Chapters in Missouri, Michigan and Wisconsin have cued up crucial primaries in early August. This and more chapter news in the July edition of “Chapter and Verse.”

The post Midwest Momentum appeared first on Democratic Left.

Note: posts by individual GMDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

Photo Credit: Kiana Hall

For the past few weeks this summer, a round and lanky raccoon named Jimothy stole the hearts of everyone on the internet.

Millions of people shared videos of his unusual body. Artists drew him. People made plushies, memes, and some people even got tattoos of the unlikely internet celebrity. He was showered in compliments, described as adorable and perfect. His difference wasn't something to hide, it became the very reason people celebrated him.

Wildlife experts believe Jimothy may have a rare congenital condition known as short spine syndrome, which causes the spine to be shortened or compressed, giving affected animals their distinctive appearance. He doesn't look like or move like other raccoons. Yet the overwhelming reaction wasn't disgust or ridicule. It was affection.

Watching the world embrace Jimothy has been heartwarming. It has also left me wondering why we find it so much easier to celebrate differences in animals than in humans.

One in four Vermonters lives with a disability. They don't become internet celebrities when they move differently, speak differently, or navigate the world with mobility aids. More often, they encounter inaccessible buildings, employers that fail to provide reasonable accommodations, housing that doesn't meet their needs, transportation systems that leave them behind, and public policies that treat disability as an afterthought.

This is not to compare disabled people to animals.

Disabled people are our coworkers, neighbors, classmates, friends, and family members. They have dreams, ambitions, frustrations, talents, and opinions as varied as anyone else's. They do not need to become symbols of inspiration or objects of pity. They deserve something much more meaningful. They deserve dignity.

Dignity is more than being treated politely. It means having the freedom to participate fully in your community: to work if you choose, to find housing you can access, to participate in public life, to visit friends, to raise a family, and to live independently. Those freedoms depend not only on personal kindness, but on a society we build together.

Too often, discussions about disability begin and end with kindness. Kindness matters, but kindness alone cannot build a wheelchair-accessible apartment. It cannot guarantee reliable public transportation. It cannot eliminate policies that force people to choose between accepting a better-paying job and losing the benefits that allow them to survive. Those are political questions.

The disability rights movement has long argued that many of the greatest barriers disabled people face are not created by their bodies but by the society built around them. Disability is a natural part of the human experience. Any one of us can become disabled through illness, injury, or simply living long enough. The question is not whether disability exists. The question is whether we choose to build communities where everyone can participate fully.

Here in Vermont, we like to think of ourselves as good neighbors. Often, we are. But being a good neighbor means more than holding the door open. It means building towns where every neighbor can actually get through the door.

Across our state, disabled Vermonters continue to encounter inaccessible housing, gaps in transportation, limited employment opportunities, and public spaces that too often exclude rather than include. These are not inevitable realities. They are the result of public choices about funding, infrastructure, housing policy, transportation, education, and labor. 

The same is true of poverty. Many disabled Vermonters live with the constant fear of the "benefits cliff," where earning a little more money can mean losing healthcare or other essential supports before wages are high enough to replace them. A promotion, an extra shift, or a better-paying job should be a path toward greater independence, not a financial trap. Instead of encouraging growth, these policies can punish people for succeeding. 

Housing tells a similar story. People experiencing disability are disproportionately vulnerable to housing insecurity and homelessness. As Vermont continues to confront its housing crisis, accessibility cannot be treated as an optional feature added after the fact. Safe, affordable, accessible housing is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for participating in community life.

Jimothy reminds us of something beautiful about ourselves. Our first instinct was compassion. No one demanded that he change before he deserved affection. No one suggested his body made him less worthy of existing. People simply accepted that he belonged.

Imagine extending that instinct beyond a viral raccoon.

Imagine a Vermont where every sidewalk, school, apartment building, workplace, and public meeting was designed with disabled people in mind from the beginning instead of retrofitted later. A Vermont where nobody had to choose between employment and healthcare. A Vermont where disability was treated not as an individual burden but as a shared responsibility to remove unnecessary barriers.

That vision requires more than goodwill. It requires investing in accessible housing, reliable public transportation, universal healthcare, strong labor protections, and public services that allow everyone to participate fully in civic life. It requires recognizing that dignity is not something earned through productivity or independence. It belongs to every person simply because they are a person.

Loving Jimothy costs us nothing.

Building a Vermont where disabled people can live with security, independence, and dignity will require resources, political courage, and collective action.

