veterans were treated back home in a nationwide network of hospitals run by the federal government. Since then, the VA health care system has greatly expanded, and now through the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provides high-quality care to nine million veterans. The majority of those veterans want to see the VHA improved and even expanded.
However, during the first Trump administration, the White House and a bipartisan coalition in Congress decided that veterans’ health care delivery needed to shift to the private sector. After passage of the VA MISSION Act of 2018, Trump’s second VA Secretary, Robert Wilkie—a right-wing southern Republican—claimed that partial VHA privatization would produce “more patient satisfaction and predictability, more efficiency for our clinicians, and better value for taxpayers.”
Using D-Day as a protest peg six years ago, a few veterans and their caregivers challenged this view. Members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Nurses United (NNU), and Veterans for Peace (VFP) staged a “National Day to Save The VA” from privatization. That resulted in modest rallies, press conferences, or informational picketing in only a dozen locations, because the grassroots effort drew little or no support from major veterans’ organizations, the national AFL-CIO, or big-name politicians.
A Renewed Assault
President Trump’s second-term assault on all services provided by federal workers—along with their jobs and bargaining rights—has finally woken up more unions and veterans’ advocates to threats that have faced the VA for more than a decade.
On June 6, 5,000 protestors gathered on the Mall in Washington, D.C., under the banner of Unite for Veterans /Unite for America. The event was sponsored by the Union Veterans Council of the national AFL-CIO and the Chamberlain Network, a non-profit group that hopes the rally will “encourage the administration to make the right decisions for veterans.”
Former service members, including some who belong to AFGE, NNU, National Federation of Federal Employees, and other unions, heard speeches from past or present vets in Congress like Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and former Republican House member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who became a major Trump critic during his first term.
Thousands of people also participated in actions at 225 other locations around the country, including in vet-heavy red states like Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, and Kentucky. Some “watch parties,” organized for real-time viewing of the D.C. event, were held in local union halls to highlight the labor-vet overlap. The grassroots political organization Indivisible was a local partner as well.
The livestream from D.C. was greatly enlivened by the Dropkick Murphys, a group of Celtic punk rockers from Boston who Union Vets Council leader William Attig regularly listened to as an 18-year-old Marine in Iraq.
This pro-labor band got wild applause after performing a new release well suited to the occasion. Its chorus, as belted out by lead singer Ken Casey, asked: “Who’ll stand with us? / Don’t tell us everything is fine / Who’ll stand with us? / Because this treatment is a crime.”
Everything is Fine?
In the run-up to this D-Day, President Donald Trump’s current VA Secretary Doug Collins—like Robert Wilkie before him—has been telling nine million VHA patients that everything is fine, not a crime, despite his planned elimination of more than 80,000 VA jobs later this year.
According to Collins, a former Republican House member from Georgia, Trump “is making it even easier for veterans to get their health care when and where it’s most convenient for them” by letting them choose between in-house doctors and faster referrals to a nationwide network of 1.7 million private-sector providers. Collins’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 clearly favors the latter; it calls for a 50 percent increase in VHA spending on outside care (which already totals $30 billion a year) and an unprecedented 17 percent reduction in direct-care funding.
Since this budgetary math would force cuts to VHA staff, services, and facilities, one purpose of the D-Day rally in D.C. was to sound the alarm about Trump’s renewed privatization push. A speaker who did that very movingly was 43-year-old Matt Stevenson, a primary care physician at the VA Medical Center in Palo Alto.
Making it clear he was speaking in a personal capacity, Stevenson lauded his employer as “a mission-driven, patient-centered, cost-effective, integrated American health care system … which delivers higher-quality care at lower cost than any other system in the country.”
According to Stevenson, under a DOGE-led assault since January, his coworkers around the country have “been disparaged and demoralized … bullied and intimidated” amid “worrisome signs of an attempt to dismantle and privatize the VA.” He argued that “those who would take this public treasure—built over generations, by many hands, working long nights in dark hospitals—and sell it off in the name of choice or modernization or efficiency or political gain” can be stopped if VA defenders “come together around a shared vision.”
Caregivers Quitting
One of the things that inspired some veterans to attend events was learning that their doctors, nurses, or therapists were quitting due to deteriorating workplace conditions under Collins.
David Magnus, a Navy veteran from Pittsburgh, told The Guardian that he traveled to D.C. because his trusted provider revealed her decision to leave the VHA during a recent mental health appointment. Outside a Veterans Memorial Building in San Rafael in northern California, Katie Weber-Linhar, an Army veteran with disabilities, lamented the recent resignation of a popular therapist who treated many vets at an outpatient clinic in Ukiah, in rural Mendocino County.
