Last Tuesday New York State held its second primary of the summer and New York City voters are sending another socialist senator to Albany. DSA endorsed candidate Kristen Gonzalez trounced Elizabeth Crowley winning the democratic primary in the newly formed Senate District 59, which includes portions of Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan. We were at Kristen’s victory party in Long Island City and will share some sounds from the ground. And we are joined live tonight by former New York City Council candidate and NewsGuild of New York organizer, Brandon West. We’ll talk about the significance of Kristen’s win and the results of two other Brooklyn Senate races - Jabari Brisport’s run for re-election and David Alexis' challenge of Senator Kevin Parker in Flatbush. 

Jack Devine also speaks with Nic, a fellow PSC union member, about the year ahead for thousands of teachers organizing for a more just CUNY. 

On May 4, 2021 Raleigh City Council approved a tax increment grant (TIG) policy which will allow City Council to grant up to 2% of the citywide annual property tax valuation (currently estimated to be $5 million) in tax breaks to private developers. City Council approved this policy on a 7-1 vote (Cox opposed; Baldwin, Stewart, Melton, Knight, Branch, Forte, and Buffkin in favor)(1).

How it works:

The tax increment grant policy will be allocated on a case-by-case basis by Raleigh City Council, like how rezonings must be approved/denied by City Council. When a property is developed, there is typically a corresponding increase in the value of the property, which will subsequently result in an increase of property taxes owed. However, if a specific development is approved for a tax increment grant, the developer will only pay taxes on the valuation of the property prior to development; any increase in property value because of the property being developed is not taxed. So, while there is not a decrease in the net amount of tax revenue, the city government is leaving future tax revenue on the table (2).

Why it matters:

Given that property tax increases typically occur on an annual basis, this policy effectively allows city government to require ordinary residents of all income levels to pay more property taxes, while allowing high income developers to pay less. This policy shifts the tax burden from real estate developers (typically run by very wealthy individuals that make campaign contributions to city council candidates (3)) to the average homeowner. Though homeowners are directly impacted by the annual increase in property taxes, tenants are indirectly impacted as increases in property taxes are passed on to tenants. This means the city government is specifically choosing to take money from working-class people to give handouts to their wealthy developer backers. If the city were to tax the full property valuation of a development instead of granting a tax break via the TIG policy, the need to increase property taxes on average homeowners and tenants would be decreased.

So why is this policy being implemented?

City government claims that this TIG policy is a tool that can help secure more community benefits from private developers which may include affordable housing, upgrades to infrastructure, or park amenities. However, for-profit entities must protect their profit margins, meaning that any community benefits provided will be a fraction of the value that could have been obtained if the full valuation of the property development were taxed. Further, many development projects seek to rezone their piece of property for increased density, meaning City Council can ask that certain conditions (community benefits such as affordable housing, upgrades to infrastructure, or park amenities) be met for the rezoning to be approved. Many members of the current Raleigh City Council claim that they are not allowed to ask for community benefits in exchange for a rezoning approval, but this is terribly misleading as they are under no obligation to approve any rezoning either. We suspect the true reason this policy is being implemented is to further encourage development by subsidizing the profit margins of private developers. At a time when the economic fortunes of ordinary working-class people are being battered, this perverse policy that Raleigh City Council is implementing would increase the difficulties for working-class people in order to make wealthy developers even richer.

Development must address the housing and transportation needs of residents equitably

Development of Raleigh is essential if we are to meet the housing, transportation, and utility needs of residents. However, it is vital that development occurs in an equitable and democratic manner. This TIG policy falls short of that standard because the shifting of the tax burden from wealthy private developers to all other residents of the city is reminiscent of a regressive tax structure in which low-income people pay higher tax rates. A better strategy regarding development would be to tax the full valuation of private developments to fund other public services such as permanent free bus fare (see Fare Free Forever), quality public housing, commuter light rail, and preservation of natural resources like the Neuse River Basin. For the Raleigh City Council to continue along the current path is a clear declaration of which side they stand on: against workers and ordinary Raleigh residents and with the wealthy developers that pay for their campaigns. We deserve better and must come together to fight for municipal governments that actually represent the will of the people, not just the ultra-rich. Learn how you can join in this fight at dsanc.org.

