There’s a particular kind of violence that comes dressed as paperwork. It looks like lease renewals, mortgage statements, and subsidized housing wait lists. This is violence wrought by financial capital, and we can see it written all over our region.

In Johnson City, median rents rose 24–35% between 2023 and 2025¹. The city’s own report admits these hikes “outpace household income growth” and “likely create some affordability challenges for area renters.” No kidding, especially with a 1% vacancy rate that gives landlords virtually unlimited leverage. Meanwhile, the number of mortgages in Northeast Tennessee that are “seriously underwater” jumped 29% last year². More and more of our neighbors owe the bank more than their home is worth, making it impossible for them to sell or refinance.

This is the squeeze of finance capital. On the rental side, institutional investors and algorithms extract maximum payment from people with no alternatives. On the ownership side, the same financialization inflates prices beyond what wages support, leaving working people in mortgages they can get out of. The renter and the underwater homeowner aren’t in different situations; they’re in different rooms of the same burning house.

This financialization of everything, housing included, creates a society where a tiny minority owns the means of shelter, the resources, and the credit, while the vast majority works merely to service that ownership. Such a society is inherently unstable. It generates contradictions that cannot be resolved within the framework of democratic consent.

The Contradictions That Finance Capital Cannot Resolve

The first contradiction is that financialization extracts value without creating it. A private equity firm that buys apartment complexes, strips maintenance, and raises rents isn’t building anything, it’s siphoning wealth upward, steadily destroying the purchasing power and stability of the working class that the whole system depends on.

The second is that finance capital needs the state desperately—for bailouts, property rights enforcement, contract law, and suppression of labor unrest—while simultaneously needing to convince people that the state is their enemy and the market is freedom. This is why the same political movement that defunds public housing also demands the Federal Reserve protect asset values.

The third is that financialized housing turns a basic human need into a speculative asset class. The conditions that make housing profitable—scarcity, rising prices—are the same conditions that make it inaccessible. The system cannot solve the housing affordability crisis without devaluing the asset that millions of people’s retirement savings are tied up in. It is structurally incapable of fixing the problem it created.

When Reform Is Off the Table

These contradictions don’t stay abstract for long. They show up as evictions, as skipped medications, as payday loans taken out to cover rent. This misery hardens into anger, and anger, when it has nowhere to go, becomes fuel.

When that fuel starts to smoke, the owning class has two options: concede reforms, like with the New Deal, or redirect the anger toward scapegoats—immigrants, trans people, women—while consolidating control.

This second option is fascism. It’s deployed when the ruling class calculates that conceding reforms would cost too much. They capture the state instead, and make sure the machinery of government serves the extractors, not the people.

The post-2008 period essentially foreclosed the reform option: The political center spent fifteen years bailing out banks while telling working people that austerity was responsible governance. That credibility is gone. When the anger finally has nowhere legitimate to go, the scapegoating infrastructure—already built, already funded—is right there waiting.

Fascism isn’t a personality type or a brand of meanness, though it can feel that way. It is a political response to the contradictions that finance capital creates and cannot resolve any other way.

The Ground Is Ours

Here’s what finance capital cannot do: it cannot pick up your neighborhood and move it somewhere more profitable. Capital is stuck here, which means it’s accountable here—if we make it so. That’s where our power lives, and we don’t need to wait for an election to use it. We can organize now, right where we live, starting with the most basic act: talking with our neighbors.

The financiers count on us feeling powerless. But they need our neighborhoods, our towns, and our labor. They cannot extract wealth from a place if the people of that place refuse to be extracted from.

The road back from fascism runs through our home. When we take back control of where and how we live, we starve the beast. The rentier class knows this. It’s time we all did too.

References:

1. 2025 Johnson City Housing Needs Assessment – Bowen Report by City of Johnson City – Issuu
2. Q4 2025 U.S. Home Equity & Underwater Report: Equity Eases via Underwater Mortgages Flag Growing Tri-Cities Home Equity Pressure – CoreData @ donfenley.com

Since the mass deportation surge began last year, ICE’s record of brutality and criminality have driven millions of people into the streets, the largest sustained anti-ICE mobilization this country has seen. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the victory of Minneapolis over ICE that followed, poured fuel on a fire that was already burning.

The public’s verdict on the Trump regime’s mask-off turn has been swift and unambiguous. According to the Economist/YouGov poll conducted February 27–March 2, 2026, half of all Americans now support abolishing ICE, among them a majority of independents (52 percent) and nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent)¹.A clear majority of Americans say ICE uses excessive force. Nearly half say they have no confidence in the agency at all.

This is what we mean when we say the morning after is already here. The new world struggles to be born, and the centrists line up to kill it in the cradle.

Centrists Intend to Kill the Movement

The Democratic Party’s centrist establishment has not been subtle about its intentions. Third Way, the corporate-funded outfit that exists largely to police the party’s left flank, put out a memo in January warning that abolishing ICE risks “squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform” while “handing Republicans exactly the fight they want.”² Third Way speaks for the people whose money funds it, the same financial and corporate interests that benefit from a workforce kept precarious, deportable, and afraid to organize. The public’s anger, in their telling, is a resource to be managed rather than something that might determine policy. That is not a strategic assessment. It is a class position.

This is the familiar playbook. Reform the rhetoric. Keep the structure. Buy enough time for the anger to fade. The centrists positioning themselves for 2028 are not neutral managers of a difficult moment. They are representatives of a class that has always found ICE useful. They are already working to transform majority support for abolition into a years-long negotiation about body cameras, training, and supervisory chains of command.

This is not a disagreement about tactics. It is a disagreement about whose interests the Democratic Party exists to serve and what role the state should play in the class struggle. The centrists have answered that question consistently for fifty years. There is no reason to expect a different answer now.

There Is No Southern Exception

The South is not exempt from these national trends. The January 2026 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll tells a story that defies efforts to set the lowest expectations. Fifty-eight percent of Southerners say ICE is making Americans less safe. Sixty percent say ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws. A majority view the anti-ICE demonstrations as mostly legitimate protests.³ “Abolish ICE” does not stop at the Mason-Dixon Line, no matter what our politicians pretend.

