Freedom Hall Pool opened in 1974. For more than fifty years, it was where Johnson City kids learned to swim and working families spent summer afternoons without paying resort prices. It closes permanently on April 3, 2026. The city received an engineering estimate last August: repairs would cost $750,000. Deputy City Manager Steve Willis called it “an incredible amount of money.” The city did not pay it.

One month before that report landed on Willis’s desk, the Johnson City Board of Commissioners approved an $8,063,000 contract to lease hundreds of cameras from the surveillance company Flock Safety. The vote was 4-0, supported by Commissioners Brock, Cox, Hunter, and Wise. It happened on the consent agenda—the section reserved for routine items that require no discussion. Nobody debated it. The whole thing passed in under a minute.

Two hundred and ninety cameras. Ten years. Eight million dollars. No public comment. Two months after cameras were already going up, the commission held a community roundtable to hear what residents thought.

The pool cost $750,000 to save. The cameras cost $8 million to lease. The city found one of those affordable.

What the Cameras Actually Do

Flock Safety photographs every vehicle that passes one of its cameras and builds a searchable record of where that vehicle was, when, and in what direction it was traveling. The cameras capture license plates, vehicle make, model, color, and what the company calls a “vehicle fingerprint”—distinguishing features like bumper stickers, body damage, and roof racks that allow tracking even when a plate is obscured.

Johnson City’s cameras join a national network of roughly 90,000 Flock cameras performing more than 20 billion vehicle scans per month across 5,000 law enforcement agencies in 49 states. By default, local data is shared with any agency within a 500-mile radius. Seventy-five percent of Flock’s law enforcement customers have enrolled in the National Lookup Tool, which allows any participating agency anywhere in the country to search the full network.

Think about what that data reveals. Your car outside a methadone clinic twice a week. Your car at a domestic violence shelter the night you left. Your car in the lot of an abortion provider, an HIV testing center, or an immigration legal aid office. Your car at a union meeting. Your car in front of a house at 3am. None of those trips were anyone else’s business. Flock logged them anyway. And because license plates, property records, and social media are public, anyone who cross-references Flock data with those records gets your home address—and from there, your name, your relationships, your photograph.

Flock Cameras Don’t Prevent Crime

JCPD’s own figures show 11 pilot cameras contributed to 15 arrests over nine months. Crime in Johnson City was already falling—down 12 percent in 2024—before a single new camera went up. The National Institute of Justice rates license plate reader technology as a crime deterrent “Ineffective.” Every randomized controlled trial conducted over 15 years has returned null results on crime reduction.

Flock markets claims of “up to 70% crime reduction,” but an investigation by 404 Media found those numbers rest on a company-produced study whose own named academic co-author said he would have done things “much differently” and that the underlying data was too “incomplete” for meaningful analysis.

A System Other Cities Are Abandoning

Since early 2025, at least 30 cities have canceled Flock contracts or rejected new ones. Denver’s city council unanimously refused a contract renewal after hundreds of residents showed up to oppose it. Ithaca’s mayor ended the city’s contract: “I don’t know that I could live with myself if I allowed something to exist in our community that directly or indirectly led to someone’s civil liberties being violated.” Oak Park, Illinois canceled after data showed 84 percent of drivers stopped in Flock-related traffic stops were Black, in a city where Black residents make up 19 percent of the population.

What were these cities responding to? In Texas, a police officer ran a nationwide Flock search logged as “had an abortion, search for female.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained documents showing the department consulted prosecutors about charging the woman. In Virginia, agencies ran nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches on the state’s Flock network. The EFF analyzed 12 million Flock searches from more than 3,900 agencies and found hundreds related to political demonstrations, including anti-Trump protests in 2025.

JCPD policy prohibits using the system for immigration enforcement or targeting based on protected characteristics. However, so did policies in the departments that used the data improperly. We’re repeatedly told the honor system doesn’t work, unless it’s the people who want power over us. Johnson City’s commissioners voted yes on the consent agenda without mentioning any of this.

The Budget Tells the Real Story

JCPD received a 16 percent budget increase in FY2025, bringing its total to $19.4 million—the city’s largest operating budget share by a significant margin. Johnson City Transit stops service at 6:15 p.m. on weekdays and 5:15 on Saturdays. No Sunday service. No night service. In a city where more than one in ten households has no car and more than one in five residents lives in poverty, the transit system closes before second shift ends. The FY2023 transit capital budget was approximately $410,000. The Flock contract’s steady-state annual cost is $970,375.

Two months before approving the cameras, the Commission unanimously paid $28 million to settle a lawsuit documenting that JCPD had maintained an “unconstitutional pattern and practice” in sexual assault investigations. More than 60 women were victimized by serial rapist Sean Williams while the department looked the other way. Total payouts reached $30.6 million. The city’s general fund balance fell from $54.9 million to $24.6 million. Residents absorbed a 14 percent property tax increase. The Blue Plum Festival did not return. The pool closed.

Five months after the settlement, the same commission approved a ten-year, eight-million-dollar contract to expand the capabilities of the department whose failures produced it. That is the transaction this city made. That is what the consent agenda hid.

What Residents Deserve to Know

JCPD has declined to tell residents where the cameras are located, saying it would reduce their effectiveness. Residents built jcmappingproject.org themselves—a community-maintained map of reported camera locations—because the city responsible for this infrastructure will not account for where it sits. There is also deflock.me, a nationwide website where people report camera locations.

Johnson City could not find $750,000 for a pool that served low-income families for fifty years. It found $8,000,000 for a surveillance system that other cities are canceling, built by a company with documented security failures and a CEO who calls civil liberties concerns criminal sympathy, to expand the reach of a department whose misconduct cost taxpayers more than $30 million.