Weber-Linhar now helps a retired VHA physician hold a weekly protest, attended by patients, family members, and local union members, at a VA outpatient clinic in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County. She and other VA defenders definitely did not get the memo from D.C. rally planners, which stressed that “Unite for Veterans” was not intended to be “an anti-Trump event or a partisan protest.”
Handmade placards in Santa Rosa included one dissing DOGE as a bunch of “Douchebag Oligarchs Grabbing Everything” and others identifying the sign-holder as a “Veteran Against Trump” and critic of “Trump’s America” because of its “Cages for Kids, Cuts for Vets.” Ernie Bergman, a cancer survivor and 77-year-old leader of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) in Marin County, criticized “this current government” for trying to take money away from medical research and innovative treatment “that saved my life.”
VSOs Were MIA
Iraq combat veteran Kristofer Goldsmith, a former staffer for the Vietnam Veterans of America turned podcaster and founder of Task Force Butler, said he was thrilled that “people at the protest in Washington were not the usual suspects. I had people come up to me who had flown in from every part of the country who had never been at a protest before but who wanted to be part of something historic.”
Goldsmith noted, however, that some groups were notable for their official absence—representatives of the “big six” veteran service organizations. Just a few months ago, Goldsmith was much encouraged when the national commander of one of these VSOs—the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW)—urged his 1.4 million members to “march forth” and “stop the bleeding” at the VA. As a life member of the VFW but past critic of overly cautious and conservative VSO behavior, Goldsmith viewed this development as “nothing short of extraordinary.”
On D-Day, however, the VFW, American Legion, and other major vet groups were MIA. According to Goldsmith, there were VSO members at the D.C. rally “in a personal capacity,” but there was no official staff or representation of the “big six.” In Goldsmith’s view, if the big VSOs “were making enough noise and standing up to the cuts in a way that reflects the urgency of the moment, they would have been on the stage with us.”
William Attig, the Union Vets Council leader and a key rally organizer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan before joining a plumbers and pipefitters local in Illinois, said that organizers were working with the VSOs “behind the scenes.” Hopefully these efforts will convince major VSOs to end, what one concerned representative described to the Prospect as their deafening silence on Trump/DOGE/Collins assault on veterans, their dedicated caregivers, and their hard-earned benefits.
The Next Step
The question is what’s next. Attig, among other organizers and attendees, emphasized that this event will be only one of many. It was a “very exciting event that shows what can happen when veterans come together around their issues.”
James Jones, a Gulf War veteran from Boone, North Carolina, who is also a federal employee with the National Park Service, a member of AFGE and of the newly formed Federal Unionists Network, could not agree more. In a post D-Day protest interview with the Prospect, Jones said he traveled from North Carolina to the event because he wants legislators to understand how important the VA has been to veterans like himself.
“I lost friends during the Gulf War, and I’ve dealt with health issues because of exposure to… you name it,” Jones said. “Airborne toxins, oil well fire smoke, burn pits, depleted uranium residue. I’ve been a VA patient since 1993 and the VA has been beneficial to me because they understand PTSD, military trauma, and everything else.”
Jones said he hopes that veterans will keep up the pressure. “We have to call our elected representatives, keep going to rallies, and join these groups that are fighting for veterans. Secretary Collins is trying to convince people that the VA is a bloated agency. It’s not—they’re thousands of positions short. The government needs to keep the promise it made to veterans. We served our country and now they’re breaking their promise to take care of us. We can’t accept that.”
…
The piece by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon originally ran in The American Prospect
On June 14th, this Saturday, it’ll be time for all of us to show up around the country. Check out sites here
…
Condemning ICE Raids and the Arrest of David Huerta
By Devra Weber and David Bacon
Dear friends and family,
As DT sends in the National Guard and is threatening to send in the Marines, I wanted to send a note.
I was at a rally called by the unions today, in which congresspeople, members of the City Council and UFW cofounder Dolores Huerta all spoke. There were no police and it was peaceful.
I understand that ICE will be in LA 30 days.. They are going to homes, work places and shopping areas, stopping people who ‘look’ like migrants, ie Latinos. Its chaotic and terrifying people .The Governor and Mayor have asked that the National Guard be taken out.
The photos which news tend to show are photos of violence and burned cars. But….the overwhelming majority of protestors an d protests have been peaceful. ICE is an invasion.
SAN FRANCISCO LABOR CONDEMNS ICE RAIDS AND THE ARREST OF DAVID HUERTA
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – 9JUNE25 – Unions and immigrant rights activists protest immigration raids and the arrest in Los Angeles of David Huerta, head of United Service Workers West during a raid. Labor leaders included Olga Miranda, SEIU Local 87, Kieth Brown, Alameda Labor Council, Lizzy Tapia, UniteHere Local 2, Robert Sandoval, IBT 350, Steve Pitts, UCB Labor Center emeritus, and others.
