Through U.S. history and around the world, people have understood that taxation of the wealthy is crucial to a democratic political system.

The post Taxing the Rich Means Taking Their Power appeared first on Democratic Left.

Arielle Clynes was an integral volunteer in the early years of EWOC, building our crucial structures and setting us on a path to success.

The post Remembering Arielle Clynes appeared first on EWOC.

By Dan M.

On May 5, a 3–3 vote in Clawson’s city council to continue the city’s Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) contract with Flock Safety resulted in the cancellation of that contract. Clawson is the third city in Oakland County to cancel its contract with Flock after my hometown, Rochester, and current home, Ferndale. Folks around the country are pushing for their cities to cancel contracts with ALPR companies.

What is Flock? What are ALPRs? What can you do about them? How many puns on Flock and the f-bomb can I make in under 1500 words? Let’s see.

What the Flock are ALPRS?

Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are computer-controlled cameras that read license plates and send that data — including the image, time, and location — to a storage system for use by the police. These cameras may be mounted to poles, police vehicles, or even handheld devices. The ALPR software analyzes information like license plate number and make/model and compares it to a “hot list” of vehicles associated with certain offenses, allowing officers to more quickly track down targets.

ALPRs have been used for far more than just official police work, however. Officers and others with camera access have used Flock ALPRs to stalk their romantic interests. The Institute for Justice has documented 14 cases that occurred since 2024. In May 2025, authorities in Texas used ALPRs across multiple states to track a woman seeking reproductive healthcare where it is legal. Flock sales employees even used their cameras to surveil a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community center, and a pool as part of a sales pitch.

ALPRs enable authorities to watch people who, even by the logic of the law, don’t need to be watched. It pains me to reference Orwell here, but truly, ALPRs are bringing Big Brother to life. Additionally, data collected by ALPRs is often retained by the companies indefinitely and used to train AI.

Flock is using ALPRs, as well as drones and other technology, to create a mass surveillance network all over the country. Flock makes attractive offers to police departments to install cameras for low or even no cost and has done trials with Border Patrol. Drivers often help to pay for the technology through fees on top of the tickets they pay. Flock also offers “free trial” periods for its technology, as it recently did to Oakland County with drones. Flock is happy to accept as compensation whatever data it can get. Flock is not the only purveyor of ALPRs, either. Axon Enterprise, Inc., the company formerly known as TASER International and as the inventor of its former namesake, is also an ALPR vendor.

Go Flock Yourself, Ferndale

Ferndale city council approved a contract with Flock in March 2023, after it was proposed the previous December. The Ferndale Inclusion Network (FIN), a local activist group that MD-DSA’s Ferndale Area Organizing Committee (FAOC) organizes alongside, has been advocating against ALPRs since the introduction of the initial contract. Members of FIN and FAOC, as well as other citizens of Ferndale and neighboring cities, went to city council meetings for years to speak against Flock. Our work got attention from more and more citizens, who joined in our organizing work. A few of them even joined DSA.

Also during this time, the city held multiple “community engagement” sessions that mostly consisted of Flock representatives and/or police officers giving a presentation in favor of ALPRs, followed by public comment. Despite frequent requests and even promises from the city, these meetings never included a presenter against ALPRs, such as a representative from the ACLU.

At later sessions, these presentations used the March 2025 murder of a DoorDash driver as a case study in favor of ALPRs, saying that Flock cameras were essential for tracking down the suspect. However, their case study mostly used footage from private CCTV cameras, not Flock cameras. Additionally, city officials supporting Flock frequently assured us that data from our ALPRs would never be shared with ICE, other federal agencies, or other police departments, as this would violate our policy with Flock.

During a city council meeting on September 29, 2025, an audit of Ferndale’s Flock data by councilperson Laura Mikulski, who had consistently voted against ALPRs, revealed that federal agencies and police departments from around the country had been allowed to access the city’s data using a National Lookup Search option. Who could possibly have seen this coming? Ferndale then cancelled the contract with Flock. City officials such as the mayor and police chief framed the issue as specific to Flock, saying that Flock was “a bad actor,” but wanted another ALPR vendor.

