Fast Food Nation Revisited
By Steve Early
As a union rep who worked in northern New England and upstate New York for more than three decades, I became very familiar with down and out working class “spaces.”
De-industrialization in the northeast spawned a service sector that didn’t quite match up to the offerings of the old, manufacturing-based economy. The resulting lower wages, limited job benefits, and reduced job security propelled many workers, their families, and communities into a downward spiral.
Two great regional story tellers—Russell Banks and Richard Russo—ploughed this field, with great personal insight. Both endured difficult childhoods, marked by absent or unreliable blue-collar fathers who left single moms in charge. In their short fiction and novels, both Banks and Russo chronicled the tragedies and tribulations of white-working class people living in hometowns like their own.
In works by Banks like Hamilton Stark, Affliction, and Rule of Boneor Russo’s The Risk Pool, Empire Falls, and Nobody’s Fool, we meet pipefitters and laborers, leather factory workers, auto mechanics and small-town cops, grill cooks and waitresses, and even the occasional failed academic.
A Literature of the Precariat
Their fictional world contains few characters and plots of the politically uplifting sort favored by promoters of proletarian literature the 1930s. Late 20th century working class life in the northeast did not lend itself to such heroic narratives. It was a time of downward mobility after lost strikes, lay-offs, plant closings, and replacement of stable blue-collar jobs with far more precarious ones.
In tumble-down houses, battered by cold-winters, cross-generational family dysfunction worsened. People got divorced, went bankrupt, left town. In the works of Banks and Russo, even the human company and liquid solace found in local bars and diners becomes a mixed blessing. Because, in the authors’ fictional rendering of those gathering places, irascible regulars can explode at any moment, directing bitterness or disappointment over life and work at others equally unhappy.
Novelist Born in Vietnam Shines a Light – On Low-Wage Life & Work in the U.S.
Thanks to immigration, the demographics of the region have changed considerably; workers born abroad account for more than half of New England’s population growth in the last 15 years. So now, fittingly enough, a new literary voice has emerged from the ranks of a more diverse low-wage workforce faced with the same job precarity as older native-born workers.
How members of this “new” and “old” working class interact—amid shared economic hardship, fraying family and community ties, but with the life-raft of workplace friendship to sustain them—is beautifully rendered, warts and all, by Ocean Vuong in his new novel, The Emperor of Gladness.
From Boston Market to A MacArthur
Vuong is 36-year -old Vietnamese immigrant currently employed as a tenured professor of writing at New York University. He’s also a leading poet and past recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (aka “genius grant”). Just a decade and half ago, he was not collecting accolades in the rarified world of literary fiction or philanthropy. He was struggling to support himself or his family– as a fast-food server and home health aide.
Workers in those two essential occupations now number nearly 4.5 million nationwide. Vuong is the only one among them (so far) to turn his formative experience doing food prep at Boston Market and Panera, plus several years of elder care for a Lithuanian woman in her 80s, into the brilliant core of a 400-page novel.
What feats did Vuong–like Banks and Russo before him—have to perform to end up on the academic track and then turn his experiences into such moving fiction? Vuong’s upbringing was even more difficult than their own, many decades before and further north.
Vuong grew up in public housing in East Hartford, just across the Connecticut River from the capital of a state ranked among the richest in the U.S., with some of the highest levels of income inequality. His late mother was a manicurist, whose father was a U.S. soldier. She became a post-Vietnam War refugee, bringing her son to America when he was two years old.
Before Vuong’s youthful foray into the service sector, he spent long summer days working, for cash under the table, at a local tobacco farm; because he had no car, that required a five-mile bike ride each way. His step-father went to work for an auto-parts company; Vuong’s brother became a longtime employee of Dick’s Sporting Goods.
“Where I’m from,” Vuong says, “reading itself is a class betrayal. Oh, you’re too good for us. You’re trying to read to go to college. You’re trying too hard to get out.”
Saved by Reading and Writing
The author did eventually “get out” by embracing not only reading, but also writing–habits shared, not surprisingly, by his fictional alter ego in Emperor of Gladness. When we first meet 19-year- old Hai in the book, he’s a depressed, pill-popping college washout who’s afraid to go home and tell his mother that he’s failed her immigrant dreams of a better life for the next generation.
He’s about to kill himself by jumping off a rail-road bridge, when Grazina Vitkus, an 82-year -old widow from Lithuania who lives alone, sees him and talks him down. Due to multiple ailments, including incipient dementia, her mind and body are deteriorating as rapidly as her century old house; it’s such a dump that no caregiver wants to stay with her overnight. That situation changes for the better when Hai, in need of shelter and a job, becomes her live-in helpmate.
Their partnership of convenience becomes a deep cross-generational friendship, rooted in hilariously disjointed discussions of life, history, great books, and their shared experience of family estrangement. The emotional labor involved in caring for Grazina is considerable; she suffers from flashbacks and nightmares from traumatic experiences in war-torn, famine-stricken eastern Europe. Plus, Grazina is barely able to put food on the table now. So, when the balance on her EBT card nears zero, Hai cycles off to land a day job to keep their household afloat financially.
Hai reconnects with his cousin Sony, who is now living in a group home for “neuro-atypical teens” while his mother is in jail. In a standard-issue uniform and cap from “HomeMarket” (as Boston Market is called in the novel) Sony earns $7.15 per hour as a valued team member at its “third best grossing outlet in history.” While serving up roast chicken and mash potatoes to go, Sony has become well-known for his detailed, non-stop monologues about civil war generals and their battles, delivered as if the war between the states is still occurring, down south, at that very moment.
“He’s ‘artistic,’ one protective co-worker explains to customers puzzled by this behavior, a product of either being on the spectrum or a form of assimilation via obsessive emersion in the minutia of American history. Grazina displays a similar blend of linguistic confusion and personal tolerance when she learns about Hai’s sexual orientation. She quickly assures him that she has no beef with “the Liggabit community.”
“How Can I Help You?”
With his cousin vouching for him, Hai joins the millions of workers, past and present—at Boston Market, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, Burger Chef, Subway, Panda Express and Pizza Hut–“who lord over nothing but a stainless-steel counter and its crumb-specked dominion.” Because it is their lot to stand behind that counter “saying again and again, ‘How can I help you?’ to an endless stream of impatient customers seeking “reheated chemically preserved sustenance.”
Emperor of Gladness provides the best back stage tour of how the “quick service restaurant sector” functions, at the micro level, since Eric Schlosser’s journalistic expose inFast Food Nation, 25 years ago. We learn that, at this fictional chain, making dinner by hand “means heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked nearly a year ago at a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum-sealed in industrial resin sacks.”
When Wayne, the African-American “Chief of Rotisserie” at the outlet lands a side gig on a nearby farm, he recruits Sony, Hai, and other co-workers to help him earn a $1,500 bonus for slaughtering hogs in time for the holiday season rush. Their bloody, bone-chilling experience– “working meat,” as Wayne calls it–plunges them into a nightmarish Connecticut Valley version of The Jungle120 years ago.
“Hidden from the road, next to the barn was a long tarp tent the size of a car wash, the sides covered all the way to the ground. It looked like the Civil War hospitals Sony is always talking about. As they approached, a swell of death metal music started filling the air…Wrapping around the tent’s perimeter was a rusty chain link fence that prevented hogs from bolting once they realized they were doomed for the chandeliered-dinner tables of millionaires. The plastic sign, zip-tied to the chain link, read: ‘Murphy’s Free-Range Pork: A Family Farm Since 1921.’”
Fortunately for Hai, his regular workplace, like Grazina’s crumbling abode, turns out to be a true haven in a heartless world. His diverse crew of co-workers may not be serving up previously frozen dinners at the faster industrial pace demanded by their whip-cracking regional manager—or doing so with a small enough crew. But they are pretty good at helping each other out, on the job and after work.
Time to Move On
The high turnover rate in the fast food industry means that most people move on, sooner rather than later. Emperor of Gladness has no big happy ending but some hints of a better life ahead for Hai and his old teammates.
His female manager, BJ, who is built like a Samoan wrestler and aspires to become “the next Rikishi,” rebounds from a disastrous debut in the arena to “become New England Regional Women’s Tag Team Champion” (while managing another HomeMarket outlet).
Wayne “moves back to North Carolina to start a smokehouse called The Knighthood.” Sony raises enough cash, with Hai’s help, to bail his mother out of jail; re-united they go to work at a local ravioli factory, while Sony studies at night to become a docent at a civil war museum.
Russia–a co-worker from Tajikistan–has similar success saving enough money to get his drug addled sister into rehab. Their hard-drinking friend Maureen, a former elementary school aide and mother of three, needs surgery for cancer and ends up in a wheelchair, but living with her brother’s family.
Lucas Vitkus, Grazina’s selfish white-collar son–who lives in a fancy condo with his own family—still wants little to do with his mother. So, Lucas decides to sell her house and evict Hai, her loving and devoted one-man “memory care” unit. Over Grazina’s objections, she is carted off to an Alzheimer’s facility, where she dies six months later, during an afternoon nap.
At the novel’s end, Hai’s own future is uncertain. He’s still calling his own mom, at her nail salon, to deceive her about his continuing separation from higher education. But he’s not peering over the side of railroad bridges anymore. Readers have reason to believe that Hai will make the best of his second chance at life. And like his resilient creator, he’ll find a way to “get out” of poverty and precarity, without forgetting what both mean for millions of Americans, both native- and foreign-born.
…
Myopia On the Left: Let’s Not Do the Billionaires’ Work For Them
By Tom Gallagher
Recently a Facebook friend of mine — whom I’ve actually known since before Mark Zuckerberg started Harvard, and whose political activism I hold in high regard — surprised me by posting an article entitled “AOC is a genocidal con artist.” I can’t tell you what the article said because I’d be as likely to read an article proclaiming that “AOC is a lying communist child-murderer” as I would that one.
