On April 5, 2025, tens of thousands of traumatized human beings took to a thousand different streets to tell the temporary inhabitants of the White House and their nazi-saluting cronies to keep their hands off the imperfect aspirations of American benevolence. 

I was not one of them. 

Instead, I was at home, high on tramadol, waging mortal combat with a recalcitrant body and a wheelchair that refused to turn left (my preferred direction). Which got me thinking: how does one promote universal social justice in the face of the banal cruelties of a sociopathic billionaire elite when one can barely get out the front door? 

On April 5, 1977, forty-eight years to the day before the Hands Off protest, over a hundred disabled activists and their allies occupied the San Francisco offices of what was then called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) for its failure to enforce Section 504 of 1973’s Rehabilitation Act, which plainly stated that: “No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States shall solely on the basis of his handicap, be excluded from the participation, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."  

While the word “handicapped” has vanished from the justice lexicon over the years, thankfully the ideas detailed in the above paragraph have not, and the credit for that rests solely on the arthritic, scoliotic, slippery-jointed shoulders of those brave disabled freedom fighters who for 25 DAYS found ways to not only avoid arrest on their way to government capitulation, but, perhaps more amazing to me, did so despite an algorithm of existence that included catheter use and an inability to sleep on the floor. 

On March 12, 1990, a thousand disabled activists and their allies marched from the White House to the US Capitol in support of the stalled Americans with Disabilities Act. When they got there, nearly four score (plus or minus seven) shed their assistive equipment and dragged their reluctant bodies up the hundred steps that barred their path to power in an all-too-human feat of endurance known as the Capitol Crawl, which helped push the bill into law four months later. 

On June 22, 2017, ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today) staged a die-in outside Mitch McConnell’s office to protest Republican-led efforts to kneecap Medicaid and eliminate the Affordable Care Act, resulting in indelible images of police tearing people from their wheelchairs and otherwise abusing fragile bodies—a surprise to no one who has ever sat between a cop and their even-more-fragile ego. Weeks later, John McCain shot his famous thumbs-down on the Senate floor in a last gasp of right-wing spinefulness, vindicating yet another self-sacrificial battering of disabled bodies.  

Last weekend, whispers of those three seminal events swayed through my fug of synthetic opioid bliss, suffocating my usual trip of warm love and solidarity with clouds of guilt and FOMO and self-recrimination at missing yet another vital protest. But then I started thinking about the ancillary characters in the high drama of those pivotal days in 1977, 1990, and 2017: the girl with quadriplegia who spent two hours at the San Francisco HEW offices before going home to peg-tube a blended burrito, the autistic man who stimmed out on the way to the Capitol and went to the library instead, the new DSA member named me who opted for Dennison’s chili instead of Domino’s pizza so he could parlay that saved ten bucks into a donation to ADAPT in 2017. 

In short, I realized that every single one of us matters to this mass movement just the way we are, regardless of spoons or arrests or protests logged. Whether I make the next one or not, what matters is that I face cruelty with kindness, injustice with defiance, and bilateral neuropathy with 25mg of that sweet peace-and-love potion currently warming my red-blooded veins. 

So if you’re feeling bummed out you couldn’t find childcare, or a ride, or a negative COVID test, and had to save your clever sign ideas for another day, know that no excuse is necessary. Your continued existence is protest enough, indeed the most primordial resistance of all. 

Or maybe that’s just the drugs talking.

Union-busting is primarily aimed at undecided workers, but you must prepare everyone for the boss campaign.

The post Who do you inoculate and when? appeared first on EWOC.

It’s hard to repress a devilish grin from stretching across my face when I see the most evil parasites of the world, from asset managers to European neoliberal politicians, in full-blown panic at the economic free fall triggered by President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. However, I can manage to stifle my joy by reminding myself of the 900 workers laid off by Stellantis allegedly due to the tariffs, or more generally that it will be the American working class that suffers the most from the approaching economic recession.

