A “No Kings” Snapshot
By The Editors
Kurt Stand from Greenbelt, Maryland
We gathered by Greenbelt’s community center, walked along the town’s streets, past a community garden, past our Honk band – with a tuba, tambourines, and other instruments welcoming all as we arrived – then reaching an overpass where we were chanting, waving signs, cheering on as motorists below greeted us with honking horns.
It would be a fool’s errand to pretend to count numbers – people were constantly coming and going, but hundreds took part, a significant number when you consider that similar rallies at overpasses and in communities throughout Prince George’s and Montgomery County.
Significant too was that it was diverse in age, diverse in background and – though far from fully representative of the City of Greenbelt – more racially diverse than other recent local anti-MAGA events.
Those handmade posters were diverse as well reflecting the range of concerns that brought people out – immigrant rights, trans right, support for Medicare, for peace, defense of federal workers and defense of science with a tone that was alternately mocking: No Kings, No Clowns and angry ICE = SS.
At the core of “No Kings Day,” however, was opposition to illegitimate authority and that was reflected in a sign quoting Book of Samuel 8:18, which, for those not so well-versed in the Bible, proclaims:
When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
Another, reminding us that megalomania in power is nothing new, recalled Louis XIV’s L’etat c’est Moi (I am the state), by providing the appropriate rejoinder:
Tu n’est pas l’etat (“You are not the state”).
Key to the rally and critically important to this moment and the future, was reclaiming our nation’s conflicted heritage. Opposition to illegitimate authority runs like a thread through U.S. history from the time of the American Revolution and the Battle of Lexington and Concord on June 14, 1775, up to the present. It has defined every struggle in recent memory for social, racial and economic justice and is a heritage we ought to acknowledge and defend even as we seek to expand its meaning.
That was in plain view in Greenbelt on June 14, 2025, as lots of U.S. flags were carried along with signs that declared:
Yes to the Magna Carta
We did it 249 years ago — we can do it again
The Constitution Separates Powers for a Reason
I’m old enough to remember “Liberty and Justice for All” was a thing
Perhaps the most important words were on a signs directed at all attending this and other rallies, words to remember in these dangerous times:
Don’t Trust Authority
Trust Each Other.
And, last but not least:
You are the “Solid” in Solidarity.
Molly Martin from Jackson, WY
Longtime community activists in Jackson, Wyoming told me that the “No Kings” protest on June 14 was the largest demonstration the town has ever seen. On a warm, sunny day, hundreds of people filled the sidewalks around the town square.
My friend and I, tourists on our way from the San Francisco Bay Area to Yellowstone National Park, were glad to join the rally. We found a welcoming crowd gathered beneath Jackson’s iconic antler arches.
A speaker addressed the crowd with somber news of lawmakers assassinated in Minnesota. He warned that the Trump regime had made violence a tool of its agenda, and urged everyone present to remain peaceful and safe.
Jackson, a gateway to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, depends heavily on tourism. Locals are deeply concerned about cuts to the National Park Service. NPS workers told me about layoffs and unfilled positions. With summer just beginning, the park system is already stretched thin.
A couple of police cars were parked nearby, but officers only intervened to remind demonstrators to stay on the sidewalks. At one corner, two older women sat calmly on horseback, representing the Jackson police as volunteers. They said the horses were their own, serving no role that day except to receive a steady stream of affectionate pats from passersby.
Douglas Marshall from Bell and Montebello, California
I called this event. Few people showed up, some for fear and some because my rule about no foreign flags “did not align with my values.”
Our mayor, a leader of our large Muslim community, and our Chief of Police, son of immigrants, both expressed their support but did not attend. The Mayor is a Bernie guy.
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The Italian Labor and Citizenship Referenda of June 8-9
By Salvo Leonardi and Lepoldo Tartaglia
A note from Peter Olney, co-editor of the Stansbury Forum
On Sunday June 8 and Monday June 9 Italians went to the polls nationally to vote on 5 Referendum propositions placed on the ballot by the largest Italian labor federation, the Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Lavoratori (CGIL) and immigrant and citizenship advocacy groups. Four of the referenda concerned labor employment rights and the fifth was an important initiative to speed up the timeline for obtaining Italian citizenship. Two Italian labor leaders, Salvatore Leonardi and Leopoldo Tartaglia have written a very comprehensive summation of the referenda and the disappointing election result for The Stansbury Forum.
