Most of the attention on the California state ballot has been focused on the Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, thanks to heavy-handed spending by a dozen superrich reactionaries who are horrified at the idea that any part of their beyond-Gilded Age-level wealth might get redirected to health care for people who desperately need it.

But there are four related measures that require the attention of voters who care about economic inequality and want to address it fairly, since these measures also relate to appropriate taxes for rich people in the Golden State. One, the Education and Health Care Act of 2026 (Prop 3) is a currently existing but temporary income tax on the top two percent of income earners—individuals who make at least $370 thousand, or joint filers who make $740 thousand a year. This top-brackets income tax brought a tidy $14 billion to the state treasury last year. The bulk of its revenue goes to K-12 schools and community colleges. I’ve written previous articles dealing with Prop 3 and so will concentrate on the other three here.

41 and 42: Poison pills for the Billionaire Tax

Props 41 and 42 are designed to thwart the Billionaire Tax, and Prop 43, if it passes, will make it very difficult to raise revenue at the local level.

Props 41 and 42 were put on the ballot by billionaires hiding behind the anodyne title “Building a Better California” to trick voters into nullifying the billionaire tax. This positive-sounding organization is a PAC funded by right wing ultrarich like Sergey Brin.

Prop 41 would supposedly create audits of new state tax revenues and makes them subject to a state cap. The Billionaire Tax will easily earn more than the cap, over which any money is either returned to voters or goes to education. Prop 41 doesn’t mention the Billionaire Tax directly, but it contains a standard California ballot measure poison pill: if it receives more votes than other measures with an overlapping topic (i.e., the Billionaire Tax) it nullifies it. 

Prop 42 would prohibit new taxes on personal property including retirement accounts, financial assets or business interests. It deceptively proposes that unnamed “Sacramento politicians” are planning to do this to everyone. The only tax it would apply to—again without naming it—is the Billionaire Tax. As with Prop 41, more votes for Prop 42 than 40 nullifies the latter. 

Let us be very clear. These initiatives aren’t about helping California taxpayers, and they’re not about audits or retirement savings. They are about defeating Prop 40. Knowing who supports a ballot measure as well as who opposes it provides excellent context for understanding its purposes. One of Prop 41 and 42’s main funders is Google founder Sergey Brin, who has recently become the third richest person in the world. Brin has already spent a psychotic $100 million against a tax that would preserve healthcare access for millions of Californians. Other sociopathic billionaires have chipped in $50 million more. 

Prop 43: a higher barrier for funding local services

Proposition 43, also backed by billionaires and corporate entities like the Chamber of Commerce through their shill, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, would impose a supermajority requirement for all local special tax initiatives.  It would require at least two-thirds of local voters to approve any local initiative that would create, extend, or increase a special tax. It applies to initiatives placed on a local ballot on or after January 1, 2027.

This new supermajority vote requirement, replacing simple majority for local citizen-initiated measures, would apply to measures raising revenue for all forms of local government—cities, counties, school and community college districts, and any other local or regional government entity.

Majority rule is the basis of local democracy. Prop 43, if it passes, would represent a giant step backward, and make it easier for giant corporate interests like the Realtors’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, fossil fuel companies and other similar entities to wreck funding for the things we all need.  

Propositions 41, 42, and 43 represent profound threats to California’s future.  Putting a lockbox around our cities’ and state’s ability to raise revenue will result in devastating cuts to education, healthcare, public safety and transit and our ability to safely breathe air and drink water.  VOTE NO on Propositions 41, 42 and 43.

PART ONE OF TWO

On July 9, 1973, Dorothy Healey sat behind a microphone at KPFK in Los Angeles and ended a political commitment that had consumed nearly her entire adult life. She had joined the Young Communist League at 14, organized farmworkers and cannery workers, gone to jail, rose through the ranks of Communist Party leadership, and for two decades led its Southern California district. Now, at 58, she told her radio audience that she was resigning from the party.

The immediate cause was almost painfully characteristic of the organization she was leaving. The national party had denounced Al Richmond, the former editor of its West Coast newspaper, the People's World, for his memoir A Long View from the Left. Southern California Communists were instructed to uphold national leaders’ judgment whenever they discussed the book publicly. Healey refused.

Her resignation was anything but a renunciation of radical politics. "My hatred of capitalism," she told her listeners, remained as intense as when she had joined the YCL in 1928. She described herself instead as "a communist ... without a party."

That distinction would define the rest of her life.

Dorothy Healey's political history is often told as a journey from Communism to democratic socialism. The description is accurate but flattens a much, much more interesting story. Beginning with the crisis of world Communism in 1956, Healey spent decades trying to salvage the radicalism, working-class politics, and organizational seriousness of the Communist tradition while discarding authoritarianism, sectarianism, and toeing the party’s foreign policy line.

Much of that reinvention happened right here in Los Angeles. From the late 1950s through the early 1980s, Healey occupied an unusual position amongst successive generations of the city's left: the Communist Old Left, the civil rights and antiwar movements, Black and Chicano radicalism, socialist feminism, the New American Movement and finally Democratic Socialists of America. 

Her story is therefore less about leaving the Communist Party than about the harder question that flowed from it: What do you build after it?

The Earthquake of 1956

For American Communists, 1956 was an earthquake.

At the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev exposed a portion of the crimes committed under Joseph Stalin. Healey later remembered hearing the secret speech in New York and being devastated by its revelations. That autumn Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, generating debate through out Communist parties around the world.

Thousands of Communists in the US responded by voting with their feet and leaving the party. Healey did not. Instead, she became an advocate for democratizing the Communist Party USA from within.