And we sure have some pretenders here in Northeast Tennessee. Some even wear their accommodation with ICE as a pragmatic virtue, noting warm relationships with local sheriffs, describing their votes for ICE collaboration as unavoidable, consoling themselves with the thought that a “no” vote would not have changed the outcome anyway. They express something like regret and ultimately conclude that the right response to facilitating a harmful system is to seek a humane working relationship with those who run it.

287(g) Helps ICE and Hurts Us, No Matter How You Spin It

The fight to abolish ICE must begin in our cities and in our counties, and we must reject local accommodation, no matter how much our centrists wish to give it the appearance of “reasonable” policy-making. 287(g) agreements are a prime example. The program deputizes local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration enforcement, and serves as a force multiplier for ICE’s masked men.

Our county sheriffs, constables, and commissioners have been all too willing to sign on. Sullivan County operates under both the Warrant Service Officer model and the Task Force Model, the latter of which authorizes deputies to stop, question, and detain people on suspicion of “illegal” status during ordinary patrol duties—traffic stops, calls for service, encounters on the street. It’s a warrant for racial profiling and terror, and Sheriff Cassidy is all aboard. Washington County operates under the WSO model alone, which Sheriff Sexton sold to commissioners as purely administrative, confined to the jail. Nothing changes, he said. Just paperwork. And every single Washington County Commissioner backed him up.

But there is no version of 287(g) that is just paperwork. Every model serves to bolster an agency the majority of Americans want abolished, and to enable the real and devastating deportation of community members–farmworkers, kitchen workers, parents of children in our schools–picked up for something as trivial as a speeding ticket.

Sullivan County: The People Said No, The Commission Said Yes

In February, ICE conducted a sweep in Sullivan County in close coordination with Sheriff Cassidy’s office. Twenty-nine people were taken.⁴ The operation bore the hallmarks of ICE at its most inhumane—not “paperwork,” but community raids that left people feeling unsafe in their own neighborhoods.

Just days later, the Sullivan County Commission met to consider accepting $215,000 from the Department of Homeland Security and the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security to formally expand and equip Sheriff Cassidy’s 287(g) Task Force operation. The commission chambers were packed. Speaker after speaker rose in opposition. “This is where we get to decide what side of history we’re going to be on,” one attendee told the commission.⁵

The commission placed both resolutions on the consent agenda and passed them unanimously, without permitting the full public comment the packed room had come to deliver. And is it any wonder? This is the same commission that voted to make the still-unfinished Sullivan County jail the most expensive construction project in the county’s history. They chose concrete and cages over the affordable housing, healthcare, and education. Cages for immigrants and cages for the poor are two expressions of the same politics, and the Sullivan County Commission has enthusiastically endorsed both. At least they didn’t bother with the performative hand-wringing we’ve seen in Washington County.

What Is To Be Done

The people who packed that Sullivan County commission chamber knew exactly what they were there for. They came because they oppose ICE, because they oppose their county’s collaboration with ICE, and because they understand that the morning-after fight is happening now, in these rooms, on these agendas. That room full of people is the proof that abolition has a home in Northeast Tennessee, whatever our commissioners and sheriffs pretend.

Our immediate demands follow directly from that reality:

No to any new funding from ICE for any purpose in any county in our region.

No to any commissioner approving any increase in the sheriff’s budget until 287(g) agreements are cancelled.

Our long-term position is that of today’s majority: abolish ICE, plain and simple.

We are not naïve about the terrain. The right dominates the Sullivan County Commission and most of the offices in Northeast Tennessee. Their position on ICE is an honest one: they support it, and they say so.
For us, the first task is to win the battle against the centrists intent on giving ICE collaboration an appearance of reasonableness while castigating the majority as extremists. Break that false consensus and more people will see the right’s position for what it actually is: a minority opinion in defiance of the public will.

If a new world is to be born, it will be people like those who packed the Sullivan County Commission chambers who will ensure it happens. Sustained, organized working-class power, rooted in communities and built through relationships, is what turns a majority position into a political reality.

That is what the morning after looks like when it is built from below. If this is your fight too, it is time to get involved. Join us at northeasttndsa.org.

References:

1. Economist/YouGov Poll, Feb. 27–Mar. 2, 2026. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54225-support-for-abolishing-ice-reaches-50-percent-february-27-march-2-2026-economist-yougov-poll
2. Third Way memo, January 2026. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/democrats-abolish-ice-abuses-not-ice
3. NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, Jan. 27–30, 2026.
   https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR_PBS-News_Marist-Poll_USA-NOS-and-Tables_202602021147.pdf
4. WJHL News. https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/29-illegal-immigrant-located-during-local-ice-operation-sheriffs-office-says/
5. WJHL News. https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/sullivan-co-commission-approves-immigration-funding-resolutions-during-contentious-meeting/

Freedom Hall Pool opened in 1974. For more than fifty years, it was where Johnson City kids learned to swim and working families spent summer afternoons without paying resort prices. It closes permanently on April 3, 2026. The city received an engineering estimate last August: repairs would cost $750,000. Deputy City Manager Steve Willis called it “an incredible amount of money.” The city did not pay it.

One month before that report landed on Willis’s desk, the Johnson City Board of Commissioners approved an $8,063,000 contract to lease hundreds of cameras from the surveillance company Flock Safety. The vote was 4-0, supported by Commissioners Brock, Cox, Hunter, and Wise. It happened on the consent agenda—the section reserved for routine items that require no discussion. Nobody debated it. The whole thing passed in under a minute.

Two hundred and ninety cameras. Ten years. Eight million dollars. No public comment. Two months after cameras were already going up, the commission held a community roundtable to hear what residents thought.

The pool cost $750,000 to save. The cameras cost $8 million to lease. The city found one of those affordable.

