Today there appears to be a great amount of anxiety stemming from the rising cost of living. While most people have been hanging on for the last few years, and I know very well people are hanging on and still finding places to rent at or under 500 dollars a month, this will soon not be the case. From the city to the countryside, there seems to be a general sense that the working class will be gradually emptied out of the area and replaced by upper middle-class individuals that move from out of State.

This environment has produced interesting sentiments in the cities and the countryside. In the cities there are young middle class people who don't see a future here in Idaho and plan to run away to another state. For the working class in the cities, those that cannot afford the mentality of “escape-ism,” the prevailing sentiments have been hopelessness for some, anger for many, and annoyance for all. In more rural areas we see a common distaste for real estate agents. There are a great number of people there who believe, and it is hard to blame them for believing, that real estate agents are going where money/demand is: marketing almost exclusively to wealthy and out of state individuals, and leaving locals behind. In the rural areas one might have heard the whispers of laws restricting commissions of real estate agents in the state, many of these whispers have great distortions within their contents, but the feeling that something is wrong is more than observable.

On top of all of this, trust in the current political institutions and the two political parties are so remarkably low that statisticians are having a field day with “all time” or “ever before” types of headlines. Pew Research has been talking about “historic lows” with their statistics that, according to them, demonstrate that Americans have less trust in the Government today than they did during the Vietnam War. While partisan hostility has grown between Democrats and Republicans, apparently between 3-4/10 Americans do not feel well-represented by either party and see both quite negatively. “63% of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the candidates who have emerged so far,” and this does seem to line up with the uncommitted votes cast in the Presidential primary and Reuters polls that demonstrate that regardless of race, gender, and age everybody is unhappy. At least on paper, many Idahoans do not affiliate with either Party. According to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, not only a mere 23.1% of the voting age population actually voting in local elections, as of January 2020, out of 872,794 registered Idaho voters, 308,784 are unaffiliated to any party. According to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, the largest block of registered voters are Republicans at a little over 400,000, then in second place, unaffiliated voters, and in third place is the Democratic party at 112,000.

This means, to put it frankly, not even half of the population of the City of Boise, considered a liberal bastion within Idaho, are registered Democrats.

Shedding the exhausting baggage of the two Parties is a crucial move in Idaho to reach an ever-growing trend within the United States of dissatisfaction. With dissatisfaction, there also comes exhaustion with both the Left and Right. While working people juggle ever busier schedules, the absurd politics of democrats have been on the decline. At the same time, the insane policies of the right have effectively brought government bureaucracy into our lives in ways never before imaginable. The State Government is now obsessed with questions of the books your children can read, words your children can say, and bathrooms your children can use. What was before The old party of so called “limited Government” has apparently taken most questions out of the hands of parents and school boards and made them all matters of the State. The tiresome politics of a perpetually fragile and guilty left and a perpetually paranoid, frantic, and emotional right has had most people looking to boredom with a sense of longing to be bored again.

What Is To Be Done?

First, any solution must be able to shed the old party politics and the agents of chaos which exist within these two parties. These parties are certainly not popular amongst working people, but an alternative, which can be legally secured with canvassing, has not been offered yet. Labor already has a base of voters that, with their signatures alone can initiate aThird Party. A third party, so long as it appeals to both rural and urban citizens, can effectively attract those who might casually vote Republican in rural Idaho, and those that might casually vote Democratic in urban Idaho. We are not looking for those who are especially energetic about either party, and fortunately there appear to be only a few anyway.

Second, after shedding the two Parties any solution must understand the cynical and heinous nature of the “Culture War” we currently see. The appeal of Farmer-Labor on this front would be in positioning itself as an attempt to bring stability to the lives of the great majority of the exhausted working class through common good politics. The common good politics I describe will confuse those on the Right and those on the Left. It rejects the right-wing obsession with the market and instead takes the concept of Self Government as the North Star. It rejects this strange hatred of the foreigner, the immigrant, and all those “different” as not only entirely irrational and immoral, but also as a criminal attempt to distract working people from their real adversaries. The hatred of those who are born outside of this country, those with a different color skin, culture or those who are not heterosexual is plain to see in so many people today, and this must be combated on the terms that this divides the camp of the working people. The consequences of division is ancient knowledge even described in the bible (Mathews 12:15), that “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.”