And really, the particulars of the article concern me less than the spectacularly myopic political stance on display. Political myopia — allowing smaller or infrequent differences to outweigh broader agreement on larger issues — is always going to be a hazard for groups of intensely committed people whose concern with an issue extends down to the smallest detail. It is, however, a tendency we really can’t afford to fall into if we aspire to actually achieving goals like winding down the nation’s war machine or supplanting our corporate-dominated economy with a democratically controlled one.
“… the April 16, 2025 New York Times headline said it all: “Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Electrify Democrats Who Want to Fight Trump.”
The concern here is both general and specific. General, in that this type of short-sightedness diminishes the effectiveness of all of us who share the above-mentioned goals. Specific, in that I consider attacks upon Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez particularly wrong-headed and damaging. And while few approach the level of absurdity of the above-mentioned article, claims that she’s only a “so-called progressive” can too often be found coming from people who really might benefit from taking a moment to consider things from a broader perspective.
When Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib authored a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring that the Israeli government food “blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help,” and going on to “demand an immediate end to the blockade, an immediate resumption of unfettered humanitarian aid entry into Gaza, the restoration of U.S. funding to UNRWA, and an immediate and lasting ceasefire,” she was joined by only 18 other members of Congress — Senator Bernie Sanders, and 17 members of the House. This did two things: it told us just how insensitive to the devastation of Gaza the U.S. Congress actually is, and it provided a marker of just who constituted its anti-Gaza war hardcore. Ocasio-Cortez was one of that 19.
On the domestic front, the April 16, 2025 New York Times headline said it all: “Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Electrify Democrats Who Want to Fight Trump.” It referred to their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour which has taken the pair before crowds of 36,000 people in Los Angeles; 34,000 in Denver; 30,000 in Folsom, California, where the line to get in was three miles long and thousands more watched through the fence and from the surrounding hills; 20,000 in Salt Lake City; 20,000 in Tucson, Arizona; 15,000 in Tempe, Arizona, with another thousand outside; 12,500 in Nampa, Idaho; 10,000 in Greeley, Colorado, with an overflow crowd said to be of equal number; 7,500 in Missoula, Montana, with another 1,000 listening outside; 4,000 in Bakersfield, California; and 1,000 in North Las Vegas. Additionally, AOC held a rally with New York Representative Paul Tonko in the district of Elise Stefanik, Trump’s one-time nominee for ambassador to the United Nations.
In short, the claim that Ocasio-Cortez is something less than a “real progressive” is preposterous. If someone were to take such an assertion to court they would have to hope for a Trump-appointed judge to have any hope of winning their case. The only political figure to have done more to rally opposition to the Trump regime than Ocasio-Cortez is Sanders himself. So whence this recent flurry of muttering that she’s not the real deal?
The current discontent concerns a failed amendment to H.R.4016, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for 2026. The amendment in question would have eliminated funding for Israel’s so-called “Iron Dome,” a missile system designed to intercept incoming missiles. It was offered by one of the most Trumpist members of the House, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and received only six votes — that of Greene, one other Republican, and four of the 18 hard core opponents of Israel’s Gaza devastation. Ocasio-Cortez was NOT one of the four.
Members of legislative bodies may opt to deal with various amendments to bills in a variety of ways. For one thing, they are obviously taken more seriously if one intends to vote for, rather than against the final bill, as well as when the amendment is deemed to have a chance of passing. In a situation such as that of the Greene amendment, other considerations may come into play. In this case, for instance, one might imagine some deciding to vote against an amendment with no chance of passage out of disdain for the overall political stance of its author.(The vote in question occurred before the shocker of Greene becoming the first Republican in Congress to call the Israel assault on Gaza genocide.)
I am in no position to speculate as to the reasons that the majority of the Tlaib-letter signatories voted against it, but Ocasio-Cortez actually articulated hers:
“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of U.S. munitions being used in Gaza. Of course I voted against it. What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue. I have long stated that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war is constructive to its end. That is a simple and clear difference of opinion that has long been established. I remain focused on cutting the flow of U.S. munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.”
The counter-argument to this is that to the extent that the Iron Dome is effective — in itself a disputed matter– it allows Israel to act with impunity, inflicting damage on others without fear of retribution. I actually share this take on the issue, in fact at the current moment I’d vote against sending aid of any kind to Israel. However, I do not consider the Ocasio-Cortez viewpoint to be beyond the pale, and I also view her vote in the context of the ongoing necessity of clarity on the point that we opponents of Israel’s military operations oppose both Israeli and Hamas attacks upon civilians. Hopefully all of us who hope to convince an ever greater sector of our population to oppose the Israeli onslaught recognize that necessity. And the possibility of erring in that direction should by no means be seen as treason to the cause on the part of one of the staunchest congressional opponents of Israel’s effort to destroy Gaza.
To take the question from a different angle, let’s consider the Israelis who are currently publicly demonstrating against this extermination campaign. Surely we’d have to count them among the most courageous and impactful protestors against their government’s actions to be found anywhere in the world.. While I personally don’t know any of them, I strongly suspect that there are some among their number who support the Iron Dome system because they believe that it actually does offer some protection to them and their neighbors in the case of attack — a real possibility in their lives. If that were to be the case, would we deem their opposition to the war as insufficient, or less than genuine?
Arguing and debating every fine point regarding the current horrific situation is in many ways an admirable thing; it’s a facet of commitment. But when it creates needless divisions or even turns friends into foes, it ceases to be admirable. And certainly on this question Ocasio-Cortez’s stance does not justify articles with absurd titles like the one cited above.
If you don’t use the right word, it doesn’t count
Of course, the phenomenon is not limited to Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie Sanders too is lately under attack by some adherents to what we might characterize as a crossword-puzzle approach to politics — that is to say, if you don’t use the right word, it doesn’t count. The word in question here is “genocide.” Many, perhaps most opponents of Israel’s actions believe they meet the definition of genocide created by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But there are also equally staunch opponents who — because they think Israel’s devastation of Gaza, although abominable, doesn’t fit that definition; or because they adhere to a different definition of the word; or for some other reason — choose not to use the word. Sanders is one of those, which has resulted in some people going to far as to argue that the fact that the word “genocide” does not appear in his statements actually outweighs, for instance, the importance of his authoring the Senate resolution that for the first time drew a majority of that body’s Democrats into public opposition to what Sanders characterized as “an all-out, illegal, immoral and horrific war of annihilation against the Palestinian people.” I even recently ran across someone who called him “a coward” on those grounds. Bernie Sanders — a coward! (He has, by the way, recently extended his Fighting Oligarchy tour to West Virginia and North Carolina.)
Nor is this sort of thing new. Before she even took office, left-wing comedian and YouTube program host Jimmy Dore was denouncing Ocasio-Cortez as a “liar … coward … gaslighter” for refusing to make her first vote for Speaker of the House contingent on Nancy Pelosi’s agreement to schedule a full House vote on Medicare-for-all legislation. Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of progressive members of the House ultimately decided against the tactic. Perhaps Dore’s Force-the-Vote advocacy was right, perhaps it was wrong, but one thing the subsequent five and a half years have clearly demonstrated is that he was wrong in his name-calling.
In a sense, these outbursts of political myopia — “I don’t care about what you’ve done or think about anything else, if you disagree with me on this, you’re a (pick one) coward/genocide-supporter/gaslighter/so-called progressive/con-artist/liar — are actually a-political. The decision to be political involves commitment to overcoming the well-known fact that no two people will agree on everything, in the interest of finding areas of agreement to act upon. The Internet does wonders in allowing people to share their ideas — including their differences — but it can unfortunately also make it too easy to forget that commitment.
I stated above that I considered misguided attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be particularly damaging. The reason is 2028 and the next presidential election. Bernie Sanders’s decision to enter the 2016 presidential race was a game changer — his ultimate failure to win the nomination notwithstanding — as it belatedly brought American politics into the twentieth century by introducing working class-oriented democratic socialist ideas into millions of living rooms during the Democratic primary debates. Likewise in 2020. But not so in 2024, when the only candidates in the limelight, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, vied to be Bibi Netanyahu’s best friend, and all opposed Medicare for all.
Assuming that Bernie Sanders will not make another run, we find ourselves very much in need of a candidate who will carry the banner he ran on — one who will reject a minimalist “At least we’re better than Trump” message instead calling for turning away from the disastrous endless-war foreign policy that has reigned supreme for decades and against economic policies that favor the interest of the few who are fabulously wealthy over the interests of the many who are not. It is certainly not too soon to be considering this question, as we know all too well how prepared the other side is. To my eye, at this point the obvious choice would seem to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, should she be interested. Perhaps the reader sees it differently, has another candidate in mind. Nevertheless, we should all be able to agree that it’s imperative not to lose sight of the broader goals because have obsessed over differences on lesser matters. We should not do the billionaires’ work of dividing us. They have enough money to do it for themselves.
…
This piece originally ran in Common Dreams
Understanding Our Past, Forging Our Future
By Kurt Stand
Asserting the rights of people over profit, that is the core of unionism and the heart of socialism
In a referendum held in 2021, the city of Greenbelt, MD voted in favor of reparations for the descendants of slaves and for Native Americans whose lands were stolen – an initiative strongly supported by members of DSA in Prince George’s County. The step that represented was an acknowledgement of the realities of racial exclusion at the town’s birth; more broadly it was a recognition of the continual impact of that legacy in income and living standards and, equally, important, in the sense of belonging. A local movement, it is very much a part of a wider set of initiatives which includes the establishment of DEI – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion – programs nationally.
