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Virginians laced up at Bryan Park to celebrate community and progress towards clean energy solutions across the Commonwealth.   RICHMOND, VA – The Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) hosted its second annual 5K for the Planet on Sunday, April 12, 2026, a community fun run and walk that brings Virginians together in support of bold […]

The post Over 100 Richmonders Step Up for Climate Action: CCAN’s 5K for the Planet Returns for Second Year appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

Last week, Brazil’s capital Brasília was transformed into a center of Indigenous resistance. With more than 7,000 Indigenous people occupying the capital, the 2026 Free Land Camp (ATL) pressured Brazil’s government to uphold native land rights

More than 7,000 Indigenous people marched through the streets of Brasília yesterday under the banner “Demarcate, Lula! A sovereign Brazil is one with demarcated and protected Indigenous lands.”

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Thousands of Indigenous people marched in Brazil’s capital yesterday, during the second day of the 2026 Free Land Camp (ATL), the country’s largest Indigenous mobilization, to denounce land rights violations driven by large-scale mining, agribusiness, and logging projects.

Indigenous peoples have demanded for decades that governments come together and commit to getting off fossil fuels. The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, taking place later this month in Santa Marta, Colombia, is a manifestation of that demand.

After two years as a movement partner, A Radical Guide is now the fiscal sponsor of General Strike U.S. Support GSUS chapters through tax-deductible donations.

The post Two Years of Building Together. Now We’re Going Further appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

The Administration designated a dozen Latin American criminal cartels as terrorist organizations and launched Operation Southern Spear in September.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has issued a clear mandate, ordering the Peruvian State to protect the Kakataibo people living in voluntary isolation in the Kakataibo Indigenous Reserve.

On International Women's Day, Indigenous women from across the Ecuadorian Amazon traveled by foot, car, and canoe to Puyo with a single, unified demand: No more oil in the Amazon.

Federal court is the second in as many days to affirm local government’s authority to cut pollution, lower energy costs, and advance healthier building codes WASHINGTON, D.C. — Just 24 hours after the U.S. District Court of Maryland upheld Montgomery County’s all-electric building code, the U.S. District Court for DC today upheld the Clean Energy […]

The post U.S. District Court Upholds D.C.’s Clean Energy Building Code appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

January 23 in the Twin Cities showed what could be done.

You’ve probably received enough communications regarding this Saturday’s “No Kings” demonstrations, which will be held all across the country. At last count more than three thousand demonstrations are being organized, and there will no doubt be at least one near you.

In case you have been procrastinating, here is a link to find the demonstrations closest to you.

The first of these demos last June had a million or two people attend. The next one, in October, had at least five million. We’re aiming to double that this time, which would put us in striking distance of the 3.5% of the US population that research says is necessary to topple authoritarian regimes in the making. 

Against the backdrop of brutal anti-immigrant violence and preparation for election suppression at home, and clueless trade policy matched with deadly wars abroad, a growing number of Americans are coming out to the streets. These include people who have never been politically involved outside of voting every few years, and progressives who sat out the 2024 presidential elections because they didn’t think there was any difference between the two parties and the two candidates. Within DSA and the rest of the left this often took the form of denouncing the “twin parties of capital”. Which they are. But that picture, drawn without nuance, underestimated what fascism is and does.

Now we know. 

A reasonable question at this point is, ‘What sort of message should socialists be sending to the other demonstrators, and the world, a year into America’s fascist descent?’ You have the opportunity to weigh in on that as you make your protest sign. “No Kings” is a start, not a program. “Workers Over Billionaires” moves us closer to the ideas we need.

This mass demonstration of opposition is absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to stop MAGA from dragging us along on its road to hell. For that we need to be broadening the struggle with other tactics and strategies (mutual aid, mass strikes, non-violent direct action, and electoral politics) that build a powerful anti-fascist movement and lay the basis for moving past the failed politics of the past. What happened in Minneapolis/St. Paul on January 23—‘No Work, No School, No Shopping’—is the best example so far. DSA has joined with labor and community partners in the May Day Strong coalition, which understands “No Kings” as a step toward a sharper critique of capitalism on May 1. On that day we will see how prepared we are to advance beyond a nationwide demonstration to a national movement.

