As a rising leader in the Democratic Socialists of America, you could be forgiven for feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. You weren’t sure what to expect when you first started attending meetings, but you were excited about DSA’s goals and glad to be among like-minded people. You took on some low-stakes projects like flyering or phone banking, and became a regular face in the crowd at your branch or working group meetings. You still felt like the ‘new kid’, but you were starting to get your bearings and develop an understanding of how and why the organization operates.

But something felt a bit unbalanced. The steering committee of your branch or working group was clearly juggling a ton of work—planning meetings, doing outreach, onboarding new members, and trying to figure out how to carry out the work they were tasked with doing for the chapter. The leadership and longtime members all seemed to know each other well, but they didn’t appear to have much time to get to know the revolving cast of newcomers at their meetings, let alone engage with them one-on-one outside of group settings. They rarely made concrete asks of general members beyond attending more meetings or basic agitprop. At times, they even appeared to be on a different page from other parts of the chapter, or to lack clear goals beyond maintaining the structure of their organizing body. 

But you believed in the work, so you kept showing up to do whatever was asked of you. Then, one day, you were approached by a member of leadership: Someone had stepped down from the steering committee for whatever reason, and they wondered if you’d be interested in filling the seat. You said yes, of course—you were eager to take on a higher level of responsibility, but hadn’t been able to find a clear path to doing so. 

Fast-forward a month or two later, and you’re running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off: Zoom meetings are multiplying across your calendar like spores, you’re getting dragged into leadership debates about internal stuff you barely understand, and your sense of your steering committee’s medium- and long-term goals is somehow not that much clearer to you than before you entered leadership. The most maddening part, however, is that you feel alone in a crowd. Plenty of new members are showing up to your meetings each month, looking for work to do. But you can’t seem to offload major tasks, because doing so would require you to engage, train, and mentor these new members—which you don’t have time to do. Eventually, you step away, burnt out, and one of the more engaged members takes your place, like a fresh-faced actor stepping into the superhero costume.

Many of our current and former chapter leaders, myself included, have reported feeling caught in this cycle of organizational burnout. As our membership has continued to grow, the chapter has elected to take on more and more work. As a result, our base workload never feels sustainable no matter how many new members sign up each month. It’s a vicious cycle. Leaders are spread too thin to develop new members into future leaders, so they struggle to carry the burden all by themselves. Meanwhile, all but the most industrious general members watch from the sidelines, waiting to be directed and developed. The membership continues to grow, but the organization doesn’t. How do you break the cycle?

I found myself asking this question throughout my tenure as a leader of the North Side Red Line (NSRL) branch. At the time I was appointed to fill a vacancy on NSRL’s steering committee, the branch didn’t have nearly as deep a pool of engaged general members to recruit from. This was in part due to high leadership turnover and structural disadvantages that date back to the split of the former North Side Branch’s split into Red and Blue Line groups in 2020. As a result, we lacked close working relationships with other leaders across the chapter, and we weren’t facilitating nearly as much activity as other branches.

Since then, NSRL has taken great strides to break the cycle of “middlelessness.” Our monthly branch meeting attendance has nearly doubled. We’ve developed a reliable organizing committee open to all branch members that focuses on logistics and operations. We’ve grown a kick-ass agitprop team and a crew of neighborhood leaders, and we’ve built effective working relationships across different parts of the chapter. 

The process of getting there as a group was at once painstaking and revelatory. And it has led me to view “middlelessness” as one of our most crucial organizing challenges across the chapter – one we ought to make a central focus of internal conversations as we approach the chapter’s June convention and look toward the next year of organizing. 

I’ve outlined here a road map of sorts based on my experience in NSRL leadership, in the hope that these insights might be helpful for other leaders across the chapter, both new and established.

1: Clarify Your Goals

Because of DSA’s significant membership and leadership turnover, new leaders sometimes end up inheriting a position of responsibility for an organizational body or initiative whose founding leaders are no longer active cadre. If these organizers have been “rocketshipped” into leadership from general membership before they have a chance to be integrated into the organizational culture, they’re likely to lack a sense of institutional history. In some cases, they may be unclear on the medium- and long-term goals of the entities they serve. Multiply that across several cycles of turnover, and you might end up with a steering committee whose members may unknowingly have different ideas about our basic goals.

As a newer leader, I recall feeling nervous asking my fellow branch steering committee members for clarity on our goals and priorities. I worried it might come across as a criticism, or even just a stupid question. But as it turns out, I didn’t need to be worried at all! My comrades were extremely supportive, and we met soon after to discuss what work needed to be done to thrive as a branch, per the priorities set for us by the chapter. How could we best divide work between us to handle the ongoing workload while also leaving ourselves with enough time and energy to develop new members into middle-level leaders?

If there’s one thing this past year has taught me as an organizer both inside and outside of DSA, it’s that these types of purposeful resets, when initiated with a positive spirit and genuine curiosity about others’ experiences, can be really transformational. They lead not only to clearer goals, but also to stronger working relationships and more deliberative processes.

2: Get Connected!

Chicago DSA is a large chapter in a geographically vast municipality, and the neighborhoods with the densest DSA membership are scattered across the city from one another. This alone makes it very difficult for members who don’t live near one another to get enough face-to-face interaction to form enduring organizing relationships. Add to that the fragmentation of our capacity across different bodies—branches, working groups, committees, etc.—and it’s not hard to see why it takes a conscious effort to avoid disconnection and siloing between different parts of the chapter.

One of my first priorities as a branch leader was to get in touch with at least one leader from each chapter body, ideally someone who was also a member of our branch, to talk about what we could do in branch meetings to better facilitate their work. Forming those connections not only gave us a clear picture of how the entire chapter was operating at any given point in time, but it also made other chapter leaders feel invested in the growth of our branch, and eager to lend a hand to help us figure out organizing and logistics challenges as they popped up.

