Aggregator

by Swapnasri Sarangi

by Becca Renk Foster and John Perry

by Johnnie Jae

by Pamela Ferdinand

by Dr Gideon Polya

by Neelakshi Joshi

by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

by Margaret Kimberley

California is the fourth largest economy in the world, with a growing number of billionaires, and an expanding crisis of poverty due to concentration of wealth and divestment from public goods like education and healthcare. This has been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s HR1 (“the big beautiful bill”), which cut $1 trillion from Medicaid nationally, resulting in a $100 billion cut to Medi-Cal, and a $20 billion cut to Calfresh, public programs that support our most vulnerable neighbors.

After the California Federation of Labor Unions, led by Lorena Gonzalez, voted at its August 4 convention to endorse two ballot measures to tax the rich – Propositions 3 and 40 – California DSA took the opportunity to reach out with a proposal: a California “Tax the Rich Day” on October 10. Gonzalez liked the idea, and the Labor Fed entered into a partnership with California DSA and SEIU-UHW (the proponent of Prop 40). 

In 2012, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and a progressive tax coalition organized across the state in an effort that culminated in the passage of a measure that put a tax on the top 2% of income earners in California in order to fund public education and healthcare. This year, voters will decide on whether to make that tax permanent via Prop 3. It currently generates between $5 to $15 billion annually. If it does not pass, the tax will sunset in 2030, and 1 in 6 public school teachers will be facing layoffs.

In response to HR1’s cuts to Medi-Cal, Service Employees International Union - United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), a labor union of over 120,000 healthcare workers across California, advanced a ballot measure, Prop 40, to create a one time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, payable either all at once, or via 1% increments over 5 years. This is anticipated to raise about $100 billion and to provide adequate funding to cover the gap in Medi-Cal’s budget wrought by HR1. This tax applies to any billionaires who were residents of the state at the start of 2026, or who will pay state income taxes for the year (at the start of 2026, around 216 billionaires lived in the state; presently, there are around 240).

California DSA endorsed both measures earlier this year, and has been coordinating canvasses, phonebanks, and communications in the run up to election day as we work to build a stronger left-labor pole capable of taking on the billionaires. 

Coming just a week after Bernie Sanders held rallies in San Francisco and Los Angeles to promote Prop 40, the day of action featured multiple local rallies and canvasses in which DSA members joined their local labor councils and union members to spread the class-struggle message that it was high time for the working class to take on the ultra-rich. In the lead up to Tax the Rich Day, Gonzalez blasted out an email, titled “It's time to Tax The Rich!,” in which she promoted events on California DSA’s landing page, and wrote: 

“I think we can all agree: billionaires have too much damn money. … No matter where you are in California, there is a protest or a canvass event near you this Saturday, October 10, where you can join our fight to tax the rich and pass Prop 3 and Prop 40, and to defeat Prop 41 and Prop 42!”

Actions took place that day across 8 cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, the Inland Empire, and the East Bay. The Labor Federation promoted and celebrated them on social media

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxkcazz6422v

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxkco3ub422v

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxkd5m24vk2v

https://bsky.app/profile/californialabor.bsky.social/post/3mxmvzfrkbs2v

In Hayward, an East Bay city south of Oakland, East Bay DSA joined forces with the Alameda Labor Council for a tax the rich rally and canvass. The Labor Fed posted that “the East Bay did not come to play!” East Bay DSA, since August, has been partnering with the Labor Council to provide volunteers for phone banks and canvasses of the labor council’s 130,000 union members in Alameda County, focused on passing Props 3 and 40 and re-electing DSA-endorsed school board candidates in Oakland.

East Bay DSA’s posters, signs and banners, designed by David Solnit and fashioned at an EBDSA art build, have been featured at canvasses, like this one on September 19.

