Calls on Community to Demand Dane County Invest in Care Not Cages

On Thursday, January 18, 2024 the Dane County Board of Supervisors will be voting on RES-286, which would increase the budget for the Jail Consolidation Project by $27.6 Million, bringing the total budget of the project to $197 Million. If this jail is built, it will be the most expensive public works project ever in Dane County by a long shot. But this community has the opportunity to say: no more.

District 2 Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner says, “It’s disappointing that some are so eager to pour more money into the jail project when the Crisis Triage Center appears stalled, behavioral health programs and homeless services are woefully underfunded, and two permanent supportive housing projects at Rethke Terrace and Tree Lane are being shut down.”

This jail will be a towering monument to Madison’s hypocrisy and the racial disparities that Dane County continues to uphold; but it has not been built yet, and we can stop it. As of January 14, the Dane County Jail’s population was 54% Black while Dane County is less than 6% Black. Building a new building is not going to fix that clearly broken and racist system. There is a real, tangible, human cost to incarceration—it is inherently violent and harmful. There is no possible budget big enough to build a “humane jail” because that is something that cannot exist.

The costs to run this jail will be an order of magnitude more than the capital cost to build it. If we build this jail, it will set Dane County on a trajectory of doubling down on incarceration, instead of using those funds on investments that would actually make our community safer. 

AWG is calling on the Dane County community to contact their County Board Supervisor to demand CARE, NOT CAGES and encourage them to fund alternatives to incarceration. We need everyone. Ask your friends and family to contact their supervisor and say NO NEW JAIL. CARE, NOT CAGES!

About the Abolitionist Working Group

The Abolitionist Working Group (AWG) formed out of the work to Derail the Jail and the Doyle Resolution campaigns to stop the jail expansion and decarcerate Dane County. This group is the home in Madison Area DSA for all abolition-related work. We believe that abolition is a key tenet of socialism as prisons and policing are some of the most direct and personal means of state-driven oppression in our current society.

With the battle over abortion rights raging in the United States at local, state, and national levels, we here in New York state cannot become complacent that access to abortion will always be guaranteed here. Economic, social, and logistical barriers prevent many people from accessing the care they need, and without decisive action to change that, working-class New York residents as well as people living in the surrounding area will continue to be at risk. Tonight we're joined live by Chelsea Williams-Diggs of New York Abortion Access Fund and Allie Bohm of New York Civil Liberties Union to discuss the state of abortion access in New York state and their advocacy for the statewide Reproductive Freedom and Equity Fund.

Tell your legislators that you support increasing access to abortion in New York state: https://action.aclu.org/send-message/protect-abortion-access-new-york

Follow and support the New York Abortion Access Fund at nyaaf.org.

Are you interested in becoming the best organizer you can be? Do you want to expand socialism here in Milwaukee, but are unsure of where and how to start? Have you been involved but feel like the project did not go anywhere? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class is for you! 

This nine week program will focus on holistically teaching you to be an unstoppable organizer who builds socialism, changes hearts and minds, and impacts our city. You will learn direct action organizing, as defined by Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists, in which we organize actions, campaigns, and tactics to “1) win real, immediate, concrete improvement in people’s lives … 2) Give people a sense of their own power … 3) Alter the relations of power.” 

Interested individuals will apply (Click here, which is due by 11:59 p.m. on February 2, 2024), be interviewed, and enter the program if selected. DSA membership is not required to participate, but is encouraged. 

This education program will be a combination of in-person events with virtual events if necessary. Each unit will be roughly a week, with a week break in the middle of the program. Each unit will consist of classroom-style instruction in the unit topic (no more than 2 hours, which will be in-person), field work in organizing (which will be at least 3 hours and consist of having conversations, moving people to action, and building infrastructure for a strong socialist movement involving several types of campaigns), and time for personal reflection. Each participant must commit to the entire program and, unless excused, attend every unit instruction, and field work session. Missing more than two classes and field work sessions may result in removal from the program.  

This is the fifth time this program has been offered, and it is back by popular demand! The two instructors have updated and revised the course to make you even more prepared to lead in socialism.  

Time commitment per week: 

Unit instruction: 2 hours 

Organizing work: 3 hours 

Miscellaneous tasks: 1 hour 

Total time per week: 6 hours

Weekly Schedule 

Class will be conducted on Tuesday evenings from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. and held in-person at Zao MKE, located at 3219 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, 53211.  

Field work will be held at regular intervals over the week, with options to organize at several points during the week (tentative schedule, subject to change):  

Saturdays, 9:00 a.m. until 12:00 p.m.

Sundays 12:00 p.m. until 3:00 p.m. 

Mondays 5:30 until 8:30 p.m.

Program Timeline: 

February 2 at 11:59 p.m.:

Application deadline – apply here

February 6:

Start of nine week program (class held, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.), held at Zao MKE, located at 2319 E Kenwood Blvd, Milwaukee, WI 53211

February 13:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

February 20:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

February 27:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

March 5:

Week Break

March 12:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

March 19:

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

March 26: 

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

April 2: 

Class will be held from 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

April 5: 

End of class party (tentative) 

April 16:

Completion of program

Units

Each unit helps to answer the question: what is organizing? 

