By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

The Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), the graduate worker union at the University of Michigan, is currently in the process of bargaining with the university to obtain a new contract for the upcoming three-year contract cycle. Despite months of ongoing negotiations, the university has left the union with little if anything to work with thus far. It wasn’t until earlier this year that their Human Resources (HR) representatives agreed to allow open bargaining, a process by which all graduate workers — as well as invited guests affected by the negotiation process — are allowed to attend bargaining sessions in-person/virtually alongside the union negotiators themselves. This is a substantial win for GEO, as open bargaining allows for a comprehensive viewing of the negotiation process, giving grad workers and other stakeholders the chance to see their futures deliberated on first-hand. However, with this victory coming in the middle of January, little time remains to conduct actual bargaining, as the deadline to finalize a contract with HR is March 1. What’s more, the union’s demands have been almost entirely rejected by the university, with its central editorial mouthpiece, The Michigan Daily, even referring to them as “unreasonable and extravagant”. Under such circumstances, it has become paramount to clarify and emphasize one outstanding point: GEO’s current contract campaign — and by extension, its rich history of labor organizing — is not just about the betterment of graduate worker life; it is a fight for the rights and dignity of our university and city-wide communities at large.

Talks of union contracts often begin with mentions of pay and working conditions. GEO’s campaign is no different in this regard. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a living wage in Ann Arbor amounts to an annual salary of approximately $38,537. As it stands, graduate workers at the university earn approximately $24,053 annually for their labor, meaning that a $14,484 gap exists between the compensation graduate workers are currently receiving and that which they require to survive. Perhaps this is why 1 out of every 10 graduate workers at the university worry about having enough food to eat and another 1 out of every 6 would not be able to incur a spontaneous $500 emergency expense. The same is true for working conditions. GEO is currently demanding a discussion section class size cap of 18, as larger class sizes mean burdensome workloads for graduate workers and lackluster educational experiences for students as a result. Moreover, a lack of agency pertaining to COVID policies has left many grad students — especially those with disabilities and/or immunodeficiency disorders — without recourse in the event of a nearby contamination, as the university does not currently grant Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) the ability to require masking nor pivot to a virtual modality if need be.

However, it is when one moves beyond these two areas of demands that GEO’s contract campaign truly begins to encapsulate the university and broader Ann Arbor communities. As a union that engages in “bargaining for the common good”, GEO stands out as an organization that uses the contract negotiation process to its advantage, leveraging worker-specific demands alongside asks that speak to the needs of its surrounding communities. Examples of this dynamic abound, but two outstanding manifestations are its calls for paid positions to establish a Disability Culture Center as well as a community-based, unarmed non-police emergency response team. In solidarity with disabled university community members — and in support of Central Student Government’s (CSG) campaign to establish a Disability Culture Center — GEO has decided to take the conversation of on-campus disability justice a step further by proposing paid positions for those spearheading these efforts. Similarly, the union acknowledges the inherent danger posed to BIPOC students, faculty, and staff by a robust police presence and law enforcement-based response to on-campus emergencies. As such, they’ve reiterated the vision put forth by the Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety (CROS) and demanded that the university contribute funds of its own to finance this community-centered approach to public safety across Washtenaw County. Beyond these asks, GEO has also championed trans-inclusive/gender-affirming healthcare, parent/caregiver accommodations, and harassment/discrimination protections with their demands.

This isn’t a new course of action for the union, either. GEO has a rich history of pushing the envelope when it comes to individual and community-level changemaking. Officially certified in 1974, GEO was one of the first unions to represent graduate student workers in the country. In the mid-1980s, the union won a formal recognition of Affirmative Action from the university alongside tuition waivers for Teaching Assistants (TAs). The 1990s and 2000s similarly featured victories in International GSI compensation and trans-inclusive health benefits, respectively. Since then, GEO has worked to fortify the university’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and has maintained an unwavering commitment to organizing efforts and collective power building, even as conservative state-level decision making — such as the “Right to Work” legislation approved by Republicans in 2012 — seeks to hinder their progress.

So where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us with a comprehensive contract campaign — formulated by hundreds of grad workers over an extended period of time — chalk full of reasonable and necessary demands that improve the lives of graduate workers as well as those of our university and Ann Arbor communities. As we close out the month of February and approach March 1, we cannot forget that the success of this campaign relies not just on the efforts of the union, but on the solidarity of every university community member and ally, working alongside GEO to make these demands a reality.

To show your support, sign the “I Stand With U-M Grad Workers” letter and remain up to date on campaign happenings via GEO’s social media platforms which can be found @geo3550.

GEO is Fighting for You was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Member J. Cooke shares their thoughts on the Florida Democratic Party’s Chair vote.

As the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) chair race came to a conclusion yesterday, I was reminded of a story from the United Kingdom. Before she passed, the right wing British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was asked what she thought her greatest achievement was. Her response was a bit of a surprise at the time. “Tony Blair and New Labour.” Thatcher said. “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” Thatcher was referring to Tony Blair and the Labour Party’s anti-working class positions and abandonment of left wing economics that betrayed the values of previous Labour leaders and governments.