3: Get to Know Your Members

Generally speaking, spending your downtime doing unpaid organizing work for a socialist party is a pretty unusual thing to do, and one without much precedent for most people. Nearly everyone who comes through our doors—even the most outgoing and enthusiastic folks—will arrive with some uncertainty as to whether there’s a place in this project for them. That’s why it’s so important that we meet people as people, rather than mere numbers or pairs of ears to listen to us talk about our politics and program.

Regular social events have helped us facilitate this work by allowing us to learn about our new members as people: their jobs, their interests, their pets, and so on. It might not feel like important work—there are no pragmatic goals to be set or immediate indicators of success. But by putting in the time to get to know your comrades well enough that you can have a real, non-DSA-related conversation with them, you build trust in each other and in the institution.

4: Set Up Shop

If you want to determine who among your general membership is interested in taking on a higher level of involvement, carving out a dedicated space for those members to opt into is crucial. Create opportunities to get people involved at a slightly deeper level than a canvas or volunteer shift. Name a time, name a place, and invite the members—but don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t take off right away. In NSRL, for example, we knew we wanted to form an organizing committee (OC) to take on some of the administrative and logistical work of running the branch, so we started advertising a weekly Zoom call for general members to join for just that purpose. At first, there were many weeks in which no one outside of the steering committee showed up. But we kept having them every week, until one or two people started consistently showing up—and then more people joined from there.

5: Make Small Asks 

Putting people together in a room doesn’t magically make delegation start happening. You need to build habits that support thoughtful task delegation, no matter what space you’re in. Don’t be afraid to start small—in fact, that’s the ideal place to start. At an in-person general membership meeting, for example, there are myriad opportunities to make small asks: you need someone to keep time, someone else to greet new members when they walk in, a third person to take notes, another to bring snacks, and so on.

It’s possible that leadership has the capacity in the moment to do all of these tasks themselves, but that doesn’t matter. The point of delegating them is much less about their completion than about letting members step up to take responsibility within the space in a way that feels safe and approachable. By doing so, you help these members feel more confident, and establish a space that feels cooperatively operated by members, rather than managed solely by leadership. And when you see a member consistently stepping up for small tasks, you can eventually try making a larger ask of them; they may even step up and offer to help with an unfilled need themselves.

6: It Just Takes Some Time

Some members will be confident and enthusiastic right from the jump, and they will quickly find a niche within the operations of your organizing body. Others will be trickier. Perhaps they’re friendly and consistent about showing up to things, but you can’t quite figure out how to encourage them to step into the middle layer of leadership no matter how much you chat with them after meetings or at socials. This is normal, and typically not a poor reflection on them (or you). Everyone moves at their own pace, for their own reasons. The most important thing is to foster people’s curiosity and recognize their consistency, no matter what stage of development they’re at. 

It’s also important to remember that you cannot be all things to all people. Your background, personality, and interests will enable you to mobilize and develop some kinds of people, but perhaps not others. The beauty of relational organizing, in fact, is that you and your fellow chapter leaders don’t have to carry the weight of middle-layer development alone. 

For example: let’s you’ve seen Wanda at nearly every general meeting and social event for months. She seems to really enjoy being a member, but she hasn’t stepped up to take on any tasks and you can’t seem to figure out how to encourage her. Meanwhile, you’ve formed a strong working relationship with a newer member named Suzanne, who’s on your OC. Lo and behold, Wanda and Suzanne totally click, and before you know it, Suzanne’s convinced Wanda to help schedule calendar events for the OC.

The fact that you couldn’t figure out how to empower Wanda isn’t a failure on your part. You just weren’t the right person to develop Wanda. Suzanne was the right person to develop Wanda, and you were the right person to develop Suzanne. Trust between members builds organically, but not randomly. It takes intention, self-awareness, and a willingness to be approachable and listen to your members with care and curiosity.

Trust the Process

A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a fellow branch member that I was planning to attend an OC meeting for the first time since I took a break from leadership two months prior. He suggested I swing by a meeting the week after next—next week’s meeting, he told me, would be a “heads down” work session where they’d be hammering out final logistics for an upcoming town hall event hosted by the branch.

When he told me this, I nearly wept from joy. There was no way we could have gotten nine or ten people in a room together to plan an event like that a year ago. Organizational growth and replication isn’t easy—in all honesty, I took a break from leadership earlier this year in part because the stress of this process had caught up to me. I needed time to recharge. But watching new members find their niche in the organization and grow into leadership in a more sustainable and supported way than I and others could is an indescribable honor and blessing. 

This is why middle layer organizing is of such profound importance to me, and why I want to see our chapter embrace it as a core internal priority. In the next year, our chapter will attempt to build on the momentum of Byron Sigcho Lopez’s congressional campaign to grow our membership and fight for big external wins. As we do this, however, we need to focus as much as possible on our capacity to grow as an institution made up of people. We must work to slow member attrition, encourage a healthy and sustainable pace of work, and build meaningful working relationships that can stand the test of time and the inevitable stresses of building a working-class party together.

The post Middle-Level Organizing: The Key to a Successful CDSA appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

In September of 2024, I brought a resolution to a Chicago Democratic Socialists of America general chapter meeting to continue our “Crash the DNC” campaign, which had reached its natural conclusion after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago a month earlier. I’d proposed that we continue the campaign for a few more months to focus on engaging the wider public in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program ahead of the general election in November. The proposal passed unanimously, without anyone motivating against it. But at our committee meeting the next week, only one other person showed up. It was humiliating. Members had voted “yes” with their hands at the meeting, but voted “no” with their feet once it was time to take action. 