The city then announced it was seeking a new ALPR contract with Axon. After the community continued to put pressure on city council not to sign, council eventually decided to compromise by making the contract contingent on passing a surveillance ordinance. This ordinance was based on the Detroit Citizen Input Over Government Surveillance (CIOGS) model and was to be voted on by city council. Members of FOAC and FIN and other citizens raised concerns about the proposed 30-day retention period, as well as repeated use of “exigent circumstances” as a justification for the suspension of rules without a clear definition of when these circumstances would apply.

By the time the ordinance came to a vote in February 2026, DSA member Eddie Sabatini had been inaugurated to the city council, meaning a majority now opposed ALPRs. The ordinance failed in a 3–2 vote, resulting in no contract with Axon and making Ferndale an ALPR-free city!

In April 2026, Laura Mikulski posted data from the September 2025 audit on her Facebook page. This audit included who performed these searches, search terms, how many times a search time was used, and more. Less than 1% of searches of Ferndale’s Flock data were made by Ferndale police officers. There were hundreds of searches using terms related to immigration, graffiti, anti-Trump protests, and littering. There was also one search using the term “Hamburger [sic].” This audit is a fantastic case study in how individual city ALPR systems are part of a larger mass surveillance network.

We’re Tired of These Motherflockin’ Cameras in Our Motherflockin’ Cities

What can you do about ALPRs in your city? The FAOC’s anti-ALPR working group is developing a toolkit for organizers. The main reason Flock has so easily been able to slip into cities around the country is that people simply aren’t paying attention. Votes for these contracts are usually public, but if the public isn’t paying attention, they are signed unnoticed.

Attend city council meetings to see if contracts with Flock, Axon, or similar companies are being considered. Speak at these meetings during public comment sections. Bring neighbors and even friends from neighboring cities, as ALPRs affect everyone who ever finds themselves within a particular city’s borders, not just the residents. Here are some arguments against ALPRs and counterarguments against support:

• There exist no formal studies showing that ALPRs are effective at preventing crime. Nada. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero! Any evidence for the effectiveness of ALPRs is anecdotal or from data provided by the companies themselves. Of course companies are going to say their product is effective — that’s their job. It’s our job to point out that their “evidence” is simply marketing.
• If your city council presents a case study in favor of ALPRs, as Ferndale did, pay close attention to the data they use. How much data they present actually comes from ALPRs? As stated earlier, the Ferndale case study mostly used footage from private security cameras, not Flock cameras. Clawson’s case study included the same. Poke holes in their case.
• Companies like Flock and Axon have a long history of shady behavior. For example, Evanston, Illinois, cancelled its contract with Flock after officials found out Flock had violated state law. The story didn’t end there, though. After the cameras were removed, Flock reinstalled the cameras without the city’s permission. Flock doesn’t even play by the rules to which they’ve agreed. In June 2022, nine of 12 members of Axon’s ethics advisory board resigned in response to the company’s plan to develop Taser-equipped drones, stating that they had “lost faith in Axon’s ability to be a responsible partner.” Share examples of these companies’ malfeasance with your city council.

I used to believe the type of pressure we were using on our community leaders didn’t mean much. Having seen the power of it firsthand, I can no longer deny it. The only way we can damage the mass surveillance network being built in our country is to organize a mass of people to oppose it. Find your community and start fighting!

Clusterflock: Automatic License Plate Readers, Mass Surveillance, and What You Can Do was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Conrad Blackburn as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA’s insurgent slate.

The post Conrad Blackburn is Ready to Challenge the Machine appeared first on Democratic Left.

By TZ

Citizens are outraged at Congress for wielding its power in the abusive manner we have witnessed for decades. The Patriot Act routinely violates the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments and leads us to the breaking point we are subjected to today. Frustrations increased exponentially with ICE invading communities, and citizens distrust the government more than ever.

