Note: posts by individual CVDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

All political parties’ policy priorities reflect the material interests of their power bases. A workers’ party, which derives its primary support from labor unions, can say so directly and proudly. Every other type of party has to make up some other reason for why it’s doing whatever it’s doing, which its representatives usually end up believing wholeheartedly.

In Vermont, the big topic on all three major parties’ minds is property tax. This year, the average homeowner received a 13.8% hike on the largest portion of their bill: the homestead education tax, which pays for public schools. Amid widespread outrage, all three parties have agreed that something must be done to protect struggling homeowners.

For Republicans and many Democrats, that means cutting spending. For the Progressives, it above all means designing a more “equitable” tax system. Their apparent instincts about how to do it say a lot about the political and economic makeup of the party.

The Burlington Progressives, whose municipal electeds played no role in boosting the homestead education tax rate, evidently share the statewide party’s concern about placing an excessive burden on the average homeowner. Municipal taxes account for a smaller portion of the average homestead’s overall bill, but naturally, taxpayers are eager for savings at every level.

After her campaign platform’s lengthy “community safety” plank, Progressive Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak’s number-one policy proposal last winter was to “create a more progressive and sustainable municipal property tax system.” Several of the Progressive Burlington City Councilors, who released a video on the same theme this summer, have also pointed to the “regressive” nature of the current property tax regime.

They’re not the first politicians, nationally or locally, to level this criticism. But what does the word “regressive” mean in the context of property tax specifically? There are a few possibilities.

Across the country, advocates for tax fairness have observed that local authorities tend to assess cheap houses at a significantly higher percentage of their market value than expensive houses, and they can cite various studies to back up the claim. Intriguingly, the City of Boston abates the first $100,000 of every home’s assessed value – a big chunk of the total for a modest house, but only a small fraction for a mansion – partly as a means to counteract the unfairness produced by this tendency, which may prove difficult to correct in itself.

In Burlington, many of the complaints about property taxes focus on 2021’s citywide reappraisal in particular, which assessed commercial properties at what seemed to be a pandemic-era low point, thereby shifting more of the responsibility for funding city services onto homeowners. This is “regressive” in a hazy, populist sense in which “business owners and landlords are getting off easy” while “ordinary folks” pick up the slack, but it’s not clear that many commercial properties actually were assessed incorrectly, and the ideal division of the tax burden between homestead property owners and commercial property owners is subjective in any case. Many American cities charge separate rates for residential, commercial, and even industrial properties, but we have no established formula that would allow us to say in mathematical terms whether one tax regime is more progressive than another on that basis.

Elsewhere, critics of the regressive property tax have lamented its flat rate. While the income tax has a bracketed structure, with higher rates for higher earners, a homeowner with a $200,000 house pays the same property tax rate as a homeowner with a $2 million house. Introducing progressive marginal tax rates for more expensive properties would go hand-in-hand with abating the first portion of the property value in that both changes would mirror the structure of the federal income tax, which, thanks to the standard deduction, offers a 0% tax rate on earnings below $14,600.

Finally – and most importantly, it seems – a property tax is said to be regressive in the same way as a sales tax. A sales tax is regressive because, over the course of a year, a high earner pays less in sales tax as a percentage of their annual income than a low earner does. This will hold true even if, as expected, the high earner treats themself to a significantly higher level of consumption than the low earner can.

Under this formulation, there are many examples of regressive taxes – from the payroll tax that funds Social Security to user fees on public goods, such as bus fares – but only one tax can be strictly progressive: the income tax itself. On a trivial, case-by-case basis, even a wealth tax on  multimillionaires would sometimes fail the test.

Imagine, for instance, a pair of plutocrats, one of whom invests primarily in growth stocks while the other invests primarily in dividend stocks. The former may have a slightly larger net worth than the latter, and if so, they’d pay a slightly bigger wealth tax, even though their friend’s income would be greater on account of the dividends.

Does this “regressive” hypothetical present a problem? Not to me. Obviously, the purpose of the wealth tax is to tax wealth, not income. In a sense, the same is true of the property tax. Targeting a single asset and declining to account for liabilities, it nonetheless remains the closest thing that we have in America today to a wealth tax.

Consider another hypothetical. A 68-year-old Burlingtonian, who owns a house worth $800,000, has retired after a remunerative career. Their overall net worth is $1.5 million, but so far, they haven’t cashed in on any of the unrealized capital gains in their IRA. Thanks to Social Security and interest on savings and bonds, their income in 2023 was $50,000.

Half a mile away, in a crummy apartment, lives a 31-year-old renter who earned $55,000 last year. They own no significant assets, so due to student debt, their net worth is negative.

According to the crude theory of progressive taxation, the renter should have paid more in taxes than the homeowner. By this understanding, the property tax, which prevented that from happening, intruded regressively upon the perfect justice of the income tax.

Yet the fundamental principle of progressive taxation is not necessarily that income matters above all but that an individual’s tax burden should depend upon their “ability to pay.” Once we remember that wealth exists, we realize that we have no way to measure with certain accuracy or confidence that ability for anyone. Neither the City of Burlington nor the State of Vermont knows my net worth or yours; the state knows our income, which functions with imperfect reliability as a proxy for general economic well-being.

We should still strive to achieve tax fairness, but the problem of how to do it is more ambiguous than many of the concept’s proponents let on, and the retiree of relatively high wealth and relatively low income presents an especially ambiguous case. And it’s not an unusual one in Vermont, which has the third-highest median age in the country. In order to grapple honestly with the difficult question of how much the aforementioned retiree should pay in taxes, we have to recognize some kind of difference between them and the no-wealth, low-income worker.

Over the next year or two, we may see various new “equity”-based proposals on the city and state levels to phase out or reduce homestead property tax as a revenue source, with new or increased income taxes replacing it, or to expand income-based property tax adjustments. Such proposals are incomplete if they assess their own progressivity strictly as a comparative measure of how much high-, middle-, and low-income Vermonters would pay as a share of their income under the revised system. Ideally, they would also consider their progressivity in terms of how much high-, middle-, and low-wealth Vermonters would pay as a share of their wealth.

This alternative method of gauging progressivity would not suddenly unmask the progressive income tax as a regressive nightmare. In general, of course, low-wealth people tend also to have lower incomes (and thus pay little in tax), and high-wealth people tend to have higher incomes (and thus pay more). Senior citizens make up only 21% of Vermont’s population, and the truly wealthy ones receive big enough regular payouts from their investments to remain high-income even after retirement, if they ever had a job beyond “investing” in the first place.

Yet an up-close look at each wealth ventile on our hypothetical graph would reveal a huge number of disconcerting outliers and notable microtrends. In the low-wealth groups, we’d find high-salary but nearly assetless young professionals paying a big income tax; in the middle-wealth groups, we’d find ordinary retirees paying extremely little income tax despite the considerable value of their paid-off houses; and in the highest-wealth group, we’d find one-percenters with stock portfolios so enormous that, even with significant investment income and a high tax rate on it to match, the income tax could never amount to anything more than a miniscule sliver of their wealth.

How would we address these subgroups? The solution would not be to discontinue the income tax but to introduce additional taxes to ensure that every middle-wealth Vermonter contributes in a reasonable way to the system and to ensure that all high-wealth Vermonters pay considerably more than an income tax alone can extract. The homestead property tax isn’t the best way to do even a portion of the job, but it has some merits – most of all, the very considerable merit of existing already.

A wealth-based analysis of tax progressivity can only be imagined, since Vermont doesn’t collect precise data on personal wealth. But if such data existed, would anyone want to crunch the numbers? The movement in support of a more strongly income-based tax system transparently includes both blue-collar homeowners for whom the property tax represents a serious expense for which they must economize and bourgeois retirees who’d simply prefer not to pay. Without the political power of the latter, it wouldn’t have come so far. Both groups benefit by keeping silent about the mixed composition of their coalition and presenting their preferred tax policy as a truly straightforward, across-the-board improvement in equity.