Action Network: The Labor Force
…
Los Angeles: Rally to Demand Justice for David Huerta
By The Editors
It’s Sunday June 8th – Trump has sent the National Guard into LA to put down ICE protestors. Tomorrow, Monday the 9th of June there will be a rally for David Huerta in Los Angeles.
Next Saturday the would be King and Dictator celebrating his birthday with a military parade and lavish spending on his ego.
We stand opposed and hundreds of thousands of us will march and demonstrate in thousands of site, urban and rural, around the country on Saturday, June 14th.
…
Defeating Mass Deportations
By Jeff Crosby
The Critical Battle of the Moment
Building powerful, overwhelming resistance to Trump’s mass deportations is the critical battle at the moment. It’s the hook that the New Confederacy (the fascist forces coalesced around Trump, which have inherited the mantle of the Old Confederacy) is hanging its hat on. It’s the one thing they think they can hold onto as Trump’s popularity sinks on issues like tariffs and inflation. While centrist establishment Democrats are pearl-clutching and privately counting the days to the next recession which they hope will bail us out, those of us who are fighting for a Third Reconstruction should be focusing on fighting mass deportations, in the courts and legislatures, and most importantly, in the streets.
Fighting mass deportations points us at the darkest core of the New Confederacy’s evil heart, head on: its performative cruelty rooted in white supremacy. And we can win on this issue.
Despite the bravado by the Steven Millers and Steve Bannons of the Trump world that immigration is their “80-20 issue” (where they win popular opinion by that margin), they are now losing ground there as well. Michael Podhorzer’s analysis in “The Re-Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority” makes a compelling case, made stronger since he qualifies and even understates his conclusions. He writes that “if voters had known in November what they know now—which could and should have been possible—Trump would have lost.” There has been no large-scale shift to the right on immigration any more than other issues, and people think Trump is, at the very least, “going too far.”
The Boston Globe reports on “growing community resistance” in my own home state of Massachusetts to fascist masked gangs who are snatching people off the streets and shipping them away from their families without due process. Notably, the writer covers actions in places like Worcester and Acton, not known as bastions of the left. It also describes people getting involved who do not consider themselves “activists” at all—neighbors, families, preachers, city councilors, and more.
The bottom line is that there is a growing resistance to Trump on what the right thinks is its strongest issue. The racism is increasingly clear, as “refugees” from the most privileged sector of South African society, the Afrikaners, are welcomed into the New Confederacy’s waiting arms while working-class people of color are spirited to gulags in El Salvador and South Sudan. Podhorzer’s analysis tracks my own experience and that of others I talk to. Many undocumented folks, as I have described elsewhere, are not against jailing or deporting violent gang members from whom they may have already fled in their home countries. A Dominican friend in Chicago said, “Every Latino family I spoke to during the last election told me ‘We need a Bukele’”—the El Salvador president who is popular, for now, in his country for a vicious crackdown on crime. People often did not believe that Trump’s actual plan was what he sometimes promised straight out: to deport every immigrant of color they can get their hands on, even US citizens, to Make America White Again.
How to Talk About Deportations
In discussions and protests about the deportations, I have found this obvious distinction to be very powerful: they aren’t deporting criminals, they are deporting hard-working people who have committed no crimes, and are our friends and neighbors—our own people, whether you are an immigrant yourself or not.
Some leftists reject that framework, arguing “We can’t imply support for mass incarceration, or for Calvinist capitalist propaganda about hard work.” But these are really debates among activists, with little actual impact among working-class people. They miss the best and wholly righteous way to build the anti-racist fight against mass deportations. There is nothing wrong with being concerned about crime, and there is nothing wrong with respecting people who work hard to build a life for themselves and their families. We need to meet people of all nationalities where they are and move them closer to an anti-racist, pro-democracy position.
Plenty of other arguments will do fine also: we need people to do these jobs, immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born folks—or as I told my ward councilor, “I agree we need to lower the crime rate—so let’s open the borders and bring in more immigrants!” Immigrants do in fact pay taxes, they just often don’t get the benefit of paying them; for example, they help keep Social Security solvent by paying into accounts that are not their own and from which they can never collect.
Faith organizing on this issue is particularly important. We need to increase the splits among evangelicals of all races on this issue, reminding them of Leviticus 19:34: “The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” Already those who were the strangers in Egypt, the Jews, are standing up against Trump’s mass deportations by a majority and opposing his attempts to use the phony campaign against antisemitism to justify kidnapping foreign graduate students and suppressing free speech on campuses. Every church, temple, and mosque: a sanctuary by those of faith.