That decision made Los Angeles unusually important. Under Healey and her longtime comrade Ben Dobbs, Southern California became a center of dissent, sufficiently independent that the national leadership repeatedly tried and failed to dislodge them. 

This was not an insignificant backwater club. Healey had been brought into LA’s leadership after World War II and eventually headed what the Los Angeles Times described as the party's second-largest district after New York. 

The old Popular Front had been broken by the Cold War. Communists had been driven from unions, prosecuted under the Smith Act, blacklisted, surveilled and pushed toward the margins of public life. Healey herself had been convicted under the Smith Act in 1952 before the Supreme Court reversed the California convictions in 1957.

Yet Southern California radicalism was already beginning to regenerate outside the party. Civil rights organizers, peace activists, students and young radicals were creating their own political networks. Healey's great post-1956 wager was that the surviving Old Left could enter into conversation with this new one.

LA became one of the laboratories.

A Communist on the FM dial

In 1959, the same year KPFK began broadcasting in Los Angeles, Dorothy Healey went on the air.

The new Pacifica station was itself an experiment. Commercial-free and listener-supported, KPFK gave airtime to an extraordinary range of political opinion, from conservatives such as William F. Buckley and Howard Jarvis to the Communist leader of Southern California. Healey's program, Communist Commentary, gave an avowed Communist a regular voice on the Los Angeles airwaves at the height of the Cold War.

Radio suited her. Healey could be ferociously political without sounding mechanical, and she possessed little patience for the wooden language that often passed for Communist public communication. Even critics of her politics encountered something difficult to fit into the stereotype of the obedient party hack: a funny, combative, recognizably local political personality.

The program also gave Healey something increasingly important: a political identity larger than the institution she led. As her disagreements with the national Communist Party widened, Angelenos could encounter Dorothy Healey directly, not merely as a representative of the CPUSA. By 1963 her presence at KPFK was prominent enough to become an issue in congressional attacks on Pacifica's broadcasting license.

More importantly, KPFK placed Healey inside a rapidly changing Los Angeles political culture. The station became one of the spaces where the Old Left, pacifism, the New Left, feminism, Black radicalism, antiwar activism and the counterculture could collide with one another. Healey no longer had to wait for those movements to enter the Communist Party; she was already talking to them over the radio.

That convergence was happening elsewhere in the city as well.

Despite the party's losses after 1956, Healey worked to restore relationships with liberals and peace activists and to open the Southern California organization toward younger radicals. Communist youth participated in southern Freedom Rides, and the party's Black membership later developed the Che-Lumumba Club, which became an important political base for Angela Davis. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener have argued that this continuing interaction between Los Angeles's Old and New Lefts distinguishes the city's 1960s history from the familiar national story in which the Communist movement simply disappears before the New Left arrives. Healey became one of the human bridges between those worlds.

Eighty-three thousand votes for a Communist

Her peculiar place in Los Angeles politics became visible in 1966, when Healey ran for Los Angeles County Assessor.

She made no attempt to disguise her politics. This was a Communist running openly for countywide office less than 15 years after the height of McCarthyism. She received 83,891 votes, 5.4 percent of the total.

The result was politically meaningless if measured by winning (and by current DSA LA standards). But it was remarkable as a measure of survival. After blacklists, prosecutions, loyalty investigations and years of official anticommunism, more than 80,000 LA County voters deliberately marked their ballots for Dorothy Healey.

The campaign also tells us something about the politics Healey was trying to construct. She was not retreating into a purified revolutionary subculture. She was attempting to make socialism visible within the ordinary political life of Southern California.

That strategy put her increasingly at odds with a national party whose instincts remained tied to Moscow and to an increasingly insular organizational culture. Los Angeles Communism had survived the catastrophe of 1956, but the contradiction at its center was becoming harder to contain. Healey wanted the party to open itself toward the new movements; the party leadership continued to demand political reliability.

In 1968, the contradiction broke open.

Socialism with a Human Face

In August 1968, Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed Prague Spring and Socialismus s Lidskou Tváří (Socialism with a Human Face).

Healey had visited the country the previous year and had close connections with Czech communists like Edward and Marta Goldstucker. She condemned the invasion, while Communist Party general secretary Gus Hall and the national leadership defended it. Healey resigned as head of the Southern California district.

For Healey, Prague brought the argument that had begun in 1956 to its conclusion. Could socialism exist without democracy? Could a communist movement possess an independent political judgment, or was its loyalty to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union ultimately stronger than its commitment to democratic change initiated by other communists?

But she still didn’t quit.

Healey had spent 40 years in the Communist movement, and a political organization built over a lifetime is not simply a bundle of positions from which one unsubscribes. It was comrades, marriages, campaigns, jail cells, organizing drives, friendships and a way of understanding one's own place in history.

So Healey remained inside for another five years, stripped of her old leadership role and increasingly alienated from the national organization. KPFK gave her somewhere else to stand.

The microphone allowed Healey to remain a public Marxist while becoming steadily less identifiable with the party hierarchy. A 1972 KPFK recording preserved by the Pacifica archive, for instance, has Healey giving an extended discussion of Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary Marxist who had famously battled the bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies of her own movement and criticized the Bolsheviks even while joining the Spartacists in Germany.

Then came July 1973.

When the Southern California party instructed its members to repeat the national leadership's attack on Al Richmond, Healey refused one final demand for obedience. She announced her resignation not in a private letter or internal meeting but over KPFK, before the Los Angeles audience she had cultivated for 14 years.

