“The Coulee DSA books club will begin reading Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds” beginning Tuesday, May 25th at 7 PM. Parenti’s 1997 text is considered a classic among many on the left. Among many themes, the book explores how corporate power has embraced fascism throughout history, how historical revolutions freed populations from the forces of exploitation, the enduring power of Marxism, and the importance of class analysis in understanding and comprehending the political realities of our time. 

The Coulee DSA Book Club meets every Tuesday night at 7 PM, It doesn’t require regular attendance, so feel free to stop by or drop in and out as you have time. Reading is strongly encouraged but not required. The discussion often goes off on tangents and covers a broad array of topics, and we would love you to add your voice to the discussion! Reply to this email if you are interested in joining and we will connect you to the group. “

The post DSA book club is starting ‘Blackshirts and Reds’ first appeared on Coulee DSA.

How would your life change if you no longer had to worry about healthcare? Maybe you would quit that job you hate and start a business, or work part-time so you could spend more time with your kids. Maybe you could finally get that dental work you have been putting off, or use the money you save on insurance premiums to pay off debt.

We say “healthcare is a human right” because it is a moral and practical imperative to ensuring people can live lives of value, and because providing it would eliminate unnecessary suffering in all our communities. Ensuring universally accessible healthcare would literally SAVE LIVES.

Just as importantly, it would break the shackles that our current for-profit healthcare system places on average Americans. In the “freest nation in the world”, many of us are beholden to jobs we hate, working long hours to pay up to a third of our income for insurance (if we are lucky enough to have it), never able to reach the financial or life goals we set for ourselves. A universal, single-payer healthcare system will open up opportunities for the average American. It will give everyone more flexibility in employment, prevent crippling medical debt, and ensure care to marginalized populations.

Right now in Wisconsin we have an opportunity to take a step closer to this goal, by accepting federal Medicaid expansion funding and using it to expand the WI BadgerCare program to cover those making between 0-138% of the poverty line. This would provide affordable healthcare to an additional 91,000 Wisconsinites, while saving our state approximately $630 million in taxes. While Governor Evers has proposed this expansion in his biennial budget, our legislature does not currently support accepting these federal funds.

Coulee DSA is fighting in coalition with other groups across the state to demand the WI legislature include BadgerCare expansion in their next budget. You can help by reaching out to your local legislator to let them know you support this legislation or by helping CDSA spread the word at our upcoming canvassing events in Viroqua.

Coulee DSA’s Health Care Justice working group meets every other Wednesday at 7 PM. Contact us at couleedsa@gmail.com if you are interested in learning more or joining up.

The post Demand BadgerCare Expansion Now! first appeared on Coulee DSA.

Do we live in a secular age? Is capitalism a religion? In this episode, Stephen Crouch asks author and professor Eugene McCarraher about the "misenchanted" qualities of capitalist society. Dr. McCarraher is the author of the 800-page tome entitled, Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (2019). During the episode, Dr. McCarraher discusses the shortcomings of Marxism and the Protestant work ethic, and suggests a better path forward through the anti-capitalist Romantic tradition with its "enchanted" view of the world. Dr. Eugene McCarraher is a Professor of Humanities and History at Villanova University and the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought. He has written for Dissent and The Nation and contributes regularly to Commonweal, The Hedgehog Review, and Raritan. His recent work, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Did you know that Coulee DSA has a book club? It started shortly before Covid hit, and currently meets online every Tuesday night at 7 PM. The group discusses books, articles, and essays, as well as podcasts and documentaries. Next Tuesday, 5/11, is a great time to join as the group is starting a new book, Before The Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine by Remi Kanazi.

The group doesn’t require regular attendance, so feel free to stop by or drop in and out as you have time. Reading is strongly encouraged but not required. The discussion often goes off on tangents and covers a broad array of topics, and we would love you add your voice to the discussion! Reply to this email if you are interested in joining, and we will connect you to the group.

The post DSA Book Club’s Next Read – Before The Next Bomb Drops first appeared on Coulee DSA.

Hey, CDSA members, supporters, and awesome community members! Coulee Democratic Socialists of America is revamping our communications stream.

Going forward, our newsletter will be broken up into regular blog posts. We have carried your subscription over from the newsletter to our blog here on the Coulee DSA website.

Posts will include info on our working groups, the DSA as a whole, local campaigns and projects, and more. We are aiming for an email a week or so–and we promise not to spam you with pointless posts.

If you are looking for more info, check out our website, or email us back.

The post CDSA Blog Kickoff first appeared on Coulee DSA.