Sources:

1. http://go.boarddocs.com/nc/raleigh/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=BWZ3V3822FDD

2. https://raleighnc.gov/zoning-planning-and-development/tax-increment-grant

3. https://indyweek.com/news/wake/everything-you-need-to-know-money-race-raleigh-city-council/

Earlier this month, voters in the state of Kansas roundly rejected the so-called “Value them Both” measure, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have laid the groundwork for a complete abortion ban in the future. This measure, pushed by extremist anti-abortion lobbies, was defeated in a 59-41% result by the voters of Kansas. Tonight, we’re speaking to Melinda, an organizer with Lawrence DSA and chair of the PAC Vote No Kansas, and Dr. Russell Fox, professor of political science at Friends University in Wichita, on the organizing that successfully defeated this ballot measure. We will also hear from Alyssa, an organizer with Reproductive Justice Collective here in NYC, on the right-wing rise in the courts and the impact of groups like the Federalist Society.

Learn more about Lawrence DSA's successful campaign Vote No Kansas on Monday, August 29: https://actionnetwork.org/events/how-we-beat-kansas-anti-abortion-ballot-measure-a-campaign-debrief-w-lawrence-dsa

Follow Reproductive Justice Collective on Instagram at @reprojusticecollective. 

Milt Tambor, a life-long democratic socialist and trade unionist and the founder of Atlanta DSA, died August 23 in Dunwoody, Georgia at age 84. Born in 1938 to a Jewish family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Milt was an active trade unionist and democratic socialist for over fifty years. He earned a Hebrew Teachers degree from Yeshiva University in 1957. Milt then went to Wayne State University in the heart of Detroit, Michigan where he completed his BA in Psychology. While working at the Jeffries Housing Project and Dodge Community House, where he fought against school and housing segregation in Detroit, Milt also earned a Master in Social Work degree at Wayne State.

After graduation, he stayed in Detroit to organize youth programming at the local Jewish Community Center. He then became Director of the UAW Retired Workers Center where he became involved in his staff union by volunteering on their local bargaining committee. In 1968 he became President of AFSCME Local 1640, a post he held for 10 years, during which he led a strike of 500 workers. During his years at Michigan AFSCME, Milt became a founding member of the Detroit New American Movement, and later joined DSA during the 1982 merger of NAM with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. He then returned to Wayne State University and earned a PhD in Sociology in 1991, with a dissertation on bargaining with non-profit agencies.

After over 35 years with Michigan AFSCME, first as a local president and later as a staff representative and labor educator, Milt retired and moved to Atlanta with his wife Linda Lieberman. In 2006, as part of an effort to organize a fundraiser for Bernie Sanders’ senatorial campaign, Milt brought together local DSA members and progressives to establish the Metro Atlanta DSA. Over the next decade, he served as chair of our chapter through a wide variety of different campaigns and fights for democracy and equality. Whether it was opposing the Iraq War, supporting local labor unions, fighting foreclosures during the Great Recession, or marching for civil rights, Milt was always present and taking up a leading role. He was instrumental in rooting our organization in the workplace and community struggles of poor and working class Atlantans, using tactics from public education, to electoral organizing, to direct action.

Milt Tambor was a long-distance runner for Democratic Socialism. You can read more about Milt’s life and work in his memoir A Democratic Socialist’s Fifty Year Adventure or read the final chapter A History of Atlanta DSA. In addition to his wife, Linda, he is survived by his two sons, Alex and Jonah and a host of grandchildren and extended family. The funeral will be held at 4:30 pm this Friday, August 26th at Temple Sinai at 5645 Dupree Drive, Sandy Springs, GA 30327 if anyone wants to come to pay respects.

Today, in an unprecedented and historic move, Governor Charlie Baker’s MBTA will shut down the entire Orange Line for thirty days of emergency maintenance. This, the severs a vital transit artery for hundreds of thousands of greater Boston residents, and forces riders to pay the price for decades of disinvestment from public transportation by corrupt politicians from both parties. The T closure will snarl traffic, cut people off from whole neighborhoods, make it more difficult to get to work, and take away time that people can spend with their families. 

The Boston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America condemns the Massachusetts political establishment’s abandonment of the T. We stand in solidarity with our neighbors and fellow commuters, the riders and frontline T workers who will bear the brunt of this crisis.

The T is falling apart. For the past decade, delays, derailments, service cuts, garages collapsing, unstable tunnels, leaking cars, rusted-out stairways, fires in tunnels and across bridges, and tragic and preventable deaths have undermined trust in the political institutions that are tasked with managing it for the public good. This doesn’t have to be the case – the T once stood as a point of pride for the city and its residents, a symbol of progress, and we must work to get there again. 