It is important to remember that your federal representative does not hold all levers of power. Activists are protesting and arguing with city officials around the country, attempting to block ICE from infiltrating their communities. During these battles, it is often forgotten that traditional government positions (such as state and federal representatives, senators, mayors) are not the only officials with power to fight ICE. Positions such as superintendents, park directors, library boards can all exercise some level of their power against ICE. An institution that has taken a step in the right direction is Royal Oak School District. On January 29, the District announced new safety protocols that create a much sterner, strict approach for ICE and Border Patrol (CBP).

Key points within these new safety protocols will protect staff, students, and families in the community. First, any ICE and CBP agent that appears at a school building will be properly identified and redirected to the Board Office, and met by the superintendent, legal counsel, and local law enforcement.

Second, if the agents refuse this and attempt to enter the school anyway, the building will enter lockdown mode, which is the safety protocol enacted when an active threat has entered the building or is on school grounds.

Lastly, if ICE or CBP appear during arrival or departure times, the building will enter lockdown mode and an emergency alert will be sent to all families notifying them of the presence of federal agents. The same team — the superintendent, legal counsel, and local law enforcement — would meet the agents on school grounds.

This protocol was in addition to some guidance in the fall on how to speak with federal agents if needed. This included contacting administrators, protecting identities of all students, and requiring a legal warrant signed by a judge.

This protocol creates reasonable guidelines that should be expected of any school district, but not all districts do so. It is imperative for citizens to ask for their school district’s safety plans for ICE/CBP, and to demand more from the school board and superintendent if they are lacking. Schools are able to provide strict protection of students and have the capabilities to alert families as well.

It is important to note that this policy has not been tested yet — there have not been any federal agents on school grounds in Royal Oak. It is unknown who the Royal Oak police will truly side with if the situation occurs. Police departments across the country have not exactly given citizens reason to trust police to protect them from lawless federal agents.

A superintendent and/or school board using some of their limited power to create safeguards in their community against fascism is a perfect example of power that citizens can direct their attention to. Royal Oak is a community known for leaning liberal — — parents and students were outraged last fall when a Turning Point USA Chapter was created at Royal Oak High School, resulting in student walkouts and protests. Students consistently protesting fascist issues and citizens demanding transparency from the Royal Oak City Commission helps pressure school district officials into creating policies, or shows they will have support for such protections when they create them. Activism is not only about forcing those who are resistant to make positive change, but also about providing support for those who are hesitant to make bold moves.

Local institutions like schools, libraries, and parks can be some very specific zones that citizens can pressure to create protective policies for their community. After all, change often happens from the bottom up. Readers interested in stricter ICE protocol in their local school district should gather a coalition of like-minded parents and citizens to voice their concerns at school board meetings. The same approach can be applied for city commissions, library boards, etc. The more businesses, institutions, and citizens that take stances against ICE, the more likely a city or state is to create a safer protocol.

School Districts Can Oppose ICE was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[[{“value”:”

By: Ashraf Hazeyen

Every semester, the adjunct professor walks into the classroom carrying the full symbolic weight of the university while possessing almost none of its protections. He enters with a syllabus, readings, assignments, office hours, and the responsibility of making a discipline feel alive to students who may never know the terms of his employment. In that room, he is the university’s voice, its care, and its promise that thought still matters. Then the class ends, the students leave, the emails continue, and the institution that needed him for its mission offers him only a temporary place in its life.

Adjunct professors are contingent, non-tenure-track faculty members usually hired on temporary contracts to teach specific courses. They often perform the central work of the university itself: preparing classes, teaching, grading, mentoring, and sustaining intellectual life in the classroom, while frequently lacking the security and institutional protections attached to permanent academic positions.

Their labor is usually described through numbers: wages per course, lack of benefits, unstable contracts, and the uncertainty of whether another class will appear next semester. These numbers matter because they shape rent, health care, debt, family planning, and the ordinary dignity of imagining a future. The numbers tell the truth, but not the whole truth. The adjunct is present where the university performs its mission and unsettled where the university distributes continuity, status, and institutional memory.