In Burlington, where the median home value exceeds $500,000, the rare figure of the working-class homeowner occupies an especially outsized role in local political discourse. This is so the bourgeois homeowner can hide behind them. Most Burlingtonians are renters, and among working-class Burlingtonians specifically, it’d be hard to argue that renters aren’t an overwhelming supermajority. Homeownership is especially rare in the wards that tend to vote for Progressives, but you wouldn’t know it from the party’s rhetoric or policy focus.

I’ve gone to a few meetings and events organized by the Burlington Progressives and have observed the demographic character of the party’s active supporters and internal committee members, most of whom belong to a generation where homeownership wasn’t necessarily an outlandish dream for a family of relatively modest means. I don’t think it would be unfair to assume that this plugged-in group of longtime partisans plays a larger role than the average Progressive voter in determining the party’s political outlook. Logically, the average Progressive voter wouldn’t care at all about property taxes because the average Progressive voter doesn’t pay property taxes, except indirectly as a portion of their rent. For them, the rent is what matters.

As a transplant, I found the Progs’ fixation on the injustice of property tax especially striking upon arriving in Vermont from New York City, where every left-of-center politician has set a laser focus – rhetorically, at least – on the problem of high rents. Among all the meetings that I attended as a socialist activist in North Brooklyn or as a journalist covering the Democratic Party in a part of town that would soon elect three DSA-endorsed public officials, I never once encountered a proposal to lower homeowners’ property taxes as a means to make the city more affordable. The idea would’ve seemed comical. Now I hear about it all the time, and it’s driven me crazy enough to write this essay.

Of course, left-wing politicians in different places have to adapt to different realities. But the difference between the rates of homeownership in Burlington and New York City isn’t as dramatic as you might think: here, 38% of homes are owner-occupied, and down there, 33% are.

Deprioritizing property tax reform could help the Burlington Progressives form a more vibrant and meaningful connection with both young people and the city’s working-class majority. It might also benefit their municipal electeds’ political fortunes for the simple reason that municipalities have very little power to change the tax system, which means that a mayor or city councilor’s promise of action is very likely to yield disappointment.

State law determines what sorts of taxes cities in Vermont may collect and how those taxes work. Without action in Montpelier, Burlington can’t set different tax rates for different types of properties (e.g., second homes), create progressive tax brackets for expensive properties, or introduce a preset abatement.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear that anyone outside of a few policy wonks has any interest in any of those reforms anyway. The central demand of the “low- and moderate-income homeowners” in Burlington is to modify the municipal property tax for the purpose of duplicating the income-sensitized structure of the homestead education tax. The State of Vermont’s Education Fund derives its revenue through a complex mathematical formula that sets a property tax rate for each town based on the local school district’s spending per “equalized” pupil, but only one third of homeowners pay that rate, while households earning below $128,000 receive a sliding deduction, capped at $5,600. On the municipal level, only households earning below $47,000 receive a deduction, capped at $2,400, which the state refunds to the municipality.

On its own, the City of Burlington could theoretically mimic the education tax’s more expansive deduction in a jury-rigged, back-end fashion by offering a sliding rebate on municipal taxes for homeowners who would submit their income tax returns to City Hall as proof of their low or moderate earnings. Calculating their refunds and mailing out their checks would probably amount to a pretty costly administrative burden, but the bigger foreseeable obstacle is that, in order to maintain revenue neutrality, the city would have to convince residents to authorize a big increase on the statutory municipal property tax rate, which would become the effective rate only for high earners. A hard-to-understand promise of progressive redistribution on the basis of income – in which a lot of the biggest checks, however, probably would go out to comfortably retired Joan Shannon voters in the southern Hill Section – might not sway a majority of voters.

Another problem of sorts is that, even with income sensitivity, homeowners still hate the homestead education tax, still say it’s regressive, and still want it abolished. On the state level, this is a Progressive priority, and in 2022, a legislative committee authored a report that put forward a blueprint for funding public schools via income tax.

Unlike mayors and city councilors, state legislators have real power to change Vermont’s tax system. The current proposals are a little disappointing.

Right now, Vermont’s tax system funds public education through local property tax bills whose payments subsequently mingle in a statewide Education Fund that redistributes them to the school districts, and its rather clever design ensures that a property-rich town and a property-poor town will always pay the same education property tax rate as long as both towns’ school districts decide to spend the same amount of money per “equalized” pupil. The purpose of the system is to allow property-poor towns to spend more on education than they otherwise could afford to, and one of the results is that, in the towns where the houses are expensive, homeowners pay a lot more property tax than they would in a purely local tax system, where a property-rich town could have a nice school even with a pretty low tax rate.

This creates a lot of anger about education property taxes among the Vermonters with the loudest collective political voice of all: upper-middle-class homeowners. They represent one more big reason why getting rid of education property taxes has become a popular idea, despite its radicalism of a sort (currently, every American state uses property tax as a major revenue source for education). According to Vermont Public, the proposed method for doing so – replacing the homestead education tax with a new income tax based on the same fundamental structure, where income-rich towns and income-poor towns would pay identical rates for identical per-equalized-pupil spending – would offer “modest decreases” in taxation for most Vermonters who earn between $90,000 and $175,000. It would make up the difference progressively, with “significant increases” for Vermonters earning more than $250,000, but on its own terms, reducing the tax burden of the former group is a bad idea.

I’m not sure that “modest decreases” would pacify them anyway. With the homestead education tax abolished, their anger would likely shift to the perceived problem of excessive spending. One of the major critiques of Vermont’s system for funding education observes that it discourages cost containment because, for each local district, which sets its own budget, the full benefit of each dollar spent stays local while the cost of each dollar spent is to some degree distributed throughout the state. This incentive structure doesn’t seem like a big problem as long as you’re in favor of generous school budgets, but the system ends up producing a total education expenditure derived from the clumsy interplay between 122 self-interested school districts and a mathematical formula that hardly anyone really understands, and in the end, the figure feels pretty random. Evidently, it can generate a lot of outrage.

The best way to undo the byzantine structure of Vermont’s education funding system would be to get rid of local budgetary decision-making altogether and to allow the legislature simply to set an education budget on the state level, sending an identical per-equalized-pupil distribution to every school in Vermont while prohibiting rich towns from supplementing this funding for their own schools through any local mechanism. This would create a clear, simple process for determining whether we as a society want to spend more or less on education than we currently do, but there’s no visible push on the state level to adopt a system of this kind.

Instead, we have a big, longstanding debate about whether to continue to fund schools through an education property tax tied to local spending or to introduce an education income tax tied to local spending. The income-based tax would have benefits in terms of progressivity by the standard measure – which, for all its limitations, should probably remain the standard measure – but it’s worth noting that the income-sensitized property tax is not wildly regressive, either.

2022’s Act 175 report contains a graph showing the amount of education property tax currently paid as a percentage of income for low earners, middle earners, and high earners. By fits and starts, the line goes up until it hits the 18th ventile (Vermonters who make $141,000 to $171,000), where it begins to descend and then drops precipitously for households with more than $233,000 in income. The same graph would look better with an income-based tax.

It would be very difficult to correct the education property tax’s tendency to go relatively easy on the highest earners. We could make the tax system as a whole more progressive by replacing the education property tax, as proposed, or by reducing its share within rich people’s overall tax burden without reducing or abolishing the tax itself. The latter could be achieved simply by upping the normal income tax at the highest levels. Think of it this way: a left-wing government’s ideal tax system would for various purposes include secondary and tertiary taxes of imperfect progressivity (New York City’s failed congestion pricing, for example) – it doesn’t matter much unless the sum total of all the taxes is insufficiently progressive.

Earlier this year, Fair Share Vermont advocated for H.828, a somewhat gimmicky proposal to add a 3% marginal “surcharge” on individual income over $500,000. Logically, it would make a lot more sense to add new income tax brackets at normal increments than to tax every dollar between $229,550 and $499,999 at the same rate and then insert a bump at $500,000, but the political experts must’ve determined that people making $400,000 are essentially sympathetic while people making $600,000 aren’t. Still, it didn’t pass, although it came pretty close.