What the Cameras Actually Do

Flock Safety photographs every vehicle that passes one of its cameras and builds a searchable record of where that vehicle was, when, and in what direction it was traveling. The cameras capture license plates, vehicle make, model, color, and what the company calls a “vehicle fingerprint”—distinguishing features like bumper stickers, body damage, and roof racks that allow tracking even when a plate is obscured.

Johnson City’s cameras join a national network of roughly 90,000 Flock cameras performing more than 20 billion vehicle scans per month across 5,000 law enforcement agencies in 49 states. By default, local data is shared with any agency within a 500-mile radius. Seventy-five percent of Flock’s law enforcement customers have enrolled in the National Lookup Tool, which allows any participating agency anywhere in the country to search the full network.

Think about what that data reveals. Your car outside a methadone clinic twice a week. Your car at a domestic violence shelter the night you left. Your car in the lot of an abortion provider, an HIV testing center, or an immigration legal aid office. Your car at a union meeting. Your car in front of a house at 3am. None of those trips were anyone else’s business. Flock logged them anyway. And because license plates, property records, and social media are public, anyone who cross-references Flock data with those records gets your home address—and from there, your name, your relationships, your photograph.

Flock Cameras Don’t Prevent Crime

JCPD’s own figures show 11 pilot cameras contributed to 15 arrests over nine months. Crime in Johnson City was already falling—down 12 percent in 2024—before a single new camera went up. The National Institute of Justice rates license plate reader technology as a crime deterrent “Ineffective.” Every randomized controlled trial conducted over 15 years has returned null results on crime reduction.

Flock markets claims of “up to 70% crime reduction,” but an investigation by 404 Media found those numbers rest on a company-produced study whose own named academic co-author said he would have done things “much differently” and that the underlying data was too “incomplete” for meaningful analysis.

A System Other Cities Are Abandoning

Since early 2025, at least 30 cities have canceled Flock contracts or rejected new ones. Denver’s city council unanimously refused a contract renewal after hundreds of residents showed up to oppose it. Ithaca’s mayor ended the city’s contract: “I don’t know that I could live with myself if I allowed something to exist in our community that directly or indirectly led to someone’s civil liberties being violated.” Oak Park, Illinois canceled after data showed 84 percent of drivers stopped in Flock-related traffic stops were Black, in a city where Black residents make up 19 percent of the population.

What were these cities responding to? In Texas, a police officer ran a nationwide Flock search logged as “had an abortion, search for female.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained documents showing the department consulted prosecutors about charging the woman. In Virginia, agencies ran nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches on the state’s Flock network. The EFF analyzed 12 million Flock searches from more than 3,900 agencies and found hundreds related to political demonstrations, including anti-Trump protests in 2025.

JCPD policy prohibits using the system for immigration enforcement or targeting based on protected characteristics. However, so did policies in the departments that used the data improperly. We’re repeatedly told the honor system doesn’t work, unless it’s the people who want power over us. Johnson City’s commissioners voted yes on the consent agenda without mentioning any of this.

The Budget Tells the Real Story

JCPD received a 16 percent budget increase in FY2025, bringing its total to $19.4 million—the city’s largest operating budget share by a significant margin. Johnson City Transit stops service at 6:15 p.m. on weekdays and 5:15 on Saturdays. No Sunday service. No night service. In a city where more than one in ten households has no car and more than one in five residents lives in poverty, the transit system closes before second shift ends. The FY2023 transit capital budget was approximately $410,000. The Flock contract’s steady-state annual cost is $970,375.

Two months before approving the cameras, the Commission unanimously paid $28 million to settle a lawsuit documenting that JCPD had maintained an “unconstitutional pattern and practice” in sexual assault investigations. More than 60 women were victimized by serial rapist Sean Williams while the department looked the other way. Total payouts reached $30.6 million. The city’s general fund balance fell from $54.9 million to $24.6 million. Residents absorbed a 14 percent property tax increase. The Blue Plum Festival did not return. The pool closed.

Five months after the settlement, the same commission approved a ten-year, eight-million-dollar contract to expand the capabilities of the department whose failures produced it. That is the transaction this city made. That is what the consent agenda hid.

What Residents Deserve to Know

JCPD has declined to tell residents where the cameras are located, saying it would reduce their effectiveness. Residents built jcmappingproject.org themselves—a community-maintained map of reported camera locations—because the city responsible for this infrastructure will not account for where it sits. There is also deflock.me, a nationwide website where people report camera locations.

Johnson City could not find $750,000 for a pool that served low-income families for fifty years. It found $8,000,000 for a surveillance system that other cities are canceling, built by a company with documented security failures and a CEO who calls civil liberties concerns criminal sympathy, to expand the reach of a department whose misconduct cost taxpayers more than $30 million.

These are priorities. They belong to the Commission that voted yes without discussion. We have a right to demand they cancel this contract before nearly $1 million of our money is spent invading our privacy. We have a right to ask why this city found money for cameras it would not spend on buses, pools, or the survivors of its own police department’s failures. And we have a right to demand that the next decision this city makes about our lives gets more than a minute on the consent agenda.

There is a pattern to American politics. A right-wing government runs itself into the ground. The public turns against it. And before working people can build an alternative, the center moves in with a simple offer: just give us the keys back and we will restore order. The window between those two moments is the one that matters. It is open right now.

The Collapse Is Real

Trump’s second term has been a case study in the distance between populist rhetoric and plutocratic governance. The United States added only 181,000 jobs in all of 2025—the fewest in a non-recession year since 2003—while tariffs raised costs for the average household by $3,800 per year^1,2. The Supreme Court struck down his tariff regime 6 to 3 in February 2026³. The Congressional Budget Office found the One Big Beautiful Bill takes $1,200 annually from the bottom ten percent while giving $13,600 to the top ten percent and throws 11.8 million people off Medicaid⁴. Trump had promised not to touch Social Security or Medicaid⁵. DOGE then moved to cut roughly 7,000 SSA positions and targeted 80,000 VA cuts⁶.