This arrangement did not appear by accident. According to data from the American Association of University Professors, nearly 75 percent of instructional staff in American higher education now work outside the tenure system. Contingency no longer exists at the edges of academic life; it increasingly defines the structure through which the university teaches, adapts, and reproduces itself. Universities rely on adjunct and contingent appointments to sustain undergraduate teaching at lower long-term cost even as administrative structures and managerial layers continue to expand.  The system grew inside a university increasingly shaped by enrollment management, administrative expansion, budget flexibility, weakened tenure lines, and the treatment of teaching as adjustable capacity. As institutions planned around fluctuating numbers, shifting programs, and market pressure, contingent labor became the convenient answer to problems described as managerial necessities. The language of efficiency made the transformation sound practical. The cost appeared inside the lives of teachers whose work remained central to the classroom and peripheral to the institution’s durable commitments. Adjunctification taught the university how to preserve its public promise of intellectual depth while relocating the risks of that promise onto the people asked to carry it.

Adaptability has become one of the preferred moral words of modern institutions. For administrators, it means efficiency, responsiveness, and quick adjustment when budgets, enrollment, or priorities shift. For workers, it enters life as fragmentation: a late-changing schedule, a future waiting on approval, a household organized around uncertain income, and a self repeatedly bent around institutional need. The institution calls it adjustment. The worker lives it as interruption. Some lives never gather long enough to become continuous.

Precarity reaches the whole person. Wages matter because they shape rent, food, health, transportation, debt, and the daily conditions of dignity. Unstable labor also enters planning, confidence, family life, intellectual growth, and the person’s sense of continuity. A worker who lives from contract to contract learns to measure life in short intervals. Decisions about housing, children, research, care, rest, and hope pass through the narrow gate of the next assignment. Work organizes the kind of person a future can still produce. When work keeps the future provisional, the worker’s life gathers itself under pressure, always carrying the next uncertainty before it arrives.

Adjunct labor names more than an employment category. It reorganizes the conditions under which teaching, study, and sustained inquiry become possible. The modern university still presents itself as a space devoted to reflection, dialogue, criticism, and public purpose while building much of its educational structure around conditional presence and temporary labor. The contradiction enters the classroom every day. Institutions celebrate thought in mission statements, public speeches, and recruitment materials while placing many of the people responsible for sustaining that work inside unstable conditions.

This instability reaches beyond contracts and salaries. The adjunct belongs intensely to the classroom: to the students, the discussion, the readings, the long hours of preparation, and the fragile moment when an idea begins to matter for someone. His labor turns institutional promises into lived experience while his own place inside the institution remains uncertain. He assembles academic life from borrowed offices, temporary schedules, short appointments, and partial recognition. The instability spreads across space, time, memory, and the long movement through which serious thought gathers shape and continuity.

Spatial instability begins where academic life is expected to continue after class. The adjunct teaches in the building, walks its hallways, answers students’ questions, writes recommendations, and carries much of the university’s daily teaching responsibility while remaining temporary inside the institution he helps sustain. His labor fills the space with meaning, yet the campus gives that labor only a passing address. A student stays after class to discuss a paper, a family crisis, or a sentence in a difficult text that opened a new way of seeing. The conversation happens beside the classroom door, over a library table, in a shared room between appointments, or later inside an email thread. This is the geography of adjunct labor: a living presence carried through borrowed rooms, hallway conversations, and whatever corner the campus leaves available.

Temporal homelessness organizes life through a future that arrives in fragments. The adjunct plans by semester, by enrollment, by contract, by the late appearance of a course on a schedule. January can carry one life, August another. A class opens, fills, shrinks, disappears, or becomes possible only after the budget permits it. One week, the teacher revises a syllabus with care; the next, he checks enrollment numbers, waits for a contract, coordinates travel between campuses, or wonders whether a course that shaped his plans will survive long enough to shape his semester. The university asks him to cultivate duration in others: patience, discipline, growth, intellectual confidence, the ability to think beyond the immediate moment. It places his own duration under semesterly review. That is the temporal wound: the adjunct helps students build futures inside an institution that grants his future one term at a time. Continuity exists for others first.