Welcome: what is organizing?

• Get to know participants and instructor
• Define scope of class and intentions
• Determine goals and desired outcomes

Organizing is one-on-one Conversations

• Learn the 7 point organizing conversation
• Practice the conversation and its elements

Organizing is building the committee and the campaign

• The importance (or not) of the committee
• Power Mapping the campaign
• Strategy Chart

Organizing is holistic productivity

• Traction versus distraction
• Time management and its importance
• The Reverse Calendar
• Overcoming blocks to action

Organizing is a mindset

• Acknowledging hurdles and setbacks
• Failure is a great option
• Develop a practice to keep you going

Organizing is raising money and managing it

• Why money is OK
• How to bring energy and money to your campaign
• The basics of campaign budgeting and finance

Organizing is communications

• What does “messaging” mean?
• The power of media
• Writing workshop

Organizing is bringing it all together

• You’ve got momentum – now what?
• Recap of unit themes

Reviews

Here is what previous students have to say about the Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class: 

“[Before the class] I had no idea about the actual work of organizing. Now I feel confident that I would be able to become a leader in a campaign setting.” 

“I loved the practical application of socialism … [and] I loved the far-reaching application of some of the class content.” 

“This is a great way to move into the world of socialism … thank you so much for offering this course.” 

“This [class] is a great first step for anyone looking to start organizing.” 

“I radically grew in my comfort around being upfront and simply being able to approach a complete stranger with a potentially controversial topic.” 

“New organizers and experienced organizers can benefit from this class.” 

“Generally speaking my confidence level just interacting with people about socialism has gone through the roof. I have been given a phenomenal overview of how to organize and I feel confident that I can find out what works best for me in the future.”  

“It was great to grow as an organizer within the confines of a welcoming community/instructor.” 

“I feel more confident organizing outside of an electoral context.”  

Meet your instructors:

Alex Brower

Alex Brower is a labor leader, socialist organizer, and the chapter co-chair of the Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America. Professionally, Alex is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, which organizes union retirees.  In his organizing work, Alex has saved jobs from privatization, helped workers win a union voice on the job, defeated a temp agency, organized against a proposed iron-ore mine, helped bring comprehensive sex education to Beloit Public Schools, and won workplace healthcare for many uninsured MPS Substitute Teachers. As an MPS substitute teacher and former Milwaukee Rec. Department instructor, Alex brings a host of experience teaching others. Alex has also been a candidate for Milwaukee City Comptroller and School Board, running both times as a socialist.

Autumn Pickett

Autumn Pickett is a union organizer and Communications Director for American Federation of Teachers – Wisconsin. She helped win back voting rights for 20,000 students while attending college in Indiana, protect 100’s of custodial and grounds crew jobs from privatization across Wisconsin, sink billionaire Howard Schultz’s 2016 presidential run, use organizing tactics that garnered national headlines, and mentor dozens of YDSA chapters across the country that continue to make real wins for working people. She has served on the National Coordinating Committee for YDSA, as Milwaukee DSA’s Education Officer, and currently represents Milwaukee DSA on the statewide Socialists in Office committee. Autumn is excited to bring her years of experience mentoring new socialist organizers over to the Milwaukee Organizer Class for the first time and help build a people powered movement in Cream City alongside each of you.

Any questions? 

Contact Alex Brower at 414-949-8756 or milwaukeedsa@gmail.com 

Apply now!

Apply here, or copy and paste this URL into your web browser: https://forms.gle/L7QCtowhrBhNm4xM7

I am speaking outside my typical monthly communication to members to tell you that I have tendered my resignation to the National Political Committee. I will spend the next month ensuring there is an orderly transition into their hands or their chosen next National Director. I’d like to take this opportunity to explain why I am leaving, reflect on my time as national director, and list the main opportunities and challenges I see DSA facing in the coming period. 

It has been an absolute honor to serve the tens of thousands of members who together constitute the power of DSA. Outside of unions, there are too few places where working class people can decide together the direction of our lives and fight for it rather than sit at home alone while the world burns and the authoritarians rise.

Why I’m Leaving and Why Now

I made my decision this fall and intended to announce my departure two months ago but chose not to do so at a time when my decision had the capacity to disrupt our critical Palestine solidarity work. To date, DSA has organized almost 400,000 calls to Congress and organized numerous local actions despite early attacks from centrist Democrats and the Right. History has already vindicated us and in that moment I refused to risk my decision to leave being mischaracterized to further attack DSA.

That said, there will never be a perfect time to go. DSA is undeniably rowdy, as is any democratic organization, but also incredibly important, and meeting challenges is how we collectively learn and build power. I have no doubt that we will weather the months ahead.