I am sure the lay off of those 900 workers is also being waved about by champions of unrestricted international trade as evidence that support for tariffs by unions like the United Auto Workers is misguided. And it’s this reaction that concerns me almost as much as the harms that will come from President Trump’s nonsensical tariffs. Because tariffs are not the problem – it is the reliance by President Trump, and practically every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter, on private investment to create domestic manufacturing that makes their tariffs so ineffective at protecting workers in this country. It was not always this way – the U.S. escape from the Great Depression and successful mobilization for World War II were predicated on one of the largest state plannings of the economy in human history, and when Americans saw the benefits, they became politically invested in it, from public housing to the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 are being used as a convenient historical example by critics of President Trump’s protectionism. The persuasive appeal is obvious – the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were a last-ditch effort to reverse the ever-deepening Great Depression.. And, depending on which historian you asked, these tariffs either failed to stop massive unemployment or made the situation far worse by the trade war it triggered. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, otherwise a notorious boogeyman of “free market” proponents, ran on decreasing tariffs, ending the trade war, and reforming the political process for instituting tariffs.

However, while the increases of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were undone by FDR, the huge decrease in tariffs did not occur until after 1947. A global economy devastated by World War II had largely made the question of imports undermining U.S. jobs a moot question, and to the contrary American capitalists wanted trade liberalization because the U.S. had become the unquestionable center of global manufacturing, not to be dethroned until 2010 by China. The state of Pennsylvania alone produced more steel in 1945 than Germany and Japan combined.

But that was not created by the “free market.” It was created by unprecedented (at least within the United States) centralization of manufacturing by the U.S. federal government. Perhaps the most obvious example was the War Production Board formed in 1942. The WPB directed $185 billion (equivalent to $2.48 trillion today) of production in its three years of existence. The Board converted companies’ production lines (whether they liked it or not), prohibited nonessential production, rationed several commodities, and otherwise behaved in a way that earned the admiration of more controversial state planning proponents. 

Unsurprisingly given its broad mandate, the WPB also worked closely with the United States Tariff Commission. As this report from the Tariff Commission in 1942 reflects, changes in tariffs and other trade restrictions were not done out of some neoliberal ideology that the free-er the trade the better, but rather were calibrated to balance protecting domestic production while maximizing trade needed for the war effort. To just name one example, the report notes that the reliance on importing “canned fishery products” created a massive shortage once the war disrupted global trade. Even so, the report notes that any restrictions to ameliorate the situation had to be “consistent with the prosecution of the war.”

There is no such calibration between President Trump’s tariffs and state planning for production. To the contrary, planning of the economy in the U.S. was long ago turned over by the state to the finance industry (as epitomized by former War Production Board staffer and former Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler becoming the chairman of Goldman Sachs International in 1969). Even worse, President Trump’s strategy for incentivizing private investment is not even the typical flawed strategies of neoliberal orthodoxy (special economic zones, tax incentives, regulatory sandboxes, etc.), but rather to bully the world in the hope that foreign private capitalists will invest in American manufacturing out of fear of becoming a target. Whether this strategy will be effective in attracting foreign private investment is dubious at best – private investment generally is averse to the uncertainty and volatility that President Trump inculcates, and that is all the more the case when the purse strings are held by those with less influence over U.S. politics.

Even if President Trump’s strategy were to succeed though, it will not create the kind of manufacturing jobs that World War II era state investment paired with tariffs did. There will be no governmental support for unions and their ability to collectively bargain with employers, let alone the WPB’s threat of nationalization to those factories that did not promote industrial peace with the unions. And there is a certain irony to President Trump’s racist hatred of foreigners not extending to foreign capitalists, who are particularly well-positioned to exploit American workers. A CEO in Barcelona does not have to worry about his workers in Danville, Illinois showing up at his house or neighborhood charity fundraiser. And the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) empowers these foreign corporations to attack what few protections exist for American workers. This is not conjecture – the Canadian mining company Glamis Gold took the U.S. to ICSID in 2003 over environmental and labor protections related to open pit mining in California.