Former Florida Agricultural Commissioner Nikki Fried was narrowly elected chair of the FDP with 52% of the (convoluted and not exactly democratic) delegate vote. Before becoming Agricultural Commissioner, Fried worked as a corporate lobbyist in Tallahassee for a variety of odious special interests, including a tobacco company, Duke Energy, and Rick Scott’s former company HCA that committed the largest Medicaid fraud in history and is still being accused of doing so by its workers. She ran in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last year, finishing in a distant second place to former Republican governor Charlie Crist. Her campaign stirred controversy when a prominent staffer hurled personal insults at a progressive state representative. Her opponents in the chair race criticized her for a variety of reasons including, but not limited to, her lack of support for the $15 minimum wage ballot initiative in 2020; her refusal to support Democratic candidates because she was friendly with their Republican opponent; and her political consultant’s ungodly amounts of money spent trying to unseat a progressive Tallahassee’s City Commissioner. The list of criticisms goes on (and boy does it go on! I haven’t even mentioned her alleged “friendship” with Matt Gaetz or her recent campaigning for Republicans), but I think you get the point.

Maybe more importantly is what her supporters say about her, and a tweet by former gubernatorial candidate Philip Levine presents a prime example:

“I support @NikkiFried. She believes in the American dream of responsible capitalism w/ a strong economy, smart border control, strengthening professional policing, parents having a say in their children’s education and fights for an FDP that is based on unification not division!”

Border control? Policing? These talking points are nearly identical to a GOP platform. Parental control of education is literally the exact justification Ron DeSantis is using for his book bans and attack on public education. One can only wonder how a voter who hears this is supposed to be able to distinguish it from the Republican platform.

None of this, however, means that her main opponent was an ideal option either. Annette Taddeo appeared to be running away with the race until Fried swooped in at the last moment. Taddeo has been a fixture in FDP politics for over a decade, having run unsuccessfully for Florida’s 18th, 26th, and 27th congressional districts, Miami-Dade County Commission, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor. Her only elected office was a five year stint in the State Senate. Taddeo was endorsed by some well-known progressive activists and elected officials and did at least support some progressive policies like the $15 minimum wage, but she has a history of fighting her left flank as viciously as anyone. In interviews, she blamed socialism for her party’s misfortunes (you know, the ideology that Pew found a majority of Democratic voters view favorably), despite every party leader constantly condemning it. While chair of the Miami-Dade Democratic party, Taddeo did make strides at ensuring someone actually ran for office as a Democrat. She had an organizing campaign as well, showing that she does have an idea about what needs to be done, and is willing to bring a message to voters instead of just shaming them for not voting. While it’s safe to say that Taddeo wouldn’t exactly have been a working class champion either, she just may have been a little more promising than Fried.

Large majorities of Democratic voters favor policies like Medicare for all (88%), free college (85%), and The Green New Deal (82%), yet it appears they will be left without a party in Florida that represents them yet again. Florida Democrats have insisted on repeatedly running to the right, and this time is no different. We’re less than four months removed from an election in which 20% of the Democratic base in Florida decided it wasn’t worth their time to cast a ballot despite the fact that right wing authoritarianism is on the rise. If you’re hoping to cajole those people back into action, or if you’re part of the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters that supports a progressive vision for the future, then the FDP Chair race, and ultimately Fried’s victory, may not exactly lift your spirits. But if you’re Ron DeSantis watching your opponents choose the most right leaning path forward, then you may look back on this moment and realize that it is your greatest achievement.

References

Statistics on Racial Disparities: Sentencing Project, The Vera Institute, MacArthur Foundation

U.S. Ranking in Incarceration Rates vs. The World: Prison Policy Initiative

Incarceration Rates in Colorado by Geography (heatmaps), including breakdowns by ZIP codes

The private contractor families blame for deaths in El Paso County CJC

Suicide and mental health disparities in El Paso County CJC

The complete list of CJC deaths in 2022

The growth of jails in the U.S. - and how they are harming our communities

A Reuter’s investigative report on deaths in jails nationwide

66% of the people who died in jails from 2009-2019 were awaiting trial - meaning they were never convicted of a crime

How for-profit “community corrections” facilities set parolees up for failure and contribute to high recidivism

Report on recidivism rates state-by-state

Out of Reach Colorado Housing Prices (report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition)

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in jails & prisons*

Mental illness in jails and prisons nationwide

The mental health impacts of incarceration

The Prison-Industrial Complex

#StopCopCity

*The original ACE study was racist. Check out this resource instead.

Police Brutality in Colorado Springs

De’Von Bailey murdered by CSPD after being stopped for a false report

Justice for Dalvin

CSPD murders a 63-year-old man having a mental health crisis

CSPD Excessive force against a 17-year-old girl

CSPD Excessive force and violent language against Colorado Springs Black Lives Matter protestors in summer 2020

Club Q

The Club Q shooter’s 2021 terrorism

How the D.A. and Judge failed to prevent the shooting at Club Q

Low enforcement of red flag laws in Colorado

Preliminary Hearings that presented evidence against Aldrich, including evidence that the shooting was bias-motivated

The Receipts

Reporting on CSPD’s infiltration and surveillance of leftist organizations in Southeast Colorado Springs

Reporting on attempts by CSPD and the FBI to entrap leftists

CSPD Body camera footage of cops discussing beating Colorado Springs Housing for All protestors

The Alphabet Boys podcast series on how the FBI planted a sex offender in the Denver BLM movement to surveil, incite violence, & entrap leftists (with an episode on surveillance and attempts at entrapment in Colorado Springs)

Community Alternatives to Public Safety

CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) is a Eugene, Oregon-based street clinic that intervenes in mental health crises without the presence of law enforcement. They receive funding as an alternative to policing and have saved the city millions of dollars.