My DSA life started on campus, at the University of Chicago Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter in 2001. Within years I was elected YDSA national co-chair, and later to the NPC. I have a lifelong commitment to democratic socialism, but when I first started as National Director, I had hoped to stay for five years. It has now been twelve. 

Being a DSA staff member is a demanding job, with many stakeholders to answer to and relentless pressures. We have limited time in the day and we deal with the complicated legal and operational questions of a national multi-million dollar budgeted organization, particularly since we face constant external political/media/regulatory threats. I have overseen massive, transformative growth since 2011. When I started, our budget was only $350,000. It’s now over five million. Our staff started at three and it is now over 30, supporting hundreds of chapters, dozens of national committees and campaigns, and tens of thousands of members. 

With fewer responsibilities, I hope to spend more time with my partner, my parents, and our families, including my step-grandson who is already three years old. I have realized that time waits for no one.

I also greatly miss organizing. Running a rapidly growing and increasingly complex national organization has forced me to focus on administrative matters. In an average week, I spend most of my time coordinating across staff directors and departments, moving projects forward smoothly and identifying and solving problems, developing and strengthening systems and structures to manage the work, and ensuring fiscal and legal compliance across the board. I also provide the NPC context necessary for decision-making and make sure staff have clear guidance on priorities and direction, including pushing for clarification as needed from the NPC as a politically diverse body. I have learned a lot of important lessons about running an organization of DSA’s scale but spent less and less time with chapters and mentoring rising leaders, my original love. I will take some time to rest and recharge, but it’s building power with people that I will always come back to for the rest of my life.

Transition and Next Steps

I notified senior staff last fall, before I had to postpone my announcement, and we have been transition planning. We have submitted a recommendation to the NPC on how to ensure critical work continues and institutional memory is not lost in the interim while the NPC decides on longer-term next steps. But for those of you reading this from outside DSA, understand that this transition is not like a typical non-profit executive director departure. Staff anchor the organization nationally with essential organizing, compliance, administrative, communications, fundraising, financial, tech, and governance infrastructure, but our power also comes from our membership rooted all over the country, and they elect our political leaders. Unlike a dynamic where the executive director brings in and then leaves with big funders, at DSA, our NPC answers to our membership, and 86% of our income comes from membership dues.

I expect that this moment will be a challenge and even risky, but this membership base is the source of our vitality. We are continually learning new lessons and I trust the members to navigate this moment and make the right choices to strengthen DSA. 

Looking Back 

I remember when the 2009-2011 NPC hired me as National Director. DSA had about 5,000 members, less than a dozen elected officials and 25 chapters. It was in the midst of the Arab Spring uprisings, the same year as Occupy Wall Street, and just days before the Christian nationalist massacre of 69 people at a left-wing youth summer camp in Norway. The authoritarian opposition has grown stronger since then. But so too have we, with more than ten times as many members today.

I mentioned before that I originally intended to stay five years. When I started in 2011, DSA was small and marginal like all left groups at the time, and I focused on stabilizing our membership fundraising, getting Democratic Left on a regular publication schedule, developing organizing trainings for chapters, organizing national projects that could help cohere chapters such as Abortion Bowl-a-thons, and hosting intergenerational gatherings. Then DSA endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in his first presidential run and we began to grow. With millions of people supporting him, our We Need Bernie campaign was an obvious strategic decision. It allowed us to organize working-class people and contribute to Bernie’s bringing socialism back into widespread political debate in the U.S. 

There was sharp debate in DSA on whether and how to engage in the presidential election outside of for Bernie. Then Trump became president. Within minutes of Trump’s victory speech that night, literally, our member join page was on fire. People were furious with the neoliberal Democrats and terrified of Trump. Thousands of new members flooded in day after day and we struggled to manage the firehose. Those of us who were politically active at that time, whether in DSA or elsewhere, recall the panic in the air, and it was a moment that transformed DSA. 

I was nearing the five-year mark as the National Director, my self-imposed deadline to leave, but chose to stay to help DSA navigate the skyrocketing growth. We hired more staff and built infrastructure and processes for new chapters, fielded a large contingent at the Washington, D.C. Women’s March against Trump, developed mass campaigns like Medicare for All, and organized hundreds of members to attend the national People’s Summit conferences organized by National Nurses United. We also organized the first predecessor of our current Regional Organizing Retreats, a training for southern members paired with a contingent at the Canton, Mississippi UAW organizing rally with Bernie Sanders in 2017. 

We kept growing, and then AOC won her upset primary in 2018. It was our largest new member month in history.

By answering Trumpism with democratic socialism, AOC and her fellow Squad and DSA members in Congress and beyond electrified the country and laid the groundwork for Bernie’s second presidential campaign and DSA’s steadily increasing number of local and state electoral victories running democratic socialists to the chagrin of Democratic Party power brokers. We also made major organizing investments, including 14 regional organizing trainings for chapter leaders to build a shared organizing vocabulary and model, and in 2019 I asked Jane McAlevey to do a three part national online training series for members. We also launched our campaign for Bernie’s second presidential run.