Intellectual homelessness appears where institutional dependence and institutional recognition move along different paths. Adjuncts shape students’ confidence, curiosity, discipline, and intellectual development while occupying temporary positions inside the institutions they help sustain. Their labor becomes part of the university’s public image of teaching excellence, student care, and transformative education, while permanence gathers around titles, committees, offices, governance structures, and institutional memory. The same instability enters the life of the mind. The adjunct begins again through new courses, new schedules, and new administrative thresholds. Serious thought develops through duration, return, and sustained relation. Teaching gains force through repeated encounters with students, texts, disagreement, failure, and revision. Precarity interrupts that movement before it accumulates weight. The university has built a system in which the labor of inquiry educates others while searching for a dwelling of its own.

Universities still speak beautifully about rigor, and those words still matter. They promise knowledge, transformation, critical thinking, mentorship, citizenship, and lifelong learning. At their best, these words name real human possibilities. A classroom can change the way a student reads the world, and a university can become one of the few places where a society pauses long enough to ask what kind of life is worth building. The fracture begins when this public language of rigor meets a private organization of disposability. The institution celebrates growth, inquiry, and mentorship while arranging much of its teaching labor through temporary contracts, shifting schedules, and adjustable teaching bodies.

The transformation reaches beyond employment structure. The persistence of adjunctification at financially stable institutions makes the pattern difficult to explain through scarcity alone. Large endowments, expanding administrative structures, and visible institutional growth often coexist beside increasing reliance on contingent faculty labor. The university preserves permanence unevenly, concentrating stability in some areas while normalizing uncertainty in others. Universities continue to describe themselves as spaces devoted to knowledge, reflection, and long-term inquiry while increasing dependence on contingent labor organized around flexibility, cost efficiency, and short-term institutional adaptation. Teaching remains publicly celebrated as central to the university’s mission even as the conditions surrounding teaching grow increasingly unstable. The contradiction gradually reshapes the meaning of academic life itself.

Many students experience the university through courses taught by adjuncts, lecturers, visiting instructors, and contingent faculty who carry much of the university’s everyday intellectual labor. They design assignments, guide discussions, grade carefully, meet students in moments of uncertainty, and translate the institution’s mission into actual encounters. Their labor gives coherence to the student experience. The arrangement carries its own pressure: the institution offers students stability through teachers whose own place inside the institution remains conditional.

Time allows ideas to accumulate weight. Thought develops through return, revision, disagreement, silence, and sustained attention. Teaching changes through repeated contact with students, texts, failures, and difficult questions that refuse quick resolution. Universities understand this rhythm well. Their public language praises rigor, inquiry, mentorship, reflection, and careful study. Their labor structures increasingly organize classrooms through speed, replacement, short-term contracts, and administrative flexibility. Knowledge loses durability when institutions build the conditions of teaching around interruption. Adjunctification exposes the contradiction clearly: universities celebrate inquiry in public while placing much of the labor that sustains inquiry inside unstable conditions. 

The crisis begins with adjuncts and opens onto a broader question about modern work. Adjunctification is no longer only a university labor problem; it is becoming one of the models through which modern life organizes human beings: necessary, available, temporary, and always adjustable. A society reveals its priorities through the conditions it gives to the people who sustain its most serious tasks. When teachers live provisionally, thought itself begins to inherit the structure of provisional life. Courses continue, students learn, institutions function, and the surface remains intact. The damage survives below visibility. Beneath that surface, something essential thins out: memory, depth, mentorship, intellectual courage, and the durable relation between a society and the people entrusted with its formation.

The adjunct remains one of the clearest figures of modern work: necessary, available, present, and permanently adjustable.