June 10th 2025
A resounding, bitter defeat
It’s not easy to explain what happened in Italy on June 8–9, when Italians went to the polls to vote on five referendums, four of which were promoted by the largest trade union confederation, the Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Lavoratori (CGIL). Three would have abrogated previous statutes that were conceived to relax the rules for firing and hiring in favor of the employers. One dealt with subcontracting and social responsibility in the case of accidents at work. The fifth would have reduced from ten to five, the years for resident and regular migrants to obtain full political citizenship.
Italian law sets a 50%+ threshold (quorum) of eligible voters to consider a consultation valid. The proponents and supporters knew that this would be an uphill battle. Recent precedents were not at all encouraging. We live in times when the average turnout at elections has almost everywhere been getting lower, year after year. Aware of that, all the right-wing Italian parties, which have since 2022 ruled the country, called their voters and sympathizers to boycott the consultation. And the support from centre-left parties was not enough to overcome the combination of natural and overt political abstention. At the end of the day, on June 9th, only 30% of those having the right to vote had gone to the urns (around 14 million voters, out of a total number of 46 million eligible electors), with the result that the whole campaign failed.
Despite the CGIL’s mobilizations and organizational effort, witnessed by a massive and generous return to militant action all over the country, from members and activists, the target at the end was largely missed. No quorum, no victory!! It was clearly a lost battle. The substantial silence from the mainstream broadcast and media, during the campaign, had for certain contributed to such a demoralizing result, but it alone cannot serve as a satisfactory explanation. There is in fact a wider problem with the general functioning of our democracy, like other democracies too, with worrying widespread forms of apathy and mass disaffection for whatever concerns are in the political sphere. This occurs even when key social rights are questioned or, as in this case, potentially reestablished to the benefit of wide sectors of the society, who have been long penalized by years of neoliberal and anti-working class policies.
It’s small consolation, but it should be remembered anyway, that the 14 million voters is a much larger number than the membership of 5 million in the CGIL. And it is more votes than what the Meloni right-wing coalition obtained in the last political elections (12,5 million) It was more than what all the centre-left parties, lined up in support of the five referendums, got one year ago, at the European elections (11 million). But one should not make too much of comparisons and draw incorrect conclusions. [1]
The path to the referendums and their substance
In order to qualify a referendum, Italian law can only be abrogative – partial or total – of norms –existing legislation. Promoters have to collect at least 500.000 officially certified signatures, now facilitated by the possibility of electronic signing. CGIL went far beyond that threshold, getting something like 1.3 million signatures for each of the four questions and requests, whereas the promoters of the citizenship’s referendum – a coalition of civil society organizations – were able to quickly collect 630.000 signatures, thanks to the very new opportunities enabled by electronic democracy.
Once delivered, the abrogative claims must be validated by the Italian Supreme Court, which is required to check whether the questions are sufficiently coherent and legally compatible in their formulation. Originally, the consultation should have also included the request to abrogate the so-called “regional differentiated autonomy”, a law that gave to the Regions many powers and responsibilities previously under the purview of the central State. For technical reasons, which would take too long to describe, this additional request was rejected by the Constitutional Court. This was a big detriment to all the other five questions, since this last issue is extremely sensitive in large parts of the Country, and especially where it is considered detrimental, as in the less economically developed regions of the South. Cut off from it, the remaining five issues had lost the main potential draw, in terms of number of voters.
What were these five referenda about, exactly? With regard to the four concerning firing and hiring at work, the intention of the promoters (CGIL) was to drastically reduce precarity, making dismissals more costly than they’ve become after the reforms of 10 years ago, with the return to some old limitations in the use and abuse of the fixed term contracts, as they are not now required to be somehow justified, for the first year, by some technical or organizational need from employers. Furthermore, in order to strengthen the social responsibility and due diligence of all companies, when outsourcing and subcontracting parts of their production cycle, they’d be called on to support extra costs when a worker suffers from an accident at work, in addition to what mandatory coverage exists from the National Institute of Insurance against the Accidents at Work (INAIL).
Surprisingly enough, most of these existing measures, aimed at relaxing the old labor protections and at increasing the work flexibility, were introduced by centre-left Governments, in times when they were inspired by a neoliberal ideology and leadership of the pivotal Democratic Party (PD). Matteo Renzi, Premier at the time (2014-15), and his encompassing labor reform (known as the “Jobs Act”), were the main target of the referendum campaign. Importantly, with the solid support of the new leadership of the PD, after its leftward turn, under the new secretary, Elly Schlein.