By contrast, the Trump Administration has launched a war against DEI programs since assuming office in January. Opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion by definition, means supporting exclusion, upholding inequity, and denying the rights, liberties, freedom of all those who don’t conform to a certain appearance, religion, way of life, i.e., to the overwhelming majority. It is thus fundamentally an assertion of hierarchical power asserting white supremacy, male supremacy, religious intolerance; it is anti-democratic to the core. And, as such, it is also an assault on the rights of working people, for the working-class in its diversity gains its strength through mutual understanding rooted in equality. Without equity, it will be impossible to assert public control over capital – assert the rights of people over profit. That is the core of unionism and the heart of socialism.
For too many people, however, a misconceived triumphalist understanding of our history provided the backdrop of Trump’s MAGA appeal – blaming those asserting their rights for the decline in quality of life and standard of living that is a reality for working people across the board. “Greatness” is thereby found where freedom means the right to oppress, where democracy consists of some choosing, others obeying. The legacy of racism drives a wedge through our understanding of who we are and where we are going, threatening the rights of all – for it is based on the pretense that our lives are not intertwined.
An alternative notion, rooted as deeply in our history, was expressed by Martin Luther King, when he stated a truism we neglect to our cost, to the world’s cost:
”Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Freedom and Equality – therein lies the only valid definition of patriotism
Last year, on Juneteenth, my wife Lisa and I attended an event at the African American Civil War Memorial in Northwest Washington, DC. Frank Smith – SNCC activist and former DC Council member (when a member of DSA) – opened the ceremony commenting that this event was a tribute to the 200,000 Black soldiers who served in the US army and navy during the Civil War in a battle to end Southern slavery as part of a struggle to enhance democracy nationwide for all. The democracy being fought for was not conceived of as an abstraction, but rather as a means for the majority to protect their interests and improve their quality of life against the minority of wealthy plantation owners in the South or industrialists in the North.
The desire for freedom was concretized in the demand for “40 acres and a mule” – that is for sufficient means to lead a life of economic independence, the land being compensation for generations of unpaid labor. One might say today: reparations. Beyond that, there was a demand for voting rights, civic rights, public education (for African Americans and people of European heritage alike). Former slaves working in crafts, trades, on the waterfront, began to unionize. That was the promise of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Though it was a promise not fulfilled, it is a promise central to our national heritage, central to Juneteenth’s commemoration and celebration.
Paying tribute to that living history, a Baptist Choir sang patriotic songs celebrating our country as a land where people have always fought for freedom. Following the communal singing, everyone present was given a list of names of the African American Civil War soldiers inscribed on the memorial. Saying their names aloud was a way of recognizing the individual contribution of each, a means of remembrance of personal identity that slave owners tried to erase in the human beings who were their “property.” Striking back against enforced anonymity serves to give back a sense of history to people whose history had been brutally suppressed.
Breaking free from anonymity is critical to the meaning and substance of the labor movement. Working people are not just “hands,” a term once common amongst factory owners, but human beings with thoughts and ideas and dreams of their own. Thus it was wholly appropriate that the program concluded with the DC Black Workers Center Chorus singing songs about justice and worker rights, labor songs and civil rights songs merging in voice. And bringing the program full circle, it ended with both choruses singing the spiritual, labor and civil rights anthem – “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” Throughout the day, we saw and heard linkages that reminded us that the nature of our society is defined by how we act, how we work to change what needs to be changed, for therein lies the only valid definition of patriotism.
The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are crucial to our national heritage. Every attempt to fill the gap between what is promised in those documents and the refusal to do so becomes a defining characteristic of our national history. Similarly, the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Speech, and the 13th – 15th Reconstruction Amendments, are markers of the Second American Revolution, completing what the compromises made at our country’s founding left undone. And, as with the first American Revolution, the struggle to fulfill the promises then made is a thread that runs through political division in the years since and is especially marked today.
Juneteenth is a critical part of that heritage. The commemoration of the public reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas – the last state where news of slavery’s end was publicly announced – on June 19, 1865 reinforces the centrality of equality to the vision of what our country could be. The brief ceremony at the African American Civil War Memorial, was also an assertion that our country belongs to all who live in it, contrary to those who by wealth, race, gender seek to proclaim that it belongs to some and not others.
Reparations
On June 19th 1838, one of the innumerable tragedies inherent in the system of racial slavery took place – for on that day, Jesuits sold 272 slaves working on their plantations in order to raise money needed to save Georgetown University from bankruptcy. That coincidence was noted in the documentary The Cost of Inheritance (directed by Yoruba Richen) at last August’s screening sponsored by the Greenbelt Interfaith Leadership Association (GILA) Reparations Education Task Force. The Task Force was established to determine how best to implement the city’s reparations commitment. Nearly 100 people viewed the film either in-person or via Zoom as part of an effort to broaden discussion about the need and possible forms reparations could take.
The film itself gave a human picture of what reconciliation might mean. One woman spoke of her need to do something, to give back, after discovering that her grandmother had been an active member of the Ku Klux Klan who had saved much of the memorabilia from the years of her membership (which only came to light after her death). Another woman talked of how she had always known her ancestors had been slave owners – but when she first saw the names of some of those who had been enslaved, their lives became real in a way they had never been to her before – and that too prompted her to look for ways to give back.
“Giving back,” however, is not about charity, not about those with resources telling those without what they need. True equality is about people jointly deciding, people working together, people transforming personal relationships and understandings – an individual process that speaks to a more fundamental way of approaching social change. That is the approach taken by Coming to the Table – a national racial justice organization featured in the film. Their definitions of reparations, as “a process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights,” was central to the documentary.
The need for a shared response to past injustices, that remain as injustices today, was highlighted in the film by the example of Georgetown University, which is still run by the Jesuits. Under pressure from advocates, students, and community members, the University established a Board and hired consultants to determine how they could atone for having profited off slavery and the selling of slaves. Descendants of those slaves sold in 1838 contested that process at a public forum. Their intervention was successful, and those descendants became part of the decision-making committee. After years of meetings, the Jesuits, in 2021, committed to hundreds of millions of dollars to be disbursed through the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation with three goals: invest in descendants’ education over the course of their lives, fund programs that support individuals already engaged in anti-racist advocacy, and support elderly descendants. This was not a project to provide for individual payments, it is a project designed as part of a process to overcome the legacy of slavery and structural racism.
Briayna Cuffie, an Annapolis resident, founder of Reparations4Slavery, spoke and answered questions after the film (in which she was featured). She stressed that reparations can take numerous forms, including conversation and advice, noting as a personal example her being mentored on home-buying, becoming thereby the first in her family to own a home. Lois Rosado, chair of the Greenbelt Reparations Commission, followed with a presentation about the Commission’s work and goals. She too stressed that reparations shouldn’t be seen as cash payment, but as equity in resources. Systemic change begins when businesses, churches, and our federal government address their history of profiting from racial slavery and Native dispossession.
Addressing the inequalities that flow from that history, is central if we are to find a democratic solution to the social and economic crises of our country. It is a long and difficult path. After all, not everyone – in Greenbelt or elsewhere – appreciates the topic of reparations even being discussed.
An instance of this was expressed in a letter to our community newspaper – Greenbelt News Review. Voicing opposition to reparations, the writer cited the sacrifice of his German-American abolitionist forbearers, some of whom paid with their lives because of their opposition to slavery, as reason to oppose reparations for descendants of slaves. Arguing that suffering and hard times were the lot of his family, but through hard work they were able to make a better life for themselves, he contrasted his heritage to that of people asking for reparations today (falsely assuming they are asking for handouts).
Although no doubt sincere, I question whether anyone or any family succeeds by themselves or that those whose forebears were in chains, who were denied equal rights and subject to lynching after freedom, and who still face systemic discrimination, are asking for handouts to avoid hard work. Truth be told, if African Americans hadn’t labored long and hard through the years, the community would not exist as it does, and our country would be the poorer.
Understanding Heritage
I grew up in a culture well aware of the legacy of German-Americans who took part in the abolition struggle before and during the Civil War, and drew different conclusions from that past. Many were themselves refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848, and they took seriously their conviction that democracy and equality are inextricably linked as the pathway for individual dignity and well-being for working people. Amongst them was Carl Schurz, a Republican and advisor to Lincoln, a general in the Union army during the Civil War and supporter of Reconstruction, another was Joseph Weydemeyer, a friend of Karl Marx, an abolitionist, trade unionist and socialist who also served as a Civil War general for the North.
To this, we can add Adolf Cluss, the German-American architect who designed Washington DC’s Eastern Market, an acquaintance of Schurz, a friend of Weydemeyer and a correspondent of Marx. He designed numerous schools in Washington DC, including the still standing Sumner School (named for the abolitionist Senator). The schools he built for Black students (at a time when segregation was still legally enforced) were based on the same principles as his buildings for white students. And at Cluss’ insistence, Black craftsmen built the school over the objections of white building-trades workers, who were then in the process of forcing African Americans out of skilled trades.
My parents were both refugees from Germany, my mother arriving here in 1934 at age 10 – her parents were already in the US, having come to escape repression following a defeated miners strike. They had planned to return to Germany but when Hitler came to power that proved impossible. My father arrived in New York in 1938 at age 18, having already been a refugee from Germany, first in Poland and then in Czechoslovakia. They met at Camp Midvale in Ringwood, New Jersey, through Nature Friends, a working-class hiking organization founded before World War I by German-American Socialists – as a branch of “Die Naturfreunde,” which had been formed earlier by socialists in Vienna.
Camp Midvale was built in the late 1920s and early 30s by the voluntary work of German immigrant laborers, most socialists or communists – including my grandparents – who would come on weekends, or after work, to put up the buildings and cabins. (And eventually an outdoor swimming pool carved by hand out of the hillside and fed by a mountain stream). The camp they built created a space for people trapped in cities to spend time out in the country, to enable children to swim and hike away from the concrete and crowded streets of urban landscapes. That included myself in the 1950s and 60s. We frequently left our Bronx neighborhood on weekends and over the summer to head to camp where we would run free to our heart’s content on the grounds.
