Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Conrad Blackburn as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA’s insurgent slate.

The post Conrad Blackburn is Ready to Challenge the Machine appeared first on Democratic Left.

By TZ

Citizens are outraged at Congress for wielding its power in the abusive manner we have witnessed for decades. The Patriot Act routinely violates the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments and leads us to the breaking point we are subjected to today. Frustrations increased exponentially with ICE invading communities, and citizens distrust the government more than ever.

It is important to remember that your federal representative does not hold all levers of power. Activists are protesting and arguing with city officials around the country, attempting to block ICE from infiltrating their communities. During these battles, it is often forgotten that traditional government positions (such as state and federal representatives, senators, mayors) are not the only officials with power to fight ICE. Positions such as superintendents, park directors, library boards can all exercise some level of their power against ICE. An institution that has taken a step in the right direction is Royal Oak School District. On January 29, the District announced new safety protocols that create a much sterner, strict approach for ICE and Border Patrol (CBP).

Key points within these new safety protocols will protect staff, students, and families in the community. First, any ICE and CBP agent that appears at a school building will be properly identified and redirected to the Board Office, and met by the superintendent, legal counsel, and local law enforcement.

Second, if the agents refuse this and attempt to enter the school anyway, the building will enter lockdown mode, which is the safety protocol enacted when an active threat has entered the building or is on school grounds.

Lastly, if ICE or CBP appear during arrival or departure times, the building will enter lockdown mode and an emergency alert will be sent to all families notifying them of the presence of federal agents. The same team — the superintendent, legal counsel, and local law enforcement — would meet the agents on school grounds.

This protocol was in addition to some guidance in the fall on how to speak with federal agents if needed. This included contacting administrators, protecting identities of all students, and requiring a legal warrant signed by a judge.

This protocol creates reasonable guidelines that should be expected of any school district, but not all districts do so. It is imperative for citizens to ask for their school district’s safety plans for ICE/CBP, and to demand more from the school board and superintendent if they are lacking. Schools are able to provide strict protection of students and have the capabilities to alert families as well.

It is important to note that this policy has not been tested yet — there have not been any federal agents on school grounds in Royal Oak. It is unknown who the Royal Oak police will truly side with if the situation occurs. Police departments across the country have not exactly given citizens reason to trust police to protect them from lawless federal agents.

A superintendent and/or school board using some of their limited power to create safeguards in their community against fascism is a perfect example of power that citizens can direct their attention to. Royal Oak is a community known for leaning liberal — — parents and students were outraged last fall when a Turning Point USA Chapter was created at Royal Oak High School, resulting in student walkouts and protests. Students consistently protesting fascist issues and citizens demanding transparency from the Royal Oak City Commission helps pressure school district officials into creating policies, or shows they will have support for such protections when they create them. Activism is not only about forcing those who are resistant to make positive change, but also about providing support for those who are hesitant to make bold moves.

Local institutions like schools, libraries, and parks can be some very specific zones that citizens can pressure to create protective policies for their community. After all, change often happens from the bottom up. Readers interested in stricter ICE protocol in their local school district should gather a coalition of like-minded parents and citizens to voice their concerns at school board meetings. The same approach can be applied for city commissions, library boards, etc. The more businesses, institutions, and citizens that take stances against ICE, the more likely a city or state is to create a safer protocol.

School Districts Can Oppose ICE was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[[{“value”:”

By: Ashraf Hazeyen

Every semester, the adjunct professor walks into the classroom carrying the full symbolic weight of the university while possessing almost none of its protections. He enters with a syllabus, readings, assignments, office hours, and the responsibility of making a discipline feel alive to students who may never know the terms of his employment. In that room, he is the university’s voice, its care, and its promise that thought still matters. Then the class ends, the students leave, the emails continue, and the institution that needed him for its mission offers him only a temporary place in its life.

Adjunct professors are contingent, non-tenure-track faculty members usually hired on temporary contracts to teach specific courses. They often perform the central work of the university itself: preparing classes, teaching, grading, mentoring, and sustaining intellectual life in the classroom, while frequently lacking the security and institutional protections attached to permanent academic positions.