One of the challenges of democracy in a membership organization is that without member discipline, democratic decisions can become meaningless. Some organizations attempt to address this problem by imposing discipline from above; if you fail to carry out a decision, or worse yet, work to oppose it, you are stripped of your membership rights. This rigid centralism solves the initial problem, but creates many more in the process, and often degenerates into exclusively top-down decision-making. What’s more, following this path means excluding the vast majority of people who aren’t ready to accept this level of direction, at least not on day one. The demands of this type of centralism are tenable for a sect, but not for a mass organization. 

So, what to do? Organizations like ours need to cultivate a kind of voluntary discipline among our members: the will to carry out democratic decisions not because you fear some form of punishment, but because you voluntarily hold yourself accountable to enacting them, regardless of what side of the debate you were on.

But as much as we need to cultivate discipline of action among our members, we also need them to exercise discipline as voters at meetings, such as General Chapter Meetings and Conventions. That is, you have to vote with your hands in a way that reflects how you are likely to vote with your feet afterwards. To exercise this discipline, we must each ask ourselves: 

1. Am I willing and able to contribute to making this thing happen? 

2. Are enough other people likely to contribute to making this thing happen, even if I don’t? 

If the answer to both those questions is “no”, you should have some serious concerns about voting “yes” — even if the proposal is a great idea in theory. 

This kind of voting discipline is difficult to maintain, and for good reason. It can be very uncomfortable to shoot down your comrades’ ideas, especially when the ideas may be good — even if the likelihood of successful execution is low. A voluntary organization like DSA can’t operate in the same way as a state with powers of taxation and coercion at its disposal, or as a non-profit organization with many paid staffers and a top-down, unelected leadership. We need members to voluntarily choose to carry out our work. Without this kind of discipline we get situations like the zombie post-DNC campaign, where everyone in the room was willing to say “yes”, but no one had the capacity to actually do the work to execute the proposal. Just because we should doesn’t mean we can.

When you vote “yes” on a proposal that seems doomed to stall out due to a lack of member involvement or organizational capacity, you avoid disappointing your comrades in the room during the meeting, especially the ones who brought it forward in the first place. But those comrades still experience disappointment afterward. Not for the span of a single vote, but gradually over time, in rooms and Zooms with fewer and fewer people each week after the project is out of sight and out of mind. 

But what’s the harm in letting people try anyway? The chief risks are that everyone becomes demoralized, and that resentments bubble up as organizers fail at a project that has become siloed. They feel isolated from their comrades and can think the membership has done little to help them succeed, which can lead to burnout and disillusionment with the greater work.

Comrades sometimes look to technical and procedural solutions at this juncture. Perhaps you simply restrict the amount of projects any one member can vote for, imposing a hard limit on members’ tendency to overcommit the organization with their votes. But these solutions don’t address the larger cultural problem at play. Members’ tendency to sign the organization up for more work than it can collectively accomplish can only be changed through action from below — from the conscious effort of moving with discipline both in carrying out decisions and in making them. This kind of transformation is not just necessary for the success of a socialist party like DSA, but is also reflective of the larger transformation needed for the entire working class to transition to workers’ democracy and socialist production. 

So when you’re at your next DSA meeting, think about how you’re going to vote with your feet before you vote with your hands. If you’re going to vote “no” with your feet, I think the most honest thing you can do is vote “no” with your hands, too. We can’t do everything. We can only succeed in the things we set out to do if we do them together, moving in the same direction as a collective.

The post “Vote With Your Feet” and With Your Hands appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

by Rita Briar i will give you pause, weed-puller wear your gloves if you come at me or you’ll get pain, annoyance, it’s not your day So you wait a day, wait a week slow down just enough and I will bloom

by Oscar Langford This poem appeared in Miner’s Magazine on May 15, 1913. They’ve put an injunction on old Mother Jones The language so stung From the brave woman’s tongue, And her truth-telling words were so noisy in tones They’ve tried the suppression of old Mother Jones The Court has imprisoned old Mother Jones. She […]

By: Mary Ann Sheppard

GREENFIELD – On April 7, 2026, unionized nurses at Baystate Franklin Medical Center staged an informational picket to advocate for better wages and staffing. The picket, organized by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), was attended by nurses, community members, and supporters of the labor movement outside of Franklin County’s only hospital. 

Nurses at Baystate Franklin have been struggling with poor nurse-to-patient ratios, a central complaint which nurses argue stretch workers thin and lead to inadequate treatment. The fight is a familiar one; the union had already won staffing grid protections in 2017 – a contract stipulation that requires the hospital to implement minimum staffing and nurse-to-patient ratios. 

Union nurses consider safe staffing ratios non-negotiable, as they have been proven to save lives. However, hospital management has attempted to undermine these protections in recent negotiations, threatening to staff Baystate Franklin with non-union floater nurses from other hospitals. In essence, the union is being threatened with scab labor unless they accept staffing levels that nurses say make their patients less safe.

The MNA has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board  (NLRB), which may take more than a year to adjudicate. In the meantime, the hospital’s contract violation has forced nurses to the bargaining table.

Nurses’ Demands

Bargaining committee co-chair Marissa Potter has led advocacy for nurses’ demands to management. In addition to safe staffing ratios, the Potter and the nurses have demanded wage parity with other regional hospitals, which pay their nurses an average of 10% – 25% more. 

Potter spoke to the strength of the union at Baystate Franklin: “We always have been a union facility.” 

The large crowd which gathered in support of the MNA picket attests to deep roots that organized labor has in the community. Union workers came out to support the nurses, bearing signs and shirts with the names of other unions such as Mass. Teachers Association, AFSCME, UNITE HERE, and the Teamsters. Some in the crowd were nurses from other hospitals, or knew medical workers personally. Others were motivated by political principles or a hope for organized labor to bring about better health care.