The electoral signals are clear. Democrats swept Virginia’s statewide offices by as much as 15 points⁷. In North Carolina’s March 3rd primaries, three Democratic incumbents who voted to override Governor Stein’s vetoes were ousted by progressive challengers; Nasif Majeed, who voted for legislation defining sex in biological terms, lost 69 to 27 percent⁸. MAGA is collapsing. But that is exactly when the danger begins.

The Familiar Playbook

After Watergate, Democrats ran Jimmy Carter as a reform outsider. He deregulated banks and airlines, appointed the Fed chair who deliberately induced a recession, and abandoned labor. AFL-CIO president George Meany called him a conservative⁹. After 2008, Obama staffed his economic team with Wall Street insiders. His mortgage relief program promised 3 to 4 million modifications and delivered roughly one million while nine million families lost their homes^10,11. Not a single senior bank executive was prosecuted¹². Ninety-five percent of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top one percent¹³.

Democratic centrists represent a coalition whose interests are served by managed capitalism with better optics. They are against us not because they are evil, but because we want different things.

The Lineup for 2028

Gavin Newsom governs California with the nation’s highest state unemployment rate and an $18 to $35 billion deficit he refuses to address with taxes on the wealthy^1,14—while criminalizing homelessness and having done podcasts with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon to signal cross-aisle credibility. Buttigieg offers vague appeals to AI disruption. Next American Era, launched in February 2026, is led by a former congresswoman now lobbying for OpenAI and Oracle¹⁵. Third Way is running conferences aimed at opposing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez¹⁶. This is not a left flank preparing to govern for working people. This is the party establishment clearing the field.

What Northeast Tennessee Tells Us

The material stakes are impossible to ignore here. Median household income in the Tri-Cities runs 70 cents on the national dollar, with poverty rates exceeding 20 percent in Johnson City and Kingsport¹⁷. Ballad Health failed 74 to 80 percent of its state quality benchmarks for four consecutive years while CEO compensation nearly doubled to $4.3 million¹⁸. Food insecurity has hit 16.8 percent—the highest in 20 years¹⁹. These conditions predate Trump. The “return to normal” centrist Democrats are selling is a return to the conditions that produced all of this.

The Fight to Name the Problem

Two stories are being told about why working-class life is so hard. The right blames immigrants and cultural elites—a false answer that connects to a real feeling of abandonment. The centrist story calls for competent management without naming corporate power, landlords, or hospital monopolies. The socialist story names the cause: wages are low because unions were broken; healthcare is unaffordable because it is a profit center; hospitals close in rural communities because there is no money in keeping poor people alive. These are not mysteries. They are decisions, made by people who profit from them.

The Window and What to Do With It

DSA has surpassed 100,000 members²⁰. May Day 2025 brought hundreds of thousands into the streets in more than 1,000 towns²¹. The 2025 convention voted to work toward an independent mass socialist party²². A general strike on May Day 2028, backed by UAW and the Chicago Teachers Union, is being built now²³.

Fascism is not defeated in blue cities. It is defeated where it lives—in the communities it recruits from, in the economic despair it feeds on. A new moderate will not fix the Ballad Health monopoly. A return to normalcy will not reverse 50 years of wage decline. The window is open. What we do with it will shape working-class life for a generation.

References:

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026, February 11). Employment situation summary: January 2026. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/economicdata/empsit_02112026.pdf
2. Yale Budget Lab. (2025). The tariff impact on U.S. households. Yale University. https://budgetlab.yale.edu
3. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___ (2026).
4. Congressional Budget Office. (2025). Estimated budgetary effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. https://www.cbo.gov
5. Newsweek. (2025, February 19). Trump’s update on Social Security, Medicaid. https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-issues-update-social-security-medicaid-2033082
6. Social Security Administration. (2025, February 28). SSA workforce restructuring update. https://www.ssa.gov
7. Virginia Mercury. (2025, November 4). Democrats sweep Virginia’s statewide races, reclaiming full control of executive branch. https://virginiamercury.com/2025/11/04/democrats-sweep-virginias-statewide-races-reclaiming-full-control-of-executive-branch/
8. WFAE. (2026, March 3). Democratic Reps. Cunningham, Majeed lose to challengers in Mecklenburg. WFAE 90.7. https://www.wfae.org/politics/2026-03-03/democratic-reps-cunningham-majeed-trail-challengers-in-mecklenburg
9. Washington Post. (1977, June 15). A break in the Carter-Meany connection. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1977/06/15/a-break-in-the-carter-meany-connection/b2698498-b055-4036-86b7-09885dc17f2c/
10. Congressional Oversight Panel. (2010, April). Evaluating progress on TARP foreclosure mitigation programs. U.S. Government Publishing Office. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-111JPRT55737/html/CPRT-111JPRT55737.htm
11. Marketplace. (2018, December 17). Divided decade: How the financial crisis changed housing. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2018/12/17/what-we-learned-housing
12. NPR. (2011, April 26). Why prosecutors don’t go after Wall Street. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/137789065
13. Saez, E. (2013). Striking it richer: The evolution of top incomes in the United States. University of California, Berkeley. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf
14. California Legislative Analyst’s Office. (2025). Fiscal outlook 2025–26. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/5091
15. Revolving Door Project. (2026). The AI lobbyist starting an abundance nonprofit. https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/new-abundance-group-ai-lobbysits/
16. Semafor. (2026, March 3). How Third Way’s president plans to avoid the Biden fate in 2028. https://www.semafor.com/article/03/03/2026/how-third-ways-president-plans-to-avoid-the-biden-fate-in-2028
17. U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). American Community Survey 5-year estimates: Selected economic characteristics. https://data.census.gov
18. Tennessee Department of Health. (2024). Ballad Health certificate of public advantage annual oversight report. https://www.tn.gov/health
19. Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee. (2025). 2025 hunger study: Northeast Tennessee regional food insecurity report. https://www.secondharvestne.org
20. Democratic Socialists of America. (2025a). DSA membership update. https://www.dsausa.org
21. Associated Press. (2025, May 1). Hundreds of thousands rally across U.S. on May Day. AP News.
22. Democratic Socialists of America. (2025b). Resolution R07: Principles for party-building. 2025 National Convention. https://www.dsausa.org
23. The Nation. (2025). The call is out for mass, simultaneous strikes in 4 years. https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/general-strike-2028-unions-labor-movement/

Our goal as organizers and seekers of political change will be the continuation of coalition growth and subsequent mobilization of power.

