You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in New York City broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

Our latest episode of "Heart of a Heartless World" is a recording of the latest webinar put on by the Religion & Socialist working group. On July 16th, Linda Sarsour, the co-founder of Until Freedom and former co-chair of the Women’s March, spoke with Rev. Andrew Wilkes, a pastor, policy director, and member of Religious Socialism’s editorial group, about how faith traditions can help undergird abolition, undo structural racism, and push toward a fundamental restructuring of our political economy. This Thursday, August 20th, at 7:30pm EDT, Rev. Wilkes will be in conversation with Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, National Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, on how to build an inclusive movement for economic justice. We hope you enjoy the podcast, and can join us at the webinar! Go here to RSVP: https://act.dsausa.org/survey/Building_Inclusive_Movement_Economic_Justice_Liz_Theoharris/

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM

Buffalo DSA’s new steering committee is passionate about building vibrant workgroups that check in with each other at general meetings. These workgroups give volunteers opportunities to participate in, learn about, and truly advance socialist initiatives in a variety of different meaningful ways. Please contact info@buffalodsa.org to be connected to a workgroup!

Labor: Advances political education and truly local support for worker’s rights & strikes, labor organizer training and support

IT: Facilitates internal data, safety, and technology initiatives

Healthcare: Organizes campaigns to pressure local politicians to co-sponsor legislations such as Medicare for All, the Emergency Healthcare Guarantee Act, and the New York Health Act, alongside political education on the material benefits of healthcare reform

Electoral: Organizing around a long-term political infrastructure and electoral strategy to gain socialist power

Ecosocialist: Political education and organizing around the need to center the working class in a Green New Deal to transform our climate policy and economy

Political Education: Reading and discussion groups on vital literature to the socialist project

SocFem: Organizing on local material socialist feminist issues, as well as reading and discussion groupsHousing: Advancing tenant organizing, rent control, and a tenant’s bill of rights in our communities.

Media: Developing a socialist newsletter, compiling media to advance political education of the public, and running social media channels.

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our websites revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or rednet.socialists.nyc as well as on twitter @nycRPM.

The Champlain Valley DSA is excited to announce the endorsement of an excellent slate of candidates for the 2020 elections. Meet the candidates below.
We will also be hosting a Meet the Candidates webinar with endorsed candidates for the state legislature on Monday, July 27. Register for the webinar or tune in live on Facebook.
Finally, don't forget to request your absentee ballot today and help get these candidates into the State House.

Trump is desperate. The pandemic, recession, and uprising for Black lives have undermined his popularity and wrecked his credibility. His polls are plummeting across the country, even in the so-called “red states.”

To salvage his failing regime and hopes for reelection, Trump has turned to law and order racism and repression. At first, he tried to order the military to repress protests against racism and police brutality, but the generals blocked him.

So, instead, he deployed federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security to crush the movement in Portland, Oregon. He’s sending them to Chicago, Seattle, New York, Oakland, and over a dozen cities across the country.

These agents evoke memories of the Gestapo. Their uniforms do not have identification, they patrol the city in unmarked vans, and they pack military grade weaponry.

They have teargassed protesters, beaten them, and detained many without charges in undisclosed locations. Trump’s storm troopers are a threat to our democratic rights and their deployment must be stopped immediately.

Portland Shows Us How to Fight

Trump hoped to intimidate Portland with outright repression. But his strategy has backfired, spurring the movement for Black lives to grow bigger, broader, and more radical.

Parents of protesters formed a “Wall of Moms” and a “Wall of Dads” to protect activists. The dads showed up with leaf blowers to disperse the stormtrooper’s teargas.

More groups are joining them. Organized workers have established a “Wall of Unions” and military veterans built a “Wall of Vets.” The protests have become so militant that they successfully forced the Feds to retreat to their headquarters.

Portland has shown us how to resist. We must follow their lead and rise up against the deployment of Trump’s storm troopers everywhere. In the words of the anti-fascist movement in Spain against Franco in the 1930s, we must say “No Pasarán!”—“You Shall Not Pass!”

Bringing the War Home

Who are these federal agents? They all come from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It was formed as part of the so-called War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. We know that war is based on lies. It has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with empire and oil.

The US set up DHS to be its domestic arm of the war abroad. It houses among other agencies the Federal Marshalls, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and ICE’s Border Tactical Unit (BORTAC) that are right now deployed in Portland and elsewhere. They usually police the borders as well as surveil, arrest, and deport undocumented immigrants, Arabs, and Muslims.

Trump has now turned this giant apparatus of repression against the uprising for Black lives and against all of us. Thus, as Martin Luther King said during the Vietnam War, “the bombs dropped abroad explode at home.”

Will the Democratic Party Resist Trump?

Thankfully the Democratic Party has objected to the stormtrooper’s deployment. But let’s be honest about the Democrats. They supported the establishment of DHS. Obama used ICE to deport more immigrants than any other president in US history.

Our own Senator Leahy secured contracts with DHS and ICE to establish their operations in Vermont. ICE’s office in Williston centralizes national information on undocumented workers and informs agents to arrest and deport them across the country.

Even worse, some Democrats are collaborating with Trump. Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that she would welcome his agents on the condition that they police violent crime in her city. In other words, she will aid and abet federal police brutality.

Other Democratic Party governors and mayors oppose the deployment, but not on anti-racist grounds. They say their state troopers and local police can control protests and fight crime.

That is no alternative. We don’t want state troopers and local cops repressing our protests and policing our cities. They are part of the problem, not the solution.

Defund DHS, ICE and the Police!

Regardless, Trump won’t listen to the Democrats. He will deploy his storm troopers if we do not organize mass actions to stop him. Here in Vermont, we have a responsibility to demonstrate at the ICE and DHS offices in Williston.

They help Trump carry out repression in our state and across the country. Community Voices for Immigrant Rights already staged an emergency action in Burlington and will soon announce plans for a protest in Williston.

We all have a stake in this fight. As Martin Luther King declared, “a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Trump is attacking immigrants, Black people, Muslims, Arabs, and Indigenous people.

In repressing demonstrations, he is undermining our collective right to organize, assemble, and fight for justice, equality and freedom. And he’s wasting our money on this repression and policing. That’s why we must unite and fight to defund DHS, ICE and the police and eventually abolish them.

We should take all that money and pay reparations to Black people and other groups oppressed by the US at home and abroad as well as fund jobs programs, Medicare for All, social services, and a Green New Deal. Amidst the pandemic and recession, it is time to invest in programs that put the needs of oppressed people, the working class, and the environment first.

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM

July 25, 2020 07:46

Right now, in the midst of COVID-19, we have a President, a Secretary of Education, and a capitalist class that is desperate to ignore the growing epidemiological threat that COVID-19 presents, and specifically the threat presented by re-opening schools full time in the Fall. This neglect could be a ploy to direct funds away from public education and into private schools, while at the same time putting teachers, staff, students, and their families and loved ones at risk. But not going back to full time, in-person school hasl material impacts — we lack any semblance of basic social democracy, so we don’t have sufficient subsidized child care for working parents and we won’t have sufficient unemployment income support for parents who have to stay at home because their kids are at home. Because that kind of subsidization and support is expensive, the brutal logic of capital prevails: re-open the schools, no matter how many more may die.

Like everything else about the COVID crisis, the contradictions reveal themselves and sharpen. We saw, a few years ago, an inspiring round of anti-austerity teacher’s strikes. Imagine a nationwide teacher’s strike on these demands. Imagine a nationwide strike, not just teachers, on these demands. Teachers’ unions are not interested in turning their schools into abattoirs and charnel houses for their members and charges. Organized teacher and staff labor strategy under this pandemic is a complicated issue, especially because the paramount demand — don’t open up schools in-person — if met creates massive economic harm and material consequences if not accompanied by demands for massive public spending on childcare and income assistance. But, we know the power workers, and teachers in particular, can wield when they strike. It is a massive, almost unimaginably difficult thing to accomplish. And these demands directly link to other vital demands to ensure basic social safety and health: M4A and social housing and rent control. It is enormously tricky for striking workers to coordinate the immediate need to avoid the danger of re-opening in-person school, the need for state action to replace public schools’ vital role in our meager social safety net (as they provide students food, social services like counseling, and childcare in addition to education), and the broader social demands that would blunt the harms of both this pandemic and capital in general. A nationwide teacher’s strike, if it could happen, won’t work unless parents support it. It is one thing for parents to deal with the inconvenience of teachers striking for a few days or weeks, it is another for them to support a strike to keep schools closed indefinitely. Perhaps demands must broaden further: bigger schools to make social distancing effective, hiring more teachers to reduce class sizes, hiring more staff to ensure regular disinfection, etc.

I’m a parent, so I think about this dilemma a lot. Given the absurdity of our federal system, we have thousands of different state, county, municipal boards of health, governors, mayors, city councils, school boards, making ad hoc and ill-advised decisions and rules on COVID, while the federal government’s response has been at turns incoherent, incompetent, and savage. Gavin Newsom is held up like a hero by liberals, and while less homicidal than many other governors, he’s too chicken shit to even make a proclamation on whether or how youth sports should be conducted. Parents are worried about how they can work if this crisis continues, and there is no coherence, no movement at the school level, much less at the county or state or nationally.

Now, it is clear that absent a mass popular movement pressuring the state, nothing like M4A or any of these other demands will happen. But the current crisis cannot wait for a realignment or a break, dirty or a clean, from the Democrats, nor can the protections and support students need be accomplished through electoral campaigning, because we are talking about a matter of months before schools ostensibly re-open. Regardless, the Democratic Party, institutionally incapable of working through its own contradictions, can only be pushed from the outside on these demands, because it will close ranks internally to make sure anything like M4A is off the table. The demands required of this crisis are potentially even bigger than M4A. The ruling class will oppose them more viciously than ever, because the demands require massive and unacceptable redistribution. But, the alternative is more dystopia, more failure, a deadly malaise. How can we organize a movement for a humane future?

John R. Parker, Jr.

(Maximas gratias ago to Bob Hodges for his helpful suggestions on this.)