Fair Share Vermont also pushed for H.827, a more radical bill that would’ve applied a tax on unrealized capital gains for taxpayers worth more than $10 million. This proposal, which presidential candidate Kamala Harris now claims to support on the federal level, represented an important recognition that wealth – not just income – matters, yet it restricted its scope to what people seem to regard as the most income-like portion of an individual’s wealth: the net appreciation of their assets over the course of a year, a sort of on-paper income that would be taxed as real income.

Politically, this move had two potential benefits: a lot of people don’t know what unrealized capital gains are, so it might be hard to stir up popular outrage over an effort to tax them; and a tax that looks a lot like an income tax might be conceptually less frightening to those in the know than a tax on net assets, since we’ve already acclimated ourselves to income tax. But it had a big practical downside (or would have if it had passed): the tax’s volatility.

In a year where the stock market goes down, a tax on unrealized gains would collect virtually no revenue at all, whereas a tax on net assets would remain relatively stable. The latter might also hit a more expansive range of assets: it’d be reasonable to ask Vermont’s lone billionaire to include a rough estimate of the market value of his Picasso in a calculation of his overall wealth, but his accountant genuinely might not know how much its price has changed from one year to the next. Once more, the perceived political advantages of a somewhat stupider tax didn’t get it across the finish line.

Proposals of this general sort, however, remain the real key to improving Vermont’s tax system. Crucially, they are not revenue-neutral. They bring in money.

Social democracy costs a lot of money – Denmark collects almost twice as much tax per dollar of GDP than the United States does – and a left-wing fiscal politics should begin with an understanding that almost no one in the United States is overtaxed in absolute terms. A middle-class American is overtaxed in a relative sense: they should be paying somewhat more, while a wealthy American should be paying much, much more. But the movement for property tax reform in Vermont promotes the notion that a vast swath of homeowners pay too many actual dollars in tax and that we need to find a way to make them pay fewer while maintaining revenue at its existing level.

This won’t get us anywhere. While we can’t ask people to pay for government services that don’t yet exist in our country or our state, we can ask them – moderate-income homeowners included – to pay more to shore up our existing underfunded public sector, where improvements would help generate an appetite for new social programs.

This isn’t to say that every property tax reform idea is bad. Some are very good, although the good ones (like transitioning to a land-value tax) tend to get less attention than the mixed-at-best ones, which appear to derive a lot of their political momentum from a popular misunderstanding of how property tax works. Most homeowners believe that if the value of their house has gone up, so too has their property tax burden. In reality, public services cost whatever they cost, and unless a home has risen in value proportionally more than the average property, its owner’s share of that cost stays the same.

Partly for that reason, dramatic mismatches between a homeowner’s property tax bill and their ability to pay are fairly infrequent. Property value inflation in an in-demand city (or in a state with a housing shortage) may place an outrageous price tag on a middle-sized, middle-quality house, but the city asks the middle-class owner of that house to cover roughly the same middling percentage of its spending as it did when its owner deemed the house affordable to buy. Over the years, however, the cost of public services has gone up, and the owner may blame an unfair property tax burden for a bill that, to them, no longer feels appropriate.

The homeowner imagines that someone else is getting a free ride, and of course they’re right in a way. There’s no persuasive philosophical justification for taxing the value of property but not taxing the value of stocks or bonds. It’s not a coincidence that real estate is the only form of personal wealth whose ownership isn’t concentrated almost exclusively among the investor class and also the only form of personal wealth whose ownership comes with a tax.

But if we created a true wealth tax tomorrow, we’d probably want to keep the property tax, too, because, for ease of collection, the wealth tax would likely begin at a very high net worth, while the property tax would ensure that we continue to capture a portion of the wealth at lower levels. And until then, the abolition of the property tax – or even just of the homestead education portion – would seem to dim the prospects for enacting a wealth tax, since the argument against both is basically the same: “Hey, just because I have a valuable asset, that doesn’t mean I have cash lying around to pay a tax on it.” We can’t afford to make that argument victorious.

Moreover, after replacing the property tax – or the lion’s share of it, anyway – with a second income tax, we might have a harder time raising the normal income tax thereafter. Immediately, Vermonters would begin paying the highest total income tax rate in the country. At some point, assetless earners would begin to contend that, by placing too large a burden on income and almost none on property, we’re advantaging current homeowners and taxing away the next generation’s ability to build wealth of its own.

It wouldn’t be a disaster if the legislature did it anyway. It sounds insane to say so after writing thousands of words on the topic, but I don’t especially care one way or the other. Whether we fund schools through property tax or income tax ultimately has very little to do with the core economic injustices in our state. Right now, a Vermont household earning $40,000 annually, if it pays the education property tax, contributes $800; although details remain uncertain, a bracketed education income tax would likely bring that figure down to about $680, and while the same unimpressive savings could be achieved in a hundred other ways, the household in question wouldn’t say no to $120. What troubles me is the Progressives’ excessive focus on this battle.

It shows whom they’re talking to, and in those conversations, the cruder arguments against the education property tax end up trickling down into an equal hostility against property tax on the municipal level, where there’s no realistic plan to replace it with a municipal income tax. Instead, we’ll just have to give in to cheapskate homeowners and defund our city.

A common knock against the property tax in general, for example, is that it strains the average retiree’s ability to “age in place,” but this can be viewed as a bug or – particularly within a politics that aims to reconceptualize housing as a public utility, not a private asset – as a feature. Disincentivizing empty-nesters from continuing to live in big, energy-eating, single-family houses, instead of passing them on to the families with children who actually need space, makes sense, but unfortunately, Vermont doesn’t currently offer a lot of opportunities for easy downsizing.

That’s because, for decades, homeowners have used their political power to prevent the development of multifamily housing. We need to change that. In the meantime, retired homeowners can continue to count on the Vermont Property Tax Credit to ease their burden. I wouldn’t support expanding the municipal deduction – $47,000 sounds like a low ceiling until you remember that Vermont’s smaller tax credit for renters expires at $23,900 in individual income in Chittenden County (or at $34,100 for a family of four) and even less elsewhere, and somehow our politicians never talk about it – but I could make peace with the state’s current program with just a couple changes.

First, very expensive houses should be fully ineligible, regardless of their owners’ incomes. We don’t owe anyone the ability to live in a mansion; if they can’t afford the property tax, they should cash in and move somewhere normal. Second, if the program genuinely intends to prevent forced sales and tax lien foreclosures (that is, if it intends to prevent displacement, not simply to give away public dollars to homeowners), we should defer the deducted tax until the home’s sale instead of forgiving it. We have to take seriously the need to raise revenue if we’re going to build a different kind of society.

Instead, thanks to a liberal susceptibility to contrived middle-class sob stories, the Progs are playing a part in driving a Reaganite taxpayer revolt by helping to convince homeowners that they’re all getting ripped off. Of the six elected Progressives serving the City of Burlington, four are homeowners themselves, and that probably makes a difference. They may still love income-based taxation, but on the municipal level, the property tax is what we have, and if we can’t embrace it, we can’t do much.

It’s true that the municipal tax rate in Burlington is already higher than in rural towns. I’d like to see it go higher still, but there are limits. Half an hour south, Vermonters in Charlotte pay little in municipal property tax because they live in a rich, quiet suburb that doesn’t need a police department, but most of them work in Burlington, earning large incomes that they wouldn’t have if not for the particular economic opportunities afforded by a city, which can’t operate without an expensive municipal workforce. Using this reasoning, we must demand injections of state-level funding for urban services – most of all, public transit, which, at a high level, always requires broader support. The whole state benefits when its cities prosper.

But we can’t wait around for the state to save us. Regular Burlington homeowners have to be willing to pay for a functional city, and their leaders have to tell them that it’s their responsibility to do so. A sentimental leftism with a fuzzy class analysis – under which we’re all innocents and victims beside the billionaires and big corporations – becomes a major obstacle in this task. Without a change of perspective, things will get worse, and there are bad signs already.

For instance, in June, facing a major budgetary deficit, Mayor Mulvaney-Stanak declined to use the full authorized amount of a new public safety tax increase, sparing homeowners from paying the rate that they themselves, in a reactionary fit of panic about crime that temporarily overrode their usual stinginess, had approved at Town Meeting Day. Revenue from the public safety tax can’t directly pay for anything other than police and fire, but because that revenue covers only a fraction of those departments’ budgets, a boost could’ve defrayed a portion of the general fund transfer that pays for the rest, freeing up those dollars for other parts of city government, which, as it is, had to leave 17 positions unfilled.