Athens Area DSA will be partnering with other DSA chapters in Georgia to host a Pass the PRO Act phonebank on Saturday, May 8th from 3:00 – 5:30pm. Join us and comrades from all across the state to demand that Senators Warner, Kelly, and Sinema fight for workers and support the PRO Act! Register for the phonebank here

Lets meet in socially-distanced and masked person-space! Saturday May 1st Athens Area DSA will be at Bishop Park with games and snacks for a family friendly gathering. Come chat, learn about what we are doing, see where you can plug in! Later we will move to a casual hang out at Little Kings (adults only) starting at 7pm. Come to either or come to both! We are excited to see and speak to your faces!

RSVP for the event here: https://fb.me/e/KR0njmt2

This episode of Heart of a Heartless World features Travis Donoho and Jeremy McMahan. Travis is a professional labor union organizer and member of Thich Nhat Hahn's Order of Interbeing Sangha. Jeremy is the producer of this podcast and a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner and scholar. They discuss the relationship between socialism and Buddhism, how self care is essential for labor organizing, and why a lot of American Buddhists don't identify as socialists.

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On Sunday, April 11th, the members of Charlotte Metro DSA voted to endorse the National DSA Pass the PRO Act Campaign. The full text of the resolution is available below.

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As a top national priority, DSA is embarking on a national campaign to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act). This transformative legislation gives power to unions to organize workers and overturns many anti-labor rulings handed down by the Supreme Court. Most importantly, it roots out racist and unjust labor practices, like right-to-work laws, and guarantees that immigrant workers have the same rights afforded to their fellow workers. DSA is joining a national coalition led by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), a union that is majority people of color, who has been leading the push. DSA’s National Political Committee is preparing to support DSA chapters in every state as we fight side by side with workers everywhere from now until May Day (Biden's 100th day in office) to force the president and federal elected officials to make this legislation a reality.

President Biden has made climate one of his key priorities in office. In his first week in office, he’s already re-entered the Paris Agreement and cancelled the Keystone pipeline. These steps re-establish the status quo of Obama’s presidency. But more importantly, the new administration's emphasis on climate, along with more socialists in Congress, creates openings for DSA to push for key legislative priorities. There is also a common desire among both labor and the left to not repeat 2008, when Obama was allowed to back down on his promises, leading to the Republican wave in 2010. 

We can only win transformative reforms like the Green New Deal with a much stronger, radicalized, and organized working class. To that end, DSA’s national Green New Deal (GND) campaign and Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC) are convening a central push for the First 100 Days of the new administration to pass the PRO Act (Protect the Right to Organize), which would strengthen unions and the power of the working class to organize on the job, helping to build labor power as strong as it needs to be in the months and years ahead to win a just transition to a green economy for all workers, especially in building power toward GND demands like a federal jobs guarantee that can function as socialist “non-reformist reforms.” The original New Deal was won through militant labor organizing — rebuilding this capacity is crucial to the theory of power DSA’s national GND campaign has developed for a radical Green New Deal.

Towards that end, Charlotte Metro DSA proposes to work within our chapter to mobilize members around the PRO Act, which would begin with emphasizing that passing this legislation is a first key demand within a larger campaign strategy to win a Green New Deal. We will coordinate our chapter with the broader DSA national initiative, laying the groundwork for future efforts strengthening connections between labor and climate justice. 

Goals:

• Align DSA members around a labor-oriented strategy for climate organizing;

• Advance a pro-labor narrative for DSA’s climate organizing, internally and externally;

• Connect with and activate DSA union members to participate in a strategic and federally-targeted DSA campaign;

• Activate non-union worker members within DSA around the demand of the PRO Act;

• Increase DSA members’ capacity/skills to carry out strategic organizing work with  federal targets in a strategic nationwide campaigns;

• Work with Labor WG to ID union members and non-union members in key sectors that would be affected by PRO for mobilization, laying the groundwork for possible future GND-related organizing with local labor unions;

• Support chapter targeting of local unions who could be brought into coalition around the PRO Act and facilitate longer-term relationship building with labor. 

To this end, we are proposing these chapter efforts for the first 100 days of the Biden administration:

• Plan public-facing political education events around the role of organized labor and the PRO Act in winning a Green New Deal;

• Mobilize members for national webinars around PRO Act and the role of organized labor in a just transition;

• Participate in DSA national phone banks with auto-dialer campaign to pressure key Reps in Congress, especially in strategic states and districts with Reps and Senators to be moved in key states like Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Colorado, and Arizona;

• The National GND campaign is developing a congressional tracking sheet with IUPAT to identify priority targets. We will work across our chapter to determine interest and capacity to organize against any priority targets in our jurisdiction;

• Adapt national social media campaign materials for targets in our region;

• Plan public action(s) locally around PRO Act, along with the national campaign and local labor allies (including a possible May Day action). These can include rallies, sit-ins, escalating nonviolent direct action, etc. based on capacity and risk factors for participating members and allies.

Interested members can sign up for the national campaign in this form! 

http://bit.ly/dsaproact