More in Detail
1. The first referendum aimed to abolish the legislative decree derived from the Jobs Act (2015), where it replaced the workers’ right to be reintegrated in his job and workplace, in a case where a judge rules that the worker’s dismissal is not based on performance or economic downturn and reorganization This right was guaranteed by the old, famous Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute of 1970, amended in 2012 and then completely abrogated in 2015. Thereafter, for all the employees hired since then, the protection will only consist in getting a monetary compensation, between a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 36 months salary[2], considering seniority, with the only exclusion of discriminatory dismissals, for de facto gender, racial, religious, political, etc. reasons, where the right to be reintegrated remains in force. Voting “yes” aimed to reinsert the right to rehire, as the normal remedy in case of unfair dismissal, with the monetary compensation as the exception.
2. The second question was about the unfair dismissals in small enterprises with less than 16 employees, where the law – considering the close personal implications in the work relationships and the minor financial capacities of the entrepreneurs – has never provided for the reintegration but only for some monetary compensation, between 2 and 6 monthly salaries. Voting “yes” aimed to give the judge the possibility to mandate compensation in excess of 6 months, in consideration of various circumstances, such as the worker’s family composition or the firm’s ability to pay. In the past, the small size of the firm was assumed as an undeniable feature of the limited financial capacity of the business. This is not always the case any longer, as in an era of digital and smart start-ups of a new generation, it’s perfectly possible to formally hire a small number of employees, outsource a lot of freelancers and to produce stratospheric turnover. See the story of the Silicon Valley economy, as an example in this regard.
3. The third referendum aimed to limit the proliferation of the fixed-term contracts, abolishing the laws that, from 2014 onwards, allowed the employer to use this contract for the first 12 months, without giving any technical or organizational justification. For the CGIL, fix-term contracts are today a true plague of the labor market and employment relationships. Most of them have an extremely short duration, especially in the tertiary, service and low pay sectors, with the result of depriving the workers of any possibility to manage their life and making them too vulnerable to get organized or ask for the respect of their rights. Voting “yes” aimed to reintroduce a cause, technical or organizational, since the beginning, when hiring with a fix-term contract. In other words, the objective was to make open-ended, stable contracts, the normal and predominant form of employment.
4. The fourth question asked to eliminate the norms that leave out the culpability by the buyer and contractor for a labor accident occurring in subcontractor facilities. Italy is a country with a very large number of accidents at work, with a tragic daily national average of three fatal accidents. The majority of these fatal accidents occur in small enterprises, usually part of a chain of subcontractors.
5. Not less important was the fifth referendum, aiming to give migrants the right to attain Italian citizenship after five, years as in most of the comparable European countries, instead of the ten years required today. This is a very sensitive issue, affecting something like 2.5 million foreigners regularly living in Italy with their children, attending school, sport activities and everything but excluded from being considered “Italians”.
In the first four questions the number of “yes” was massively prevailing over the “no”, with majorities ranging between 87 and 89 per cent. Of course, don’t forget that most of those against opted for boycotting the consultation, by not going to vote. Remarkably, this was not the case for the fifth question, about migrants and citizenship, where the “No” reached 34.5%.This is a very disappointing result, which leads to some critical and preoccupying reflection about the incidence of xenophobia, also within wide segments of the working class, including the unionized blue collar and centre-left electorate. It’s a worldwide and well-know trend; certainly in the US, in times of mounting Trumpism, but not only there.
Exultation vs. dejection
It’s too early to fully understand and evaluate the consequences of this heavy defeat. Obviously, the right wing Government, parties and media have been exulting, pretending to deduce that “the Italians” approve their politics, against the “ideological” CGIL positions, ignored or rejected by a large majority of the electorate. They flaunt some good employment data, ignoring the true quality of many jobs, terribly affected by precarity and very low wages. Some “reformist” commentators, from neoliberal positions and inspirers or makers of the under scrutiny reforms of 10-15 years ago, such as the former Premier Renzi in person, contested the contents of the referenda, accused it of being outdated and anachronistic, since the true problem today are very low wages, and not job stability. Concern for which, of course, is of great importance to the CGIL too, which is engaged on that topic in collective bargaining. But the CGIL is also aware that workers precarity and worker blackmail are some of the main reasons for such a long-lasting wage stagnation.