I’ll always remember DSA for Bernie. Chapters learned to run field operations to knock on neighbors’ doors rather than preach to the choir. Tens of thousands of Bernie supporters found us, and DSA was invited to the People Power for Bernie coalition with base-building national organizations. We continued to grow as people flocked to us for our commitment to organizing not just towards elections but between them, and in not just the electoral arena but also in workplaces and communities. It’s hard to predict what might have happened had COVID not ground the country to a halt in 2020. 

But it did. DSA chapters went fully remote and caused a break in the leadership development (and relationship building) cycle that comes with in-person meetings, cross-chapter gatherings and in-person staff Field Organizer visits. Chapter mutual aid, labor, and tenant committees went into overdrive to provide support and solidarity as working class people lost their jobs, were forced into unsafe working conditions, or faced eviction. Black Lives Matter protests swept the country including the epicenter Minneapolis and our chapters across the country mobilized.

Despite the pandemic, we found ways to run national campaigns. DSA’s Green New Deal strategy summit planned a December 2020 day of action and 85 May Day 2021 actions to launch the Protecting the Right to Organize campaign. DSA members and new volunteers made over a million phone calls to voters in key states, while chapters organized on the ground pressure. We flipped two Senators and were a founding member of the PRO Act focused Worker Power Coalition. 

Today, DSA’s membership numbers are down from our high point of over 90,000, but we are organized. Last summer and fall, for example, close to 200 endorsed elected officials at all levels of government, and over 100 chapters with Strike Ready solidarity captains lent support to the Teamsters and United Auto Workers, while chapters all over organized dynamic strike solidarity for other unions locally. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, our chapters in Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio fought and won abortion ballot measure campaigns, with Florida and other states coming up this year. And most recently, we have organized relentlessly against the U.S. government’s support of genocide in Palestine. As I write we have an energized base and retain a large majority of the members who joined in the “Trump bump” period.

Claims of DSA’s demise are premature, but we have work to do.

There are trends to make me cautiously optimistic. Most importantly, beyond the impressive campaigns I mentioned above, we have signed up 1700 members to pay Solidarity Income-Based Dues of 1% or at least higher monthly membership rates. Staff Field Organizers are rolling out a toolkit on mass recruitment for chapters, and national committees are integrating recruitment into their work. With the continued rise of authoritarian forces and disgust with Wall Street Democrats, DSA is a way for working-class people to take action in collective self-defense. 

That said, we like all social movements go through a cycle and are not in a major upswing. Hundreds of  members join each month, but more members leave or let their dues lapse. In the wake of the pandemic and the election of Joe Biden, there was a worldwide slowdown in donation income and volunteer engagement at nonprofits and other civic organizations, and even public sector unionization rates went down. Many community organizers are confronting a retention crisis in base building organizations. While DSA has retained members and engagement at a far higher rate than most civic organizations, we’re still in a period of membership shrinkage and increasing financial stress. 

One duty I have always held sacred is the responsibility to share hard truths, not just what people want to hear. It has not always endeared me to everyone, but in this moment, I must remind you yet again that there are serious challenges not just on the horizon but here now. 

DSA convention delegates this past summer could not fully realize the realities of the budget or debate the real tradeoffs inherent in the resolutions considered. The organization structurally approaches these questions with a group diplomacy based process. Without a holistic, materialist assessment of our accomplishments, strengths, weaknesses, and especially resources, many individual resolutions were passed but not considered in relation to each other with an eye to explicit prioritization or effectiveness.

The national budget is our clearest example. On our present course, we will be unable to pay all our bills in a few months without a change in direction. Funding all 2023 convention decisions would add more than $2 million to the budget which we simply don’t have. As a nonprofit organization, we cannot print money like the government or take loans like a large corporation. Nor can we make unrealistic predictions about stronger fundraising or recruitment and then spend money we merely hope to raise. We are making strides in Solidarity Income-Based Dues and integrating member recruitment in everything we do at all levels, but a fundraising shortfall could create pressure to accept grants or outsized donations from single individuals, diluting a key source of our independence and power. And given our process, there will often be pressure to displace foundational functions to focus on new projects put forth by various groups. It is the donut hole problem we often discuss in our trainings with chapters – if all your time or resources go to work just outside the core, the core falls apart. With this in mind it is important to find the right balance between experimentation and stability, creativity and basic fundamentals, silos and integration. 

Right now, the NPC is working on finalizing the 2024 budget. It will require very hard choices, and longer term, a reckoning with our structure and our definition of democracy. I’ve said before that DSA is both an army and a town hall. We must act together but also question each other. We can never resolve this fundamental structural contradiction, and it is why my main advice to DSA members is to face this truth. Accept that mass work means competing ideas, so seek ways to compromise with each other. Act responsibly and expect the same of your leaders. Most importantly, learn to act holistically and based on a hard analysis of real conditions. This becomes increasingly important as we head into an election year with stakes higher than ever. 

We have everything to lose, but also everything to win. Let’s take ourselves as seriously as the moment requires.