Inland Empire DSA heard the call from CA DSA for a Tax the Rich Day on October 10th, and put together a rally in collaboration with SEIU-UHW and PSL at City Hall in downtown Riverside. Over fifty volunteers from Inland Empire DSA, SEIU-UHW, PFP, PSL and Teamsters 1932 as well as Riverside City Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes showed up in support of taxing the state’s billionaires. Volunteer organizers led a march around City Hall and the surrounding area and held a tabling event in front of City Hall to speak to passers-by about how vital passing Proposition 40 (and defeating Propositions 41 and 42!) is to save our healthcare system and provide necessary funding to education and food assistance in the state. Immediately afterward, volunteers headed down to the SEIU-UHW headquarters in downtown Riverside to phone bank for Proposition 40, and IE DSA will be hosting joint phonebanks with SEIU-UHW weekly from now until the election. 

Angelenos turned out to canvasses in South Central and the Eastside to talk about LA City Council District 9 candidate Estuardo Mazariegos and Congressional District 34 candidate Angela Gonzales Torres alongside the need to pass Prop 40 to redistribute power from billionaires to working people. Later that day, a comedy and karaoke fundraiser capped the night off in support of efforts to tax the rich.

California DSA’s statewide working group will be meeting Tuesday, October 20th, at 6pm in order to continue planning and coordinating efforts in support of Props 3 and 40. You can RSVP here: https://www.californiadsa.org/calendar/tax-the-rich-wg-2026oct20 

The California Federation of Labor Unions Prop 40 will be hosting a phonebank in support of Prop 40 on October 21st and 5:30pm: https://www.mobilize.us/caaflcio/event/1056391/

“You can sleep when you’re dead.”

—Benjamin Franklin

There are just two weeks to go before one of the most consequential elections in the history of California. Driving the existential nature of this election is the onset and growth of the fascist cancer within American capitalism, pushed into metastatic overdrive by the election of Donald Trump to his second term in 2024. 

In the two years since, he has checked every box in any rational person’s understanding of what the word “fascism” means. As a result we are facing End Times Fascism— the term (and the title of their new book) coined by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor—meaning that this time around, fascists are sucking us down the chutes of climate destruction, democratic devolution, and rapidly eroding institutional means to reverse the tide. 

While all of DSA’s endorsed election campaigns throughout the state are important and contribute in various ways to the anti-fascist cause, I will go out on a limb to suggest that the campaign that can best serve the anti-fascist struggle is the dual effort to tax the rich via Props 3 and 40.  Why? 

Here we find an unprecedented opportunity—not one, but two tax the rich ballot measures up for a vote in one election. Each is essential to the wellbeing of the working class—one for education, the other for health care. Loss of either would be a disaster and a boon to billionaires.

Conversely, passage of both would send an urgently needed message:  that the wealth of the rich is not invincible, because an organized working class can be the greater force. 

Money shores up the power and power shores up the money 

You recall those two photos of Elon Musk early in 2025: wielding with sick glee a chain saw to demonstrate what his DOGE project was doing to the helping services of the federal government, and his Nazi salute at a MAGA rally? These were accurate signals of an emboldened and newly unified far right sector of capital, melding the formerly antagonistic interests of fossil fuel and big tech, brought together by Trump to supercharge the development of AI and its evil twin, data centers, under the control of corporations. 

The combined resources of these two capital sectors united in support of the fascist program is the reason why political spending hit record levels in the 2024 elections, and why it is on track to break the record again this year.

As Klein and Taylor make clear, mix hitherto undreamed of quantities of capital with Christian nationalism, perpetual war in the Middle East fanning the flames of religious fantasy along with the climate crisis, reckless investment in AI, the Trump administration’s removal of all federal regulatory controls, and you have the perfect cocktail for apocalypse. The richest people in the world think they can escape the dystopia they are consciously unleashing—to island bunkers, to the Rapture, to outer space—as they run the rest of us over the cliff and the earth to the end of its tether.

Here in California the billionaires’ push to defeat Prop 40 will set new spending records for ballot initiatives. That’s pocket change from their bloated portfolios. The campaign to pass Props 3 and 40 directly challenges the fascist program, valuing human need over uncontrolled profitmaking, saying yes to life and to the earth, and reducing the purses of the superrich and thus their power. If we win, we demonstrate that the power of people can outweigh the power of money.  

Time to Overdo it

I’m asking everyone who reads these words to add just a bit of work—something, anything— to election work you are already doing in the next two weeks to help get Props 3 and 40 passed. 

