Defeating Mass Deportations
By Jeff Crosby
The Critical Battle of the Moment
Building powerful, overwhelming resistance to Trump’s mass deportations is the critical battle at the moment. It’s the hook that the New Confederacy (the fascist forces coalesced around Trump, which have inherited the mantle of the Old Confederacy) is hanging its hat on. It’s the one thing they think they can hold onto as Trump’s popularity sinks on issues like tariffs and inflation. While centrist establishment Democrats are pearl-clutching and privately counting the days to the next recession which they hope will bail us out, those of us who are fighting for a Third Reconstruction should be focusing on fighting mass deportations, in the courts and legislatures, and most importantly, in the streets.
Fighting mass deportations points us at the darkest core of the New Confederacy’s evil heart, head on: its performative cruelty rooted in white supremacy. And we can win on this issue.
Despite the bravado by the Steven Millers and Steve Bannons of the Trump world that immigration is their “80-20 issue” (where they win popular opinion by that margin), they are now losing ground there as well. Michael Podhorzer’s analysis in “The Re-Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority” makes a compelling case, made stronger since he qualifies and even understates his conclusions. He writes that “if voters had known in November what they know now—which could and should have been possible—Trump would have lost.” There has been no large-scale shift to the right on immigration any more than other issues, and people think Trump is, at the very least, “going too far.”
The Boston Globe reports on “growing community resistance” in my own home state of Massachusetts to fascist masked gangs who are snatching people off the streets and shipping them away from their families without due process. Notably, the writer covers actions in places like Worcester and Acton, not known as bastions of the left. It also describes people getting involved who do not consider themselves “activists” at all—neighbors, families, preachers, city councilors, and more.
The bottom line is that there is a growing resistance to Trump on what the right thinks is its strongest issue. The racism is increasingly clear, as “refugees” from the most privileged sector of South African society, the Afrikaners, are welcomed into the New Confederacy’s waiting arms while working-class people of color are spirited to gulags in El Salvador and South Sudan. Podhorzer’s analysis tracks my own experience and that of others I talk to. Many undocumented folks, as I have described elsewhere, are not against jailing or deporting violent gang members from whom they may have already fled in their home countries. A Dominican friend in Chicago said, “Every Latino family I spoke to during the last election told me ‘We need a Bukele’”—the El Salvador president who is popular, for now, in his country for a vicious crackdown on crime. People often did not believe that Trump’s actual plan was what he sometimes promised straight out: to deport every immigrant of color they can get their hands on, even US citizens, to Make America White Again.
How to Talk About Deportations
In discussions and protests about the deportations, I have found this obvious distinction to be very powerful: they aren’t deporting criminals, they are deporting hard-working people who have committed no crimes, and are our friends and neighbors—our own people, whether you are an immigrant yourself or not.
Some leftists reject that framework, arguing “We can’t imply support for mass incarceration, or for Calvinist capitalist propaganda about hard work.” But these are really debates among activists, with little actual impact among working-class people. They miss the best and wholly righteous way to build the anti-racist fight against mass deportations. There is nothing wrong with being concerned about crime, and there is nothing wrong with respecting people who work hard to build a life for themselves and their families. We need to meet people of all nationalities where they are and move them closer to an anti-racist, pro-democracy position.
Plenty of other arguments will do fine also: we need people to do these jobs, immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born folks—or as I told my ward councilor, “I agree we need to lower the crime rate—so let’s open the borders and bring in more immigrants!” Immigrants do in fact pay taxes, they just often don’t get the benefit of paying them; for example, they help keep Social Security solvent by paying into accounts that are not their own and from which they can never collect.
Faith organizing on this issue is particularly important. We need to increase the splits among evangelicals of all races on this issue, reminding them of Leviticus 19:34: “The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” Already those who were the strangers in Egypt, the Jews, are standing up against Trump’s mass deportations by a majority and opposing his attempts to use the phony campaign against antisemitism to justify kidnapping foreign graduate students and suppressing free speech on campuses. Every church, temple, and mosque: a sanctuary by those of faith.
Further, there simply is no bold line between “citizens” and “non-citizens.” According to the Pew Research Center, undocumented folks live in 6.3 million households, 70% of which have families of “mixed status.” The crackdown on undocumented people is simultaneously an assault on US families and citizens: children, fathers, mothers, cousins. The attacks on immigrants’ access to benefits like Social Security will also hit citizens and non-citizens alike.
Voluntary deportation, or “auto-deport” intimidation, is one of Trump’s most powerful tools. Because mixed-status families are common, it affects whole communities. Families fighting deportations of loved ones are faced with mounting legal and survival fees, so some are just leaving whether they are citizens or not.
One of my friends went to his children’s school to withdraw his child before the end of the year so they could return to their home country—and was told that this was becoming common. The son of another friend was accosted by a stranger who demanded his papers—a random bigot, not even ICE. That mother and son are both citizens, but because relatives across the US are experiencing deportations and detentions, they are thinking of returning home, citizens or not. A building trades leader told me, “This is a great country—but this is not the country I thought I immigrated to.” The three people I describe here are from three different countries in South America.
Courts, the Legislatures, the Streets
Even before Trump took office for his second term, the battle lines were drawn in the courts, our legislative bodies, and the streets. The courts have been inconclusive but stood up to Trump more than I had anticipated. This is a legitimate field of struggle, and one way to gum up the works for the fascists and keep them from consolidating power. Plus we are winning back the freedom of an occasional detainee, like Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student from Tufts University in Massachusetts. But the courts are also compromised by the systematic efforts by the New Confederacy to bring them to heel—and they are SLOW, and offer little in the way of public engagement or base-building opportunities. Part of Trump’s strategy has been to slow things down in the courts, so that even if he loses some major cases when they get to the Supreme Court, 1) the damage against our people and the propaganda appeals to whiteness can’t be undone, and 2) he will just attack the “liberal courts” who are standing in the way of his efforts to save us, in the normal fascist line of attack.
The legislatures are often either under the thumb of the New Confederacy, like the national Congress or the 23 states where the New Confederacy has a trifecta—that is, controls both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office (and often the state attorney general as well). Even where that is the case, there can be field hearings held by Congressional representatives, the Anti-Oligarchy Tour by AOC and Bernie, televised Congressional hearings, and protests joined by elected representatives. In this moment we need leaders, not just legislators. Some Democrats seem to be getting this message. And in blue states we can call on legislators to actively support immigrants, like the bill in Massachusetts to provide an emergency $10 million in funding for legal defense of our immigrants. This will shore up the overworked legal advocates who are intervening and occasionally winning—or at least slowing down the fascist machine.
But the streets are key, and will push the other fronts along. The Globe article describes the creation of LUCE, a network of immigrant and other activists who develop rapid-response mobilizations whenever they can verify an ICE presence in our communities. Neighbor to Neighbor and a broad alliance of groups that make up LUCE have trained over 1,000 “verifiers” in over 25 “hubs” across the state. LUCE is modeled on the work that the Latine base-building organization Siembra NC pioneered in North Carolina during the first Trump administration. Now Siembra has created a “defend and recruit” workbook for people looking to expand this model in other states. Verifiers respond to calls to a statewide hotline and show up on site when ICE (or their various law enforcement partners in crime) is spotted. The verifiers who approach ICE are under strict training not to directly interfere with the ICE and to be non-violent. They film ICE cars and license plates, ask them what they are doing, ask for their names and badge numbers, etc., and report back to the hotline, which is staffed in multiple languages. Massachusetts has been a priority state by the feds in the last few weeks, and LUCE is receiving 700 or more calls each week.
This has multiple positive impacts. First, the videos fly over social media and the mainstream press, showing the world the brutal ugly face of aspirational fascism in the US. The video of the cruel kidnapping of the gentle and kind Rüymesa was more powerful than a thousand Substack articles like this, or a million leaflets. My wife and I watched the arrest of the daughter of a woman snatched by ICE in Worcester online—from Palermo, Sicily.