Even the referendum instrument itself as it is conceived today is now under question, in the days following the vote Utilized more than in other comparable country in Europe, Italian referenda have always failed to reach the quorum since 1999 – with just one single exception in 2011 (on the water as a public good) – with a very low average participation (below 30%) of those having the right to vote. The threshold of 500.000 signatures, set in a time when the population was of 30 million, seems to be too low and easily reachable, especially now that electronic signatures are allowed, and disproportionate to the millions of votes required to be valid. One of the discussed solutions could be to double the number of signatures and to lower the quorum (40%+1) for the result to be valid.
The mood in the world of the promoters, the day after, is understandably of delusion and dejection. The effort of the big organizational machine had been huge and thus the high hopes, at the eve of the vote. Nevertheless, the willingness to keep on fighting is for certain not dead and buried, as the referenda issues can be considered as a step, though missed, in the everyday struggle to achieving better jobs and workers’ rights. The outcome of this battle has been undoubtedly negative, but its objectives are not deleted from our agenda. We can and must in fact capitalize on some of the good things we achieved with this campaign. The reputation, for instance, of the CGIL and its reliability in representing and advocating the weaker and most vulnerable sectors of our society has been enhanced. To bring the workers’ rights and dignity back again to the top of the list in the public discourse, in a time saddened by wars and epochal challenges, can be also considered a positive. The energy and the enthusiasm was profuse from a new generation of militants and activists who campaigned, street-by-street, house-by-house. The practice of a new model of social movement unionism, open and in alliance or in coalition with other associations of civil society, students and NGOs, as for instance in the intersectional battle for justice on the side of the migrants or young precarious worker women. It was no small feat to have stimulated and pushed the centre-left parties to gather and share a common political campaign – with finally the workers’ rights and conditions as a key identitarian issue – can be listed on the column of the partial success of this story.
Lost is the immediate battle for changing bad laws, what remains is to use the traditional tools and battlefields in the field of industrial relations. With collective bargaining at all levels, as the key arena for union action and the members’ militancy. We don’t give up. La lotta continua
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[1] The 14 million voters refers to the total turnout for the vote, not the number of voters that supported the abrogative referenda which of course will be less because within that total turnout are voters who voted “no” on some or all of the questions.
[2] The original formula of the 2015 reform was a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 24,but a new Centre-left government increased the formula to its present status in 2018.
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The Power of Showing Up
By Evie Frankl, Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
“A lot of the people I served with are 100 percent disabled. What if they lose their care? What if they served the country but can now no longer make ends meet?” Reed Radcliffe, 68, who spent two decades in the Navy, told the Washington Post on June 6th, 2025
I’m Evie Frankl
I took the pics at the “Unite All Vets” demo on the National Mall in DC today, the 6th of June 2025.
It was great to be in such a politically, demographically and multigenerational crowd. People were eager to have their photos sent so I texted or email each one.
Drop Kick Murphy played lots of raucous rock versions of old favorites including Which Side are you On and We Shall Overcome.
We heard Cecil Robert’s (UMW).
Big crowd, great weather, lots of flags, angry Republicans
What could be better?
Defending VA Veterans Health Care on D-Day – Thousands of veterans mobilize to oppose the gutting of direct care and the move toward privatization.
By: Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early
The D-Day anniversary on June 6 is a pretty irresistible date for scheduling a protest related to veteran benefits. Eighty-one years ago, American soldiers and their allies stormed ashore in Normandy, establishing a critical beachhead in the military campaign to defeat Adolph Hitler and Nazism.
In World War II’s aftermath, hundreds of thousands of injured veterans were treated back home in a nationwide network of hospitals run by the federal government. Since then, the VA health care system has greatly expanded, and now through the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) provides high-quality care to nine million veterans. The majority of those veterans want to see the VHA improved and even expanded.
However, during the first Trump administration, the White House and a bipartisan coalition in Congress decided that veterans’ health care delivery needed to shift to the private sector. After passage of the VA MISSION Act of 2018, Trump’s second VA Secretary, Robert Wilkie—a right-wing southern Republican—claimed that partial VHA privatization would produce “more patient satisfaction and predictability, more efficiency for our clinicians, and better value for taxpayers.”
Using D-Day as a protest peg six years ago, a few veterans and their caregivers challenged this view. Members of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Nurses United (NNU), and Veterans for Peace (VFP) staged a “National Day to Save The VA” from privatization. That resulted in modest rallies, press conferences, or informational picketing in only a dozen locations, because the grassroots effort drew little or no support from major veterans’ organizations, the national AFL-CIO, or big-name politicians.
A Renewed Assault
President Trump’s second-term assault on all services provided by federal workers—along with their jobs and bargaining rights—has finally woken up more unions and veterans’ advocates to threats that have faced the VA for more than a decade.