Further, there simply is no bold line between “citizens” and “non-citizens.” According to the Pew Research Center, undocumented folks live in 6.3 million households, 70% of which have families of “mixed status.” The crackdown on undocumented people is simultaneously an assault on US families and citizens: children, fathers, mothers, cousins. The attacks on immigrants’ access to benefits like Social Security will also hit citizens and non-citizens alike.
Voluntary deportation, or “auto-deport” intimidation, is one of Trump’s most powerful tools. Because mixed-status families are common, it affects whole communities. Families fighting deportations of loved ones are faced with mounting legal and survival fees, so some are just leaving whether they are citizens or not.
One of my friends went to his children’s school to withdraw his child before the end of the year so they could return to their home country—and was told that this was becoming common. The son of another friend was accosted by a stranger who demanded his papers—a random bigot, not even ICE. That mother and son are both citizens, but because relatives across the US are experiencing deportations and detentions, they are thinking of returning home, citizens or not. A building trades leader told me, “This is a great country—but this is not the country I thought I immigrated to.” The three people I describe here are from three different countries in South America.
Courts, the Legislatures, the Streets
Even before Trump took office for his second term, the battle lines were drawn in the courts, our legislative bodies, and the streets. The courts have been inconclusive but stood up to Trump more than I had anticipated. This is a legitimate field of struggle, and one way to gum up the works for the fascists and keep them from consolidating power. Plus we are winning back the freedom of an occasional detainee, like Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student from Tufts University in Massachusetts. But the courts are also compromised by the systematic efforts by the New Confederacy to bring them to heel—and they are SLOW, and offer little in the way of public engagement or base-building opportunities. Part of Trump’s strategy has been to slow things down in the courts, so that even if he loses some major cases when they get to the Supreme Court, 1) the damage against our people and the propaganda appeals to whiteness can’t be undone, and 2) he will just attack the “liberal courts” who are standing in the way of his efforts to save us, in the normal fascist line of attack.
The legislatures are often either under the thumb of the New Confederacy, like the national Congress or the 23 states where the New Confederacy has a trifecta—that is, controls both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office (and often the state attorney general as well). Even where that is the case, there can be field hearings held by Congressional representatives, the Anti-Oligarchy Tour by AOC and Bernie, televised Congressional hearings, and protests joined by elected representatives. In this moment we need leaders, not just legislators. Some Democrats seem to be getting this message. And in blue states we can call on legislators to actively support immigrants, like the bill in Massachusetts to provide an emergency $10 million in funding for legal defense of our immigrants. This will shore up the overworked legal advocates who are intervening and occasionally winning—or at least slowing down the fascist machine.
But the streets are key, and will push the other fronts along. The Globe article describes the creation of LUCE, a network of immigrant and other activists who develop rapid-response mobilizations whenever they can verify an ICE presence in our communities. Neighbor to Neighbor and a broad alliance of groups that make up LUCE have trained over 1,000 “verifiers” in over 25 “hubs” across the state. LUCE is modeled on the work that the Latine base-building organization Siembra NC pioneered in North Carolina during the first Trump administration. Now Siembra has created a “defend and recruit” workbook for people looking to expand this model in other states. Verifiers respond to calls to a statewide hotline and show up on site when ICE (or their various law enforcement partners in crime) is spotted. The verifiers who approach ICE are under strict training not to directly interfere with the ICE and to be non-violent. They film ICE cars and license plates, ask them what they are doing, ask for their names and badge numbers, etc., and report back to the hotline, which is staffed in multiple languages. Massachusetts has been a priority state by the feds in the last few weeks, and LUCE is receiving 700 or more calls each week.
This has multiple positive impacts. First, the videos fly over social media and the mainstream press, showing the world the brutal ugly face of aspirational fascism in the US. The video of the cruel kidnapping of the gentle and kind Rüymesa was more powerful than a thousand Substack articles like this, or a million leaflets. My wife and I watched the arrest of the daughter of a woman snatched by ICE in Worcester online—from Palermo, Sicily.
Second, ICE agents are cowards and bullies, who are masked to conceal their cowardice, even as they follow orders and leave children on streets without parents, break windows in the cars of people who only asked to see their lawyers, and drag them out to jail from in front of churches and schools. Often they simply leave. LUCE in Lynn claimed 100% effectiveness for the retreat of ICE over the last weekend when they could mobilize verifiers quickly enough. At a recent New Lynn Coalition board meeting, we viewed a video of just such an interaction. In some cases LUCE verifiers had to go back again and again to keep warding off ICE agents.