Second, ICE agents are cowards and bullies, who are masked to conceal their cowardice, even as they follow orders and leave children on streets without parents, break windows in the cars of people who only asked to see their lawyers, and drag them out to jail from in front of churches and schools. Often they simply leave. LUCE in Lynn claimed 100% effectiveness for the retreat of ICE over the last weekend when they could mobilize verifiers quickly enough. At a recent New Lynn Coalition board meeting, we viewed a video of just such an interaction. In some cases LUCE verifiers had to go back again and again to keep warding off ICE agents.
Finally, these rapid-response actions give people something concrete to DO, especially the combative youth and immigrants and others who have come to realize that this will not stop until we stop it. There is no imaginary cycle of history that will save us, this is not something that will just pass, and it is not a drill.
The scale of this kind of resistance is growing, and will continue to grow as more and more people are drawn into action. This goes beyond the regular activists who may attend Hands Off rallies. These are the people who are moving left, laying the basis to go beyond just “Hands Off what we used to have”—moving instead toward building something much better.
To be clear, immigrant defense work by groups like LUCE and Siembra will not stop mass deportations all on its own. It will take a variety of tactics by different social actors and sectors of the people, including legal and legislative efforts and other forms of both passive resistance that puts sand in gears of the repressive regime, as well as aggressive direct action. At times it feels like we have a great 10-year plan to respond to an existential 10-week crisis. Things inevitably heat up over this summer. The New Confederate thugs will no doubt respond to resistance with more repression. Fascism is not a dinner party, either. We need to expect that and prepare for it as the cost of doing our business.
But the street action of LUCE and multiple other similar efforts provide a place to win some victories, learn and uplift our own roles as working class people, and drive successes on other levels. Ultimately, it is through building and connecting these strategic defensive battles that we will lay the groundwork for the strategic counter-offensive needed to decisively defeat the New Confederacy, and put an end to its fascist agenda.
For we can win. Indeed, we are already winning over public opinion on what was supposed to be Trump’s strongest issue. The American people stand with immigrants. Give light, and the people will fight.
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This piece orginally ran on Liberation Road. Checkout their substack
BOOK REVIEW: A People’s History of SF’s Most Notorious Neighborhood
By Steve Early
”Any city that doesn’t have a Tenderloin isn’t a city at all.”
—Herb Caen, longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist
The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco by Randy Shaw, Urban Reality Press, 2025
Few San Francisco neighborhoods have had more ups and downs than the 33-block area still called “The Tenderloin”—a name that derives from the late 19th century police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking their best cuts of beef in lieu of cash bribes.
At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studios, and professional boxing gyms.
In 1966, trans people hanging out at the all-night Compton’s Cafeteria staged a militant protest against police harassment three years before the more famous LGBTQ uprising at the Stonewall Inn in NYC. During the last decade, the Tenderloin has become better known for its controversial side-walk camping, open-air drug markets, and fentanyl abuse.
The failure of municipal government to deal with those social problems— in a residential neighborhood for working-class families with 3,000 children—contributed to recent electoral defeats of a district attorney, city supervisor, and San Francisco’s second female and African-American mayor.
For the past 45 years, Randy Shaw has been a fixture of the place as co-founder of its Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC). After graduating from law school nearby, Shaw became involved in fights for tenants’ rights and more affordable housing at a time when blue collar neighborhoods in San Francisco were starting to gentrify.
A Unionized Non-Profit
The THC, which now employs 200 SEIU Local 1021-represented staff members, began to acquire and develop its own network of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) buildings in the Tenderloin, as an alternative to run-down private landlord-owned ones.
Today, THC provides subsidized housing and wrap-around services to several thousand of the city’s most needy tenants—who might otherwise be among the social outcasts living in the surrounding streets. Shaw estimates that the Tenderloin has a higher percentage of housing in nonprofit hands than any central city neighborhood in the nation, an arrangement that safeguards its distinctive character as an economically mixed neighborhood with many low-income people among its 20,000 residents.
In this second edition to his book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco, Shaw recounts how this multi-racial working-class enclave managed to survive, if not always thrive, amid a city dominated by tech industry wealth and privilege.
That history of neighborhood resistance to displacement is also on display at the Tenderloin Museum (TLM). Created ten years ago, with much help from the author, this venue for community-based, historically-inspired cultural programming now operates under the direction of Katie Conry.
In her Forward to Shaw’s book, Conry describes the TLM’s many art shows, special exhibits, theatre productions, walking tours, and other public programs that have drawn 50,000 people to a downtown area many out-of-town visitors (and locals) are told to avoid. On April 11, for example, the THC hosted a new production of The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot to commemorate that “collective act of resistance” and “the on-going fight for transgender rights.”
Community Benefits Agreements
Californians fighting gentrification—or trying to make sure its benefits are more equitably shared—will find Shaw’s book to be an invaluable guide to effective activism around housing issues. It illustrates how persistent and creative grassroots organizing can challenge and change urban re-development schemes designed for the few, rather than the many. In too many California cities, it’s the latter who continue to get pushed out and left behind in the name of “neighborhood improvement.”
A central case study in The Tenderloin is the author’s account of how community residents won a pioneering “community benefits agreement” (CBA) with three powerful hotel chains. In the early 1980s, Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Ramada wanted to build three luxury tourist hotels adjacent to the Tenderloin. Given the city’s pro-development political climate at the time, these hospitality industry giants expected little organized opposition to their plans. Then Mayor Diane Feinstein lauded them for “bringing a renaissance to the area.”
However, as originally unveiled, their blueprint would have transformed nearby residential blocks by “driving up property values, leading to further development, and, ultimately the Tenderloin’s destruction as a low-income residential neighborhood.”
An Organizing Case Study
Among those faced with the prospect of big rent increases and eventual evictions were many senior citizens, recently arrived Asian immigrants, and longtime residents of SRO buildings in dire need of better ownership and management. Fortunately, this low-income, multi-racial population included some residents with “previously unrecognized activist and leadership skills” that were put to good use by campaign organizers, like Shaw, who were assisting their struggle.
During a year-long fight, hundreds of people mobilized to pressure the city Planning Commission to modify the hoteliers’ plans. As Shaw reports, the resulting deal with City Hall created “a national precedent for cities requiring private developers to provide community benefits as a condition of approving their projects.”
Each of the hotels contributed $320,000 per hotel per year for twenty years for low-cost housing development. They also had to sponsor a $4 million federal Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) for the acquisition and renovation of four low-cost Tenderloin SROs. In addition, each hotel had to pay $200,000 for community service projects, and give priority in employment to Tenderloin residents.
Four decades later, community benefits agreements of this sort are not so unusual. But, in the absence of major new federal investment in public housing built with union labor, they are still much needed.
Where tax breaks or rezoning encourages various forms of private development today, the only way to win additional low-income housing units, living wage jobs, local hiring, or preservation of open space for public use is through grassroots campaigning by community-labor coalitions, aided by sympathetic public officials.
Otherwise mayors and city councils under the thumb of developers will simply offer financial incentives with few strings attached—whether the project involved is a new hotel, casino, shopping center, office building, or luxury apartment building.
Organizers’ optimism
Back in the Tenderloin, as Shaw reports in the conclusion to his book, residents in recent years have had to mobilize around basic public safety issues. Pandemic driven economic distress flooded their neighborhood with tent dwellers, drug dealing, and street crime that added to small business closures, drove tourists away, and made daily life hazardous for longtime residents (except when state and local politicians cleaned things up for high-profile gatherings like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leadership meeting in S.F. two years ago).