STAR (Support Team Assisted Response) Program is a response program in Denver that sends trauma-informed behavioral health professionals to respond to community crises related to mental health, homelessness, substance use, and more without the assistance of police. They have reduced the number of arrests and improved community well-being since their beginnings in 2020.

Colorado HB17-1326 was a two-part bill that created parole reform by reducing the amount of time a person could be reincarcerated for a technical parole violation. The second part of the bill redirected $4 million in savings from the parole reform into a program called Transforming Safety , which provides grants to community organizations in North Aurora and Southeast Colorado Springs — two communities that are overpoliced and disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration — for creating crime prevention programs.

Work and Gain Education and Employment Skills (WAGEES) is a program to support people reentering society from incarceration by using Colorado Department of Corrections funds to allow community organizations to provide job skills training and assist with employment placement. This program has been so successful at reducing recidivism and helping people transition back into community that it has received increased funding and been set for renewal in legislative sunset reviews.

The Gathering Place in Denver provides free supportive, wrap-around services to women, children, and transgender people struggling with poverty in the Denver area. They provide housing assistance, food assistance, education and job training, healthcare, and mental health services.

Liberatory Harm Reduction is a philosophy that centers freedom of choice and treatment for those who use substances if they want it. Colorado has several harm reduction programs that offer clean syringes, overdose prevention education, and Narcan distribution to help people stay safer as opposed to using incarceration to punish substance use. However, many of these programs operate under a public health model rather than a liberatory model. Check out the link to learn more about the difference and why we need more programming that works under a liberatory harm reduction model.

One Million Experiments is a project that shares stories of community projects that redefine safety and explore alternatives to community-based public safety.

Interrupting Criminalization is a resource organization that provides a platform for programs and ideas around alternatives to policing and incarceration. They also coordinate between organizations to help build bigger campaigns for abolition work.

Do No Harm is a philosophy and guide for healthcare professionals to commit to serving clients while refusing to cooperate with the process of criminalizing and incarcerating them.

What is Transformative Justice?

Abolition Reading List

We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba

Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, and Erica Meiners

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

The End of Policing by Alex Vitale

Saving Our Own Lives: Liberatory Harm Reduction by Shira Hassan

Ready to join the fight against mass incarceration and police brutality? Join DSA!

You can also help support our work by donating to help us print more copies of our abolition zine! You can also share a downloadable version here.

We recently received a request from Fred Miller of Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, asking to join one of our meetings to promote the work they’ve done with Troy Police Department.

We are not interested. This is our full response.

Dear Fred,

We received your request to come to our meeting “to share information about our work with the Troy Police Department and the May event … and answer any questions. We only need 10-15 minutes on your agenda.” 

You’ve done work with the City of Troy and the Troy Police Department for two years with no community involvement until now. To presume that 10-15 minutes to talk at our membership about your solutions to problems we were never originally consulted on underscores that this is nothing but a public relations campaign to whitewash the Troy Police Department’s long history of reckless and hateful violence. 

We are not interested in exposing our members or the community to your pro bono work to overhaul the TPD’s reputation. We are connected to this community as residents, students, workers, parents, and neighbors. When we received this invitation, our first step was to check who else you’ve included in this long process up to now. We were made aware that you have not reached out to prominent Black-led organizations, and your work has lacked transparency and real outreach. By removing the voices of those most impacted by police violence, you told us everything we need to know about your event.

You are not welcome in our space, because you represent cops, not the people of Troy. Cops hurt the people in our community. This is a fact. The Times Union’s editorial board released a statement today on the city’s secrecy around police disciplinary records, and the long history of violence against Black and Brown people in Troy. Meanwhile all media outlets are covering how an officer killed a young man while driving recklessly through a dangerous intersection.

The people in our communities do not need to be subjected to your PR campaign about emotionally disturbed persons training and six new community officers. The City and TPD have repeatedly ignored years of outreach, activism, political involvement, social justice work, requests from leaders and non-profits, an executive order from the NYS governor, and the cries of 11,000 people in the streets of Troy.

We provided our recommendations publicly in the past. We’d like to know how many of those were considered in your work. You can share the status of that free labor in writing.

Troy DSA encourages anyone who received a similar invitation to boycott this meeting in May. 

-Troy DSA

It’s budget season again here in New York! We caught up with freshman Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha to talk about a major development in the fight for Public Power here in New York State and what her budget priorities are in her first year in office.  

And in City budget news, Eric Adams is using the influx of migrants to justify an austerity budget this year. His preliminary budget proposes deep cuts to public education, libraries and other essential social services- while it appears he is leaving the New York Police Department budget untouched. Desiree and Caitlin have been doing mutual aid work with migrants and are joining us live tonight to give us an update on what happened to the migrants who camped outside the Watson Hotel and to comment on the Mayor’s austerity budget.  