The unfairness and absurdity of modern homelessness can be summed up in a single number: there are 28 vacant homes for every homeless person. Although this fact diminishes the complexity of homelessness, its simple cruelty reveals America’s greatest contradiction: a nation of abundance and a nation of destitution. Society holds in its hands the ability to provide for all, yet chooses not to. The inherent inequality of the economy only deepens its inhumanity as prices rise, real wages stagnate, and social services are cut. Homelessness is growing at record rates, mostly among the youth and elderly, and disproportionately affecting racial and sexual minorities. Government services often fail to address the root issue of the problem, if it exists at all. It is not enough that capitalism should subject one part of society to be without a place to stay; governments viciously criminalize homelessness and maniacally inflict pain through anti-homeless architecture. Why does capitalism force one part of the population into abject poverty at their most needed? And why does this unignorable inequality not anger society more and more every day? The answer is rooted in capitalism’s need for a reserve army of labor and dominance as the base for society, including our thoughts and feelings about the world around us.

Homelessness and unemployment are not solely symptoms of capitalism but a necessary element in order to further exploit workers and lower wages through the immiseration of the lowest strata of society. The underhoused and unhoused are part of a group Marx termed the reserve army of labor. This reserve army acts as a potential replacement for employed wage workers, forcing them to accept worse working conditions and lower wages in fear of losing their jobs. The largest supply of workers with the lowest demand for labor allows employers to increase exploitation of workers, as people become desperate for any job at all. Increased competition between those needing employment divides the working class, making them fight over the scraps instead of banding together to bring about change. This supply grows ever larger as capital concentrates in fewer hands and more people are pushed into the proletariat, seen in the record high rates of homelessness and wealth inequality in the U.S. Capitalism and bourgeois society have no desire or reason to end homelessness as it needs the reserve army to be so large and conditions for the unemployed so miserable to keep workers subservient to wages. As Marx said, “accumulation of wealth is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

Capitalism was built and continues to be supported by the forced unhousing of sectors of society and the creation of the reserve army. British industrialism exploded rapidly in urban areas due to the enclosure of farming and grazing land. Peasants were kicked off the soil to create privately owned land, and forced off in droves to the cities. Vagrancy and homelessness became criminalized, and former peasants had to take the worst possible jobs. The reserve army helped keep the plantation system and the exploitation of black labor alive in the post-Reconstruction South. By arresting unemployed freed slaves, the black population was given a choice between quasi-slavery in sharecropping or legal slavery in the prison system. And in modern times, legislation and government policy criminalizes homelessness in order to sweep away the issue and punish the victims without any concern for the root cause.The landmark Grants Pass v Johnson SCOTUS case in 2024 overturned protections for homeless encampments even if the unhoused had nowhere else to go, combining with other statues and ordinances that make it illegal to sleep in public. As affordability and welfare cuts make permanent housing harder and harder to obtain, the state punishes those caught in these unavoidable situations with nowhere else to turn. Cemented is the rule of capitalism: work or suffer.

The reserve army of labor explains why capitalism impoverishes the most needy. But the system permeates deeper: into societal thoughts and feelings towards the unhoused. Certainly, hateful, hyper-exaggerated, and largely false stereotypes play their role, but what lies deeper? Societal attitudes towards the homeless, ideas of who they are in relation to the employed, and theories on how to confront the issue cannot be boiled down to malicious disparagement or apathetic pity. Instead, they are shaped by the foundations of capitalism and bourgeois society.

First, the unhoused lie outside the capitalist system of production. They are not laboring in order to create surplus-value or profit. Capitalism defines people as wage-workers who live solely to create capital; therefore, the non-worker lives for nothing, a burden that “provides” nothing. Production of capital, as the foundation of society, becomes the measure of human “value.” We can see this exemplified in current unhoused aid practices and social services. With the prevalence of employment dependent help or simple job training, help comes only if people engage in, or are seeking to engage in, producing surplus-value. Aid without concern for how much the person contributed to capital is reserved for those who can’t work at all. While the right parrots the idea of laziness being the cause of poverty more and more as a justification for policy, these ideas remain in the minds of all. The connection between labor and human value lies at the core of our species. Marx writes, “it is just in his work upon, the objective world, therefore, that man first really proves himself to be a species being”. Labor is humanity’s purpose, what separates man from animal, and defines us as a species. But under capitalism, labor comes under the harsh master of capital, as the only form labor can take. The worker is alienated from his labor, his species-being, his humanity. Since the unhoused are not laboring for capital, they are viewed to not contribute to society, viewed as not to be fulfilling our greater purpose. Capital defines society, and the unhoused are not in its service, viewed to be not in its society. Humans define themselves and others through labor and work. However, as labor is dominated by the tyranny of capital, our ideas of humanity and human value are dominated by the tyranny of capital.