Finally, these rapid-response actions give people something concrete to DO, especially the combative youth and immigrants and others who have come to realize that this will not stop until we stop it. There is no imaginary cycle of history that will save us, this is not something that will just pass, and it is not a drill.
The scale of this kind of resistance is growing, and will continue to grow as more and more people are drawn into action. This goes beyond the regular activists who may attend Hands Off rallies. These are the people who are moving left, laying the basis to go beyond just “Hands Off what we used to have”—moving instead toward building something much better.
To be clear, immigrant defense work by groups like LUCE and Siembra will not stop mass deportations all on its own. It will take a variety of tactics by different social actors and sectors of the people, including legal and legislative efforts and other forms of both passive resistance that puts sand in gears of the repressive regime, as well as aggressive direct action. At times it feels like we have a great 10-year plan to respond to an existential 10-week crisis. Things inevitably heat up over this summer. The New Confederate thugs will no doubt respond to resistance with more repression. Fascism is not a dinner party, either. We need to expect that and prepare for it as the cost of doing our business.
But the street action of LUCE and multiple other similar efforts provide a place to win some victories, learn and uplift our own roles as working class people, and drive successes on other levels. Ultimately, it is through building and connecting these strategic defensive battles that we will lay the groundwork for the strategic counter-offensive needed to decisively defeat the New Confederacy, and put an end to its fascist agenda.
For we can win. Indeed, we are already winning over public opinion on what was supposed to be Trump’s strongest issue. The American people stand with immigrants. Give light, and the people will fight.
…
This piece orginally ran on Liberation Road. Checkout their substack
BOOK REVIEW: A People’s History of SF’s Most Notorious Neighborhood
By Steve Early
”Any city that doesn’t have a Tenderloin isn’t a city at all.”
—Herb Caen, longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist
The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco by Randy Shaw, Urban Reality Press, 2025
Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name that derives from the late 19th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes.
At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studios, and professional boxing gyms.
In 1966, trans people hanging out at the all-night Compton’s Cafeteria staged a militant protest against police harassment three years before the more famous LGBTQ uprising at the Stonewall Inn in NYC. During the last decade, the Tenderloin has become better known for its controversial side-walk camping, open-air drug markets, and fentanyl abuse.
The failure of municipal government to deal with those social problems— in a residential neighborhood for working-class families with 3,000 children—contributed to recent electoral defeats of a district attorney, city supervisor, and San Francisco’s second female and African-American mayor.
For the past 45 years, Randy Shaw has been a fixture of the place as co-founder of its Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC). After graduating from law school nearby, Shaw became involved in fights for tenants’ rights and more affordable housing at a time when blue collar neighborhoods in San Francisco were starting to gentrify.
A Unionized Non-Profit
The THC, which now employs 200 SEIU Local 1021-represented staff members, began to acquire and develop its own network of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings in the Tenderloin, as an alternative to run-down private landlord-owned ones.
Today, THC provides subsidized housing and wrap-around services to several thousand of the city’s most needy tenants—who might otherwise be among the social outcasts living in the surrounding streets. Shaw estimates that the Tenderloin has a higher percentage of housing in nonprofit hands than any central city neighborhood in the nation, an arrangement that safeguards its distinctive character as an economically mixed neighborhood with many low-income people among its 20,000 residents.
In this second edition to his book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco, Shaw recounts how this multi-racial working-class enclave managed to survive, if not always thrive, amid a city dominated by tech industry wealth and privilege.
That history of neighborhood resistance to displacement is also on display at the Tenderloin Museum (TLM). Created ten years ago, with much help from the author, this venue for community-based, historically-inspired cultural programming now operates under the direction of Katie Conry.
In her Forward to Shaw’s book, Conry describes the TLM’s many art shows, special exhibits, theatre productions, walking tours, and other public programs that have drawn 50,000 people to a downtown area many out-of-town visitors (and locals) are told to avoid. On April 11, for example, the THC hosted a new production of The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot to commemorate that “collective act of resistance” and “the on-going fight for transgender rights.”
Community Benefits Agreements
Californians fighting gentrification—or trying to make sure its benefits are more equitably shared—will find Shaw’s book to be an invaluable guide to effective activism around housing issues. It illustrates how persistent and creative grassroots organizing can challenge and change urban re-development schemes designed for the few, rather than the many. In too many California cities, it’s the latter who continue to get pushed out and left behind in the name of “neighborhood improvement.”