Farmer-Labor, in the same breath rejects the liberal obsession with the self and all its “individualized” truths. Common good politics does not find an ally in trains of thought which demand the acceptance of all points of view or interpretations as wholly legitimate just because a person has them. This negates more than it affirms. Instead, I see Farmer-Labor championing the concept of toleration even with those whose views on social norms one may privately disagree with. Conversations on social norms and taboos are worth having in a Democratic society, and this requires toleration of views but also the ability to not accept and even disagree with views regarding social matters. To be a mass-movement, a truly mass movement, a common shield is required to protect all people on the basis of toleration. This does not mean that one must advocate nor accept all views another has, only be willing to hold up their end of the shield.

However, there is a line, the outlawing of one way of life is a serious matter which strips democratic and human rights away from a people. Broadly Farmer-Labor, and every decent person, opposes such a thing and offers to protect all sections of the working class from abuse, maltreatment, and persecution. This does not mean that one must advocate nor accept all views of those Farmer-Labor will protect, but a strong democratic culture requires broad unity for the defense of democratic and human rights, a common agreement to hold up the shield. If there is no room for this way of thinking then there is no tolerance, there is no mass movement to begin with.

Third, to put it plainly, the Farmer-Labor solution is an attempt at mass “common good” politics which appeals to the city and countryside with a sense of democratic life. Farmer-Labor values self-government and democratic life in Idaho and identifies threats to self-government in a small elite group of shareholders who profit while the great majority suffers. It is here that the argument for expropriation and nationalization, even a Workers and Farmers Government, are best found. Farmer-Labor identifies the monopoly of industry, credit and communication in the hands of a small group of shareholders as a great contradiction to the concept of self-government. The development of a small elite few has meant that the lives of the rest of the population have been entirely dictated by the needs and interests of a small group’s profit motive. Contrary to the principles of self-government, the real center of political and economic life today is not the demands of the citizenry, but the profitability of a very small group of shareholders. This violates what I see as Common Good politics that starts from the undeniable fact that a stable, democratic political order of self-government must be in the hands of the great majority - that is the working class.

This is only possible of course, through a more democratic government, a Republic worthy of the name Republic - a Workers and Farmers Government.

Those things and people harmful to the tenets of Self-Government, namely those economic players and practices that breed mass dependence, are the chief enemies Farmer-Labor identifies.

What a fresh idea it is, Farmer-Labor will finally actually publicly identify enemies honestly, a practice unheard of in American politics.

Students here in New York and across the country are staging protests and encampments on university campuses in solidarity with Palestinians under siege in Gaza for over 200 days. The student movements are united by a common call for their institutions to divest and boycott the state of Israel, companies, and institutions complicit in Israel’s occupation and ongoing genocide in Gaza. In response to this vast mobilization of students, the university administrations at Columbia, NYU, CUNY and elsewhere have handed out mass suspensions & even threats of expulsion to students involved in the encampments, in addition to unleashing NYPD to arrest students protesting peacefully on their campuses. Tonight, we will hear from the students themselves. We will hear from Britt, a student organizer at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at CUNY City College, about the ‘Five Demands’ of the students to the CUNY administration. We will also be joined in-studio by Erin, a student at NYU and a member of the National Coordinating Committee of YDSA, to hear the latest from the NYU encampment and what YDSA is doing to meet the national moment. 

 

*This episode was recorded at 7pm Tuesday night before the NYPD sweep and mass arrests of students at Columbia and CUNY. Go out and provide jail support for the arrested students & comrades opposing genocide at One Police Plaza  

 

Link to CUNY Gaza Solidarity Statement: https://twitter.com/cunygse/status/1785677626431934751/photo/1

As Ron DeSantis and his ilk across the country seek to further enshrine a white supremacist version of history in our schools, libraries, and cultural centers, “organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation.”

Place names are an enduring and omnipresent way of remembering the past. The choice of place names informs whose version of history is commemorated and given precedence. Our daily interaction with the names of streets, parks, rivers, and buildings continuously reinforces a specific version of history and consciously and subconsciously informs our relationship to the places we live.