One is a viral moment. Viral moments fade, the values they reveal don’t have to.

The compassion we showed Jimothy is worth celebrating. The challenge now is extending that same instinct to our neighbors and building a Vermont that reflects it.

Monthly Newsletter of the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America

Brett A., Secretary. We talk about “solidarity” a lot as socialists, whether standing in it, or singing our favorite songs about it. It’s a simple concept that can seem somewhat mystified in our current political climate. We are conditioned to think “Everyone for themselves”, looking out for our own self-interest only, selling our skills on the market as a single economic unit, casting a single vote within limits already marked out by elites. Solidarity is the antidote to the chill of this lonesome individualism. And it does not entail a hive-mind-like unity as if we were a colony of ants or bees. Solidarity is not unity, but it is cohesion of diversity across differences. We may disagree on specific tactics, but we know to come together and support one another, basking in the warmth of shared struggle. 

What’s crucial is that solidarity is not merely a feeling, it is made real in action. There is nothing more empowering and more indicative of our shared humanity than fighting for your neighbor, on the picket line, at city hall, on the streets or whatever terrain we call home. As socialists, these bonds need to be reconstructed, and I encourage you to spread solidarity wherever you go. Our work will require us to organize with those whose politics are close to ours to extreme opposites, yet we know that all humans are siblings and that is the power we must harness to achieve our goals.    

* * *

Interested in contributing? Send submissions to bit.ly/SubmitRedStar, or get involved with our Communications Committee. Reach out to steering@rocdsa.org and join DSA today!

The post Rochester Red Star | August 2026 | (Issue 28) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Bush is fighting to reclaim a seat in the U.S. House that was lost to a historic barrage of cash in 2024. Election day in Missouri is Aug. 4.

The post Cori Bush Hopes to Extend the Black Radical Tradition appeared first on Democratic Left.

From Thomas Paine to Social Security, Americans have fought for state provision for those in need.

The post Welfare Transfers are a Proud U.S. Tradition appeared first on Democratic Left.

By Asanti M

We will all be sick, but we will not all receive care. Our mortality guarantees the former, but it is the system, chosen for us, that forces us to cope with the latter. For the unempathetic or short-sighted among us, the latter is a sad fact, but one not worthy of any recourse. They see themselves as happily positioned to receive their care and don’t dare dream that they will ever count themselves among the sick. To them, there exists a stark separation between those who will and who won’t receive healthcare: the deserving and the listless, the good and the wicked, so on and so forth. Whatever rationale is necessary to obfuscate the human condition of ailment is employed to justify a perverse system.   

The collective effort to care for the sick stands as a testament to the inherent communal nature of human life in which two important points ought to be discerned. First, there’s recognition of the necessity of communal bonds. To organize and use resources on the impaired as opposed to the healthy suggests either a strong utility to gain from the health of others, or an emotional bend towards the preservation of another that surpasses the expense necessary to care for them. Of course, both can be true at once. Second, ailment is a universality embedded in the human condition in which we all can empathetically enter, to some degree. Therefore, some semblance of systematic healthcare that promotes communal health and safeguards the fragility of life naturally emerges as a joint effort to alleviate one’s own suffering. Healthcare, being an extension of communal relations and common sentiments, is then naturally positioned as a public good.  

The contortion of healthcare into a product sold solely to maximize monetary ends, fundamentally alters how we discuss and analyze the preservation of life. This peculiar transmutation yields the very sinister consequence in which callous indifference is amplified and allowed to tear apart the very basic ties of empathy. This virulent apathy numbs the public to the condemnation of our neighbors who are left to the selfish and subversive schemes of profiteers, whose existence is made entirely on maximizing public extraction. The conversation shifts from life and death, suffering and repose, to the economic jargon that surrounds the client-supplier model and wholly conceals the humanitarian gravity of such a callous approach.  These profiteers move to restrict the communal aspect of healthcare fully ceding any semblance of its humanitarian nature until the sick and suffering become unwitting consumers. All talk of preservation of life loses meaning when the preservation of dividends supersedes its importance and constricts its application. 