But learning to appreciate nature also meant learning to respect all people. Camp Midvale welcomed refugees from fascism such as my parents, welcomed all who stood against hatred wherever it raised its face, and opposed the anti-Semitism then rampant in Germany, and a reality in the United States. Folk songs and folk dances from around the world reinforced that sense of oneness with all people. Solidarity with organized labor and those who organize and strike was in its DNA, as was a firm and unwavering opposition to racism rooted in the conviction that an injury to one is an injury to all.
“We all pick and choose which heritage has meaning to us”
Camp Midvale was the first – and for many years – the only integrated camp in New Jersey, the only public swimming pool that permitted Blacks and whites together. What gave that extra meaning is that Ringwood was a “closed Christian community” – i.e., Jews and Catholics were not permitted to buy homes in the town. African Americans, those descendants of slaves, were not only prohibited from buying a home: they were not welcome to set foot in town. The presence of Blacks at Midvale was viewed with great hostility by many in the surrounding community. For those of us fortunate to be there, on the other hand, it opened us up to the world we lived in. We also saw that the parents of our Black friends worked just as hard as our parents but found greater obstacles to getting by, to getting ahead.
My parents also took part in every year’s Steuben Day parade and picnic as part of the Workmen Benefit Fund‘s contingent. Like many other immigrant communities, German immigrants created the WBF as a cooperative to provide health and life insurance at low cost as well as old age services to members who lacked resources, who had little to show after a lifetime of work due to bouts of unemployment or low wages. That mutual support, however, did not prevent the fund from advocating for national health insurance or improved Social Security benefits for all people. Helping each other in the community was not exclusive from helping all.
Similarly, my brother and I attended a turnverein (pronounced “TOORN-fair-ine”) in Yorkville (in Manhattan) to learn conversational German – there too, the values imparted were that of a democratic ethos. Those democratic values stood against the militarist and stratified German imperial ethos which laid the groundwork for fascism in the 1930s and is raising its ugly head again today in Germany and in the United States. Reflecting that outlook, in 2017, the Milwaukee Turners (one of the few still remaining) unanimously called for an end to the Muslim ban the Trump Administration had then announced, recognizing in their plight the circumstances that brought many impoverished or politically persecuted Germans to our country in previous times.
We all pick and choose which heritage has meaning to us – like with every culture and community, there are alternative ways of understanding that past, always a choice to be made as to how to see the world. During the 1880s and 1890s (and our first “Red Scare”), German-American communities were targeted by police and vigilantes, following the Haymarket riot. Anti-German sentiment was manifested on a greater scale during World War I, when it was merged into a frenzy of violence directed at any who questioned U.S. participation in the war. Organizations like the Nature Friends were attacked during the years of McCarthyism when the society was put on the list of subversive organizations. Many of those at the camp – including my father – were blacklisted for many years simply because of their Communist convictions.
Camp Midvale was burned down in 1965 by militia style vigilantes stemming from anti-Communist hysteria and hatred of that afore-mentioned “race-mixing.” (Midvale’s legacy is not wholly lost, however. Today the grounds are the home of the New Weiss Center for Education, Arts & Recreation). Undergoing those experiences only strengthened a feeling of solidarity with African Americans who have been in this country longer than us but who faced, and still face discrimination in jobs, housing and education. Solidarity is another word for mutual support to solve the common problems that our country will only overcome when equality for all is made real in public policy, rather than existing only as an aspiration.
That is how I view my heritage. I’m well aware that others look at the past from a different lens, far too many (even one is one too many) embracing the militarist and chauvinist side of their German roots. For many others, their German culture is embodied by food or drink, or a reference to anecdotal instances of the past that are important pieces of family history. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with that, I only question when upholding one’s particular roots is used to pass judgement on other people’s experience and present.
Speaking only for myself, my German-American heritage leads me to uphold the dignity of labor, respect for all and the value of unionism, socialism, cooperation – and hence to value the cooperatives in Greenbelt where we now live. And a wonderful expression of that value can be found in the discussion now taking place in our community about reparations – for without genuine equality for all, the rights of no one is secure. The Nature Friends old socialist motto: Berg Frei, Mensch Frei, Welt Frei – free mountains, free people, free world – still rings true.
Final Reflections
Reparations are not a one-size fits all fix. German reparations to Jewish victims of the Holocaust is a prime example of the wrong approach – based as it was on isolating one source of oppression while ignoring all others. That especially incensed my father, a German Jew (but no less German for that, no matter what anti-Semites might say) – for those who were victimized as working-class opponents of Hitler, such as my mother’s family, were ignored, reparations were not paid to the people of Poland, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, and other countries whose lands were bombed and people killed, and yet whose pain and whose needs were unaddressed. It is a blindness now seen in the racism directed toward Palestinians in Germany, the United States and Israel, a racism akin to still present anti-Semitism, to the racism which still denies African Americans equal protection under the law. We act on the principle of “one for all, all for one,” or we act to divide – that choice remains to each of us.
On the afternoon of last year’s election day, when it was unclear what the outcome would be, Lisa and I went to the national mall to visit the Martin Luther King Memorial and from there walked to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial to reinforce for ourselves where we stand when it comes to our country’s heritage. The quote from King with which we began was inscribed on one of the panels. So too was this basic injunction:
“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”
And at Roosevelt’s Memorial was the quote below which speaks to the vision of the New Deal, reflecting values we are sorely in need of today:
“We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.”
Taken together we can see a definition of what “greatness” in our country, in any and every country, entails. They are part of our national heritage which we need to embrace now more than ever.
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Mamdani for NYC Mayor: The Fight We’ve Been Waiting For
By Tom Gallagher
A shift the nation is obviously in desperate need of
I have no doubt that Zohran Mamdani, upset winner over the heavily favored former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, would have greatly preferred that his much better financed opponent would graciously accept the will of his party’s voters, thereby allowing the Democratic nominee, him, to sail on through the final election in November as is generally the case. And so would we, his supporters, all. Instead, he finds himself actively opposed by elements of just about every significant anti-democratic, anti-working class faction in American politics. As the Talking Heads song put it, this race “ain’t no disco; this ain’t no fooling around.” Should Mamdani’s campaign prevail over all of them, the victory will realign the nation’s politics more profoundly that anything since the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign — a shift the nation is obviously in desperate need of.
On the one side we have a candidate arguing the need to pull out all the stops, to try all avenues — increased rent control and housing construction, reduced transit fares, city-owned supermarkets, higher taxes on great wealth, and so on down the line — in an effort to allow the city’s working class to remain the city’s working class, rather than become a stream of economic refugees who can no longer afford to live there. On the other side we’ve got a magpie’s cast of characters, united only by their dread of the prospect of a mayor siding with the struggling many, while openly acknowledging that the over-privileged few — the billionaires who think that the city owes it all to them — are not the saviors they think themselves to be, but are actually part and parcel of the problem.
More interested in corporate cash than in the working class
First up in the cast, of course, is the Republican Party, nominally in the person of its candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the unarmed crime prevention group the Guardian Angels. Sliwa, however, is not expected to be a factor in the final outcome. Naturally, the party’s interest in the race is primarily represented — as it is in all things — by our intermittently coherent president, who has fulminated about arresting Mamdani, revoking his citizenship, cutting off federal funding to the city and even taking direct control of it — a threat he was bound to make sooner or later to some local government not to his taste.
Then we have the Democrats more interested in corporate cash than in the working class — unfortunately a rather large sector of the party — along with those troubled by the fact that Mamdani opposes Israel’s ongoing obliteration of Gaza; two groups with significant overlap. This dominant wing of the party is actually directly involved in this race to an unusual degree by dint of the fact that the minority leaders of both branches of Congress — Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer — are Brooklyn voters. So are they going to pull the lever for their party’s nominee in November? We don’t know. Neither has actually opposed Mamdani, but the failure of the party’s leaders to endorse him thus far is without recent precedent. Since Schumer was recently pleased to be seen smiling in a group photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you can see the problem. Others have been outright hostile. Democrat Laura Gillen, Representative of a New York city-adjacent district. for instance, has characterized Mamdani as “a threat to my constituents.”
Next we have the independent candidates themselves who have now come to seem more like anti-Mamdani place holders, even though one of them is actually the current Mayor of New York. That would be Eric Adams, elected to the position as a Democrat, who declined to enter his party’s primary after running into a few bumps in the road during his term of office. The problems were indictment on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and soliciting and accepting a bribe; and a subsequent pardon by the ubiquitous Donald Trump. The other major one is Andrew Cuomo, one-time Democratic Governor of New York, forced to resign in the face of numerous charges of sexual harassment, and loser of the Democratic primary, despite the backing of independent expenditure committees spending more than $25 million — out of a total of $30 million spent by such committees on all of the city offices at play in the primary — the heaviest spending in the history of New York City politics. Cuomo has decided that the voters deserve a second chance to make up for their error in not choosing him the first time and declared that this time “It’s all or nothing. We either win or even I will move to Florida.” His campaign has subsequently declared this was a joke — the Florida part, not the second shot. But there is precedent: Trump decamped there after the state’s voters rejected him and certainly he could fix the ex-governor up with something at Mar-a-Lago. It’d only be fair after everything he’s done for Eric Adams.
And last, but certainly not least, we have the billionaires, starting with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who used to be a Republican until he decided he wanted to be mayor. Bloomberg, never one to shy from putting his money where his mouth is — he spent over $1 billion on his own four-month presidential campaign in 2020 (he won American Samoa) — dropped $8.3 million on the Cuomo effort. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and William Lauder, executive chairman of The Estée Lauder Companies, were in for $500,000. Expedia chairman Barry Diller, Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb were down for $250,000. Alice Walton, of the Walmart family contributed $100,000. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin was in for $50,000. Ackman, Loeb, and Griffin were 2024 Trump supporters, by the way.