The symbolism is almost too neat. Dorothy Healey left the Communist Party through the microphone.

[Stay tuned for Part Two in the October California Red.]

OCDSA’s Mutual Aid Committee, affectionately abbreviated to “MAC”, has been one of the chapter’s longest operating undertakings. Following the Marxist ideal of a society sharing goods and services according to ability and need, MAC’s work, directly within the chapter and with members of the community at large, has long been the focus of the group, even before our formal establishment as a committee in 2026. 

What does MAC do?

In the pandemic years, MAC provided taillight services for free to the community in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and helped provide groceries to low-income community members directly at their doors during lockdown. Following the easing of social distancing restrictions, MAC worked with community partners to provide meals and groceries to the county’s at-risk and unhoused populations, helped get medical supplies to besieged countries through our partners at Not Just Tourists, established close ties with other mutual aid organizations such as Costa Mesa Mutual Aid, Lucha, and 714 Mutual Aid, and responded to individual requests from members and non-members alike for support with material, emotional, and social needs. 

What does it take to join MAC?

MAC takes a friendly “as you are” approach to service, accepting members regardless of their experience with mutual aid endeavors, and works within their abilities to help empower them through direct work with the community. MAC meets twice a month virtually, provides onsite training at events to help members and volunteers find their footing, and co-hosts events regularly with our community partners. MAC works within the comfortability of our members, taking into consideration people’s interests, capacities, abilities and disabilities, diversity considerations, and opinions to operate horizontally, reciprocally, and in a participatory manner.

How has MAC been a vehicle for socialist change in OC?

Because it is the nature of MAC events to involve direct action and accessibility, they are often some of the first events new members attend. Lower-key MAC events like our “cookovers” or grocery packing nights serve as equal parts socials, networking events, and direct actions, while more involved events allow members to interact with orgs outside of DSA to cross-pollinate. MAC has been a powerful tool for OCDSA and its members to demonstrate that we actively stand by our ideals, are friendly with and supportive of the community at large, and that the nurturing, prosocial world that Marx envisioned is possible, even within the belly of the beast

What do our members have to say?

• NH: “Our goal is creating a community where a core value is lifting each other up. We want to build this into the fabric of our community, with systems that provide necessary aid to those in need, with the understanding that at some point, we will also need aid. During my time with OCDSA's Mutual Aid committee, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with other mutual aid groups in OC to foster community and help build and strengthen these systems. The organizing skills I have learned have been invaluable, but even more so, the connections we have made with these incredible people have made a major impact on me. It's been said before that without hope, no one would have the drive to do this work, and I wholeheartedly agree. My cup overflows with hope when I see the overwhelming number of kind-hearted, dedicated people who are activated. If everyone engaged in mutual aid, the world would be a better place, but I also think that every person would be happier, less lonely, and more fulfilled.”

• PB: “Being a member of MAC is a personal reminder for myself that there’s a need out there, there are like-minded people who want to help fill it, and that though the world can seem discouraging and that I alone can feel powerless to change it, I can at least shape a better place in my corner.”

• SB: “DSA-MAC is a true demonstration of community and people’s ability to rely on each other when capitalism tries to make everything so scarce and isolated.”

• ZR: “To me, mutual aid means helping people with what they need without expectations or administrative barriers and being able to be helped when I need it. Being a member of MAC makes me feel like I have a community of people who will support me, and also it gives me space to help others when I am able to and that what I have to give means something.”

• AL: "As a disabled person I often feel invisible and erased from society. Our needs are often forgotten about by the government and even our fellow man. For me that stopped when I joined the DSA and MAC. As both a member of MAC and someone who benefits from the help it provides, I felt a sense of community that I wasn’t sure was even possible. I felt seen and supported. My comrades put hard work and dedication into our services every week to provide mutual aid to our communities, where like me, people are seen, not discarded."

PART ONE OF TWO [Reprinted from Geese]

Too often, mutual aid, direct action, and electoralism are treated as exclusive contrasts. Reflecting on his work in the San Diego chapter of DSA, Aldo B. argues that each tactic is part of a necessary whole and that any of them, taken individually, are ineffective as a revolutionary strategy.

A colleague of mine once said that his revolutionary cocktail for the systemic change we needed as a movement entailed three key elements; direct action, mutual aid, and electoralism. This concoction has stuck with me and rolled around in my head since he said it over a year ago in his millennial-style car vlog that he posted on Instagram. I've since expanded these three components into conceptualized processes:

• Direct Action is the means by which existing conditions are confronted head on to the point of rupture in the mode of production.

• Mutual-Aid is the logistical metric for satisfying the consumption of a community by an organized grassroots network of distribution and production. 

• Electoralism is the competition between politically organized factions over the attention economy of the electorate, aka, the 30-60% of the population that is allowed to vote.

With the recent primaries across the country, my own personal hajj to NYC, and of course the lovely DSA discourse on X the Everything App, this revolutionary cocktail has only come to sit evermore in the front and center of my thinking about how to organize internally around a variety of issues my comrades feel passionately about—especially in light of those issues seemingly being at odds with one another. 

I’ll state explicitly now that I fundamentally disagree with the framing of these three tactics as being antagonistic towards each other. In fact I would go as far to state that the distilled critiques which a proponent of direct action or mutual aid might level against electoralism and a staunch electoralist against the proponents of mutual aid or direct action, are all the same. None of these tactics are an end in and of themselves. 