Ultimately, the bare-bones staffing at City Hall – which inevitably affects the quality of public services, which most of all affects the quality of life of Burlingtonians who can’t afford to buy houses – isn’t Mulvaney-Stanak’s fault, but instead of presenting this year’s austerity as an unfortunate necessity that we must work to reverse, she framed the FY25 budget as a “right-sizing” of city government. This is just normal fiscal conservatism, and that’s where we’re headed.

On tonight’s episode of RPM, we’ll talk about how the “border crisis” is manufactured under capitalism and break down some of the dangerous presidential election year framing we see from both Republicans and Democrats.  

You’ll hear from Yvette Borja, abolitionist and Laura E. Gomez Teaching Fellow at UCLA Law. Yvette lived and organized in Tucson for 6 years and will tell us what it’s really like on the ground in Southern Arizona along the border and why there are no single issue voters. We’ll also hear from Luisa and Tristan, members of the DSA IC International Migration Working Group, about that working group’s new webinar series, revitalizing migration organizing efforts during a presidential election year and so much more.  

To listen to Radio Chachimbona: https://www.radiocachimbona.com/

And you can follow Yvette on Instagram @RadioChachimbona

You can read DSA statement on Migration and International Solidarity Between Working People here: https://www.dsausa.org/statements/statement-on-migration-and-international-solidarity-between-working-people/

And visit dsaic.org/MigrantRights to register for upcoming webinars. 

SV DSA is holding a picnic for our August Chapter Meeting! If you are a Member or just want to learn more about DSA, come join us for a delicious summer picnic!
We will be voting on an anti-zionist resolution and discussing upcoming events including a Black August Brake Light Clinic and canvassing for our endorsed candidates!
Date: Saturday, August 24th
Time: 1:00pm – 3:00pm
Place: Sylvan Park, 600 Sylvan Ave

The post Silicon Valley DSA August Chapter Meeting appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.

Submission from a member of Cleveland DSA

An “hourly rate of pay” is such a universal practice that it might even seem strange to question it. Even a salaried worker’s pay is usually derived from an hourly rate, which is theoretically superfluous. It cannot have always been this way; it’s only within the last few years or so that reliable timekeeping devices became truly widespread. So where did the arbitrary standard of hourly pay originate?

The answer lies in the advent of the modern factory system. If you were to time travel to any era before the rise of mass industry (which was, at risk of offending any sticklers for historical precision, roughly around the 17th century), asking anyone what they were paid for each hour they worked would likely yield a rather perplexed response. Let’s say you were to go to a 15th century blacksmith and say “I want to pay you to make horseshoes for me for one hour. What would you charge me?” They would likely respond, “What are you talking about? Just buy the horseshoes! They’re 15 shillings a piece.” (I don’t know how much a horseshoe costs or what a shilling was worth)

Being the persistent time-traveler that you are, let’s say you pressed the issue and insisted on paying this blacksmith for an hour of their work. The metalworker might actually become indignant and snap back with “Just buy the damn horseshoes, you weirdo! Why do you need to know when I’m working on them? Why do you want to control my time? Who do you think you are, a king? And what do you think I am, your slave?”

Ye olde blacksmith is right, if you think about it. Being paid “by the piece” makes far more sense than setting an arbitrary timeframe that determines compensation for a generalized concept of “work” or “labor”. Wouldn’t it make more sense for a barista to be paid by how many drinks they make and sell, or for an assembly line worker to be paid by the number of parts they complete? It could actually allow for more accurate and fair compensation, in theory.

Therein lies the rub; or partially, at least. By paying per hour of work rather than pieces or parts delivered, business owners can avoid paying workers more when they produce more. Instead, they keep the extra value generated as profit. Karl Marx would have described this practice as one of the many ways that capitalists ensure a “higher rate of relative surplus value” for themselves, or, more generally, a higher rate of profit relative to their competitors.

So how did this blatantly exploitative method of compensation become the norm? One could argue that it was partially born out of practical necessity, although that logic disregards the power imbalance between capitalists and workers. “Paying per piece”, or paying a worker for what they produced, was the universal norm until factories expanded the scope and accelerated the rate of production. Before machines and assembly lines, complex manufacturing and fabrication was carried out by small workshops of “artisans” with years of training and practice specializing in a specific trade or handicraft. These workshops or guilds earned an income by selling their wares, with the younger apprentices paying a fee for training and access to the guild’s equipment.

This all changed when the factory system came into play. Suddenly, manufacturing, fabrication, and the processing of raw materials could be aided by machines which required little or no training to operate. The concept of an “unskilled” worker is a myth, of course; the workers who ran these machines were required to develop the skill to do so. But the fact that a new employee could be taught the basics of operating a metal press in a matter of minutes dramatically undercut the value of the years of training and practice that would have been required to perform the same task by hand. Consequently, it allowed for a massive increase in productivity.

In the factory system, the number of workers involved jumped from the handful of artisans in a workshop to dozens or even hundreds of workers on a factory floor. And with so many individual employees, a new problem arose: how was the factory owner supposed to keep track of what each of these workers were producing in order to compensate them according to the traditional “pay-per-part” standard? There were so many workers, each producing at different rates, that a whole team of accountants would be required to calculate their payment if it were based on the amount each of the factory workers produced.

“Pay an entire staff just to be able to pay another staff? But that would cut into profits!” griped the capitalists, “To hell with that! Let’s just pay them all the same wages by the day.” And so it was. Factory workers were paid a set amount per day, regardless of how productive they were. This led to a windfall of new authority that capitalists could wield over workers. “So how long is a full day?” a worker may ask. “Why, 16 hours, of course,” smiled the quick-thinking factory owner, wanting to maximize the amount of time his machines were operational. “And not a second less, or you won’t get paid.”

In a pre-union era, workers were in no position to argue or protest. The capitalists were quick to point out that employees were “free” to seek work in a different factory; nevermind that other factories were obliged to adopt the same exploitative, cost-cutting practice in order to stay competitive in the market. Moreover, the artisanal guild system of production was quickly driven out of business by the exploitative and highly profitable practices of the factories. Managerial overreach and abuse grew more and more commonplace, and the workers’ options shrank just as quickly. So they began to band together and form a resistance.

Workers’ rebellions had occurred sporadically throughout history; european miners fought back against tyrannical mine owners during the renaissance, disgruntled sailors have mutinied against abusive ship captains for millenia, etc. The organization of industrial era factory workers into early unions, however, is the origin of the modern workers’ movement as we understand it today. Their trials and tribulations are dramatic and heroic, and their efforts deserve study and admiration. But let’s keep our focus on the origin of hourly pay.

Along with generally abusive and corrupt managerial practices, some of the primary grievances of these early factory workers were unfair compensation and strict time requirements. Factory employees were routinely docked pay for “slacking” or not technically completing “a full day” of work, in spite of toiling in the factory for hours upon hours. On top of that, factory owners were known to slow down clocks, lie about compensation, withhold pay, and myriad other petty tyrannies.

So an obvious early target for these disgruntled factory workers was the clock. “Look,” they argued, “If I’m scheduled to work for 16 hours and I have to leave 15 minutes before the shift ends because I lost a half finger in the hydraulic lathe, you should still have to pay me for the time I worked.” The factory owners resisted but eventually caved to social, economic, and political pressure brought on by strikes, demonstrations, coordinated work stoppages, etc. So thanks to the diligence of these militant worker organizations, capitalists were forced to pay by the hour instead of the day, a dramatic improvement from the far-more-easily-abused day rate standard.

But today, we haven’t progressed any further. Sure, unions have won many more material improvements for workers, all of which are achievements that are to be lauded. Yet “pay-by-production” versus “pay-by-hour” isn’t really part of the mainstream labor rights conversation outside of the handful of nerds who read books by David Graeber and the like. Workers today produce far more than they are actually compensated for, and the fact that they’re paid by the hour instead of the day gives them little comfort or protection.