Maria Svart
@MariaOrganizes

The post A Farewell from the National Director appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Upcoming Events

Wednesday, 1/17 (6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): What is DSA? (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, 1/18 (6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.): Labor Movie Night: Matewan (1987) (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday, 1/19 (12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.): Office Hours (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday, 1/19 (5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): March Election Research Party (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, 1/20 (11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Retrospective (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Monday, 1/22 (6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.): SHOP Training with the Tenant Organizing WG (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Wednesday, 1/24 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): HWG Reading Group: Mean Streets (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, 1/27 (1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.): HWG Sock Distro (Meet in person at 1916 McAllister)

Sunday, 1/28 (11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.): January Office Cleaning/Organizing (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events/ for more events.

Events & Actions

Labor Movie Night: Matewan

Come join us for a Labor movie night at the DSA SF office at 1916 McAllister on January 18th from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. We will be watching Matewan (1987), a film dramatizes the events of the Battle of Matewan, a coal miners’ strike in 1920 in Matewan, a small town in the hills of West Virginia. Made in 1987, this film is arguably an even more relevant, cautionary tale today than ever before.

There will be food and drinks provided!

This event will be mask optional but highly recommended. 

Join the Tenant Organizing Working Group for SHOP Training!

Come join the DSA Tenant Organizing Working Group for the final two parts of a three-part training to develop successful socialist tenant organizers.

The Socialist Housing Organizing Program (SHOP) started yesterday with a study group to discuss how housing developed as a commodity under capitalism, and why the market will never solve the housing crisis. Part 2 is a training on tenants’ rights in San Francisco. Part 3 covers the basics  of an organizing conversation to recruit your neighbors to the tenant union.

You can attend upcoming trainings are at the following times:

• Monday, January 22nd at 6:30 p.m.
• Tuesday, February 6th at 6:30 p.m.

All trainings to take place at the DSA SF office at 1916 McAllister. Zoom is available upon request. Register today!

Mutual Aid Priority WG Has a New Meeting Schedule!

The Mutual Aid Priority Working Group has an updated schedule! The working group will be meeting every other Tuesday at 7:00 p.m.

If you are interested in diving into DSA SF mutual aid projects this year, our first meeting of 2024 will be tonight, January 16th, starting at 7:00 p.m. Currently, our working group is building out capacity for several existing projects, including smolidarity/childwatch for chapter meetings, healing circles in the Tenderloin, a How to Do Mutual Aid course, and more. Check out the #priority-mutual-aid channel on Slack to help us strategize, develop new mutual aid projects, and help our fellow San Franciscans through the power of organizing!

Behind the Scenes

The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.

To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.

Questions? Feedback? Something to add?

We welcome your feedback. If you have comments or suggestions, send a message to the #newsletter channel on Slack.

For information on how to add content, check out the Newsletter Q&A thread on the forum.

But transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism – because it sought
to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish
state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which, in turn, persuaded the Yishuv’s leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure.

Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 60

On a frigid night, December 5, 2023, Joe Biden visited Boston to raise money for his re-election campaign. The president was received by a large group of citizens who protested in unconditional support for Israel and, by extension, its genocidal actions against the Palestinians. 

In Washington, on the same day as Biden’s visit, the House of Representatives passed a resolution explicitly equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and defining many common pro-Palestinian slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as anti-Semitic. 

This is a blatant attack on freedom of speech, and signifies a dangerous step toward the criminalization of legitimate political dissent. 

As a Boston local living near many universities, I have been disappointed to see local student leaders threatened with strong disciplinary sanctions, just as students were threatened during the Vietnam anti-war protests. 

_._

“I know firsthand that Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders and through its occupation. The parallels with my beloved South Africa are truly painful,” (Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 2014).

Indeed, the current situation in Palestine is reminiscent of South African apartheid, though in many ways, incomparably worse. Nevertheless, despite their differences, the Zionist movement bears an important resemblance to the Afrikaner movement: it is a social system rooted in colonial, racist, and totalitarian practice. 

In the West Bank, while broad democratic freedoms are extended to Israeli Jews, Arabs Israelis face, on one level, overwhelming political, legal, and economic discrimination in apartheid-like form and, on another, the daily humiliation and incursions of a brutal and prolonged military occupation. In Gaza, the situation has reached the level of genocidal proportions. As of writing, South Africa is before the International Court of Justice, engaged in a legal proceeding against Israel accusing it of “subject[ing] the Palestinians in Gaza to genocidal acts.” 

This is the true face of Zionism: repopulating stolen land, expelling its indigenous inhabitants through humiliation, indiscriminate force, and destroying all access to the basic necessities of life. As much was suggested by the UN Secretary General , who stated that this ‘wave of violence,’ as it is cynically referred to in the press, “does not come out of nowhere,” but “is born of a long-standing conflict, with 56 years of occupation and no political end in sight.”

