I’ll be honest, I was a little skeptical when I first heard about the effort to achieve universal health care in Maine through a statewide citizen initiative.

Not because we shouldn’t try this by referendum (I’m a “by any means necessary” kind of guy on good policy), but because this initiative is a “Resolve.” Resolves are mostly non-binding short term expressions of opinion, not actual enforceable law. A directive to send a strongly-worded letter of disdain, offer praise for an achievement, or maybe to create a temporary task force to do a study that will end up on a shelf.

In short, they are mostly just to make a point.

Not that I am opposed to making a point. Indeed, in 2003, as a state senator, one of my proudest moments was sponsoring a resolve opposing the pending war in Iraq. The Maine Senate became the first state senate in the nation to go on record opposing that senseless attack, which certainly made a statement in the form of national headlines. But that was all it did. Pres. George W. Bush went through with his attack (in case you missed it).

So, when I saw this initiative I thought, why spend all the time and money collecting signatures – and then additional time and money to win a campaign – just to make a statement? In truth, we already know Mainers want universal health care, as poll after poll has shown.

But then I read the initiative.

While it is indeed a resolve, it is crafted in such a way that might just actually work. Instead of crafting the details of a complex universal single-payer health care law that the industry can tear apart in a well-funded misinformation campaign, the resolve simply, but very specifically, directs the legislature to come up with and pass said legislation. 

While a resolve directing the legislature to come up with legislation certainly leaves some concern for what that legislation might ultimately look like, the initiative is pretty precise at making clear what it must include and achieve.

Here’s how the resolve appears to work. It directs the legislature to come up with legislation to create a universal health care plan that will reduce costs, preserve choice, and pay providers expeditiously. It’s very specific in terms of these values.

But what it also says is that said legislation must, “Ensure that all residents of the State possess comprehensive, publicly funded health care coverage.” [emphasis added]

Whoa. 

That is not simply directing the legislature to nibble around the edges with ineffective market-based solutions. That gets right at the heart of the best solution possible – a single payer health care system like Medicare for All that the people have been clamoring for.

This kind of reminds me how Barack Obama gave the reins of creating ObamaCare to Nancy Pelosi and the Congress. Instead of drafting his own plan, he asked them to do it, as long as it met certain criteria to earn his signature.

Now, to be clear, as we learned under former Gov. Paul LePage – who refused to implement the voter approved elimination of the tipped wage, or the expansion of Medicaid that voters approved – the legislature/governor can always try to ignore the will of this vote. And, as mentioned earlier, since the legislature has the leeway to craft the bill, that does give corporate health care lobbyists a shot at trying to influence what the final legislation looks like.

But that is a battle we will have to fight either way, resolve or law.

In the meantime, getting this initiative on the ballot for 2027 is an important step toward getting a publicly funded single-payer health care system in Maine enacted. I’m looking forward to signing the petition on Election Day. You should too.

***

This story was originally published by The Beacon, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from the Beacon, sign up for the free Beacon newsletter here.

The post Why I am excited to sign the petition to pass Health Care for All Mainers appeared first on Pine & Roses.

Welcome to the new website of the DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group. Many thanks to Devon Bussell, Ian Hyzy, Matthew Carroll, Ron Hogan, and content editors Maxine Phillips and Russell Fox, who have worked many volunteer hours to bring all of our activities and resources together. This site is a work in progress, and we hope you’ll give us feedback and ideas for what you want to see and potential writers and topics. Look at our categories and let us know if you want to write something for us. Query us at religioussocialism@dsacommittees.org first. —Ed.

Today, as the Religious Right threatens the rights and lives of so many in this country and uses religion as an excuse to wage endless war, we’re heartened by the renewed spirit of progressive religious folk.  They may not all be socialists, but they know in which direction their moral compass points. This article from the Guardian describes some of what’s going on.

The post Righting the Wrongs of the Christian Right appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.