Their labor is usually described through numbers: wages per course, lack of benefits, unstable contracts, and the uncertainty of whether another class will appear next semester. These numbers matter because they shape rent, health care, debt, family planning, and the ordinary dignity of imagining a future. The numbers tell the truth, but not the whole truth. The adjunct is present where the university performs its mission and unsettled where the university distributes continuity, status, and institutional memory.

This arrangement did not appear by accident. According to data from the American Association of University Professors, nearly 75 percent of instructional staff in American higher education now work outside the tenure system. Contingency no longer exists at the edges of academic life; it increasingly defines the structure through which the university teaches, adapts, and reproduces itself. Universities rely on adjunct and contingent appointments to sustain undergraduate teaching at lower long-term cost even as administrative structures and managerial layers continue to expand.  The system grew inside a university increasingly shaped by enrollment management, administrative expansion, budget flexibility, weakened tenure lines, and the treatment of teaching as adjustable capacity. As institutions planned around fluctuating numbers, shifting programs, and market pressure, contingent labor became the convenient answer to problems described as managerial necessities. The language of efficiency made the transformation sound practical. The cost appeared inside the lives of teachers whose work remained central to the classroom and peripheral to the institution’s durable commitments. Adjunctification taught the university how to preserve its public promise of intellectual depth while relocating the risks of that promise onto the people asked to carry it.

Adaptability has become one of the preferred moral words of modern institutions. For administrators, it means efficiency, responsiveness, and quick adjustment when budgets, enrollment, or priorities shift. For workers, it enters life as fragmentation: a late-changing schedule, a future waiting on approval, a household organized around uncertain income, and a self repeatedly bent around institutional need. The institution calls it adjustment. The worker lives it as interruption. Some lives never gather long enough to become continuous.

Precarity reaches the whole person. Wages matter because they shape rent, food, health, transportation, debt, and the daily conditions of dignity. Unstable labor also enters planning, confidence, family life, intellectual growth, and the person’s sense of continuity. A worker who lives from contract to contract learns to measure life in short intervals. Decisions about housing, children, research, care, rest, and hope pass through the narrow gate of the next assignment. Work organizes the kind of person a future can still produce. When work keeps the future provisional, the worker’s life gathers itself under pressure, always carrying the next uncertainty before it arrives.

Adjunct labor names more than an employment category. It reorganizes the conditions under which teaching, study, and sustained inquiry become possible. The modern university still presents itself as a space devoted to reflection, dialogue, criticism, and public purpose while building much of its educational structure around conditional presence and temporary labor. The contradiction enters the classroom every day. Institutions celebrate thought in mission statements, public speeches, and recruitment materials while placing many of the people responsible for sustaining that work inside unstable conditions.

This instability reaches beyond contracts and salaries. The adjunct belongs intensely to the classroom: to the students, the discussion, the readings, the long hours of preparation, and the fragile moment when an idea begins to matter for someone. His labor turns institutional promises into lived experience while his own place inside the institution remains uncertain. He assembles academic life from borrowed offices, temporary schedules, short appointments, and partial recognition. The instability spreads across space, time, memory, and the long movement through which serious thought gathers shape and continuity.

Spatial instability begins where academic life is expected to continue after class. The adjunct teaches in the building, walks its hallways, answers students’ questions, writes recommendations, and carries much of the university’s daily teaching responsibility while remaining temporary inside the institution he helps sustain. His labor fills the space with meaning, yet the campus gives that labor only a passing address. A student stays after class to discuss a paper, a family crisis, or a sentence in a difficult text that opened a new way of seeing. The conversation happens beside the classroom door, over a library table, in a shared room between appointments, or later inside an email thread. This is the geography of adjunct labor: a living presence carried through borrowed rooms, hallway conversations, and whatever corner the campus leaves available.

Temporal homelessness organizes life through a future that arrives in fragments. The adjunct plans by semester, by enrollment, by contract, by the late appearance of a course on a schedule. January can carry one life, August another. A class opens, fills, shrinks, disappears, or becomes possible only after the budget permits it. One week, the teacher revises a syllabus with care; the next, he checks enrollment numbers, waits for a contract, coordinates travel between campuses, or wonders whether a course that shaped his plans will survive long enough to shape his semester. The university asks him to cultivate duration in others: patience, discipline, growth, intellectual confidence, the ability to think beyond the immediate moment. It places his own duration under semesterly review. That is the temporal wound: the adjunct helps students build futures inside an institution that grants his future one term at a time. Continuity exists for others first.