I’m not arguing that anyone should stop their campaigning for a local city council candidate or US congressional seat and replace that work with the Prop 3 and 40 tax the rich campaign between now and November 3. I’m saying something else, and I admit it runs against the grain of the advice that a lifetime of activist labor and socialist politics has led me to consistently offer comrades and other activists, which is, “Don’t overdo it.” Passion for political causes can easily tip over into burnout, which is not helpful for the long run. But we are up against an enemy that is literally attempting to destroy the long run. And so I make an exception this time so that it’s not the last time. 

In other words, for the next two weeks, let’s overdo it. 

Our final California DSA Tax the Rich Working Group meeting of the campaign is this Tuesday night at 6 pm; join us to hear what we’re planning. You could also join the Prop 40 phone bank on 10/21 at 5:30. Here is tonight’s Prop 3 phone bank link. 

It can also be simpler. You can grab a posterboard from an art supply store and make your own sign for Yes on 3, Yes on 40, Tax the Rich and stand on a street corner with a friend or two. You can put a sign up in your window. You can call your friends and tell them to vote yes on 3 and 40 and no on 41, 42, and 43. You can download flyers and pass them out in your workplace. 

With your help taxing the rich is possible. Once we’ve done that we can rest (contra Franklin, we don’t have to wait til we’re dead) recover from burnout, and breathe the air of a world slightly less imperiled by fascism.

In the early 1970s, when many student activists were migrating from campus to industrial jobs to promote working class radicalization, no labor film was more influential than Salt of the Earth.

This pioneering docudrama was made two decades earlier by a producer, writer, director, and several actors who were unemployable in Hollywood, due to McCarthy era-blacklisting.

This left-wing creative team recruited a cast of workers and their families from the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) to play themselves in a fictional account of a long strike at the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. 

Local 890 members knew something about red-baiting too. Shortly before their 1951 fight for better conditions and an end to wage disparities between Anglo and Chicano workers, Mine, Mill was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), along with the left-led United Electrical Workers (UE) and west coast longshore union, the ILWU. In 

In real life, and later on screen, the key to the success of this mining community struggle was the militant participation of strikers’ wives, mothers, daughters and sisters after their own mass picketing is enjoined by a local judge.

In Salt of the Earth, this picket-line replacement strategy, which challenged and changed traditional gender roles in a socially conservative company town, is heatedly debated by film’s two lead characters. 

Blacklisted and Deported

Playing the role of Ramon Quintera, Juan Chacon, an actual IUMMSW local president, initially objects to the strike activism of his fictional wife Esperanza, played by Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas (who was deported for making the film). Other members of an entirely male and largely Latino workforce are similarly conflicted about the emergence of a vocal and empowered women’s auxiliary.

When Esperanza and her fellow female pickets are arrested, she takes her small baby behind bars with her. The resulting boisterous jail house protest—which prefigures southern civil rights and peace movement tactics in the 1960s--forces the sheriff to release them all. The miners’ subsequent defense of the Quintera family--when the company tries to evict them--becomes a turning point in the long strike which ends in a contract settlement.

Berkeley journalist and now first-time novelist Barry Bergman was among the many young radicals much inspired by this now iconic depiction of Mexican-American labor struggle.  Before Bergman relocated to California and began a long career as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer/editor, and communications specialist for UC Berkeley and numerous non-profits, he worked for several years in a copper smelter near Tucson.

That experience as a rank-and-file member of the United Steel Workers (USW)--which gobbled up the IUMMSW, after years of raiding it--led to his writing Proles. (Serving House Books). Bergman’s novel is a funny, moving, and historically accurate account of workplace “colonizing”—or “salting” as it’s called today-- told from the point of view of the author’s fictional alter-ego. 

Via a college course entitled “Celluloid and Social Change,” Simon Bussbaum learns about a film called City of Emeralds. He is captivated by its depiction of “dirt-poor Chicano miners in the Southwest” and their humble but charismatic leader, Naldo Galvin.

Art Imitates Life

Simon does further research and discovers that Galvin—like the real-life Juan Chacon in the 1970s—has become a dissident in the Steel Workers. The former strike organizer—and Salt of the Earth co-star-- is now rallying his co-workers against “a class collaborationist union which muscled its way into zinc and copper mines in the Sun Belt” by marketing itself as a labor-management partner, rather than a class struggle foe.