To call your rep and urge them to Tax the Rich and include Build Public Renewables in the budget, visit https://taxtherichny.com/contact-your-reps/

To connect with Desiree and Caitlin you can show up to the Red Hook Mutual Aid Store at 147 Pioneer Street in Brooklyn and follow South Bronx Mutual Aid on twitter @SBXMutualAid and on Instagram @southbronxmutualaid

On Feb. 21st Boston DSA emailed out the following call to action to Boston residents encouraging them to give public testimony on how the Mayor’s rent control proposal is in need of serious changes

Tomorrow, Wednesday, Feb. 22nd, at 10 am the Boston City Council will be hearing public comment on the Mayor’s proposed rent control legislation. Unfortunately, the proposal as is does not adequately protect tenants from increasing rents. It excludes many renters’ landlords and still allows for annual rent increases of 6 percentage points more than inflation (and rent increases of up to 10%). Most gravely, since the proposal lacks vacancy controls it may even incentivize evictions.

We are asking people to either submit written testimony or show up to give public comment tomorrow to point out to the Council that Boston deserves better. Boston is one of the most expensive cities to live in within the US; we need more affordable housing options.

To testify virtually on Zoom, email this address and ask for a link to give public comment: Christine.oDonnell@Boston.Gov. To submit written testimony, simply email your comments to this email: Ccc.Go@Boston.Gov. There is no deadline to submit written testimony.

If while drafting your testimony you’re looking for specific points to make on how Boston City Government could be ensuring people have affordable housing, here are some suggestions:

• First and foremost, the rent control proposal absolutely needs vacancy controls added in. Meaning, rent-increase caps must extend to both current and new tenants. Absent vacancy control, landlords will just have an extra incentive to evict renters and find higher-income tenants.

• The rent control proposal’s ‘just cause’ eviction protections have too many exemptions / potential loopholes to make up for the lack of vacancy controls. Most importantly, the vast majority of evictions in Boston are for non-payment of rent, which are not protected at all.

• The rent control proposal should limit increases to no higher than inflation in the given year.

• The rent control proposal excludes too many tenants. For example, it excludes buildings where the property owner lives there and there are also six or fewer dwelling units.

• The rent control proposal does not give due consideration to students who also suffer from their universities’ exorbitant housing costs.

• The rent control proposal should also include an overall rent cap, in an actual dollar amount.

Furthermore, we encourage folks to point out to the Council how rent control alone is not sufficient to end the exploitation of tenants by real-estate interests. More needs to be done to address the core problems the housing market generates.

• More municipal dollars should be committed to community-land trusts.

• We need more social housing and greater public funding for maintenance so as to have the upkeep residents deserve. Accordingly, the State Legislature must approve Boston’s request for a real estate transfer fee.

• The State Legislature must also pass legislation guaranteeing a universal right to free legal counsel in housing court for tenants.

Again, the public hearing is tomorrow at 10 am. And to testify virtually on Zoom, email this address and ask for a link to give public comment: Christine.oDonnell@Boston.Gov. To submit written testimony, send your comments to this email: Ccc.Go@Boston.Gov. 

P.S. We want to further acknowledge that housing justice isn’t simply attained with governmental policy changes, but through tenants collectively organizing and compelling real-estate interests to act. So, we encourage you to get in touch with the chapter’s Housing Working Group if you wish to plug in to that sort of organizing — simply email Housing@BostonDsa.Org and ask to join.

By Michael Sebastian

As the Oakland Education Association bargains a new contract, it has raised a comprehensive set of common good demands to help strengthen Oakland’s public schools and support students. OEA rallied hundreds of teachers and community members in support of these demands at the February 8 school board meeting. 

At the rally outside La Escuelita elementary school ahead of the board meeting, participants heard speeches from OEA teachers and parent leader Pecolia Manigo, who fired up the crowd with chants of “Who’s schools? Our schools!” Manigo, a leader of the Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network (PLAN) and recent candidate for school board, said “we can get this confused, that this is just about a contract. The contract is a representation of what we want in our schools.”

As the school board meeting opened to the public, hundreds flowed into the gymnasium where the meeting was held. Ismael Armendariz’s suggestion to “cut pork at the top” sparked chants of “chop from the top,” referencing the top-heavy finances of the district’s budget, where the superintendent makes $294,000 and other administrators pull in large salaries which divert money away from schools, teachers, and children. As OEA observed in a pamphlet in 2019: “OUSD is ‘broke’ on purpose so billionaire influencers can make financial arguments for closing neighborhood schools, refusing living wages for teachers, and denying students the support they need in order to learn and grow.” The chronic lack of resources has less to do with funding and more to do with who will foot the bill. The budget will either be balanced on the backs of black and brown students, as Armendariz said in the gymnasium, or the district will need to “chop from the top”.

As the meeting continued and the floor opened for public comment, attendees spoke about the dangerous consequences of chronically underfunded schools. One teacher spoke via Zoom about finding guns in school lockers, and a student report back showed that roughly half of high school students in OUSD don’t feel safe at the school that they attend. These problems arise because schools are understaffed, which is why OEA is calling for smaller class sizes, more nurses, counselors, psychologists and school librarians. Reinvesting in our schools and fully staffing them is the only way to create safe and productive learning environments for children.