In Gaza, according to latest UN data, there are at least 22,835 fatalities, with approximately two-thirds of those being women and children. Additionally, there are thousands of Palestinian political prisoners being held without due process, only a handful of hospitals partially functioning, and the threat of famine looming large as the result of draconian Israeli restrictions.  

These crimes are well-documented by leading figures and institutions in international law and human rights:

Human Rights Watch: “Since 1948, Israel has established a regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people primarily in the domains of nationality and land. In the immediate aftermath of the Nakba, Israel adopted a series of laws, policies, and practices, which sealed the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian people, systematically denying the return of Palestinian refugees and other Palestinians who were abroad at the time of the war. At the same time, Israel imposed a system of institutionalized racial discrimination over Palestinians who remained on the land, many of whom had been internally displaced. Such Israeli laws have constituted the legal architecture of Israeli apartheid that continues to be imposed on the Palestinian people today.” 

Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), described the IDF’s relentless bombardments of the Gaza Strip as “shocking” and the unfolding human tragedy as “unbearable.” Lazzarini highlighted the dire situation in Gaza, where approximately one million people were displaced from north to south over three weeks, in stating that “no place is safe in Gaza.”

Such conditions have prompted rights-groups, like Amnesty International, to call for “End[ing] all U.S. support for the Israeli government’s rights violations and crimes against humanity against Palestinians, particularly the illegal campaign of forced displacement through home demolitions, evictions and settlement expansion in occupied East Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories.

In Boston, we received Biden in the manner he deserved: with powerful, spirited, and determined protest. Nor he, nor his administration, promote peace; instead, they relish war, squandering billions of dollars on instruments of death that could be used for humanitarian efforts and real democracy promotion.

Israel is engaging in wanton terrorism and racism: to state this is not to entertain anti-Semitism, nor is it to deny the Jewish faith, ethnicity, culture, or nation. Jews and Israelis are deserving of the same rights and dignity as everyone else. But Israel, as a State, does not represent all Jews, nor does it contain only Jews. Jews are not a problem, but the prevailing ideology of Zionism is; and it is Zionism that we see unfolding in Gaza today.

Just as we cannot overlook the crimes committed in other historical instances of apartheid and genocide, we cannot overlook the crimes committed in Gaza today.  As members of Boston DSA, we have the political and moral obligation educate, organize, and mobilize against all forms of oppression: therefore, it is undeniable that such obligations apply to the case of genocide and Israel’s present assault on Gaza. 

The Democratic Socialists of America demand an immediate and permanent cessation of hostilities by the United States against Yemen and an end to diplomatic and military support of Israel. President Biden widened the existing regional war even further by ordering airstrikes against civilian infrastructure in Yemen in an effort to stop that country’s humanitarian blockade of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Since October 7th, Israel has continuously engaged in provocative military aggression, aimed at expanding its brutal war into Lebanon. Israeli spokespeople continue their propaganda efforts to tie Iran to the events of October 7th and have issued calls for retaliation. A cyberattack believed to be the work of Israeli military intelligence has struck Iranian civilian infrastructure and extrajudicial assassinations have targeted senior leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hamas in Syria and Lebanon. The U.S.’s attack on Yemen comes in the context of Yemeni forces having blocked container ships owned by Israelis or headed towards Israeli ports. U.S. airstrikes are taking place while South Africa presents its arguments to the International Court of Justice for provisional measures against Israel for the crime of genocide. The U.S. has clearly demonstrated that it would rather pursue a dangerous course of escalation that is alienating the entire global south than rein in its junior imperial partner in the region.

Socialist internationalism obligates us to act in solidarity with the Palestinian and Yemeni people who have bravely resisted imperial aggression by the US and its partners for decades, with hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dying in the U.S.-backed Saudi and UAE war and blockade on Yemen. Reaffirming the principles outlined in UN General Assembly Resolution 45/130, which acknowledges the legitimacy of peoples’ struggle for independence, territorial integrity, and liberation from foreign occupation, DSA firmly supports the rights of those who resist occupation and war. We reiterate our demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and renew our commitment to the cessation of all hostilities against the Yemeni people. We echo DSA congressional representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush’s condemnations of the Biden administration’s illegal attack on Yemen and we call on our members and all other supporters of peace across the country to join us, along with our comrades in Progressive International and the global anti-war movement in elevating these demands.

Take Action Now:

• Join NYC-DSA for an Emergency Ceasefire Phonebank: Hands Off Yemen!
• Join DSA for a No Money For Massacres Solidarity Phonebank
• Become a DSA Member – A Better World is Possible!

The post DSA Condemns U.S. and Israeli hostilities in Palestine and West Asia appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

by Joanne Coutts

The Detroit Lions’ win over the Minnesota Vikings on December 24th clinched the division title for the first time in 30 years. For this feat each player will receive a $54,500 bonus with the potential for additional payouts depending how they fare in the playoffs. This money comes from a playoff pool created by the NFL’s revenue-sharing program. Does this sound a little bit like socialism?