If we truly want to shift how we think about work and compensation, if we truly want to chip away at the foundations of capitalism’s means of working class exploitation, this should be one of our prime targets. And needless to say, moving from hourly pay to a more ethical system of compensation based on production would not end the exploitation of labor, just as raising the minimum wage wouldn’t end it either. But reframing the argument in this manner forces capitalists to engage in debate on our terms and not the other way around. At the very least, it gives us a more honest and accurate understanding of the economic injustices wrought by our economic system.

The post Why do we get paid by the hour? appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Recent wins from labor unions have inspired workers to consider unionizing, but should you consider when first talking with your co-workers?

The post How can I talk to my co-workers about unionizing without losing my job? appeared first on EWOC.

Resolution to Adopt an International Solidarity Working Group

Whereas, the accelerated Zionist genocide in Palestine has been ongoing for over nine months with still no end in sight, much less the likelihood of decolonization any time in the near future,

Whereas, while we must not slow down in our work on Palestine and BDS, there are also many other countries, colonies, and populations that require our attention,

Whereas, imperialism, “the highest stage of capitalism,” is a global system led by the United States,

Whereas, we likely cannot, nor should we aspire to, create freedom for ourselves without also freeing our comrades around the globe,

Be it resolved, the ad hoc Tampa DSA Palestine Solidarity Committee will henceforth be known as the International Solidarity Working Group.

International Solidarity Working Group Charter and Mission

Charter

The International Solidarity Working Group shall be a Standing Committee governed by the Tampa DSA Bylaws.

Mission

Recognizing that no person is “alien” or “illegal,” we will seek to build solidarity with foreign nationals, migrants, refugees, and colonized and indigenous people both outside and within “official” U.S. borders, while drawing attention to and promoting awareness of the crimes, military and otherwise, historical and ongoing, of the U.S.-led capitalist Empire against our non-American comrades.

Objectives

1. Appoint Liaisons to the DSA International Committee
2. Coordinate with other DSA chapters and other local and national organizations with whom we align.
3. Curate and provide educational materials and actionable items to the chapter at-large, other WG’s when appropriate, and the general public.

Members

Membership to the International Solidarity Working Group is limited to DSA Members In Good Standing. Membership in the ISWG is closed. Tampa DSA members can request membership in the ISWG, after which, and no longer than a week after the request, the ISWG will determine whether they will be granted membership by their own vote. The ISWG should not deny membership unless it is believed or found that such membership would be disruptive to the work of the committee.

The post Resolution and Charter: International Solidarity Working Group appeared first on Tampa DSA.

By Travis Wayne

Chapter Co-Chair

Our New Strategy centers the fight for democracy in socialist struggle here in North Carolina. There’s a good reason for that: North Carolina is uniquely undemocratic. The Jim Crow structure was less dismantled here than even much of the South. The state’s electoral map is torn to shreds by the gerrymandering knives of the ruling class while city councils are preempted from legislating reforms to benefit workers or tenants. The government calls itself “democratic” while there’s no democracy in sight.

We are denied democracy in the workplace and the home, too. Decisions over both are made by elites without even paying lip-service to democracy. Collective bargaining in the public sector is banned and only 3% of the workforce is unionized. The bosses run most workplaces as dictatorships while landlords – often the same bosses with real estate portfolios – control the home. The home includes our housing, but also our community and the land itself. Landlords let parasitic institutions like anti-abortion centers prey on student tenants as long as those parasites pay up, then destroy the land they stole with development for the rich, then set our rent hundreds of dollars higher than even their beloved Invisible Hand. Thanks to landlords, there’s no democratic decision-making over our home: our housing, our community, our land.

We need both internal and external democracy. Fortunately, both are deeply linked. Growing a democratic culture requires our chapter to test our ideas, to decide on action through discussion and debate, but also to increase participation by caring for each other better and incorporating more and more members – particularly those of color – into active protagonist roles as organizers in the organization participating in decision-making. A democratic culture strengthens us all and gives us more power to fight for democracy at three sites of struggle.

Three Sites of Struggle

Government, workplace, and home are all controlled undemocratically in North Carolina – and those are the arenas where we have to fight. These are not random. They are concrete sites of struggle. We draw a distinction between issues and sites of struggle. Issues bring in and activate people politically while sites of struggle are the arenas in which issues are fought. We contest the state government’s lack of democracy from the ballot and city council by running on issues; workers are galvanized to organize by issues, not only wages but racial inequities and sexual harassment and the other forms of oppression enabled by authoritarian power dynamics; we are currently campaigning against landlords by fighting them at the home in our housing (through tenants organizing against their displacement with one another in the Triangle Tenant Union, a housing issue), in the community (to target anti-abortion centers, a socialist feminist issue), and over the land (by defending both DSA-endorsed city councillor Mary Black from their real estate lobby and public land from private corporations like Wake Stone, an ecosocialist issue). DSA is both at its best and uniquely equipped as the largest socialist organization to cross-pollinate across the movement ecosystem, synthesizing and strategizing in all arenas at once, democratically deciding what to do as a party in formation and motion. 

Sites of struggle are arenas in time as well as space. The reason for that is best summarized in the best quote I’ve ever read about organizing: “you have one body and twenty-four hours in a day. An organizer asks what you’ll do with them, concretely, now.” That’s why they try so hard to control our bodies by doing things like incarcerating us, by evicting us, by forcing us to work to survive, by attacking gender-affirming healthcare. It’s not just about our bodies; in the vestiges of the 8-hour workday, we move from the home (housing) to the workplace and back to the home (community). Unless we’re part of a democratic organization like a union or a cooperative or a mass organization, we are denied democracy at every hour of our daily lives. Both bosses and landlords extract profit not only from us in spaces like the workplace and the home; they suck the marrow out from our minutes and hours, too. And they always seek to find more ways to transform our time into profits for themselves. As the ruling class attacked the 8-hour workday, they forced us into contract work and side hustles and double jobs that literally steal more and more of our space and time. We have less time to socialize with one another, to create new worlds through art and love and community. We have less time to organize.

We have to fight everywhere we’re being attacked by the ruling class. We need to build working class organization in all sites of struggle: government, workplace, and home. That means building DSA, as a mass organization in our local chapter, and challenging the legitimacy of the undemocratic state legislature as per our New Strategy. But we can’t stop there. We have to fight for democracy in our workplace and in our home. We have to be socialists everywhere, which means we have to fight for democracy everywhere.

Growing a Democratic Culture

Socialist struggle requires growing a democratic culture. Democratic culture means sharpening our analysis together by debating ideas. Democratic culture means competing for positions, as we test out those ideas and trade the baton of leadership in the beginning of decades-long relationships. Democratic culture means expanding ways for members to participate in decision-making over the chapter through integrating debate and discussion at every level of meeting and chapter business. Democratic culture means supporting formations of sections and associations that create new points of entry for working people into the chapter. One example is the Caregivers Section, which meets at a more accessible time for caregivers and creates a space for workers our chapter would otherwise not accommodate, through decisions made for and by socialist caregivers directly. These are all needed to grow.

Democratic culture also means being laser-eyed on expanding participation in decision-making to more and more people. This is crucial. A room of five people may be able to vote on something, but a room of five people has less democratic legitimacy than a room of fifteen. The weight of a decision made democratically is directly translatable to how many people commit to that decision – and how many people it touches that are embedded in their homes, in their workplaces, in their communities. That’s why we have to direct ask for direct asks’ sake.

One way we grow democratic culture is through creating better systems of care to support ourselves and each other. People tend to participate more when they feel heard, welcomed, seen. People participate when they feel comfortable. Comfort isn’t just the product of materially meeting the needs of people, but also sitting with discomfort when generative conflict appears in the life of mass organization. We need to understand our movement as a continuum across decades into the future. We must and will be with one another, literally, for much of our lifetimes. We need to find generative ways to resolve inevitable conflict and methods to address each other’s emotional and social needs. Right now, we have a tradition of mutual aid not shared by all other chapters and the queer and trans solidarity working group is actively discussing how unfilled needs for mutual aid in the queer community presents a need that we should organize around. We also have moved towards more of a culture of restorative repair. These are good starting points to build from, which we must, since multiple core members of our chapter have suffered acute depression in the past year that has nearly stolen their lives. We can’t take accountability for holistic mental health for comrades struggling in their own minds, but we can provide care and support in more active and intentional ways that treats our comrades suffering through mental health crises as wounded comrades – injured on the frontlines of struggle. We need to find ways to be able to better practice care for each other if we want to grow a democratic culture and participation through the decades ahead. 