A Brief History of Place-Naming in Michigan

People have been naming places for as long as there have been people in places. Indigenous place names often relate to the intrinsic nature of the land. Teuchasa Grondie, the place of many beavers, is the placename Iroquois speakers call the place we call Detroit, and Maskigong, based on Ojibwe “mashkig” meaning “swamp,” describes the large wetlands at the headwaters of the Maskigong Ziibi (Muskegon River). Descriptive place names value the land for its innate properties and allow for the creation of practical maps that share knowledge of how to get from one place to another, using narrative stories, poetry, and song, as well as pictorial images.

Settler-colonialism brought with it the practice of naming places to claim land ownership. British, French, and Spanish colonizers asserted the collective ownership of their rulers and cultures by naming places for kings and queens, Christian saints, European towns and cities, and famous figures from their history. Hence across the river in Ontario there is a town called London and a river called Thames, and any number of places across the U.S. named for St. _____ and various Charleses, Marys and Georges.

Individual colonizers claimed ownership of land by affixing their names to the places they settled. To give just two of many examples in Michigan: Pellston was named by William Pells in 1882, to claim his ownership of a camp on the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad [1], and on the Lake Michigan coast, Bliss was named for Rhoda Bliss, the first white woman to colonize there [2]. Many of the places the colonial settlers slapped their names on already had names. Some of these names were erased and replaced, such as Teuchasa Grondie by Detroit, and some were erased and rewritten in English, such as Maskigong to Muskegon, Michigami to Michigan, and Michinimakinaang to Mackinaw.

Later settlers took over not only Anishinaabe land but also Anishinaabe language to name places. Peter White, iron mining tycoon, appropriated the Anishinaabemowin word “ni-ga-ni” meaning “he walks foremost or ahead,” and anglicized it to Negaunee, to name a colonial settlement on the Upper Peninsula in honor of the “pioneer” ore furnace in the region. Henry Schoolcraft, U.S. “Indian Agent” in Michigan, who incidentally has a street named after him in Detroit, made up place names by combining Anishinaabemowin and Latin. For instance, Arenac is a combination of Latin “arena” meaning sand and Ojibwe “ac” meaning land or earth, made up by Schoolcraft to mean “sandy land” or “sandy place.” Some other Schoolcraft-appropriated names include Alcona, Alpena, Iosco, Kalkaska, Oceola, and Oscoda. Before assuming that a place name is Indigenous in Michigan it is worth researching to ensure it was not made up by Henry Schoolcraft [3].

Place naming for individuals did not just rename the land, it redrew the map. Instead of explaining, verbally or pictorially, how to get from A to B by describing the features of the land, maps now facilitated navigation using the names of the local colonizers. This orientation around ownership claims removed a layer of connection to the land as people walked or rode along the path navigating, not by the wetlands at the headwaters of the river, but by Pells’ Railroad Camp.

Redrawing the map erased and rewrote history. Many books, blogs, historical societies, websites, and Wikipedia posts have been dedicated to the stories of settlers who named places for themselves. All these sources, directly or indirectly, legitimize colonizers’ land ownership claims and orient us to place from a settler colonial perspective. Trying to dig beneath the layers of William Pellses, Rhoda Blisses and Arenacs to learn the original place names and the stories of the people who called them home is not an easy task.

A New Gazetteer for Downtown Detroit

To visit downtown Detroit is to be immersed in a space created to laud a specific version of the city’s past and perpetuate a vision of the future where that vision is seen to be the natural, and only possible, order of things. This space is created using monuments, statues, parks, fountains and, most ubiquitously, street names. In his work on the naming of Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the Southern U.S., Derek Alderman notes, “Naming is a powerful vehicle for promoting identification with the past and locating oneself within the wider networks of memory” and “[street names] make the past intimately familiar to people in ways that other memorials cannot [4].”

What does it feel like to move through a land where your place names, language and history have been erased or ignored? For People of European Descent, with our language and history so prolifically and seemingly indelibly inscribed on the land, it is almost impossible to imagine.

This map shows what downtown Detroit would look like if you erased the streets and street names that honor the colonizers. When you go downtown to enjoy the holiday lights, open this map on your phone and, even if you think you know where you are going, try to use it to navigate. While in no way parallel to hundreds of years of human, land, history, and language theft and erasure, may this little exercise give you pause to acknowledge that theft and to recognize the impact of its inscription on the land.