Nevertheless, the author ends on an optimistic note (characteristic of organizers): “New restaurants and small businesses are again opening in the Tenderloin. Street and crosswalk changes make the neighborhood among the city’s most walkable. New housing has increased the Tenderloin’s population…”
But, Shaw reminds us, residents of this urban enclave must still fight to achieve “the quality of life common to other San Francisco neighborhoods,” while “protecting an ethnically diverse, low-income, and working-class community” with a colorful past and always uncertain future.
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This post original ran on California DSA
Pete Hegseth — Offense at the Defense Department
By Tom Gallagher
“Trump slams Biden, praises ‘tough cookie’ Hegseth …” Politico 26 May 2025
Isn’t the most remarkable — and least remarked-upon — aspect of the Pete Hegseth Defense Department reality show the fact that no one has appeared worried that the nation’s security might actually be threatened by this? That no one has seemed particularly concerned about any danger resulting from the vast U.S. military arsenal ostensibly being placed in the hands of someone who had obviously not read the job manual? But then why would they? Did anyone seriously think China’s Ministry of State Security was dashing off memos advising the country’s leaders to invade the United States because control of its armed forces had somehow fallen into inept hands? Or that something like that was going on in Russia … or Denmark … or Canada … or any other of our enemies, old or new?
Apparently not. Why? Well, at recent count, the U.S. was in possession of a fleet of 299 deployable combat vessels; 3,748 nuclear warheads; 5,500 military aircraft; 13,000 drones; and 2,079,142 military personnel. All of this comes with highly detailed operational plans for situations involving an actual attack on the nation. But no one seemed to think that what Hegseth was spending his time on had much, if anything, to do with that eventuality. From the point of view of the nation’s legitimate security, that’s a good thing. But it raises the question of what was Hegseth on about, anyhow?
The story that brought the question of the Trump foreign policy team’s competence to the fore has little to do with the matter of American national defense. What it’s really about is the unauthorized, global use of American military force. The few Americans whose well-being was plausibly threatened by Hegseth’s now infamous sharing of the details of upcoming bombing missions — with his wife, brother, lawyer, as well as the editor of The Atlantic — were the pilots of those missions.
The object of this now haulted bombing campaign — which the Administration says has struck a thousand targets — is the Yemen rebel group called the Houthis, an organization allied with Iran and militarily opposed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The recent U.S. attacks came in response to a resumption of Houthi efforts to block Israeli shipping in the Arabian Gulf that followed upon Israel’s breaking of its ceasefire agreement with Hamas, along with its blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza. In response to the renewed U.S. assault, the Houthis attacked the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, the aircraft carrier which then-President Biden deployed to the Gulf last December as a base for the anti-Houthi airstrikes that he had ordered.
Now, although it may seem quaint to mention such technicalities as the law in relation to the routine U.S. bombing of another nation, the truth of the matter is that — whether one considers bombing the Houthis to free up Arabian Gulf shipping a good idea, or whether one doesn’t — we are simply not at war either with the government of Yemen or with the Houthis trying to supplant it. Nor has Congress authorized the use of force there, in lieu of a declaration of war.
If you have trouble recalling Congress declaring war, that’s because you probably weren’t alive in 1942, the last time it did so (against Bulgaria, Hungary and Rumania.) The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan? No declaration of war deemed necessary. And while the current Republican-controlled Congress may be distinguishing itself for new depths of subservience, generally the Democrat and Republican leadership alike tend to act as if questions of war and peace were above their pay grade, with only a minority of Democrats and a handful of Republicans ever making noise about the latest military action taken in our name. Congress’s ultimate responsibility notwithstanding, Presidents Biden and Trump have made their decisions to launch attacks on Yemen unilaterally.
What we’re dealing with here is what we might call the Defense Department’s Offense Division — the part that maintains the 700–800 foreign military bases around the globe (the exact number is classified, but maybe if you could get your number on Hegseth’s phone list …), along with the ships that ply its waters and the planes and drones that fly its airs. As previously noted, Trump is not the first President to bomb Yemen. And while, as in so many areas, he may well be the crudest exponent and practitioner of American foreign policy that we’ve seen in some time, the bombs Trump orders do not fall far from those dropped by previous administrations. Prior to the current episode, the U.S. has bombed Yemen during every single year since 2009 — nearly three hundred times, primarily via drone.
Nor is Yemen the first country bombed during the second Trump Administration; Iraq, Syria and Somalia have preceded it. None of this was considered much by way of news — a failing of the news media, yes — but less so than of the congressional leaders who have failed to make it news. Here too, while Trump may denigrate his predecessors, he apparently takes no issue with their bombing choices, joining the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump I, and Biden Administrations in the serial bombing of Somalia that has occurred more than 350 times over the course of those presidencies. The U.S. has also bombed Syria and Iraq every year since 2014.
All of this has been justified under tortured, expansive legal interpretations of the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force permitting military action against entities that “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons” as well as “to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.” Under Bush, the authorization was interpreted to extend to the occupation of Iraq. Under Obama, it would encompass action against groups that did not even exist in 2001, but were “descendants” or “successors” — such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The first Trump Administration would expand that logic to warfare against eight different groups — including the assassination of an Iranian military commander. It was now understood to allow for military actions anywhere on the globe.
Before the Trumpists coopted the use of the term “Deep State” to encompass what they believe to be a malign government network that supports programs like Social Security, or Medicare, the term was used by quite a different group of people to quite a different end. The Deep State back then referred to the unelected elements of the government committed to waging endless war, often covert, often illegal — e.g. the Central Intelligence Agency — the sort of thing President Lyndon Johnson was talking about when he said that under President Kennedy the U.S. had been running “a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean.”
We don’t call that the Deep State anymore because, as the above discussion indicates, our government no longer feels a need to hide these things. It’s above ground now — part of the DoD’s Offense Division. The CIA now conducts assassinations openly — via drone.
This is the part of the U.S. Government that should really worry us. It’s what Pete Hegseth was hired to run, something that was clear right from his Senate confirmation hearings that culminated in a narrower win than even his boss’s on Election Day — his approval requiring a Vice Presidential tie-breaking vote for only the second time in history (the first being the approval of Betsy DeVos as Trump I Secretary of Education). From the get go, Hegseth was forthright in declaring himself against increased “wokeness” — and for increased “lethality.”
One simple way to increase lethality is to broaden the potential killing range. And in this area, Hegseth came with a pretty strong record, having successfully lobbied for pardons of soldiers convicted of war crimes during the first Trump Administration, and suggesting in a book he wrote last year,“The War on Warriors,” that rather than adhering to the Geneva conventions, the U.S. would be “better off in winning our wars according to our own rules.”
Nor has he missed a beat since taking office; he’s announced plans to terminate the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, and the Army will no longer require training in the law of war; henceforth it will be optional. Results have quickly followed, with the bombing of a migrant detention center in Yemen, for instance. One of Hegseth’s infamous Signal chats even described the targeting of a civilian location.
One last thought for the Secretary: Pete, If you were to spend your time on our national defense — instead of “lethality” in attacking foreign nations with which we are not at war — you could probably rest easier about using your phone. Of course, we both know that’d get you fired in a New York minute. You’re there to play offense.
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We will never ever accept to be ignored and be treated as worthless
By Ibrahim Diallo
Peter Olney:
Lyft and Uber are in talks with the Labor Commissioner, the State Attorney General, and the city attorneys from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego over the massive wage theft they inflicted on drivers after the passage of Assembly Bill 5 which classified them as employees. At stake is tens of billions of dollars in stolen wages and unpaid expenses from years of misclassification. On May 21st, the parties were scheduled to meet to discuss the future of the case, and on May 20th they heard from drivers statewide at rallies organized by Rideshare Drivers United (RDU) . Rallies were held in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.
At the rally at San Francisco City Hall, Ibrahim Diallo, a driver who was deactivated by Uber in 2023 gave a stirring address.