And reinforcements are on the way, with Hamptons polo patrons Kenneth and Maria Fishel of Renaissance Properties lining up new billionaires — in this case for Eric Adams — including grocery (Gristedes and D’Agostino) and real estate mogul John Catsimatidis, himself a former (Republican) candidate for New York City mayor. As Kenneth Fishel told Fortune, “This is about keeping New York vibrant, keeping it free from socialism, and keeping it safe.” At this point, this story might sound like something out of that recent Francis Ford Coppola movie that no one went to see, but it’s what’s actually happening.
(Personal disclosure: As one who was once slightly famous long ago, when elected to the Massachusetts Legislature at 32 as a self-described socialist — said to be the first since the Sacco and Vanzetti era — I am wildly jealous. Reading the news on election night, I was literally moved to tears of joy — I did, by the way, grow up in the South Bronx. And I don’t imagine I’m the only one feeling envious.)
The upshot of all this? This is our race Who’s the we in “our”? Anyone who feels that we the people have to find a way wrest control of the economic future of this country from the likes of Trump, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, all of the above-named billionaires, and the ones we don’t know. Whether it be knocking, calling, texting, posting, giving a buck — even if just that — all of us should give this race at least a bit of our attention. Just think of how sweet it will be to beat that whole crew.
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“Mamdani for NYC Mayor: The Fight We’ve Been Waiting For” First ran in Common Dreams
When The World Seems On Fire
By Joe Sciarrillo
Yesterday afternoon I was going for a bike ride through San Francisco when I witnessed an unconscious man lying in the middle of the sidewalk on Mission St. No one seemed to know what to do. I always carry Narcan (Naloxone) with me because I’ve seen this scenario before. Thankfully, I was able to reverse the potentially fatal overdose and when the paramedics arrived, he agreed with them to go to SF General Hospital for follow up care.
When the whole world seems like it’s on fire, and many places are literally being bombed into rubble and flames, it can be overwhelming to walk our streets and not know how to find solutions to suffering in our own cities. We can feel lost in the chaos, lost in the fog.
When I got home I tried looking for detailed information about the city’s current street outreach team protocols, and got an error message saying, “We can’t find that page.” Maybe it got lost in the fog.
Last month, I left the job I had for two and a half years as a street based social worker and therapist at the Harm Reduction Therapy Center. It’s a wonderful organization, but like so many community based organizations it has experienced funding cuts from the city. I left the job due to the combination of funding cuts and programmatic cuts (cutting off most foot-based street outreach), in addition to my need to change my schedule. But, as I reflect on the last few years of witnessing the homelessness and overdose crisis on the streets, the main takeaways have been simple: folks who are suffering on the street seek care that is accompanied by compassionate, relationship-based programs. Many folks respond best to a harm reduction model in which city services (shelters or substance use treatment) involves meeting the person where they are at without judgement. Listen to their voice first, get to know their responses to their traumas, and how they are processing it all, without mandating them to immediately go into a program. Yes, some folks respond to abstinence-based programs, but that should be their choice.
Last year I witnessed the city use a ramped-up enforcement-first approach under Mayor London Breed. It has expanded under the new mayor Daniel Lurie. This has meant SFPD and the Department of Public Works (DPW) moving people off of the street, oftentimes using aggressive and violent means. Preliminary data for 2025 shows an increase in overdose deaths in the first three months with this strategy.
Whether or not we agree with someone having a tent on the sidewalk, do we want our city workers to take away people’s tents before they can retrieve their medications and personal belongings like phones, photos, clothes, or diaries? I spoke to one person who claimed that DPW took her tent despite, her pleas, while her cat was inside it.
More housing options, more types of shelters, more health outreach teams, clinics, harm reduction, and safe-use sites are needed. More rehab beds are needed to deal with the waitlists.
Looking at these issues as we walk outside, or as we follow the news, we end up absorbing a lot of secondary trauma as well as an overall sense of negativity. Staying socially conscious shouldn’t come at a cost that drains us, depresses us to the point of impairing our functioning.
Looking for answers shouldn’t leave us lost in the fog. For those who are marginalized, social injustice can take away the self-care tools that once helped them stay afloat. And for those less afflicted by systems of oppression, and even for those more privileged, trying to do things in solidarity with the marginalized can be paralyzing.
How do we get over that paralysis, especially during these Trumpian times?
We need to remember to take care of our soul, body and mind. Without coming across as a self-help author, I merely want to share points from conversations I’ve had with other social workers and therapists. One of the biggest factors for my moments of burnout, and I’ve seen this with coworkers too, is when the constant tension of the work and the traumatic injustice takes you away from the things that keep you grounded, and the values that got you involved in this work. We tend to absorb the stress, anger and numbness that we see around us to the extent that it becomes difficult to distinguish our own emotions and response from the responses we have absorbed around us.
We often think of the mind (how to make sense of what we’re experiencing) as the key to fixing our well-being. But body movement is such a good technique to calm and slow the mind down, wipe away the static, and to give you a clearer bird’s eye view of what you’re going through. It can be anything from rigorous exercise to breath work while you’re sitting. The spiritual is the foundation of all of this. It can be understood as what is transcendent, symbolic, and poetic in your life. Both the believer in the Divine and the atheist can focus on the root values of what you feel and think this world should be, and what the purpose is.
With that said, let’s look again at where we are in SF. Streets are being cleared by SFPD, DPW, and ICE’s actions are joining the terror. Our tax dollars are used to police people more and more while federal agencies cut social services and increase military activities.
Continue to speak out, protest, stay up to date, and organize. But as Kendrick Lamar said, don’t let it kill your vibe and take you away from your roots.
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Why Did This Farmworker Die
By David Bacon
Jaime Alanis Garcia died of a broken neck in the Ventura County Medical Center on Saturday. He fell 30 feet from the roof of a Glass House Farms greenhouse, where he’d climbed in a desperate effort to get away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and National Guard soldiers during an immigration raid on Thursday.
In announcing his death, Alanis’ family called him, “not just a farm worker [but] a human being who deserved dignity. His death is not an isolated tragedy.” The raid, they said, inspired “chaos and fear” among hundreds of farmworkers in the company’s two cannabis farms in Camarillo and Carpenteria, an hour north of Los Angeles.
ICE announced that 319 people had been detained in the raid, and Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin denied responsibility for Alanis’ death. “This man was not in and has not been in CBP or ICE custody [and] was not being pursued,” she claimed.
Of course, Alanis was being pursued. All the workers were, by dozens of agents in battle gear as they fanned out inside the greenhouse. That pursuit was the reason he climbed to the roof.
Another worker was recorded in a video during the raid after climbing a tall scaffolding. “Do what you want. Say what you say. I’m not coming down,” she cried out. “They say they will come and get us. They are saying whatever they want to get us down. We ask them who they are but they won’t answer.” The video was uploaded onto a website, @mrcheckpoint, used to track raids. The woman’s fate is still not known.
Chaos and fear are deliberately used as weapons to terrorize workers and their families. At Glass House Farms, agents arrived in unmarked tan troop transports whose license plates had been removed. They were dressed in military camouflage uniforms reminiscent of the Afghan and Iraq wars, with balaclavas covering their faces.
Arrests were indiscriminate. After a security guard-a US citizen and US Army veteran-was detained, his family couldn’t even find out where he was being held. Jonathan A. Caravello, Ph.D., also a US citizen and professor at the California State University Channel Islands campus in Camarillo, was also arrested by ICE. A judge finally ordered him released from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center on July 14.
After the raid President Trump claimed the agents were under attack, and gave ICE “Total Authorization … using whatever means is necessary.” A few days earlier, after sending mounted agents and National Guard soldiers into Los Angeles’ Macarthur Park, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said no one could stop these military-style deployments. “You have no say in this at all,” he told Mayor Karen Bass. Miller has given DHS a quota of 3,000 arrests per day
Immigration authorities knew that a death like Alanis’ would happen sooner or later. There is a long history of people dying while fleeing from ICE. Santos Garcia and Marcelina Garcia were two indigenous Mixtec farmworkers killed when their car overturned, trying to escape from ICE agents in Delano in 2018. Agents had been staking out roads to stop laborers going to work-a terror tactic during Trump’s first administration, but not one he invented. Five migrants were killed in the 1992 crash of a van fleeing the Border Patrol in Temecula, and two years later another seven died in another truck pursued by agents in the same area.
Inspiring terror, as a tactic, is openly acknowledged. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official in charge of the Southern California region, said “Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport. Now we’ll help things along a bit.” Bovino earlier led a January raid the day after Trump’s election victory was certified, targeting farmworkers in roadblocks and Home Depot parking lots in the San Joaquin Valley. “Self-deportation” is the euphemism used by immigration authorities when people are made so fearful that they leave their homes to return to their countries of origin, or simply to another safer place.
But the military deployment of ICE agents is also a response to rising protest that is defying this campaign of intimidation. Within minutes of the arrival of agents at the greenhouses, calls on cellphones brought family members and community activists to the sites. They were met with tear gas, “flash bang” grenades and smoke bombs.
Immigrant communities have been preparing for raids since Trump’s election. For months in the state’s farmworker towns young people (mostly documented and US citizens born here) have organized marches to defend their parents, in an inspiring demonstration of courage and determination. The conduct of the raids, by armed soldiers in combat fatigues, is an effort by ICE and Homeland Security to intimidate them into halting any action that might interfere.