Newspapers publish letters from Portland DSA members all the time. Occasionally, the takes are too hot for corporate news media. We are publishing those letters here.

Portland City Councilors: Pass Police/ICE Mask Ban

At a time when our community’s trust in federal law enforcement has reached its nadir, it is crucial that the City take steps to restore our faith and confidence in those sworn to protect Portlanders and uphold the laws. The “Right to Know Who is Policing You” ordinance would do just that. When we authorize uniformed and armed law enforcement to patrol our city, and at times to restrict our freedoms, the ability to immediately recognize those officers and distinguish them from masked and anonymous vigilantes or impersonators can be a matter of life and death.

Last month the legislature passed and the governor signed HB 4138, directing state and local police agencies to implement policies like those found in the proposed ordinance. Policeofficers, whether local, state or federal, are public servants whom we entrust with solemn responsibility. This ordinance would codify the City’s policy as one of “trust, but verify,” grounded in transparency and backstopped by accountability in cases where that trust is misplaced or abused.

Requiring clear, visible identification, including recognizable uniforms identifying the specific agency and individual officer,protects all members of our community including sworn officers themselves. This ordinance is an important step toward repairing the damage that has been done to community–police relations in recent years, and underlines our commitment to the bedrock principle of the rule of law, no matter how tattered and torn that principle may be in Washington, DC.

I urge every member of city council to support this ordinance.

-Michael W.

And beginning the feminist conversation with myself

This is an opinion piece written by an individual member and was not voted on by membership. Opinion pieces from members do not reflect the opinions of other members and are not chapter approved statements.

2/10. Would not recommend. This book plays up some of the worst stereotypes and effects of white American culture, and it does so through horrific themes. Suicide and incest are pervasively spoonfed to you throughout the novel in ways that make me sick. Hate that. Hated the book.

Unfortunately, Irving’s emotional jiu-jitsu and exploration of dark and morbid topics is supposedly part of the fun. He’s been praised for his matter-of-fact presentations of heavy themes. Failure to find stability in a family, the loss of loved ones to a plane crash, and suicide are all explored to magnify the absurdity of loss’s effects on us. There is a tremendous depth to his works at times. This is, in theory, the work of someone who truly understands the human condition.

But come on. He doesn’t need to romanticize everything morbid. I don’t know what incest looks like with two consenting adults (as is so tastefully portrayed in the novel), but it doesn’t look like that. I mean, I would know. I haven’t spent the last year grappling with the internalized misogyny my family instilled in itself to keep victims quiet just to think the book was accurate. Irving barely explores the difficulty of finding, documenting, and addressing households affected by incestual abuse—no matter how often that abuse happens. Sure, I wasn’t directly impacted, but I had my close encounters. I knew enough to know how it worked. If nothing happened, it wasn’t going to be talked about. An odd interaction with an uncle; a strange drawing with familiar faces- that’s nothing. And if something did happen? If an abuser was amongst the family again? If you told someone what was happening? Don’t worry. It’s taken care of. Don’t. Talk. About. It.

It won’t be reported.

And if it is, what happens in the courtroom stays in the courtroom. There will be no family dinner-table discussion. 

Look, all I’m saying is if John Irving is gonna discuss the perverted nature of our society, he should do it right. I’m aware most of his writings begin about a decade or two before the Epstein class really started to dig into our cultural framework, but I just think that’s no excuse. For me, once what was going on really started to click, I began to ask questions. Like a half-decent writer, I tried to make sense of what was happening. I tried to understand it so that I could talk about it correctly. Obviously, that’s been difficult and so far unsuccessful. I still feel the effects of asking those questions in myself, in the ways I shut down. There’s no correct way to talk about it when there’s no one willing to talk.

So I guess I’m just upset that I don’t think Irving accounted for that in this novel—in any of his novels. I mean, he has like 20 of them and the majority portray incest, so I think this might just be his thing and not something he’s “unafraid to talk about”. And he still hasn’t taken the time to get it right. He talks about it the way most people misinterpret Lolita. As if it’s almost a beautiful thing in his misunderstood eyes. But whatever. He’s gonna get the praise he’s gonna get.

