By Paul Garver

Since my last article on U.S. politics in The Chartist was printed [#302, Feb. 2020], the coronavirus pandemic followed by the Black Lives Matter protests has been reshaping the political terrain.

The ongoing pandemic is damaging Trump. His bumbling ineptitude and narcissistic callousness are on full display every day. The societal consequences of the economic crisis triggered by attempts to control the pandemic are devastating with no end in sight. Trump’s chief argument for reelection had been the relatively strong economy, and Trump is now promoting over-hasty measures to revive the economy by relaxing safety precautions. The pandemic is therefore raging out of control in those rural and small-town areas controlled by Republican politicians too much in thrall to Trump’s willful ignorance and denial of science. 

The widespread and persistent Black Lives demonstrations throughout the country, led by young people of all races, are showing the power of the streets to shift popular attitudes on race and force politicians at all levels to promise reforms in policing.  Progressive insurgents have been defeating middle-of-the-road Democratic incumbents in recent Congressional primaries.  In a New York district, African-American educator Jamaal Bowman decisively defeated Eliot Engel, a darling of the Democratic establishment, who was endorsed by Hilary Clinton and heavily funded by pro-Israel and both Democratic and Republican political action committees. Another African-American progressive insurgent Mondaire Jones won a primary election for an open seat in a predominantly White New York suburban district, while Black Lives Matter insurgent Cori Bush defeated an entrenched Democratic incumbent in Missouri.

“Squad Members” and DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib easily won their reelection primaries.  It is now likely that the current Squad of four in the House of Representatives will be expanded to at least ten members after the 2020 elections. Despite the panicked negative responses from the institutional Democratic Party, the balance of power is clearly shifting towards the Left in the U.S. House, which is likely to have an expanded Democratic majority.

The fundamental tenet of Sanders campaign was that millions of new, marginalized and younger voters would be drawn into the electoral process, which did not happen. However It now appears that the massive and sustained Back Lives Matter Protests are being accompanied by a strong Left electoral surge, at least in major metropolitan areas.  It remains unclear whether Biden can harness that surge. In general, younger and poorer people do not vote in the same proportion as older and wealthier persons. This partly explains why Biden defeated Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. 

Sanders may have withdrawn prematurely from the Presidential race.  The pandemic is dramatically demonstrating the defects of employer-based insurance by threatening tens of millions of newly unemployed with loss of their health coverage. The costs of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal jobs program pale in comparison with the huge sums of money now being poured into financial and fossil fuels corporations as temporary bailouts. By withdrawing from the Presidential race, Sanders failed to accumulate enough committed Democratic delegates to ensure that the positions of his supporters would have direct influence on the Democratic Party 2020 platform. 
 
Sanders quid pro quo was to enter into negotiations with Joe Biden to create “unity” task forces to shape the Democratic Party’s platform.    The six task forces were Climate Crisis/Environmental Justice, Criminal Justice, Education, Economy, Health Care and Immigration. The Sanders and Biden campaigns each appointed a co-chair plus four additional members {Biden] and two [Sanders] for each task force. The recommendations of those unity task forces were made public in early July. In general, they would provide a comprehensive domestic framework for a decent social democratic party, although compromised short of more ambitious progressive goals like Medicare for All, Green New Deal or free higher education. 

However, the Democratic Party policy committee is already watering down these task force recommendations. In any event few people actually read long form party platforms. What the electorate will be made aware of is how the candidate and the campaign present their proposals. Left to his own advisors and devices, Joe Biden is likely to follow the Hilary Clinton model by lying low and stressing the defects of Trump rather than propose any sweeping or comprehensive alternatives.  As in 2016 this is thought by Democratic pols to be the “safe” strategy for defeating Trump in 2020.

Most leaders of progressive movements and unions, following Sanders, are endorsing Biden. Less from enthusiasm but as the only available alternative to Trump’s re-election. However, we cannot know yet whether sufficient numbers of their members and followers can be motivated to overcome the twinned difficulties of the pandemic and voter suppression hurdles to actually register and vote in November. 
Most of the voting is likely to be through absentee mail-in ballots because of the pandemic.  Physical polling places, particularly in African-American neighborhoods, have been closed down, forcing long lines at those still open. We do not know the full impact of a shift to mail-in voting.  Trump is opposed to its widespread use even though he and most of his advisers vote absentee themselves. But in general, poorer people still face more difficulties in voting by mail as well as in person.

In any event the most potent electoral tool of the Left had become door-to-door canvassing in lower-income neighborhoods and communities.  This has become almost impossible due to the pandemic. But that has not hindered good performances by progressive insurgents in Democratic congressional primaries. Effective use of social media helped bring out tens of millions to the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the country, where tables were set up to register and inform voters. It could encourage voting as well by young people as well.

Defeating Trump electorally is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for preserving democracy and advancing democratic socialist ideas. It is even possible that Trump will not willingly vacate the White House following a narrow defeat. He has dozens of ways to discredit and contest the vote, by claiming fraud and by plying upon the slow process of counting challenged and absentee ballots. Trump also has a Supreme Court majority that could award him a dubious electoral victory in a close election as it did for George Bush in 2000.

Even if Joe Biden wins the Presidential race, Republicans will continue to block any serious progressive legislation if they continue to control the U.S. Senate. A Democratic majority in the Senate is needed to block Trump if he is reelected and to pass any vitally needed legislation if he is not.

There are only marginal indications that Trump’s core support bases are crumbling.  He is still supported by a plurality of White male voters, by most Evangelical voters and by virtually all Republicans. The Trump administration is doubling down on those repressive and regressive measures designed to fire up that base – anti-immigrant and refugee, militarization of police forces, restricting reproductive freedom, encouragement of religious-based bigotry, destruction of environmental protections, etc. 
 
Trump’s re-election remains possible. The arcane rules of the U.S. electoral system permit an electoral victory by a popular minority, like Trump won in 2016. Republican legislatures and politicians at the state level are enacting targeted measures to discourage and deny voter participation, particularly by persons of color and younger persons.  The Supreme Court continues to tolerate these anti-democratic practices.

Elections of course matter mostly because they register ideological and political trends in the electorate. The defeat of Sanders in the primaries, countered in part by a growing number of state and local electoral victories by the Left, suggests that, while the democratic socialist movement is increasingly relevant to U.S. politics, it is relatively strong only among younger people [of all races], those with some higher education, and concentrated in larger cities and university towns.  To become a major force in national politics the democratic socialist left has to become convincing and credible to other broader constituencies as well.

This poses a major challenge to the democratic socialist movement in the USA, and in particular to the Democratic Socialists of America [DSA], its largest and fastest growing organization. As a “big tent” organization that every month takes in hundreds of young people from all socialist backgrounds and none, DSA can do little more than provide a political education framework for local DSA groupings that vary widely from place to place. DSA does not have a single strategic direction or mandate as clear as [for example] the small but admirably focused Justice Democrats. However, DSA is alive and energetic, and its members are learning to organize at the grassroots in hundreds of local chapters.

I became politically active in the late 1960s and early 1970s through the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. We never managed to align our immediate demands with a long-term strategy for achieving political power.  Part of our problem was that we young people felt isolated and alienated from most existing authorities, including the Communist and Socialist parties. Today we are working that this tragic failure to connect between Left generations is not going to happen this time. The wonderfully sustained and widespread multi-racial Black Lives Matter demonstrations build about the achievements of the civil rights movement, and give us hope that together with a sustainable Left electoral and organizational building strategy we can build a political movement capable of contesting for power.

​We may not get a second chance !

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. & Jose Alejandro La Luz
​
            The eruption of protests and rebellions following the murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd sent shockwaves across the country; indeed, around the world.  Suddenly, in the context of a pandemic unlike anything that we in the USA have witnessed since 1918-1919 and an economic collapse worse than the Great Recession, masses of people were on the move challenging the profound racial injustice demonstrated by law enforcement abuse against racialized populations and, specifically, against African Americans.  “Black Lives Matter” became the renewed battle cry and, when it met with the response that “All Lives Matter,” the correct refrain was, all lives should matter, but the reality of the USA is that Black lives don’t matter.  And, as we swept away the racial fog that surrounds so much in the USA, we discovered that other racialized populations were also regular targets of extrajudicial violence, including Native Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans.
      
​      The moment in which we live is explosive because of the fusion of crises, including but not limited to the Covid19 pandemic, the economic collapse, the environmental catastrophe, extrajudicial violence targeting racialized populations, and a growing right-wing populist movement with a crypto-fascist President as its main spokesperson.  In this situation, organized labor—the trade union movement—has been inconsistent; sometimes paralyzed; and at other moments outspoken.  What it fails to acknowledge, let alone address, is that the political polarization of the USA has placed us in a situation that some commentators have described as a “cold civil war.”
          
  How should we understand the term “cold civil war”?  It means that the social, economic, and political contradictions in the USA have been brewing in such a way that there is a polarization undermining a so-called mainstream consensus within the democratic capitalist framework.  It does not necessarily mean that we are in pre-civil war situation, i.e., it does not necessarily mean that we are on the verge of a military conflict, but it does mean that the antagonisms have bubbled to the surface and have moved outside of the generally accepted bounds of democratic capitalist politics.  This includes the increased use of extrajudicial violence by the authorities as well as by paramilitaries.  To be clear, the polarization that has emerged is between forces that are advancing right-wing, irrationalist authoritarianism, on the one hand, and those who favor democracy (subject, of course, to wide interpretations).
      
      None of this should surprise us since the Republican Party has shifted dramatically, since the late 1960s, in a rightward direction and, particularly beginning in the 1990s, flirted more and more with right-wing populist movements as a means of driving forward their neo-liberal economic agenda and their anti-20th century social and political agenda.
          