Ibrahim Diallo: My speech for our Wages Claim
There is absolutely no place on earth where people’s freedom or rights were given free. People always need to constantly fight with a big determination to never give up, to obtain it.
Please never forget that there will be no exception for us Rideshare Drivers United. So, we must stand up for ourselves, as no one will do it for us
We Drivers also play a very important role in our current world.
Let’s remind people who we are because many tend to either forget, underestimate or maybe even neglect how crucial and preponderant our position is.
We will never ever accept to be ignored and be treated as worthless.
In the preamble of the Declaration of independence of the United States it says:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
That is all we are asking for. Our “pursuit of happiness” is not respected and guaranteed.
Who are we?
We are part of the backbone of our society, which we can hardly imagine without transportation services.
We are those guys of all genders, colors, and faiths, young and old who are dedicated to serving you, 24 hours a day without any discrimination.
We are the dawn breakers who safely drop you at work, school, hospital and at your other errands and back home.
We are the ones who avoid you to miss your trains and planes (flights).
We are the night owls who still tolerate and accept to come back on the road to serve you, even after drunk clients often vomit or use our cars as a restroom.
Sometimes Uber refuses to pay for our cleaning fees.
Like this bartender/girl once told me with a big humor, on a late Friday night in Seattle: “You bring them (clients) to us sober, we get them drunk for you to come and safely drop them home. Then lastly you come and safely drop us (bartenders) home, before you go sleep”.
We are those who are exposed to all kind of crazy situations, like a client intentionally broke my right mirror and Uber decline to fix it. I had to fix it from my own pocket, otherwise my car is not fit to drive for them.
We are the ones braving all types of weathers: rain, fog, wind, cold to go out and serve you.
We are the braves risking their lives, who could be victims of drunk drivers on the road.
One day of strike of all taxi and Uber/Lyft drivers would paralyze all the country and have an impact on all sectors of our economy.
How can you dare to marginalize us?
We are doing the same type of job as taxi, limousine and bus drivers who are obviously well regulated and have much better treatment.
How can you not consider us as them?
Are we less human?
How the hell can you not make sure we have a better treatment?
Are you receiving some cut from Uber and Lyft?
How can California and the Federal Government not guarantee equal dignity to both Uber&Lyft drivers?
How can you close your eyes and ignore the crime which has been happening for so long in your state, your country?
When we see or know about an injustice, and we can do something to prevent or stop it, but don’t do anything, then we are crystal clearly complicit.
Consequently, if California government does not definitely eradicate this 21st century slavery (which is a kind of sharecropping), we Uber/Lyft drivers hold them complicit and responsible, as they are the guarantor of justice for their citizens’ welfare — “we hold these truths to be self-evident…our pursuit of happiness…” which is in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.
Uber said they were losing money, which is why they could not raise drivers’ income and pay their shareholders. Yet they paid about $200 million to their lawyers to lobby to reverse PROP 22.
How do you dare to underpay and exploit us?
If Uber and Lyft clients, even non clients, knew what could be the negative impacts of the bad treatments we are undergoing, everyone would join on the street to come and fight for us to have more safety.
What are the risks to which people can be exposed with the current situation?
Do you want to ride with a stressed, depressed, tired, and sleepy driver?
Do you want to ride with a hungry and angry driver?
Certainly no.
But FYI, many drivers are, because they are obliged to drive 10 to 12 hours per shift for 6, or even 7 days a week to meet the ends.
Remember also, that when Uber drivers are affected their families and dear ones are as well. So too schools, and other work places because “WE ALL ARE ONE”.
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Lessons of Labor for Bernie
By Steve Early
Challenging and Changing Union Decisions About Politics Takes Rank-And-File Action
Photo: Robert Gumpert
The experience of seeing fellow union members fall for the faux populism of Donald Trump in 2024 has led to much soul-searching about why working-class people vote for billionaire-backed candidates—or don’t vote at all.
In 2016 and 2020, unlike last year, labor voters had a chance to rally around a candidate for the presidency who campaigned against the “billionaire class” (and is still doing so as part of his current “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour).
Within organized labor, a grassroots network of union activists strongly supported Bernie Sanders’ two bids for the White House. Campaigning under the banner of “Labor for Bernie” (L4B), they helped shape rank-and-file opinion for the better, put pressure on the national AFL-CIO and its affiliates to make political endorsements more democratically, and, in Democratic presidential primaries, helped boost turn-out for a candidate actually worthy of the union label.
Rank-and-filers trying to make their voices heard, in such oppositional fashion in the future, will face similar difficulty challenging and changing leadership decisions about what politicians to back or not.
Those hoping to launch more labor-backed independent candidacies, outside a corporate-dominated Democratic Party, will get even more push-back from the AFL-CIO and its affiliates—if their past levels of support for Sanders are any guide.
Yet the political and economic upheavals triggered by Trump’s second presidency will inevitably create cross-union insurgencies and internal union ones, leading, in some cases, to greater receptiveness to the idea of doing politics differently. That’s why the lessons of two rounds of L4B campaigning, as recalled below, remain timely and relevant at the moment.
Labor for Bernie, 2016
Bernie Sanders’ announcement in March, 2015 that he was running for president was initially regarded by supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton as just a minor irritant. Corporate Democrats viewed the then U.S. Senator, former Congressman, and ex-mayor of Burlington, Vt. with particular resentment as a party crasher.
For the previous 45 years, he had been a frequent critic of both major parties. He also proudly maintained his ballot line brand as an “Independent,” rather than become a Democrat (while he caucused with them in the House and Senate). Most Clintonites viewed the anti-war socialist as a marginal protest candidate of the Dennis Kucinich sort, who wouldn’t win a single state primary (other than possibly Vermont’s).
Unfortunately for Clinton and a national AFL-CIO eager to endorse her, Sanders started out with a few more out-of-state friends than they realized—and quickly attracted hundreds of thousands more. Among them were union activists in the northeast with much past personal experience working with Bernie on key labor causes, locally, regionally, and nationally. Sanders’ working-class orientation, political independence, and rejection of corporate money was a major selling point for them, not a personal liability.
As Don Trementozzi, leader of a Communications Workers of America (CWA) local based in New Hampshire, pointed out: “Bernie was not on the fence or the wrong side, like Hillary Clinton, when our union was campaigning against the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He was helping us lead the fight against that job killing free trade deal back by Democrats and Republicans alike.”
John Murphy, a Carpenters Local 40 steward in Lowell, Mass., favored Sanders because of his “long record of supporting workers and their right to unionize.” When some fellow building trades members questioned whether Bernie could win, Murphy told them: “That’s up to us!”
On June 25, 2015, Trementozzi and Murphy joined 1,000 other local union elected officers, shop stewards, organizers and rank-and-file members from 50 states and 57 different unions who kicked off “Labor for Bernie 2016.”
They urged their respective national unions and the AL-CIO to get behind the only presidential candidate “who challenges the billionaires who are trying to steal our pensions, our jobs, our homes, and what’s left of our democracy.”
In a letter sent the same day to then AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, Labor for Bernie (L4B) supporters strongly objected to any “premature endorsement” made without “the broadest possible membership participation in the electoral process.”
Instead, they urged the labor federation and its affiliates to sponsor grassroots candidate forums and debates, throughout the primary season, and forego making any presidential pick until the 2016 primaries were over.
Not Feeling the Bern?
This was definitely not the preferred time-table of the Clinton campaign or top union officials. So Trumka, John Podesta, Clinton’s Campaign Manager, and Nikki Budzinski, her Labor Outreach Director, began conferring about how to overcome any delay in the AFL-CIO executive council’s endorsement of Clinton by the required 2/3 vote.