The message was clear: We have your back.

Speakers from within and outside the union expressed support for the nurses in securing a fair contract. Ethel Everett, the incoming president of the Western Mass Area Labor Federation, spoke in terms of class conflict. She said:

Nurses are the ones who keep us alive. This is part of an ongoing war on the working class.

The incoming WMALF president then led the crowd with a call and response chant – “When we fight, we win!”

Greenfield Mayor Ginny Desorgher and Ward 6 Councilor Patricia Williams also attended the picket. Both had ties to the union, Desorgher a former union nurse, and Williams  is a former MNA staff representative. Baystate Franklin hospital is located in Councilor William’s district: “You are my constituents,” she said, announcing her plans to propose a resolution in Greenfield City Council in support of the union. 

MNA nurses were cautiously optimistic about negotiations. As with any strike action, workers would have to forgo wages in order to force the company’s hand. Baystate Franklin’s nurses can only win their contract through solidarity with one another. “We don’t want to strike,” said Marissa Potter. “But if we have to, we will.” 

Mary Ann Sheppard is a member of Worcester DSA and contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Greenfield Nurses Prepared to Strike At Franklin County’s Only Hospital appeared first on Working Mass.

by Rich H

The City is moving rapidly towards finalizing an economic development deal that raises financial and political warning signs—it potentially gives away millions of our tax dollars to an Abbott and Cruz crony, who is also a major Texas donor to AIPAC and one of the authors of the scurrilous Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission’s 2024 Study on Antisemitism in Texas, which perpetuates Abbott’s lies about the Anti-Gaza-War protests at UT.

The Deal

The deal (described in Item 6 on the April 23 Council agenda) is with RIDA Development, a Houston-based company that builds resort-style hotels, mainly in Florida. The proposed tourist-oriented project here in Austin is for a mid-sized convention center and hotel adjacent to the COTA facility that will be a “self-contained” “destination hotel and conference resort” (see news stories here and here for more details). The agreement with the City of Austin will rebate millions of dollars in Hotel Occupancy Taxes (HOT) back to RIDA for 30 years, in exchange for certain public benefits, the most significant of which is that the developer claims the project will result in 900 permanent hospitality jobs, at an average annual wage of $61,000. However, details about the specific performance benchmarks RIDA needs to hit to receive the tax rebate are sketchy. 

The deal also includes public parkland, $1.5 million into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and a labor peace deal with Unite Here Local 23. The City also touts projected property tax revenue from the project as a benefit.

The deal, which was unanimously advanced by the City Council at its April 23^rd meeting, has been celebrated by several city council members especially because of the labor agreement. This aspect is obviously great for the labor movement, but there are other serious concerns that may outweigh it.

In general, economic development deals do not benefit the public in ways politicians claim; instead, they tend to have negative impacts on local communities, especially for the working class. Research on economic development deals that use tax breaks allegedly to attract businesses and investment to cities has shown two important points: First, in the vast majority of cases, companies make decisions about where to locate operations independently of tax breaks—in other words, these tax breaks are just corporate tribute and make no difference to whether a project happens or not. Second, cities usually do not benefit financially from these kinds of deals—these deals end up costing the public more than they bring in.

An example of this research is the book, Incentives to Pander, co-authored by UT-Austin Government Professor Nathan Jensen, summarized as follows on the publisher’s website (see also this excellent two-minute video summary):

“Politicians … use these policies to claim credit for attracting investment… This book … shows how such pandering appears to be associated with growing economic inequality. As national and subnational governments surrender valuable tax revenue to attract businesses in the vain hope of long-term economic growth, they are left with fiscal shortfalls that have been filled through regressive sales taxes, police fines and penalties, and cuts to public education.”

Beyond these general problems with economic development deals, this particular one is especially suspect because of who the developer is and because of the financial implications of the deal.

Issues with RIDA’s Ira Mitzner

RIDA was founded by David Mitzner, the father of current CEO Ira Mitzner. It is a privately owned and family-run multibillion dollar company based in Houston. Billionaire Ira Mitzner is a big-money donor to Republicans in Texas and Florida, including to DeSantis’ super PAC and to Ted Cruz. He was the chair of the committee that brought the 2024 RNC to Houston, which resulted in Trump’s second term. Mitzner is also an important pro-Zionist voice in Texas, a big donor to AIPAC, and 2019 AIPAC Gala Chair. 

Additionally, he was appointed to the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission (THGAAC) by Abbott. The THGAAC’s 2024 Study on Antisemitism in Texas was partly responsible for the atrocious (and likely unconstitutional) slew of bills passed last year by the Texas Legislature that enshrined in Texas law and education code the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism (see page 9 of the report). (Incidentally, those bills passed with the support of most Democrats in the Legislature, including locals Hinajosa, Talarico, Cole, Flores, and Bucy.) Another recommendation of the THGAAC is an anti-masking law.

The Study on Antisemitism in Texas repeats false claims that the Anti-Gaza-War protests were anti-Semitic, and it justifies the police crackdown on protesters: “Tensions at UT Austin reached a crescendo at anti-Israel protests in April 2024 that required intervention by state troopers and campus police” (page 7, my emphasis). The report also calls out activists who went to city councils to demand a ceasefire resolution, falsely calling them anti-Semitic: “At public hearings in many cities, anti-Israel activists have regularly gone beyond their free speech rights to bully and intimidate elected officials and Jewish community members, using antisemitic language and sometimes being forcibly removed by police” (page 7). Additionally, the report praises Texas’s “lead” on anti-BDS legislation and Abbott’s pro-Israel statements and actions (pages 10-11). Mitzner is, in part, responsible for this report.