  Though the Republican establishment seems to have thought that they could control the right-wing populist forces, much like Dr. Frankenstein thought that he could control the monster, it has largely lost sway.  The complete collapse of the traditional Republican establishment in 2016 in the face of the Trump juggernaut illustrates this point.
           
We now have an Administration that flirts with open fascists; articulates lies and other forms of irrationalism; and has threatened to ignore the results of the November 2020 election should they lose.  All of this lays the foundation for, quite possibly, a series of confrontations between pro-democracy forces, on the one hand, and on the other, both pro-Trump forces of the State as well as pro-Trump mass movements and militias.
          
  What must be done?
(1) Organized labor must pull its collective head out of the sand:  Most immediately there must be a recognition of the toxic danger contained in the growing right-wing populist threat.  While it is clear that the majority of the USA, including the majority of the US working class, has no interest in right-wing populism, it is also the case that right-wing populism represents a major threat to the working class movement specifically, and the USA more generally.  Organized labor needs to speak openly about this threat and not act as if this is not a “labor issue”.

(2) Organized labor must advance a mobilization process that engages its members in supporting efforts to rethink, restructure, reallocate, and demilitarize law enforcement:  This is not just a matter of transforming local police departments but also must include addressing the barbaric treatment of documented and undocumented immigrants and refugees by ICE and the Border Patrol.  US authorities are treating migrants as cattle, completely ignoring the fact that many of these migrants are at our borders precisely because of the role of the USA in undermining the economies, environments, and sovereignty of their respective countries of origin.  Contrary to the right-wing myth that these migrants are coming to the USA in order to have so-called anchor babies—as opposed to the industry created to facilitate just this for many East Europeans—migrants from the global South are arriving at our borders largely because of the damage done to their homelands.

(3) Organized labor must put into place pro-democracy volunteer brigades in preparation for the November election:  We need volunteers who will assist with voter registration; mobilize in large numbers should law enforcement and right-wing militias show up at polling places in order to intimidate voters; block the right-wing from challenging legitimate voters and ballots; and lay the groundwork for massive civil disobedience should the Trump administration attempt to forestall the elections and/or refuse to recognize the results.

(4) Organized labor must join hands with other social movements in creating a broad front for democracy and against repression:  Organized labor cannot do any of this work alone.  It must reach out to potential allies with a focus on opposing the growth of authoritarianism.  The ‘price of admission’ to this front or coalition must be low, i.e., we need to recognize that there are many things around which we shall disagree, but the time has come to join hands in the name of defending AND expanding democracy.
​
            We may not get a second chance.
——————————————————————-
​

BILL MOSLEY
Washington Socialist

Donald Trump’s intent to steal this November’s election has long since moved out of the realm of paranoia and conspiracy theory and into ho-hum conventional wisdom.
 
One didn’t have to do much digging to come to that conclusion – he as much said so himself in a July 19 interview with Chris Wallace, his least-favorite journalist on his house organ Fox News, in which he declined to guarantee that he would accept the results of the election. He had said much the same thing in 2016, launching a bit of asymmetric warfare with his opponent Hillary Clinton who respected the result at the polls which awarded Trump the Electoral College victory even though he lost the popular vote. No one has asked Joe Biden whether he would accept the results, as it’s assumed he would be too decent a human being not to.  No one, not even Fox, assumes decency of Trump.

Thus Trump continues to lay the groundwork for a 2020 election in which he is defeated at the polls but nevertheless somehow manages to upend democracy and retain control of the White House. As they say, it’s crazy but it just might work.

Trump realizes he could not win a free and fair election in which all eligible voters who wanted to participate could vote easily without standing in long lines, traveling long distances or jeopardizing their health. At the beginning of 2020 it was at least plausible that the enthusiasm of his white working-class base coupled with general apathy among much of the rest of the electorate could carry the day for him. But with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 6 million Americans infected and over 170,000 dead, the collapse of the economy accompanied by mass unemployment, the explosion of outrage over police violence against African Americans, and the president’s incompetent, uncaring and frequently destructive leadership in the crises, more and more voters have become motivated to ensure that Trump is a one-term president.

Part of Trump’s strategy involves the old ploy of the pot calling the kettle black – claiming without evidence that it’s the Democrats that are plotting to steal the election from him. “Fraud. That’s what they want: fraud. They want to try and steal this election because, frankly, it’s the only way they can win the election,” Trump charged in an interview from the links in Bedminster, taking a golf break since he was handling the national crises so well.

It’s odd that a sitting president would charge the opposition of trying to steal an election, since in most countries it’s the incumbent head of government who uses the powers of their office to do the stealing – as just recently happened in Belarus. For a strongman, Trump seems to consider himself a laughably weak one. He could correctly assert that in this country the states largely control voting, and that each of the nation’s 24 Democratic governors would like to see him gone. Those governors, however, all want to bring about that result by making it easier for their citizens to vote – to expand democracy, not overturn it.

Trump is not as feckless as he sometimes claims to be. He does have levers to use in his favor and plans to employ them. He once proposed delaying the election, although he has no legal authority to do so and gained little mainstream traction for the proposal, even among leading Republicans. Trump’s real scheme always has been to make it harder to vote. And with the pandemic raging, he knows that many Americans will be reluctant to vote by any method other than the mail. Therefore, he has attacked mail voting as insecure and subject to fraud. But since many state governments, and not only those dominated by Democrats, are expanding mail voting anyway. Trump moved to step B of his plan: to undermine the institution without which mail voting would be impossible – the U.S. Postal Service.

The efforts of Louis DeJoy, Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General, to “reorganize” the Postal Service have been well-documented in the press. The effect of his “reform” effort has been to slow down the mail and make delivery more unreliable. And this is exactly what Trump wants, for it sets the stage for him to delegitimize an election in which he loses but manages to retain power anyway. Once again, Trump made his intentions plain in an interview with the Fox Business Network in which he stated baldly that he didn’t want emergency funding for the Postal Service because “they need that money to have the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.” Once his plot to sabotage his own agency was revealed and both Congress and citizens fought back, DeJoy promised during a Senate hearing to delay any further overhaul of the Postal Service until after the election. That could be believed as much as the fox in the henhouse solemnly promising to eat no more chickens.

One nightmare scenario is as follows, similar to speculations reported by the Post’s Robert McCartney: Election-night news coverage shows a close election, especially in crucial swing states, with Trump holding a slight lead. Even well past midnight the networks can’t call the election because an unprecedented number of ballots has been submitted by mail and much of it is yet to be counted. Election night passes into the morning with no declared winner as election boards all over the country are sifting through millions of uncounted ballots. Since Trump condemns mail-in voting and the Democrats have embraced it, Biden is likely to gain in this late count. This gives Trump the opening to claim unfriendly state governments are trying to use “fraudulent” mail voting to steal the election from him, especially those in swing states with Democratic governors such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina.  Republican governors try to halt the count in their states.  Amidst the chaos, Trump’s Second Amendment boys descend on election boards with their hardware, while Biden futilely pleads for calm while the votes are counted.  It’s unclear where this story would end, but it would make the 2000 debacle look like a picnic.

In fact, many of those mailed-in ballots might not get counted at all. DeJoy’s Postal Service has bluntly warned 46 states and DC that it can’t guarantee delivery of all their mailed ballots in time to be counted according to the states’ rules.  In response some states have pushed up their deadlines for voters to mail ballots, or extend the time after election night for tabulating them. But the former disenfranchises voters by forcing them to vote before the official day of the election; the latter drags out the count and further allows Trump to claim the election is being stolen from him.

--
How do we fight back?
First of all, all states should institute universal, no-excuse voting by mail, and their citizens should lobby for it as vigorously as possible.  Here in the Washington region, DC already plans to mail a ballot to all registered voters; Maryland is mailing an application for a mail ballot to all its registered voters while in Virginia one can vote by mail without an excuse, although voters have to ask for a ballot. It’s very late in the election calendar for states to institute new election procedures, but these are unprecedented times. States must ensure ramped-up security at locations where votes are being counted to guard against intimidation or violent attempts to disrupt the tallies (this being distinct from a heavy security presence during actual voting which may be used for voter intimidation).

There seems to be no way to oust DeJoy before the election, but Democrats in Congress and state government as well as citizen watchdogs must continue to keep an eye out for further shenanigans intended to hold up the mail or, worse, lose some of it. It’s a sad statement that we have come to this pass, but this is only the latest in a slow slide to dictatorship that will steepen if Trump is re-elected.

And everyone concerned about what a second Trump term would bring must vote – for Biden. Not Howie Hawkins or Kanye West or others in the grab-bag of spoiler candidates. Biden is not the candidate we wanted – I hardly need to catalog his flaws and his past failings – but he is all that is standing between us and the destruction of democracy.
A second Trump term would be too awful to contemplate. Should he somehow emerge victorious, even by questionable means, he would feel unleashed. After the Senate voted against removing him from office he sacked administration officials who courageously testified about his hijacking of aid to Ukraine for naked political purposes: Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, national security staff member Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. He subsequently canned the supposedly independent inspectors general across the government who were poking into areas that inconvenienced him.

What would a newly re-elected (even in a stolen vote) Trump be like? He would respect no restraints on his power. He would employ the full strength of the executive branch as he willed. Border Patrol agents kidnapping demonstrators in Portland? That was only a warmup. He’s the commander in chief of all the armed forces and has the Insurrection Act at his disposal; he could send the military to crush dissent. He would raid the Treasury for his pet projects and laugh at the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause, as he already has to fund his Mexican border wall. What recourse would Congress or the courts have? Impeachment? He already beat that one. Congressional oversight?  Don’t make him laugh. As for the courts, he would be Andrew Jackson writ large – who, after Chief Justice John Marshall penned the Supreme Court decision against his plan to force the Cherokees to move to Oklahoma from their ancestral home in the Southeast, allegedly said, “Let him enforce it.” That quote would become Trump’s mantra. It’s the executive branch that does the enforcing.