A central case study in The Tenderloin is the author’s account of how community residents won a pioneering “community benefits agreement” (CBA) with three powerful hotel chains. In the early 1980s, Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Ramada wanted to build three luxury tourist hotels adjacent to the Tenderloin. Given the city’s pro-development political climate at the time, these hospitality industry giants expected little organized opposition to their plans. Then Mayor Diane Feinstein lauded them for “bringing a renaissance to the area.”
However, as originally unveiled, their blueprint would have transformed nearby residential blocks by “driving up property values, leading to further development, and, ultimately the Tenderloin’s destruction as a low-income residential neighborhood.”
An Organizing Case Study
Among those faced with the prospect of big rent increases and eventual evictions were many senior citizens, recently arrived Asian immigrants, and longtime residents of SRO buildings in dire need of better ownership and management. Fortunately, this low-income, multi-racial population included some residents with “previously unrecognized activist and leadership skills” that were put to good use by campaign organizers, like Shaw, who were assisting their struggle.
During a year-long fight, hundreds of people mobilized to pressure the city Planning Commission to modify the hoteliers’ plans. As Shaw reports, the resulting deal with City Hall created “a national precedent for cities requiring private developers to provide community benefits as a condition of approving their projects.”
Each of the hotels contributed $320,000 per hotel per year for twenty years for low-cost housing development. They also had to sponsor a $4 million federal Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) for the acquisition and renovation of four low-cost Tenderloin SROs. In addition, each hotel had to pay $200,000 for community service projects, and give priority in employment to Tenderloin residents.
Four decades later, community benefits agreements of this sort are not so unusual. But, in the absence of major new federal investment in public housing built with union labor, they are still much needed.
Where tax breaks or rezoning encourages various forms of private development today, the only way to win additional low-income housing units, living wage jobs, local hiring, or preservation of open space for public use is through grassroots campaigning by community-labor coalitions, aided by sympathetic public officials.
Otherwise mayors and city councils under the thumb of developers will simply offer financial incentives with few strings attached—whether the project involved is a new hotel, casino, shopping center, office building, or luxury apartment building.
Organizers’ optimism
Back in the Tenderloin, as Shaw reports in the conclusion to his book, residents in recent years have had to mobilize around basic public safety issues. Pandemic driven economic distress flooded their neighborhood with tent dwellers, drug dealing, and street crime that added to small business closures, drove tourists away, and made daily life hazardous for longtime residents (except when state and local politicians cleaned things up for high-profile gatherings like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leadership meeting in S.F. two years ago).
Nevertheless, the author ends on an optimistic note (characteristic of organizers): “New restaurants and small businesses are again opening in the Tenderloin. Street and crosswalk changes make the neighborhood among the city’s most walkable. New housing has increased the Tenderloin’s population…”
But, Shaw reminds us, residents of this urban enclave must still fight to achieve “the quality of life common to other San Francisco neighborhoods,” while “protecting an ethnically diverse, low-income, and working-class community” with a colorful past and always uncertain future.
…
This post original ran on California DSA
Pete Hegseth — Offense at the Defense Department
By Tom Gallagher
“Trump slams Biden, praises ‘tough cookie’ Hegseth …” Politico 26 May 2025
Isn’t the most remarkable — and least remarked-upon — aspect of the Pete Hegseth Defense Department reality show the fact that no one has appeared worried that the nation’s security might actually be threatened by this? That no one has seemed particularly concerned about any danger resulting from the vast U.S. military arsenal ostensibly being placed in the hands of someone who had obviously not read the job manual? But then why would they? Did anyone seriously think China’s Ministry of State Security was dashing off memos advising the country’s leaders to invade the United States because control of its armed forces had somehow fallen into inept hands? Or that something like that was going on in Russia … or Denmark … or Canada … or any other of our enemies, old or new?
Apparently not. Why? Well, at recent count, the U.S. was in possession of a fleet of 299 deployable combat vessels; 3,748 nuclear warheads; 5,500 military aircraft; 13,000 drones; and 2,079,142 military personnel. All of this comes with highly detailed operational plans for situations involving an actual attack on the nation. But no one seemed to think that what Hegseth was spending his time on had much, if anything, to do with that eventuality. From the point of view of the nation’s legitimate security, that’s a good thing. But it raises the question of what was Hegseth on about, anyhow?
The story that brought the question of the Trump foreign policy team’s competence to the fore has little to do with the matter of American national defense. What it’s really about is the unauthorized, global use of American military force. The few Americans whose well-being was plausibly threatened by Hegseth’s now infamous sharing of the details of upcoming bombing missions — with his wife, brother, lawyer, as well as the editor of The Atlantic — were the pilots of those missions.