Our chapter has two separate conversations currently happening that actually belong in the same conversation: how we increase democracy and how we become a more diverse organization. If we want to increase the power of our own internal democracy, and the weight of democratic decisions, we need to increase the participation of diverse groups that experience the most oppressive exploitation within the shackles of racial capitalism. DSA self-organized from a relatively specific and disproportionately white chunk of the working class: downwardly-mobile, young white-collar workers. Expanding beyond that segment is in the material interest of the people united. The decisions made by a handful of people – especially from the same sliver of the working class, especially receiving the wages of whiteness – in a room is a lot less representative and powerful than a movement of the masses can organize. We do have to address internal biases that, as Angela Davis analyzes in “Women, Race, and Class” that we recently read, divide the people by design and benefit the white supremacist ruling class we haven’t dislodged since Reconstruction. We do have to learn from socialists of color, particularly Black socialists, who have experimented with organization and theory informed by lived experience white socialists don’t share. We can and will become more representative as we create spaces organized with socialists of color (like No Appetite for Apartheid), intentional recruitment through direct asks to join our organization, and by rooting ourselves in democratic struggle with and alongside the Black working class that has fought the struggle for democracy since Black workers organized the general strike that destroyed slavery. 

The Struggle for Democracy 

Growing a democratic culture lets us concretely expand our capacity because it allows us to bring more and more people into decision-making. That’s more and more people shaping and participating in struggle, if decision-making translates to action, which is the responsibility of member leadership to mobilize people into doing through both meetings and active one-on-ones with active members who take on more and more decision-making. A democratic culture gives us more power to fight for democracy; internal democracy allows us to fight more for democracy. 

Rather than focus on the fight for democracy in government, which we discussed as a chapter at length in formulating the New Strategy, I’ll focus on democratic struggle in the workplace and the home. We have made significant strides over the years in integrating with the militant layer of the local labor movement through becoming rank-and-file activists in our workplaces, targeting strategic jobs as salts, and forming relationships with other rank-and-file workers through struggle and social life. But that’s been with untapped potential, turbulent participation in the labor working group, a capacity drain without rising leadership, and a local Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) in need of support. We need to commit our space and time to that work as a collective while also taking seriously the need to experiment as socialist individuals in our workplaces, with our bodies and our eight hours. Every workplace is different and every workplace presents challenges. That means confronting contradiction head-on and persevering in organizing through those challenges. If there’s no social fabric, we knit one by inviting coworkers to bars or remote hang-outs; if there’s no militancy, we build it slowly, block by block, relationship by relationship. We become an organization of organizers, doing mass work ourselves, organizing at our own workplaces even if it means starting slow in our own workplaces or taking strategic jobs to further the movement particularly during moments of unemployment. This is how we fight for democracy in the workplace on all fronts at the rank-and-file level in which we must embed. We build the militant layer in the labor movement even as we organize the labor movement to expand in North Carolina. That is how we struggle for democracy in the workplace because that’s how we increase the number of workers with direct democratic decision-making in their own workplaces.

We fight for democracy in the home through different methods that suit different parts of the home. In our housing, landlords control the supply with the same absolute power that they control the rent. They lump both together as the “market.” That means the landlords determine which tenants are housed or unhoused, which, given the necessity of a Housing First framework for wellness, means the landlords largely decide the position of the tenant in relation to other systems of oppression and cycles of trauma. They also determine the rent and the conditions and who gets displaced. Building democratic control over our homes happens through organizing with our neighbors. Sometimes, we share a landlord. Sometimes, we don’t. But in the Triangle, where land trusts tend to be governed with far less tenant control than democracy requires and neighborhoods are fragmented between different parts of the Landlord Cartel, organizing tenant councils only under the same landlords is simply insufficient. We have to find ways to build collective power, and thus leverage, with tenants from a far larger diversity of tenant experiences and incorporate that diversity into democratic decision-making within our tenant unions. We bring more people into movement by winning concessions from landlords together, whether that be rent reductions or defenses from eviction, even as we keep our eyes on the prize that tenant power can build towards: the total decommodification of housing. The removal of housing from the profit motive itself entails land where there are no lords, where people democratically control the housing supply to meet the needs of everyone.

One important cleavage in the landlord class that we can exploit to build democratic power is the NIMBY-YIMBY binary. The binary does not serve tenants whatsoever. The poor excuse for a redbaiting letter targeting DSA member Mary Black sent to the Wake County Democratic Party by Zionists reveals the two issues the Democratic Party finds most controversial: Palestine and “housing issues.” That’s because the Democrats aren’t rooted in the working class. They have more consensus on social issues, the terms of which are set by social movements, than they do on more fundamental questions of who controls the home. Prominent local Democrats can be found all over the place on the spectrum between Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) and Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY). This spectrum is a completely false dichotomy, since both NIMBY and YIMBY politics are landlord politics. They split the landlord class itself, as some landlords seek to build developments (cheered on by YIMBYs) and other landlords seek to entrench the value of their housing to the exclusion of others (supported by NIMBYs). But the fact that the landlord class is split means the Democrats are structurally incapable of mobilizing around tenant issues, even when questions like how high the rent will be and whether someone will be evicted impact people at the most visceral of levels. The cleavage presents an opening for a socialist path to be tread by the tenant as protagonist. The democratic road in the home is paved with the cobblestones of tenant organization that already has significant momentum in North Carolina. 

As socialist individuals, we must become organizers of our apartment complexes and neighborhoods. This is in some ways the original, bread and butter politics that the bourgeoisie distracted us from by channeling politics into elections every few years at the expense of everything else. That means practicing mass work where we’re living or moving to where we’re needed, same as in the workplace. Organizing under the conditions of complete landlord control also means embracing experimentation. That includes not only organizing tenants in different ways, but also finding new ways to practice socialist politics around housing. One way would be for cadre elected officials to build relationships with tenants facing eviction and then mobilize community members en masse to block an eviction – especially if the elected official ends up arrested. This helps us to stigmatize evictions through press and propaganda, increasing the costs of evicting tenants on landlords, while also defending tenants that are disproportionately Black women materially and building our credibility as DSA with tenants directly. Socialists are uniquely equipped to take advantage of the landlord class’s own cleavage on housing.

Fighting for democracy in the parts of the home that are the community and the land requires tightly-organized, escalating pressure campaigns that target identified antagonists. Civil rights organizing presents solid models for effective campaigns of this nature that led to dramatic change in democratic struggle. In our own chapter, our socialist feminist working group recently escalated from pickets to pressure on the landlord that leases space to our target. In other words, the landlord became our secondary target. Continuing to apply strategic pressure on this base-level secondary target, if we see the tactic to success, will present a model for us to follow in our local conditions. 

The same applies in larger fights with the landlord class as well: the Stop RDU campaign and Duke Respect Durham campaigns. Stop RDU is a campaign to keep the land public – subject to democratic control – and protect its treasures from a trade between corporations, from a landlord to a boss, from RDU to Wake Stone. Winning requires building a base and then escalating actions on our target, incorporating more people into decision-making at all steps of that process, extending democratic control where right now there is only landlord control. 

Similarly, our campaign alongside Duke Respect Durham coalition partners to make Duke University pay up to the community is a fight against Duke University, a landlord that happens to own 11% of the land in Durham. Popular pressure to force Duke to pay will require a momentous level of tight organization across the coalition, which calls for more people to be assigned as bottom-liners from DSA as well as one-on-one organizing conversations with coalition partners to identify bottom-liners across their organizational ranks as well. That’s the immediate need. Long-term, however, Duke Respect Durham is a beacon for the potential to unite a community against its chief landlord and extract concessions collectively from that landlord. A tall order, possible only through shared capacity with dozens of other organizations with which we’ve built relationships, and also one with explosive potential.