Yet the collapse of the T was not caused by mere governmental incompetence, or an inevitable failure of public institutions. It’s the result of years of hard work by politicians like Charlie Baker and leaders in the Massachusetts legislature to undermine those public institutions. We condemn the failure of elected leadership and their abandonment of the public good that is mass public transit. We appreciate the legislature’s $400 million appropriation for the T in a recent transportation bond bill, although bond bills still leave a lot of the power in the hands of the Governor whether the money is even spent. We call for this full amount to be appropriated as fast as possible. But this is not enough. The T’s debt exceeds $8 billion, requiring a serious commitment to long-term funding from the state. 

We call:

• For the legislature to come back into session to forgive the T’s unjust, inherited debt and create a dedicated, long-term sustainable source of funding for the T. 
• In solidarity with Senator Markey, Representative Pressley, and others, for Governor Baker to make the MBTA’s entire system free during the Orange and Green Line extension shutdowns. 
• For cities along the Orange and Green Line shuttle routes to install temporary protected bus and bike lanes so that commuters and residents utilizing alternate modes of transportation can travel safely, as we know the streets are not completely safe for non-car uses without these measures. 
• For Maura Healey, the presumptive next Governor of Massachusetts, to resist attempts to privatize the T and undermine its unionized workforce, who work every day to protect commuters and deliver a public good, and to appoint a Secretary of Transportation with experience. 
• For voters to vote yes on 1, the Fair Share amendment, this November to fund the T in a more comprehensive way. 
• For DSA members and interested readers, to join us in canvassing at Haymarket station TODAY at 5 pm to circulate these calls to action with commuters! 

Resist privatization! Fund, Fix, and Free the T! 

Boston DSA is the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America for the Greater Boston area. We are an activist organization — not a political party — that works against oppression in its many forms. DSA’s members are building mass movements for social change while establishing an openly socialist presence in communities and politics in the Greater Boston Area, from the South Shore to the Merrimack Valley

TAMPA, FL — 

The Tampa chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has drafted a City Council resolution outlining support for decriminalizing abortion city-wide. This resolution has been drafted in collaboration with Councilwoman Lynn Hurtak in response to the recent overturning of Roe v Wade, and was presented to the Tampa City Council for a vote at the City Council meeting on August 4th, 2022. The City Council moved to table this vote until the evening City Council meeting on August 18th, 2022, with only Councilwoman Lynn Hurtak voting against delaying a vote. As a non-binding statement of intent, this resolution is the bare minimum that the Tampa City Council can do to show support for our reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. 

This resolution outlines that the City Council of the City of Tampa:

• will not approve funding for actions or activities that would criminalize the rights of Tampa residents to make reproductive health decisions, including abortion, for themselves
• will not approve funding for any organization or entity operating a “crisis pregnancy center” or “pregnancy resource center” established with the purpose of opposing legal abortion and dissuading pregnant people from seeking abortion services
• will do everything in their power to make the criminalization of abortion the absolute lowest priority for city resources and personnel and approve a city budget that reflects as much

See the resolution attached in this email.

This resolution builds off a list of demands Tampa DSA has released for the City of Tampa regarding abortion rights, which has been signed by 223 community members and organizations. You can find and sign onto our list of demands here.

This resolution also mirrors a recent city resolution which passed in Austin, Texas to support decriminalizing abortion – the GRACE Act, or Guarding the Right to Abortion Care for Everyone Act. This resolution passed 10-1.

“This is the bare minimum Tampa’s City Council can do to show they oppose criminalizing our right to abortion care. In this unprecedented moment we need to challenge what’s clearly unsettled law and fight for our basic rights before they’re viciously stripped away. To not pass the full text of the proposed resolution would signal that Tampa’s City Council is unwilling to confront unconstitutional Tallahassee laws and any future abortion restrictions or bans that come our way. I hope they follow Councilwoman Hurtak’s lead and vote to pass this on the 18th.” – Jocelyn Koenig, member of Tampa DSA.

For media inquiries, please contact Mikaela Aradi at 727-492-9646 or healthjustice.tdsa@gmail.com 

Tampa DSA is an official chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. We believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for the wealthy elite. We are a political and activist organization, not a party. DSA members use a variety of tactics, from legislative to direct action, to fight for reforms that empower working people. We have over 270 dues-paying members of our chapter.