Click here to open the map in ARCGIS

Unlike removing monuments or changing the names of private buildings, such as university halls, changing street names is a hard and expensive task and one that, frankly, we do not have the time to organize around given all the other needs of our communities. We also cannot boycott or divest from street names, they are everywhere; on signposts, maps, your ID, your mail, every form you fill out, your online billing statements, your eventbrite RSVP, and many more.

This Gazetteer asks us to change the conversation by subverting the street name narrative to tell another version/s of our shared history…

Click here to open the map in ARCGIS

This project is not intended to be the final word on street names. I am in no way any more “qualified” to be naming Detroit’s streets than the city’s so called “founders.” My intention is to inspire Detroiters to use street names to tell different narratives of place that expand our learning of history and thus our vision for the future.

In working on this project, I noticed I was only able to find Black and White honorees for the street names. I want to recognize that this is directly related to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism as discussed above, and to the legacy of slavery, which erased the indigenous names of enslaved people, and replaced them with the names of their White enslavers.

If you would like to share an honoree/s (it could be anyone from the past or present, well-known or unsung, a personal hero or a family member, or someone who is both of those things) and their stories for the gazetteer, either for any of the streets on the current map or other Detroit streets, parks, plazas etc., please click here!

[1] Petoskey News Review, 14 April 1966

[2] The Petosky Record, 19 September 1883

[3] Walton, I. (1955). Indian Place Names in Michigan. Midwest Folklore, 5(1), 23–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317501

[4] Alderman, D.H. (2008). Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the South: A New Landscape of Memory. Southern Cultures. (14)3. 88–105. University of North Carolina Press.

The Detroit Socialist is produced and run by members of Detroit DSA’s Newspaper Collective. Interested in becoming a member of Detroit DSA? Go to metrodetroitdsa.com/join to become a member. Send a copy of the dues receipt to: membership@metrodetroitdsa.com in order to get plugged in to our activities!

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Whose Streets? Our Streets!: A New Gazetteer for Downtown Detroit was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

DSA San Diego has endorsed Power San Diego, a ballot measure to move the City of San Diego to its own municipal electric utility. The measure is currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November 2024 ballot. DSA members are helping gather signatures, including at some of the events you can find on the Power San [...]

Read More... from We can do better than SDG&E

The post We can do better than SDG&E appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America | San Diego Chapter.

In this episode, we sit with Dr. Tim Conder and Dr. Daniel Rhodes of the Black Mountain School of Theology and Community to discuss a marxist, community-centered mode of theological research, organizing, and education. Visit their website at https://blackmountainschool.org

Connecticut DSA (CTDSA) condemns the arrest on Monday morning, 4/22/2024, of over 40 protesters by the Yale Police Department (YPD) and New Haven Police Department (NHPD) at Yale University’s Gaza solidarity camp in Beinecke Plaza. We stand in solidarity with those who were arrested and all students calling for Yale to divest from apartheid Israel and its genocidal actions in occupied Palestine. We celebrate the efforts and leadership of student organizers, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, SJP chapters and other Palestine solidarity formations, Yale YDSA, and National YDSA in the growing wave of college occupations.

The successful struggle for telework, transit subsidies, alternate work schedules and similar programs was the result of the hard work of federal workers and their unions.

In this episode we meet Jonathan Soto, the DSA endorsed candidate running for New York State Assembly in the North East Bronx. Jonathan is a public school parent, an inter-faith organizer and a democratic socialist, campaigning to unseat longtime incumbent Michael Benedetto in Assembly District 82. 

This commentary by CVDSA member Tanya Vyhovsky originally appeared in VTDigger. A clinical social worker and former school services clinician, Vyhovsky represents the Chittenden-Central District in the Vermont State Senate.

Ordinarily in Vermont, we in the Senate give the governor great deference when it comes to whom he appoints to serve in his cabinet. While we may have policy differences with an appointee, the governor was elected by the people, and he deserves the benefit of the doubt when making appointments.

Not this time.

After years of methodically hinting at his preference for private schools, Gov. Phil Scott made it crystal clear where he stands when it comes to education funding here in Vermont. By choosing a former executive of a for-profit charter school company to be his next education secretary, he is finally saying the quiet part out loud — public education money should be able to flow freely to private and religious schools.