In the words of Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh, “In real international competition, there are always winners and losers.” The neoliberal ideology behind global free trade ignores this reality by claiming that unrestricted global trade lifts all boats, when that is clearly not true. The Trumpian protectionist ideology meanwhile acknowledges this reality but attempts to make America the “winner” by bullying other countries with the hope that this leads to foreign private investment in U.S. manufacturing. That strategy will likely fail, or even worse create abominable manufacturing jobs with little protections for workers. In this time, socialists must thread the needle by arguing that tariffs are an important tool but must be paired with state investment and planning to replicate the process by which the U.S. became the manufacturing powerhouse with good union jobs in the post-World War II era. We must clearly say that tariffs cannot bring back good union jobs, and even state investment is not guaranteed to, but instead we should follow historic examples like the Tennessee Valley Authority where public investment was paired with democratic engagement and labor unions (which continues to this day).

The post Tariffs Are Not the Problem – Private Investment Is appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Nevada’s 83rd legislative session started on February 3rd, 2025. Las Vegas DSA’s Electoral Working Group has been tracking bills on economic justice, worker power, immigrant justice, environmental justice, criminal justice reform and more.

Recent attacks on the NLRB are forcing unions to consider their tactics. U.S. labor history may hold some new ideas.

The post How do we organize when union rights are under attack? appeared first on EWOC.

Welcome to your quick glimpse into some of the work of the chapter over the past couple of months, prepared for the Little Red Letter #135. The I-94 Fight Continues Organizers kept the pressure on after our joint event with Our Streets to shine light into MNDOT’s opaque and undemocratic process at the January Political […]

Author’s Note: This article was written and initially posted to slack prior to the vote for endorsement in the Mayoral election, however due to the author’s laziness it was not finished in time for the prior newsletter. Because the thrust of the article is caution against the socialist electoral project taking executive offices, rather than […]

Statement from the Madison Area DSA Executive Committee on the Detention and Deportation of Pro-Palestinian Students, Faculty, and Staff

As scholars, faculty, staff, students, and members of the University of Wisconsin-Madison community, we members of Madison Area DSA condemn the immoral and unlawful kidnappings of our colleagues and neighbors from universities across the U.S. Our colleagues and peers have been targeted for opposing Israel’s genocide in Palestine in yet another display of the United States’ escalating fascism. These targeted detentions and disappearances are part of efforts to destroy scholarship in the United States, to force alignment with Zionist foreign policy, and to punish those who dare step out of the carceral, white supremacist, Zionist line.

Since March 1, 2025, at least four students have been arrested by ICE in scenes akin to kidnappings or Schutzstaffel-style disappearances: on video, masked ICE officers whisk Rumeysa Ozturk away, as a bystander asks, “Is this a kidnapping?”

On March 8, ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in the Columbia University student protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, from his family’s apartment in Columbia student housing without being charged for any crime. Khalil is being held in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center.

On March 9, ICE searched the home of Yunseo Chung’s parents in an attempt to find her. Chung is a Columbia student and was present in Barnard College sit-ins. Chung has since filed a lawsuit alleging that “the administration is demonstrating a ‘pattern and practice of targeting individuals associated with protests for Palestinian rights for immigration enforcement.’”

On March 17, Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar and instructor at Georgetown University, was detained by ICE. Suri was “approached by masked men outside his home.” Like other students targeted by ICE, Suri is accused of supporting Hamas–Suri’s lawyer argues that Suri is “being punished because of the Palestinian heritage of his wife–who is a U.S. citizen–and because the government suspects that he and his wife oppose U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.”

On March 25, plainclothes ICE agents arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a scholar at Tufts, off the street without providing any identification–the encounter, which was captured on video, looks like a kidnapping. Although Öztürk was granted a petition to be held in Massachusetts, ICE transferred her to Louisiana. A DHS spokesperson accuses Öztürk of “supporting Hamas,” without providing evidence.