Following the destruction of our democratic institutions comes the full force of his toxic policies. Environmental destruction that pushes us over the cliff into full-blown and irreversible climate change. Militarized policing. Massive tax cuts for the rich and austerity for everyone else. Evisceration of safety, environmental and consumer-protection regulations. A stream of right-wing judges pledging to undo Roe v. Wade, for starters. And if you like the way he’s handling the pandemic, we’ll get more of the same.

So as not to shy away from the obvious conclusion, a re-elected Trump could lead us into strongman dictatorship along the lines of Russia or the Philippines, if not full-blown fascism. The Constitution’s protections against a president with no regard for it are shaky at best.

Four years ago I wrote an article for the Washington Socialist in which I argued that in noncompetitive states, those who opposed Trump but couldn’t bear to support Hillary Clinton could safely vote for third-party candidates – while still, I added, helping to elect Clinton through phone banking, canvassing, contributions and other efforts. A similar argument has been made for 2020 by, among others, DSA member Mike Hirsh in New Politics who urged leftists in noncompetitive states to vote Green.

Today I say that argument might have been fine for 2016, but in 2020 we live in a different world. Perhaps the only thing that will force Trump to back down from an attempted overthrow of the election results is an overwhelming popular vote against him on Election Day, notwithstanding how many mail ballots have yet to be counted. Losing in a landslide vote wouldn’t shame him enough to abandon claims that voter fraud was the reason for his losing – shame is not in his makeup – but it would lead the bulk of Republican governors and members of Congress, whose support he has needed and still would need to advance his schemes, to abandon him. They know how to read the election results and when to retreat. They were Trump’s toadies when he was winning, but once the stink of defeat is on him they won’t be able to run away fast enough.

Therefore, in 2020 every vote counts – in California and Massachusetts, in Wyoming and Mississippi -- and in DC, Maryland and Virginia.  If we want Trump out, there can be no protest voting – every vote for the Democratic ticket is a vote for a democracy. All others are votes for Trump and tyranny.
​
So vote – and donate, and join a phone bank, and do whatever you can to elect Biden and Harris. Then once democracy is preserved, we can become the opposition again.
I realize this article might rub some readers the wrong way. If so, good. I welcome your comments.
 

​ 

• Bill Barclay, Chicago Political Economy Group 

 
There are many bad things that flow from the highly unequal distribution of income in the United States but there is one positive: you know where to look for tax revenue to fund our depleted social support system.  Or if you want to address some of the inequality itself.
 
Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren made proposals during their presidential campaigns that built on this reality.  Warren’s best-known proposal was her wealth tax, while Sanders attacked the intergenerational transmission of inequality by proposing a much more robust estate tax than currently exists.  During the Democratic primaries, Joe Biden did not support either of these proposals.  But as a candidate of a party that has moved to the left over the last decade or more, he has put forth several tax proposals that speak, at least in part, to the problem of economic inequality in the United States.  His proposals address both the current level of inequality as well as the intergenerational transmission of economic privilege.
 

1. Taxing for Our Retirement Years – Social Security (FICA)

 
It has been widely recognized that the FICA, the payroll tax that funds Social Security as it is currently structured, is outdated.  FICA is not raising enough revenue to insure that, over the long term, Social Security will continue to be fully funded.  And this is, in large part, because of increased income inequality.  In 2020 FICA applies to only the first $137,700 of income received. Here is the problem.  Although the annual FICA cap rises with inflation, it doesn’t rise fast enough to keep up with increasing income concentration.  Thus, while the 1980 FICA cap of $25,900 captured over 90% of all income received, the 2020 cap captures less than 83% – over $1.2 trillion of income escapes the FICA tax – and that threatens the system.  
 
Biden is proposing to tax all income received above $400,000 (in addition, of course to the current first $137,700).  This would raise between $800 billion to $1 trillion new revenue over a decade. While it obviously creates a doughnut hole between the current cap and $400,000, it would significantly increase FICA coverage. 
 

1. Capital Gains

 
Capital gains, the amount above your cost that you sell an asset such as stocks for, have been taxed at a lower rate than income for many decades in the Unites States.  The argument has been that investors should be rewarded for deferring consumption and taking on risks, that lower capital gains taxes would generate faster economic growth and ultimately benefit everyone.  However, the primary beneficiaries have been the top 1-5% of households by income. 
 
This is true on two counts. First, the vast bulk of capital gains, about 70%, goes to the top 1% of households by income while less than 10% goes to the bottom 80% of households by income.  Second, since the highest income households in the United States receive a large share of their total income in the form of capital gains (and pass-through income, taxed at the capital gains rate), many in the very top income level pay a lower effective income tax rate than households lower down the income hierarchy.  Finally, the low capital gains tax rates that benefits primarily high-income households leads to a further concentration of wealth and greater wealth inequality.  
 
Biden proposes to tax capital gains at the same level as income for all households with total income in excess of $1 million (households below this level would still benefit from the lower capital gains tax rate).  This proposal would raise $400-550 billion in new revenue over a decade.  It is also smart politics, since households with small amounts of capital gains often value that small income and its lower tax rate – and they would still have that benefit.  The constituency for resisting this proposal would be limited to a relative few, the roughly 500,000 households with income in excess of $1 million out of a total number of tax filing household of more than 150,000,000.  Of course, these households have a lot of money to lobby against such a proposal.
 

​Leo Casey
The following piece was originally written in opposition to a resolution proposed to the 2018 convention of the Metro DC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, “Supporting Anti-Fascist Organizing.” It is published here because it addresses issues that continue to be of major concern, given ongoing violent clashes between groups of Antifa and groups of fascists and proto-fascists in various parts of the United States.

As democratic socialists we have always been anti-fascists, because the essence of fascism — its authoritarianism, its racism, its misogyny, its homophobia and its suppression of independent unions, political freedom and civil liberties — runs completely counter to the principles and moral values that are most important to us. The question that we grapple with is not “do we oppose fascism,” but “what is the most effective way to defeat fascism?”

Resolution One is entitled “supporting anti-fascist organizing within the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America (MDC DSA),” which would seem to be a consensus position for democratic socialists. But the seemingly innocuous language of the resolution — and in particular the resolved “That Metro DSA recognizes the need for a diversity of tactics to defeat fascism” — actually proposes a particular political direction that is destructive of anti-fascist organizing and would be deeply damaging to MDC DSA. “Diversity of tactics” is a term of art that has a particular political meaning — one that treats street violence as a legitimate political tactic. In the context of anti-fascist organizing, “diversity of tactics” is commonly understood as a claim that Antifa street fighting with fascists is a legitimate tactic that deserves support.

Why is support for Antifa street fighting with fascists a serious political mistake and contrary to our principles and values?

First, our own recent experience is that fascists are most effectively countered when there is the broadest possible mobilization of democratic forces in opposition to them. A powerful example of this type of mobilization was the extraordinary anti-fascist demonstration in Boston, a week after Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer. The streets were filled with tens of thousands of Bostonians from unions; churches, synagogues and mosques; neighborhood and community groups; Black Lives Matter and civil rights organizations; and feminist and LGBTQIA organizations, among others. The pitifully small numbers of white supremacist neo-Nazis were completely outnumbered and soundly politically defeated.

Contrast that to the scenes of small groups of Antifa fighting street battles with fascists in Berkeley, which were completely avoided by the people and popular organizations of the city, despite the fact that the left and anti-fascism is as strong there as in any American urban center. Street fighting and violence is opposed by the very people we would want to involve in mass anti-fascist demonstrations, and in overwhelming numbers. By contrast, fascists thrive on violence: it is central to their identity. Unlike Boston, where they disappeared after their humiliating defeat, the street fighting of Portland, Berkeley and Seattle has only encouraged fascists to return for repeat performances.

Second, our history tells us that mass mobilizations of the broadest type, including all democratic forces, is the way to defeat fascism. Antifa claims as their inspiration groups that opposed the rise of Nazism and Italian Fascism with street fighting. They seem oblivious to the fact that such street fighting — and divisions on the German and Italian left that prevented united opposition to fascism — led to the victory of Nazism and Italian Fascism, not their defeat. A bloody world war which claimed millions and millions of lives had to be fought to undo that victory of Nazism and Italian fascism.

Moreover, the practice of street fighting on the American left, such as that indulged by the Weathermen in their early days, led to ultra-leftism, extreme political isolation, and further adventurism that did profound damage to the anti-Vietnam War movement and the left itself. But Antifa is either unaware of this history, or choses to ignore its lessons.

Third, the adoption of tactics such as street fighting and the secrecy used to organize and execute them has historically been a most fertile ground for agent provocateurs and infiltrators of various sorts. An open, democratic political culture is our best defense against such efforts against us.

Fourth, the macho posturing associated with street fighting, so strikingly evident in the past in 1930s Germany and Italy and in 1960s Weathermen, is deeply at odds with the socialist feminist values that define DSA.

Fifth, there are serious legal ramifications to support for Antifa street fighting, that would put MDC DSA and its elected leadership, as well as DSA as a whole, in legal jeopardy.

There is a strong democratic socialist tradition of direct action against white supremacy and fascism: the use of non-violent civil disobedience. From ‘sitting in’ at racially segregated lunch counters to participating in ‘freedom rides’ on racially segregated buses to marching against court injunctions, democratic socialists put their bodies on the line in the struggle against racism. When married to mass actions such as Montgomery bus boycott, the 1963 March on Washington and the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, this non-violent direct action proved most effective in winning the victories of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. We should employ a similar approach to the struggle against authoritarianism and white supremacy of the far right today. Resolution One diverts us from this path.