The object of this now haulted bombing campaign — which the Administration says has struck a thousand targets — is the Yemen rebel group called the Houthis, an organization allied with Iran and militarily opposed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The recent U.S. attacks came in response to a resumption of Houthi efforts to block Israeli shipping in the Arabian Gulf that followed upon Israel’s breaking of its ceasefire agreement with Hamas, along with its blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza. In response to the renewed U.S. assault, the Houthis attacked the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, the aircraft carrier which then-President Biden deployed to the Gulf last December as a base for the anti-Houthi airstrikes that he had ordered.
Now, although it may seem quaint to mention such technicalities as the law in relation to the routine U.S. bombing of another nation, the truth of the matter is that — whether one considers bombing the Houthis to free up Arabian Gulf shipping a good idea, or whether one doesn’t — we are simply not at war either with the government of Yemen or with the Houthis trying to supplant it. Nor has Congress authorized the use of force there, in lieu of a declaration of war.
If you have trouble recalling Congress declaring war, that’s because you probably weren’t alive in 1942, the last time it did so (against Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania.) The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan? No declaration of war deemed necessary. And while the current Republican-controlled Congress may be distinguishing itself for new depths of subservience, generally the Democrat and Republican leadership alike tend to act as if questions of war and peace were above their pay grade, with only a minority of Democrats and a handful of Republicans ever making noise about the latest military action taken in our name. Congress’s ultimate responsibility notwithstanding, Presidents Biden and Trump have made their decisions to launch attacks on Yemen unilaterally.
What we’re dealing with here is what we might call the Defense Department’s Offense Division — the part that maintains the 700–800 foreign military bases around the globe (the exact number is classified, but maybe if you could get your number on Hegseth’s phone list …), along with the ships that ply its waters and the planes and drones that fly its airs. As previously noted, Trump is not the first President to bomb Yemen. And while, as in so many areas, he may well be the crudest exponent and practitioner of American foreign policy that we’ve seen in some time, the bombs Trump orders do not fall far from those dropped by previous administrations. Prior to the current episode, the U.S. has bombed Yemen during every single year since 2009 — nearly three hundred times, primarily via drone.
Nor is Yemen the first country bombed during the second Trump Administration; Iraq, Syria and Somalia have preceded it. None of this was considered much by way of news — a failing of the news media, yes — but less so than of the congressional leaders who have failed to make it news. Here too, while Trump may denigrate his predecessors, he apparently takes no issue with their bombing choices, joining the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump I, and Biden Administrations in the serial bombing of Somalia that has occurred more than 350 times over the course of those presidencies. The U.S. has also bombed Syria and Iraq every year since 2014.
All of this has been justified under tortured, expansive legal interpretations of the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force permitting military action against entities that “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons” as well as “to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.” Under Bush, the authorization was interpreted to extend to the occupation of Iraq. Under Obama, it would encompass action against groups that did not even exist in 2001, but were “descendants” or “successors” — such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The first Trump Administration would expand that logic to warfare against eight different groups — including the assassination of an Iranian military commander. It was now understood to allow for military actions anywhere on the globe.
Before the Trumpists coopted the use of the term “Deep State” to encompass what they believe to be a malign government network that supports programs like Social Security, or Medicare, the term was used by quite a different group of people to quite a different end. The Deep State back then referred to the unelected elements of the government committed to waging endless war, often covert, often illegal — e.g. the Central Intelligence Agency — the sort of thing President Lyndon Johnson was talking about when he said that under President Kennedy the U.S. had been running “a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean.”
We don’t call that the Deep State anymore because, as the above discussion indicates, our government no longer feels a need to hide these things. It’s above ground now — part of the DoD’s Offense Division. The CIA now conducts assassinations openly — via drone.
This is the part of the U.S. Government that should really worry us. It’s what Pete Hegseth was hired to run, something that was clear right from his Senate confirmation hearings that culminated in a narrower win than even his boss’s on Election Day — his approval requiring a Vice Presidential tie-breaking vote for only the second time in history (the first being the approval of Betsy DeVos as Trump I Secretary of Education). From the get go, Hegseth was forthright in declaring himself against increased “wokeness” — and for increased “lethality.”
One simple way to increase lethality is to broaden the potential killing range. And in this area, Hegseth came with a pretty strong record, having successfully lobbied for pardons of soldiers convicted of war crimes during the first Trump Administration, and suggesting in a book he wrote last year,“The War on Warriors,” that rather than adhering to the Geneva conventions, the U.S. would be “better off in winning our wars according to our own rules.”
Nor has he missed a beat since taking office; he’s announced plans to terminate the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, and the Army will no longer require training in the law of war; henceforth it will be optional. Results have quickly followed, with the bombing of a migrant detention center in Yemen, for instance. One of Hegseth’s infamous Signal chats even described the targeting of a civilian location.