On June 6, 5,000 protestors gathered on the Mall in Washington, D.C., under the banner of Unite for Veterans /Unite for America. The event was sponsored by the Union Veterans Council of the national AFL-CIO and the Chamberlain Network, a non-profit group that hopes the rally will “encourage the administration to make the right decisions for veterans.”
Former service members, including some who belong to AFGE, NNU, National Federation of Federal Employees, and other unions, heard speeches from past or present vets in Congress like Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and former Republican House member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who became a major Trump critic during his first term.
Thousands of people also participated in actions at 225 other locations around the country, including in vet-heavy red states like Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, and Kentucky. Some “watch parties,” organized for real-time viewing of the D.C. event, were held in local union halls to highlight the labor-vet overlap. The grassroots political organization Indivisible was a local partner as well.
The livestream from D.C. was greatly enlivened by the Dropkick Murphys, a group of Celtic punk rockers from Boston who Union Vets Council leader William Attig regularly listened to as an 18-year-old Marine in Iraq.
This pro-labor band got wild applause after performing a new release well suited to the occasion. Its chorus, as belted out by lead singer Ken Casey, asked: “Who’ll stand with us? / Don’t tell us everything is fine / Who’ll stand with us? / Because this treatment is a crime.”
Everything is Fine?
In the run-up to this D-Day, President Donald Trump’s current VA Secretary Doug Collins—like Robert Wilkie before him—has been telling nine million VHA patients that everything is fine, not a crime, despite his planned elimination of more than 80,000 VA jobs later this year.
According to Collins, a former Republican House member from Georgia, Trump “is making it even easier for veterans to get their health care when and where it’s most convenient for them” by letting them choose between in-house doctors and faster referrals to a nationwide network of 1.7 million private-sector providers. Collins’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 clearly favors the latter; it calls for a 50 percent increase in VHA spending on outside care (which already totals $30 billion a year) and an unprecedented 17 percent reduction in direct-care funding.
Since this budgetary math would force cuts to VHA staff, services, and facilities, one purpose of the D-Day rally in D.C. was to sound the alarm about Trump’s renewed privatization push. A speaker who did that very movingly was 43-year-old Matt Stevenson, a primary care physician at the VA Medical Center in Palo Alto.
Making it clear he was speaking in a personal capacity, Stevenson lauded his employer as “a mission-driven, patient-centered, cost-effective, integrated American health care system … which delivers higher-quality care at lower cost than any other system in the country.”
According to Stevenson, under a DOGE-led assault since January, his coworkers around the country have “been disparaged and demoralized … bullied and intimidated” amid “worrisome signs of an attempt to dismantle and privatize the VA.” He argued that “those who would take this public treasure—built over generations, by many hands, working long nights in dark hospitals—and sell it off in the name of choice or modernization or efficiency or political gain” can be stopped if VA defenders “come together around a shared vision.”
Caregivers Quitting
One of the things that inspired some veterans to attend events was learning that their doctors, nurses, or therapists were quitting due to deteriorating workplace conditions under Collins.
David Magnus, a Navy veteran from Pittsburgh, told The Guardian that he traveled to D.C. because his trusted provider revealed her decision to leave the VHA during a recent mental health appointment. Outside a Veterans Memorial Building in San Rafael in northern California, Katie Weber-Linhar, an Army veteran with disabilities, lamented the recent resignation of a popular therapist who treated many vets at an outpatient clinic in Ukiah, in rural Mendocino County.
Weber-Linhar now helps a retired VHA physician hold a weekly protest, attended by patients, family members, and local union members, at a VA outpatient clinic in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County. She and other VA defenders definitely did not get the memo from D.C. rally planners, which stressed that “Unite for Veterans” was not intended to be “an anti-Trump event or a partisan protest.”
Handmade placards in Santa Rosa included one dissing DOGE as a bunch of “Douchebag Oligarchs Grabbing Everything” and others identifying the sign-holder as a “Veteran Against Trump” and critic of “Trump’s America” because of its “Cages for Kids, Cuts for Vets.” Ernie Bergman, a cancer survivor and 77-year-old leader of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) in Marin County, criticized “this current government” for trying to take money away from medical research and innovative treatment “that saved my life.”