One such conversation with Trumka on this matter was held four months after L4B was launched. As WikiLeaks later disclosed, the AFL-CIO president, in Podesta’s words, was very “keen on convincing union members that they could trust HRC to fight for them.” According to Trumka, as recounted by Podesta, few unions were “feeling the Bern,” “only APWU was likely to endorse him” and, if “pushed hard,” Larry Hanley, then president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) “might end up endorsing HRC.”
Podesta informed fellow Clinton campaign staffers that Trumka “didn’t think CWA was likely to go with Bernie” either and that “Larry Cohen [its recently retired national president] wasn’t playing that well at his surrogate appearances” in front of other labor audiences.
At the time of this exchange, CWA was–as recommended by the AFL-CIO itself—in the middle of a three-month process of membership meetings, telephone town halls, and other forms of information sharing about the 2016 presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican.
The results of a binding on-line CWA membership poll, released in early December, 2015, were not what Trumka predicted. Thanks to Cohen’s high-profile work as Sanders’ main emissary to the labor movement and voter turn-out efforts, within CWA, by L4B supporters and their locals, CWA did “go with Bernie.” As CWA spokesperson Candice Johnson told The Intercept. “Tens of thousands of members voted in the poll, with Sanders getting a decisive majority.”
Headaches for Hillary
By this point in 2015, ten other national unions had, via their usual top-down decision-making, endorsed Clinton as fast as they could. But, as a headline in Bloomberg News warned: “Labor for Bernie Means Headaches for Hillary,” that were just beginning. Contrary to Trumka’s forecast, Cohen worked successfully with several other former AFL-CIO executive council colleagues whose unions became Bernie backers—including Hanley at the ATU, RoseAnn DeMoro at National Nurses United (NNU), and Mark Dimondstein, who is still president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU).
Before the 2016 primary season was over, the total membership of national unions in the Labor for Bernie camp reached one million (although only CWA backed him as a result of membership voting, as opposed to a leadership decision). L4B backers included both AFL-CIO affiliates and independents like the United Electrical Workers (UE) and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
Plus, Sanders won the backing of more than 100 local unions around the country, including many affiliated with national unions backing Clinton. Vocal minorities raised hell in the building trades, SEIU, AFSCME, and both major teachers’ unions when their top officials ignored membership advocacy on Sanders’ behalf.
Through grassroots organizing and on-line signature gathering, funded with a budget of less than $5,000, L4Bdeveloped a mailing list of 50,000 activists. They pledged to work, within their own unions and communities, to help Sanders win Democratic primaries in their respective states. As Donald Trump emerged as the likely Republican presidential nominee, Sanders continued to argue that he, not Hillary Clinton, was the general election candidate best positioned to counter Trump’s appeal to working-class voters, disenchanted with business as usual.
During the June, 2016 Democratic primary in New York, while losing to Clinton there, Sanders even challenged Trump to a debate—an invitation the latter wisely declined—to prove this point. The national AFL-CIO did not officially endorse his opponent until that same month, long after the late February executive council meeting at which Trumka originally hoped to confirm the federation’s backing of Clinton.
Before she became the party’s nominee, with critical backing from un-elected Democratic National Convention “super-delegates,” union activists helped Sanders win primary elections in 23 states and amass 13 million votes overall. About 250 Labor for Bernie supporters won delegate slots at the DNC in August, 2016, where they continued to rally other Democrats against free trade and for Medicare for All.
A Hard Act to Follow?
After the fall general election campaign, Labor for Bernie co-founder Rand Wilson and former ILWU Organizing Director Peter Olney were optimistic that Sanders supporters would remain part of an on-going, cross-union formation. All that was needed, they argued, was “sufficient union resources to coordinate our work” and labor leadership willing to “form a coordinating body and staff to begin implementing a unifying program in selected campaigns at the state and national level.”
This “new force for a democratic economy would also tackle issues like climate change and “our permanent war economy and militarized foreign policy.”
Such ambitious post-election goals proved hard to achieve, despite the promising June, 2017 launch of Labor for Our Revolution., which tried to steer trade unionists toward the 300 local or state committees then rallying former Sanders supporters under the banner of Our Revolution (OR).
Six months before, a surprising number of recent Labor for Bernie veterans had already detached themselves from its national mailing list, after they received a general election appeal to elect Clinton. And, without the unifying focus of the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, even pro-Bernie national unions “soon reverted to doing their own thing in politics,” Wilson recalls.
OR remains a key organizational advocate for Democratic Party rules reform, foe of big money in politics, and backer of progressive candidates, many of whom were inspired by Sanders’s first race. Chaired by Larry Cohen, OR aided Sanders’ second presidential campaign and continues to champion workers’ rights and grassroots opposition to the wide-ranging Republican attacks on democracy, unleashed after Jan. 20 of this year.
The difficulty of fostering a durable vehicle for independent political initiatives, rooted in unions, was the subject of a recent phone conversation with now retired California Nurses Association/NNU leader RoseAnn DeMoro, a key Labor for Bernie advocate in 2016. As DeMoro lamented, “The hold of the Democratic Party on organized labor is something to behold.” And the truth of that was definitely on display in 2019-20.
Labor for Bernie, 2020
Three years after the Electoral College put Trump, rather than Clinton, in the White House, the Democratic presidential primary field for 2020 looked, initially, nothing like the eventual two-person duel between Sanders and Clinton in 2016. Nearly 20 Democrats—including two of Trump’s fellow billionaires—competed to replace him.
This created far more difficult terrain for the second iteration of Labor for Bernie. Sanders now faced competition not just from a plethora of corporate Democrats but also from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, long identified with many progressive causes. As a result, recalls one Sanders advisor, his pandemic disrupted second run for the presidency “didn’t have the same magic” or single galvanizing primary opponent, with a questionable record of support for labor.
L4B was officially re-launched in May, 2019. With an eventual budget of $35,000, it was able to hire some full-time help, a departure from the all-volunteer effort three years before. Local committees became active again in LA, the Bay Area, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. As in 2016, they circulated petitions seeking labor voter pledges to support Sanders in the primaries. They organized debate parties, spoke on Bernie’s behalf at local union meetings, and marched in Labor Day parades.
According to Paul Prescod, then a teacher’s union activist in Philly, L4B lobbied the local labor council to host a “Workers Presidential Summit,” featuring seven candidates, and then turned out supporters for the event. Hundreds of union members attended but, Prescod recalls, it ended up having “a sleepy feeling,” particularly when Joe Biden spoke. Bernie, per usual, got the most cheers—when he called for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and a Workplace Democracy Act.
In a crowded primary field, rank-and-file cheering did not translate into as much official labor backing as Bernie received four years before. In late September, 2019, Jonah Furman, the labor outreach coordinator for Sanders’ second campaign, reported that its only national union endorser so far was the UE. That smaller union was later joined by two larger organizational backers of Bernie in 2016– the APWU and NNU.
The latter, whose independent spending on Sanders behalf reached $1 million, according to one former staff member, devoted only a fraction of those resources the second time around. After a post-2016 change in presidents, neither the ILWU and ATU endorsed Sanders again.
Members Demand A Voice!
In a September, 2019, article for Labor Notes entitled “Members Demand a Voice in Their Unions’ Presidential Endorsements,” Furman reported that “several national unions had revised their presidential endorsement processes, in response to members’ dissatisfaction with the procedures used in 2016”—that were widely protested by labor backers of Bernie’s first campaign.
The largest union that backed Sanders first race—CWA—changed its endorsement process too, but not for the better. While Sanders was in the process of garnering 9.5 million votes and placing first in 8 primary elections, CWA headquarters officials refused to conduct another binding membership poll to determine its 2020 presidential endorsement, since that is not a requirement of the CWA constitution (or any other union’s).
Sanders contributed to this setback by informing CWA, via his 2020 presidential candidate questionnaire, that he favored anti-trust action in the telecom industry. In an accompanying message, Sanders called his otherwise very pro-labor positions “a snapshot of our great history together — and a glimpse of how promising and bold our future together will be, with your support.” When informed that anti-trust action harmful to several hundred thousand unionized workers and their customers would mainly be a boon for non-union competitors to AT&T and Verizon, Sanders stubbornly refused to withdraw his ill-advised campaign plank.