The apathy elicited by the transformation of healthcare exists not solely as a natural byproduct of the commodification, but as a sought-after condition that must be met in order to maximize the profitability of suffering. Under the benign contentment of apathy, an all too familiar structure takes root.  Executives are selected to manage funds and generate profits; administrators are hired to push efficiencies towards cost reduction; and managers enter as mediators between bureaucratic will and clinical expertise. With such a normative system in place it’s difficult to see the intrinsic contradictions that produce its disparities until we look among its victims. Far too many of us are forced to weigh the options of an agonizing abstinence, or seek care that thrust us into destitution. The hailed “market forces” drive the public to the upper limit of what they can afford at which point the invisible hand of the market becomes indistinguishable from the sordid hand of death. Both equally unfeeling and equally cold. The atmosphere of apathy transitions to a confused helplessness as the general public questions “how did we get here” and any answer provided sums up to “this is how things have to be”.   

With the inquisition underway, the public forcefully ascribes their poor conditions to a variety of pernicious players, accusing them of all manner of “rule breaking” leading to the degradation of the system. This line of thought mistakenly grants too much consequence and culpability to the disposition of individual players and fails to see the ghost in the machine, the invisible hand. To perform well in an environment bent on making profit is to shift efforts towards that end as demanded by competition or collusion, despite how scrupulous an individual might be. What results is a race yielding higher and higher costs of care, even if it means neglecting the preservation of life. This is not to say that any one profiteer acts as an exceptionally malevolent operator but acknowledges that their motives are entirely irrelevant when positioned within a system designed to commodify life and wellness. Competition rewarded based on the generation of revenue bends the health care industry towards extraction. Hospitals, insurance agencies, pharmaceuticals, medical device companies, medical coders, etc. all claw to extract as much wealth from the public as possible. This economic position is by no means unique, but when adopted by health care it’s difficult to distinguish lifesaving medical treatment from extortion. The makeup of such a system leaves culpability lost in its machinery. Employers move to stay alive in response to market forces and employees follow suit so as to not become victims themselves. Cornered clinicians are reduced to cogs, and whether ambivalent or begrudging, complicity becomes the defining mode of all components. Each piece turns independently towards their personal wellbeing, and in doing so inadvertently line the gears perfectly to perpetuate our Machiavellian healthcare machine. 

The life of our Frankenstein system requires close collusion between those who benefit from its monstrous design, and the absolute atomization of all who blindly grasp its contours with their hopes and fears in hand. Collective action is reserved for the corporate but fiercely condemned amongst the “consumers” and the “cogs”. Collusion at every junction of our system forces both prices and public confusion to outpace legislation as monopolies systematically tip the scale in their favor. It’s imperative that “consumers” remain impotent and assert no will that runs contrary towards the higher purpose of profit if healthcare is to exist solely as a commodity. The ideal consumer becomes both the perpetrator and the victim. Under the cloak of apathy, the national exaltation of the individual over the community begets an ecosystem ideal to undermine any step towards humanitarian solidarity. However, in true dialectical fashion, the conditions forced on the majority become a unifying factor, fomenting the prerequisites for change and tearing at the seams of apathy. The countless barriers to access once again make the inescapable nature of ailment front and center in the national consciousness. Through the lens of solidarity any system that forces such a cruel reality on far too many of us becomes criminal; the callous discussions surrounding human life become untenable; and the humanitarian position becomes emboldened. The unified potential of the uncared-for drives discussions both foreboding and inspiring as an opportunity to steer history emerges.   

Further Reading

• An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal 
• Priced Out by Uwe E. Reinhardt 
• The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good by Michael J. Sandel 
• Evicted by Matthew Desmon

The post To Care for the Sick: Thoughts of an ICU RN first appeared on Red Fault.

by Megan N

Indian Myths and Legends: The Pleiades – The Creation – The Coming of the Chinigchinich – The Island of the Dead By Reuben Kadish

The first piece I saw on the recent Austin DSA “field trip” to the Blanton Museum of Art was Indian Myths and Legends: The Pleiades – The Creation – The Coming of the Chinigchinich – The Island of the Dead (1937-41) by Reuben Kadish¹. It wasn’t really fair to the rest of the works in the exhibit, to start off so strong.

The blurb in the museum said he was born to immigrant parents from Kovno, or presently Lithuania. His Wikipedia page² adds the context that this land was under the Russian Empire at the time of his birth, and that his father had been a part of the General Jewish Labor Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party, before emigrating. Wikipedia does not mention his mother, Ida Saks, whose name I found from a biography website that seems to have been written by a descendent³.

As an artist for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Kadish made plans and sketched “studies” for as many as twenty murals, but only two were accepted and completed: Physical Growth of Man / History of Medicine (1936)⁴ and Dissertation on Alchemy (1937)⁵. Both were heavily inspired by his time in Mexico with muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The museum label said he ascribed his rejections to their being “too flamboyant, too revolutionary, too this, too that.” Regardless, he still got paid for coming up with ideas. Artists hired for the WPA were salaried and paid by the week, not by commission or output.