Part of the reason that Oakland schools are so understaffed is that teachers in Oakland are substantially underpaid. Oakland is one of the most expensive cities to live in the state, and one of the lowest paid for teachers in Alameda county. “Living wages continue to be an issue in Oakland,” said OEA president Keith Brown in Edsource. “An experienced teacher can move to Hayward Unified and make $28,000 more overnight.” This results in high turnover, with one in four teachers leaving the district each year. In order to increase teacher retention rates, provide quality teachers for students, and maintain a stable learning environment in public schools, Oakland Unified will need to increase salaries so that teachers don’t leave the district or change careers to meet cost of living in the Bay Area.

Finally, OEA wants to reinvest in the Community School model, which has received over $4 billion in new state funding over the past two years. Engaging parents and communities so that schools become places where neighborhoods can flourish, community schools will provide needed resources for families, organizing in and out of school to make sure that students can thrive. This will help the district fulfill another one of OEA’s common good demands, a Reparations 4 Black Students resolution which aims to eliminate the black student opportunity gap in literacy and educational outcomes, and provide resources for black families who predominantly live in the city’s most disadvantaged communities.  

Combining the teachers’ requests for living wages and better working conditions with resources that will help Oakland children thrive, OEA is mindful that without the support of the community most of their demands will go unmet. The fight for better teacher wages, better working conditions, and better schools for children are completely intertwined. This is why the union fought so hard to save Oakland schools from closure, culminating in the 4-3 vote in January to overturn last year’s decision to close five elementary schools. This is also why it continues to fight to hold on to these victories and set the stage for more gains for our schools, children, and communities in the future.

Join teachers at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater on Wed, March 15 at 2pm to demand that OUSD bargain in good faith.

Michael Sebastian is a member of the steering committee of East Bay DSA.

Revolutions Per Minute spans the Atlantic Ocean this week, exploring the parallels between Labor movements in the UK and the US, with special guest Jordan Flowers, a co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. We speak to Stuart Richards, a senior organizer with the GMB in the UK’s West Midlands focused on Amazon workers, and James Meadway, a Council Member at the Progressive Economy Forum and a former advisor to the shadow chancellor John McDonnell MP. 

Member Bruce Nissen shares his thoughts about a past political movement

In conversations with my younger comrades in the Pinellas DSA, I have been astonished to discover that virtually none of them has any idea of who the Yippies were in the 1960s — 1980s period. As one who came to political maturity in the ’60s (I was twenty years old in 1968), I was powerfully influenced by them at the time. They were a significant force in bringing together the emerging “hippie” or youth culture and political radicalism at the time. They were in the news fairly frequently, I just assumed that they would remain in the public consciousness up to the present day. How wrong I am!

I still think that the Yippie! phenomenon is worth remembering and examining, so that’s why I am writing this. Let’s start with a little bit of background. The 1960s was a decade of increasingly obvious disaffection from society by the younger generation. The 1950s had produced the beatniks but they were a very small sideshow to the decade of conformity in most things. By the 1960s some of the most obvious failings of the United States became so prominent that they could not help but stimulate a negative visceral reaction from a growing segment of young people. The two most prominent failings were the racist repression of African-Americans, prompting a civil rights movement that was viciously repressed on national TV news each evening, and an imperial war in Vietnam that resulted in a draft to send young American men off to fight a war that made little sense to many of them.

The numerically larger reaction was cultural. Young people began experimenting with mind-altering drugs (especially marijuana but also less frequently more potent drugs such as LSD and mescaline). Some young men grew their hair longer; puritanical attitudes toward sex were under attack. Peace and love and freedom to “do your own thing” became keywords of the growing cohort of those who became known as hippies.

A second reaction was political. The anti-war movement against the Vietnam War grew throughout the final third of the decade and into the 1970s. The civil rights movement morphed into a Black Power movement and a women’s movement seeking gender and sexual equality grew by leaps and bounds. Liberation movements from underdeveloped countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America spurred solidarity movements in the U.S. as well as Latino freedom struggles among Chicanos and Hispanic (primarily Puerto Rican) populations. Militant reform movements in a previously self-satisfied labor movement challenged the power of employers and their often-compliant union leadership.

These two reactions were not necessarily connected with each other. Despite a common vaguely defined opponent — the “system” — there could be enormous differences in both cultural styles and political analyses among these emerging forms of resistance. I distinctly remember in 1967 running into young Marxist revolutionaries who urged me and other radicals to cut our hair, eschew dope, look as straight as possible, get a job in a factory, and integrate into a working class that was perceived as being hostile to the new youth culture. I was lectured that only in this way could I contribute to a transformation of U.S. society. I rejected this invitation to mimic the very attitudes and lifestyle that I was rebelling against.

A big portion of the emerging hippie culture remained apolitical in any conventional sense of the word “politics.” They rejected the striving competitiveness of mainstream culture and attempted to live a quieter life less centered on conspicuous consumption, but did not necessarily engage in political activism or advocacy. But many of us attracted to the hippie culture also were politically estranged because of the war and other reasons, so we felt a compulsion to also rebel through political activity.

Enter the Yippies. As a named phenomenon the Yippies originated in 1967 from a meeting of a small group of leftist veterans of previous demonstrations and movements. The most prominent figures to emerge as Yippie leaders were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. (More on them later in this article.) The name was of course a take-off on the word “hippie” and was intended to indicate joy in living, antics and pranks, and a nullification of the “death culture” that the originators saw as pervasive in America. To make it look more official for mainstream media, they invented a (non-existent) “party” — the Youth International Party (YIP).