Tampa Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) | Tampa, Florida | healthjustice.tdsa@gmail.com | tampadsa.org | https://www.facebook.com/tampadsa

The post TAMPA CITY COUNCIL TO VOTE ON TDSA’S CITY RESOLUTION ON ABORTION DECRIMINALIZATION appeared first on Tampa DSA.

Where we left off

Five years ago I was at the counterprotests to Unite the Right, the fascist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, that culminated in a car attack that killed Heather Heyer and wounded many others, some quite seriously. I wrote about this for the PEWG Blog four years ago. I don’t need to rehash all the same things here, but I do want to reflect on the five years since.

I wrote that post from four years ago in part to promote the antifascist action that was coming up on August 18, 2018, and the educational panel ahead of it. As the post itself mentions, I was a speaker on that panel: Boston DSA’s speaker. It was a strange experience. I was used to protecting myself by being unnoticed. Being a speaker effectively made me a sort of VIP, one of the people that the security team – headed up by a dear friend and comrade who had been punched and stabbed at an antifascist action two weeks earlier – was there to safeguard. Some fascists did indeed show up and try to get in, albeit for apparent reconnaissance purposes more than mayhem. I didn’t know about it until the panel was over, because the security team did a great job. One guy that we’d never seen before did get in and record audio, but he wasn’t able to take video because, by his own admission, he knew that the security team would notice and bounce him.

The past and the present

On August 9 of last year, I was in Nashua, NH, hanging around outside a school board meeting with a handful of other people, including three other Boston DSA comrades. We were there in case fascists tried to crash or intimidate it. More than an hour into the meeting, the Nationalist Social Club (NSC-131) marched in, identically dressed and chanting in a group. The subset of people there who were active antifascist activists, including the four of us from Boston DSA, got in front of them. They came in shoving, grabbing one guy by the collar. We were able to arc their march to the other side of the street, so that our whole group was between them and the building. As we faced each other from across the street, one of their chants – presumably in recognition of it being two days before the anniversary of the A11 torchlight march – was “Jews will not replace us.” This was all pretty jarring for me, a direct reminder of being afraid that I would be dragged into a torch-wielding mob and mauled or killed. It brough up that same feeling of needing to be innocuous. But however unpleasant a walk down memory lane that was, it was still a memory rather than a repeat. I’ve put in a lot of work to prevent a repeat.

When I say that I’ve put in a lot of work to prevent a repeat, I mean some weeks where I spent 40+ hours doing antifascism (on top of my normal job). I mean time behind the scenes, time spent doing outreach and education, time spent in the streets. I mean getting in between our people and a guy swinging a hammer. I mean taking injuries and pepper-sprayings from both cops and fascists.

Which makes it all the more demeaning when people exclaim “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” in response to a 4^th of July weekend march by Patriot Front (see an actual antifascist comrade’s statement on that), or in response to rallies from NSC. It also makes it all the more demeaning when people imply that commitment to antifascism is measured by whether you talk tough online or in street propaganda, whether you put “punch all the nazis” in your Twitter display name, or whether you have the right aesthetic. Or when people imply that because I don’t dress in black, that I owe a non-mutual gratitude toward those who do, or that my antifascist work is inherently lesser than theirs. Or that you need to be able to win a fight – something that’s always going to be unlikely for me for disability-related reasons – in order to properly be an antifascist.

NSC has gotten a lot of attention lately, in Boston and nationally, after they protested a Drag Queen Story Hour in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, and their founder and leader Chris Hood was arrested for attacking a counterprotester. They recently protested another Drag Queen Story Hour in the Seaport as well. A lot of people seem to think NSC is a new player (they aren’t – they started as the New England Nationalist Club in 2019 and have been active monthly for nearly a year and a half) and indicative of things “getting worse” in the Boston area vis-à-vis the far right. The transphobic threat aimed at drag queens has escalated over the last several years alongside a far-right obsession with hunting “pedophiles.” We badly need to develop effective means to address that threat as escalation manifests locally. But in a more general sense of how the Boston area is faring in the face of fascism, the alarmism is wrong on more than one level. I remember what Chris Hood was doing in early 2018. He was building the Boston-area chapter of a different neo-Nazi group, Patriot Front (which he founded). He was part of an alliance that included Proud Boys, militias, American Guard, and a future 1/6 Capitol Riots arrestee who helped beat up counterprotesters in Portland later that year. That alliance was aiming to be an East Coast version of the ones centered around Patriot Prayer that caused so much damage to so many people in Portland (if you look closely at the ThinkProgress article, you can see that infamous Portland-area goon Tiny Toese was in its chat). Its goals never came to fruition.