Leo Casey is the Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers which focuses of issues of public education, unionism and democracy promotion. Before he assumed his current position at the Institute, Casey served as Vice President from Academic High Schools for the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s 200,000 person strong teacher union. This article was originally published by the Albert Shanker Institute.
Keywords:  ANTIFA, Democracy, Fascism, Nazism, Politics, White Supremacy
 

If you haven’t read a lot of labor history or lived through the golden age of American trade unionism in the postwar boom, you will find the story of New York’s Local 6 almost impossible to believe. The local is the heart of New York’s Hotel Trades Council, which represents nearly all workers at Manhattan’s major hotels, some 40,000 in all.

This union has something that has vanished in most industries—serious worker power.
It has used this power to negotiate astonishing benefits and protections. For instance, room cleaners in New York hotels earn upward of $50,000 a year. Union members range from restaurant staff such as line cooks, dishwashers, bartenders, waters, and bussers, and hotel workers including desk clerks, bellmen, and “back of the house” staff such as laundry workers and cleaners.

​The union bargains for very long-term contracts, which protect workers from having to negotiate concessions if a contract happens to come up during an economic downturn. The current contract expires in 2026. With tourism and business travel to New York on indefinite hold, some 90 percent of the union’s members are on layoff.

“Because our contract is long term, it is likely to outlive the virus,” says union president Rich Maroko. “There is no other industry that I am aware of with such a long-term contract.”
In city politics, Local 6, a relatively small union, is famous for punching above its weight.

The union also has what is probably America’s best worker health plan. It does not use commercial insurance, but runs state-of-the-art clinics located in four of New York’s boroughs, with salaried medical staff.
“One reason we’re able to negotiate such long-term contracts is our unique health care system,” says Maroko. “Because of that model, we’re able to predict and control costs. In the private insurance market, you can’t dictate cost increases and therefore you can’t project very far into the future. So even in most other union contracts, the parties will only will go out two or three years.”

In the pandemic, tens of millions of workers have lost their health coverage. But thanks to the hotel union’s power, its members have kept their full health coverage since massive layoffs began in March, and coverage will continue at least through September. The cost to the hotel industry, which is largely shut down and losing money, is upward of $50 million a month.

Because of the very strong contract protections and the worker power that backs them up, union members on layoff also have extensive call-back rights that simply don’t exist in non-union workplaces. “Non-union employers have no obligation to recall workers, nor do they have any obligation to offer recalled workers the wages, benefits, or working conditions they enjoyed prior to being laid off,” says Maroko. “A non-union employer could lower wages, eliminate benefits, and increase workload, and there is little the workers can do.”

For 40 years, hard times have revealed the weakness of unions, as labor leaders have had to negotiate givebacks rather than raises. But in the case of Local 6, hard times reveal the union’s strength. The master contract includes safety protocols to protect workers against COVID that exceed those of most organizations, like 20 days sick leave for workers with COVID, and that's on top of 45 days of other time off guaranteed in the contract.

With a heavily immigrant membership, the union organizes in 67 languages. Its rank and file is also very active in New York’s electoral politics, which creates alliances with local government in a city whose elected leaders are relatively pro-union to begin with. This comes in very handy when disputes with management get nasty, since nothing in New York can get built without a lot of permits, zoning approvals, and the like.

Virtually all bosses would prefer to operate without the inconvenience and expense of sharing power and money with their workers.
In city politics, Local 6, a relatively small union, is famous for punching above its weight. In the 2017 City Council election, all 26 of the City Council candidates the union endorsed were victorious. The union ran the largest independent-expenditure campaign of the city election cycle, focusing on nine closely contested races. Rank-and-file volunteers were far more important than money.

Notably, the New York hotel union has thrived during a period when all the larger forces were against it: the deliberate weakening of the Wagner Act protections, corporate America redoubling its anti-union efforts; the rise of private equity owners (including in the hotel industry) determined to break unions; and the relentless casualization of work.

HOW DID LOCAL 6 get so powerful and what might the rest of the labor movement learn from it?
I had been hearing about Local 6 for a long time, and in 2011 I decided to check it out for myself. I spent several weeks reporting and writing a feature piece called “A More Perfect Union.” For interested readers, the full history of the union is in that article.

Here is the basic story. The union, now affiliated with UNITE HERE, was founded in 1938. Maroko, who became president in August, is only the union’s fourth president in more than 80 years. The local has a long and continuing tradition of militant organizing, a democratic structure, and an activist rank and file. Shop stewards, known as delegates, are directly elected by the membership at each hotel.

The uses of rank-and-file power are backed up by an extraordinary strategy of contractual jurisprudence. The prime architect is Maroko, 50, who served as general counsel and chief negotiator for 18 years before being elected union president in August. Maroko, the son of a Brazilian mother and a Polish father, succeeded the legendary Peter Ward, who served as union president since 1995. Ward was known for his shrewd and creative use of tactics, and insistence on rank-and-file engagement.

The union’s strategy has been to organize the New York hotel industry wall to wall. Its citywide master agreement with the industry includes the holy grail of the labor movement, card-check neutrality. If a hotel group has even one union contract in the city and decides to build, purchase, or manage another hotel, it is bound by a neutrality clause. That invariably means the new property is union from day one.

Each contract spells out rights and responsibilities and the grievances process in detail, and binding arbitration in cases of rare deadlocks. This is backed by the union’s sheer power to shut down a hotel. Not surprisingly, solidarity feeds on itself. Union members, who might otherwise be part of the large low-wage labor market or casual jobs and gigs in New York, are devoted to their union.

The master agreement also provides that all the terms of the union contract carry over if the hotel changes ownership. And it requires that all payroll and scheduling data must be shared with the union, in the form of an electronic database.

The process sounds bureaucratic, but in practice it is the opposite. Both labor and management share an interest in quick resolution of disputes. Because the union delegates and negotiators know the contract and its remedies so well, most disputes are settled ad hoc.

The union has also used its power to avoid the kind of outsourcing that has plagued the hospitality industry in non-union towns, where someone working at a brand-name hotel is actually working for a staffing agency. This enables the brand to disclaim responsibility for the lousy pay and working conditions.

A strong union actually helps management be more efficient because it precludes low-road strategies, such as putting all the pressure for adjustment on the workers. For instance, in non-union hotels, workers get little notice of when and whether they are supposed to come in, depending on fluctuations in the guest census. With a union contract, management is compelled to recognize that workers have lives.

​The union creatively uses the solidarity and activism of its membership, in rare cases of open conflict with management, to embarrass the brand. One weapon of last resort is the “lobby meeting.” The entire membership shows up in the lobby. As I wrote in my feature piece, it is the union’s equivalent of the famous distress call of the circus, “Hey, Rube.”

In one famous incident, a maître d’ at the ultra-luxury St. Regis hotel had been sexually harassing staff. The hotel’s celebrity chef sided with the maître d’ and management backed the chef. The entire staff showed up in the lobby and demanded a public meeting with the general manager, scandalizing guests. Management quickly caved. The eventual settlement required the chef not only to fire the maître d’ but to read a statement of apology to the whole staff.

IN SOME RESPECTS, it may seem easy to organize New York hotels. After all, the city is a must-visit tourist and business destination. If workers are decently compensated, hotels can simply pass the cost along to guests. But think again.

In the early days of the union, hotel companies resisted unionization as much as any other industry, as they still do in other cities. The very strong hotel locals, notably in New York and Las Vegas, are still the exception. Virtually all bosses would prefer to operate without the inconvenience and expense of sharing power and money with their workers.

While New York’s hotel union benefits from a legacy of worker power, and works to keep renewing it, this will be harder in other industries. Yet there are valuable lessons to be learned. Organizing an industry wall to wall is one such lesson. Involve the public is another. Both were applied in the SEIU’s famed Justice for Janitors campaign. Fast-food organizers are also attempting to replicate this approach.

​What will become of the industry and the union once the pandemic eases? Maroko is optimistic. The city is still a worldwide tourist destination. Zoom may crowd out some live business conferences, but people are already getting sick of Zoom and craving face-to-face contact, eventually without mask and over a good meal. “It will come back,” says Maroko. “People will always come to New York.”
Robert Kutner
The American Prospect 
More from Robert Kuttner
 

   
David Bacon.  The American Prospect.