Left: Photograph of Dissertation on Alchemy (1937) by Reuben Kadish.

Right: Photograph of a section of Physical Growth of Man/History of Medicine (1936) by Reuben Kadish and Philip Guston.

Among those flamboyant and revolutionary rejections was Indian Myths and Legends. I’m a sucker for anything with space references in it. The Pleiades is a star cluster that has six stars visible to the unaided, 20/20 eye; seven, if you are atop a mountain with perfectly clear skies and a new moon; and over a thousand stars if you have a telescope to help you out. The Western understanding of the Pleiades as the “Seven Sisters” comes from Greek mythology, as many of our astronomical names do. The Greek story involves young women, all mothers, who were fleeing the hunter Orion (a nearby constellation) who relentlessly pursued them for their beauty.

It’s one of the myths that’s strikingly similar across the world. Kadish lived in southern California for most of his life, where the Payómkawichum (Luiseño) and Tongva (Gabrieliño, Fernandeño)⁶ peoples understood the Pleiades as women escaping death by retreating to the skies. I could not find why the women were fleeing death in the Payómkawichum version, but they do so via a rope, and they cut the rope while a man is trailing behind them. He ends up as a bright star separate from the Pleiades, in the constellation we know as Taurus⁷. In the Tongva tale, the women “found out their partners were holding back food from the community” and catapulted themselves into space. One of the men came back home with food for his partner after all, and loved her so much that he, too, rushed to the skies, becoming the entirety of Taurus⁸.

Kadish’s representation sits six cave-like drawings of bodies at the center-left on a gray background, with two more to the right, these separated on a blue background and sitting just underneath a large red-and-black body that I presume represents the men in the stories who followed the women into space, lagging just behind.

How curious that the Pleiades cluster, visible from most of Earth in the winter as long as you’re not at the South Pole, has been so universally perceived as women, let alone as runaways and escape artists. The stories almost certainly predate ancient Greece⁹. Kadish’s depiction mostly evades gender, but I don’t know if the work would have struck me in the same way without its amorphous bodies swimming alongside the fish, without the sharp skeletons dancing on their postmortem island.

I found no history or analysis of this piece online. I wonder from whom he heard these stories, and what he hoped to convey to Americans had it become a WPA-sponsored mural after all. Kadish’s political convictions were no secret; he and Philip Guston are responsible for a mural in Mexico so momentous that it has multiple names (though I favor The Struggle against War and Fascism). The mural had to be hidden behind a fake wall for three decades after being deemed offensive by the Catholic Church. Both men were also targeted by the Los Angeles police’s “Red Squads” for making art with the Marxist-affiliated John Reed Clubs to protest the racist trial of the Scottsboro Boys¹⁰. The LAPD didn’t just destroy a dozen paintings, they shot at the people depicted in each one. Kadish was already familiar with this kind of persecution: his childhood home had been ransacked for his father’s “Bolshevik sympathies.” He continually spoke about worker’s rights and the abolition of class in interviews throughout his life. Why the artistic focus on indigenous mythology?

In 1943, not long after his stint with the WPA, Kadish was recruited to document the war as an Army artist. In an interview conducted with Kadish a few months before his passing in 1992, he had this to say about the impact of the war on his art:

“Well, you can’t have the impact of the horrendousness of the kind of death that the world had seen without asking yourself some questions as to where we came from and where do we think we’re going, and who’s your mother and who’s your father, and who do you think you can choose to find in this world of ours? … In all religions, and when we read the [stories] that seem to be most gratifying … they’re the ones that we least understand. They’re the ones that have more poetic elements in them, that carry out more than just the fringe of what a mother figure is all about.”¹¹

But Indian Myths was made before Kadish had seen that “kind of death” up close in a war. He was clearly thinking about storytelling, creation, and loss before then. Did he witness another kind of death in his youth that compelled his interest in these themes? Political repression and the police state followed him throughout his formative years. Yet his art highlighted the humanity of nearly everyone but himself. Kadish chose solidarity, reminding us that we achieve universal dreams of peace and livelihood by working as a collective, that disconnected people across the world can look at a blurry patch of sky and see the same vision.