Do Austinites want our city to be entering into deals with people like Ira Mitzner, especially given the irregular, fast-track process the Council has used, and the unanswered financial questions about the deal that remain?

Irregular Process & Unanswered Financial Questions 

In addition to the unsavory connections of Mitzner, this development deal also raises serious financial and process questions.

At the April 23^rd meeting, Council passed an ordinance that “waives the staff presentation, public announcement and portal setup, and public hearing requirements” normally required for economic development deals. This prevents public scrutiny of the deal, which is especially problematic because “the structure of the agreement and its long-term cost to the city remain unclear, however, with key financial projections and final terms still under negotiation and not yet publicly released” (see this news article). We do not know what is actually in this deal, yet Council is fast-tracking it. Among the things that we do not know is the projected amount of the tax rebates—we don’t know how much this will cost us.

Typically, convention center and hotel development deals are sold to the public because they have “economic spillovers”: convention-goers typically spend money locally in restaurants and bars, retail stores, other local attractions, etc.—the argument goes—thus, supporting local businesses and jobs¹. Some of that rhetoric is in the staff presentation, but this project is specifically described as a “self-contained” (page 3) “destination hotel and conference resort” (page 2), located far from other local businesses at the COTA facility. This means that attendees of future events at the RIDA development are unlikely to spend much money outside the “resort” itself or in local businesses, severely limiting any “economic spillover.” The City’s claims about the “economic impact” of this project are disingenuous.

The deal does include public parkland, $1.5 million into the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, in addition to the peace agreement with Unite Here. These are all great benefits, but the city cannot tell us at what cost to the public. How much are we spending from HOT funds to get parkland and $1.5 million in the Trust Fund? We are not told.

However, we can make some calculations based on assumptions that we do know: 

• The deal will rebate 8.5% of gross room revenue from the hotel for 30 years. 
• The hotel is planned to have 1,000 rooms. 
• Standard rooms at one of RIDA’s comparable developments, the Omni Orlando Resort, are around $250 per night. 
• The average annual hotel occupancy rate in Austin is somewhere around 65%. 

These are conservative numbers, so we can conservatively approximate the amount of HOT tax to be rebated to RIDA as:

8.5% x 1,000 rooms X 65% occupancy X $250/night X 365 nights X 30 years

=

~$150,000,000

That is $5 million per year for 30 years, with the main public benefit being 900 jobs. That’s about $5,500 of public money per job per year, which means that the public is effectively covering approximately 10% of RIDA’s payroll for 30 years, guaranteeing Ira Mitzner larger profits, subsidized by Austinites. 

This is what economic development looks like in Austin.

The item should be coming back to the council in next few month, so keep your eyes out for it to appear on an upcoming agenda—and be ready to write, call, and testify against this bad deal.

---

¹It’s important to remember that most jobs in hospitality and food service are low-paying jobs. For example, of the job categories that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics uses, in Austin food service pays the lowest, at $31,200 on average, which is under 60% of the median wage for our area. Tourism-related economic activity tends to rely on a low-paid workforce; economic development deals do nothing to improve pay or working conditions in “spillover” jobs, yet those jobs are counted as part of the “public benefits” that we are paying for.

The post Troubling Economic Development Deal in the Works at City Council first appeared on Red Fault.

The post Metro DC DSA Urges DC Council to Put Working People Before Autonomous Vehicle Companies appeared first on Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America.

by Justin W

I Love Boosters is a story about a trio of “boosters,” women who steal from department stores and resell the items to the community, and their fight against a local billionaire. The billionaire’s name is Christie Smith, whom one of them admires so much she has her platitudes memorized, which makes for a complicated relationship that evolves as the movie goes along. The CEO is very clearly a genius, having graduated college at 17 and spent years working in physics departments, but her platitudes still sound just as vapid and amorphous as any other CEO or motivational speaker. During their heists the trio find a Chinese worker who steals the designer wear so quickly they legitimately believes she has a magic bag, and given that this is a Boots Riley film, you believe it too until it’s revealed to be a teleporter. 

The Chinese factory worker, Jianhu, is stealing the clothes as a way to attack Christie Smith for the horrible conditions in the factory she and her family work in. This brings the trio and Jianhu together as they start stealing more from Christie Smith. As they’re in the process of stealing clothes a discovery is made: The teleporter does more than teleport, it deconstructs and accelerates the contradictions as well. It becomes clear this is a machine based on Dialectical Materialism as the machine brings two things together (teleports), it deconstructs (as shown when they deconstruct clothes into their base components AND when they aim it at a person and turn that person into their parents having sex), and it accelerates the contradictions of a given entity (a cop car is turned into a parody of overmilitarization and reconstructs a person from their parents from before). 

This leads to the personal conflicts in the movie and what I believe to be the thesis. We have the main character Corvette and her best friend Sade, one who is trying to overcome the ills brought about by capitalism (Sade) and the other who is so lonely a loneliness demon tries to pick her up on multiple occasions (Corvette). Sade sees MLM marketing as the way through the ills of capitalism and Corvette sees vengeance as her way out of her loneliness. This is resolved when they link their struggle against Christie Smith to the workers both in China who are making the clothes as well as the workers building a union to stand up against the billionaire. The resolution is built through the combining of the efforts of all workers against Christie Smith and the fashion industry, starting in China and the United States but then the rest of the world, and the community organizing that needs to happen to build those strikes and protests. 

We see this through Corvette rejecting the loneliness demon and her confronting the rolling ball of bills, tickets, and failures of Corvette’s past (seen the entire movie following her just out of sight of everyone else), which shrinks once she has a community to help her deal with those problems. The problems are still there, just reduced to a more manageable size. 