Standing alone, Mutual-Aid is mere charity at best, or bandaids for bullet holes at its worst; Direct Action is frankly adventurism at best, or in the worst case acts as a revolutionary release valve; and Electoralism may demonstrate a shift in the Overton Window, but at the expense of cooptation and complacency with a tepid reformism. It is only together, united by a coherent and democratically decided strategy, that its potency for revolutionary change can be actualized. 

That's enough theory for now, but I want this conceptual engine to be humming in the background as you read this piece. 

Personally, since I was a young man, I have always strived to be a well-rounded organizer, a Jack of All Trades if you will. My mother would call me a metiche (nosey?), but that's neither here nor there. The way that manifests in my organizing today is that I have a tendency to stick my fingers in every pie within arm’s reach. I run the political education committee as an elected leader in my chapter, founded and am an active participant of our migrant rights subcommittee, am the former mentor for the electoral working group and current campaign manager of a chapter cadre campaign, a proud member of the Springs of Revolution network championing our national priority Labor for an Arms Embargo locally in conjunction with our Palestine Solidarity and Labor working groups; and last, but certainly not least, my day job is as an organizer for a statewide non-profit that leans towards tenant organizing. All that to say is, six years into my organizing journey, I have yet to pigeonhole myself into just one avenue of organizing. I may not have done it consciously initially, but I try to embody the concoction of this revolutionary formula in my day-to-day organizing projects. 

Through my experience, I believe there is something to be abstracted from the overlaps in these tactically diverse projects and campaigns.Allow me to explain.

I will start with direct action as it is probably the most contentious and certainly the most volatile element of the cocktail. I want to clarify now that I am not necessarily talking about the high-risk civil disobedience operations of a Palestine Action or of a civil uprising nature; though assuredly those too have their place in the cocktail. The primary methods of direct action organized by DSA San Diego are pro-Palestine banner drops, anti-ICE community defense, and strike line support. 

In my opinion, banner drops are a sort of guerrilla political education and agitation. Of the near dozen banner drops we have organized or supported in the last year, they have proven to be opportunities for some of the most frank organizing conversations amongst the membership and with the general public. I recall one instance during a banner drop in the South Bay, a predominantly Latine working class community, where a woman began to lightly criticize us; not for being pro-Palestine, but genuinely interrogating us as to how hanging a piece of painted cloth over a bridge helps the Palestinian people. The working group cochair and I explained to her that our intentions were to keep Palestine in the public’s mind. Nearly three years into the genocide and almost a year into Trump’s regime, it almost feels as though, with the onslaught of tragedy after tragedy domestically, people might forget or deprioritize Palestinian liberation in order to deal with the struggles we have to overcome at home. What we were really trying to do was emphasize that the struggle in Palestine was the same struggle we faced here.

In the same vein, our anti-ICE community patrols are another form of direct action. Just as in Palestine the genocide was result of a century of development by the Zionist entity, experimenting with different methods of occupation and disenfranchisement, Trump and the Department of Homeland Security are fomenting the early stages of an ethnic cleansing of working class black and brown people from our communities. When I motivated to prioritize community self-defense in the chapter, I was met with some well-intentioned pushback. The main worry was the high-risk nature of the work and associating with organizations like Union del Barrio (which had just been the target of a congressional investigation for their role in the LA resistance to ICE occupation). Ultimately, enough members of the working group reasoned that, if DSA defending migrant communities was unlawful, then that long arm would eventually come for us anyway. 

We spent the first three months investigating how radical projects like this had been executed in the past. We examined the Black Panthers and engaged with the plethora of resources that organizations like CrimeThinc, SiempraNC, and Front Line Defenders had compiled on ICE tactics and strategy. We read historical and contemporary pieces of theory on how a ragtag group of socialists could even stand a chance at hampering in any way an imperial terror machine like the US government. As we grew and developed, we realized that patrolling the community was beginning to inspire discourse on the notion and structures of public safety. This consciousness was spreading not just among patrollers, but within the communities themselves. The patrols became prefigurative for how a community protects itself from an entity that wishes to do it harm, and our chapter was a driving force in that.

Direct action also takes the form of labor work. We are lucky enough locally to have a talented and knowledgeable labor working group chair that keeps tabs on every union in contract negotiations, prepping for a strike, or already on the strike line. By the time they have begun, we are already actively organizing in support of it. We are turning out members to the strike line, donating to strike funds, and even anchoring strike kitchens. My experience walking strike lines has displayed (and tested) the vast spectrum of revolutionary optimism that can emerge out of solidarity with militant workers fighting against unfair labor practices. It is almost a form of political education similar to what occurs during a banner drop, except no one is wondering what exactly the picketers are trying to accomplish—it’s right there on the signs! 

Most recently, on a 24-hour Teamsters picket line, I got to talk to workers about everything from the world cup to the Iran war. But the most consistent topic the workers brought up was that, in spite of the risk they were taking, they felt deeply convinced that they could win this fight. It was deeply inspirational and to my mind demonstrated the potency of direct action as not just a tactic for fighting the good fight, but as a method for motivating workers that a better world was in fact possible. All they needed was to take the risk to fight for it.

[Stay tuned for Part Two in the October California Red]

“…people believe, 'Well this is a really affordable premium experience.' Because they're saying like, 'Well it's less than $10 and I get a really premium experience'." 

—Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, Wall Street Journal interview, April 2026.

Being ordered by your boss to do the impossible is nothing new. Nearly everyone has multiple stories of a boss holding them to an unreasonable standard. But those managers may not just be one-off cranks whose demands of their employees don't ultimately affect the overall business model and instead are a symptom of a much deeper problem. My argument is that this phenomenon has not only become more common in lower management; these unrealistic and often contradictory expectations are increasingly common in the corporate upper management of the monopolies that dominate our daily lives.