The Yippies (and YIP) had no formal membership; one could simply declare oneself a member. The goal was not to establish anything with a formal structure; instead it was to utilize the media to spread among America’s youth countercultural and anti-capitalist messages through the use of flamboyant spectacles and symbols. Some prominent Yippies took outrageous names as part of the theater: Wavy Gravy was a prominent Yippie who became fairly well known for his role at the historic Woodstock Festival in 1968. Here is Wavy at later point in his life:

Others took names like Joannee Freedom or Daisy Deadhead. Some semi-famous people like radical singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, radical lawyer William Kunstler, Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders of the rock group The Fugs, and others were self-declared Yippies.

But probably the most prominent Yippie was Abbie Hoffman, a brilliant media performer who constantly ended up in the news because of his latest outrage against conservative mainstream sensibilities. For all his clowning, Abbie was a serious revolutionary who had a thought-out rationale for his theatrical antics. He had come to believe that people were not moved to radicalism by rational discourse and logic. Instead, they viscerally responded to events and images that shaped their cultural viewpoint through which they interpreted the world. Thus, the way to reach them was to engage in pubic theater that forced them to reevaluate.

Here are a few images of Abbie:

Jerry Rubin was almost equally prominent in the Yippie mythology, but he was not as deep of a thinker as Abbie. Books he authored were fairly shallow, and he didn’t exhibit the same degree of purposive refection on his own actions as did Abbie. In the end he would sell out his ideals and become a Wall Street trader and businessman who Wikipedia claims became a multi-millionaire. But in his earlier incarntaion he did have something of a flair for theatrical messages. Here are a couple of images of Rubin in his revolutionary days:

Abbie and Jerry and fellow Yippies engaged in numerous public guerilla theater events. Among them:

· In the 1967 March on the Pentagon, Yippies induced some in the crowd to surround the Pentagon, handed out witch’s hats and colorful outfits and levitation sticks and held a ceremonial “levitation” of the Pentagon building to drive out the evil of militarism and war. Soldiers guarding the Pentagon held rifles out in the direction of the protesters; a picture of a girl inserting a flower into the barrel of one soldier’s gun went around the world in news media.

· Abbie Hoffman in late 1967 snuck a crew of protesters into the Wall Street Exchange building. When up on the visitor’s balcony over the Exchange floor, they rushed to the rail and threw hundreds of dollar bills down on the trading floor. Trading was stopped for a few minutes; some stockbrokers scrambled to retrieve the bills as chaos ensued. Abbie and crew managed to escape outside where he related the story to reporters who had been tipped off in advance. Then he publicly burned a $5 bill to complete the guerrilla action. Again, publicity streaked around the country.

· In March 1968 the Yippies called for a “Yip-In” at New York City’s Grand Central Station. I happened to be in New York for a spring break from college in Iowa, and my then-girlfriend and I attended. Well over one thousand people showed up. Balloons, music, and a festive atmosphere was everywhere. Then a couple of intrepid youths climbed up on the famous Grand Central clock and removed the hands. (Later Yippie publicity claimed the purpose was to free the masses from the tyranny of the clock and a forced workweek.) At that point the police went crazy and rioted. They waded into the crowd, swinging batons and cracking heads. We were trapped inside the building and could not escape except by running down the stairs into the subway system. As we were running down the stairs, a policeman pursued us and others who were likewise escaping. I still vividly remember an older gentleman who looked very straight and who most likely was not part of the demonstration but simply a commuter. He ran down the stairs with us, but he was slower. The policeman smashed him across the head with such a loud crack that I can still hear the pop. The man reeled and fell heavily to the ground, bleeding profusely. We couldn’t even get him help for some time, as we were trapped inside by a police line. Things like that radicalize you very, very quickly.

· The biggest stage for Yippie! theatrics was the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August 1968. The Vietnam War was heating up; Democratic President Lyndon Johnson was retiring in disgrace; the Democratic Party was planning to nominate VP Hubert Humphrey, a strong war supporter, for president; and Chicago Democratic Mayor Richard Daley had instructed the Chicago police to “shoot to kill” anyone disturbing the peace. Mainstream anti-war movement organizations had called for a massive march during the convention and the city had refused to grant a permit. Hundreds of thousands had been expected for the march, but widespread publicity of Mayor Daley’s threats intimidated most who had planned to come. In the end only about 10,000 showed up. The Yippies had planned a massive Festival of Life with live rock bands and theatrical happenings; again, permits were denied. All the big nationally known bands pulled out in face of the threats; only the MC5, a radical Detroit-basaed band ended up playing. Phil Ochs also performed. The MC5 concert was cut short when the cops attacked the crowd. The Yippies brought in a pig named Pigasus to coronate as President of the U.S. Abbie was arrested and the pig was confiscated by the police. The whole convention was a mess that culminated with a Police Riot outside the hotel where Humphrey was being selected. The TV media brought all of this to the nation on a nightly basis.

· Following the Democratic Convention police riot, the U.S brought felony conspiracy charges against eight organizers who had planned the demonstrations. Most were anti-war political organizers who looked like normal Americans, but Abbie and Jerry were also part of the Chicago 8 (later the Chicago 7 when Black Panther Boby Seale’s case was severed from that of the rest). Abbie and Jerry showed up at the trial adorned in judge’s robes, repeatedly taunted the judge, and were charged withi contempt of court countless times. Because the name of the judge (a real fool who made a joke of himself by his behavior) was Julius Hoffman, Abbie made a legal effort to change his first name to Fuck so he could answer as Fuck Hoffman every morning in court. (For some reason, his application was turned down.)