It feels like Irving has this self-righteous air around the subject, like he understands it differently and can therefore talk about it differently. And it’s frustrating because, well, I can’t talk about it at all. I don’t mean within my family. I mean because I can’t. I can’t get myself to talk about it. I can’t talk about it because my family’s conditioning to keep us quiet worked. Every conversation about gender-based violence; every conversation about defining feminism; every conversation where I feel like it could come up, I avoid. And if I don’t avoid it, I walk away shaking. Having been through what I’ve been through, within and without my family, it’s almost easier to be victimized and to dissociate than to go through the process of analyzing what happened. I was trained to be more afraid of how I’ll be perceived if I talk about it than of actually being abused.

But

I can’t keep watching my mom turn into a scared little girl whenever her brother’s name is mentioned. I can’t avoid my cousin anymore because I don’t know how to ask if he meant to send me what he did. I can’t keep watching my aunt relive finding those notebooks at 15 and reading her own name in them. I can’t keep asking myself if the decades-long family friends know how their daughter was talked about; that when I hit puberty, my body was compared to hers; that her sister was written about in those notebooks too. I can’t hear more stories from other women in my family about the patriarchs within it. And now that it’s “over,” I can’t watch while the older generations fight to keep these things undiscovered, as if there was never a judge or jury involved—to pretend they haven’t paid extra for people to have personal security during their prison sentence. I can’t learn about them lying to protect the abusers. I can’t do this anymore. So, so much has been buried under the rug that any discussion was suffocated before those most hurt could get peace.

So I’ll learn to speak up. At home, and out in the world.

I haven’t been much of a feminist yet; I’m just now truly addressing my internalized misogyny. In recent years I’ve become much more aware of what it means to me to be a woman: This comes at the same time that I’ve begun to face the world as a mother. This new understanding of the world has been difficult to accept, and something I spent the last year trying to avoid in the chapter. 

No matter how much I didn’t feel ready, being asked repeatedly to figure out childcare, and to attend male-dominated events to make other non-cis men comfortable, and experiencing unintentional-yet-outright sexism eventually led me to “accept my fate.” I let the project I was slowly, privately, and personally working through become a bandaid for others’ bruised egos, all while knowing I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t know what lines were where, or how they were being crossed. I didn’t say anything. As I helped push part of this conversation within SLDSA, I found that I’m still unwilling to actually talk about it. I’m unable to vocalize my thoughts without feeling deeply uncomfortable; presenting the Centering Children Resolution—itself born from my first time really confronting what feminism means to me—is the most emotional and distressing experience I’ve had during my time in the chapter. 

That distress was needed. I’ve spent years terrified of how every word I said and wrote would sound. Addressing these things within the chapter carried the same emotional weight that I would be buried under addressing them at home. After passing the resolution, the discomfort grew, and I couldn’t sit in silence anymore. Now was the time to address those ghosts which lingered in the hallways of my childhood home. I’m beginning to open the conversation at home, and I’m finally ready to talk out loud. To identify myself as another angry feminist, and actually sit and think through what that means to me: politically, spiritually, personally. Beginning with a book first recommended to me by a family member at 14, I’m on my way to developing a clear feminist framework to bring forward to the world.

In the meantime, I hope Irving comes to actually understand how this plays out in a home; what it means to be a child raised in a family with strange rumors. The Hotel New Hampshire does not capture it right, and what a shame that is. He really could’ve given life to an often hidden conversation. What a waste. The rest of the novel is fine though, if you were wondering. 

The post An Overdue Review of The Hotel New Hampshire first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

A union can democratize your workplace, protecting you against at-will employment, ensuring just cause, and raising standards for all workers.

The post Your boss is lying when he says unions are no longer necessary appeared first on EWOC.