Works Cited

1.  https://blanton.emuseum.com/objects/21172/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuben_Kadish
3. https://kadishart.org/biography-reuben/
4. https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/city-of-hope-guston-and-kadish-mural-duarte-ca/
5. https://digitalcollections.sdsu.edu/do/814f8546-f84f-41bc-9082-74c4f41b1af4
6. I only provided the Spanish-given names to make one’s independent research easier, as I found these names were used more often in text.
7. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/before-the-telescope
8. https://www.lacountyarts.org/experiences/civic-art/memory-and-futurity-yaangna
9. https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568
10. https://reubenkadish.org/publication/double-consciousness-in-mexico/
11. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-reuben-kadish-12170

The post Reflections on Austin DSA’s Field Trip to the Blanton Museum of Art first appeared on Red Fault.

by Eugene V. Debs

Eugene V. Debs (1855 – 1926) was a labor leader and socialist candidate for president. As president of the American Railway Union, Debs took part in the Pullman Strike. Debs was arrested when federal judges issued an injunction, and forces were dispatched to stop the strikes.

Debs was sentenced to six months in jail, during which time he “began to read and think and dissect the anatomy of the system in which workingmen, however organized, could be shattered and battered and splintered at a single stroke,” and became a socialist. In the following excerpt [PDF], published on July 4, Debs reflects on the supposed American liberties of our founding, and decries their betrayal in the “despotic decree” of the injunction. – GLH

Sitting in Woodstock Jail, behind prison bars, and permitting my fancy to have free rein, what more natural than to contemplate the resounding acclamations of a great nation celebrating the anniversary of the birthday of Liberty? What more natural than to commune with the dead, who, when living, in the spirit of heroism expanded to the full stature of patriots and dared all things, battles, wounds, imprisonment, confiscation, and death, to secure liberty for themselves and their posterity.

But in the midst of such ardent admiration of the men who wrested the scepter from England’s proud monarch and secured for the American people the priceless boon of liberty, I am compelled to ponder present conditions and ask myself, “What remains of the liberty thus secured for the American people? Why celebrate the ‘birthday’ of American liberty when Liberty itself lies cold and stiff and dead, stabbed to death by nine gowned and ermined men, who, if they have any mission connected with the affairs of the American people, it is to forever stand guard over their constitutional and unalienable rights.”

It has been regarded as a patriotic duty for Americans, on the 4th of July, to apostrophize Liberty and to select from the vocabularies of all languages eulogistic words to describe its value and its glory, and when words failed to express those essential attributes of liberty which made life itself an inferior blessing, bonfires have blazed, cannons have belched their thunder, banners have waved, drums have throbbed, and bugle blasts have called the people to assemble and rejoice together over God’s inscrutable decree in bestowing upon Americans blessings denied to all other peoples, kindreds, and tongues since time began. Nor do I doubt that on this anniversary such exhibitions will be repeated, but it will be a hollow mockery. The stage will be gorgeous with scenery for the play of liberty, but liberty will be absent – only its ghost will appear, only its “canonized bones” will be present; only its skeleton jaws will move to tell American slaves that the supreme “funeral directors” have buried it in a potter’s field without so much as a slab to mark its resting place.

And yet the farce will proceed, and orators will be found to bombard the air to convince the people that in the nation’s grand march across the continent and in its physical achievements, the ultima thule of its destiny has been reached. If liberty is referred to at all, it will be to emphasize the plutocratic doctrine that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people and constitutional guarantees of liberty are as so many vagaries and that a strong, centralized government is what the Fathers designed should be established upon the ruins of the Republic, and that the Constitution itself, ceasing to be a guarantee of the liberties of the people, should be eventually so construed that one man, robed, crowned, and sceptered as a judge, combining the characteristics of caitiff and satrap, could, as whim might influence him, strike down every constitutional right of the citizen and send him to prison. . . .

If the anniversary of the 4th of July is devoted to arousing the American people to a realization of their great misfortune, if they will resolve to regain their liberties by renewing he pledge of the Fathers to perish or conquer, then Woods and Woodstock Jail may stand in the future monumental infamies, from which the people may go forth as did the revolutionary heroes from the infamous edicts of King George to regain their lost liberties – and all along the lines of the hosts of the common people, the victims of plutocracy and their corrupt agencies, should resound again the battle cry that was heard from Lexington to Yorktown: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

The post Liberty’s Anniversary (1895) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Wondering which U.S. labor law protects your job? Learn if your sector (private, public, gig, rail, or ag) has the legal right to organize, strike, and unionize.

The post Federal labor rights: A sectoral guide to organizing appeared first on EWOC.