Secondly, the unhoused not only buck capitalist production but it’s necessary counterpart-consumption. The existence of a dominant consumer society is widely known. But modern adoration for commodities is more than a want for better and more stuff. Not only does capitalism alienate people from their labor but also the products of that labor. When we make something, we are impressing part of ourselves into the material world. In the object we pour our sweat, effort, ideas, feeling, and being. Yet capitalism takes us from the fruit of our work- we don’t own what we make. Instead, we receive wages, which in turn buy commodities- the replacement for our stolen, objectified labor. Mass modern economies hide the relations of production from the common eye, so we do not see the relationship between labor and commodity hidden by the chaotic world encompassing scale of modern industry. Value is believed to be inherent in the commodity itself and not a result of the labor congealed in it. Commodities as value become personal power, social power, and a mark of value presentable to the larger society. We become what we own, we can choose who we are by buying back the lost objectification of our labor through commodities. The less commodities owned, the less you are, the less you can express yourself, the less you can be. Commodity fetishism runs deep. The desire for commodities innate in our economic system, in the base of society, directly supervenes on not only politics or religion but into our conceptions of the world around us, other people, and even morality and philosophy. While we might not realize it, the base mechanics of capitalism- the need for commodities to be used to make profit- makes it seem that this is one the base mechanics of human society as a whole. The unhoused, as non consumers, become social pariahs, outside the value system. This goes hand in hand with their status as non-producers. Commodities become the value we create in our labor. The unhoused neither produce value nor own value in the eyes of capital. Property is the highest form of social power and ownership-based value. To have privacy, a place to call your own, is to have a false objective self in the physical and social world. Commodities start to gain power over us, the ability to “own” us as the physical realization of self through labor. Those who lack commodities are the ones cast aside by society and only helped again if they work to create and own more. Capitalism and its unending want for more stuff makes ownership of commodities a key part of day to day life. By being unable or limited to join this system of commodity fetishism, the unhoused appear to stand separate from the rest of capitalist society. They are the ones who force society to look reality in the eye and listen- “look what you have done.”

Capitalism’s influence on the material base on society leads to an influence in the ideological base- in the core evaluations and appreciations of humanity, the purpose of human life, and the value of human life. Because current society revolves around the creation of surplus-value through labor and the exchange of wages for commodities, dominant ideas about people revolve around these same poles. This is not the immediate, interpersonal feelings one might have or not have about the homelessness. This ideological base is the subconscious building block of beliefs about people that guides larger ideas about the world and our place in it, leading to real-world opinions and justifications that play back into the capitalist system. Understanding where attitudes about this issue stem from allows us to undermine these infiltrations. By realizing where capitalism thwarts ideas towards inequality and cruelty, we can build new ideas of equity, compassion, and humanity that will help us grow towards a new society.

Since Pres. Donald Trump took office, the federal government and many states have rapidly escalated attacks on the trans community seeking to erode rights, block access to health care, and exclude these Americans from accessing services and fully participating in our society. 

Maine, thankfully, has mostly resisted this wave. Our legislators have defeated numerous efforts by GOP anti-trans legislators to persecute trans people and almost all of our school boards have resisted the efforts by out-of-state far right organizations to hurt the  children they are entrusted to protect.

Unfortunately, this fall, these national forces of hate are trying again to bring Maine into their transphobic fold. They have placed a “citizen” initiative on the ballot forcing us to vote to kick trans kids out of bathrooms and trans girls off of school sports. I put “citizen” in quotes, because this effort was solely funded by one very, very, very rich Wisconsin oligarch – Richard Uihlein, the heir to the company that makes the worst beer on the planet, Schlitz, who attempted to roll back the ERA in New York and has spread conspiracy theories about Sharpies being used to disqualify Trump votes in Arizona.

But while these forces are certainly hateful toward those they see as outside their preferred version of a white, straight, patriarchal America, it’s important to understand that these attacks are not simply a backlash to America’s commitment to equality. It is the result of a well-funded movement that has weaponized hate to distract from issues that might actually improve the conditions of working-class people.

Graham Platner said it best a couple weeks ago in an interview with Slate: 

“The anti-trans campaign in Maine is funded by an out-of-state billionaire to make sure we have this discussion and we don’t talk about raising his taxes. That’s why it exists. I think there are like two trans kids that compete in high school sports in Maine? There are 40K Mainers who are going to lose healthcare because of the lack of the ACA extension.” 

Platner goes on to say, “One of those things seems very important and real to me,” and he’s not talking about the fictional threat of trans kids playing sports. When you think about it, it’s very clear that as well as being morally disgusting, going after trans kids is a showy distraction that Uihlein and his far-right billionaire friends are using to keep us from having bigger conversations about the economic divide.

This is not a new tactic. Today’s attacks on immigrants are the same. Scare everyone into believing that people they have never met are the ones undermining their pursuit of happiness and economic security. When, in fact, those very same people are the ones making their lives better through the work they do, and the community they build.

It is the same with trans kids and adults who are almost always, literally, the ones bullied, ostracized, discriminated against, and/or killed for just being who they are – not the other way around. And if this bill passes, it will just make it worse.

Because this bill is being used to distract, or perhaps to turn out certain voters, is not a reason to ignore this attack on Maine’s values. In fact, it is a reason to double down on our resistance, without losing sight of our bigger purpose. 

We can both tax the rich, provide health care, and beat back transphobic attacks meant to distract. And we will, because we must.

***

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 Don’t be fooled – anti-trans referendum is just a distraction while they pick your pocket appeared first on Pine & Roses.

You’ve probably received enough communications regarding this Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations, which will be held all across the country. At last count more than three thousand demonstrations are being organized, and there will no doubt be at least one near you.

In case you have been procrastinating, here is a link to find the demonstrations closest to you.

The first of these demos last June had a million or two people attend. The next one, in October, had at least five million. We’re aiming to double that this time, which would put us in striking distance of the 3.5% of the US population that research says is necessary to topple authoritarian regimes in the making. 

Against the backdrop of brutal anti-immigrant violence and preparation for election suppression at home, and clueless trade policy matched with deadly wars abroad, a growing number of Americans are coming out to the streets. These include people who have never been politically involved outside of voting every few years, and progressives who sat out the 2024 presidential elections because they didn’t think there was any difference between the two parties and the two candidates. Within DSA and the rest of the left this often took the form of denouncing the “twin parties of capital”. Which they are. But that picture, drawn without nuance, underestimated what fascism is and does.

Now we know. 

A reasonable question at this point is, ‘What sort of message should socialists be sending to the other demonstrators, and the world, a year into America’s fascist descent?’ You have the opportunity to weigh in on that as you make your protest sign. “No Kings” is a start, not a program. “Workers Over Billionaires” moves us closer to the ideas we need.

