How Common Ground Cafe workers won a union and a cafe
Common Ground workers began fighting against mistreatment at work and ended up winning a union and ownership of the business.
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Unionists! Assemble!
County Passes Some Eviction Protections in Response to Wildfires + Mayor Fires LAFD Chief
Thorn West: Issue No. 226
City Politics
- As many criticize the city’s lack of wildfire preparedness in advance of the Santa Ana winds, Mayor Karen Bass has today fired LAFD chief Kristin Crowley. The LA Times covers the firing in the context of a “sense of disarray that has enveloped City Hall.”
- Children’s Hospital Los Angeles stopped offering several forms of gender-affirming care, in response to a Trump administration executive order threatening the funding of any medical institution that provided this care to transgendered youths. The hospital has now partially reversed that decision, following weekly protests.
Housing Rights
- The LA City Council postponed voting on a motion that would offer eviction protections to Angelenos economically impacted by the wildfires. It will revisit the issue in March. A similar measure did pass at the County Board of Supervisors. That motion applies countywide, but only protects those who specifically lost work. Tenants in Maui, devastated by wildfires in 2023, suffered a variety of cascading displacements, despite the passage of stronger tenant protections than LA is considering.
- The California FAIR Plan, a state-administered fund that provides fire insurance to property owners in high-risk areas, has run out of money in the aftermath of the wildfires. This triggers a condition that allows the fund to collect an additional $1 billion from insurers. Half of this cost may be passed onto consumers, with the state’s approval.
Education
- This week, a Los Angeles Unified School District policy went into effect that bans student phone use during school hours.
- The Trump administration’s terrorization of immigrant communities is depressing school attendance, per CalMatters.
Police Violence and Community Resistance
- A member of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Civilian Oversight Commission has resigned, amid a conflict pitting the oversight body against county attorneys, LASD, and the State Attorney General’s office.
- In San Francisco, an effort to bolster recruitment to the Police Department has failed, as a growing percentage of cadets are dropping out of the police academy.
Transportation
- A long-awaited discussion about how Los Angeles will implement Measure HLA was delayed; the City Council’s Transportation Committee has been drawn into the efforts to block an affordable housing development, and ran out of time.
- The Trump administration has signaled that it will sabotage a California high speed rail project. At Union Station, a press conference by the U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was shouted down by project advocates.
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Madison Area DSA’s 2025 Chapter Convention
Our annual Madison Area DSA Chapter Convention is Saturday, March 15 from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Madison Labor Temple. Please RSVP as soon as possible! (Masks will be required and provided; lunch will be available to those who RSVP by March 4th.)
At Convention, we’ll take a look back at the past year, and members in good standing will make important decisions about the direction of the upcoming year.
The 2025 About the MADSA Convention Guide has everything you need to know about our Convention.
We’re asking members to submit resolutions, bylaw amendments, working group reports and charters, and executive committee and community accountability committee nominations by March 4th.
If you have questions or want to team up with other folks on resolutions, join #2025-convention in the Slack.
Solidarity from the Convention Committee!
Statement in Response to the Erasure of Transgender and Queer People from the Stonewall Uprising National Monument Website
Now, at Stonewall we are watching our own undoing.
At our monument, a hollow has been carved into history—a deliberate emptiness where our stories used to live. Where Marsha’s name once stood proud, teaching generations that we have always existed, that we have always fought, that we have always loved and been loved. Now there is only silence.
They think we don’t notice when they chip away at our memories, stone by stone. That we won’t feel the weight of each erasure, each redaction, each carelessly crafted omission. But we feel every cut. We see our elders’ names fade like ghosts from the walls they built with their own hands. We watch as they try to orphan us from our own history.
Every time they try to erase us, we write ourselves back into existence—in permanent ink, in unshakeable community, in unwavering solidarity.
But they have forgotten something crucial: We are still here. We are still telling our stories. In basements and bookstores, in community centers and living rooms, in whispered conversations and shouted protests. Every time they try to erase us, we write ourselves back into existence—in permanent ink, in unshakeable community, in unwavering solidarity.
There is a bitter irony in attempting to sanitize a monument that exists precisely because people refused to accept such violent marginalization. Stonewall stands as testament to the power of collective rage, to a moment when the marginalized said “enough” and transformed their pain into action, to a moment that showed their oppressors they knew how weak the chains really were. It commemorates not polite requests for dignity, but the throwing of bricks, the breaking of barriers, the raw and necessary fury of people who had been pushed too far. Those who now seek to edit this history, to remove some of its participants from the record, seem to miss the fundamental lesson of what they’re trying to erase: that oppressed people will not quietly accept their own erasure, that solidarity is stronger than state power, and that the very actions they’re commemorating prove the futility of their sanitization effort. They seek to remove transgender people from the story of a riot that began, in part, because society tried to deny transgender people’s right to exist—a historical echo that would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.
This is why we must act now, together. Not just transgender people, but all who understand that when they come for one community’s history, they pave the way to erase others. Every activist, every ally, every person who believes in truth and dignity must stand together.
What can we do? We document. We archive. We create underground histories and public demonstrations. We build networks of resistance that transcend individual identity. We teach our children not just about Stonewall, but about every attempt at oppression and how we fought back. We turn their acts of erasure into fuel for our collective memory and action.
Most importantly, we recognize that this is not just about preserving history—it’s about protecting our future. When they try to erase transgender people from Stonewall, they are trying to erase the possibility of transgender youth seeing themselves in history, of understanding their place in a long line of resistance and triumph.
Let this attempt at erasure be the spark that ignites our collective resistance. Let every blank space they create become a canvas for our truth.
Let this attempt at erasure be the spark that ignites our collective resistance. Let every blank space they create become a canvas for our truth. Let every silence they impose become a chorus of our voices. Together, we will not just preserve our history—we will make it impossible to erase.
The time for passive observation is over. We must act with the urgency of people watching their own existence being questioned, with the determination of communities who refuse to be written out of history, and with the solidarity of those who understand that an injury to one is an injury to all.
Who will join us in ensuring that our stories survive? Who will stand with us in turning this moment of erasure into an era of unprecedented visibility and power? Our history is not just words on a monument—it lives in our actions, in our unity, and in our unwavering commitment to truth and justice.
The future is watching. What will we show them?