Given this is a Boots Riley film, there are some incredible design and artistic choices that combine to create wonderful metaphors. The CEOs office is tilted, showing her skewed view of the world. The loneliness demon who has been around for millenia can only remember two years back when they were lost in a Target, or, one might say, lost in a capitalist hellscape (please listen to the song “Lost in the Supermarket” by The Clash). At one point some characters who have been seen interviewed on TV take off their skins, revealing that they play characters on TV (like workers arguing for less pay and benefits as well as Candace Owens, among others) or lead MLMs to generate in people the need for more brutal cop tactics, anti-worker propaganda, and false solutions (like MLMs) as part of a campaign created by the billionaire to reduce in workers the desire for real solutions like collective action. 

The skin suits also demonstrate how those with anti-worker sentiments but still working class themselves literally sell their identities to be used and interchanged by anyone who needs them for whatever purpose. They give away their ability to identify themselves for the purpose of fulfilling the whims and desires of a billionaire. In true Boots Riley fashion, he tries to make the metaphors as overt as possible, with a little bit of surrealism thrown in the mix. The comedic elements of the movie shine through these metaphors and are so littered throughout I am very surprised the movie isn’t considered a comedy. Boots Riley’s love of storytelling and visual metaphor make him one of my favorite directors and this was terrific and just the right amount of silliness to push through the slightly radical position he’s leading towards through the film.

But this wouldn’t be a Marxist take on a very overtly Marxist movie (the main catalyst for the movie is a Dialectic Materialism machine) without some discussion on the theory presented. The Dialectical Materialism machine is initially seen only as a teleporter, but later in the movie a union organizer explains the full functionality, urging the trio to use it to help them accelerate people into the union they’re building. Initially, the Velvet Gang (the name of the boosters’ group) turns her down in favor of their plan to simply steal from the billionaire thinking that would be enough. As the movie progresses and we reach the climax of the film, the machine is used to link the struggles of the union in the United States to the factory workers in China, creating the solidarity needed to fight against their collective boss. 

Through the explanation of the functions of the machine we get a decent description of dialectical materialism, in a way that is simple enough that we can progress with the movie, while still being faithful to the concept itself. I think Boots’ decision to purposefully inject actual theory into the movie gives a stepping stone for those who like the movie something to grasp onto when deciding to work on their own politics, but does mean the resolution of the movie cannot be as explicit in the direction I think we should go. The CEO is not removed nor a communist revolution waged by the end of this film, instead a worldwide strike against the fashion industry is started, and characters from the movie are seen leading the union in their fight for a better wage, though the main characters are not participants. The most recent film to have such overt Marxist themes, also made by a black director, is Sinners. 

Sinners, for those who haven’t seen it (Why haven’t you? Go watch it!) has a black community fighting against a vampire who uses racism to escape from justice and controls the actions of those whom he has bitten. It is a story about a blood sucking parasite who had oppression forced on him years ago and wants to forcibly create the community he lost due to colonialism and imperialism by stealing the music and soul of a community that hasn’t yet lost themselves to that same oppressive force. The black community fights and kills the vampire, in a bloody struggle that lasts all night, ending with one character killing the racists who came to kill him. In interviews following the release of the film, director Ryan Coogler was asked multiple times about the Marxist implications of the movie and what was being said through the metaphors, every time keeping silent about what he wrote. He could not, at any point, be explicit in the aims and messaging of his movie, lest he lose what position he has to make films like Sinners again. He was able to show the action of the theory, but wasn’t allowed to be explicit in the ideology that created it. 

I see Boots Riley’s choice to name the theory but not show the action as the flip side of the coin. Even on a good day Hollywood would not allow both sides of the coin to be shown on screen at the same time, as Capital knows what it can allow anti-capitalist art to show, as well as what it can’t. Were I Love Boosters to show the fall of capitalism and say the words “Dialectical Materialism,” a producer would have simply shut down the movie and not let it see the light of day. There must be a balance struck between what can be said and what can be shown while still being funded by those who would otherwise be the target of said action or the villain of theory. The theory of the film is presented in a relatively clear way, but the film needed to reel in the actions shown to compensate. When we say “The Revolution will not be televised” this is an example. You can see that revolutions happen or you can hear theory be spoken, but never the twain shall meet, at least not on the big screen. So we need to read between the lines, and see the direction Boots Riley or Ryan Coogler are pointing us in. (On a related note, come join us at Book Club sometime.) 

Overall, this movie is terrific and I recommend everyone go see it. The bright colors, wonderful fashion, comedic style, and the only just so slightly over the top surrealism blend together into a wonderful movie that I would definitely watch again, and recommend others watch too. Combined with the theory hilariously intertwined into the movie, it is one of the best movies I have ever seen and I want to hear your thoughts on it too.

The post I Love “I Love Boosters” appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

[Federal] US CONGRESS CA-26: Chris Espinosa

We have been represented by a terrible establishment AIPAC shill for far too long, and we have a candidate who is anti-establishment and not beholden to the donor class.

The Ventura County DSA is proud to endorse Chris Espinosa.

Sources:

• CA DSA
• The Acorn
• ACLU
• CAIR California
• VC Star

[Federal] US CONGRESS CA-24: Helena Pasquarella

Incumbent Salud Carbajal (D) is running for his 6th term. He is an establishment democrat and has a disappointing track record for the working class. He is beholden to the donor class, with campaign contributions from organizations like AIPAC, SpaceX and Raytheon. He also accepted funds from Samuel Bankman-Fried, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for defrauding billions of dollars from thousands of people.