This mass demonstration of opposition is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to stop MAGA from dragging us along on its road to hell. For that we need to be broadening the struggle with other tactics and strategies (mutual aid, mass strikes, non-violent direct action, and electoral politics) that build a powerful anti-fascist movement and lay the basis for moving past the failed politics of the past. What happened in Minneapolis/St. Paul on January 23—‘No Work, No School, No Shopping’—is the best example so far. DSA has joined with labor and community partners in the May Day Strong coalition, which understands “No Kings” as a step toward a sharper critique of capitalism on May 1. On that day we will see how prepared we are to advance beyond a nationwide demonstration to a national movement.

We’ll see you out in the streets this weekend. And then we’ll continue to train and educate and prepare ourselves for the struggle ahead.

In the February issue of California Red we ran a background article on the California DSA campaign we call “The Fair and Responsible Tax Plan for California’s Wealthy”, which embraces both measures currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November state ballot. That was the first in a series we are running between now and the election. Here is the next installment.—Editor

The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality

Our East Bay DSA crew of five had planted ourselves in the parking lot of a supermarket in North Berkeley on a warm mid-March afternoon. We were collecting signatures for the Billionaires Tax and the Protecting Education and Health Care Act. During our three-hour shift we did not do badly, gathering several dozen for each measure. Even better were the conversations, which ranged from informing voters about the nuts and bolts of the proposals to broader questions about economic inequality: how much money do billionaires have, anyway? What share of the total income of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, goes to the one percent? What would be the right amount of taxes for them to pay? And how do we get them to pay their fair share? 

We explore a few of these ideas and numbers below.

A cool million

It used to be hard for the typical working class stiff to imagine what a million dollars looks like. A million dollars? That’s what millionaires have, and I’m not even close to being one of those, we would say. But that was before a million dollars or thereabouts became the average price of a house in Los Angeles. It’s slightly below that statewide, and slightly above that in San Francisco. But you get the idea. Generally speaking, if you can afford a home, you know what a million dollars looks like—it looks like your house. (If you’re a renter, it looks like that house.)

A billion dollars was even more unfathomable. We didn’t have many in the United States until relatively recently; as late as 1990 there were just 66 of them. Now there are close to a thousand, and we’ve got 213 right here in the Golden State. Since we know that a million dollars looks like a house these days, we can imagine that since a billion is a thousand millions, it would look like a thousand houses. 

No one needs a thousand houses to live in, so most billionaires scrape by with just ten or twelve. Of course, being billionaires, they need somewhat larger houses than most people, so they might spend five or ten million dollars or even more—fifty million! A hundred million!—on their humble abodes. If they owned ten of those, that could put a pretty big dent in their billion dollar fortune. But guess what? The average wealth of a billionaire is not a billion dollars. It’s currently around 8.6 billion dollars, according to inequality.org. So that would be 8,600 houses. 

Minus the dozen they “live” in, that would leave them with enough money to purchase 8,588 more houses. I don’t know about you, but as the numbers climb my ability to translate the million dollar house into a clear image of the wealth of billionaires is beginning to get somewhat unequal to the task. And that’s before we try to imagine what the total wealth of 213 billionaires looks like. 

Trillions

It is reliably estimated that thanks to the ginormous growth of their fortunes during the past ten years (Trump I’s tax cuts, pandemic economy when there was nothing to invest in except stock buybacks, Trump II’s continuing tax cuts, massive AI bubble, and outright looting of public resources) our couple hundred California billionaires collectively own (hold onto your “tax the rich” baseball cap) two trillion dollars’ worth of assets. In California they’re doing a little better than the average 8.6 billionaire; they’ve each got around 9.4 billion. 

Although I just said I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the houses when they added up to the average 8,600 houses each (adjusted now to 9,400), let’s try it out with trillions. That’s a thousand billions. So collectively our 213 ultra-rich people with their two trillion dollars would have, let’s see, carry the one, a bit over 1.8 million houses, at a million dollars each. 

You might think that that’s enough for anyone, and these individuals must be looking around for philanthropies to unload to. But no, according to a recent New York Times article, billionaire giving has fallen precipitously in the last few years as their ‘uneasy accommodation with fascism’ (fascism scholar Robert Paxton’s formulation describing the initial response of economic elites to the uncouth new political rulers) has grown considerably less uneasy—more like downright comfortable. The 213 billionaires in California have seen their total wealth grow by nearly a third in this period as the rest of us have been essentially running in place—and that’s not enough for some of them. 

If you listen to one of their loudest mouthpieces, tech mogul Ron Conway, the proposed billionaire tax is not only bad for his 212 other peeps; it’s way worse than that. He was recently quoted in a New York Times article with a sentiment that inadvertently revealed how that kind of bank account can warp one’s perspective: According to Mr. Conway, referring to the billionaire tax, “This is the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt.” Hmmm. I wonder whether the families of dozens of people who lost their lives and thousands who lost homes in the Eaton and Palisades fires in 2025 agree? Or if Japanese-Californians, 93,000 of whom were incarcerated during World War II, share that view? Or if Native Californians, whose population fell from a third a million people in 1800 to about 15,000 by 1910 during the genocide that did them in, would agree with Conway’s historical research? 

On the other hand

At the other end of the economic spectrum, California’s borders contain about 7 million people below the official poverty line, or 18% of its roughly 40 million people. But the official federal poverty line ($33,000/year for a family of four) is laughably (that’s probably the wrong word) below an actual ability to live. One measure of how many people are barely getting by in California is the number of MediCal recipients, dependent on the federal Medicaid funding stream for most of their care costs. Although California is a net donor to the federal treasury, it does rely on $20 billion per year from the feds to support MediCal. Some 15 million Californians are enrolled in MediCal.

Let’s move on from the tiny extremely rich and the very large poor slices of the state and look at the condition of the merely rich, the top 1% income earners, which includes the billionaires but extends downward to the merely well-to-do. Although calculations vary, the bottom rung of the ladder for a one percenter is just about a million dollars a year in income; the median merely rich, right in the middle of the one percent, is $3.6 million a year. Here’s chart to help us visualize how their share of total California income has grown over the past half century. 