VSOs Were MIA
Iraq combat veteran Kristofer Goldsmith, a former staffer for the Vietnam Veterans of America turned podcaster and founder of Task Force Butler, said he was thrilled that “people at the protest in Washington were not the usual suspects. I had people come up to me who had flown in from every part of the country who had never been at a protest before but who wanted to be part of something historic.”
Goldsmith noted, however, that some groups were notable for their official absence—representatives of the “big six” veteran service organizations. Just a few months ago, Goldsmith was much encouraged when the national commander of one of these VSOs—the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW)—urged his 1.4 million members to “march forth” and “stop the bleeding” at the VA. As a life member of the VFW but past critic of overly cautious and conservative VSO behavior, Goldsmith viewed this development as “nothing short of extraordinary.”
On D-Day, however, the VFW, American Legion, and other major vet groups were MIA. According to Goldsmith, there were VSO members at the D.C. rally “in a personal capacity,” but there was no official staff or representation of the “big six.” In Goldsmith’s view, if the big VSOs “were making enough noise and standing up to the cuts in a way that reflects the urgency of the moment, they would have been on the stage with us.”
William Attig, the Union Vets Council leader and a key rally organizer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan before joining a plumbers and pipefitters local in Illinois, said that organizers were working with the VSOs “behind the scenes.” Hopefully these efforts will convince major VSOs to end, what one concerned representative described to the Prospect as their deafening silence on Trump/DOGE/Collins assault on veterans, their dedicated caregivers, and their hard-earned benefits.
The Next Step
The question is what’s next. Attig, among other organizers and attendees, emphasized that this event will be only one of many. It was a “very exciting event that shows what can happen when veterans come together around their issues.”
James Jones, a Gulf War veteran from Boone, North Carolina, who is also a federal employee with the National Park Service, a member of AFGE and of the newly formed Federal Unionists Network, could not agree more. In a post D-Day protest interview with the Prospect, Jones said he traveled from North Carolina to the event because he wants legislators to understand how important the VA has been to veterans like himself.
“I lost friends during the Gulf War, and I’ve dealt with health issues because of exposure to… you name it,” Jones said. “Airborne toxins, oil well fire smoke, burn pits, depleted uranium residue. I’ve been a VA patient since 1993 and the VA has been beneficial to me because they understand PTSD, military trauma, and everything else.”
Jones said he hopes that veterans will keep up the pressure. “We have to call our elected representatives, keep going to rallies, and join these groups that are fighting for veterans. Secretary Collins is trying to convince people that the VA is a bloated agency. It’s not—they’re thousands of positions short. The government needs to keep the promise it made to veterans. We served our country and now they’re breaking their promise to take care of us. We can’t accept that.”
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The piece by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon originally ran in The American Prospect
On June 14th, this Saturday, it’ll be time for all of us to show up around the country. Check out sites here
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Condemning ICE Raids and the Arrest of David Huerta
By Devra Weber and David Bacon
Dear friends and family,
As DT sends in the National Guard and is threatening to send in the Marines, I wanted to send a note.
I was at a rally called by the unions today, in which congresspeople, members of the City Council and UFW cofounder Dolores Huerta all spoke. There were no police and it was peaceful.
I understand that ICE will be in LA 30 days.. They are going to homes, work places and shopping areas, stopping people who ‘look’ like migrants, ie Latinos. Its chaotic and terrifying people .The Governor and Mayor have asked that the National Guard be taken out.
The photos which news tend to show are photos of violence and burned cars. But….the overwhelming majority of protestors an d protests have been peaceful. ICE is an invasion.
SAN FRANCISCO LABOR CONDEMNS ICE RAIDS AND THE ARREST OF DAVID HUERTA
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – 9JUNE25 – Unions and immigrant rights activists protest immigration raids and the arrest in Los Angeles of David Huerta, head of United Service Workers West during a raid. Labor leaders included Olga Miranda, SEIU Local 87, Kieth Brown, Alameda Labor Council, Lizzy Tapia, UniteHere Local 2, Robert Sandoval, IBT 350, Steve Pitts, UCB Labor Center emeritus, and others.
Action Network: The Labor Force
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Los Angeles: Rally to Demand Justice for David Huerta
By The Editors
It’s Sunday June 8th – Trump has sent the National Guard into LA to put down ICE protestors. Tomorrow, Monday the 9th of June there will be a rally for David Huerta in Los Angeles.
Next Saturday the would be King and Dictator celebrating his birthday with a military parade and lavish spending on his ego.
We stand opposed and hundreds of thousands of us will march and demonstrate in thousands of site, urban and rural, around the country on Saturday, June 14th.
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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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