Then, in the Spring of 2020, Covid-19 made further in-person campaigning very difficult. As other candidates dropped out and threw their support to Biden, he became the last corporate Democrat standing between Bernie and the nomination. Faced with another convention delegate count deficit he could not overcome, Sanders withdrew from the race, at which point the CWA executive board backed Biden, as labor’s best bet for defeating Trump.
While the CWA national union reverted to form, 10,000-member UPTE-CWA, its largest west coast affiliate, ignored instructions from headquarters not to endorse a Democratic Primary candidate on its own. This active pro-Bernie local in 2016 put the choice of Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the rest of the 2020 field before its own members. Sanders won again with 66 percent, with Warren coming in second with 22 percent of those voting.
Another 2016 Labor for Bernie backer was the California-based National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). This statewide labor organization invited Sanders, Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and others in the field to address its 2019 stewards conference. NUHW then empowered members of that body, plus rank-and-filers voting on-line, to choose among them, based on their live video presentations and candidate questionnaire responses.
The result was a joint endorsement of Sanders and Warren, reflecting membership sentiment that was about evenly split. Sanders went on win the California primary in March, 2020 with help from these and other labor supporters more enthusiastic about his candidacy than the already failed one of their own U.S. Senator Kamala Harris.
Conclusion
Last year, there was another big blue-collar union, also with new leadership, that weighed in differently on the presidential election, but not by deepening its own recent process of internal democratization, The United Auto Workers entered 2024 with the great momentum of just having held a first-ever direct election of its own top officers. That resulted in leading members of the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) slate becoming an executive board majority.
It was no easy task for new UAW President Shawn Fain to rally members who felt cynical and disengaged because of the corruption and dysfunction of the prior leadership. Yet, during national contract talks two years ago, the UAW’s use of membership education and mobilization, unprecedented bargaining table transparency, and a selective strike strategy produced major auto industry gains, after years of divisive and demoralizing concessions.
A logical next step, in 2024, might have been changing the union’s approach to political action. If “one member/one vote” was a good way to get UAWD candidates elected and restore confidence in the union, why not also let the rank-and-file decide who the UAW should back for president, since that might add greater legitimacy to the union’s preferred candidate.
This was not the course taken by the new leadership. The UAW’s 400,000 members had the same limited and indirect voice last year that they had before UAWD’s victory. The question of who to endorse was decided by the union’s 15-member national executive board.
The much harder and politically riskier approach of empowering the membership gained popularity amid widespread enthusiasm for Sanders’ candidacies and L4B’s organizing around them. A decade later, using a more democratic method to endorse politicians is still the exception, not the rule.
That’s because a politically desirable outcome is not guaranteed, as demonstrated by the results of last year’s Teamster polling on Harris vs. Trump. Instead, it is dependent on internal political education and the degree to which rank-and-filers get out the vote for their favored candidate, which CWA supporters of Sanders did successfully ten years ago.
CWA’s own subsequent backtracking from giving members the final say in 2000 and 2024 would not have been possible if the union’s constitution required it to conduct a binding membership vote on presidential candidate endorsements. In the absence of such a mandate, more local unions can follow the best practices of UPTE-CWA or NUHW.
They should find ways to empower their members at the local or state level to vet candidates and choose among them—based on union-provided information and advice–but without always giving the officialdom the final say. Over time, this greater willingness to trust an informed and engaged rank-and-file, might even prove to be as contagious as “feeling the Bern” was in the heyday of Labor for Bernie.
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The Pope
By Nicola Benvenuti
Pope Leo XIV (the former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost), by his training and character, will—while keeping the content unchanged (the script is always the same, the Gospel)—certainly be more rigorous and attentive than the combative but somewhat instinctive Bergoglio (the late Pope Francis). I believe this trait, along with his background as a missionary amongst the poor in Peru, led the vast majority of the conclave to support the North American proposal. A too-striking shift—or confirmation—compared to Francis would have highlighted divisions and conflicts. Instead, it seems Prevost received the approval of over 100 cardinals, positioning himself as the guarantor of a new unity.
He won’t, therefore, be the anti-Trump—and Cardinal Dolan of NYC believes he even wants to build bridges with the Tycoon—but he certainly won’t allow himself to be used in Trump’s attempt to create a political-religious community that cuts across churches and evades their jurisdiction, even in matters of faith. On the contrary, I presume Leo XIV will work to show the clean and popular face of the Catholic Church in the U.S., after the divisions and scandals (especially around pedophilia), in an effort to regain the credibility lost to other churches and religious sects.
The composition of the conclave, as well as the dynamics of Leo XIV’s election, also marks the decline of the Italian Church, which started as the favorite with Parolin and Zuppi, in light of the growing awareness that the future of the Catholic Church is shifting toward Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
The man is relatively young and has many years of pontificate ahead of him to define his policy—there will be time to evaluate him. Regarding workers, Prevost took the name Leo XIII, the pope who in 1891, with Rerum Novarum, laid the foundations of the Church’s social doctrine to confront the spread of socialism. Perhaps it is no coincidence that—this time amid the deafening silence of the left even on this issue—he expressed concern about unemployment, and especially about the conditioning of consciences that artificial intelligence could lead to.
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This post was originally in the Italian, below.
Prevost per sua formazione e carattere sarà, con contenuti immutati (il copione è sempre il solito, il Vangelo), certo più rigoroso e attento del combattivo ma un po’ istintivo Bergoglio e credo che questa caratteristica oltre al curriculum di missionario tra i poveri in Perù, abbia fatto convergere sulla proposta nordamericana la grande maggioranza del conclave. Un cambio di rotta, o una conferma, troppo eclatante rispetto a Bergoglio, avrebbe sancito divisioni e contrasti: sembra invece che Prevost abbia ricevuto il consenso di oltre 100 cardinali posizionandosi come il garante di una nuova unità.
Non sarà quindi l’anti-Trump – e il cardinale Nolan ritiene che i ponti voglia lanciarli anche verso il Tycoon: ma certo non si farà strumentalizzare nella operazione di Trump di creare una comunità politico-religiosa trasversale alle Chiese, sottraendosi alla loro giurisdizione anche in materia di fede: anzi, presumo che Prevost si impegnerà a mostrare il volto pulito e popolare della Chiesa cattolica in USA, dopo le divisioni e gli scandali (soprattutto per la pedofilia), per recuperare la credibilità perduta a favore di Chiese e sette religiose.
La composizione del conclave ma anche la dinamica della elezione di Prevost, segna anche il declino della Chiesa italiana, partita favorita nei pronostici con Parolin e Zuppi, a fronte della consapevolezza che il futuro della Chiesa Cattolica si sposta in Asia, in Africa e in America.
L’uomo è relativamente giovane e ha davanti a sé molti anni di pontificato per definire la sua politica, ci sarà tempo per valutarlo. Riguardo ai lavoratori Prevost ha preso il nome di Leone, il papa che nel 1891 con la Rerum Novarum pose le basi della dottrina sociale della chiesa per fronteggiare la diffusione del socialismo, e forse non è un caso che (stavolta nel silenzio assordante della sinistra anche su questo problema) abbia espresso preoccupazione per la disoccupazione, ma soprattutto per il condizionamento delle coscienze cui può condurre l’intelligenza artificiale.
Searching for Sinners
By Gary Phillips
In the classic ‘50s noir movie D.O.A., a shattered man who has been fatally poisoned walks into police headquarters to report a murder – his own. The tale of this dead man walking then unfolds via flashback. Also from the ‘50s was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The story begins with a haunted-looking M.D. being held in an emergency room under psychiatric watch. He implores another doctor, “Tell these fools I’m not crazy.” Thereafter his tale of cold, calculating creatures possessing humans, hollowing them out, is told in flashback.