These are priorities. They belong to the Commission that voted yes without discussion. We have a right to demand they cancel this contract before nearly $1 million of our money is spent invading our privacy. We have a right to ask why this city found money for cameras it would not spend on buses, pools, or the survivors of its own police department’s failures. And we have a right to demand that the next decision this city makes about our lives gets more than a minute on the consent agenda.

There is a pattern to American politics. A right-wing government runs itself into the ground. The public turns against it. And before working people can build an alternative, the center moves in with a simple offer: just give us the keys back and we will restore order. The window between those two moments is the one that matters. It is open right now.

The Collapse Is Real

Trump’s second term has been a case study in the distance between populist rhetoric and plutocratic governance. The United States added only 181,000 jobs in all of 2025—the fewest in a non-recession year since 2003—while tariffs raised costs for the average household by $3,800 per year^1,2. The Supreme Court struck down his tariff regime 6 to 3 in February 2026³. The Congressional Budget Office found the One Big Beautiful Bill takes $1,200 annually from the bottom ten percent while giving $13,600 to the top ten percent and throws 11.8 million people off Medicaid⁴. Trump had promised not to touch Social Security or Medicaid⁵. DOGE then moved to cut roughly 7,000 SSA positions and targeted 80,000 VA cuts⁶.

The electoral signals are clear. Democrats swept Virginia’s statewide offices by as much as 15 points⁷. In North Carolina’s March 3rd primaries, three Democratic incumbents who voted to override Governor Stein’s vetoes were ousted by progressive challengers; Nasif Majeed, who voted for legislation defining sex in biological terms, lost 69 to 27 percent⁸. MAGA is collapsing. But that is exactly when the danger begins.

The Familiar Playbook

After Watergate, Democrats ran Jimmy Carter as a reform outsider. He deregulated banks and airlines, appointed the Fed chair who deliberately induced a recession, and abandoned labor. AFL-CIO president George Meany called him a conservative⁹. After 2008, Obama staffed his economic team with Wall Street insiders. His mortgage relief program promised 3 to 4 million modifications and delivered roughly one million while nine million families lost their homes^10,11. Not a single senior bank executive was prosecuted¹². Ninety-five percent of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top one percent¹³.

Democratic centrists represent a coalition whose interests are served by managed capitalism with better optics. They are against us not because they are evil, but because we want different things.

The Lineup for 2028

Gavin Newsom governs California with the nation’s highest state unemployment rate and an $18 to $35 billion deficit he refuses to address with taxes on the wealthy^1,14—while criminalizing homelessness and having done podcasts with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon to signal cross-aisle credibility. Buttigieg offers vague appeals to AI disruption. Next American Era, launched in February 2026, is led by a former congresswoman now lobbying for OpenAI and Oracle¹⁵. Third Way is running conferences aimed at opposing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez¹⁶. This is not a left flank preparing to govern for working people. This is the party establishment clearing the field.

What Northeast Tennessee Tells Us

The material stakes are impossible to ignore here. Median household income in the Tri-Cities runs 70 cents on the national dollar, with poverty rates exceeding 20 percent in Johnson City and Kingsport¹⁷. Ballad Health failed 74 to 80 percent of its state quality benchmarks for four consecutive years while CEO compensation nearly doubled to $4.3 million¹⁸. Food insecurity has hit 16.8 percent—the highest in 20 years¹⁹. These conditions predate Trump. The “return to normal” centrist Democrats are selling is a return to the conditions that produced all of this.

The Fight to Name the Problem

Two stories are being told about why working-class life is so hard. The right blames immigrants and cultural elites—a false answer that connects to a real feeling of abandonment. The centrist story calls for competent management without naming corporate power, landlords, or hospital monopolies. The socialist story names the cause: wages are low because unions were broken; healthcare is unaffordable because it is a profit center; hospitals close in rural communities because there is no money in keeping poor people alive. These are not mysteries. They are decisions, made by people who profit from them.

The Window and What to Do With It

DSA has surpassed 100,000 members²⁰. May Day 2025 brought hundreds of thousands into the streets in more than 1,000 towns²¹. The 2025 convention voted to work toward an independent mass socialist party²². A general strike on May Day 2028, backed by UAW and the Chicago Teachers Union, is being built now²³.

Fascism is not defeated in blue cities. It is defeated where it lives—in the communities it recruits from, in the economic despair it feeds on. A new moderate will not fix the Ballad Health monopoly. A return to normalcy will not reverse 50 years of wage decline. The window is open. What we do with it will shape working-class life for a generation.

References:

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026, February 11). Employment situation summary: January 2026. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/economicdata/empsit_02112026.pdf
2. Yale Budget Lab. (2025). The tariff impact on U.S. households. Yale University. https://budgetlab.yale.edu
3. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___ (2026).
4. Congressional Budget Office. (2025). Estimated budgetary effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. https://www.cbo.gov
5. Newsweek. (2025, February 19). Trump’s update on Social Security, Medicaid. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-issues-update-social-security-medicaid-2033082
6. Social Security Administration. (2025, February 28). SSA workforce restructuring update. https://www.ssa.gov
7. Virginia Mercury. (2025, November 4). Democrats sweep Virginia’s statewide races, reclaiming full control of executive branch. https://virginiamercury.com/2025/11/04/democrats-sweep-virginias-statewide-races-reclaiming-full-control-of-executive-branch/
8. WFAE. (2026, March 3). Democratic Reps. Cunningham, Majeed lose to challengers in Mecklenburg. WFAE 90.7. https://www.wfae.org/politics/2026-03-03/democratic-reps-cunningham-majeed-trail-challengers-in-mecklenburg
9. Washington Post. (1977, June 15). A break in the Carter-Meany connection. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/06/15/a-break-in-the-carter-meany-connection/b2698498-b055-4036-86b7-09885dc17f2c/
10. Congressional Oversight Panel. (2010, April). Evaluating progress on TARP foreclosure mitigation programs. U.S. Government Publishing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-111JPRT55737/html/CPRT-111JPRT55737.htm
11. Marketplace. (2018, December 17). Divided decade: How the financial crisis changed housing. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2018/12/17/what-we-learned-housing
12. NPR. (2011, April 26). Why prosecutors don’t go after Wall Street. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/137789065
13. Saez, E. (2013). Striking it richer: The evolution of top incomes in the United States. University of California, Berkeley. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf
14. California Legislative Analyst’s Office. (2025). Fiscal outlook 2025–26. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5091
15. Revolving Door Project. (2026). The AI lobbyist starting an abundance nonprofit. https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/new-abundance-group-ai-lobbysits/
16. Semafor. (2026, March 3). How Third Way’s president plans to avoid the Biden fate in 2028. https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/how-third-ways-president-plans-to-avoid-the-biden-fate-in-2028
17. U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). American Community Survey 5-year estimates: Selected economic characteristics. https://data.census.gov
18. Tennessee Department of Health. (2024). Ballad Health certificate of public advantage annual oversight report. https://www.tn.gov/health
19. Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee. (2025). 2025 hunger study: Northeast Tennessee regional food insecurity report. https://www.secondharvestne.org
20. Democratic Socialists of America. (2025a). DSA membership update. https://www.dsausa.org
21. Associated Press. (2025, May 1). Hundreds of thousands rally across U.S. on May Day. AP News.
22. Democratic Socialists of America. (2025b). Resolution R07: Principles for party-building. 2025 National Convention. https://www.dsausa.org
23. The Nation. (2025). The call is out for mass, simultaneous strikes in 4 years. https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/general-strike-2028-unions-labor-movement/

The unfairness and absurdity of modern homelessness can be summed up in a single number: there are 28 vacant homes for every homeless person. Although this fact diminishes the complexity of homelessness, its simple cruelty reveals America’s greatest contradiction: a nation of abundance and a nation of destitution. Society holds in its hands the ability to provide for all, yet chooses not to. The inherent inequality of the economy only deepens its inhumanity as prices rise, real wages stagnate, and social services are cut. Homelessness is growing at record rates, mostly among the youth and elderly, and disproportionately affecting racial and sexual minorities. Government services often fail to address the root issue of the problem, if it exists at all. It is not enough that capitalism should subject one part of society to be without a place to stay; governments viciously criminalize homelessness and maniacally inflict pain through anti-homeless architecture. Why does capitalism force one part of the population into abject poverty at their most needed? And why does this unignorable inequality not anger society more and more every day? The answer is rooted in capitalism’s need for a reserve army of labor and dominance as the base for society, including our thoughts and feelings about the world around us.

Homelessness and unemployment are not solely symptoms of capitalism but a necessary element in order to further exploit workers and lower wages through the immiseration of the lowest strata of society. The underhoused and unhoused are part of a group Marx termed the reserve army of labor. This reserve army acts as a potential replacement for employed wage workers, forcing them to accept worse working conditions and lower wages in fear of losing their jobs. The largest supply of workers with the lowest demand for labor allows employers to increase exploitation of workers, as people become desperate for any job at all. Increased competition between those needing employment divides the working class, making them fight over the scraps instead of banding together to bring about change. This supply grows ever larger as capital concentrates in fewer hands and more people are pushed into the proletariat, seen in the record high rates of homelessness and wealth inequality in the U.S. Capitalism and bourgeois society have no desire or reason to end homelessness as it needs the reserve army to be so large and conditions for the unemployed so miserable to keep workers subservient to wages. As Marx said, “accumulation of wealth is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

Capitalism was built and continues to be supported by the forced unhousing of sectors of society and the creation of the reserve army. British industrialism exploded rapidly in urban areas due to the enclosure of farming and grazing land. Peasants were kicked off the soil to create privately owned land, and forced off in droves to the cities. Vagrancy and homelessness became criminalized, and former peasants had to take the worst possible jobs. The reserve army helped keep the plantation system and the exploitation of black labor alive in the post-Reconstruction South. By arresting unemployed freed slaves, the black population was given a choice between quasi-slavery in sharecropping or legal slavery in the prison system. And in modern times, legislation and government policy criminalizes homelessness in order to sweep away the issue and punish the victims without any concern for the root cause.The landmark Grants Pass v Johnson SCOTUS case in 2024 overturned protections for homeless encampments even if the unhoused had nowhere else to go, combining with other statues and ordinances that make it illegal to sleep in public. As affordability and welfare cuts make permanent housing harder and harder to obtain, the state punishes those caught in these unavoidable situations with nowhere else to turn. Cemented is the rule of capitalism: work or suffer.

The reserve army of labor explains why capitalism impoverishes the most needy. But the system permeates deeper: into societal thoughts and feelings towards the unhoused. Certainly, hateful, hyper-exaggerated, and largely false stereotypes play their role, but what lies deeper? Societal attitudes towards the homeless, ideas of who they are in relation to the employed, and theories on how to confront the issue cannot be boiled down to malicious disparagement or apathetic pity. Instead, they are shaped by the foundations of capitalism and bourgeois society.