Intellectual homelessness appears where institutional dependence and institutional recognition move along different paths. Adjuncts shape students’ confidence, curiosity, discipline, and intellectual development while occupying temporary positions inside the institutions they help sustain. Their labor becomes part of the university’s public image of teaching excellence, student care, and transformative education, while permanence gathers around titles, committees, offices, governance structures, and institutional memory. The same instability enters the life of the mind. The adjunct begins again through new courses, new schedules, and new administrative thresholds. Serious thought develops through duration, return, and sustained relation. Teaching gains force through repeated encounters with students, texts, disagreement, failure, and revision. Precarity interrupts that movement before it accumulates weight. The university has built a system in which the labor of inquiry educates others while searching for a dwelling of its own.

Universities still speak beautifully about rigor, and those words still matter. They promise knowledge, transformation, critical thinking, mentorship, citizenship, and lifelong learning. At their best, these words name real human possibilities. A classroom can change the way a student reads the world, and a university can become one of the few places where a society pauses long enough to ask what kind of life is worth building. The fracture begins when this public language of rigor meets a private organization of disposability. The institution celebrates growth, inquiry, and mentorship while arranging much of its teaching labor through temporary contracts, shifting schedules, and adjustable teaching bodies.

The transformation reaches beyond employment structure. The persistence of adjunctification at financially stable institutions makes the pattern difficult to explain through scarcity alone. Large endowments, expanding administrative structures, and visible institutional growth often coexist beside increasing reliance on contingent faculty labor. The university preserves permanence unevenly, concentrating stability in some areas while normalizing uncertainty in others. Universities continue to describe themselves as spaces devoted to knowledge, reflection, and long-term inquiry while increasing dependence on contingent labor organized around flexibility, cost efficiency, and short-term institutional adaptation. Teaching remains publicly celebrated as central to the university’s mission even as the conditions surrounding teaching grow increasingly unstable. The contradiction gradually reshapes the meaning of academic life itself.

Many students experience the university through courses taught by adjuncts, lecturers, visiting instructors, and contingent faculty who carry much of the university’s everyday intellectual labor. They design assignments, guide discussions, grade carefully, meet students in moments of uncertainty, and translate the institution’s mission into actual encounters. Their labor gives coherence to the student experience. The arrangement carries its own pressure: the institution offers students stability through teachers whose own place inside the institution remains conditional.

Time allows ideas to accumulate weight. Thought develops through return, revision, disagreement, silence, and sustained attention. Teaching changes through repeated contact with students, texts, failures, and difficult questions that refuse quick resolution. Universities understand this rhythm well. Their public language praises rigor, inquiry, mentorship, reflection, and careful study. Their labor structures increasingly organize classrooms through speed, replacement, short-term contracts, and administrative flexibility. Knowledge loses durability when institutions build the conditions of teaching around interruption. Adjunctification exposes the contradiction clearly: universities celebrate inquiry in public while placing much of the labor that sustains inquiry inside unstable conditions. 

The crisis begins with adjuncts and opens onto a broader question about modern work. Adjunctification is no longer only a university labor problem; it is becoming one of the models through which modern life organizes human beings: necessary, available, temporary, and always adjustable. A society reveals its priorities through the conditions it gives to the people who sustain its most serious tasks. When teachers live provisionally, thought itself begins to inherit the structure of provisional life. Courses continue, students learn, institutions function, and the surface remains intact. The damage survives below visibility. Beneath that surface, something essential thins out: memory, depth, mentorship, intellectual courage, and the durable relation between a society and the people entrusted with its formation.

The adjunct remains one of the clearest figures of modern work: necessary, available, present, and permanently adjustable.

Dr. Ashraf Hazeyen is a Palestinian-Jordanian philosopher, political commentator for Roya News, and adjunct professor at the University of Rhode Island.

The post Intellectual Homelessness: The Adjunct and the Disappearing University appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

A progressive enclave in northern California attracted participants to disparate issue campaigns. Now, they have a unifying organization with over 100 members.