The recently released atmospheric vampire film Sinners by writer-director Ryan Coogler opens on scarred Preacher Boy Sammie. Driving a flivver, he too is haunted. He arrives at the country church presided over by his father, the right Reverend Jedidiah Moore. Limping, he enters the church, gripping the neck of his destroyed Dobro guitar as if it were a life preserver. Like in many a western, the double doors thrust wide open, Sammie remains backlit in the doorway. He’s unsure if he’s going to come in. His father implores him to do so. A riff on the notion the vampire won’t enter your abode unless invited.
Sammie enters. His father asks him to let go of the guitar. He knows his son is torn between the church, and playing the blues, the devil’s music.
For what does the blues offer but temptation. Songs about drinking, chasing wanton women (and men and women as sung by Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith), and gambling. There’s no better bad example Reverend Moore can point to here in Clarksdale, Mississippi than Delta Slim. The worn out alkie harmonica player who haunts the train station, playing his tunes for coins in a cup. Enough to buy a bit of food and refill his flask.
The depot Slim inhabits is where bluesmen such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker caught a train. They’d played the juke joints in and around Clarksdale. Firey Saturday nights where Black fieldhands and maids could laugh and drink and dance, if only for a few hours out of a week of backbreaking toil. Guitars in hand, those blues artists escaped lives of drudgery spent sharecropping. They sought something better. Seventy miles north they plied their trade in Memphis, and beyond to places like Chicago and Detroit.
Standing among the pews, Preacher Boy Sammie can’t let go of what remains of his guitar. The guitar he knows now didn’t belong to Charlie Patton. That doesn’t matter. It’s a powerful totem against the horrors he’s experienced — the dead walking, friends possessed. The flashback begins taking us to the day before. This was when Sammie’s twin first cousins returned. Elijah Moore, known as Smoke, and Elias Moore, known as Stack. The twins are tough WWI vets who worked for Al Capone’s outfit and have come back home to work for themselves. Smoke tells Sammie Chicago wasn’t much different than down here in Mississippi in terms of how Black folk are treated. “Better to deal with the devil you know,” he says.
The twins have purchased a former sawmill they plan to turn into a juke. It’s noted the floorboards have been scrubbed cleaned. The juke’s grand opening will be tonight. A reasonably sober Delta Slim along with Sammie Moore will provide the music. As observed by Samuel James in his April 24, 2025 post for his Banned Histories of Race in America, “A Quick Guide to the Blues in Sinners,” Delta Slim (played with his usual verve by Delroy Linbdo) is inspired by real life fabled Delta bluesman, Eddie James “Son” House, Jr.
Son House lived the life that is the backdrop to Sinners. He’d been a levee camp worker, a gandy dancer laying railroad track, a Baptist preacher who knew the sixty-six books of the Bible backwards and forward, a rivet heater, and a Pullman porter, He too wrestled with the bottle.
He entertained in those jukes in and around Clarksdale, sometimes playing those gigs with Willie Brown, or Robert Johnson, or the gravel-voiced, enigmatic Charlie Patton (Also spelled Charley). Clarksdale is where the crossroads of highways 61 and 49 meet. Where Robert Johnson was said to have come one high midnight to sell his soul to the devil so as to play the blues like no other.
Charlie Patton, who once survived getting his throat slashed, was known to drop to his knees when performing. He’d put the guitar behind his back and wail. A feat repeated by guitarist Jimi Hendrix decades later.
At one point in the early ‘40s Son House put the guitar down for some twenty years. In an interview with Studs Terkel on WFMT on April 19, 1965, he told Terkel the early deaths of Brown, Johnson and Patton haunted him. He’d get any kind of little twinge and he’d get worried. Maybe he might be next he opined. Best leave the blues be. Son House grappled with the blues over his lifetime. It was a music he’d been warned as a boy as Reverend Moore had warned Sammie, was the devil’s way to seduce you. Isn’t that why Remmick, the head vampire in Sinners comes to the twins’ juke? Through the piney woods he’s heard Sammie Moore’s guitar playing. He’s felt what his music can conjure, calling to the dead and the living.
When Sammie plays “I Lied to You” the spirits of the ancestors are invoked as are the representations of what’s to come. From griots and tribal dancers to hip-hop and electric funk, swirl about. There is so much energy from all this, figuratively the juke’s roof is on fire — as in the ‘80s rap “The Roof is On Fire” by Rock Master Scott and The Dynamic Three. In the battle with Remmick’s transformed flock, including the turned Stack and his girlfriend Mary, the jury-rigged juke will literally burn to the ground. Remmick is injured when Sammie smashes his guitar over his head, the resonator, the stylized metal covering over the sound hole, slicing into the vampire’s skull.
Daybreak and the surviving Smoke has unfinished earthly business. He sends Sammie away. He’s found out the man he bought the sawmill from, Hogwood, is a Klan Grand Wizard. The floor was scrubbed clean because Black men were beaten and lynched at the sawmill. The place was cursed. Now Hogwood and his fellow Kluxers are coming to get the drop of those uppity twins. Only in true gangster fashion Smoke uses a “Chicago typewriter” a drum-fed Tommy gun to mow them down. But he’s fatally wounded, having dispensed his brand of rough justice for the dead. He sees his deceased child with Annie, the woman he loves who begged him to kill her when she was bitten in the fight with the vampires.
Only Preacher Boy Sammie survived that God forsaken night. In the first of two after credit scenes, we see an aging scared Sammie Moore as embodied by blues great Buddy Guy. It’s after his set in a club in 1990s Chicago and Smoke and Mary walk in.
In an interview with Jeff Todd in Living Blues magazine issue #31, March-April 1977, Son House recounted. “I went on; I was there in that alfalfa field and I go down, pray, getting on my knees, in that alfalfa. Dew was falling. And man, I prayed and I prayed and I prayed…” Yet even sanctified and preaching, Son House eventually picked up the guitar and played those smoky jukes. For whispering to him as he told Studs Terkel, God was on one shoulder, the Devil on the other.
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Gary Phillips first went to Clarksdale as a teenager. His mother’s side of the family was from next door Shelby. He went to the crossroads decades before a monument was erected there. His reissued novel Only the Wicked is set in the Delta of the 1990s.
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Making American Banking Risky Again
By Rick Girling
Trump’s Gutting Financial Protections Placed after 2008 Financial Crisis
If you, like millions of others, are a victim of financial fraudsters, debt collectors, excessive banking fees, a false credit report, unscrupulous payday lenders, or check cashers you can file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Unfortunately, there is little chance that the problem will be resolved now that President Trump is attempting to reduce its staff from 1700 to 200 and has replaced Rohit Chopra, the head of the agency that saved and recovered at least $23 billion for consumers, with Trump loyalist Russel Vought.
In January virtually all of the agency’s workers were put on notice that they likely will lose their jobs. Hundreds of workers in San Francisco’s Western Regional Office received notices that they were on administrative leave and told not to return to work and to stop almost all of the projects they were working on. A furloughed employee has said there are plans to close the office entirely along with all the other regional offices except Atlanta. While their National Treasury Employees Union was granted a preliminary injunction to preserve the CFPB on March 28 by DC District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the Trump Administration has appealed the ruling hoping to neuter the agency charged with “Rooting out unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices by writing rules, supervising companies, and enforcing the law.”
Since 2012, consumers have been credited or saved more than $23 billion due to CFPB actions. The CFPB won a suit against Wells Fargo for $3.7 billion for decades of mismanagement of auto loans, mortgages, and deposit accounts harming more than 16 million Americans gaining them justice after suffering fraud. The CFPB recovered $363 million from lenders who scammed service members and veterans by violating the Military Lending Act. The CFPB instituted a rule limiting overdraft fees to $5 instead of the customary $20-35 that banks charge customers who have the least in their accounts, a projected savings of $5 billion to consumers. Unfortunately, Congressional Republicans killed this rule in April allowing banks to go back to charging whatever they want.
