Portland Democratic Socialists of America stands in full solidarity with the heroic struggle of Portland city workers on strike with LIUNA 483. We condemn Mayor Wheeler and Portland City Council for their refusal to address city workers’ economic plight in the face of our community’s affordability crisis.

Even more disturbing is the Mayor’s bald-faced effort to break this strike by bussing in strike-breakers, filing spurious legal claims, and asserting without basis to city employees that strikers engaged in acts of violence. These claims are outright lies and fabrications.

Portland DSA members joined city workers’ picket lines the very minute the strike began, and our mobilization has not wavered — we can attest without exception the Mayor’s claims about picket line conduct are without merit. Instead, Portland DSA members have experienced joy, celebration, triumph, and an unprecedented display of community and unity.

The unprecedented action by Mayor Wheeler shows his desperation. City workers who maintain our parks, roads, and wastewater treatment facility are essential workers. But the Mayor’s attacks on their right to strike represent an attack on every worker facing unjust working conditions.

Portland DSA members are city workers. Grocery and restaurant workers. Delivery drivers. Teachers and healthcare workers and more. Together, we recognize the righteous struggle of city workers, and we see their fight as our fight.

The Mayor’s attempt to injure striking workers is an injury to us all.

Join us on the picket line and take your place in this struggle for the future of our community, when we gather on Sunday, February 5 at 5:30–6:30pm, near the Wastewater Treatment Plant, 5001 N Columbia Blvd.

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What: Community to Mobilize in Support of Striking CIty Workers

Where: Wastewater Treatment Plant, 5001 N Columbia Blvd

When: Sunday, February 5th 5:30p — 6:30p

Who: Portland DSA and community supporters

Community Supporters to Join Striking City Workers in Light of Mayor’s Falsehoods and Strike-Breaking

Portland Democratic Socialists of America stands in full solidarity with the heroic struggle of Portland city workers on strike with LIUNA 483. We condemn Mayor Wheeler and Portland City Council for their refusal to address city workers’ economic plight in the face of our community’s affordability crisis.

Even more disturbing is the Mayor’s bald-faced effort to break this strike by bussing in strike-breakers, filing spurious legal claims, and asserting without basis to city employees that strikers engaged in acts of violence. These claims are outright lies and fabrications.

Portland DSA members joined city workers’ picket lines the very minute the strike began, and our mobilization has not wavered — we can attest without exception the Mayor’s claims about picket line conduct are without merit. Instead, Portland DSA members have experienced joy, celebration, triumph, and an unprecedented display of community and unity.

The unprecedented action by Mayor Wheeler shows his desperation. City workers who maintain our parks, roads, and wastewater treatment facility are essential workers. But the Mayor’s attacks on their right to strike represent an attack on every worker facing unjust working conditions.

Portland DSA members are city workers. Grocery and restaurant workers. Delivery drivers. Teachers and healthcare workers and more. Together, we recognize the righteous struggle of city workers, and we see their fight as our fight.

The Mayor’s attempt to injure striking workers is an injury to us all.

Join us on the picket line and take your place in this struggle for the future of our community, when we gather on Sunday, February 5 at 5:30–6:30pm, near the Wastewater Treatment Plant, 5001 N Columbia Blvd.

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What: Community to Mobilize in Support of Striking CIty Workers

Where: Wastewater Treatment Plant, 5001 N Columbia Blvd

When: Sunday, February 5th 5:30p — 6:30p

Who: Portland DSA and community supporters

The Portland Democratic Socialists of America expresses our outrage at the murder of Tyre Nichols by the Memphis Police Department. This murder is part of the systemic violence of police everywhere against people of color and the working class. We offer our condolences to the Nichols family, and we stand in solidarity with the black community of Memphis and with all others protesting for an end to police brutality and racist violence.

55 years ago, civil rights leader and democratic socialist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis while organizing with striking sanitation workers. As socialists, we recognize the essential task of grappling with the profound interactions of capitalism and racism. We believe that anti-racist organizing rooted in class struggle is how we can fight back.

Police are the armed wing of the capitalist state, and their role in society is to enforce exploitation. It is police who break strikes, evict families from their homes, harass the houseless, jail the poor, and attack those who are suffering. Police do not act as a service for public safety, but rather as an occupying army, hurting those who need help, and defending those who cause harm.

The only way to rid our society of the capitalist police is the self emancipation of the working class into a socialist society. Protests, no matter how powerful, will not be enough. To win black liberation, the working class and oppressed people must organize and take control of society. The best way forward is an alliance between organized labor and the movement for black liberation — the coordination of an independent, anti-racist, working-class movement that fights to overturn racial -capitalism at the workplace, in the streets, and on the ballot line.

To meet this moment, protest energy must develop into political movement which can sustain itself. We cannot rely on the ruling class to deliver reforms.

To that end, Portland DSA calls for the following initial steps:

1. The immediate reallocation of 50% of the PPB budget to fund housing, community services, education and healthcare
2. The immediate establishment of a democratically elected oversight board empowered to investigate officers and hold the PPB to account
3. End the war on drugs and tough on crime policies, provide full addiction care, and decriminalization of drug use
4. An end to the sweeps of homeless encampments and the public provision of shelter to those in need
5. The establishment of a labor slate for the 2024 city council elections, unified around proposals to reallocate money from the bloated police budget to provide for public services and fund housing, food, education, and healthcare.