After meeting with the nominee, it is clear to me that she is very smart and accomplished. However, she is not qualified to lead the Vermont public education system past this inflection point and into the future. The nominee’s scant experience in public schools does not give me confidence in her ability to strengthen our public schools in this time of turmoil, and it further shows the governor’s lack of commitment to our public schools. 

Couple that with a State Board of Education that seems willing to at the least be complicit in the governor’s agenda to privatize our schools. This nomination raises alarm bells that should give every one of us who cherishes our local public schools great pause.

I have always been proud that in the state of Vermont, the Constitution guarantees quality public education for all children. That imperative has been carried out over the centuries by dedicated educators, volunteer school boards, administrators, parents, communities and others who believe — rightly — that education for all Vermont children is a valuable asset to all of us.

Indeed, our local public schools — despite assertions to the contrary — deliver the goods year after year, preparing our children with the tools to be happy, healthy and successful in whatever life they choose.

But that egalitarian opportunity is in danger as private and religious schools ramp up their ongoing efforts to co-opt taxpayer dollars for private gain. 

This comes with the tacit approval of the governor and, as of two years ago, the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. Those justices, in Carson v. Makin, made it clear that states like Vermont that give publicly funded vouchers to private schools must also open the public purse to religious schools as well. 

I am profoundly disappointed that we as a Legislature have failed to address this very real threat to our public schools.

It will further undermine our public education system if the charter school company executive chosen by the governor becomes the next guardian of Vermont public schools. If confirmed by the Senate, she will have a compliant pro-private-school State Board of Education to remake rules that will not only allow those schools to become even more unaccountable to the public, but to expand the amount of public resources flowing in their direction and further undercutting our top-in-the-nation public school system.

I am not alone in my deep concern over this nominee. Many of my colleagues have expressed reservations about this appointee, and I’ve heard from hundreds of Vermonters who say charter schools and the further privatization of public education are just plain wrong. 

The governor and those who work in his cabinet want us to believe that opposition to his appointee is personal, sexist or based on where she came from. But those accusations — taken directly out of the D.C. GOP handbook — are meant to distract from the nominee’s deep experience as an executive for a for-profit charter school company that has siphoned public education dollars from students and into the pockets of shareholders, and her utter lack of experience leading a public school system.

We will, as promised, fully explore the nominee’s record. We will conduct hearings and respect the nomination process. But as we do so, we must ensure that the next education secretary is dedicated to protecting, preserving and supporting our local public schools and the 90% of Vermont kids who rely on them every day.

As of our March 7th general meeting, DSA Cleveland has resolved to adopt a Palestine priority plan for the next six months.Though we have been showing up the last several months (and beyond), this represents a significant deepening of our solidarity work. Our chapter now has a dedicated leadership body elected to implement Palestine work according to a specific plan, with measurable goals and specific democratically decided tactics. This priority status also renders this work the near-exclusive focus of our chapter’s Steering Committee and our membership as a whole. The time is now to join with your comrades and demand a free Palestine from the river to the sea.

On October 15th our Chapter’s Steering Commitee released a statement calling on “all people of conscience to oppose genocide in Gaza”, calling for an end to occupation and apartheid in Palestine, and calling on our fellow DSA members, chapters, and leaders, to stand proud against intimidation, death threats, legal attacks, slander, and misinformation. We are proud to say that our organization has done so. For the last five months, since the conclusion of our Abortion rights priority campaign, Cleveland DSA has joined our allies in the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community at city hall, on the highways, and in the streets protesting Israel’s cowardly genocide against the Palestinian people. In December we organized a fundraiser concert generating over $3.5k for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. We have devoted ourselves to the study of Palestinian history, and hope to deepen our education further.

Join us to launch this project with a fundraiser concert at the Happy Dog! Friday at 9pm, we’ll raise money for UNRWA and hear from local bands The Last Gasp, Arms & Armour, GRVE and Mud Whale. Then join us at County Council on Tuesday at 5pm to demand divestment from Israel Bonds – check our calendar for details.

The post Announcing Palestine Solidarity as Cleveland DSA’s Priority appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.