Socialists Everywhere Always

As you’ve probably noticed, the three sites of struggle bleed into one another just like movement ideas flow together. We are tenants at home, workers when we go to work, and community participants and caretakers of land all at oscillating and different points of our lives – both broadly and daily. We have to fight for democracy at all three sites of struggle, which means we have to think as socialists throughout all parts of our lives in which we are already embedded. This is how we maximize our potential as an organization of organizers, but also as a collective, the most promising foundation for a working class party that the state has seen in decades.

Democratic struggle means fighting for democracy in government through the New Strategy, challenging the undemocratic nature of the state, even as we organize for democracy in the workplace and the home. The bosses control the workplace; the landlords control the home, including housing, community, and land. We have to adapt our strategy in democratic struggle to the conditions of all of these sites of struggle in which we fight. In the workplace, we can organize unions with our coworkers and neighbors. Our housing is the same, even if tactics may change. But the landlords are also the opponent in the community and the land. On those turfs, we need different tactics – specifically, campaigns based on escalation that lead to more and more people in the community and caring for the land participating in democratic decision-making over their home. This is how we carry out democratic struggle in all parts of the home, not just our housing. 

Growing a democratic culture creates the conditions for us to fight for democracy better. A democratic culture creates more ownership over our collective project and incorporates more people into decision-making, while also holding space with and for one another as comrades through better systems of care. Finally, we can foster a more democratic culture by doing the work we need to do to make DSA a more diverse organization that more closely represents the entire working class to which we belong and that we aim to emancipate.

Inspired by DSA Cleveland’s resolution, “Winning the Battle for Democracy,” DSA San Diego adopted the following resolution on July 28, 2024:

Rene Gonzalez’ terrible, horrible, no good, very bad campaign for Portland mayor is both mean and clumsy.

“She came from behind, sort of surprised me,” Gonzalez said.”

In early February, Gonzalez claimed he was “assaulted” by a fellow MAX passenger, but video footage released later by Trimet showed “incidental contact” — a fancy way of saying that he completely fabricated the incident.

Rene has been cheerleader #1 for the police union’s ‘Portland-so-dangerous’ campaign (they are best buds). But that not must be hitting like it used to, so Rene took matters into his own hands.

Even fact-checkers with the website X (formerly Twitter) hit Gonzalez’ claim with a Community Note:

Petty Corruption and Wikipedia

Just last month, it was revealed Gonzalez used over $6,000 of city money to pay an outside PR firm, WhiteHat Wiki, to manipulate the mayoral-hopeful’s Wikipedia article.

WhiteHat Wiki claims to be the “the leading ‘white hat’ ethical provider for Wikipedia strategy and problem solving, including crisis management.”

No doubt Gonzalez is keen to suppress public awareness of his various scandals — many of which are described in this article!

The City Elections Office is now investigating.

Any Ngo Fanboy

Rene was caught liking a repugnant post by far-right street provocateur Andy Ngo. If only he’d waited a few months until X (formerly Twitter) owner — and fellow weirdo — Elon Musk turned off the ‘View Likes’ feature across the website. D’oh!

Comic Book Corruption Greases Downtown Real Estate Deal

Usually, Portland politicians are smart enough to break bread with their major corporates backers in the privacy of the Multnomah Athletic Club or at dinner parties in their West Hills mansions.

But a 2022 “gift” from mega-Downtown property inheritor Jordan Schnitzer caught the ire of the public — and the City’s election office.

Per OPB, “Portland City Council hopeful Rene Gonzalez was slapped with a hefty fine Tuesday for accepting — and failing to report — a steep discount on rent on his campaign office from real estate company Schnitzer Properties Management.”

Schnitzer waived rent and charged the Gonzalez campaign only for parking (also at a steep discount). According to data from Portland real estate firm Norris & Stevens, the rent should have been about $7600/month.

That’s substantially more than FREE.

A few months later, Gonzalez announced a cruel ban prohibiting his favorite punching bag — Portland Street Response — from handing out live-saving tents and tarps. Downtown property owners rallied around Gonzalez’ tent distribution ban and recently secured another Gonzalez-led victory when the City enacted an all-out ban on camping.

Unsheltered Portlanders are dying on the street, but some of Portland’s biggest property owners are cashing in.

Rene Will Trip You On The Soccer Pitch

The man is bush league!

P.S. An honorable mention that didn’t make this Top 5 list. Per the Portland Mercury:

“The city commissioner and candidate for mayor insists the city should no longer ‘platform abolitionists’ by allowing comments about police brutality during council votes on legal matters.”

Big business and their puppets like Rene are contemptible — but we can beat them — if regular people get organized.

Click here to get Portland DSA’s monthly elections newsletter and join the movement to win working-class leadership — not soccer cheaters — in Portland City Hall.

The mood among opponents of MAGA has shifted dramatically. But the electoral map hasn’t changed, and the Gaza genocide continues. What does this mean for progressives and the socialist Left? 

The Joe Biden-to-Kamala Harris handoff has produced a dramatic shift in mood among all opponents of MAGA’s white Christian Nationalist agenda. The gloom about prospects for defeating authoritarianism in 2024 that hung in the air for months has been replaced by a surge of energy and hope.

That hope can produce a big win in November, but only if it is translated into effective action grounded in realism. The balance of forces that existed before Biden withdrew remains the same. Likewise unchanged are the differing political programs of those contending for power – the MAGA-controlled GOP, the Biden-Harris (now Harris-Walz) wing of the Democratic Party, and the still-developing progressive trend that started to take its current shape in 2016. 

To begin sorting through the complexities of the moment, let’s examine what forced Biden to step down.

Ceasefire movement laid the groundwork

The unprecedented movement for a ceasefire and an end to US complicity with the Israeli genocide in Gaza laid the groundwork for Biden’s withdrawal. The sustained protests consistently spotlighted the moral bankruptcy and political cowardice of a President whose “red lines” were just hot air. They were irrefutable evidence that Biden had alienated large numbers in constituencies absolutely essential to any electoral victory.  

That meant the pump was already primed for change when Biden’s debate debacle showed the world that he was unable to effectively combat Trump even on the issues where he had actual accomplishments or had majority support. 

That combination punctured the bubble of denial that had pervaded the Democratic Party leadership for the last year. For several weeks, leaks and speculation about their ensuing rethink filled the headlines. 

On the broad Left, the conversation about what was underway reflected the widespread opinion that mainstream Democrats don’t offer a program that can inspire the working-class majority and are incompetent at messaging even when they do something positive. But the Democratic leadership’s apparent paralysis while facing the prospect of a landslide defeat seemed to bolster the idea that mainstream Democrats are mired in denial about the danger from the Right, and only get combative when they battle the Left.

But then the hammer came down. Led by their toughest and savviest heavyweight, Nancy Pelosi, top Democrats faced facts and moved to push Biden out. And once they succeeded, they quickly got behind Kamala Harris and gave her the green light: Make this a fight.

And Kamala Harris came out swinging. 

Three lessons

There are three lessons here. 

One, even before a militant grassroots movement achieves its immediate goal (in this case, a ceasefire) it can alter political dynamics in the country, as shown by the sparkplug role it played in pushing Biden out.

Two, with MAGA’s campaign to restrict all right to protest, gain control of higher education, and further fan anti-immigrant hysteria as well as justify genocide, the movement for a ceasefire and Palestinian rights is an absolutely crucial component of a consistent fight for peace and opposition to fascism.

Three, a Left that opts to sit out the fight because it objects to the weaknesses and inconsistencies in mainstream Democrats’ opposition to fascism will have little credibility with the millions whose spirits have been lifted by the one-two punch of Biden being forced out and Harris launching what is shaping up as the most combative Democratic presidential campaign in decades.  

This is energy at scale

The speed and scale of the energy surge underway has outstripped anything since the first Women’s March on January 21, 2017 and the uprising that began immediately after the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. 