This work must begin with public support for protests, and a movement to improve the lives of the most marginalized and oppressed. We must build a fighting socialist movement for black liberation.

Organized workers can overturn the racist, capitalist system. They can provide the winning leverage to Black Lives Matter.

The only way to win justice is to expand these protests into a mass movement. To achieve this, we must convince workers to join the struggle — unions and workers must become the strongest opponents of racism. This means a conscious project of reform within existing labor unions, and a coordination with organizations rooted in communities of color. We must also create our own, enduring socialist structures. And we must wholeheartedly support this protest movement.

With solidarity and shared struggle to guide us, a better world is possible.

In solidarity,

Portland DSA Steering Committee

Tax The Rich is a seasoned Portland DSA working group where we think about how to move money and power from the rich to the working class. We’re a rag-tag group of amateurs and academics – all levels of expertise (or lack thereof) are welcome! We have several main categories of the work we do: wealth taxes, work on the city budget, supporting coalition campaigns, and tax education.

So far, our wealth tax work has been remarkably successful! In 2021-2022, we saw the first $208 million dollars flow from the wealthy to fund universal preschool. Our universal preschool campaign, which we worked on beginning in 2018 and through the passage of the Preschool For All measure in November of 2020, is good for kids, families, and workers. Through our work on the preschool campaign, we learned that although the tax code is famously skewed in favor of the wealthy, given the democratic choice, Multnomah County voters are more than ready to change that.

We’re also not slowing down in our ballot measure and taxation policy work! We’re already working on our next wealth tax, which would tax extreme “intangible” wealth, which includes stocks and bonds. This type of wealth is currently only taxed when it’s sold, or sometimes through the estate/inheritance tax, which means that the wealthy hold onto their money tax-free. That’s not very fair when the rest of us pay taxes on our wealth via income taxes and property taxes.

Our proposed intangible wealth tax (or an “extreme wealth tax”, as we’ve taken to calling it),  would be a 1% tax on extreme wealth over 10 million dollars, bringing  in about 2.6 billion dollars in revenue annually. But, we still have work to do: most importantly, we’re still trying to figure out what the tax should fund. Our research crew has discussed what $10 million would mean for housing, preschool and education, mental health and addiction services, and more, but we’re still mulling any and all possibilities. If you have ideas of what this tax should fund, please reach out and tell us about them!

When we’re not coming up with new taxes, we’re working on other projects. One of our long-standing traditions is advocating around the city budget. Each spring, we do our best to let Portlanders know what’s in the proposed budget, and encourage people to take action. We make shareable and easily digestible social media content, create phone scripts that Portlanders can use to call the councilors, as well as template emails for the phone-shy. Some people even get empowered to testify in front of the council!

We can’t afford to step away from the budget work this year. Over the last few years, our conservative city council has decided to spend our hard-earned tax dollars in ways that make the Portland Police Bureau and the Portland Business Alliance very happy. With this year’s even more conservative city council, the budget is probably going to reflect their cozy relationships, rather than finding ways to serve the actual needs of Portlanders. Join us for our annual deep dive into the budget, and brainstorm ways to tell our council to fund a budget that serves all of us, not just the rich and powerful.

Of course, the fight towards economic justice is too big to do alone, and so we’re proud to support all fights that work towards a more just Oregon. We helped our friends at Eviction Representation For All by developing a capital gains tax that will fully fund legal representation for all renters in eviction court, as well as other tenant services. We’ll be doing our part to ensure that their measure is successful on the ballot this spring. Additionally, we’re finding ways to support OPAL’s very cool fareless Trimet campaign, which you can learn more about here.

Lastly, our educational work is central to much of what we do. Our goal across our social media pages is to make tax policy interesting and maybe even fun. We mostly do that through social media content: we’re on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter! After all, it’s hard to convince people that we need to change tax policy unless they understand how and why it’s broken in the first place.

If any of this work sounds interesting to you, we’d love to have you! We’re really excited about our February social, which is at 8pm on Thursday, February 9th at Worker’s Tap: come hang out! Of course, we also have our regular meetings every second Thursday of the month at 6:30pm. These meetings are hybrid, so you can join us in person at the IWW, or virtually over Zoom, whichever works better for your schedule.  If you have any questions or comments for us, feel free to reach out to co-chairs Emerson or Lauren on Mattermost, or email us at taxtherichpdx@gmail.com!

CW: Graphic descriptions of police violence The footage of Tyre Nichols being killed at the hands of Memphis PD captures the murderous function of police in all its brutality. The […]

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Drag is an art with deep roots in New York City’s queer communities of color that has much to offer to all people who are interested in liberating themselves from traditional and patriarchal ideas of gender. That’s part of why it’s become a target of the organized far-right both here in NYC and nationally, with public libraries and other community venues facing protests over their regularly offered drag performances and story hours. Local politicians have also experienced far-right threats for merely expressing support for drag. On tonight’s edition of Revolutions per Minute, we’re live with Drag Story Hour NYC storyteller Oliver and  organizer and parent Desiree to discuss the many aspects of drag, and how New Yorkers have come together to reject the far-right threat and show the beauty and power of queer community.  

To learn more about Drag Story Hour NYC, visit dshnyc.org.