On June 24, new COVID-19 cases passed 200 in one day in rural Yakima County in central Washington state for the third time this June. That brought the total number of people infected to 6,940, and the number of the dead to 132. The infection toll for Seattle’s King County, with a population ten times larger than Yakima’s, was 9,453.
   COVID numbers are spiking in farmworker communities all over the United States. On June 26, the Imperial Valley, on the California-Mexican border, the source of winter vegetables worth over $1.8 billion per year, registered 5,549 cases and 70 deaths. In California’s huge San Joaquin Valley, Fresno County had 3,892 infections and 71 deaths, and Kern County had 4,108 cases and 63 deaths. Collier County in Florida, center of the U.S. tomato crop and headquarters of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, had 3,778 cases and 70 deaths. Cumberland County, New Jersey’s agricultural heartland, had 2,876 cases and 124 deaths, and nearby Chester County, Pennsylvania, where workers labor in Kennett Square’s mushroom sheds, had 3,437 cases and 313 deaths. In Arizona’s Yuma County, an irrigated desert along the Colorado River, there were 5,323 cases and 76 deaths.
   This raging rural infection rate, which tracks those of urban counties many times their size, is not due to a refusal by farmworkers to wear facemasks. It is a function of structural racism—the way immigrants in general, and farmworkers in particular, are treated as disposable labor. People in the fields are viewed as machines, whose ability to work is the only aspect of their human value worth considering.
   There is no clearer demonstration of this fact than the immigration order issued by the Trump administration on June 23. President Trump boasted that he would “preserve jobs for American citizens” by stopping the recruitment of guest workers in four visa categories. He failed to mention, however, that he was leaving untouched the country’s main guest worker program, under which growers bring farm laborers to the U.S.—the H-2A visa program.
   Faced with the need to please agribusiness, Trump made clear that no rhetoric about family values applies to farmworkers. H-2A migrants cannot bring a wife or a child with them (the program notoriously discriminates against hiring women), so they live the lives of lonely men in barracks. And in its most significant impact on families, Trump’s order would close down the country’s historic path for keeping families together—the family preference system for granting residence visas, or “green cards.”
   There’s nothing new about streamlining the labor supply for growers, making it cheaper and more vulnerable, under the cover of anti-immigrant rhetoric.
   Trump’s order ostensibly stops the issuance of visas for four much smaller guest worker programs, including H-1B for workers in health care and high tech; H-2B for non-agricultural workers, mostly in landscaping, forestry, and food processing; L-1 for corporate executives; and J-1, the visa for students in cultural exchange programs, au pairs, and university researchers.
   Nativist anti-immigrant organizations duly praised the order, which a senior administration official claimed to Vox “would open up 525,000 jobs.” The anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies declared, “Now there is a new sheriff in town. For the first time, a president has stood up for the American people.” According to Tom Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, “With record unemployment crushing millions of Americans ... importing more foreign labor ... is simply unacceptable.”
    Almost all media coverage took Trump’s claim at face value. Yet the announcement was clearly a case of smoke and mirrors. According to Mary Bauer, counsel for the Centro de los Derechos de Migrantes (the Center for Migrant Rights), “We can’t figure out where these numbers are coming from. This administration just makes things up.”
In March, Trump shut down the international division of Citizenship and Immigration Services, the office that processes all visa applications abroad, and effectively closed visa operations at U.S. consulates. Most H-1B and H-2B work visa applications for this year had already been made and approved, however, and will be unaffected by the new order. The impact on employers, therefore, will be small, despite their loud, pro-forma protests.  
   In any case, those two visa categories have caps of 65,000 each, making them much smaller than the untouched guest worker program for agribusiness, which has no cap. Last year the administration certified grower applications to fill over a quarter of a million jobs with H-2A workers. And when Trump in March shut down the processing of all other visa applications, growers got the administration to keep their flow of guest workers going.
   Adding one more wrinkle, the order allows employers to apply for exceptions to the work visa bans. A blanket exemption has already been made for the food supply and health care industries. Meatpacking companies that use H-2B visas to send workers into COVID-saturated plants will undoubtedly win exemptions, as will hospital corporations that want H-1B nurses to risk their lives in the pandemic’s emergency rooms. “But where’s the protection from OSHA, or for wages and sick pay, or any reform of the abuses of these guest worker programs?” Bauer asks. “There’s nothing here to protect workers, regardless of whether they’re guest worker visa holders or citizens.”
   That lack of protection is especially serious for the huge wave of workers recruited by agribusiness. Bringing H-2A workers into the country in the middle of a pandemic is dangerous. Mexico, the country from which over 250,000 were recruited last year, is struggling to contain its own outbreak. There is no testing for these contract workers as they cross the border. Meanwhile, in the U.S. towns where they’re put to work, COVID cases are spiking.
    COVID infections go back and forth between workers themselves and their surrounding communities. In March and April, the biggest apple grower in Washington, Stemilt Fruit, admitted that over 50 workers it had recruited in Mexico had the virus. Because these workers showed symptoms more than one month after their arrival, it was likely they hadn’t brought the illness with them—they were infected here.
In many places, non-H-2A farmworkers and their families have gone on strike to enforce working conditions that would keep the virus from spreading.
   On the same day that virus cases reached 3,533 in California’s Tulare County, with 118 deaths, sorters went on strike in the sheds of Primex Corporation’s 5,000 acres of pistachio groves. Although workers say 61 have tested positive, one worker, Veronica Perez, says the company was selling them facemasks for $8 apiece. Another worker, Ernestina Mejia, charged, “The company told us nothing. We found out workers were getting sick by talking with each other in the bathroom. Now my whole family is infected.”
   Workers in Yakima Valley apple packinghouses went on strike earlier this month for the same demand—safety from the virus. Knowing the disease was peaking in their county, they wanted hazard pay to compensate for the terrible risk involved in just going to work.
Raising wages, however, is not part of the administration’s plan. Instead, Trump has promised to help growers lower the required pay for H-2A workers, who now make up 10 percent of the U.S. farm workforce. Currently, each state has to calculate an Adverse Effect Wage Rate that won’t undermine the wages of farmworkers already living here, who are mostly immigrants themselves. The new rule that the administration is proposing would cost workers up to $6 an hour, while saving growers millions.
   Lowering wages for H-2A workers would pull the floor from under farmworker wages in general. In Georgia, growers already fill a quarter of all farm labor jobs with H-2A visa holders. Local farmworkers are not in a strong position to insist on higher wages in the face of this forced competition. The income of farmworkers nationally is already below the poverty line, with an average annual family income between $17,500 and $20,000.
   Grower pressure to lower costs, even at the risk of the spread of the virus, descends on states as well. In Washington, a state with a Democratic governor and legislature, the department of health was pressured to issue a toothless “guideline” for grower housing that puts workers’ lives at risk. In the barracks for H-2A migrants, workers sleep in bunk beds closer to each other than the six-foot distance recommended by the state’s own epidemiologists. Prohibiting bunk beds, however, would have required growers to build additional housing or hire local workers instead. Either alternative would increase costs. The “guidelines” therefore gave bunk beds the stamp of approval, and farmworker unions and advocates are now suing the state’s Democratic administration.
   Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has explained that the administration wants “to separate immigration, which is people wanting to become citizens, [from] a temporary, legal guest-worker program. That’s what agriculture needs, and that’s what we want.”
There’s nothing new about streamlining the labor supply for growers, making it cheaper and more vulnerable, under the cover of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Growers’ desire for low-wage labor was the justification for the bracero program, which brought up to half a million people per year from Mexico, to harvest U.S. crops between 1942 and 1964. The program was notorious. Braceros were held in labor camps, often behind barbed wire. If they went on strike, they were deported. If local workers went on strike, growers brought in braceros to replace them.


   Deportations and anti-immigrant racism were part of the scheme. In one year, 1954, the U.S. deported 1.1 million migrants in “Operation Wetback.” Two years later 445,197 braceros were brought to work on U.S. farms, 153,000 in California alone.
Thanks to the efforts of activists like Ernesto Garza, Bert Corona, and Cesar Chavez, who’d awakened Congress to the injustices of the bracero system, the program was ended in 1964. The following year, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 set up a system in which people from all nations—not just Western Europe—could come to the U.S., and in which those already in the U.S. could petition for visas for mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, brothers, and sisters. Community demographics changed in the wave of immigration that followed. Migrant workers still followed jobs and crops, and slept in labor camps.        But at the same time immigrant families—mostly people of color—sought to reunite themselves and set down roots. Their communities grew, and together with the civil rights and labor movements, began to challenge local rightwing regimes. In time, Los Angeles was no longer governed by the racist Sam Yorty, and slowly, California—once the political home of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—became a liberal and “sanctuary” state.
   At the federal level, however, many “immigration reform” proposals, including laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s, have sought to reverse this course by establishing new bracero-type programs, criminalizing immigration and militarizing the border. The family preference system has been sabotaged by limits on the available visas. The waiting time for a visa to bring a married son or daughter from Manila or Mexico City is now over 22 years.
   Trump’s new order makes this course reversal official, at least until it expires in December, by placing no limits on guest workers for growers, and completely ending the issuance of visas for family reunification. That is basically the return of the U.S. immigration policy of the 1950s.
That prospect should make the order an election issue. To be sure, ending the family preference system permanently, in the view of the CDM’s Mary Bauer, cannot be accomplished without an act of Congress, rewriting the 1965 law. “Trump has been able to use the pandemic to impose temporary measures, but permanent changes can’t be done by executive order,” she says.
   Nevertheless, should Trump win reelection, it is clear that he would try to extend his order and make it permanent. A Supreme Court majority that upheld the DACA program only a week after giving its blessing to the administration’s restrictions on asylum applicants cannot be depended on to save family preferences.
   Why, then, is this not a big issue for Democrats? Some Democratic office holders buy the neoliberal idea that immigration policy should be “market based” and serve labor needs. There was significant support in the party for those parts of past comprehensive immigration bills that sought to end some family preferences, using the argument that they weren’t serving the needs of the economy. Some Democrats, like California’s Sen. Diane Feinstein, support H-2A and guest worker programs and see no problem making alliances with growers to preserve them.
    But what about the Democratic left? A class perspective no longer gets a candidate redbaited when it’s applied to issues like health care, gentrification, or fighting the banks. But that perspective is strangely absent when it comes to much of U.S. immigration policy.
Part of the problem is historical amnesia. We don’t remember the fights it took to get what we have now. We may remember names like Cesar Chavez, Ernesto Galarza, and Bert Corona, but we don’t quite remember what it was they fought for, or why.
   Amnesia can be costly, though. At a minimum it will keep the Democratic Party from campaigning on an issue the Trump administration has handed to it. And should the election go awry, it would mean a fast track backwards to one of the most abusive periods for immigrants in U.S. history. If the Democrats win, defending family preferences and ending the H-2A program isn’t a given either, but fighting for those goals now will build a more powerful movement for them if a new administration takes office.
   As COVID-19 sweeps through rural counties and farmworker towns, Trump’s immigration order may seem a distant issue. But the administration is using the pandemic to accomplish a goal it might not be able to otherwise, moving while attention is focused on immediate illness and death. To fight the virus’s spread, workers and immigrants have to challenge not just the dangerous working and housing conditions but also the entire system of immigration and guest worker policies from which those dangers arise. They have to fight for the same goals that Galarza and Corona fought for more than half a century ago.
   “Trump is dismantling all protections for immigrant communities, especially for families and workers,” says Alma Maquitico, co-director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “Our families are the ones risking COVID to harvest crops and care for others. We need real legalization for those without papers, and a working preference system for keeping our families together. Guest worker programs don’t do either of these things. They just exploit us.”
IMMIGRATION THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION LABOR CORONAVIRUS WASHINGTON STATE CALIFORNIAAGRICULTURE
 
 
https://prospect.org/labor/trump-immigration-order-farmworkers-no-rights/

​ An excerpt from Mass Movement Labor Strategy for DSA.  A position paper of the Collective Power Network of DSA. Aug. 26, 2020.   A viewpoint. 
Edited for length. 
 