The NFL suffers from many identity crises. It promotes nationalism while yearning for the global appeal of soccer. It cloaks itself in militarism and extracted $5.4 million from the Department of Defense in exchange for patriotism spectacles. It aids billionaire team owners in appropriating taxpayer money to build giant stadiums ($110 million in the case of Ford Field) while positioning itself as the sport of the “blue collar worker.”

However, the NFL identity crisis on which sports writers have spilled the most ink is the tension between the league’s deeply capitalistic goals and its need to embrace at least parts of socialism to achieve them.

If you type “NFL socialism” into an internet search engine, many articles will pop up, arguing that various aspects of the NFL are or are not socialist. These generally focus on the draft, which gives the teams with the worst win/loss records in the previous season first choice of the best players moving from college to the NFL each year, thereby giving the teams that need it most first access to new resources.

They also discuss revenue sharing, which distributes television revenue equally among all teams regardless of how many people watch their games on any given Sunday, to spread the wealth and allow teams in smaller cities like Green Bay to remain competitive with larger ones like New York. And they argue that the salary cap, which prevents teams from accumulating all the best players by paying them more, means that wealthy team owners cannot gobble up and hoard all the “best resources” for themselves.

These measures have the goal of ensuring parity across the league, and have resulted in 12 different Super Bowl winners in the past 15 years. In contrast, the English Premier League, where none of these socialist wealth-distribution mechanisms exist and unfettered capitalism reigns supreme, has seen only 5 different clubs win the league during the same period.

Credit the union (or blame the union)

One central tenet of socialism, worker’s unions, is mostly overlooked in these articles. The strength of the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) has been a key factor in the success of the league, and over the years the NFLPA has gotten its members everything from clean jock straps to a $1 million per year minimum wage.

At the NFLPA’s first meeting, in 1956, players from 11 of the 12 teams signed on to be represented by the new union. Their demands included a minimum $5,000 salary whether playing or injured, clean uniforms, and equipment paid for by their teams. In 2014, the latest year for which information is available from the Department of Labor, 1,959 or 91% of the NFL’s approximately 2,144 active and practice squad players were voting members of their union. An additional 3,130 former players were also NFLPA members. Union membership remains strong because of the NFLPA’s success in raising player’s salaries and improving working conditions and benefits, and its relatively modest dues, $31,000 per year, which for context represents 4.1% of the league’s 2023 minimum salary ($750,000 per year).

In the summer of 1968, the NFLPA, led by Detroit Lions offensive guard John Gordy, held its first strike and soon after ratified its first collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The CBA included an increase in minimum salaries, exhibition game pay, and a $1.5 million contribution by NFL owners to a pension fund. The most recent CBA, ratified in 2020, makes these gains look paltry by comparison. Some of the highlights which we might all drool over include:

Revenue sharing — The CBA requires that players receive 48% of gross football-related revenues generated by the league. This means that 48% of TV broadcast deals, ticket sales, league-wide and local sponsorships, gambling, and even soda and hot dog sales must be spent on player wages and benefits. Retail store workers receive around 17% of revenue in wages, for restaurant workers it’s 25 to 30%, and in some manufacturing plants worker’s share of revenue can drop as low as 10%.

Minimum wage — In 2023 minimum-salary players on a team’s active roster received a 6.4% increase from $705,000 to $750,000 per year. Under the current CBA, minimum-salary players will see a 33% increase from their current salaries, hitting the $1 million mark by 2030. The recent UAW deal comes close to this, raising base wages by 25% by 2028. For the rest of us, the Congressional Budget Office predicts that we will see average wage growth of 3% per year, for a total 18% increase by 2030.

Health and Pension Benefits — NFL players and their dependents receive a variety of health benefits which continue for five years after they leave the league, after which they can opt to continue in the health plan at their own expense. Specific health conditions related to playing football, such as joint damage or neurological care, are covered for life. They also get a league pension, averaging $43,000 per year, starting at age 55 and can join the league’s 401K, Annuity and Second Career savings programs. While many U.S. workers participate in 401K or Retirement Savings Plans, only 11% of private sector workers have access to a pension plan.

The NFLPA has been aided in achieving all this by advantages most unions can only dream of. Its coffers are filled with revenue from marketing and endorsement deals in addition to player dues. Its members hold almost all the “means of production” of their product, making scabbing all but impossible; all attempts during the various player strikes and owner lockouts to replace the product on TV and in stadiums have been a dismal failure.

The union’s leadership is predominantly made up of rank-and-file players. Hands up: who has heard of NFLPA President JC Tretter and of Jalen Reeves-Mabin, who currently represents the Lions as a vice-president of the union? Perhaps because of this rank-and-file leadership, many of these gains benefit rank-and-file over “star” players. For example, increases in minimum salaries and benefits for all, combined with the salary cap, limit the money available to pay “big name” players.

We should all be so lucky as to be represented by such an active, well funded, and powerful union. With that power comes responsibility to stand in solidarity with workers around the world. As our Detroit Lions head to the playoffs let’s push the NFLPA to use its power to support workers across the country, as they did for Amazon workers in Alabama in 2021, and across the globe. Tell the NFLPA to demand a #CeasefireNow!

Send a message https://nflpa.com/contact. Tweet @NFLPA @JCTretter

Go Lions!!!

Notes and Links

Inflation 2023:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/12/heres-the-inflation-breakdown-for-november-2023-in-one-chart.html

Jalen Reeves Mabin is Detroit Lion on NFLPA Executive Committee:

Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Football_League_Players_Association

NFLPA Revenue spending:

https://paddockpost.com/2022/12/11/how-revenue-is-spent-at-the-national-football-league-players-association/

NFLPA:

https://nflpa.com/ and https://www.influencewatch.org/labor-union/nfl-players-association/

Paid militarization of the NFL:

https://fee.org/articles/its-time-to-end-the-paid-militarization-of-the-nfl/

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/nfl-dod-national-anthem-6f682cebc7cd/

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/sep/11/the-nfl-and-the-military-a-love-affair-as-strange-and-cynical-as-ever

2020 CBA highlights:

https://operations.nfl.com/inside-football-ops/players-legends/2020-nfl-nflpa-cba-need-to-know/

NFL post season pay:

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/agents-take-an-inside-look-at-postseason-pay-and-how-brock-purdy-can-benefit-most-by-winning-super-bowl/

Detroit Lions Player Report Card:

https://nflpa.com/detroit-lions-report-card#treatment-of-families

https://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/bears/ct-cb-nfl-cba-players-vote-20200312-q5nz2afepncpbo2masulsl2nqm-story.html

NFL and Socialism:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-the-nfl-owners-are-exclusive-socialists-102946280.html

https://fee.org/articles/is-the-nfl-draft-socialism/

https://www.sj-r.com/story/news/columns/2014/10/24/the-nfl-is-socialistic-enterprise/36089303007/

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/sep/19/english-football-got-the-commercialism-of-us-sports-but-none-of-their-egalitarianism

Capitalism in UK football:

https://jacobin.com/2020/08/english-football-capitalism-manchester-premier-league-fc

Detroit Lions history:

Detroit Lions | Detroit Historical Society

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!

Unionized workers in Detroit to get $54,500 bonus was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Sara G.

It’s time for an RSS revival and socialists should be taking the lead. RSS–Really Simple Syndication–is a tool that aggregates content from multiple sources like news sites and tweets into one single feed. Popular in the early 2000s, it has since been overshadowed by social media as writers and artists moved from blogs to Twitter and Instagram. Corporations abandoned it because, as an open protocol, it isn’t easily monetized. When reading an article on an RSS feed, the reader only sees the content, not the multitude of ads embedded on the original site. The reader chooses what to view, so algorithms can’t push more financially beneficial articles in front of their eyes. This decreases the captive audience for corporate content.

While social media networks are where the largest audiences are, they are hostile to leftist organizing. Content is moderated to suit corporate agendas. For instance, X bans users who tweet “from the river to the sea” while promoting right-wing hate speech. All user data and content is tracked and fed into AI to put workers out of jobs or create deepfakes, or to hand over to the police or surveillance organizations like Palantir. Sex workers are kicked off platforms, and minority posters are routinely dogpiled, stalked, and doxxed. User posts appear alongside anti-semitic ads, or are algorithmically served up to the people most likely to be enraged by them. Social media sites can be actively harmful to leftists who post on or read them. 

We are trying to build a mass movement, so we should continue recruiting the working class on large sites like X even though they are owned by our ideological enemies. They are great for posting out wins and advertising upcoming events. For anything deeper or more internal, we need to have greater control over our messaging and how it is presented and moderated, so that we can discuss issues on our own terms. RSS allows leftist writers to host their own content wherever they’d like, without relying on a social media conglomerate like Meta and being subject to its limitations.

Most leftists with a blog or newsletter don’t need to do anything extra to post to RSS. Sites like Squarespace and WordPress automatically provide RSS feeds of their content. The DSA National Tech Committee has created a feed that aggregates publications from DSA chapters. Chapters who want to syndicate their publications can talk to NTC about how to get added.
Since RSS is an open protocol, readers are not tied to one app or company to access content. To read RSS feeds, you need to download an RSS reader. Popular readers include Newsblur, Feedbin, Feedly, Miniflux, and Readwise. Some are free, some have ads, some have extra features like web clipping or archiving, and some are more minimalist. Some accommodate tweets and email-based newsletters, and some don’t. There’s something for everyone, but the downside of not having one monopolistic company means users need to make their own decision about which app to use. After selecting an app, feeds can be added. Leftists might be interested in the DSA feed, Jacobin, In These Times, and Labor Notes. We have a lot of opportunities to build a leftist ecosystem online that allows robust discussion and encourages the development of class consciousness. Social media companies don’t need to be the only way in which we interact with one another online: seize the means of content production!

The post RSS: A Better Way to Collect News Content first appeared on Red Fault.