We’ll see you out in the streets this weekend. And then we’ll continue to train and educate and prepare ourselves for the struggle ahead.

Make it stand out

Find materials like this in the May Day Strong toolkit.

In the February issue of California Red we ran a background article on the California DSA campaign we call “The Fair and Responsible Tax Plan for California’s Wealthy”, which embraces both measures currently gathering signatures to qualify for the November state ballot. That was the first in a series we are running between now and the election. Here is the next installment.—Editor

The unfathomably vast yet still growing level of California’s economic inequality

Our East Bay DSA crew of five had planted ourselves in the parking lot of a supermarket in North Berkeley on a warm mid-March afternoon. We were collecting signatures for the Billionaires Tax and the Protecting Education and Health Care Act. During our three-hour shift we did not do badly, gathering several dozen for each measure. Even better were the conversations, which ranged from informing voters about the nuts and bolts of the proposals to broader questions about economic inequality: how much money do billionaires have, anyway? What share of the total income of California, the fifth largest economy in the world, goes to the one percent? What would be the right amount of taxes for them to pay? And how do we get them to pay their fair share? 

We explore a few of these ideas and numbers below.

A cool million

It used to be hard for the typical working class stiff to imagine what a million dollars looks like. A million dollars? That’s what millionaires have, and I’m not even close to being one of those, we would say. But that was before a million dollars or thereabouts became the average price of a house in Los Angeles. It’s slightly below that statewide, and slightly above that in San Francisco. But you get the idea. Generally speaking, if you can afford a home, you know what a million dollars looks like—it looks like your house. (If you’re a renter, it looks like that house.)

A billion dollars was even more unfathomable. We didn’t have many in the United States until relatively recently; as late as 1990 there were just 66 of them. Now there are close to a thousand, and we’ve got 213 right here in the Golden State. Since we know that a million dollars looks like a house these days, we can imagine that since a billion is a thousand millions, it would look like a thousand houses. 

No one needs a thousand houses to live in, so most billionaires scrape by with just ten or twelve. Of course, being billionaires, they need somewhat larger houses than most people, so they might spend five or ten million dollars or even more—fifty million! A hundred million!—on their humble abodes. If they owned ten of those, that could put a pretty big dent in their billion dollar fortune. But guess what? The average wealth of a billionaire is not a billion dollars. It’s currently around 8.6 billion dollars, according to inequality.org. So that would be 8,600 houses. 

Minus the dozen they “live” in, that would leave them with enough money to purchase 8,588 more houses. I don’t know about you, but as the numbers climb my ability to translate the million dollar house into a clear image of the wealth of billionaires is beginning to get somewhat unequal to the task. And that’s before we try to imagine what the total wealth of 213 billionaires looks like. 

Trillions

It is reliably estimated that thanks to the ginormous growth of their fortunes during the past ten years (Trump I’s tax cuts, pandemic economy when there was nothing to invest in except stock buybacks, Trump II’s continuing tax cuts, massive AI bubble, and outright looting of public resources) our couple hundred California billionaires collectively own (hold onto your “tax the rich” baseball cap) two trillion dollars’ worth of assets. In California they’re doing a little better than the average 8.6 billionaire; they’ve each got around 9.4 billion. 

Although I just said I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the houses when they added up to the average 8,600 houses each (adjusted now to 9,400), let’s try it out with trillions. That’s a thousand billions. So collectively our 213 ultra-rich people with their two trillion dollars would have, let’s see, carry the one, a bit over 1.8 million houses, at a million dollars each. 

You might think that that’s enough for anyone, and these individuals must be looking around for philanthropies to unload to. But no, according to a recent New York Times article, billionaire giving has fallen precipitously in the last few years as their ‘uneasy accommodation with fascism’ (fascism scholar Robert Paxton’s formulation describing the initial response of economic elites to the uncouth new political rulers) has grown considerably less uneasy—more like downright comfortable. The 213 billionaires in California have seen their total wealth grow by nearly a third in this period as the rest of us have been essentially running in place—and that’s not enough for some of them. 