Dr. Ashraf Hazeyen is a Palestinian-Jordanian philosopher, political commentator for Roya News, and adjunct professor at the University of Rhode Island.

The post Intellectual Homelessness: The Adjunct and the Disappearing University appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

A progressive enclave in northern California attracted participants to disparate issue campaigns. Now, they have a unifying organization with over 100 members.

The post New Chapter in Humboldt County California appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Anna V.

Meat is expensive. It always has been. Prices are higher, sure, but it’s never really been cheap. Many people don’t think of it as the most expensive item but ounce for ounce it is. It’s why when you go to a hotel breakfast buffet the meat will generally be placed at the very end so you fill your plate with the less expensive fruit and bagels and can’t get as much of the pricier sausage and bacon. 

The reason meat costs so much is due to the amount of resources needed to produce it. Before you can slaughter a cow you need to give it feed made from corn and soybeans for one to two years.  Grass fed beef is even more expensive as it takes longer to get a cow up to slaughter weight on grass alone. This is why multiple studies have found that vegetarian diets can be less expensive, because instead of feeding soy beans to a cow for a year or more you can just make them into tofu.

That’s why it is concerning that the new USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans increase the protein recommendations and are emphasizing eating beef – as well as the similarly expensive dairy – to meet those new recommendations. 

It would be one thing if these changes were backed by science, but most nutrition experts heavily disagree with these guidelines. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics released a statement expressing concerns over the new recommendations (source).  Furthermore, the guidelines actually contradict themselves. For example, they keep the recommendation from the previous guidelines to keep saturated fats consumption under 10% of total calorie consumption. However, in the list of recommended cooking fats are “beef tallow, butter, and olive oil,” two of which are saturated fats. Not only would canola and soybean oil be healthier, but they are less expensive, so it seems the new guidelines are going out of their way to make Americans spend more money on worse health.

Now it would be easy to write this off and say, “Well, everyone knows RFK Jr is crazy, no one is going to listen to him.” However these guidelines aren’t just suggestions for the average American. They instruct how federal food programs like WIC and School Lunches are set up. So if the guidelines aren’t making Americans healthier and aren’t reducing costs, who do they benefit? Well luckily they tell us on page 2: “We are realigning our food system to support American farmers, ranchers, and companies who grow and produce real food . . .”

A lot of people think of farmers as working class but don’t let the big trucks and boots fool you. A lot of farms are owned by large companies or families with generational wealth who make their profit exploiting the low paid farm workers who are the ones actually getting their hands dirty. These profits translate into power via groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Global Dairy Platform who go on to influence politics. 

This problem isn’t even unique to the current administration. Probably for as long as you can remember you’ve seen the recommendation that adults need three servings of dairy a day. This has been heavily contested over the years. It’s not that you can’t have a balanced diet with that much dairy in a day, it’s just that it isn’t always necessary. Many people, especially those of non-European backgrounds, get all their nutrients in with little to no dairy. However, it’s in the guidelines and therefore has an effect on government programs. I once spoke to someone who had been on WIC and complained that they gave her way more milk and cheese than she knew what to do with.  

So it seems these new Dietary Guidelines are continuing the theme of taking existing problems in our government and cranking them up to 11. The exact effects on programs like WIC haven’t been seen yet but they’re not likely to help struggling families. However, these guidelines aren’t meant to help them. They are meant to help the wealthy cattle ranchers who will destroy our environment, government, and health if it means increasing their own wealth.

The post My Beef with RFK Jr.: The Problem with the New USDA Dietary Guidelines and Who Really Benefits appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Labor organizer Daniel Gross's new book, Unions of Our Own, helps workers build progressive, militant, and sustainable unions driven by the rank-and-file.

The post Daniel Gross and Unions of Our Own appeared first on EWOC.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Eon Huntley as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA's insurgent slate.

The post Eon Huntley Spearheads Worker-Power in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights appeared first on Democratic Left.