One last thought for the Secretary: Pete, If you were to spend your time on our national defense — instead of “lethality” in attacking foreign nations with which we are not at war — you could probably rest easier about using your phone. Of course, we both know that’d get you fired in a New York minute. You’re there to play offense.
…
We will never ever accept to be ignored and be treated as worthless
By Ibrahim Diallo
Peter Olney:
Lyft and Uber are in talks with the Labor Commissioner, the State Attorney General, and the city attorneys from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego over the massive wage theft they inflicted on drivers after the passage of Assembly Bill 5 which classified them as employees. At stake is tens of billions of dollars in stolen wages and unpaid expenses from years of misclassification. On May 21st, the parties were scheduled to meet to discuss the future of the case, and on May 20th they heard from drivers statewide at rallies organized by Rideshare Drivers United (RDU) . Rallies were held in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.
At the rally at San Francisco City Hall, Ibrahim Diallo, a driver who was deactivated by Uber in 2023 gave a stirring address.
Ibrahim Diallo: My speech for our Wages Claim
There is absolutely no place on earth where people’s freedom or rights were given free. People always need to constantly fight with a big determination to never give up, to obtain it.
Please never forget that there will be no exception for us Rideshare Drivers United. So, we must stand up for ourselves, as no one will do it for us
We Drivers also play a very important role in our current world.
Let’s remind people who we are because many tend to either forget, underestimate or maybe even neglect how crucial and preponderant our position is.
We will never ever accept to be ignored and be treated as worthless.
In the preamble of the Declaration of independence of the United States it says:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
That is all we are asking for. Our “pursuit of happiness” is not respected and guaranteed.
Who are we?
We are part of the backbone of our society, which we can hardly imagine without transportation services.
We are those guys of all genders, colors, and faiths, young and old who are dedicated to serving you, 24 hours a day without any discrimination.
We are the dawn breakers who safely drop you at work, school, hospital and at your other errands and back home.
We are the ones who avoid you to miss your trains and planes (flights).
We are the night owls who still tolerate and accept to come back on the road to serve you, even after drunk clients often vomit or use our cars as a restroom.
Sometimes Uber refuses to pay for our cleaning fees.
Like this bartender/girl once told me with a big humor, on a late Friday night in Seattle: “You bring them (clients) to us sober, we get them drunk for you to come and safely drop them home. Then lastly you come and safely drop us (bartenders) home, before you go sleep”.
We are those who are exposed to all kind of crazy situations, like a client intentionally broke my right mirror and Uber decline to fix it. I had to fix it from my own pocket, otherwise my car is not fit to drive for them.
We are the ones braving all types of weathers: rain, fog, wind, cold to go out and serve you.
We are the braves risking their lives, who could be victims of drunk drivers on the road.
One day of strike of all taxi and Uber/Lyft drivers would paralyze all the country and have an impact on all sectors of our economy.
How can you dare to marginalize us?
We are doing the same type of job as taxi, limousine and bus drivers who are obviously well regulated and have much better treatment.
How can you not consider us as them?
Are we less human?
How the hell can you not make sure we have a better treatment?
Are you receiving some cut from Uber and Lyft?
How can California and the Federal Government not guarantee equal dignity to both Uber&Lyft drivers?
How can you close your eyes and ignore the crime which has been happening for so long in your state, your country?
When we see or know about an injustice, and we can do something to prevent or stop it, but don’t do anything, then we are crystal clearly complicit.
Consequently, if California government does not definitely eradicate this 21st century slavery (which is a kind of sharecropping), we Uber/Lyft drivers hold them complicit and responsible, as they are the guarantor of justice for their citizens’ welfare — “we hold these truths to be self-evident…our pursuit of happiness…” which is in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
Uber said they were losing money, which is why they could not raise drivers’ income and pay their shareholders. Yet they paid about $200 million to their lawyers to lobby to reverse PROP 22.
How do you dare to underpay and exploit us?
If Uber and Lyft clients, even non clients, knew what could be the negative impacts of the bad treatments we are undergoing, everyone would join on the street to come and fight for us to have more safety.
What are the risks to which people can be exposed with the current situation?
Do you want to ride with a stressed, depressed, tired, and sleepy driver?
Do you want to ride with a hungry and angry driver?
Certainly no.
But FYI, many drivers are, because they are obliged to drive 10 to 12 hours per shift for 6, or even 7 days a week to meet the ends.
Remember also, that when Uber drivers are affected their families and dear ones are as well. So too schools, and other work places because “WE ALL ARE ONE”.
…