In many communities activist groups like Union del Barrio and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles have formed teams to monitor the movements of ICE and Border Patrol agents. They carry bullhorns, and warn community residents not to open their doors when a raid seems likely. White House border czar Tom Homan was explicit about consequences. “The rhetoric keeps rising and rising and rising – someone’s gonna get hurt,” Homan told NBC News a month prior to the Glass House raid. “If this violence isn’t tamped down, someone’s gonna die, and that’s just that’s just a cold fact of life.”
The Trump administration was careful to target a marijuana-growing operation because it provides headlines appealing to its MAGA base, while not threatening its big ag supporters. Fox News accused California Governor Newsom of receiving big campaign donations from Glass House co-founder Graham Farrar. Like most big marijuana operations, Glass House Farms donates to state politicians from both parties because it depends on their votes for the license to operate. Marijuana is still illegal under Federal legislation, and Federal law enforcement has long made California cannabis a target.
ICE even claimed that its raid had “rescued” a handful of minors. A statement by the United Farm Workers responded, “detaining and deporting children is not a solution for child labor.”
The Trump administration, however, has been careful not to conduct raids targeting big corporate farms. California’s central coast, where Glass House Farms is located, is the nation’s biggest strawberry-growing area. While fear in the coast’s farmworker towns is endemic, the strawberry crop is getting harvested. In Washington State’s Wenatchee River Valley-the largest apple growing area in the U.S.-Jon Folden of Blue Bird farm cooperative says, “We’ve not heard of any real raids.” The Border Patrol’s Bovino says, “For us, targeting agricultural workers at their job, absolutely not.”
The Glass House raid didn’t even make it into the news section of the website of the Western Growers Association, which includes the country’s largest growers of fruits and vegetables. Their silence, in fact, is deafening. There is no WGA statement opposing raids, and its website reassures growers, “While enforcement activities have not targeted agriculture, here are some prudent proactive steps to respond appropriately to potential [ICE] visits.” Among them, it advertises, “Western Growers H-2A Services available to support growers during this complex labor environment … helping members secure a capable, reliable and legal workforce.”
Last year growers recruited 384,000 H-2A workers (a sixth of the country’s farm labor workforce), mostly from Mexico, under temporary work contracts. These laborers can only work for the grower who recruits them, and can be fired and deported for protesting, organizing or simply working too slowly.
In the fields surrounding Glass House Farms, central coast strawberries are picked because growers increasingly rely on this program. According to the Employer Data Hub of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, agribusiness has brought 8,140 workers to Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, about a quarter of all the farm workforce.
Trump has promised to make this program even more grower-friendly, and big ag has supported him overwhelmingly. The current secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, told Congress that she’d modernize the H-2A program “to do everything we can to make sure that none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business [by immigration enforcement].”
At the end of June Trump scrapped the Farmworker Protection Rule, regulations put in place by Julie Su, Biden’s Secretary of Labor, that provided minimal protections for H-2A workers. By getting rid of it, growers can now bar outsiders (community groups or unions) from labor camps, give workers contracts in languages they can’t read, retaliate against workers who complain of bad conditions, and even stop using seat belts in the vehicles transporting laborers to the fields. In 2019 Trump froze the minimum wage for H-2A workers, and growers are calling on Congress to support a bill that would do that permanently.
Pushback against ICE, however, continues to win in court. The day after agents arrived at Glass House farms, U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong in Los Angeles made permanent two temporary restraining orders which would limit the ways ICE can conduct immigration raids. One prohibits agents from stopping and detaining people based on skin color, language or other general factors used to profile immigrants. The second mandates legal representation for detainees held in the notorious B-18 jail in downtown L.A.
DHS’s Tricia McLaughlin attacked Judge Frimpong for “undermining the will of the American people,” and claimed “”enforcement operations are highly targeted.” That was certainly how Jaime Alanis must have felt before he fell.
So who gained and who paid in the Glass House raid? The Trump administration hyped up the MAGA base once again with images of extreme force deployed against immigrant farmworkers. Big Ag growers, meanwhile, seem immune, continuing to pay wages at the bottom, with government-sponsored access to a labor program that has been described as “close to slavery.” Terrorized farmworker families risk deportation if they try to organize and raise those wages, while living in fear that parents will be picked up when their kids are in school.
The brutality of entrenching an agricultural system based on poverty and fear of deportation is the real price of raids.
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This piece ran originally in The Nation
What California history has to say about the New York mayor’s race
By Fred Glass
One hundred and fourteen years ago a democratic socialist was poised to become Mayor of Los Angeles. Not yet the sprawling megalopolis of today, the city nonetheless ranked second largest in California, and was growing fast. A socialist in the top municipal office? The idea sent the L.A. ruling class into a freakout of red-baiting, lies, half-truths and an occasional accurate depiction of Job Harriman’s progressive positions.
The Socialist Party candidate—a labor attorney, and former vice-presidential running mate of Eugene Debs—had come out on top of an open primary, just short of the majority he needed to win outright. Now he faced off against the incumbent, a champion of the interests that had earned Los Angeles the moniker of “scabbiest town on earth” within the city’s unions. Adding spice to the mix, this would be the first major election in the Golden State in which women could vote, Proposition 4 having just squeaked by in a state referendum the same day Harriman won the mayoral primary.
The business elites threw everything they could muster into their effort to stave off the Apocalypse. The Los Angeles Times—a virulently anti-union publication owned by Harrison Gray Otis, leader of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, a close friend and business associate of corrupt Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz—warned every day with a creative variety of arguments that if Harriman were elected, the sky, along with the economy, would crash onto Angelenos’ heads. He editorialized that this election represented “the forces of law and order against Socialism; peace and prosperity against misery and chaos; the Stars and Stripes against the red flag.” What program so enraged and frightened the capitalist class of southern California? Harriman promised to:
· Reverse an anti-picketing ordinance that had filled Los Angeles jails with peaceful union members for the crime of walking on sidewalks with signs, singing labor songs, while on strike
· Investigate the real estate deals that had brought giant payoffs to Otis and his friends when the Owens Valley aqueduct terminated on land they had purchased via insider information (the real life backdrop to events depicted in the film Chinatown)
· Municipalize city services to save the taxpayers money and improve efficiency;
· Invest in building community centers, public pools and baths, and increase support for public schools;
· Oh, and modestly raise taxes on the rich and large businesses to pay for these reforms.
Pretty radical stuff.
Ultimately none of these political ideas or the opposition’s counters to them defeated Harriman. What did was an early historical appearance of the “October Surprise”. A year before the election, a bomb ripped through the Los Angeles Times building, killing twenty workers. When brothers James and John McNamara (a national leader of the Ironworkers union) were arrested and put on trial, Harriman, the top labor attorney in southern California, defended them, believing in their innocence. When he decided to run for mayor, he turned the defense over to crusading lawyer for the damned Clarence Darrow. Darrow had previously proven that labor leaders in Colorado accused of a bombing had been framed, and like Harriman thought the McNamara brothers trial was a rerun.
But the McNamaras were guilty, as Darrow ultimately found out. After secret negotiations with Otis and other Los Angeles business leaders, Darrow—a fervent opponent of the death penalty— unexpectedly changed his clients’ plea to “guilty” just days before the election. The timing was key to the agreement. In exchange the prosecution agreed to ask for prison instead of death sentences.
Although left out of the loop, Harriman suffered the consequences. Heavily favored to win a week before the election, but firmly tied in the public’s mind to the McNamara’s defense, he and the entire Socialist slate went down to defeat.
Today democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is in good position to win the New York City Mayor’s race. With a ferocious ground game, smart media, charisma to spare and a set of goals clustered under the umbrella of “affordability” popular with the working class and youth, his coalition will be a formidable force between now and November. He’ll likely confront a Republican rival, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and perhaps the disgraced former governor, whom he just defeated in the Democratic primary. If both run the latter two will split the anti-Mamdani vote sufficiently to get him elected.
But the climb will be slippery. The mud is already being flung by the usual suspects. One shouldn’t be surprised by Trump’s characterization of Mamdani as “a one hundred percent Communist lunatic.” That won’t be the deciding factor, as the unpopular former New Yorker POTUS will probably add more votes to Mamdani’s column than he removes.
The two biggest problems will come from the right-wing of the Democratic Party—intransigent Zionists and the city’s Wall Street and real estate sectors. Alongside mountains of cash from billionaire bank accounts, the leading edge of the anti-Mandami campaigns will comprise red-baiting and spurious charges of antisemitism.
What does card-carrying DSA member Mamdani actually stand for?
· A freeze in rents for stabilized apartments
· Free city busing
· Raising the city’s minimum wage to something close to livable: $30/hour by 2030
· A community safety department separate from police to deal with mental health related issues
· City-run grocery stores to bring down food prices
· Free childcare for children six weeks to five years old
· Oh, and modestly increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay for the above.
Like Harriman’s wish list, not exactly the Bolshevik revolution here, but you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from what the other side is already saying, and what they will flood the airwaves with for the next few months. It’s the last item, of course—raising taxes on the rich and corporations—that, as in L.A. in 1911, especially infuriates the city’s plutocrats.
Currently most New York City residents pay around 3% of their income in city taxes. The wealthiest income earners pay closer to 4%, with an absurdly flat cap for people making $500K and above. New York City at last count is home to 350,000 millionaires. The richest 1 percent of New Yorkers tripled its share of the city’s total income from 12 percent in 1980 to 36 percent in 2022.
These statistics represent a flashing red sign about the city’s lack of affordability—along with an “X marks the spot” for the buried treasure that can pay for decent public services for the 95 per cent of the city’s inhabitants who aren’t millionaires. The slight tax increase Mamdani is calling for—2% on individuals making a million dollars a year—will not crimp the lifestyle of the rich in the least.