A theory interlude

I see a lot of confusion and debate about what antifascism is and what its role in the left is. Whether it needs to take on a wider range of evils in order to be justified. My position is that antifascism is reproductive labor for liberatory movements that the far-right would attack and disrupt, and for the multiracial, multiethnic, multigender working class to which it would lay waste. It’s the shield to the sword, and it’s okay that it’s not the sword. Antifascism is also unusual (though not unique) in our organizing, in that it pits organizer vs organizer, rather than organizer vs existing system. That necessitates different, if overlapping, strategies and tactics, compared to what’s needed to take on the status quo. That’s okay too – it’s part of being “the shield.” I sometimes see people devalue antifascism precisely because they see far-right organizers as small potatoes. But as organizers ourselves, who believe in the power of organizing to literally remake society, we of all people should understand why far-right organizing, in all of its ideological and strategic tendencies, is dangerous. Fighting it is a specific, highly detailed task, and it needs no larger justification.

Another misconception that I see frequently about antifascism is this idea that if enough people in a community just mobilize and say they don’t want fascists in their community, the fascists will go away. A radical version of this is the idea that if you go hard enough against one fascists rally, really shut it down, they’ll never come back. I suspect that many of my readers are leftist organizers. Would you stop organizing because a bunch of people expressed opposition to you one time? Would you leave a city that you had goals for, and never come back, or abandon a campaign that resonates with the people you’re trying to organize, because your opposition shut down a single rally? This is not to say that there’s no value in individual mobilizations (a sustained effort, after all, is made up in part of individual mobilizations). But to successfully undermine, disrupt, and even eventually break fascist organizing, antifascism requires sustained, multi-pronged work. Sometimes daily work.

It requires understanding the far right, too, in its many ideological and strategic forms. How do you analyze, prioritize, predict trends, when you don’t understand what you’re fighting? No more “we don’t need to know anything about our enemies or what they think” nonsense dressed up as antiracism. No more trying to fit every far-right group into the mold of either the Klan or the National Socialist Movement, or pretending for the sake of 101-level online talking points that all far-right groups have the exact same orientation (either pro or anti) toward the state and/or police. And I am begging everyone to please read about the multiracial far right, its dynamics and its gender politics, and then to stop pretending that everyone on the far right has the same primary motivating chauvinism. Or worse, that queerphobic and transphobic groups are merely using queerphobia and transphobia as a cover for their true evil, white supremacism, as though viciously reactionary gender politics were not also far-right ideology.

Onward, redux

Reading through this reflection, it feels a bit like a litany of complaints. But I mean to end on a hopeful note. There’s no happily ever after, and the last few years have unfortunately brought a lot of new people into the far right. But I’ve seen new people join the work to fight the far right, become organizers, build their skills, and do a great job. I’ve seen people do things they never believed that they would be able to do. And I’ve seen the impacts of that – the crumbling of fascist organizations, coalitions, and actions, the gradually-increasing public awareness, the interest and involvement from people I never would have expected to join in antifascist work. In 2018, we contained fascists who tried to disrupt a trans youth rally and pro-immigrant rallies. This year I’ve seen both those events happen without incident. In 2017, I saw a torchlight march end in a brutal attack, saw hours of street brutality, saw Heather Heyer die and a lot of other people get badly hurt. Now, many of the fascist groups that participated in those events, and even the ones that rose in their wake, have declined or disappeared thanks to the hard work of antifascists.

If there’s any message that I’m trying to convey here, it’s that that this work matters, and that people can learn to do it. You don’t have to be some kind of stereotypical badass (I’m not!). You just need to be willing to put in the work, to think through what you’re doing and why, to learn and develop and reflect. To quote the comrade whose statement on the 4^th of July Patriot Front march I linked to above: “Our work is amplified when we work together, and to do that takes the sort of trust built only by shared struggle and shared vision of a better future. I have spent many years working with Boston DSA. Here, and in other organizations, is where you can find the people you can work with to make a difference.”

Donate to the fund for survivors in Charlottesville who still have ongoing medical and psychological needs.