Within days of the baton being passed,  44,000 Black women joined a Zoom that  raised $1.5 million and more than 20,000 Black men joined a call and raised over $1 million. Groups that had been struggling to recruit people to postcard, text and canvass got flooded with volunteers. Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) sponsored a series of three calls for white people and more than 20,000 registered. A “White Women Answer the Call” session initiated by anti-gun violence activist and founder of Moms Demand Action Shannon Watts broke the record for the largest Zoom call ever with 164,000 participants.

This outpouring reflects the deep and wide hunger for a fighting response to what millions of people in the US regard as an existential threat to their rights and livelihoods. It’s not that tens of thousands studied Kamala’s political positions and decided they were better than Biden’s, though many of course hope they are. The shift in mood that is translating into action is not driven by a change in policy. The surge is driven by a call to fight. 

Voices in the progressive wing of the anti-MAGA front – electeds like Bernie, AOC and Cori Bush, labor leaders like Shawn Fain, people’s organizations like the Working Families Party and Progressive Democrats of America – have been working to rouse the electorate all along. But it’s hard to build excitement when the electoral standard-bearer’s posture signals the exact opposite of the militancy needed. Once Kamala showed she could take the gloves off, the dam burst.

What about the politics?

The contrast between Harris and Biden on fighting mode is not matched by a comparable difference in their political programs. Harris has, after all, been a loyal part of the current administration and has long functioned within the parameters of the Democratic mainstream. And initial indications are that she is assembling her campaign team and the advisers who will flank her if she is elected from the same pool of insiders that have surrounded Biden.

That said, Harris comes from a different political generation and has not been as cocooned as Biden from current cultural trends and the sentiments in younger generations. That shows in some of her rhetoric, and it means that she is likely to be more susceptible to pressure on several key issues than Biden has been. The choice of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro for the VP spot, in light of labor (teacher’s unions in particular) throwing down for Walz and the ceasefire movement’s highlighting of Shapiro’s aggressively backward stance on Gaza, is also a positive sign.

Both the inertia and the potential openings in the above combination have already shown up in Harris’ positioning on the Gaza genocide and US support for Israel. She continues to pledge “unwavering” support for Israel, she issued a terrible statement denouncing the protests against Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, and she gives no sign she is breaking with the administration on any concrete action item. But she did break tradition and skip Netanyahu’s speech; her on-camera remarks after meeting privately with him lifted up the importance of Palestinian life in a way Biden never could manage, and her stress on achieving a ceasefire has reportedly made Israeli officials  nervous. 

Only continuing pressure will reveal whether Harris can be moved from words to real action. A new vehicle for such pressure is the Not Another Bomb initiative just launched by the Uncommitted Movement. Like the hundreds of thousands of uncommitted primary votes that played a big part in priming the pump for Biden to withdraw, this new campaign has the potential to turn the shifting sentiment among left-of-centner constituencies and young people generally and the Democratic voting base in particular into a powerful political force. 

The potential for change here is underscored by looking again at Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi skipped Netanyahu’s speech, saying afterwards that it was “by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.” She stated that Netanyahu’s time would be better spent achieving a ceasefire. That kind of stance coming from this powerful Democratic stalwart is clear evidence that the movement for Palestine has made a difference, and is a huge incentive not just to keep up but to intensify our efforts. And coming off the AIPAC-funded defeat of Cori Bush, defense of another pro-Palestine champion in Congress, Ilhan Omar, is just around the corner. .

The same goes for immigration, real action to combat climate change, and every other issue on which progressives differ with mainstream Democrats. Defeating MAGA is an essential step on the road to changing the country, but so is building the clout to force deep-going change as the fascists are pushed back.

Progressives are seizing the moment

Because of the gains progressives have made since 2016 – including important shifts in the labor movement – we now have both influential figures and organizational infrastructure to make a difference in this new climate. The sophistication now exists to move in a way that strengthens the overall anti-MAGA front, grows the clout of social justice organizations, and moves the Democratic mainstream closer to our positions on key policy issues.

This does not require tactical uniformity in the progressive camp. Rashida Tlaib has withheld her endorsement, stressing the pressure side of this moment of new opportunity. Other Squad members – Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, AOC and Ayanna Presley – have all endorsed Kamala, as have the AFL-CIO and numerous national unions (Service Employees International Union, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association) and grassroots progressive organizations (Community Change Action, March for Our Lives, Black Voters Matter). 

Of particular note is the increased cooperation among progressive national and local groups reflected in common messaging and coordination of practical efforts. On July 25, the Working Families Party, Center for Popular Democracy Action, and People’s Action jointly announced their endorsement of Harris and “pledged to mobilize their national member bases to knock on over 5 million doors in key battleground states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona.” 

The Working Families Party also has been joined by SURJ, Seed the Vote and the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) in a common 2024 effort of political education and action situated within a long-term strategy to gain governing power. In explaining WFP’s plan to “make 2024 a win for working people” and forge a new center of gravity within the progressive movement, WFP director Maurice Mithcell wrote: 

“We must block MAGA extremists from seizing governing power, and we must build the most viable, durable political vehicle that is beholden and accountable to the people and not the wealthy and corporations.”

Where are the socialists?

When faced with the threat (or reality) of authoritarian or fascist rule, socialists, communists, and revolutionaries in most times and places have sought to galvanize the broadest possible front in defense of democratic space, and to rally the most progressive forces in their society to contend for influence and leadership within that front. 

Some socialists are taking that kind of approach to US politics today. Framing the 2024 election as one essential-to-win fight in the long-term battle to win working-class political power, several socialist groups are throwing themselves into the anti-MAGA fight with all they’ve got. 

These include the Communist Party USA, whose resolution on the 2024 elections contains a “call to action to help build and actively participate in the broad all-people’s front to block fascism”; the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism whose editorial statement is titled “The Core of Our 2024 Elections: Democracy vs. Fascism”; and Liberation Road, which has issued a statement titled “Block, Broaden, Build: the 2024 Elections and the Threefold Tasks of the Left.” 

These three groups are also joined by the newly formed North Star Socialist Organization, which emerged out of a years-long process of strategy discussion and cadre development. Their Movement Mission 2024 statement says: “Block the Right and Build the Left must be leftists’ guiding orientation for 2024 and upcoming years. Blocking the Right this year must include defeating the Donald Trump and MAGA campaign to commandeer the power of the presidency…” 

All these formations have the potential for growing their influence in the newly energized anti-MAGA front. The Liberation Road and North Star groups are especially well- positioned to boost the influence and anti-MAGA contributions of some of the progressive world’s most dynamic sectors: many of their members are already embedded in labor and many of the state-based power-building organizations and issue-focused organizing networks that relate to the Working Families Party-led motion noted above.   

But these groups, even taken together, are far smaller than the largest socialist group in the US, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Unfortunately, the current majority on the leadership body of DSA does not agree with positioning the organization within the anti-MAGA front and assigns little importance to most of that front’s progressive wing. They refrain from a call to defeat MAGA in 2024, instead calling for a focus on building a new party as an alternative to both the Republicans and Democrats.

Many DSA members—perhaps a majority—disagree with this view. So while the organization as such sits out the 2024 presidential contest as it did in 2020, many of these members will be doing what they can to defeat MAGA, especially at the local and state levels, and trying to preserve relationships with those progressives and socialists who are throwing themselves into the anti-fascist fight. Hopefully, their efforts will succeed. But the stance of DSA’s national leadership is not just a missed opportunity for DSA, it is an obstacle to accomplishing those goals.  

US-style fascism is on the march. Among most of the constituencies existentially threatened by MAGA there is a surge of new energy for taking on the electoral fight against it. Victory or defeat will still come down to close votes in six battleground states. And with a woman of African American and Asian descent heading the anti-MAGA ticket, we can expect that the racist and sexist tropes floated in the last week will only increase in both viciousness and quantity. 

The mood shift produced by the Biden-to-Harris handoff will not by itself produce the changes we need. But the combative energy unleashed is an essential element in moving this country, and failure to connect to it, build it, and fight for influence over its political direction, is to miss the moment.

The gender myopia in this passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar stands out at a time when it is largely women’s energy that is driving US politics. But still, these lines capture the moment: 

“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”