Organizations working to democratize finance such as the California Public Banking Alliance, the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition and Americans for Financial Reform strongly support the work of the CFPB. They are also strongly opposed to billionaire tech moguls and bankers attempts to defang these effective regulators and consumer advocates.
Elon Musk whose DOGE started the mass firings may fear the CFPB getting in the way of his desire “to transform X.com, his social media platform, into a virtual wallet where people can send money to one another” without regulatory restraints.
Hai Binh Nguyen, an enforcement attorney with the agency in San Francisco notes the agency was designed to take actions against businesses that employ unfair tactics, such as getting credit card companies to return money from disputed charges and stopping businesses like Wells Fargo that opened thousands unauthorized accounts.
The shuttering of the CFPB has met strong opposition from those that want to see American families protected from financial scams and mismanagement. Senator Elizabeth Warren posted on Twitter/X, “Understand this: by trying to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elon Musk and Russ Vought [the acting director of CFPB and key architect of Project 2025] are trying to make it easier for big banks to cheat you. It’s another way the Trump administration wants to reward the rich and powerful while hurting working people.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, tells the story of Sharon Tolbert-Glover who was swindled by mortgage refinance salespeople who claimed they could reduce her monthly mortgage payments. The contract these fraudsters sold her instead raised her mortgage payments from $1200 to $1900 a month leaving this ex-nun with only $200 left for necessities after receiving $2100 from social security and her deceased husband’s pension. This horror story led Ellison to become an outspoken defender of the CFPB.
With Trump’s attacks on the CFPB and his installation of banking and crypto friendly regulators, the chances for another financial collapse, as bad or worse than the one in 2008, are greatly increased. A key role of government is to protect the general public from unscrupulous actors that rob us; Trump and his billionaire backers would like nothing better than eliminating these protections in order to secure even more profits.
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May 1st: We Will Not Stand By, We Will Not Allow This to Happen
By The Editors
May 1st 2025, the first Labor Day in the 2nd Trump presidency.
Marchers, supporters of labor, union members, defenders of human rights and the rule of law gathered and marched in cities around the country.
In Chicago, San Francisco, Solvang, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans people took to the streets to raise their voices in support of a greater United States, and against the proponents of inequality, greed and hate.
There were demonstrations all over Florida, Colorado, Connecticut, California, Georgia, and the Deep Red South.
If you have reports, one or two paragraphs, and/or 2-3 images send them to the Stansbury Forum
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May Day 2025: The current installment of an annual remembrance (1)
By Robert J.S. Ross, PhD
Dear friends, comrades and colleagues
The story of May Day as an international worker’s holiday has its distant origin in Chicago in 1886. And it finds its relevance in the current Administration’s full throated attack on trade unions and standards of working conditions.
Since late in the eighteenth century American workers had sought to protect their lives and families –their humanity — by limiting the hours of the workday. As early as 1844 John Cluers led a labor federation calling for July 4 of that year to be declared a Second Independence Day in support of the ten-hour day.
Later, in the fall of 1885, the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) decided upon May 1886 as the start of a series of strikes for the eight-hour day. They called for demonstrations declaring that after May 1 the working day would be de facto eight hours. Hundreds of thousands did demonstrate and strike that day, and tens of thousands won shorter hours.
The most memorable and tragic events of the 1886 struggle occurred in the days directly after what Samuel Gompers had also grandly called the Second Independence Day.
In Chicago, the May 1st rally in Chicago had been gigantic, and the city was tense. The Lumber Shovers union of 10,000 was on strike for the eight-hour day. They held a rally on May 3rd near the McCormick Harvester works, which was then gripped in a bitter lock-out and strike. As the workday ended at Harvester, strikebreakers came through the gates and some of the six thousand rallying workers protested against them. Police shot at the rallying lumber shovers and killed four on May 3rd.
On the next day, May 4, the leaders of the Chicago Eight-hour movement, anarcho-syndicalists of exceptional leadership ability, most of whom were immigrants, called for a protest of the shootings and a demonstration of resolve. It was rainy and there were numerous neighborhood rallies that day. The crowd was small. It dwindled from three thousand when the charismatic Albert Spies spoke, followed by his comrade Albert Parsons. By the time Samuel Fielden began his address the crowd had become only 300.
Then, 180 armed police, who had been waiting in a side street, marched into Haymarket Square, surrounded the small throng, and ordered the crowd to disperse. Fielden defended his right to speak. The police approached the platform and a bomb was thrown at them. One officer died there and six later. Later research showed that five of the six police who later died were shot by friendly fire as a result of police indiscriminately firing into the crowd. [Eighty-four years later, on May 4th, six Kent State University students protesting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, were shot and killed by National Guardsmen firing indiscriminately into a crowd of demonstrators.]
With scant evidence, the leaders of the eight-hour movement were tried and convicted of the murder of one of the police. Four were eventually hanged in November 1887; years later a courageous governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld pardoned three who were still in jail. One of the eight died in prison (a suicide).
After the convictions of the Haymarket leaders a worldwide movement in their defense spread through the labor and socialist camps. Thus, the American struggle for an eight-hour day was internationalized by the trial of the Haymarket martyrs.
The Haymarket bombing sparked the first Red Scare. Police around the country hounded labor leaders and socialist and anarchist groups. The defense efforts were not successful – although three of the eight eventually had their death sentences commuted and they were later pardoned.
However, by 1888, Gompers and the AFL were ready to launch once again a militant movement for the eight-hour day. The AFL called for a series of demonstrations, including Washington’s Birthday and July 4th 1889, and May 1, 1890.
“… it is a good time, as attacks on our rights and benefits mount, to celebrate and experience solidarity”
In the summer of 1889, the (Second) Socialist International was being re-founded in Paris. A representative from the AFL read a letter from Gompers to the Socialist Congress asking for support for worldwide demonstrations in favor of the eight-hour day. The French representative LaVigne inserted into a prior resolution on the eight hour day support for the American demonstrations on May 1st 1890. And so, around the world on May 1, 1890, workers called for the eight-hour workday – and many struck and achieved it or shorter hours. In Vienna, the entire working class called the day off. In the United States, the Carpenters, leaders in the struggle, won shorter hours for 75,000 workers. By the next year, 1891, it appeared that the May 1st demonstrations for a shorter workday had become an international and regular practice, becoming also a call for universal peace and a celebration of working class power.
Eventually, the conservative wing of the AFL would cause that labor federation to give up ownership of May Day and instead to preserve Labor Day in September as a more conventional American celebration. Around the world, though, both socialists and communists treat May Day as workers’ celebrations.
In the last few years the mainstream labor movement, i.e., the AFL-CIO, has come to acknowledge May 1 as “Workers Memorial Day.” And it is a good time, as attacks on our rights and benefits mount, to celebrate and experience solidarity.
The precious time workers wrenched from the grasp of employers and courts is embodied in our Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It requires overtime pay past eight hours in a day or forty hours in a week, as well as giving Congress the authority to set a minimum wage. Its companion was the Wagner Act, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, committing the nation to support unions and the right to collective bargaining. Each of these is a pillar of decency and support for the dignity of work and labor; and each is now under attack.
There will be broadly based demonstrations on May 1, here in the USA defying Trump and his band of bumbling fascists, and elsewhere wherever working people are able.
I’ll be on Boston Common; perhaps we will greet each other there..
Solidarity
Bob Ross
1)Emended annually, the basic historic narrative is culled from May Day: A Short History of the International Workers’ Holiday, 1886-1986 Paperback – January 1, 1986 – by Philip Sheldon Foner
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