When socialists run for public office, or when measures to reduce economic inequality are placed before the voters (e.g., taxing the rich, a raise in the minimum wage, help for renters), you can count on the most reactionary sectors of the ruling class to spend freely to convince everyone to see the world through the same warped lens they do. You can also bank on the same tired tropes at the core of their argument. Behold: these tax increases are going to hurt everyone; small business can’t afford it; the wealthiest New Yorkers (mislabeled “job creators”) will flee the city and go to a more welcoming business environment; and all the jobs will leave with them.
In the real world, these things never happen. Take the California example, 101 years after Harriman’s defeat. In 2012, over the dire predictions that the “job creators” and their jobs would flee California, voters passed a progressive tax bumping top income earners up a couple percentage points. The tax, Proposition 30, has brought in seven to nine billion dollars a year, and prevented public services from going over a fiscal cliff in the aftermath of the Great Recession. In the years following its passage, the state minted ten thousand new millionaires, and 1.4 million new jobs.
In New York, where much of the wealth is clustered in finance and real estate, the former creates relatively few working-class jobs and the latter can’t move. The lies may be countered with clear messaging explaining the real problems, how to address them, and who should pay to fix them. Which is what Mamdani has been doing.
But there is another weapon in the anti-Mamdani arsenal: the charge of anti-semitism—which for AIPAC and its candidates means the duplicitous conflation of ‘anti-Zionist’ with ‘antisemitic’. A deluge of these talking points and ads in support of Cuomo failed to take Mamdani down in the primary, but that doesn’t mean that the stream of invective will stop during the next stage of the campaign. For a recent example we could turn our gaze across the Atlantic to England, where another democratic socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, who achieved a surprise momentary capture of leadership in the Labor Party, was brought low principally by a combination of the highly organized repetition of the lie (mostly by the right-wing of his own party) and a fumbled response to it.
Two big things are different in this regard in New York 2025 compared with the England of a few years back: the war in Gaza and its impact on Jewish opinion about Israel, which means the deception in the equation of Jewish and Zionist is much clearer to many more people; and the charismatic Mamdani is not the curt Corbyn, despite similarities in their democratic socialist politics.
What would a Mamdani victory mean at this moment in our history?
A democratic socialist mayor in the largest city in the United States would be a tremendous boost to anti-fascist morale as the mass movement to oppose Trump and MAGA is slowly gaining steam. It would arguably provide a programmatic roadmap to victory in the 2026 elections (presuming they are going to be held, and held fairly).
Yes, we are aware that New York City is not the rest of the country. But the largest urban centers are farther to the left than any other stash of votes, and they are where the resistance to Trump and MAGA has been and will likely continue to be strongest—an important indicator of possible electoral victory, if the coalitions emerging from organization of the mass demonstrations are able to develop the necessary synergy between street and ballot box forms of activism. A sclerotic neoliberal politics as usual will not mobilize this base.
Here in California municipal democratic socialist politics have gained ground over the last few election cycles. In all, there are more than three dozen DSA-affiliated officeholders in the state—the most since the heyday of the Socialist Party more than one hundred years ago—including four mayors, fifteen city council members, a state assembly member, a county supervisor, and occupants of various down ballot offices, all of whom push for progressive policies shunned or feared by the rest of their fellow officeholders.
If Mamdani loses, the leadership of the Democratic Party will redouble its push to field empty neoliberal suits in 2026. Harriman’s defeat in LA in 1911 set back the cause of working-class politics for decades. A high-profile loss like that today would make it that much harder to remold the Democratic Party as a majoritarian progressive force. Alternatively a win will provide wind in the sails to the anti-MAGA movement, on the strength of which Democrats can reclaim power. That’s why it’s necessary to forcefully demonstrate the viability of Mamdani’s politics now.
California DSA members may be three thousand miles away from this historic battle but we can nonetheless help. Mamdani needs every penny he can raise to fight the onslaught of right-wing lies propelled by billionaire funding. Send him your hard-earned dollars here.
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Bloody Thursday
By Nairobi Williese Barnes
Every year on July 5, ILWU Local 10 holds a commemoration of the 1934 bloody attack of the police and National Guard on maritime workers striking on the Embarcadero. Their attack resulted in the deaths of two maritime workers. This year’s celebration was particularly vibrant in light of the Trump administration attacks on immigrants and all working people.
The closing address was by Poet Nairobi Williese Barnes, the daughter of a Longshore clerk. Her dramatic reading roused the crowd to sustained applause and acclamation.
We thank her for allowing us to publish her poem.
Bloody Thursday
Brothers and Sisters,
Do you hear the horns in the harbor?
Do you feel the rumble in the rails, the cry in the crane?
There was a time when they told us to carry the weight—
But not the power.
To bleed for the profit—
But never touch the throne.
Brothers and Sisters,
The docks remember.
The waters recall the names.
Bloody Thursday, 1934—
When the hands that built this nation
Stood still in defiance.
Not in weakness—no,
But in will.
Brothers and Sisters,
Let me tell you about July 5th,
When bullets rang out like betrayal in the wind.
Let me tell you about fallen Brothers,
Struck down not for violence—
But for daring to dream of something just.
Their blood stained the streets
So we could walk free with dignity.
Brothers and Sisters!
This wasn’t a riot—
This was a rising.
This was Labor shouting back:
We are not your machines.
We are men.
We are women.
We are more.
Brothers and Sisters, Can I get a witness?
A witness to pain, yes—
But also to power.
To the hands that fed ships and stitched sails,
That dug in, locked arms, and said:
We will not move until you see us.
We remember Bloody Thursday
Not for defeat—
But for the victory that came after.
For the general strike that shut down a city
With nothing but solidarity
And the sound of boots refusing to march alone.
Brothers and Sisters,
This is sacred history.
And the pulpit isn’t just in the church—
It’s in the union hall,
The breakroom,
The picket line.
It’s in the mother feeding three kids on one paycheck.
It’s in the old man whose back gave out to finish the job.
Brothers and Sisters,
We are not just workers.
We are the ones who make the world move—
And we can make it stop if we stand still!
Can I preach a little longer, Brothers and Sisters?
They’ll try to divide us:
Black against white, young against old,
Dockworker against teacher,
Nurse against patient—
But solidarity doesn’t speak the language of division.
Solidarity doesn’t care what the color of your collar is
When your hands are calloused just the same.
Solidarity is gospel, Brothers and Sisters!
And the gospel says:
An injury to one is an injury to all.
The gospel says:
You touch one, you fight us all.
The gospel says:
From every port, every factory, every school, every field—
We rise together or not at all.
I ask you, Brothers and Sisters—
Are you ready to lock arms again?
To shoot down injustice,
To know when to walk off to a better world?
This isn’t nostalgia—this is a torch.
Carried from 1934 to today,
Pass the torch in remembrance, Brothers and Sisters,
In memory, and In might!
For every soul who dared say, no!
So we could one day say yes to fair wages,
Say yes to dignity!
Say yes, to the unbreakable union of the working class!
Say yes, to the ILWU!
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From Florence, Referenda Revisited!
By Nicola Benvenuti
On June 13 the Stansbury Forum published an analysis of the Italian vote on the 5 Referenda that took place on June 8-9.
Frequent Stansbury Forum contributor Nicola Benvenuti[1] wrote up his own brief analysis from his political perch in Florence, Italy
The difficulty in defining a political and trade union strategy
It’s my opinion that the Italian political crisis of the left-wing does not stem from contingent factors, like neglecting old class conquests or avoiding a tough fight for crucial objectives. I think it stems from today’s power relations between classes, but also from a lack of understanding of reality and the misunderstanding of social conflict, and therefore from the difficulty in defining a political and trade union strategy.
In the history of the workers’ movement there are constituent moments of a new identity dictated by changes in objective conditions. I think of Togliatti’s[2] 1944 Svolta di Salerno when national unity was a priority for the construction of the new Italian democracy; or to the SPD’s (German Social Democratic Party’s) 1959 opening to market logics (Bad Godesberg)[3], at a time when economic development made it possible to exchange work quality and intensity, and cooperation (Mitbestimmung) for work stability and high wages. Even Berlinguer’s Compremesso Storico (historic compromise) had the characteristics of a politically mediated social pact, aiming to overcome the dualisms of Italian society (north and south, rich and poor, pre-capitalist relations and advanced industry, cities and countryside) through the full democratic integration of the subordinate classes and a program of social reforms (healthcare, public housing, price controls, schooling etc.)
Attempts to formulate responses at this level, in a moment like ours marked by financial capitalism, a declining rate of industrial profit, and a massive concentration of wealth and power through technology and artificial intelligence, have not been seen either inside or— outside of Italy. This new phase of capitalism is truly disruptive and puts the defense and development of democracy and fundamental freedoms at the center of reflection, because it calls into question the very possibility of coexistence based on dialogue and debate, rather than mere force. This will certainly be the key battleground in the coming decades, and we look with hope to the opposition mounting in the U.S. against Trump, which Olney and Wilson vividly portrayed in a recent article in Sinistra Sindacale.[4]
The Italian labor movement, however, is now fragmented and divided into a myriad of interests, with no political mediation capable of regrouping a majority of citizens around the workers’ program. The construction of hegemony has been replaced by the pursuit of particular interests of one sector or another. As a result, politics is weakened and impoverished, and political participation collapses.
Within this roughly outlined context, the political activism launched by the CGIL through the proposed referendums of June 8-9 needs to be situated. These appear to be initiatives to build a relationship between the union and politics—especially in the absence of a party that would take on this task.