Carbajal continuously supported Israel during the genocide in Gaza, despite multiple town halls where his constituents directly expressed their outrage to him for his inhumane positions and refusal to acknowledge the genocide. His voting record reflects that he supports the following measures:

    – Supplying billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Israel (HR 2670 in 2023 and HR 6090 in 2024)
    – Opposing the BDS movement (HR 246 in 2019)
    – Codifying the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel (HR 894 in 2023 and HR 6090 in 2024)
    – Censuring House Representative and DSA member Rashida Tlaib for her support of Palestinian humanity (HR 845 in 2023)

Carbajal has crossed the aisle to vote alongside MAGA republicans on several harmful bills. In 2022, while acknowledging that “a good part of the Republican Party” has transformed into an anti-democratic cult loyal to Trump, he also stated his belief in “collaborating and creating a collaborative environment” with the MAGA republicans. Here are a few examples of measures he supported in his collaboration with MAGA politicians:

    – Enabling Trump to legally receive bribes in the form of cryptocurrency (GENIUS Act in 2025)
    – Legalizing the detention/deportation of immigrants who haven’t committed any crimes (HR 3697 in 2017)
    – Expanding the power of ICE and the DHS to collect American citizens’ personal information under the guise of fighting retail theft (HR 2853, aka CORCA, in May 2026)
    – Denying gender-affirming healthcare to children (National Defense Authorization Act in 2024)
    – Denouncing socialism (House Concurrent Resolution 58 in 2025)

Carbajal has shown time and again that he prioritizes corporate interests and the donor class over the working class, has no regard for the lives of Palestinians, and is willing to help advance Trump’s agenda.

Salud Carbajal’s challenger in the Democratic Party is Sarah Bacon, a former tech executive who is currently the vice president of external affairs for UC Santa Barbara’s Graduate Student Association. This will be her first time running for office. Overall, her platform aligns reasonably well with ours and she seems sincere and competent, but in this race she’s a Democrat running on a reform ticket. We feel the Democratic party needs to be transformed or supplanted, not just reformed.

Our preferred candidate is Helena Pasquarella, a DSA member and the Director at the Department of Peace in Ojai. She previously ran in the primary for CA-24 in 2024 as a Democrat, securing 9.1% of the votes and finishing 3rd. She is the only candidate – other than incumbent -Carbajal who has previously run for office.

Pasquarella is running as a member of the Peace and Freedom Party this election cycle and has been endorsed by the Green Party of Santa Barbara. Her platform includes Medicare for all, cutting funding to Israel, immigration reform, universal rent control, defunding the police, and supporting the Green New Deal. Pasquarella has recognized that Israel is committing a genocoide in Gaza and has pledged to refuse campaign contributions from corporations and their PACs. If elected, she has said she will proudly promote the DSA ideals into her decision making in Congress.

DSA Ventura-County is proud to endorse our fellow DSA member Helena Pasquarella.

Sources:

• Santa Barbara Independent
• Vote View
• The Sacramento Bee
• Federal Office of Public Affairs – Press Release
• Reverse Canary Missions
• Daily KOS
• Brad Lander (X.com)
• ED Hat Santa Barbara

[CA State] Lieutenant Governor: Oliver Ma

(Via CA DSA)

Very much like the governor’s race, the race for lieutenant governor contains a lot of candidates that leave much to be desired. Fiona Ma, California’s State Treasurer, and Josh Fryday, one of Gruesome Gavin’s high-ranking appointees, are the main establishment candidates. Fiona Ma has the bulk of endorsements from the Californian political establishment, with politicians like incumbent Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis and the majority of organized labor behind her. Along with Fiona Ma’s uninspiring establishment political line, she has been accused of sexual harassment and racial discrimination by a former staffer.

Occupying the “progressive” lane is the former mayor of Stockton, Michael Tubbs. Since Tubbs’s single term as mayor, where he is most known for his attempts to implement a universal basic income (UBI) program, he has led efforts in the non-profit sphere to combat wealth inequality with his End Poverty in California (EPIC) organization. While Tubbs is certainly running as a progressive and is endorsed by members of the progressive Californian establishment like former Senator Laphonza Butler, Representatives Lateefah Simon and Robert Garcia, and Mayor of Oakland Barabara Lee, his commitment to advancing left politics is not entirely certain.

To start off with, Tubbs endorsed billionaire centrist and former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg for president in 2020, even while democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s campaign swept California, receiving almost 36% of the primary vote to Bloomberg’s 12%. Bernie even won Tubbs’s home of San Joaquin county. On the campaign trail, Tubbs has certainly evoked economic populism, but revealed sparingly little policy- especially policy that results in real redistribution and the elevation of workers over owners. He has also been conspicuously silent on the ever-escalating violence, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine.

Luckily, there is another choice: Oliver Ma. Oliver is CA DSA’s first-ever endorsed statewide candidate and is running on an explicitly democratic socialist platform that articulates a vision of a California that works for working people—not oligarchs and billionaires.

Oliver immigrated to California at age seven and has dedicated his career as a lawyer to protecting the rights of tenants, immigrants, and workers. As an immigrant rights attorney with the ACLU, Oliver has been on the front lines of defending Californians against ICE and the federal government’s terror campaign. When elected, he will shut down the for-profit detention centers that have proliferated across our state, ending the profits made from our exploitation.

One of the primary areas of influence of the Lieutenant Governor is over California’s higher education system. Currently, University of California schools alone have over $32 billion invested in assets tied to genocide and apartheid in Palestine. Not only is Oliver the only candidate to describe the atrocities in Gaza as genocide, he is the only candidate who has promised to divest these funds from Israel and ensure that our higher education institutions are not funding atrocities overseas.

Oliver is committed to building something that lasts beyond his campaign and, in this, building DSA statewide. Oliver understands, like all democratic socialists must, that an organized movement of working people is more than one candidate or one campaign. If you are not in DSA yet, join today and get involved with our statewide organization or in your local chapter’s work.

For more information on Oliver Ma, go to: https://oliverma2026.com/ and vote for Oliver Ma before June 2.