· When Abbie and Jerry were pulled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Abbie came wearing an American flag shirt; he was promptly arrested as he stated, “I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country.” Jerry, who was wearing a Viet Cong flag shirt, shouted that the cops were Communists for not arresting him also.

· Yippie chapters across the country engaged in similar public theatrical events. In 1969 they stormed and briefly seized the Justice Department building in D.C. during an anti-war demonstration. In 1970 Yippies raided Disneyland and occupied Tom Sawyer’s island; riot police shut down the theme park and arrested dozens of occupiers.

These theatrical radical events fascinated me as a young college student. For about two and a half years from mid-1967 until 1970 I considered myself a Yippie and attempted to emulate their work on my campus. I joined a guerrilla theater group that disrupted officious campus events, participated in the coronation of a male homecoming queen at a homecoming football game, played a minor (and shamefully cowardly) role in a nude-in against Playboy magazine’s spokesman speaking on campus, ran a giant be-in festival of life on campus, hosted various “Digger dinners” with free communal meals outdoors, set up a Free Store in an unoccupied alcove of my college dorm, and more.

The college student government appreciated many of these antics, and they were happy to sponsor a visit to campus by a leading Yippie. We tried to get Abbie Hoffman, but could not find an easy way to reach him. We did contact Jerry Rubin, and he came and spoke to fairly large crowd on campus. I arranged a Yip-in welcome where we inundated the crowd with balloons thrown down from a balcony we occupied. I still have a photo of Jerry and me during his visit in 1969:

We interviewed Rubin for our college underground newspaper, and I quickly saw that he was not a particularly deep thinker — I remember thinking that I had thought through a number of these questions more thoroughly than he had. He was warm and friendly and fun to be with, but here was not a leader to work out a strategic direction for the future of our movement. He had nothing to say when I attempted to converse with him about the role and function of the Yippie myth, something I had discovered through reading writings by Abbie.

Still, I thought the Yippies were pretty cool for a couple of years. But subsequent events caused me to lose my fervent admiration and to move to other elements of the movement. First, it became apparent that the Yippies were not anchored in anything that had staying power, such as the labor movement. When youth culture faded so did the Yippies.

Second, it became apparent that behind the flashy exterior many of the Yippie “leaders” were lesser idols than they appeared. All idols have feet of clay, and my infatuation with Abbie Hoffman cooled considerably as later episodes showed him to be a very flawed human being. When I finally got a chance to meet him, at a fizzled demonstration at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village in New York City, he was acting paranoid. I asked him if he was Abbie Hoffman (because I wasn’t sure) and he immediately said, “Yeah! Want to drop some acid?” I replied no and retreated in confusion. Upon later reflection I realized that he suspected I was a “narc” (narcotics agent) trying to get him arrested and he knew that narcs are not allowed to consume illegal drugs when they pursue drug dealers and users. He certainly didn’t appear as brilliant in person as he did through his media antics; in fact, he appeared to be an isolated and somewhat paranoid individual.

In 1973 he was busted for being involved in an attempted sale of a huge amount of cocaine (probably set up by narcs, but nevertheless he was there). He disappeared and went underground shortly thereafter. He resurfaced in 1980 as Barry Freed, an environmental activist with a surgically altered face in upstate New York leading a campaign to preserve the St. Lawrence River. He eventually served four months for the cocaine bust and continued his activism against the CIA, the War on Drugs, and similar issues. He was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder in 1980 and in 1989 he committed suicide at age 52.

Unlike Jerry, Abbie stayed true to his leftist ideals to the end. He deserves respect but had some large human failings that were exposed in his brother Jack Hoffman’s book Always Running: the Lives of Abbie Hoffman. The larger Yippie project, to influence the country’s culture and politics toward the left through mass media interventions, also deserves respect. But it is flawed as a larger strategy: it should be seen as simply one tactic among many to move the consciousness of the American public to the left. We also need serious analysis and strategy, an affiliation with the labor movement and grounding in the working class.

So I say, may the Yippie spirit carry on, as one of many emanations from a growing socialist movement in the United States. I hope the DSA will be at the center of that movement.

By: The People’s Transit Alliance

5 minute read

tw: racism, sexual assault

This past Saturday, Feb. 4th, 2023, was Transit Equity Day, “a collaborative effort of several organizations and unions to promote public transit as a civil right and a strategy to combat climate change…” organized by Labor 4 Sustainability. 

For Transit Equity Day 2023, the People’s Transit Alliance held a canvass of transit riders in Downtown Berkeley to discuss what improvements could be made to the bus system, the planned service redesign, and the importance of transit workers and riders building power together.

Labor 4 Sustainability chose Feb. 4th, Rosa Parks’ birthday, in order to honor her legacy as a civil rights icon, and her courageous action taken on a segregated bus on December 1, 1955. Those of us raised in the United States know the story of Rosa Parks, and her refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger.

What is less well known is her long history as an organizer for the NAACP, her radical politics, and her lifelong commitment to fighting white supremacy in the United States. 