It is worth noting that the last attempt to establish a wide-ranging platform of social and economic agreements was made by the Matteo Renzi[5] (a man who was an outsider from the socialist tradition but able to arouse enthusiasm in the Partito Democratico (PD) electorate) government. While one may disagree with some of its elements, the initiative nonetheless had the stature of a foundational and structured pact. Its main pillars were: a political agreement with the opposition (Berlusconi[6] met Renzi at the PD headquarters), moderate liberalization of labor relations (fewer restrictions on dismissals, increasing protections for newly hired workers, tax incentives for hiring, reform of precarious employment, etc.), and institutional reform to streamline the decision-making process of an inefficient political system (differentiating the roles of the Chamber and Senate, a radical rethink of regionalization, etc.)—all under the benevolent eye of President Giorgio Napolitano[7]. It’s true that hiring decreased once tax incentives ended, that the promised “increasing protections” never materialized, and that layoffs significantly increased. But it’s also true that after Parliament approved the reforms, the “right” withdrew its support and effectively allied with the “left” to reject the constitutional reforms and bring down the Renzi government.
Avoiding blame and oversimplification, the substance is that the pact failed. Since then, Italian politics has largely been characterized by tax amnesties, security propaganda, xenophobia, clientelism, and the dismantling of the welfare state. In the political vacuum that has followed, several political initiatives have been tried, including the populism of the yellow/green government (5-Star Movement and League), and politically discredited: the PD after Renzi’s exit, is divided between a moderate/centrist party apparatus and the followers of the voters’s choice General Secretary Elly Schlein; the Northern League’s shift under Salvini toward building a southern client base; the 5-Star Movement, whose only real ambition seems to be replacing the PD; Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, which aspired to unify the “right” in the groove of a moderate right-wing line, now exists only as a subordinate part of the Fratelli d’Italia (Meloni) government. And finally the current “majority-of-the-minority government” led by the true winner of this political period, Giorgia Meloni, the last political force to try to govern but politically extremist and equipped by a low-quality ruling apparatus. And after that?
Returning to the specific issue, the union referendums were abrogative and thus lacked positive, detailed proposals. They were necessarily constructed with technical language that made even their actual effects hard to grasp—a bit weak to mobilize an electorate disillusioned by the lack of alternatives to the current state of affairs. Perhaps the union was also held back by its role and didn’t want to encroach too much on the territory of its “friendly” parties, the PD and the 5-Star Movement—or maybe this political task is simply too much at odds with the nature of a union.
However, these referendums also reveal an ideological approach: the defense of prerogatives won in very different contexts, as seen in the:
1. First referendum—against the Jobs Act—which, among other things, eliminated the union’s key instrument for protecting workers: Article 8, which prevented unjustified dismissals, introduced under Renzi. The other referendums concerned:
2. eliminating the cap on compensation for workers dismissed by small businesses, allowing judges to apply stricter penalties in the case of unjustified dismissals;
3. fighting precarious employment—especially temporary contracts that never lead to stable work;
4. workplace safety—by making the commissioning entrepreneur accountable for the often inadequate working conditions of subcontractors.
Given their abrogative nature, these referendums couldn’t propose comprehensive reforms; they were limited to adjusting the system by repealing measures considered harmful.
Sadly, the fifth referendum was also disappointing. This one was proposed by Più Europa, a political group in Parliament rooted in the old Radical Movement of Marco Pannella[8]. It aimed to halve the residency requirement for foreign residents and their families to apply for Italian citizenship—from 10 years to 5—once good conduct was established. Unfortunately, this referendum confirmed the widespread mistrust Italians have toward non-EU immigrants, and underscores the need to move beyond vague ethical attitudes toward concrete policies for legal integration and matching labor supply and demand, eliminating the utility of undocumented workers.
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[1] Nicola Benvenuti is an Italian political historian who resides in Florence
[2] Palmiro Togliatti 1893-1964 – Leader of the Italian Communist Party for 40 years
[3] Bad Godesberg is a town near Bonn Germany where the SPD convention took place
[4] https://www.sinistrasindacale.it/
[5] Matteo Renzi – Italian Prime Minster 2014-16
[6] Silvio Berlusconi was an Italian media tycoon and Prime minister from 1994-95, 2001-2006 and 2008-11.
[7] Longest serving Italian President and member of the Italian Communist Party from 1945-91.
[8] Marco Pannella 1930-2016 – Italian politician, journalist and activist and leader of the Radical Party
The Oligarchy Is Not Invincible
By Eric Blanc
Zohran’s Historic Win: 16 Takeaways
After decades of defeats for working people and the Left, it almost felt like a dream to witness Zohran Mamdani make history on June 24th. Sometimes the good guys win. As David Hogg wrote last night, “BREAKING: Not everything has to suck.”
Absorbing the key lessons of this campaign is essential for the fights ahead, not just in New York City, but across the United States. Here’s an initial list of the biggest takeaways.
1) Zohran’s victory is a nationwide political earthquake. Huge numbers of voters are sick of the Democratic establishment, and there’s no good reason why his playbook can’t be widely repeated elsewhere. The party’s decrepit “old” guard is vulnerable, its unpopularity delivered us Trumpism, and it deserves to be displaced everywhere.
2) By stubbornly hammering on proposals to make the city affordable, Zohran was able to break beyond the Left’s college-educated base. He won all across the city, including in neighborhoods like Sunset Park and Woodhaven that swung rightwards towards Trump in 2024. Economic populism is our best weapon to win back the working people and to overcome Trumpism. Blame the billionaires, not immigrants or transgender people.
3) We should always ignore the pundits and political hacks who try to convince us that transformative change is impossible — or that the best we can do is chase after a mythical political center, rather than winning the battle of ideas and ambitiously raising voters’ expectations.
4) Billionaires tried to buy this election and they lost badly. It turns out that the oligarchy is not invincible.
5) Pundits will try to spin this as purely the result of Cuomo’s unpopularity or Zohran’s charisma. That’s part of the story, but only part. In addition to the resonance of his policies and crystal-clear message on affordability, there’s no way he could have won without the tireless ground game of 50,000 volunteers and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and other allied organizations. Knocking 1.5 million doors is an astounding feat.
6) Young people were the heart of this campaign. The night of June 24th tens of thousands of them got to experience the ecstatic feeling of making history through collective organizing. Feeling that even once is enough to make you an organizer for life. This youthful social movement has the energy and ambition to make New York social democratic again.
7) Social media is extremely important for capturing the attention of wide layers of voters, and Zohran’s media team was amazing. But the secret sauce for good comms is not primarily technical — it’s political: you need an authentic messenger armed with a compelling platform. Hack Democrats can’t post themselves back into relevance.
8) It’s a very big deal — with nationwide and international implications — that Cuomo’s cynical smears about anti-Semitism fell flat. It turns out that opposing genocide and acknowledging the humanity of Palestinians is not necessarily an electoral dealbreaker. AIPAC should be very worried.
9) Despite what his opponents claim, Zohran is not a dogmatic extremist, but a radical pragmatist. He could not have gotten this far had he not focused on bread-and-butter economic issues, spoken in a commonsense language, ran as a Democrat, dropped his support for defunding the police, and endorsed Brad Lander. Zohran refused to drop his support for democratic socialism or his opposition to Zionist apartheid, but performative ultra-leftism was anathema to this campaign.
10) It took a liberal-Left alliance to defeat Cuomo. A huge amount of credit is due to Brad Lander for being a man of principle who refused to punch Left. At the same time, Zohran smartly rejected a widespread leftist tendency to treat liberals and liberalism only as ideological competitors to be fought. Look at how he adopted the best parts of the “abundance agenda,” how he cross-endorsed Lander, and how he framed his criticisms of Israel in the language of liberal equal rights. Leftists can’t defeat the old establishment — let alone overcome the Right — on their own. And mutuality cuts both ways: we can’t ally with liberals only when we’re in the lead.
11) Zohran’s inroads within organized labor were crucial steps towards legitimizing his campaign. The unions who took a risk and stood by working people by endorsing Zohran include AFSCME DC 37, UAW Region 9a, Doctors Council SEIU, CIR/SEIU, UNITE HERE Local 100, IATSE Local 161, PSC-CUNY, OPEIU Local 153, and Teamsters Local 804.
Every union that endorsed Cuomo should be embarrassed by their narrow-mindedness. The good news is now they have a chance to make things right by endorsing Zohran in the general election.
12) The fight has really just begun. Establishment Democrats, Trump, and their billionaire funders are going to do everything possible to prevent Zohran from taking office in November or, if that fails, from implementing his agenda. Expect an unprecedented, billionaire-funded scaremongering onslaught to convince New Yorkers that a Mamdani City Hall will bankrupt the city, unleash crime sprees, and persecute Jews.
13) Faced with claims that his project will lead to urban ruin and chaos, Zohran can lean on the progressive, technocratic competence of Lander’s crew and point to thriving social-democratic cities across Europe as well as strong historical precedents of success in the US. Before they named an airport after him, as Waleed Shahid notes, New York City’s wildly successful socialist mayor Fiorello La Guardia was also first denounced as an impractical radical.
14) The experience of La Guardia, like Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists,” shows that winning office is not enough. When you’re up against such powerful opponents, you need lots of organized grassroots power outside the state to actually implement your agenda. The most challenging obstacle on the road ahead is that Zohran’s electoral success has significantly outpaced the scale of working-class and socialist organization in New York City. Building widespread organization in workplaces and neighborhoods is hard, essential, and urgently needed. So join DSA. Unionize your workplace through EWOC. Reform your union. Salt a strategic company. Or build a tenant union in your building.
15) DSA’s membership is about to surge. And the organization is going to come under intense scrutiny from Fox News, Trump, and the Democratic establishment. It’s time to tighten our ship and to make a concerted nationwide turn away from self-marginalizing leftism. Members should study and emulate NYC DSA’s mass politics orientation. If this campaign didn’t fit all of your ideological priors, maybe those priors are wrong.
16) There are going to be all sorts of major setbacks in the months and years ahead. But after yesterday, it’s so much easier to see — and so much easier to feel — that a better world actually is possible if we fight like hell for it. The future is unwritten. Let’s write it together.
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