 
Intro: To drive the socialist movement deep into workplaces across the country, DSA needs an ambitious approach to labor organizing that taps the potential of our 70k-strong membership. In this strategy guide, Collective Power Network presents our mass movement labor strategy for DSA…
 
An excerpt from Mass Movement Labor Strategy for DSA. 
 
For Unionism, 
For Organizing Where We’re At,
Against Substituting Agitation for Struggle
We will never gain credibility by leading our coworkers into losing battles, no matter how righteous they are. It’s often alleged that the primary barrier standing in the way of victory for the US left is an uneven development of working-class consciousness. Based on this assumption, agitation becomes prioritized over any other organizing goals. Organizing campaigns are chosen based on their agitational potential, but not their potential for material gain. But leading our coworkers into unpopular or infeasible campaigns for the sake of consciousness-raising, rebellion, or theoretical purity objectifies workers by treating their lives like political experiments. While it’s true that unionization is not always immediately feasible as an organizing goal, worker agitation is not an end unto itself. If anything, agitation with no plan for success is even more alienating. 
For Fighting to Win
We support a labor strategy that empowers our members to engage in long-term organizing efforts at their workplaces with the primary intent to win material victories by leveraging majoritarian political power. If we intend on making DSA an organization of the working class, we have to build organizational credibility. The best way to do this is to win. To gain credibility for DSA as a vector for working class politics, we have to rebuild the labor movement from the ground up with sustainable, democratic structures that masses of workers can participate in and materially benefit from.
Functionally, this means running quality DSA campaigns in our workplaces. Quality campaigns are properly planned, resourced, and executed. This doesn’t mean that DSA should try to be a union. But DSA must aim to be a mass working class weapon against capital, and at times revolutionary work looks like bread-and-butter workplace organizing. DSA-supported unionization drives are impressive examples of our ability to enact working class politics. Other campaigns like the Restaurant Organizing Project are not premised on winning union recognition or collective bargaining agreements, but they still set out to win life-altering concessions from bosses through collective worker action.
 
For Organizing the South 
Read the entire piece.
https://dsaorganizer.org/2020/08/26/mass-movement-labor-strategy/

For a  detailed view of labor history see

https://medium.com/@kurtstand/labor-history-35-books-for-socialists-a-selective-annotated-bibliography-34aa047a6661
 

Donald Trump and his allies at the RNC repeatedly make the argument that the Democrats and Biden support Open Borders.  This is false.  The following essay reposted from last year describes many of the conflicting positions on immigration- NONE argue for Open Borders.  ( although a  poorly informed resolution at DSA’s 2019 convention does endorse open borders.) 
 
 
Steps Toward a Labor Informed Position on Immigration
Duane E. Campbell 
 
( a prior version of this paper appeared on Portside with the title: The Left Case Against Open Borders-by Angela Nagel:  a Review) 
 
Tens of thousands of Hondurans, El Salvadorans and Guatemalans are fleeing  hunger and death.  Usually they do not flee in caravans but alone or with their immediate families. Caravans are formed for protection from crimes, assault, rape and extortion. As the Exodus Caravan from Honduras has reached our borders, there is a heightened sense of fear in the nation promoted by Donald Trump and his administration.
 
To  begin with, the caravan of poor people at our border should not be stopped.  Instead, those eligible for refugee status should be admitted required by the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1946) and current U.S. law.  DSA’s Immigrants’ Rights Committee is actively involved with several local chapters in support of the migrants in the caravan in Tijuana, Mexico. 
 
When writers  propose an immigration policy and a critique of a movement, it is important to get the story right. People’s lives depend upon it.
 
It Is Not About Open Borders
 
In the article, “The Left Case against Open Borders”, writer Angela Nagel  gets some  of the economic conditions correct, but like Trump, she argues without evidence that the problem is that  unions, the Left  and immigrants’ rights activists support  “open borders”.   Her  writing  follows from the position in Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders – (2018) by Reihan Salam
 Developing a policy on migration for labor and  the left  is far more complex than presented by  these writers.  
 
First we must  deal with some of  the false accusations about the role of unions  in the immigration policy  debates.  
 
Writer Nagel is wrong  in asserting that the left and labor favor open borders. This is accepting the false narrative of Trump and the anti- immigrant forces. 
 
There has been a long and well developed movement for immigration reform, along with connected policy proposals – few of which argue for open borders. Progressive policies and practices have emerged from within U.S. communities and the labor movement.  The writer seems to not be aware of this history. Instead she describes critics of the current attacks on immigrants as “Useful Idiots.”
 
She notes the Reagan Administration policy  known by Republicans  as amnesty without noting that the  Simpson- Mazolli Act was the consequence of a multi- year struggle for immigration reform by both corporate forces and community groups. 
This  Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 bill permitted the legalization of some 2 million farmworkers and over 4 million others already living in the U.S.  This program was a hard fought product of years of struggle by immigrants’ rights activists and their allies.
 
In addition to providing a path to legalization for many already here, the act required employers to attest to their employees immigration status  and made it illegal for hire or recruit undocumented workers.  These provisions were known as employer sanctions.  The act also contained the program known as H2A which provides a system of temporary, controlled farm labor “guest workers” with very limited ability to organize, to have a union,  and to demand improved wages or working conditions. The law further  includes  H1B temporary workers in high skilled technical fields.  By 2017, some 40,000  agricultural “guest workers” were employed in the fields  and some 419,000 mostly high tech H2B workers were employed in the U.S. 
 
Immigrant rights groups opposed employer sanctions arguing that they would provide the employer with yet another way to exploit and intimidate immigrant workers.  Now, the Nagel article argues for E verify system, which is the current digital  process of employer sanctions, without noting that employer sanctions were  opposed by the AFL-CIO in their  landmark 1999 resolution on organizing immigrant workers.   

In 1994, a Republican led Congress, with the support of 102  Democrats, passed the North American Free Trade Act, the economic construction that provides for free trade of goods and services but did not change immigration law. The promise made by NAFTA supporters was that the new trade regime would significantly reduce immigration.  Instead, NAFTA impoverished millions of small farmers in Mexico and drove  many of these workers to migrate to the U.S.
In 1996 the Republicans passed and Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, a repressive bill that  provided for the construction of fencing along the border and criminalized many factors of immigrant life. Over the decade there were numerous appropriation bills to provide increased funding for the Border Patrol,  militarization and fencing of the border.
It Is Not About Mass Migration
In 2005 when Republicans pushed the Sensenbrenner bill , the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 , unions with significant immigrant membership worked with immigrants rights groups to muster over 1 million into the streets in protest around the country on May 1, 2006,  to kill the bill. They did demand a new amnesty for workers already here, this is what the Republican nationalists call a demand for open borders and mass migration. 
 
Nagel argues: “There is no getting around the fact that the power of unions relies by definition on their ability to restrict and withdraw the supply of labor, which becomes impossible if an entire workforce can be easily and cheaply replaced. Open borders and mass immigration are a victory for the bosses.”
 
While this is  partially true, neither unions nor the left have been arguing for open borders nor mass immigration.  They have been arguing for revised policies that protect the rights of migrant workers including their right to form unions. 
Nagel argues that support for restriction of immigration  can be found in labor history.   Yes, organized labor has long had two traditions on immigration; one urged restriction of immigration, the second urged recognizing that immigrants were here and sought to organize  them into unions.    Certainly there are instances of  organized labor being anti immigrant, such as in the Chinese Exclusion Act.   However she uses her history very selectively for example ignoring the unionization of the Industrial Workers of the World , the CIO  and  Packinghouse Workers among many.   BTW. the socialists in labor were almost always on the side of supporting unionizing immigrant workers- not of building walls. 
 Seeking to support her claim, Nagel cites as evidence references to the UFW strike in 1969 ( I think she means 1973).  In the strike mass Immigration was not the issue confronted by the UFW, it was strike breaking. The author, an Irish writer, may not know that the UFW has organized undocumented labor, has helped tens of thousands to  achieve their  legalization papers and has proposed more immigration and the protection of farm worker rights. The actual history of the UFW contradicts her thesis and the photo of Cesar Chavez used to promote the essay is -at best- a deception. 
 
 It would help for the writer  to be better informed on the immigrants’ rights movement and the labor movement.  If you are going to describe union’s approaches to immigration, you should deal with union sources, not the Koch Foundation funded think tanks she currently relies upon.  
 
It Is About Workers’ Rights 
 
In 1999 and 2000 The AFL-CIO changed its policy and no longer supported efforts prior efforts that blamed workers for migration.   Since the 2000  change  of federation policy several unions have changed their stance and work to  organize immigrant workers rather than trying  to keep them out of the country, but these unions  have not argued for open borders.
See, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants,  Bacon (2008)
 
Nagel describes  the neoliberal  corporate opinion campaign in support of more immigration. These are corporate campaigns, not union campaigns. 
The left and unions are not promoting open borders, they are defending workers- some of who are undocumented.  Workers without  legal status are a product of the biases in current immigration law including per country caps on granting visas.  
Angela Nagel is the author of a prior book Kill All Normies.  Her criticism of immigration politics  seems , like her book, to be informed by  a class of pundits and hash tag politics  rather than a  working knowledge of U.S.  labor unions and their history in dealing with immigration. 
 In her essay Nagel  describes well several  aspects of global finance and NAFTA.  Yes, there are real problems with NAFTA.  But, NAFTA was and is a neoliberal project, not a left project nor a union project.   Rather than accepting the  neoliberal argument that the U.S. has benefitted from migration, it would be more accurate to argue that certain corporations and industries and their owners  have benefitted in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The lobbyists from these industries dominate finance and  the foreign policy establishment and they  promote the  reconsideration of NAFTA.  Other corporations and most workers are harmed by the  current exploitation of illegal migration- such as in farm labor and construction.  The winning corporations externalize their own costs to the entire society and take little responsibility for their actions including the destructions of entire communities.  Under CAFTA, (Central America Free Trade Agreement) for example, the U.S. military is active in Honduras and other parts of Central America paid for by us all for the benefit of specific corporations not to the benefit of the people of the U.S.
 