If you listen to one of their loudest mouthpieces, tech mogul Ron Conway, the proposed billionaire tax is not only bad for his 212 other peeps; it’s way worse than that. He was recently quoted in a New York Times article with a sentiment that inadvertently revealed how that kind of bank account can warp one’s perspective: According to Mr. Conway, referring to the billionaire tax, “This is the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt.” Hmmm. I wonder whether the families of dozens of people who lost their lives and thousands who lost homes in the Eaton and Palisades fires in 2025 agree? Or if Japanese-Californians, 93,000 of whom were incarcerated during World War II, share that view? Or if Native Californians, whose population fell from a third a million people in 1800 to about 15,000 by 1910 during the genocide that did them in, would agree with Conway’s historical research? 

On the other hand

At the other end of the economic spectrum, California’s borders contain about 7 million people below the official poverty line, or 18% of its roughly 40 million people. But the official federal poverty line ($33,000/year for a family of four) is laughably (that’s probably the wrong word) below an actual ability to live. One measure of how many people are barely getting by in California is the number of MediCal recipients, dependent on the federal Medicaid funding stream for most of their care costs. Although California is a net donor to the federal treasury, it does rely on $20 billion per year from the feds to support MediCal. Some 15 million Californians are enrolled in MediCal.

Let’s move on from the tiny extremely rich and the very large poor slices of the state and look at the condition of the merely rich, the top 1% income earners, which includes the billionaires but extends downward to the merely well-to-do. Although calculations vary, the bottom rung of the ladder for a one percenter is just about a million dollars a year in income; the median merely rich, right in the middle of the one percent, is $3.6 million a year. Here’s chart to help us visualize how their share of total California income has grown over the past half century. 

That’s right, believe your eyes. The top 1%’s share of income in the Golden State has grown over the past half century from about one twelfth of total income to almost one third. Richest state in the richest country in the world? Yes, but a vast chunk of the riches seems to have ended up in the pockets of people who didn’t need the transfer. 

On the third hand, if all of the state’s total income had been divided up equally, every person in California in 2024 would have received around $80,000—which means that for a family of four, combining their incomes, the household would have had $320,000—just a little under ten times the official poverty line.  

“But that would be socialism!” cry the billionaires, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and probably quite a few temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Well, sort of. We’ll get into that some other time. One thing is clear: it would certainly be different from what we’ve got.

When HR-1, Trump’s Big Bad Budget Bill, first passed last summer, the California Medical Association warned of “catastrophic” consequences. They were right.

Residents of Glenn County now travel 40 minutes to the nearest emergency room, thanks to a 40% funding cut that forced the county’s only hospital to shut down. St. Johns Community Health in Los Angeles struggles to stay open, after seeing one-third of its operating revenue disappear. $50 million in cuts have forced the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to close more than half its community clinics; besides vaccinations, the clinics provided screening and treatment of tuberculosis and HIV. In Alameda County, Wilma Chan Hospital narrowly averted a layoff of 400 workers while the County searches  for new funding sources to keep them on the job.

MediCal, California’s version of the federal Medicaid program, currently covers one in five working Californians and half the state’s children. A 25% cut in state and federal spending is expected to strip close to 3 million people of their coverage by 2028. People on Medicaid will lose access to reproductive health services.  

Nor has Medicare been spared. Refugees and asylum-seeking immigrants who were on  Medicare no longer qualify. Other non-citizens were already barred from the program. 

HR-1’s proponents claimed the only people harmed by Medicaid cuts will be those who should not have been getting benefits in the first place—what were once referred to as the “undeserving poor. ” The new law requires that any adult under 65 who is not caring for young children must provide proof of working at least 80 hours a month to qualify for Medicaid, so long as their employers met the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.  