That’s right, believe your eyes. The top 1%’s share of income in the Golden State has grown over the past half century from about one twelfth of total income to almost one third. Richest state in the richest country in the world? Yes, but a vast chunk of the riches seems to have ended up in the pockets of people who didn’t need the transfer. 

On the third hand, if all of the state’s total income had been divided up equally, every person in California in 2024 would have received around $80,000—which means that for a family of four, combining their incomes, the household would have had $320,000—just a little under ten times the official poverty line.  

“But that would be socialism!” cry the billionaires, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and probably quite a few temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Well, sort of. We’ll get into that some other time. One thing is clear: it would certainly be different from what we’ve got.

When HR-1, Trump’s Big Bad Budget Bill, first passed last summer, the California Medical Association warned of “catastrophic” consequences. They were right.

Residents of Glenn County now travel 40 minutes to the nearest emergency room, thanks to a 40% funding cut that forced the county’s only hospital to shut down. St. Johns Community Health in Los Angeles struggles to stay open, after seeing one-third of its operating revenue disappear. $50 million in cuts have forced the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to close more than half its community clinics; besides vaccinations, the clinics provided screening and treatment of tuberculosis and HIV. In Alameda County, Wilma Chan Hospital narrowly averted a layoff of 400 workers while the County searches  for new funding sources to keep them on the job.

MediCal, California’s version of the federal Medicaid program, currently covers one in five working Californians and half the state’s children. A 25% cut in state and federal spending is expected to strip close to 3 million people of their coverage by 2028. People on Medicaid will lose access to reproductive health services.  

Nor has Medicare been spared. Refugees and asylum-seeking immigrants who were on  Medicare no longer qualify. Other non-citizens were already barred from the program. 

HR-1’s proponents claimed the only people harmed by Medicaid cuts will be those who should not have been getting benefits in the first place—what were once referred to as the “undeserving poor. ” The new law requires that any adult under 65 who is not caring for young children must provide proof of working at least 80 hours a month to qualify for Medicaid, so long as their employers met the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.  

“Too onerous”

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, most people on Medicaid already work, but may find it “too onerous to demonstrate compliance” with the work requirement. The UC Berkeley Labor Center estimates that this could account for more than half the Californians expected to lose their MediCal coverage.  Their hours may fluctuate; they may be laid off temporarily or change jobs; they may be self-employed, or work for an employer who is unable or unwilling to provide the necessary documentation. The same illness that required access to Medicaid could also disqualify you from getting it, if it keeps you off work for any length of time. 

Work requirements don’t come cheap; one of the ironies of HR-1 is that the cost of implementing them could offset any savings from  throwing people off the rolls. Georgia is a case in point. Medicaid is jointly funded by state and federal governments, and one of the best features of the Affordable Care Act to make federal Medicaid dollars available for states  that cover people who make  up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Georgia took the money, but added a work requirement. As a result,  Pro Publica reports that “most of the tax dollars used to launch and implement the program have gone toward paying administrative costs rather than covering health care.”  Worse, many Georgians who complied with the work requirement still found their coverage terminated. 

The targets of HR-1

HR-1 targets those who benefited from expanded access to Medicaid—including 5 million Californians—in other ways. They are now required to reestablish their eligibility every six months. Every doctor’s visit requires  a $35 co-payment. In California, providers who will take them on as patients will likely become harder to find, since the state will no longer augment notoriously stingy Medicaid payments. And no one on Medicaid can count on being reimbursed if they get medical treatment more than a  month before their eligibility is confirmed.

More than any other group, Californias’s immigrants will feel the impact of the cuts;  here, the state must assume its share of the responsibility. California was the first state in the nation to grant MediCal eligibility without regard to immigration status. This did not come easy or happen overnight; it was the product of a protracted, step-by-step struggle to extend state funds to cover those denied access by the feds—first immigrant children, then Dreamers, finally all state residents, whether “legal” or not. 

This victory for immigrant rights is now in peril.  California has responded to lost federal health care dollars by barring any new enrollment in MediCal for undocumented adults. Those already enrolled must pay a $30 monthly premium. Even one missed payment gets you dropped from the program, with no opportunity to reenroll. In fact, leaving the program for any reason, even temporary, means you can’t get back in. Those who remain enrolled must now pay out of pocket for dental care.

A weapon in the war on immigrants

How is it that that a state that boasts the world’s fourth largest economy could allow access to health care to be used as a weapon in Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, all in the name of “austerity budgeting”? Much of the blame lies with the health care system itself. A plethora of profit-driven private insurance plans, coupled with various public programs that try to patch up the system’s holes, make rampant administrative waste and glaring inequities inevitable, while driving health care costs through the roof. 

The state legislature is already on record in favor of a “unified financing” system that provides comprehensive benefits and equal access for all Californians, at a projected savings of $158 billion a year. AB 1900, the latest attempt to adopt a single payer health plan in California, fleshes out what the system should look like.  But it is strictly a policy bill; effective financing for a truly comprehensive, universal health care system in the state would require federal waivers that aren’t likely to happen as long as Trump is in the White House. 

That doesn’t mean the money isn’t already there. It’s just that so much it is in the hands of people who are exempt from equitable taxation. That’s the rationale for the Billionaire’s Tax, a one-time 5 percent state tax on assets over $1 billion. It would affect only about 200 people, but would bring in enough money to offset all the federal revenue cuts from  HR-1. 

A second measure, to extend Proposition 55, the Education and Health Care Act of 2026, would make permanent an existing state tax on incomes in the top 2 percent’s brackets, due to expire in 2030. It wouldn’t bring in any new revenue, but it should prevent further cuts to cash-strapped public schools and colleges, and sets aside money as well for children’s health.

Both measures are currently collecting signatures for the November ballot and are endorsed by California DSA. On March 15, East Bay DSA created a Tax the Rich Working Group to get them on the ballot and work for their passage.

Neither measure represents a long-term solution to the health care crisis. They’re more like applying a tourniquet to a cut artery—a stopgap measure, to buy time until you can get the patient to a doctor. But without it, the patient could die. We can’t let that happen.