Addressing Root Causes of Migration- The Economy 
Angela Nagel makes her most useful point when she argues in her conclusion,   “The proper response, therefore, is not abstract moralism about welcoming all migrants as an imagined act of charity, but rather addressing the root causes of migration in the relationship between large and powerful economies and the smaller or developing economies from which people migrate. “
 
Most labor and left advocates of immigration reform would agree with her assessment of the need to address the root causes of migration.   See for example,  Bacon,  The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration (2013) 
There were 27.4 million foreign born persons working in the U.S. labor force in 2017- 17.1 percent of the total labor force.  Latinos accounted for 47.9 percent of the total and Asians 25.2 percent,  As of 2016, roughly 10.6 million of  all the 16.3 million workers covered by a union contract were women and/or people of color.  More than a third (35.8 percent) are black, Latino or Asian.  
 These are the workers discussing the future of immigration and how it will affect their work lives, their unions, and their families.  
 
The growth of neoliberal corporate capitalism and the global markets produce a few winners and millions of losers including millions of migrants.
The actual alternative to the current existing  immigration policy is  not “ open borders”- it  is enforcement of existing employment laws as a first step, followed by the development of new employment and immigration laws, leading to a fair, pro worker  system of immigration. 
 
The U.S. does need to develop a new immigration policy. Note- asylum policy is different than immigration policy.  
In the last 50 years immigration policy was shaped by what could be passed through Congress, not what ought to be policy.  A policy that the left might favor such as the control of capital is not likely to pass the Congress.
We should try something different.  We should try consulting working people.  An enlightened policy on immigration is more likely to emerge from  including leaders and activists from the multi-racial (and significantly immigrant) working class in conversations and  cooperation with labor and  left forces in other countries.  
One  example, in July 2018  Mexico elected a new left president, Manuel Lopez Obrador.  After the vote, and prior to his inauguration on Dec.1, progressive independent labor unions have emerged after decades of repression.  These unions will represent Mexican workers. 
 
Trump, in his arrogance, has told Mexico to enforce U.S. immigration and asylum policy at the border in Tijuana and  on November 24, he claimed that he had an agreement with the new Obrador government.  He did not. Readers should understand that current U.S. immigration policy and drug policy  is  significantly dependent upon the continuing  cooperation of the Mexican Army.  The Obrador government  responded  to Trump’s demand by offering to cooperate if the U.S. provided $20 billion in development  aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. We have not heard of a response. 
 
We on the left  should engage with the newly insurgent labor movement and the new government of Mexico and the peoples of Central America in designing  an immigration policy that serves working people on both sides of the border.  
 
 
David Bacon describes  the issues  well, 
Without changing U.S. trade policy and ending structural adjustment programs and neoliberal economic reforms, millions of displaced people will continue to migrate, no matter how many walls are built on the border.

Changing corporate trade policy and stopping neoliberal reforms is as central to immigration reform as gaining legal status for undocumented immigrants.  There is a fundamental contradiction in the bipartisan policies in Congress that promote more free trade agreements, and then criminalize the migration of the people they displace.  Instead, Congress could end the use of the free trade system as a mechanism for producing displaced workers.  That would mean delinking immigration status and employment.  If employers are allowed to recruit contract labor abroad, and those workers can only stay if they are continuously employed (the two essential characteristics of guest worker programs), then they will never have enforceable rights.
 
THE RIGHT TO MIGRATE, THE RIGHT TO STAY HOME
By David Bacon  NACLA Report on the Americas
Volume 50, 2018 - Issue 3: NACLA at 50: 
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714839.2018.1525078
 
The DSA Immigrants’ Rights Committee has worked toward defining a socialist approach to immigration that respects working people. Working with the national office we are actively engaged in supporting efforts by several DSA chapters and individuals to provide support for the migrants in Tijuana, Mexico.
 
We oppose the efforts of both Trump nationalists and neoliberal advocates to  avoid discussion of  the  neoliberal economic system we currently have that produces migration.  
 
 
 
 
Duane Campbell has over thirty years of experience working with unions and immigrants’ rights organizations.  He is currently a co-chair of DSA’s Immigrants” Rights Committee. The committee can be contacted at  (new e mail) 
immigrantrights@dsacommittees.org 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By Bill Barclay and Peg Strobel
DSA Ventura County
 
 
Background
 
Recently there have been discussions of the way in which DSA staff members should or should not express political opinions, either in personal contact with other DSA members, on DSA media, print and digital and to a larger public.
 
By way of introduction we should acknowledge our previous experience with these questions. Both of us were in one of the two predecessor organizations to DSA, the New American Movement (NAM).  Bill served in the national office of NAM as one of the three elected leaders of the organization.  NAM was, of course, much smaller than DSA is today. There were only three (very under-) paid staff and these were all elected at NAM’s national conventions.  These elected leaders were expected, and did, both run the organization and also articulate political positions and perspectives between and at the national conventions.  While we think this worked reasonably well for NAM, it is not a model that we think should be adapted by DSA. A second relevant background experience is that Peg served on DSA’s NPC for six years and acquired a close-up knowledge of how the national office functioned.  The organization was much smaller then, although beginning to grow during her third term on the NPC.
 
DSA Staff and Expression of Political Positions
 
In thinking about the issue of staff and the expression of political positions, we have conceptually divided the DSA staff between political and technical functions.  We recognize that there are times when this distinction may be a little fuzzy around the edges but we believe this distinction is useful in terms of thinking about the question of staff roles and political expression.
 
We believe that the staff we are labeling “political” include the National Director, the Assistant to the National Director, the Field Organizers and the Organizing Director, who oversees the work of the Field Organizers.  As reported on the website today, these total eight individuals. 

1. Political Staff

 
What should be the guidelines for the work of these people in terms of political expression?
 
First, we think that none of these individuals should be a member of any caucus within the organization.  All of them are, to a greater of lesser extent, representing DSA as a whole.  They are the full-time national leaders of the organization (NPC members are neither paid nor full-time).  They should represent the whole organization in their internal organizational work and in their public appearances, etc.  In an organization such as DSA, where the decision has been to allow caucuses but also seeking to be a pluralistic organization, the national leadership should not be seen as or act as the representatives of one or another faction of the organization.
 
Second, these individuals should be required to have or acquire the ability to describe the different positions and significant internal lines of difference in DSA in a manner that is clear, concise and fair to all positions. We think this requires developing an agreed-upon description of caucuses and what these major differences are.
 
Third, we think that it is impossible for people in these political positions to be neutral or without passions and beliefs that impact how they prioritize work and how they interact with other members of DSA and the public.  To expect this is to seek the mythical value neutrality that some academic disciplines claim but which experience has taught us is not possible for living and breathing human beings.  Thus, these political staff should be free to express their own positions on the major issues being discussed within the organization as well as the larger political environment in which they live and work. This includes the possibility of presenting these positions in DSA but not to external media, where their advocacy may easily be construed as presenting DSA’s position.  Most importantly, these individuals should not advocate specific positions in their organizational work with chapters or potential chapters.
 
Finally, as is true for all DSA members, political staff must always make clear when a position they are advocating differs from the position adopted by the organization as whole.

1. Technical Staff

 
There are members of what we are labeling technical staff in DSA. On the website, as of today these include: Operations Director, Financial Manager, Internal Communications and Digital Organizing Coordinator, Development Director, Conventions and Conferences Coordinator, Finance Coordinator, Database Coordinator, Data and Technology Manager, Full Stack Developer, Program Associate, Compliance Manager, Membership Services Coordinator, Office Coordinator, and National Grievance and Harassment Officer.
 
From our experience, some technical staff are relatively uninterested in the differing politics within the organization while others are more closely attuned to these differences and may identify with one or another caucus.
 
We think technical staff should be free to state their political position, in person or via media. 
 
We do not think these staff members should be prohibited from caucus membership so long as, like the political staff, they do not advocate for or advance the agenda of a caucus in the course of their DSA work.
 
Because technical staff are not part of the political function of DSA, we do not think that they must also be able to articulate the difference positions in the same manner as political staff.  It would, of course, be good if these staff members are aware of the differences.
 
Organizational Issues
 
Partly as a result of thinking about the issue of staff and the expression of political positions, we want to raise some organizational questions about how DSA functions.
 
For many years of its existence, DSA struggled to find any member willing and able to take on the role of National Director (ND).  Times are different now (full disclosure, the two of us worked hard to recruit the current ND into that position).  We believe it is time to consider some questions of tenure and selection.

1. National Director

 
First, we believe there should be an initial term of office for a ND.  Our suggestion is five years, with the first year a probationary period in case the person and the position are a bad fit. We also believe -- and this is one of the reasons we suggest five years for the initial terms of office -- the term of office for the ND should not, in general, align with the national conventions.
 
We also suggest that the ND can be offered a second term of office, perhaps shorter, during which a search would be conducted for a new ND.
 
Annually a personnel committee should review the work of the |ND with an eye to improving performance and identifying potential problem areas.
 