First, the unhoused lie outside the capitalist system of production. They are not laboring in order to create surplus-value or profit. Capitalism defines people as wage-workers who live solely to create capital; therefore, the non-worker lives for nothing, a burden that “provides” nothing. Production of capital, as the foundation of society, becomes the measure of human “value.” We can see this exemplified in current unhoused aid practices and social services. With the prevalence of employment dependent help or simple job training, help comes only if people engage in, or are seeking to engage in, producing surplus-value. Aid without concern for how much the person contributed to capital is reserved for those who can’t work at all. While the right parrots the idea of laziness being the cause of poverty more and more as a justification for policy, these ideas remain in the minds of all. The connection between labor and human value lies at the core of our species. Marx writes, “it is just in his work upon, the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being”. Labor is humanity’s purpose, what separates man from animal, and defines us as a species. But under capitalism, labor comes under the harsh master of capital, as the only form labor can take. The worker is alienated from his labor, his species-being, his humanity. Since the unhoused are not laboring for capital, they are viewed to not contribute to society, viewed as not to be fulfilling our greater purpose. Capital defines society, and the unhoused are not in its service, viewed to be not in its society. Humans define themselves and others through labor and work. However, as labor is dominated by the tyranny of capital, our ideas of humanity and human value are dominated by the tyranny of capital.

Secondly, the unhoused not only buck capitalist production but it’s necessary counterpart-consumption. The existence of a dominant consumer society is widely known. But modern adoration for commodities is more than a want for better and more stuff. Not only does capitalism alienate people from their labor but also the products of that labor. When we make something, we are impressing part of ourselves into the material world. In the object we pour our sweat, effort, ideas, feeling, and being. Yet capitalism takes us from the fruit of our work- we don’t own what we make. Instead, we receive wages, which in turn buy commodities- the replacement for our stolen, objectified labor. Mass modern economies hide the relations of production from the common eye, so we do not see the relationship between labor and commodity hidden by the chaotic world encompassing scale of modern industry. Value is believed to be inherent in the commodity itself and not a result of the labor congealed in it. Commodities as value become personal power, social power, and a mark of value presentable to the larger society. We become what we own, we can choose who we are by buying back the lost objectification of our labor through commodities. The less commodities owned, the less you are, the less you can express yourself, the less you can be. Commodity fetishism runs deep. The desire for commodities innate in our economic system, in the base of society, directly supervenes on not only politics or religion but into our conceptions of the world around us, other people, and even morality and philosophy. While we might not realize it, the base mechanics of capitalism- the need for commodities to be used to make profit- makes it seem that this is one the base mechanics of human society as a whole. The unhoused, as non consumers, become social pariahs, outside the value system. This goes hand in hand with their status as non-producers. Commodities become the value we create in our labor. The unhoused neither produce value nor own value in the eyes of capital. Property is the highest form of social power and ownership-based value. To have privacy, a place to call your own, is to have a false objective self in the physical and social world. Commodities start to gain power over us, the ability to “own” us as the physical realization of self through labor. Those who lack commodities are the ones cast aside by society and only helped again if they work to create and own more. Capitalism and its unending want for more stuff makes ownership of commodities a key part of day to day life. By being unable or limited to join this system of commodity fetishism, the unhoused appear to stand separate from the rest of capitalist society. They are the ones who force society to look reality in the eye and listen- “look what you have done.”

Capitalism’s influence on the material base on society leads to an influence in the ideological base- in the core evaluations and appreciations of humanity, the purpose of human life, and the value of human life. Because current society revolves around the creation of surplus-value through labor and the exchange of wages for commodities, dominant ideas about people revolve around these same poles. This is not the immediate, interpersonal feelings one might have or not have about the homelessness. This ideological base is the subconscious building block of beliefs about people that guides larger ideas about the world and our place in it, leading to real-world opinions and justifications that play back into the capitalist system. Understanding where attitudes about this issue stem from allows us to undermine these infiltrations. By realizing where capitalism thwarts ideas towards inequality and cruelty, we can build new ideas of equity, compassion, and humanity that will help us grow towards a new society.

Since Pres. Donald Trump took office, the federal government and many states have rapidly escalated attacks on the trans community seeking to erode rights, block access to health care, and exclude these Americans from accessing services and fully participating in our society. 

Maine, thankfully, has mostly resisted this wave. Our legislators have defeated numerous efforts by GOP anti-trans legislators to persecute trans people and almost all of our school boards have resisted the efforts by out-of-state far right organizations to hurt the  children they are entrusted to protect.

Unfortunately, this fall, these national forces of hate are trying again to bring Maine into their transphobic fold. They have placed a “citizen” initiative on the ballot forcing us to vote to kick trans kids out of bathrooms and trans girls off of school sports. I put “citizen” in quotes, because this effort was solely funded by one very, very, very rich Wisconsin oligarch – Richard Uihlein, the heir to the company that makes the worst beer on the planet, Schlitz, who attempted to roll back the ERA in New York and has spread conspiracy theories about Sharpies being used to disqualify Trump votes in Arizona.

But while these forces are certainly hateful toward those they see as outside their preferred version of a white, straight, patriarchal America, it’s important to understand that these attacks are not simply a backlash to America’s commitment to equality. It is the result of a well-funded movement that has weaponized hate to distract from issues that might actually improve the conditions of working-class people.

Graham Platner said it best a couple weeks ago in an interview with Slate: 

“The anti-trans campaign in Maine is funded by an out-of-state billionaire to make sure we have this discussion and we don’t talk about raising his taxes. That’s why it exists. I think there are like two trans kids that compete in high school sports in Maine? There are 40K Mainers who are going to lose healthcare because of the lack of the ACA extension.” 

Platner goes on to say, “One of those things seems very important and real to me,” and he’s not talking about the fictional threat of trans kids playing sports. When you think about it, it’s very clear that as well as being morally disgusting, going after trans kids is a showy distraction that Uihlein and his far-right billionaire friends are using to keep us from having bigger conversations about the economic divide.

This is not a new tactic. Today’s attacks on immigrants are the same. Scare everyone into believing that people they have never met are the ones undermining their pursuit of happiness and economic security. When, in fact, those very same people are the ones making their lives better through the work they do, and the community they build.