DSA has become an important vehicle for climate politics. A new book uses the campaign for a New York state climate law as a lens for understanding the organization and its approach to the crisis.

The post Feel the Burn appeared first on Democratic Left.

State Rep. Rabb has fought for working-class Philadelphians in the legislature for years. Now, he’s taking his fight to DC to continue the struggle for housing for all, universal healthcare, and for real democracy in America! DSA is incredibly proud to endorse Rep. Rabb and make sure our voices are heard in the halls of power!

Rep. Rabb is our second Congressional endorsement this cycle. He has some tough opponents, and AIPAC and other dark money groups are already boosting his opponents. Philadelphia DSA has built up a powerful canvassing operation, but we can all help!

Rep. Rabb is joining Oliver Larkin on our Congressional slate. It’s going to take a lot of us standing together to bring more voices and votes into the halls of power.

Rep. Rabb is part of a slate of candidates in the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising project!

The author of "Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993" discusses how her theory of an “Inside/Outside” strategy applies to the Mamdani era.

The post Let the Record Show: Democratic Left Interviews Sarah Schulman appeared first on Democratic Left.

The Ithaca Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America along with Mayor of the City of Ithaca Robert Cantelmo condemn the silence of New York Congressman Josh Riley from District19 during the national horror that Americans were subjected to on April 7th, 2026. While New Yorkers lived through a modern day Cuban Missile Crisis, wondering if President Trump's threats of a nuclear Holocaust in Iran were genuine or merely an insane and unforgivable bargaining strategy, Congressman Josh Riley was silent. He did not issue a statement condemning the President’s declaration that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” - a clear and explicit threat of a nuclear strike or similar catastrophic event. Nor did Congressman Riley condemn Trump’s promises on Easter Sunday to destroy civilian infrastructure, a war crime in and of itself under international law.

A leader in this moment should have spoken out. A leader should have condemned the fear that the Trump administration was wielding as a weapon against all people of conscience, and communicated the steps that were necessary to keep the country and the world safe. Nothing short of a call to impeach or to invoke the 25th amendment will do. Congressman Riley would not have had to stand alone. As of writing, 50 house Democrats, led by DSA allies Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), are meeting the moment and speaking out against war, showing this country what being a true opposition party looks like. Even Republicans, such as Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Representatives Kevin Kiley of California and Nathanial Moran of Texas, and far-right commentator Tucker Carlson condemned Trump's threats while Josh Riley stayed silent.

Ithaca Mayor and member of the Ithaca DSA, Robert Cantelmo, had this to say about the events of April 7th: “Authority to declare war is clearly vested with Congress under Article I. The president’s operation in Iran is illegal and risks destabilizing the region. Worse still, his behavior threatens international norms, risks escalation, and is putting our service members and the innocent people of Iran in harm’s way. I know Congressman Riley shares my deep respect for the Constitution and I urge him to speak out against this war of choice."

Perhaps Congressman Riley’s reluctance to take a stand against MAGA fascism and our illegal war in Iran is rooted in the fact that as of February 17th, 2026, Track Aipac has found that Josh Riley has taken $882,674 from Pro-Israel Lobby groups and their donors. The breakdown of this money being $119,061 through their PACs and $763,613 through their lobby donors. While 78% of Israelis are currently in favor of this illegal war of choice by the Trump administration, Congressman Riley would do well to note more than 61% of Americans are against this war, and most relevant to a Democratic congressman, 88% of Democrats believe striking Iran in the first place was the wrong decision.

This is a moment of utter moral clarity. There are those who understand the President must be removed immediately, and there are those who are afraid to uphold their sworn oath to the Constitution. The Ithaca Democratic Socialists of America are prepared to meet this moment. If Congressman Riley will not - either due to his campaign contributions, or to calculated pandering to Trump’s MAGA base - then in NY-19, the Democratic Socialists of America must become the opposition party that our country deserves. Join us and help take back our democracy, with the Congressman’s help, or without it.

Read more at Memphis-Midsouth