The People’s Transit Alliance wishes to share this neglected side of Rosa Parks’ story. As we organize in her name, we must disrupt the whitewashed version of her life that is taught in schools, and used by politicians and corporations to maintain the very systems of oppression that she spent her life fighting against.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She grew up with her maternal grandparents and mother. Her grandfather was a follower of Marcus Garvey, and taught young Parks the importance of self-defense, sitting on his porch with a shotgun when the Ku Klux Klan came into town.

She was a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for her entire life, where she learned a “theology of liberation that affirmed the equality of all people, laid forth a Christian responsibility to act and provided sustenance to struggle against injustice.”

Mrs. Parks first met her husband, Raymond Parks, while he worked as an organizer on the Scottsboro Boys case. Mr. Parks was a committed activist and revolutionary, who often had to hold secret meetings and avoid police, who were seeking to harass and arrest him for his activism. He and Mrs. Parks attended Communist Party meetings, and worked with other important socialist and communist organizers in the Deep South.

Mrs. Parks began working with the Montgomery NAACP in 1943, where she would soon meet E.D. Nixon. Nixon, Parks, and a small group of activists at the NAACP would lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement in the decade leading up to the bus boycott. 

Parks worked as the secretary of both the Montgomery and Alabama State chapters of the NAACP, seeking justice for black women who had been raped by white men, and black men who had been wrongly accused of sexually assaulting white women.

She and Nixon represented a working class presence at the NAACP, which was often dominated by more affluent members of the black community. When the national NAACP directed local chapters to expel members with socialist or communist tendencies, Parks spoke out against the purge. The Montgomery chapter refused to carry out the resolution.

On December 1, 1955, when Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, she was not the first to do so. Claudette Colvin, who was 15 years old at the time of her arrest, had refused to give up their seat months before Parks, as had others.

In fact, it was a case against Colvin, not Parks, that was brought before the Supreme Court and led to the decision that bus segregation was illegal.

Parks’ decision to remain in her seat was not wholly spontaneous, but a result of her growing frustration with the lack of success that negotiating with the city government had produced, as well as an intimate understanding of the consequences of taking such an action.

Often, Parks’ role in the boycott is diminished. Rather, it is seen as the moment where Martin Luther King Jr. achieved national prominence. However, this version of events ignores Parks’ work as a carpool operator, and a key member of the inner circle of organizers at the Montgomery NAACP.

Eventually, due to death threats, red baiting, an inability to find work in Montgomery, and disagreements over the direction of the Civil Rights movement, Mrs. Parks and her husband were forced to move to Detroit.

In Detroit, Mrs. Parks worked tirelessly as an organizer, particularly focused on freeing political prisoners, expanding access to reproductive rights, defending the rights of women prisoners, and defending black women who had been sexually assaulted. She was a primary organizer of the Joann Little Defense Committee.

Rosa Parks’ politics were truly radical, and clearly opposed to the goals and actions of the powerful politicians who claim to honor her legacy today. She called Malcolm X her personal political hero, and believed in the power of organized nonviolent direct action and the moral right to self-defense.

In 1973, she wrote a letter that included the statement, “The attempt to solve our racial problems nonviolently was discredited in the eyes of many by the hard core segregationists who met peaceful demonstrations with countless acts of violence and bloodshed. Time is running out for a peaceful solution. It may even be too late to save our society from total destruction.”

She was a committed supporter of the Black Power movement, showing up to support radical organizations such as The Black Panthers and working alongside the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Republic of New Afrika in the wake of the 1967 Detroit Riots.

She was also an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, and the march towards war in the aftermath of 9/11.

To recount the entirety of her activism, organizing, and incredible life is beyond the scope of this article. Rather, our goal with this piece is to shed light on an important piece of history that is often ignored, in favor of a quiet, modest Rosa Parks.

Organizing around public transit was not her primary political project but rather one part of a broader struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism. On this Transit Equity Day and beyond, The People’s Transit Alliance seeks to carry Parks’ radical history into the present and imagine organizing for a better transit system as one part of a broader struggle.

When we organize transit workers and riders, we build power at a key political and economic intersection in the East Bay. We reconnect organized labor with a radical political project, and develop concrete strategies to improve the working conditions of those that operate the transit system, which in turn improves riding conditions.

Public transit serves the East Bay’s multiracial working class. It ensures that workers can get to their jobs, the grocery store, doctor’s appointments, places of worship, friends and family, and access all parts of the city.

Improving public transit alleviates the economic burden of maintaining a car, lowers the carbon emissions that deepen the climate crisis and pollute the air we breathe, improves mobility for disabled people, and provides critical access to the working poor of the East Bay.

Transit organizing is a key priority in the fight against white supremacy, the climate crisis, patriarchy, and liberation of the working class. To honor Rosa Parks on Transit Equity Day, we must remember that we are still fighting the same systems of oppression she began fighting more than 80 years ago.

Solidarity forever!

Note: For further reading about the incredible contributions of Rosa Parks to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, please visit these links:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/01/how-history-got-the-rosa-parks-story-wrong/

https://archive.org/details/rebelliouslifeof0000theo_i7s2/page/n24/mode/1up?view=theater

The People’s Transit Alliance is a project of East Bay DSA, organizing for an equitable, democratically controlled transit system that serves the multiracial working class of the East Bay and beyond.