These incidents are not isolated. Students continue to be detained by ICE, including one University of Minnesota Twin Cities student on March 27, 2025. By the time this statement is published, it will surely be woefully out of date as our peers, neighbors, and colleagues continue to be targeted and kidnapped. As we wrote this letter, unjust arrests were made on UW-Madison’s campus at a protest against former US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Just days later, UW announced that students and staff in our community are victims of visa termination.

It is clear that this anti-immigrant, white supremacist, Zionist tendency seeks to punish scholars for taking the moral stance. Many targeted academics, including Mahmoud Khalil, are being held in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. This prison is owned by a private corporation, and is known for its unsafe and inhumane conditions. Accusations of mistreatment are many: “In 2016 alone, three immigrants died within six months. Following a fourth death in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties concluded that inadequate medical care contributed to “multiple deaths; sexual assault allegations have “plagued” the facility; prisoners are served unlabeled and expired foods.

As abolitionists, we extend solidarity with targeted scholars held in Jena, Louisiana, and elsewhere: imprisonment and cages are the violent arm of these efforts to silence activists and scholars, punish the poor, and exploit labor from the oppressed. 

As scholars, we understand that detentions are an attack not only on individuals, but on the pursuit of knowledge itself. There is no neutral scholarship, and we extend solidarity to our colleagues and neighbors who have been and continue to be targeted for challenging carceral, white supremacist, Zionist structures and motivations.

As socialists, anarchists, communists, and moral human beings, we believe the right of free speech should never be infringed. We believe that no-one should ever be imprisoned for acts of speech and peaceful protest. We believe that anyone who speaks out against genocide and hate should be lifted up, not denigrated as supposed terrorists.

The true cause of terror in American communities right now is this expanding fascist wave we see: this intentionally illegal abduction of citizens and scholars by masked agents must end. We demand: Hands off our colleagues, and hands off our communities!

See and share how federal workers can fight back against Trump's cuts regardless of their status with the FLRA.

The post How federal workers without a union can still act like a union appeared first on EWOC.

by Rob Switzer

Over 10,000 grocery workers from 77 stores struck King Soopers in Colorado last month*; it’s a division of stores owned by Kroger. Like me, they are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

A rank-and-file reform caucus called Essential Workers for Democracy (EW4D), which is working to make UFCW more democratic, was in Denver walking the picket lines and delivering daily bulletins to keep workers up-to-date. They flew in several UFCW members from different locals around the country to support their fellow grocery workers. This is how I became one of them!

The story starts with the election in November. Like many people who identify with the Left, I was very deeply invested in seeing Donald Trump lose. Despite how terrible Biden and Harris were on some of the issues — and their membership in a party that props up the system that I believe to be the root of most of our problems — I preferred their victory over a fascist-friendly administration bent on vengeance. So I held my nose and voted for Harris, and advocated that others should as well.

When the unthinkable happened and Trump won, I watched many of my liberal and progressive friends erupt in anger at Trump voters, with disgust for what their country had become. I can sympathize with that to a degree, but my reaction was more one of shame. And anger, yes, but not so much toward Trump voters, but more toward the Democratic establishment. They were running to the right on every issue in order to win. To see them do that and still lose was beyond maddening.

I was fed up. On social media I saw something about a general meeting of “Democratic Socialists of America” just a few days after the election. I immediately identified with their goals and values. I resolved to make it to the next one, and I did. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: A room of over 100 people not afraid to proudly represent their values and call themselves socialists. And they seemed happy to be there, rather than despondent. I got the sense that it didn’t matter who had just won the election: they’d still be fighting the same fight regardless. There was just a little more work to do now.