Candidate Recommendations

Recommendations are personal statements from members of DSA and are not elected endorsements from the chapter

[State] CA Governor – Ramsey Robinson

By T.

Opportunism and class collaboration have historically not brought about a strong socialist movement, independent organizing has. If the current situation is unique enough that we should diverge from the lessons learned by past socialist projects and change strategy, that argument has not been made. It is not the job of socialists to further empower a billionaire, to funnel people’s support into the bourgeois Democratic party, the ruling class has enough help doing this as it stands. There is a tendency among some to say that if socialists are not winning directly we should strategically align ourselves with the winning side, but in this case the winner is still capitalist exploitation. This is not just our opinion, this is a long standing socialist strategy that has seen great effect in the past.

“Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.”
-Karl Marx, 1850

Running as and voting for socialists provides valuable benefits in building visibility for socialist organizations, growing class consciousness, emphasizing organizational independence from bourgeois parties, and measuring support among the population. To frame socialists voting for a socialist candidate who represents their values as simply a “protest vote” while advocating for socialists to vote for a capitalist candidate is belittling and disrespectful to our comrades who dedicated their resources to the socialist campaigns. As Eugene Debs once said, “I would rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don’t want and get it.” If voting for a socialist, such as Ramsey Robinson of the Peace and Freedom Party, is purely a symbolic protest, then what is it called when a billionaire promises to raise taxes or arrest ICE officers? Less than symbolic, this is an empty promise. Voting socialist is only symbolic support if voting is where your organizing ends.

We understand the disagreement is not over which candidate is preferable in and of themselves, the disagreement is over which campaign is worth supporting in a race. This being said, we must understand that our endeavors do not last for one election cycle, one act of praxis does not exist independently from the others. The question we must ask ourselves is: what course of action will result in a stronger socialist movement? Voting for Steyer to further empower one of the richest, most powerful individuals in our state, or voting for Ramsey Robinson and adding momentum to California’s growing socialist movement? For many of us, the answer is solidly Ramsey Robinson. A better world is possible and that world starts with standing by what we believe in, and standing in solidarity with workers.

Vote socialist! Vote Peace and Freedom in 2026! Vote Ramsey Robinson for governor!

[State] CA Governor – Tom Steyer

By G.

The California Gubernatorial field is huge. And with the open primary system, the two candidates who receive the most votes will advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. As it stands, the only non-Republican candidates in position to advance are billionaire Tom Steyer and attorney Xavier Becerra. 

After Eric Slalwell resigned when accusations of sexual misconduct and alleged rape emerged, Xavier Becerra became the preferred candidate of establishment democrats. As Attorney General of California during the first Trump administration, Becerra strongly advocated for lowering the cost of medicines that were developed with taxpayer dollars. But in 2023, as Joe Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), he completely reversed his position at the behest of pharmaceutical lobbyists and rejected a petition by prostate cancer patients to lower the cost of the medicine they needed and couldn’t afford. Becerra has refused to recognize that Israel is committing a genocide. As a member of the House of Representatives, Becerra voted to authorize the use of armed forces against Iraq (HJRES 114 in 2002). Under his watch as HHS, 85,000 migrant children went missing. Becerra pushed to move children out of shelters quickly, resulting in the loosening of protections that were in place, including the screening of sponsors. Several of these kids were subjected to child labor in places like slaughterhouses, which resulted in cases of severe injuries and death. Becerra refused to take accountability for his failures. Becerra’s endorsements include Julia Brownley and Salud Carbajal, two Zionist supporting politicians. He has also received the maximum campaign endorsement from Chevron and has doubled down on receiving their support. 

Tom Steyer has a far more progressive platform than Becerra. Despite being a billionaire, he has stated his commitment to be a class traitor and advocate against his financial interests, including supporting the California Billionaire Tax that will be on the ballot. He supports the abolishment of ICE, calling them a violent extremist group. Steyer’s anti-ICE position goes beyond rhetoric. He has a 5-step plan to prosecute ICE agents if elected governor. Steyer supports Medicare for All and has been endorsed by CAIR and the Bernie Sanders organization Our Revolution.

But there are some red flags that immediately stand out. He is a billionaire who made his wealth in horrible ways. He founded an investment firm called Farallon that invested almost $90 million in a private prison company that runs the largest ICE detention centers in California. It is something he has acknowledged and says he regrets. Steyer also used his hedge fund to finance fossil fuel projects. Today he claims to be a climate change activist and has tried to distance himself from Farallon but he never fully cut ties with the firm he founded. Steyer has stopped short of acknowledging that Israel is committing a genocide and has stated that the focus should be on Iran rather than holding Israel accountable for their crimes against humanity. But he has condemned AIPAC, saying there’s no place for dark money in politics.

In an ideal world, socialist Ramsey Robinson would be the leading candidate. But unfortunately, he has no chance of winning. The reality is that the only viable candidates to oppose Steve Hilton, the pro-ICE Republican candidate, are Steyer and Becerra, neither of whom deserve the endorsement of DSA. That being said, I will be voting for Tom Steyer because his platform is far more progressive. He has not been endorsed by oil lobbyists and Zionists like Becerra has. It’s a matter of public record that Becerra has capitulated to the capital class over the working class when given power in government. And while Steyer has many flaws, he has pledged to run on a progressive platform that includes taxing billionaires, abolishing ICE, housing first initiatives, advocating for trans rights, and Medicare for all. It remains to be seen if Tom Steyer will follow through on his commitment to be a class traitor, but his platform is far superior to Becerra’s, and I would much rather Steyer be the candidate to oppose Hilton.

The official publication of NNJ DSA is back with a brand new name. Formerly known as The Red Star Ledger, this quarterly issued magazine features various stories of our chapter. […]