I've been working at Starbucks for nearly a year. Under the tenure of Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, I have become well-versed in the corporate double talk Starbucks deploys. Starbucks corporate waxes poetic about creating a cozy, calm, local-feeling cafe atmosphere. The reality is we are a fast-food restaurant, and we are designed to operate like one. During peak hours we are expected to send a car in the drive-thru on its way, on average, every 45 seconds. This is an impossible standard to reliably maintain. Barring miraculous circumstances, with everyone working as efficiently as possible, we can expect to hit 55-65 seconds, and that’s still without writing on cups.

As you may know, we baristas are supposed to write a personalized message on the drinks we make. We’re not even supposed to write messages on cups ahead of time based on the logic that they couldn’t have been written with personalized intent. Baristas generally forgo the cup writing altogether, only pulling out their sharpies when the district manager drops by. Needless to say, this mass-produced personalized experience Starbucks ostensibly pursues is not possible, let alone while keeping drive times under 45 seconds. This is what Starbucks corporate thinks can be pawned off as a “really affordable premium experience”. They sincerely believe customers will read the words “pumpkin vibes” hastily scrawled on their pumpkin spice latte and forget Starbucks raised prices again. It betrays a frighteningly low opinion of their consumer base’s intelligence. Customers are smart enough to understand that the message on their cup wasn’t written for them personally—it was written to meet a quota.

The greatest example of Starbucks’ anti-reality obtuseness is its refusal to bargain in good faith with Starbucks Workers United. After years of fighting, Starbucks has racked up mountains of labor law violations. For now, they write the fines they have to pay off as the cost of doing business. This is not a sustainable strategy. The Starbucks unionization effort spreads further and faster each year, as does the DSA takeover of the Democratic party. Eventually, one of two things will happen: Starbucks union density will reach critical mass and force Starbucks to settle a contract, or an insurgent socialist administration will prosecute Starbucks’ labor violations so vigorously that continuing to incur fines becomes completely untenable. 

If Starbucks is serious about saving its flailing company, they will have to start with meeting the demands of their employees. The unionization movement will drag Starbucks and companies like it kicking and screaming into a world where “good business” means treating workers and customers fairly, not maximizing shareholder value at the expense of the entire planet.

Every so often we have an opportunity to do something transformative. I’m not talking about “changing the narrative”, although that’s important and part of the picture. I’m talking about changing the world. 

Easy to say, hard to do. But on October 10 we will have that opportunity by countering right wing billionaire lies with a simple truth: education and health care are rights, not privileges reserved for the wealthy few.

What’s at stake

On the November 3 state ballot there are two initiatives—Prop 3 and Prop 40—that together give us the chance to help the richest Californians part with a significant amount of money, unneeded by them, and absolutely necessary to bettering the lives of millions of the rest of us.

Prop 3 makes a temporary state income tax on the top two percent of income earners permanent. It supports public education. Prop 40 taxes California billionaires on their enormous wealth, five percent to backfill cuts Trump made to Medi-Cal. If it doesn’t pass three million Californians will lose access to health care.

Currently there are phone banks and door to door canvassing happening, and you can join these to help. Sign up here for Prop 3, and here for Prop 40. But there’s one other thing you can do that potentially can make the biggest difference: come out on October 10 for both measures.

On that day

On that day people across the state will hold signs on streets, banners on freeway overpasses, leaflet in public places, and demonstrate. Perhaps we might pay a visit to a billionaire or two and say hello. We often hear that while the rich have the money, we have the people. That equation only works when the people are organized enough to counter the money power.

What does the money power look like? A handful of sociopathic billionaires, claiming without justification to speak on behalf of all 250 members of that group in California, have spent more than $150 million so far against Prop 40. That spending has bought confusion and fear on the basis of lies (California will lose investments, taxes and jobs; first they tax billionaires, then they come for you; this is a tax on all of us, etc.). Even relatively well-informed people are perplexed, as I found in talking with voters in the first East Bay Tax the Rich canvass on September 19.

This is unsurprising. We know that if a lie is repeated enough times at least some people will be persuaded, or at least confused. And at this point the lying commercials and digital ads are everywhere. But the good news is that the lies are easy to address in one-on-one conversations. The deep anger in the electorate toward Trump-supporting billionaires is waiting there ready to tap. Through the phone banks, and at the doors.

So we organize. By coming out on October 10 with a high public profile we can provide the truthful alternative view. We may not have the money for the advertising, but we can earn a spot on the news, in social media, and turn around the confusion in neighborhood conversations. 

California DSA is working with the labor movement and other coalition organizations to make October 10 California Tax the Rich Day. This is how we organize the day of action: we do it ourselves. No one is coming to the rescue except us: Workers over Billionaires. 

To get involved, contact your local DSA chapter, your union, your local central labor council. Plan to come out. Put together an art build. Make signs. Make banners and set them up where the public can see them. Find a place to stand, and stand there together on October 10. It will make a difference in this campaign, and in this world.

Join the California DSA Tax the Rich Working Group.

For more info, contact Working Group co-chair Mark G.

Events & Actions

Tuesday, September 22 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (in person at 1916 McAllister St and zoom)

Wednesday, September 23 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM)  What Is DSA? (in person at Latino Community Room A of the San Francisco Main Public Library, 100 Larkin)

Thursday, September 24 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM)  Phonebank for Prop I  (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, September 24 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM)  Organizing Mindset Training Series (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday, September 25 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM)  Movie night: The Battle of Chile Part Two (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, September 26 (11:00 AM – 2:00 PM) Yes on I Lit Drop (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, September 26 (11:00 AM – 12:00 PM) No on Prop D Lit Drop (in person at McCoppin Square Park, 1200 Taraval)

Saturday, September 26 (2:00 PM – 5:00 PM) HWG Outreach and Outreach Training (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, September 26 (3:00 PM – 4:30 PM) Decolonization Studies (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Sunday, September 27 (11:00 AM – 1:00 PM)  Canvass Workers with SF EWOC! (in person, meet at William McKinley Monument)

Sunday, September 27 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (zoom)

Monday, September 28 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM)  Tenderloin Healing Circle (in person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday, September 28 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (in person at 1916 McAllister and zoom)

Tuesday, September 29 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group  (in person at 1916 McAllister and zoom)

Thursday, October 1 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM)  Phonebank for Prop I (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, October 1 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM)  Education Board Open Meeting  (in person at 1916 McAllister and zoom)

Thursday, October 1 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM)  Organizing Mindset Training Series (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, October 2 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM)  Movie night: The Battle of Chile Part Three (in person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday, October 3 (6:00 PM – 9:30 PM)  International Solidarity Potluck (in person at 1916 McAllister) 

Monday, October 5 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Yes On I – Social Housing Working Group Lit Drop (3100 26th St)

Monday, October 5 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Labor Working Group Meeting (in person at 1916 McAllister and zoom)

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Organizing Mindset Training: Basebuilding 101, How to Have an Effective Organizing Conversation

Every Thursday at 7:00 PM from September 17 through October 8 at DSA SF Office, 1916 McAllister St

Talking to people is central to effective organizing, but how do you embark on an organizing conversation? Organizing Mindset Training is a four-part event series that goes in depth into every aspect of the organizing conversation so that it’s a sharpened and ready-to-use tool for any campaign. After this training, participants will:

• Learn about the differences between organizing, advocacy, and direct services/mutual aid
• Understand of the role of an Organizing Committee and carrying out an organizing strategy
• Overview the Organizing Conversation and get in-depth practice for each step
• Develop the ability to have multiple successive organizing conversations with a person, with the goal of getting them more involved in your organizing

Attendance of all four sessions isn’t required, but it is encouraged! 

RSVP HERE

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Rally to Save TPS!

Join us this Thursday, September 24, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM at the Ferry Building as we stand with Haiti Action Committee, AROC, PYM, Bay Resistance, PRISO, and many others organizations calling for the extension of TPS (temporary protected status) for refugees and other vulnerable members of our community.

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Decolonization Studies: Session 2

Come join your friendly neighborhood socialists for the second session of Decolonization Studies! On Saturday, September 26th 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM at 1916 McAllister we’re discussing a collection of texts chosen to elevate our understanding of decolonization and socialism, reading is done beforehand and participants are invited to the DSA office for an in person facilitated discussion. Please feel free to come to the session even if you’ve only partially completed the readings or you missed the first one! Masks are required and provided!

RSVP HERE

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Yes on Prop B Mobilizations

We have two exciting mobilizations this upcoming week to support a public bank in SF! On Saturday, September 26th at 11:00 AM we’re meeting at the SEIU 1021 office (350 Rhode Island St. #100) for a progressive unity mobilization with Yes on I and No on D!  Note that non-endorsed campaigns (DJ Brookter, Reina Tello, Virginia Cheung, and Ryan Hazelton) will also be present, so please use your judgment for lit drop participation with those campaigns. RSVP here. 

On Sunday, September 27 at 11:00 AM we’re mobilizing in Park Merced at Juan Bautista Circle. Note that non-endorsed campaigns (Reina Tello, Virginia Cheung, and Ryan Hazelton) will also be present, so please use your judgment for lit drop participation with those campaigns. RSVP here.

See you this weekend!

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Canvass Workers with SF EWOC!

The SF local of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) wants more workers to be aware of their power and potential for collective organizing! Join us as we do some direct canvassing with workers on Sunday, September 27th at11:00 AM. We’ll be meeting at the William McKinley Monument in the Panhandle, walking down Haight St, and ending with a beer at Zeitgeist.
No experience with direct canvassing is necessary! We’ll start with a training for everyone, then split into groups and make our way through the Haight. We will (discretely) inquire if workers are unionized, what their issues are, and try to make contacts in order to start union campaigns.

EWOC is one inspiration for Zohran Mamdani’s new Office of Worker Power in New York, and the local there has reached many workers through events like this one. If you’re interested in bringing that sort of movement to SF, come out on Sunday the 27th! Sign up here

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International Solidarity Potluck

The immigrant justice group is hosting an international themed potluck! You are encouraged to bring a main dish, appetizer, drink or dessert from a country of your choice to share! Come hang out and eat delicious food! All are welcome!

Please RSVP and sign up to bring food!

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REPORTBACK: Organizing Mindset Session #1

We held the first of the four sessions comprising the Organizing Mindset training on 9/17, from 7-9PM. Caitlin and Julien co-facilitated, and the session’s goals were to have attendees come away with an idea of the differences between organizing, advocacy and direct services/mutual aid, and to understand the role of an Organizing Committee and carrying out an organizing strategy.
It terms of what went well:

• We had 20 attendees of various organizing experiences and seniority/experience in DSA.
• There was good attendance from IJWG, whose charter includes a goal for all members to go through organizing trainings.
• The Raining Rocks scenario (used to differentiate between organizing, advocacy, and mutual aid strategies) seemed to be well liked by people.
• It was good to have examples of campaigns with different stages of OC development.
• There was good engagement from the attendees, and we didn’t have the issue of only a few louder people doing more of the talking.
• We feel like the attendees left having an understanding different strategies and what is an OC, so we achieved our goals for session #1.
• Though we ran 30 minutes over the scheduled calendar event, not too many people seemed antsy to go or left early.

In terms of what could be improved:

• There’s opportunity to improve in the engagement of IJWG, especially those who were involved earlier on in the working group but not so much recently.
• We went over our scheduled time by 30 minutes.
• When we had a few examples of different types of OCs, providing more structure/guiding questions/talking points would’ve been useful to more clearly illustrate each campaign, how OCs played a role, how the OC formation went, etc.
• We need a better check in process with Solidarity Tech QR code, perhaps with a greeter at the door to direct people to check in.
• We ran out of name tags.
• We had a higher attendance than expected, so we shouldn’t use the tables so that we can have more chairs and room for people to spread out and/or group up.

We have three more sessions to go, so we’ll be incorporating this feedback into the next three Thursdays. If you want to attend the Organizing Mindset, come to the office (1916 McAllister) from 7:00 PM – 9:00 PMon 9/24, 10/1, and 10/8! 

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REPORTBACK: Prop B and Prop I Lit Drops!

On Saturday and Sunday, Prop B and Prop I held two join mobilizations in the Richmond. Our comrades turned out to drop lit and support the affordable housing vision of these two ballot measures. We’ll have mobilizations every weekend for these campaigns, show up so we can win big in November!

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REPORTBACK: Haight Ashbury Street Fair

DSA SF was out in the community on Sunday for the Haight Ashbury Street Fair! It was great to talk to neighbors about our two endorsed ballot measure campaigns that we are helping to lead for the November 3 ballot: Yes on B & Yes on I!

That’s “B” as in a Bank for the People! A SF Public Bank will keep money flowing on Haight St instead of towards Wall Street.

And “I” as in I want affordable housing, social housing, and rent relief with no new taxes!

DSA members gathered in Chicago this summer for organizer training and discussion of urgent issues facing the organization. Event organizers spoke with the Class podcast about their vision for the event.

The post DSA’s Socialist Summit Laid the Foundations of a Democratic Culture appeared first on Democratic Left.

This is a guest episode from Fran Quigley's podcast, "We Can Do Better." He discusses the way the arms industry has captured our political and economic life with Stephen Semler. If you like the episode, please consider subscribing to the We Can Do Better podcast, and sign up for the Substack newsletter: https://endpovertynow.substack.com/ Check out Fran's book, "Religious Socialism" along with several other recommended readings on our website: https://religioussocialism.org/recommended-reading/

by Douglas Dollinger

I thought my friends in ROC DSA might appreciate a bit of an update on your northern neighbour. What follows deals with the astounding rise of militarism in Canada under the Liberal prime minister Mark Carney. My American friends – I am myself half-American – will doubtless note some similarities between the rhetorical approaches of the Canadian and American governments, despite recent disagreements between the two countries and a flurry of ill-tempered threats by the American president against Canada. 

Mark Carney would have Canadians believe military spending is good for the economy. He is on track to move military spending from $70B this year (2026) to $150B in 2035, an astronomical increase. This, he has argued, will create all sorts of economic benefits for the Canadian people – a high rate of investment, good jobs, etc. He is dreaming. It has been amply documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, among others, that military spending creates fewer jobs per dollar spent than spending on education or health. But Trump whispered 5% and Carney and the Liberal Party jumped. Not out of sheer sycophancy, although sometimes I do wonder; no, Carney jumped because he is a neoliberal: Health care and education are costs; military spending is an investment. The distinction is a subtle one, granted. In other words, like most conservatives, he believes big government is bad, unless it comes in the form of policing, national security, business subsidies, financial bail-outs, and war-making.

Like most conservatives, too, he committed the money without either campaigning on the increase or consulting Parliament. Of course, given that the opposition in Canada is the Conservative Party, which has never stopped whining about the cash-strapped military, Carney has faced almost no criticism from opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and his happy troupe of militarists. Interestingly, Carney recently announced the purchase of 12 submarines from Germany. These will be used, Canadian military analysts affirm, to “contain China” and protect the Canadian Arctic from Russians. Needless to say, however, it is the Americans who have actively challenged Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Passage for decades, as the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies has documented. This however can simply be forgotten.

With fresh water becoming a highly endangered resource in many parts of the United States, it is a safe bet that American politicians will not sit on their hands and watch the Southwest become uninhabitable. Who has a lot of fresh water? Canada. If Canadian defence planners are aware of this looming danger, they seldom mention it; indeed, given the close integration of the Canadian and American military, it might be a bit much to expect the Department of National Defence even to consider the possibility. In all, Mark Carney has made no bones about building a war industry in Canada, taking up a proposal from his well-heeled friends at the Business Council of Canada, longstanding advocates of bolstering military spending in Canada. And so military Keynesianism is in full march. 

Carney’s record on Gaza, to address a related matter, would suggest he is only too happy to stand in the shadow of the American colossus, and so it is probable that the Canadian military will continue to serve as a kind of branch plant to the American military under the guise of NATO. Gaza is important here. If Canada cannot establish an independent stance on Gaza, it is difficult to conceive of its developing an independent stance on any critical geopolitical issue. Carney made the bold statement that Netanyahu would be arrested if he entered Canada, but just a few weeks back Netanyahu graced Canadian airspace and thus its territory with his august presence and Ottawa went dark. So much for the bold talk. It does not even seem clear that the Canadian government issued an objection, never mind scrambling the jets to force the Wing of Zion to alter its course.

Meanwhile, as NATO moves east, Canada will have little choice but to jump on the ”contain China” bandwagon – indeed it was the American president who called for the 5% increase in the Canadian defence budget. Ever the Canadian stalwart, Carney obliged without hesitation. Note the refusal here to dignify the frequent threats to Canadian sovereignty by the American president. These can be dismissed for the most part for what they are, the deranged ejaculations of a political distemper called the Republican Party, but the American threat to Canada is nevertheless real. Those who believe the United States will respectfully acquiesce to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic need to study American history. A country that can steal almost half of Mexico can certainly steal portions of the Arctic. Nor should anyone be surprised if this theft comes with the usual rhetorical embroidery about national security, which has become for all practical purposes the modern American substitute for Manifest Destiny. Carney talks big but carries a tiny stick, more twig than stick. Israel, again, provides a pertinent illustration.

Despite the fact that just about all of the Jewish Holocaust experts in Israel have declared what is happening in Gaza a genocide, the Canadian government under Carney has not found its way to using the G-word, the best explanation for which is that it would ruffle American feathers, since it is the American government that has been cheerleading the genocide and otherwise supporting it without reserve. None of this can be mentioned: Canada must be a good partner and this means not stepping on the toes of the global hegemon. So much for Canadian independence and sovereignty. As the United States invades country after country – those foreign wars just keep happening for some inexplicable reason – Canada, hewing as always to the American line, courageously asserts that it is Iran that represents the source of international terrorism. Canadian officials utter such nonsense with a straight face. If knowledge is recollection, as Plato taught, then it becomes very hard not to see these individuals as heralds of an astonishing historical ignorance. Has Iraq been forgotten? What about Afghanistan? Vietnam? Nicaragua? Guatemala? Dominican Republic? Grenada? Panama? Libya? Laos? Cambodia? El Salvador? Yemen? Cuba? Haiti? Somalia? And now Iran. But no, you will not find a Canadian official in the government of Mark Carney with the courage to suggest, much less declare, that the United States has endorsed terror as a political instrument. The facts do not matter; they can be forgotten.

Only a particularly deep form of ideological blindness can fail to see the terror standing behind what some Americans call “endless wars”. It is also this form of blindness that leads someone like Madeleine Albright, former American Secretary of State, to say that 500,000 dead Iraqi children – the documented result of Western sanctions on Iraq – was a price worth paying to bring down Saddam Hussein, a dictator whom the American government was only too happy to support when he was killing Iranians with American-supplied munitions, including chemical weapons. Canada voiced no objection. It is of course simply too impolite to point out that the American government supported Saddam Hussein for years. It crosses the ideological line and violates the bounds of what is considered serious and responsible political discourse. Power does many things: One thing it does quite well is to establish the limits of permissible discussion. Its most effective weapons in this respect are the words “terror”, “terrorists”, and “terrorism”. 

Three points should be noted here. First, the terrorist is always out there somewhere – in Iran, say, or Cuba, or China. Western nations, by contrast, never commit acts of terror. For instance, leveling Gaza, a small strip of land full of unarmed civilians, is not an act of terror, nor is Israel a terror state. The United States has been bombing Iran in what all acknowledge to be an illegal war, but no, it is simply the height of indecency to so much as suggest that the United States is practicing terror. Canada understands this and has not raised an eyebrow. Second, once a government has been dubbed a terrorist state, Western political leaders free themselves of any obligation to exercise diplomacy, since it is axiomatic that one cannot negotiate with terrorists. War becomes the one option left, which goes a long way toward explaining what otherwise remains a mystery to millions of Americans, the reality of endless wars. Third, once the label is attached to an official enemy, the military machinery of the West, and there is no greater in the world as Trump never tires of reminding us, can be brought to bear without moral scruples of any kind, and whatever horrors this produces – take a look at Gaza or Iraq for current examples – will be dismissed as a legitimate response to terror. Israel, remember, is only defending itself. In this regard, the West is always responding to terror but never committing it. 

The West, after stripping much of the globe of its valuable resources, enslaving millions of its inhabitants, and otherwise subjugating foreign peoples to regimes of terrible violence, has never suffered, so our leaders would have us believe, from an obsession with terror, with terror more specifically as a means of domination and control. Colonialism was an act benevolence, of kindness towards our darker brothers and sisters. For instance, the death of millions in India under the British Empire was either simply a mistake – a kind of huge clerical error – or it was an act of legitimate self-defence against restless, petulant, and ungrateful natives. The ideological mainstream in which people like Trump and Carney excogitate has little or no room for such reflections on Western terror. Nor is any thought given to what such pervasive violence might say about what we call Western values, meaning here not our espoused but our actual values, the ones that motivate our behaviour. 

Mark Carney wrote a book on values, so one might be tempted to think that he would be able to provide some useful guidance on what all of this might say about the values we hold dear; however, because he thinks inside the principal assumptions of the Washington consensus, he is as blind as a bat when it comes to identifying our actual values. There is thus little reason to expect any enlightenment from Mark Carney and the Liberal government of Canada. Canada once had a reputation – not altogether underserved – for its role as a peace keeper. Canada is now effectively Americanizing its approach to defence. Militarism has become the order of the day.

The post On Canadian Militarism first appeared on Rochester Red Star.