It is the same with trans kids and adults who are almost always, literally, the ones bullied, ostracized, discriminated against, and/or killed for just being who they are – not the other way around. And if this bill passes, it will just make it worse.

Because this bill is being used to distract, or perhaps to turn out certain voters, is not a reason to ignore this attack on Maine’s values. In fact, it is a reason to double down on our resistance, without losing sight of our bigger purpose. 

We can both tax the rich, provide health care, and beat back transphobic attacks meant to distract. And we will, because we must.

***

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Beacon, sign up for the free Beacon newsletter here.

The post Don’t be fooled – anti-trans referendum is just a distraction while they pick your pocket appeared first on Pine & Roses.

You’ve probably received enough communications regarding this Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations, which will be held all across the country. At last count more than three thousand demonstrations are being organized, and there will no doubt be at least one near you.

In case you have been procrastinating, here is a link to find the demonstrations closest to you.

The first of these demos last June had a million or two people attend. The next one, in October, had at least five million. We’re aiming to double that this time, which would put us in striking distance of the 3.5% of the US population that research says is necessary to topple authoritarian regimes in the making. 

Against the backdrop of brutal anti-immigrant violence and preparation for election suppression at home, and clueless trade policy matched with deadly wars abroad, a growing number of Americans are coming out to the streets. These include people who have never been politically involved outside of voting every few years, and progressives who sat out the 2024 presidential elections because they didn’t think there was any difference between the two parties and the two candidates. Within DSA and the rest of the left this often took the form of denouncing the “twin parties of capital”. Which they are. But that picture, drawn without nuance, underestimated what fascism is and does.

Now we know. 

A reasonable question at this point is, ‘What sort of message should socialists be sending to the other demonstrators, and the world, a year into America’s fascist descent?’ You have the opportunity to weigh in on that as you make your protest sign. “No Kings” is a start, not a program. “Workers Over Billionaires” moves us closer to the ideas we need.

This mass demonstration of opposition is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to stop MAGA from dragging us along on its road to hell. For that we need to be broadening the struggle with other tactics and strategies (mutual aid, mass strikes, non-violent direct action, and electoral politics) that build a powerful anti-fascist movement and lay the basis for moving past the failed politics of the past. What happened in Minneapolis/St. Paul on January 23—‘No Work, No School, No Shopping’—is the best example so far. DSA has joined with labor and community partners in the May Day Strong coalition, which understands “No Kings” as a step toward a sharper critique of capitalism on May 1. On that day we will see how prepared we are to advance beyond a nationwide demonstration to a national movement.

We’ll see you out in the streets this weekend. And then we’ll continue to train and educate and prepare ourselves for the struggle ahead.

In the February issue of California Red we ran a background article on the California DSA campaign we call “The Fair and Responsible Tax Plan for California’s Wealthy”, which embraces both measures currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November state ballot. That was the first in a series we are running between now and the election. Here is the next installment.—Editor

The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality

Our East Bay DSA crew of five had planted ourselves in the parking lot of a supermarket in North Berkeley on a warm mid-March afternoon. We were collecting signatures for the Billionaires Tax and the Protecting Education and Health Care Act. During our three-hour shift we did not do badly, gathering several dozen for each measure. Even better were the conversations, which ranged from informing voters about the nuts and bolts of the proposals to broader questions about economic inequality: how much money do billionaires have, anyway? What share of the total income of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, goes to the one percent? What would be the right amount of taxes for them to pay? And how do we get them to pay their fair share? 

We explore a few of these ideas and numbers below.

A cool million

It used to be hard for the typical working class stiff to imagine what a million dollars looks like. A million dollars? That’s what millionaires have, and I’m not even close to being one of those, we would say. But that was before a million dollars or thereabouts became the average price of a house in Los Angeles. It’s slightly below that statewide, and slightly above that in San Francisco. But you get the idea. Generally speaking, if you can afford a home, you know what a million dollars looks like—it looks like your house. (If you’re a renter, it looks like that house.)

A billion dollars was even more unfathomable. We didn’t have many in the United States until relatively recently; as late as 1990 there were just 66 of them. Now there are close to a thousand, and we’ve got 213 right here in the Golden State. Since we know that a million dollars looks like a house these days, we can imagine that since a billion is a thousand millions, it would look like a thousand houses. 

No one needs a thousand houses to live in, so most billionaires scrape by with just ten or twelve. Of course, being billionaires, they need somewhat larger houses than most people, so they might spend five or ten million dollars or even more—fifty million! A hundred million!—on their humble abodes. If they owned ten of those, that could put a pretty big dent in their billion dollar fortune. But guess what? The average wealth of a billionaire is not a billion dollars. It’s currently around 8.6 billion dollars, according to inequality.org. So that would be 8,600 houses. 

Minus the dozen they “live” in, that would leave them with enough money to purchase 8,588 more houses. I don’t know about you, but as the numbers climb my ability to translate the million dollar house into a clear image of the wealth of billionaires is beginning to get somewhat unequal to the task. And that’s before we try to imagine what the total wealth of 213 billionaires looks like. 

Trillions

It is reliably estimated that thanks to the ginormous growth of their fortunes during the past ten years (Trump I’s tax cuts, pandemic economy when there was nothing to invest in except stock buybacks, Trump II’s continuing tax cuts, massive AI bubble, and outright looting of public resources) our couple hundred California billionaires collectively own (hold onto your “tax the rich” baseball cap) two trillion dollars’ worth of assets. In California they’re doing a little better than the average 8.6 billionaire; they’ve each got around 9.4 billion. 

Although I just said I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the houses when they added up to the average 8,600 houses each (adjusted now to 9,400), let’s try it out with trillions. That’s a thousand billions. So collectively our 213 ultra-rich people with their two trillion dollars would have, let’s see, carry the one, a bit over 1.8 million houses, at a million dollars each. 