We think it may also be advisable to have ND and Assistant ND terms of office that do not coincide. Obviously the ND reviews the work of the Assistant to the Director.

1. Field Organizers and Field Organizer Supervisor

 
Currently Field Organizers are chosen at the level of the national office.  There has been some interest in having the regions select their Field Organizers.  We are not sure which is the best process. But we do think that the accountability of these positions would be enhanced by the following:

• In addition to reporting to the Field Organizing Director, Field Organizers should report to regional committees composed of representatives from all chapters in their region.
• Written reports from Field Organizers should also be shared with the regional committee with the exception of any material that must remain confidential because of its potential to harm one or more members.

 

1. Editorial Boards

 
We don’t know the process by which editorial boards – DL and Socialist Forum – are selected.  Thus we don’t have specific recommendations to make with regard to these bodies.  We do believe that, like our proposed strictures on Field Organizers, members of the editorial boards should not use their position to advocate or organize for a specific caucus. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

DSA Member and co-editor of this blog Max B. Sawicky on the beleaguered U.S. Postal Service.

North Star caucus member Paul J. Baicich has a new article in Jacobin on reviving one of the most important and successful parts of the New Deal.

We, the undersigned democratic socialists, want to make clear that the priority for the left in 2020 should be the electoral defeat of Donald Trump and the Trumpist Republican Party in November. At present, the only way to accomplish that will be to vote for his Democratic opponent.

The racist, xenophobic, misogynist authoritarianism of Trumpism poses an immediate existential danger to people of color, to immigrants, to reproductive rights, to trade unions, to LGBTQIA people, to Muslims, to Jews, to members of other religions, and to democracy itself. A Trump victory would fortify our authoritarian State, expand imperial aggression, and collapse the political space for democratic and left forces at home. Reversing the creeping neo-fascism at play in our country is a strategic imperative, the most urgent political task before us.

Trump’s regime is literally imposing massive casualties on people of color, immigrants, and women, by means of its work-or-starve campaign to restart the economy in the face of a raging pandemic, through indulgence of random, murderous assaults epitomized by the cases of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, by the shutdown of abortion clinics, and by virtual death sentences imposed on incarcerated persons, including those detained by the vicious Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The mob attacks on Democratic state governments encouraged by the president call to mind the reversal of Reconstruction by terrorist partisans of the old Confederacy, after the Civil War.

Thousands are dying of the coronavirus each week, disproportionately POC, particularly elderly nursing home residents, the incarcerated, and detained immigrants. How many more must be sacrificed?

As democratic socialists, we believe that the best way to defeat Trumpism as well as Trump himself is with a platform that  breaks decisively with neo-liberal policies, especially austerity, privatization, deregulation, and anti-worker trade deals. But in the near term, as a practical matter, alliances are also necessary with other anti-Trump forces, for the sake of a Democratic victory in November.

We should continue to promote the interests of working people above the 1%, to take on institutional racism and sexism in law enforcement, employment, and social services, to address catastrophic climate change, and to promote public health. But our core mission need not preclude us from urging a vote against Trump. Nor should it discourage us from enthusiastically backing progressive elected officials and candidates for office, such as “the squad” in the House of Representatives.

Particularly important is vigorous support for avowed democratic socialists, such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tliab. They must be defended from efforts to pillory and defeat them, not least so that the ranks of progressives in office can grow.

Our electoral work will have the greatest impact when done cooperatively among all progressive constituencies, including trade unions, civil rights organizations, and community groups, as well as progressive political organizations. This collaborative approach powered the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and helped to elect Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, among others.

​Trump’s commitment to the destruction of basic democratic institutions – the right to vote, an independent judiciary, a free press, Congress as a co-equal branch of government, the sovereign character of state governments – would make further pursuit of a progressive agenda impossible. Nothing is more important than ensuring his removal from the White House in 2021.

Max Berger
Dan Cantor
Leo Casey
Carl Davidson
John D’Emilio
Barbara Ehrenreich
Susan Feiner
Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Frances Fox Piven
Kathleen Geier
Jose Gutierrez
Richard Healey
Barbara E. Hopkins
Gerry Hudson
Barbara Joye
Michael Kazin
Randall Kennedy
Jeanne Kracher
Charles Lencher
Jose La Luz
Daraka Larimore-Hall
Stephen Lerner
Penny Lewis
Nelson Lichtenstein
Eric Mar
Bob Master
Deborah Meier
Gus Newport
Ed Ott
Katha Pollitt
Chris Riddiough
Michele Rossi
Max Sawicky
Jay Schaffner
Marilyn Sneiderman
Cornel West
Ethan Young


PLEASE ADD YOUR NAME 

https://www.dsanorthstar.org/defeattrump.html
 
Read the statement at The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/defeat-trump-open-letter/
 

​
 

​What happened in Georgia, Bernie?

By Alexander Hernandez
 
The primary vehicle on the ground  in Georgia was not the Bernie for President campaign proper, but the Metro Atlanta DSA for Bernie IE. Over the course of the campaign this effort hosted debate watch parties, pub crawls for Bernie, canvasses knocking over 10,000 doors, and reaching more voters via phone/text bank, but as we know politics begins with the millions - or at the very least the hundreds of thousands; and this effort alone was clearly not enough. 
 
In a state fending off the worst kind of racist voter suppression, the amount of organizational work required to build a viable statewide operation needs time; and the Sanders campaign either ignored this reality or was unaware, either way, this failure was of the campaign’s own doing. Stacy Abrams’ efforts in both voter registration through The New Georgia Project and more recently taking on voter suppression explicitly with Fair Fight, show us what building a viable grassroots operation to contest power in Georgia looks like - it requires investing time and money, both of which the Bernie campaign never committed to the state.
 
During Bernie’s first campaign stop in Atlanta in May 2019, in a room of 100 organizers and activists, the Senator was doing his best to speak to voter disenfranchisement and local efforts, but was laughed at when he talked down racism in the South towards the end of his comments. This missed the reality of systematic racist disenfranchsment and Bernie’s own inability to connect to the issue, leaving some folks less excited than when they had arrived. 
 
The narrative, “Bernie’s out of touch on race,” reinforced by years of media repetition, bad faith attacks, and self inflicted wounds, itself may have been insurmountable. A giant tell of how difficult this narrative was going to be to counter occurred during an initial canvass in September 2019. On a turf training 2 Black women, we arrived at a 2016 Bernie supporting household turned Warren 2020. The white couple could not get past “how he treated Hillary” and “not drawing in POC.” We did not have an effective counter to the false baked in narrative, even as 2 Black women and a Latino stood at their door, our very presence their debunking the claims. 
 
Another significant miss of the campaign’s own doing came during the primary debate hosted in Atlanta. One of the preeminent Atlanta events was hosted by Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight organization.  In the days before and after the debate, candidates dropped by Fair Fight events that included phone banking and voter outreach. Notably absent from making an appearance was Bernie. The man himself has said he is “not very good at bull shit,” but passing up an opportunity to drop in and phone bank was a self inflicted wound that did not help the narrative. 
 
The pandemic caused all in person outreach efforts to cease, the primary was delayed 11 weeks, and Bernie suspending his campaign was the final nail in the coffin - it’s hard to motivate anyone to make calls for a suspended campaign. Leading up to the June 9th primary, in an effort to garner more delegates, the only visible GOTV effort came from Nina Turner’s Once Again PAC, hosting a web panel days before the election. Without a commitment of investing time and money, it will be difficult for any insurgent candidate to overcome the obstacles to winning in Georgia and the South. 
 

We are in a very dangerous moment in American history.

Last month, as you'll recall, Trump had peaceful protestors outside of the White House in Washington, D.C. viciously attacked by federal agents who wore no identification.

As we speak, in Portland, Oregon, federal agents in combat gear and unmarked vehicles are pulling protesters off the streets and jailing them without charges, despite opposition from local and state officials.

What Trump and his allies are now doing is "normalizing" the use of federal troops to patrol and make arrests of American citizens in communities throughout the country. Today it is Portland, Oregon. Tomorrow, Trump is suggesting it could be New York City, Chicago or Philadelphia. Next, your hometown.

This is what a police state is all about.

Make no mistake about it: Donald Trump does not believe in democracy, our Constitution or the rule of law.

He is working aggressively to suppress the vote and, in the midst of this terrible pandemic, is vigorously opposing the right of citizens to vote by mail. He has ignored decisions of Congress, which is why he was impeached. He has contempt for a free press and has called the media "an enemy of the people." He has used his office for blatant personal and political gain, running the most corrupt administration in modern American history. He has ruptured our relationships with long-time democratic allies around the world while he embraces right-wing authoritarian leaders in Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, the Philippines and elsewhere.

Yes. We must all come together to defeat Trump in November, but we must also act right NOW to stop the movement toward authoritarianism and a police state.

That is why I am introducing legislation with Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon which would greatly curtail the activities of federal military forces in our communities. This bill would limit their ability to conduct crowd control to properties immediately surrounding federal buildings without the invitation of the Governor and Mayor, require federal agents to wear visible IDs, and ban them from making arrests or detentions in unmarked vehicles.

Now we need you to make your voice heard — to send a message to Congress that you are paying attention to this issue and will do everything possible to defend our Constitution, the separation of powers and the right of Americans to peacefully demonstrate.

Please add your name as a citizen co-sponsor of legislation that would force federal agents to wear visible IDs, ban them from making arrests and detentions from unmarked vehicles, and limit their ability to conduct crowd control without invitation from the Governor or Mayor.

Too many Americans fought and died to defend American democracy to let President Trump move us even further in an authoritarian direction.

And that is why I am asking you to join Senator Jeff Merkley and me in making your voice heard.

Trump's strategy of hateful rhetoric and using a crisis to seize more power is nothing new. It has been used by authoritarian leaders throughout history.

Our job NOW is to stand together, fight back, and stop the movement toward authoritarianism and a police state.

In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders