With NY nurses threatening to strike, millions still uninsured and without care, and politicians co-opting our language to describe their capitalist solutions to our healthcare problems, our fight for universal healthcare is at a crossroads. What does advocating for universal healthcare mean for us as people, as workers, and as socialist organizers in an intersectional left movement? Host Amy Wilson will talk to organizer Emma Claire Foley of the NYC-DSA Healthcare Committee about this pivotal moment for universal healthcare in the United States. Get excited for the campaign for universal healthcare in New York State.

It was illegal to be queer in 1969. Homosexuals – as we were all called then – were labeled dangerous and subversive deviants. We were tracked and surveilled by the FBI, considered security risks by the national security apparatus, and rounded up and driven out of cities and into ghettos. Queer spaces were regularly raided by the police; their arrestees humiliated, brutalized, and even tortured. Many of our people lived in abject poverty, especially those who did not conform to the narrow gender constructs of a hostile society.

This was America on June 28, 1969, when ten police officers entered a bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn with the intent to arrest anyone suspected of “deviancy.” The patrons of Stonewall were divided along perceived gender lines. Cross-dressers, a dated term which included what we now call drag queens and transgender individuals, were separated from the rest and forced to expose themselves to police officers. Women in butch clothing were groped and violated under the guise of frisking; a common practice, as wearing an insufficient number of feminine items of clothing was considered a crime. Anyone found to be in violation of rigid gender norms was arrested on the spot.

When the arrestees refused to cooperate, they were brutalized. When one woman protested her treatment, she was beaten over the head with a baton. As outrage grew among the crowd gathering to witness this injustice, what began as a routine crackdown quickly escalated to two days of violent resistance we now call the Stonewall Riots. It is this event we commemorate every year with the celebration of Pride.

Standing on the shoulders of generations before it, Stonewall marked the beginning of the modern struggle for LGBTQ+ equality and, ultimately, liberation. Though Obergefell v Hodges opened the door to an unprecedented era of queer rights and visibility, reactionary efforts to erase these victories have grown just as pronounced. From a ban on transgender people in the military, to a multitude of religiously justified discrimination bills, to homegrown attempts to roll back marriage rights, all under the watch of an increasingly conservative judicial system, we stand to lose everything we have fought so hard to win.

At every stage of this ongoing struggle, the police, as the sanctioned enforcers of the state, have been our opposition and our oppressors. Indeed, it will be the police who drag us out of bathrooms and business places in shackles, who will harass us when our name or gender markers don’t match our “biological sex,” who will drive us into ghettos when we can’t find work. Why, then, are the police permitted a place at the 50th anniversary of the riot that birthed our movement?

The Nashville Metropolitan Police Department has ridiculed transgender members of our community; fought viciously against community oversight voted by a majority of our city; targets, oppresses, and murders black and brown people; and works in direct cooperation with ICE to tear families apart. We refuse to welcome our oppressors at a table ostensibly set to celebrate our hard-won and still-besieged liberties. It is therefore, in the spirit of the Stonewall Riots that we, the undersigned members of the Middle Tennessee Democratic Socialists of America, call for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s booth to be disinvited and summarily ejected from Nashville Pride.

Middle Tennessee Democratic Socialists of America Queer Working Group

Socialist candidates don’t take money from real estate or corporate PACs, but these campaigns still need money to function. This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign fundraising staffers Michael Carter and Simone Norman talk about grassroots fundraising: what it looks like and how to do it.

The media industry is in peril, but this is felt most acutely for exploited workers and for the audience who are left wanting for real journalism and genuince content. In this show, we talk with @hunterboone, @jamie_elizabeth (from @the_antifada) about the current problems in the media industry, unionization efforts, and the capitalist contradictions in media/journalism.

Donate Here: New York Abortion Access Fund

Saturday, April 6th, 2019
2:00 to 4:00 pm

Classic Lanes
1840 Military Rd
Buffalo, NY 14217

We’re lacing up our bowling shoes and getting to work! Help us to #FundAbortionBuildPower. Your participation could be the difference between someone getting the abortion they need, and being forced to go without.

Send a message that you believe we all should be able to access abortion no matter how much money we make or where we live. Join us on April 6th to bowl for abortion access!

There’s been a ton of buzz around the proposal for a Green New Deal, on today’s show we’ll break down DSA Ecosocialists’ principles of a Green New Deal and see how the NYC DSA Ecosocialist Working Group is organizing an Energy Rights campaign and getting involved in the ConEd Rate Case to solve the climate crisis and the inequality crisis together.

Saturday, May 4, 2019
10 am – 3 pm

SEIU/1199 Main St. Office
2421 Main St, Buffalo, New York 14214

Come on out and have volunteers from Buffalo DSA change your brake light for FREE! Free coffee, doughnuts and legal advice while you wait.

This is our 4th Brake Light Clinic and each light replaced reduces the likelihood of interaction with the police.

How do we fight the demonic principalities behind climate change? Shay O’Reilly is an organizer for renewable energy in NYC, a DSA member, a Lutheran, and a graduate of UnionTheological Seminary. We chat with him on why he believes in demonic powers (see: white supremacy), why fighting climate change necessarily means fighting for socialism, how he got into environmental issues through anti-poverty work, as well as his experience of converting to Christianity shortly after coming out as trans and gay. Yes, it’s a packed episode! Follow him on Twitter @shaygabriel

Hudson Yards’ billionaire developer Steve Ross got far more in subsidies than Bezos, yet he is undercutting New Yorkers on the job everyday. On today’s show we talk to two carpenters about the battle that has been going on at Hudson Yards to keep the construction union.

At our March 3rd meeting the members of Charlotte Metro DSA engaged in the debate facing all of our fellow 60,000 comrades: whether to affirm the demands of the National Political Committee (NPC) and provide financial and labor support for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, and more broadly, what Bernie Sanders and his bid for president means to the burgeoning and resurgent Socialist movement in the United States.  Naturally, as good Socialists, we held a structured and comradery debate about what our role nationally is in relation to electoral politics and what our capabilities as a chapter are to affect change locally through elections and campaigning.  Our conversation about local needs and capabilities transitioned to why the national debate was happening so early in the 2020 election cycle, and was seemingly predetermined by the NPC, when an opportunity to decide this more democratically and transparently is only months away. 

 

Regarding the endorsement for Bernie Sanders for President set forth by DSA NPC, Charlotte Metro DSA decided to delay our decision whether to endorse in order to better focus on issues that affect our local communities and allow us to build a broader working class movement in the Charlotte Metro area. We also call on the NPC not to endorse at this time, especially under the current conditions of the endorsement presented.  This endorsement is too important and impactful to be decided by so few individuals and without the transparency necessary for a democratic organization.  Additionally, we are concerned that in its current form the endorsement will pull too much money away from other more necessary DSA-led endeavors to continue to build our movement, particularly by chapters outside of major metropolitan areas.  Due to the lack of horizontal participation and likely cost to Charlotte Metro DSA, we cannot at this time and in good conscience endorse Bernie Sanders for President, and we ask for the NPC to call off its vote for an endorsement and to instead let it be determined at the General Convention this August in Atlanta.  

 

In Solidarity, CLTMDSA