The post New Chapter in Humboldt County California appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Anna V.

Meat is expensive. It always has been. Prices are higher, sure, but it’s never really been cheap. Many people don’t think of it as the most expensive item but ounce for ounce it is. It’s why when you go to a hotel breakfast buffet the meat will generally be placed at the very end so you fill your plate with the less expensive fruit and bagels and can’t get as much of the pricier sausage and bacon. 

The reason meat costs so much is due to the amount of resources needed to produce it. Before you can slaughter a cow you need to give it feed made from corn and soybeans for one to two years.  Grass fed beef is even more expensive as it takes longer to get a cow up to slaughter weight on grass alone. This is why multiple studies have found that vegetarian diets can be less expensive, because instead of feeding soy beans to a cow for a year or more you can just make them into tofu.

That’s why it is concerning that the new USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans increase the protein recommendations and are emphasizing eating beef – as well as the similarly expensive dairy – to meet those new recommendations. 

It would be one thing if these changes were backed by science, but most nutrition experts heavily disagree with these guidelines. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics released a statement expressing concerns over the new recommendations (source).  Furthermore, the guidelines actually contradict themselves. For example, they keep the recommendation from the previous guidelines to keep saturated fats consumption under 10% of total calorie consumption. However, in the list of recommended cooking fats are “beef tallow, butter, and olive oil,” two of which are saturated fats. Not only would canola and soybean oil be healthier, but they are less expensive, so it seems the new guidelines are going out of their way to make Americans spend more money on worse health.

Now it would be easy to write this off and say, “Well, everyone knows RFK Jr is crazy, no one is going to listen to him.” However these guidelines aren’t just suggestions for the average American. They instruct how federal food programs like WIC and School Lunches are set up. So if the guidelines aren’t making Americans healthier and aren’t reducing costs, who do they benefit? Well luckily they tell us on page 2: “We are realigning our food system to support American farmers, ranchers, and companies who grow and produce real food . . .”

A lot of people think of farmers as working class but don’t let the big trucks and boots fool you. A lot of farms are owned by large companies or families with generational wealth who make their profit exploiting the low paid farm workers who are the ones actually getting their hands dirty. These profits translate into power via groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Global Dairy Platform who go on to influence politics. 

This problem isn’t even unique to the current administration. Probably for as long as you can remember you’ve seen the recommendation that adults need three servings of dairy a day. This has been heavily contested over the years. It’s not that you can’t have a balanced diet with that much dairy in a day, it’s just that it isn’t always necessary. Many people, especially those of non-European backgrounds, get all their nutrients in with little to no dairy. However, it’s in the guidelines and therefore has an effect on government programs. I once spoke to someone who had been on WIC and complained that they gave her way more milk and cheese than she knew what to do with.  

So it seems these new Dietary Guidelines are continuing the theme of taking existing problems in our government and cranking them up to 11. The exact effects on programs like WIC haven’t been seen yet but they’re not likely to help struggling families. However, these guidelines aren’t meant to help them. They are meant to help the wealthy cattle ranchers who will destroy our environment, government, and health if it means increasing their own wealth.

The post My Beef with RFK Jr.: The Problem with the New USDA Dietary Guidelines and Who Really Benefits appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Labor organizer Daniel Gross's new book, Unions of Our Own, helps workers build progressive, militant, and sustainable unions driven by the rank-and-file.

The post Daniel Gross and Unions of Our Own appeared first on EWOC.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Eon Huntley as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA's insurgent slate.

The post Eon Huntley Spearheads Worker-Power in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights appeared first on Democratic Left.

DSA candidates are on the ballot in California, New Jersey, and New Mexico

The post Live Blog: LA City Attorney Candidate Leads After Election Night appeared first on Democratic Left.

Around the world, support for parents and young children is denied or hedged by means-testing. Zohran Mamdani’s childcare initiative is a welcome exception.

The post Three Models for Childcare  appeared first on Democratic Left.

New York, LA slates on deck, “Not On Our Dime” reintroduced, Houston DSA backs police reform initiative and more in the May edition of Chapter and Verse.

The post How Chris Rabb Won, Precinct by Precinct appeared first on Democratic Left.