As part of our 2025 Migrant Rights Campaign, DSA San Diego is pressuring local school districts to defend students against ICE raids. Read more. [...]

Read More... from Migrant Rights Priority Campaign: Spring 2025 Update

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Buffalo DSA’s Response to Buffalo Niagara Partnership’s 2025 Advocacy Agenda

We are a volunteer effort of class-conscious Western New Yorkers who have researched and organized against the BNP.

Here’s what you need to know:

Buffalo-Niagara Partnership stands for expensive, private healthcare on behalf of their health insurance company donors and board members.

Universal, public healthcare is what we need as people, patients, caregivers, and workers.

Unlike the “Advocacy Agenda” states, the child tax credit is not a solution to the childcare crisis.

Groups who might be actually concerned about the workforce should use their political power to advocate for direct cash payments to families to help with childcare costs, and a universal childcare system of well-paid caregivers.

BNP warns about the”benefits cliff” that means-testing creates, while advocating against universal policies that would solve the problem.

The solution is a state that provides support to all of us and encourages shared responsibility.

They want blank checks for their friends to make superficial improvements to our city while our existing housing issues worsen.

What we need is Good Cause Eviction and measures for Rent Control to start. We ultimately need public, social housing and anti-discrimination in New York.

BNP’s genius development ideas include a push for Buffalo to take part in over-investment in Al centers that fry our power grid and have little potential for actual adoption, while opposing environmental progress.

Building a tech bubble locally is an oversight that will lead to job loss in the future.

We have all the productive capacity we need to thrive, but the power is held in the wrong hands.

BNP’s scarcity mindset around taxes, as well as desire to protect and expand the private sector at great cost to the public, reflects their elite members’ preferences – not the scale and potential of New York’s economy.

A better Western New York is possible – if we get educated, build the independence, and political courage to prioritize the needs of working people.

The Butlalo-Niagara Partnership is structurally incapable of undertaking, or even guiding, such a task.

Political leaders should be held to account for their collaboration with them.

Take action with us:

• Read our full reports and share our materials – we are a volunteer effort!
• Sign our Back Off, BNP open letter exposing the relationship between our local corporate elites and politicians!
• Use our tools to contact your rep and demand they bring universal healthcare to a vote in NY this year!
• Share your healthcare story with us. Lets flip the script on the corporate for-profit care industry.
• Union Members: Advance a resolution in your union to support universal healthcare.

Thorn West: Issue No. 228

State Politics

• Former Orange County congress member Katie Porter is the most recent candidate to announce their candidacy for California governor. Current governor Gavin Newsom will be unable to run in 2026 due to term limits.

• Governor Newsom interviewed Steve Bannon on his newly launched podcast. It is the third episode to feature a friendly interview with a member of the far right.

City Politics

Los Angeles chief administrative officer Matt Szabo predicted a $1 billion budget shortfall in the next fiscal year in a presentation before city council, projecting the need for “thousands” of layoffs of city employees. The current fiscal crisis was precipitated by raises for LAPD officers, and is exacerbated by police liability claims. Mayor Karen Bass, released a statement warning that her draft budget for the upcoming fiscal year, due to be released within a month, will represent a “fundamental change in the way the City operates.”

Health Care

• As Republicans discuss cutting billions of dollars in Medicaid funding over the next ten years. Capital & Main projects the devastating cascading effect this will have on health care in California.

• Medi-Cal, California’s implementation of Medicaid, is $6.2 billion over budget, a result of rising pharmacy costs, and increased participation in the program. The state has borrowed from its reserve fund to partially make up the shortfall.

• There was a diagnosed case of measles in LA County last week, in a patient who had just flown into LAX. Press release from the LA County Department of Public Health here.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• Recordings made by an LAPD officer in the department’s Recruiting Division captured a stream of racist, sexist and homophobic comments from multiple officers across dozens of conversations. A probe is underway.

• [CW: police violence] LAPD officers shot and killed an unarmed driver during a traffic stop last week.

• Amid a budgetary crisis, advocates worry about the future of a successful pilot program that diverts emergency mental health calls to an unarmed crisis response team. LA Forward is hosting a zoom call to organize a defense of the program, here.

• Sheriff Robert Luna is suing the Los Angeles County’s Civilian Oversight Commission, seeking to withhold documents related to deputy misconduct that the commission has subpoenaed.

Housing Rights

• Funding for a federal emergency rental voucher program, which provides assistance to tenants facing homelessness, is projected to run out in the upcoming fiscal year.

• An audit has revealed that LAHSA, the organization which currently provides homelessness services across LA County, has been lax in tracking its use of funds. LA Public Press provides further details on plans at the city and county level to restructure how homelessness services are provided.

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