I am a union member, and I got involved in the Labor Working Group. I have attended every meeting since. I’ve met many great people, and I’ve been involved in actions supporting striking Starbucks workers, graduate workers, and others. After hearing stories of organizing and activism from others, I started to think about how I could change my own workplace.

I work as a butcher in a UFCW shop. I am very proud to be a union worker and I’m known at work as being very politically conscious and pro-union. Many people at my workplace are critical of the union, and for valid reasons. Yet I sometimes find myself defending the union, or at least the workplace benefits that it has clearly brought us. I have a fair amount of seniority there and am generally respected.

So some time last March, after we lost our shop steward, I was encouraged by several people to sign up for consideration as the next one. Nobody signed up to challenge me. Months passed and I heard nothing from our union officials. On this issue and on our union representation in general, most of my coworkers felt lost and confused. And I did too. I didn’t feel empowered to do anything.

But several months down the line, now a DSA member, I started to think about what I could do to change the situation. I started talking to coworkers. I read the Labor Notes book Secrets of a Successful Organizer. I attended a Labor Notes workshop called “What to Do When Your Union Breaks Your Heart.” I even surveyed my coworkers about whether they supported me becoming steward, and circulated a petition which almost all of them signed without hesitation.

I found my way to getting in touch with Essential Workers for Democracy. I held several Zoom calls with EW4D, and they helped me consider ways to deal with the steward issue and others. I met other disaffected pro-union UFCW workers. Eventually I was invited onto a Zoom call with EW4D leader Steve Williamson. He wanted to hear my story. And afterwards he told me that they were all holed up in Denver, supporting the UFCW workers out there who were on strike. He asked if I wanted to come out.

I did. I arrived on a Monday morning and met with Steve. In the snowy, foggy, below-freezing weather, we drove from picket line to picket line. He would introduce himself, hand out that day’s issue of their bulletin, and just talk to the strikers. He would introduce me. They were always thrilled to hear that a union brother had come all the way from Detroit to support them. We would walk the lines with them, chant with them. Share stories with them.

I learned about the conditions the workers endured over those two weeks on strike: not just the weather but manipulative tactics by Kroger. For example, Kroger unsuccessfully sued to essentially shut down the strike, challenging who strikers could talk to and what they could do, and insisting that they not be allowed to use heaters or heat lamps on the lines. Just the day before I arrived, Kroger had reportedly agreed to the local’s demands, but ultimately reneging on the deal and instead circulating misleading statements blaming the union. I learned firsthand that most of the workers were not buying it. And although many were tired, the overwhelming majority seemed to support fighting on if need be. Their resilience was simply inspiring.

After a full day of visiting the lines, I was brought to the house I would be sharing with other activists. Three of them were members of DSA from around the country, and even knew some of my local comrades! We had lively discussions. I was supposed to stay for several days. But the following morning, we received word that a “Return-to-Work Agreement” had been finally reached, and that the strike was ending immediately.

That day we held a debriefing conference, in which everyone was encouraged to speak. I told them that although it was unfortunate that I came so late, it definitely wasn’t a waste of time for me. I explained that I honestly feel that with every minute I participate in activism — whether it be direct action or even just discussions — I learn something new. And this was a unique and exceptional experience in which I learned an incredible amount in a short time. And I would take those lessons and those skills with me and they could potentially change lives.

I carry those lessons today in my on-going campaign to become shop steward and to otherwise organize my coworkers. I have already seen some of them become more outspoken and encouraged. I will carry those lessons into the labor work I am involved in right now, and even beyond it. I’m even helping with the current campaign to bring rail transit to Corktown in Detroit, which could have a direct impact on my neighborhood.

Activism has become a driving purpose of my life, rather than a side hobby. None of this — my Denver trip and otherwise — would have happened without DSA, and I thank every member of that organization and every activist, everywhere, for leading by example and reminding people like me of the power that we each hold. Solidarity forever!

*Note: this article was written in March 2025.

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How I Found Myself on a Picket Line in Denver after 2 Months in DSA was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.