“Too onerous”

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, most people on Medicaid already work, but may find it “too onerous to demonstrate compliance” with the work requirement. The UC Berkeley Labor Center estimates that this could account for more than half the Californians expected to lose their MediCal coverage.  Their hours may fluctuate; they may be laid off temporarily or change jobs; they may be self-employed, or work for an employer who is unable or unwilling to provide the necessary documentation. The same illness that required access to Medicaid could also disqualify you from getting it, if it keeps you off work for any length of time. 

Work requirements don’t come cheap; one of the ironies of HR-1 is that the cost of implementing them could offset any savings from  throwing people off the rolls. Georgia is a case in point. Medicaid is jointly funded by state and federal governments, and one of the best features of the Affordable Care Act to make federal Medicaid dollars available for states  that cover people who make  up to 138% of the federal poverty level. Georgia took the money, but added a work requirement. As a result,  Pro Publica reports that “most of the tax dollars used to launch and implement the program have gone toward paying administrative costs rather than covering health care.”  Worse, many Georgians who complied with the work requirement still found their coverage terminated. 

The targets of HR-1

HR-1 targets those who benefited from expanded access to Medicaid—including 5 million Californians—in other ways. They are now required to reestablish their eligibility every six months. Every doctor’s visit requires  a $35 co-payment. In California, providers who will take them on as patients will likely become harder to find, since the state will no longer augment notoriously stingy Medicaid payments. And no one on Medicaid can count on being reimbursed if they get medical treatment more than a  month before their eligibility is confirmed.

More than any other group, Californias’s immigrants will feel the impact of the cuts;  here, the state must assume its share of the responsibility. California was the first state in the nation to grant MediCal eligibility without regard to immigration status. This did not come easy or happen overnight; it was the product of a protracted, step-by-step struggle to extend state funds to cover those denied access by the feds—first immigrant children, then Dreamers, finally all state residents, whether “legal” or not. 

This victory for immigrant rights is now in peril.  California has responded to lost federal health care dollars by barring any new enrollment in MediCal for undocumented adults. Those already enrolled must pay a $30 monthly premium. Even one missed payment gets you dropped from the program, with no opportunity to reenroll. In fact, leaving the program for any reason, even temporary, means you can’t get back in. Those who remain enrolled must now pay out of pocket for dental care.

A weapon in the war on immigrants

How is it that that a state that boasts the world’s fourth largest economy could allow access to health care to be used as a weapon in Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, all in the name of “austerity budgeting”? Much of the blame lies with the health care system itself. A plethora of profit-driven private insurance plans, coupled with various public programs that try to patch up the system’s holes, make rampant administrative waste and glaring inequities inevitable, while driving health care costs through the roof. 

The state legislature is already on record in favor of a “unified financing” system that provides comprehensive benefits and equal access for all Californians, at a projected savings of $158 billion a year. AB 1900, the latest attempt to adopt a single payer health plan in California, fleshes out what the system should look like.  But it is strictly a policy bill; effective financing for a truly comprehensive, universal health care system in the state would require federal waivers that aren’t likely to happen as long as Trump is in the White House. 

That doesn’t mean the money isn’t already there. It’s just that so much it is in the hands of people who are exempt from equitable taxation. That’s the rationale for the Billionaire’s Tax, a one-time 5 percent state tax on assets over $1 billion. It would affect only about 200 people, but would bring in enough money to offset all the federal revenue cuts from  HR-1. 

A second measure, to extend Proposition 55, the Education and Health Care Act of 2026, would make permanent an existing state tax on incomes in the top 2 percent’s brackets, due to expire in 2030. It wouldn’t bring in any new revenue, but it should prevent further cuts to cash-strapped public schools and colleges, and sets aside money as well for children’s health.

Both measures are currently collecting signatures for the November ballot and are endorsed by California DSA. On March 15, East Bay DSA created a Tax the Rich Working Group to get them on the ballot and work for their passage.

Neither measure represents a long-term solution to the health care crisis. They’re more like applying a tourniquet to a cut artery—a stopgap measure, to buy time until you can get the patient to a doctor. But without it, the patient could die. We can’t let that happen.