You might think that that’s enough for anyone, and these individuals must be looking around for philanthropies to unload to. But no, according to a recent New York Times article, billionaire giving has fallen precipitously in the last few years as their ‘uneasy accommodation with fascism’ (fascism scholar Robert Paxton’s formulation describing the initial response of economic elites to the uncouth new political rulers) has grown considerably less uneasy—more like downright comfortable. The 213 billionaires in California have seen their total wealth grow by nearly a third in this period as the rest of us have been essentially running in place—and that’s not enough for some of them. 

If you listen to one of their loudest mouthpieces, tech mogul Ron Conway, the proposed billionaire tax is not only bad for his 212 other peeps; it’s way worse than that. He was recently quoted in a New York Times article with a sentiment that inadvertently revealed how that kind of bank account can warp one’s perspective: According to Mr. Conway, referring to the billionaire tax, “This is the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt.” Hmmm. I wonder whether the families of dozens of people who lost their lives and thousands who lost homes in the Eaton and Palisades fires in 2025 agree? Or if Japanese-Californians, 93,000 of whom were incarcerated during World War II, share that view? Or if Native Californians, whose population fell from a third a million people in 1800 to about 15,000 by 1910 during the genocide that did them in, would agree with Conway’s historical research? 

On the other hand

At the other end of the economic spectrum, California’s borders contain about 7 million people below the official poverty line, or 18% of its roughly 40 million people. But the official federal poverty line ($33,000/year for a family of four) is laughably (that’s probably the wrong word) below an actual ability to live. One measure of how many people are barely getting by in California is the number of MediCal recipients, dependent on the federal Medicaid funding stream for most of their care costs. Although California is a net donor to the federal treasury, it does rely on $20 billion per year from the feds to support MediCal. Some 15 million Californians are enrolled in MediCal.

Let’s move on from the tiny extremely rich and the very large poor slices of the state and look at the condition of the merely rich, the top 1% income earners, which includes the billionaires but extends downward to the merely well-to-do. Although calculations vary, the bottom rung of the ladder for a one percenter is just about a million dollars a year in income; the median merely rich, right in the middle of the one percent, is $3.6 million a year. Here’s chart to help us visualize how their share of total California income has grown over the past half century. 

That’s right, believe your eyes. The top 1%’s share of income in the Golden State has grown over the past half century from about one twelfth of total income to almost one third. Richest state in the richest country in the world? Yes, but a vast chunk of the riches seems to have ended up in the pockets of people who didn’t need the transfer. 

On the third hand, if all of the state’s total income had been divided up equally, every person in California in 2024 would have received around $80,000—which means that for a family of four, combining their incomes, the household would have had $320,000—just a little under ten times the official poverty line.  

“But that would be socialism!” cry the billionaires, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and probably quite a few temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Well, sort of. We’ll get into that some other time. One thing is clear: it would certainly be different from what we’ve got.

by Kevin N

Sometime in my early twenties — way, way back in the early 2010s — for reasons I’m still not entirely sure about, I suddenly stopped being a nihilist apolitical punk who couldn’t be bothered with activism because he had more important things to drink. I was first radicalized around the issue of campaign finance reform, and got involved with a national organization called Wolf-PAC. I spent a few years lobbying Ohio’s state representatives regarding campaign finance laws — they were invariably bemused each time I walked into their offices with long hair and a patchy leather jacket. In spite of my ratty appearance, I did manage to personally convince a Republican State Representative to change his stance on campaign finance laws after a series of meetings at the Mentor Public Library, although he still wouldn’t sponsor our Wolf-PAC resolution for fear of political backlash. I learned a lot about political advocacy through that experience, but that’s another story.

At some point, I got an email from a group dedicated to campaign finance reform that called itself Democracy Spring. They were organizing a protest in DC, with the intention of having as many people as possible perform an act of civil disobedience by willingly getting arrested for protesting without a permit on the steps of the Capitol Building.

I was absolutely thrilled at the idea. I had romanticized 1960s images of crowds of protestors in my head, and they had convinced me that this was the sort of direct action that would affect real change (that was, indeed, the depth of my analysis). So I threw everything I had into the organization. After months of working with the Democracy Spring organizers in DC, I was able to organize a small contingent of Clevelanders to travel to DC by train and participate in the protest. All in all, there were some 1,300 people who were arrested on the first day of the protests, the largest number of arrests at the Capitol since the Vietnam Protests. More would be arrested in the week that followed.

I spent a week in DC protesting, and it was one of the most exciting weeks of my life. I marched, chanted, and commiserated with like-minded activists. I have a picture somewhere of me getting my hands zip-tied behind my back, but I have no idea where. Rosario Dawson and Cenk Uygur got arrested with us. One of my favorite political commentators at the time, Lawrence Lessig, spoke at the rally. Bernie Sanders gave us a shout out on social media. Cory Booker and John Lewis came out to speak with us and encouraged us to continue. Elizabeth Warren admonished the rest of the Senators for ignoring us during a speech she made on the Senate floor. I even made my first semi-viral Twitter post. It truly felt like the beginning of something important — I left DC feeling downright euphoric.

But that was it. Nothing changed.

Aside from CNN showing a single 30 second clip of the protest, no mainstream news media covered us. Someone at Vice wrote a piece on us, but nobody ever really took them seriously anyway. After it ended, nobody in the government ever referenced the protest again. I’m quite certain most of you reading this have never heard of the protest in the first place. It was like we had plowed the ocean.

After I got home, I was undeniably elated by the experience, but in the back of my mind I was still somewhat conflicted. It seemed like we hadn’t actually accomplished anything, despite all that effort.

Luckily, I learned from the organizers that there would be a coordinated follow-up effort: the country would be divided into smaller regions, and local organizers would recruit supporters (there was no formal membership process) by staging smaller protests at local political events. Then after two years of building support, we would return to the Capitol and stage a repeat of the original protest, but larger.

This was promising! Again, I threw everything into the effort. I drove to Columbus once a month to meet with Ohio’s organizers, and got another small contingent of Clevelanders to go to protests in an effort to build support for our nonpartisan campaign finance reform movement. 

Then Trump got elected.

The Spring Dries Up

Suddenly, all of the emails from Democracy Spring stopped talking about campaign finance reform and were just focused on “resisting” Trump. Okay, that’s fine. But how? Are we still meeting in Columbus to coordinate efforts? No, those regional meetings around the country stopped pretty abruptly. Are we trying to organize another big protest in DC? No, the communications were just filled with vague calls to “Resist!” and unoriginal, unremarkable statements about the gravity and urgency of the political threat posed by Trump. Lacking any formal structures, the organizational movement in Ohio and around the country dissipated faster than it came together.

But emails from Democracy Spring’s leadership (the only remaining form of communication they sent out) kept coming. I wasn’t clear on what they were doing now, but I continued to read them since they had been such a big part of my life for nearly half a decade. On Trump’s inauguration day, I went to DC to protest — although, admittedly, I ended up disgusted and depressed by the whole spectacle and spent the day in the Holocaust Museum instead.

I touched base with some of the Democracy Spring organizers who were in DC as well. They said they had something big planned for the inauguration, and I was confused as to why there hadn’t been a more concerted effort to recruit people. Regardless, I hadn’t planned to get arrested again, so I declined to participate.

Later that day, I got this email:

The email went on to detail the efforts of “six brave democracy defenders” — a far cry from the 1,700 who joined them just two years prior — and they claimed it as a massive victory. In the weeks and months that followed, similar emails with subject lines like “Trump Disrupted!” and “Two Democracy Spring Leaders Arrested at Sit-In!” followed, each containing photos of the same handful of participants engaged in various innocuous acts of “resistance” — and typically accompanied by a request for donations. The emails eventually stopped.

The Democracy Spring organization (if you can call it that), once able to mobilize thousands of people across the country, had dissolved into a vanity project for its leadership clique. All it took was a single political crisis (Trump’s election, in this case), and the structureless network of dedicated activists from across the country fell apart into a harmless, toothless display of performative “Resist!”-ance.

I was devastated. I felt like I had totally wasted those years of my efforts with Democracy Spring. I dropped out of activism altogether and probably (definitely) started drinking too much. I got into activist journalism instead, and made a few locally-focused documentaries about homelessness that won some awards at some film festivals around Ohio. But I stopped engaging in direct political activism, for the most part, aside from attending one-off protests or local community-building events.

I’d occasionally talk with the organizers of these events, and when I asked them what their long-term strategy was, they would invariably offer vague, starry-eyed platitudes about “building the movement” and “Resist!”-ing without offering anything concrete. It was always too reminiscent of the empty rhetoric I heard from Democracy Spring’s leadership for me to buy into their passion again.

Luckily, I had also been a convert of Bernie Sanders in 2014, and canvassed for him in 2015. Exclusively thanks to him, I spent the following years reading and unlearning all of the misconceptions that I didn’t know I had held about the word “socialism” (on my own, since I still mostly liked to hang out with nihilist apolitical punks who all thought I was annoying for being “political” and reading). It took a long time! Anti-socialist propaganda dies hard. I’m still unlearning stuff. At some point in 2023, I saw a post made by an old college friend (shout-out Julie) about a DSA event and decided that I’d better attend if I were going to be calling myself a socialist. It was my socialist “put up or shut up” moment, if you will.

Democracy In Action

In Cleveland’s DSA chapter, I found tons of committed members working together in an organization that was structured in its composition, serious and thoughtful about its rhetoric, deliberate about its strategy and tactics, intentional about political education, and focused on efforts that did not just consist of protests and petty acts of civil disobedience. But most importantly, it was democratic, directly accountable to its membership, and committed to building its members into leaders — instead of having them orbit around an insular group of self-proclaimed leaders who lead through force of personality alone.

The chapter’s model of organizing, as opposed to just mobilizing and advocacy, was nothing short of inspiring. According to what a given situation demanded, the organization’s goals were both long-term and short-term, widescoped and narrow, national and local, and with a calculated strategy to achieve all of them — with the right kind of deliberate and thorough organizing, of course. Most importantly, the chapter had a priority structure that allowed its membership to pivot and focus their limited capacity on issues as needed, so the organization wouldn’t crumble if the national political situation demanded a change of course.

In short, DSA was everything that Democracy Spring wasn’t.

I want to clarify that I don’t expect or even want you to be disillusioned by protesting. It was a real bummer of a process to go through, and I’m happy for folks who don’t feel the same way I do. I’m also not trying to use my personal experience as a demand for deference — although if you’re someone who is shallow enough to grant political weight to this sort of activist credentialism, feel free to defer to me if you want to — nor am I trying to say “I know better than you, so you should think like I do.” My intentions are solely to give an example that illustrates the clear limitations of protest-based activism. The trend I laid out in my personal story about one protest movement is observable in varying degrees across all protest movements.

Protesting is an acceptable way to “fight back” precisely because the ruling class thinks protesting is ineffective. And without a deep commitment to organizing, it is. The word “demonstration” is suggestive of the performative nature of protests — which there is a time and place for! But protests are by no means the most important tool in our toolkit. Without clear follow-up, without a commitment to building ourselves and each other into leaders, without a plan to build working-class power — in other words, without organizing — protests achieve little beyond making the attendees feel good about themselves. And to amplify the social standing of the self-proclaimed “leaders” in liberal activist circles, of course.

(By the way, the French word for “protest” is “manifestation,” which is more befitting of their culture of resistance; the average French protest would be called a “riot” if it took place in this country. But that’s a separate discussion.)

Again and again, when I see a political crisis emerge in this country, I watch the liberal activist groups in this city circle their wagons and start mobilizing for protests. I see the same people attending every time. And when the crisis passes, the mobilizing stops. There’s good work being done by these liberal activists, for sure. But every time a new issue emerges as the crisis du jour, the same pattern plays out: new coalitions with catchy names (but composed of the same people), emergency protests, vague calls to “Get organized! Join an org!”, and then — once public perceptions of “crisis” and “urgency” have faded — nothing. That sort of Sisyphean ambulance chasing is not organizing for change — it’s just performative “Resist!”-ance.

I often hear that we have a bad reputation among liberal activists in this city. Quite frankly, I don’t care. I’m not really all that impressed with those groups. That’s why I’m in DSA instead. Our DSA chapter is one of the largest, most coordinated, and most capable independent political organizations in the city, so let’s act like it. Liberal activist groups should be more worried about what we think of them. There’s nothing to be gained from deferring to liberal activists and giving undeserved weight to their criticisms of our chapter. We should absolutely work with them where our interests align, but at the end of the day, they need us more than we need them. After all, they wouldn’t be so desperate for us to endorse, support, and attend their events if that weren’t the case. Let them work for our approval instead.

I’m in DSA because I think it’s the organization best poised to stage a serious, coordinated, and multifronted resistance against capitalism and fascist reaction — not because it just happens to be “one progressive org out of many” that I happened to join. But if we treat this organization like it’s just one of many generally progressive orgs, it definitely will be.

Organizing, Not Just Mobilizing

I have nothing against attending protests. I attend and will continue to attend protests. People should attend protests; they’re cathartic, empowering, and publicly visible. But we have to recognize the strategic limits to endorsing and attending protests just for the sake of endorsing and attending protests. And if we do endorse a protest, we need to be deliberate about turnout.

The March 28th No Kings protest is coming up and there are questions over whether we should endorse it or not. Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. Unless we’re doing something tangible at it like collecting signatures for our Gender Freedom Policy Petition, simply showing up, as good as that might feel, will accomplish as little as any other protest.

If we endorse a protest and only about 10 people show up, that misrepresents the actual power in this chapter and perceptibly brings our nearly 700 member org to the level of the myriad small, disorganized activist groups in the city. So, there is a potential cost associated with the optics of being present at these protests as well as the potential benefits to which folks are appealing; but those benefits only manifest if our turnout is strong.

Protesting alone isn’t going to stop Trump, Zionism, or ICE — it won’t stop any form of fascist reaction, for that matter. What will stop these things is organizing people into DSA and building it into a formidable political force that can leverage its power from below. As long as we’re not making a concerted effort at doing the latter, the former holds.

On a positive note of what can be possible at protests: at the last anti-ICE protest I attended, I connected a group of student activists at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) with the state Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) coordinator, and they’re currently organizing a new YDSA chapter on Case’s campus. This, in my opinion, is the sort of thing we should be aiming to do at protests.

Without organizing — and I mean organizing — mobilizing attendees for protests has an inherently limited impact. I think many comrades think “organizing” simply consists of getting people to show up at events, direct actions, canvasses, and training sessions; but that’s only mobilizing, not organizing. Without a deep commitment to developing one another into leaders both inside and outside the organization, we are not organizing.

Internal organizing is just as crucial a part of “the work” as our outward-focused efforts in the community. Without either, we stagnate.

To be clear, nothing should stop us from attending, endorsing, or supporting protests when they’re aligned with our values, but we need to be deliberate and calculated about what we’re doing when we go. Otherwise we’re just chasing the tail of the liberal activist movement — and I don’t know about you, but I joined DSA because I found that movement lacking.

We can attend these protests, demonstrate resistance to ICE and fascism, participate in direct actions/responses, and be serious about organizing people into DSA at these events — all at the same time. As one of our comrades likes to say, “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.” Another likes to say “We just have to do it.”  Again, I fully agree — we just have to be deliberate and strategic about it. The urgency of the situation demands nothing less than a principled and coordinated organizational effort, not just blind faith that “Resist!”-ing at protests is enough to change anything on its own.

Solidarity, comrades.

The post Why Protesting Isn’t Enough: The Limits of Protest Activism appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

At our March 2026 chapter meeting, SV DSA member Stacey delivered a statement of our chapter’s position on the allegations against Cesar Chavez. The recording is available on Instagram.

The Labor Working Group’s Statement in response to the Cesar Chavez investigation results:

1. SV DSA stands in solidarity with the women who were abused by Mr. Chavez.
2. SV DSA recognizes and applauds these women’s strength and courage to come forward as well as their resilience living with this for 60+ years.
3. SV DSA stands in solidarity with the United Farm Workers movement and state that this news absolutely does not define the movement in the past or present. SV DSA acknowledges the damage and grief this news will cause within the Latino community.
4. SV DSA condemns sexual assault, harassment, and abuse in all forms.
5. SV DSA stands with women, children, and other vulnerable groups who need protection from abuse of power.

This news will affect each person differently, for some it is the loss of a heroic figure regardless of the accuracy of that description.

This movement historically provided an opportunity for migrant workers and their families to fight for rights and against exploitation.

A movement should not be defined by its leader, too much power for one person without much oversight.

This gives us an opportunity to become more aware of how power imbalances can lead to horrible abuses.

It is important for us to keep this in mind when we are working in our communities and with our partners to promote safety, respect, and dignity for all people.

The post SV DSA Statement on Cesar Chavez Investigation Results appeared first on Silicon Valley DSA.