The bookish film buff from Queens (the author’s hometown as well) leaves anti-war politics behind for a very different blue-collar life in open shop Arizona. Arriving for his first shift at Cobra Copper Company (aka “ThreeCo”) near Turcson, Simon walks into a scene lifted from the film that inspired his turn toward the working class.

“Outside the giant garage doors that opened out from the smelter’s shell, hundreds of men clustered in small groups, coveralls gone or dangling at their waist. Some were standing, others lying on bare ground or using their hardhats for seats. A handful were shirtless, glistening in the sun. It might have been a disorderly line at the Fillmore East, save for the work clothes and industrial boots.” 

A new co-worker, a “hard-looking Chicano with a missing tooth, a Fu Manchu mustache and a cobra tattoo on his right forearm” tells Simon what’s going on.  “It’s a ‘wildcat,’”  explains Snake, who seems happy to follow the crazy "white dudes” who started it all by “waving their arms, walking out, and shouting, ‘Join us!”. 

Other hard hats in the now idle crowd are pissed off about losing a few hours pay. “Anarchists,” one grumbles. “Commies and agitators. They don’t like it here, can’t blame them for that. But you can’t strike till the contract’s up. That’s the law.”

A manager addresses the crowd with a bull-horn and repeats the same message. “This is an unlawful work stoppage. Your local union has not authorized this action, and joins us in ordering you to immediately cease and desist. This is your final warning.”

A Tactical Error?

The “cadre” organization members--who have inducted Simon into their small circle at a local radical bookstore--are among “the twelve people pegged as troublemakers and fired.” After this “tactical error,” Simon attends his first Steelworkers local union meeting. There, he encounters bureaucratic lethargy and business union routine familiar to many rank-and-file activists, then and now.

Only a smattering of members show-up—at a VFW hall with an “American flag on the pole outside the building and another hung on a wall behind the podium.” Much time is spent on the financial report and a reading of minutes from the last meeting. The biggest agenda item is the e-board’s unanimous decision “not to pursue grievance arbitration cases for employees who were terminated.”

As the union treasurer explains, this will result in “a big savings for the local because we could not have prevailed in defending an action that went against the ‘no strike’ clause in our own contract.” (“Good riddance,” blurts out the local’s business manager, “a pudgy man in a short sleeved white shirt,” who gavels the meeting to a close soon thereafter.)

Bergman’s workplace descriptions are equally on target. Some resemble the best passages in The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s fictional account of job hazards in mid-western meat-packing plants a century ago or in Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Voung’s new novel about low wage work in 21st century New England.

“The smelter, known as ‘Freako,’ was a cavernous, ramshackle Big Top featuring spark-spewing furnaces, splashing cauldrons dangled from the cranes like murderous marionettes, rapids of liquid fire tumbling down in harrowing dayglow ribbons. Danger was everywhere, lurking beneath the dull roar and the rotten eggs stench. Everything black and orange, darkness and firelight, a waking nightmare Halloween that left him in terror of any possible misstep.”

Unfortunately, the hottest shop floor issue is not the threat of being scalded to death or maimed and killed in many other ways.  It’s ThreeCo’s controversial decision to hire its first female laborer, a feisty former high school athlete, who is a half-Latino and a single mother. It’s 1973, after all, and the era of equal opportunity is dawning. 

As the fictional reincarnation of Esperanza, Samantha Tanager is not just showing that she can, in a pinch, take a man’s place on the picket-line; she’s going to join them on the shop floor, in a fire-resistant orange jump suit, aluminum hard-hat, and steel-toed boots. But the sudden arrival of a “fetching copper miner’s daughter,” as a local newspaper describes her, proves to be very triggering for Bullock. 

He’s the big, tobacco-chewing redneck with “a natural talent for cruelty” that Bussbuam is assigned to work with. Already suspicious of Simon’s rather obvious East Coast Jewishness and college boy ways, Bullock views “Tanager’s admission to the sacred sanctum of the smelter as sacrilege, a grievous affront to the Code of the Working Stiff, Nonferrous Division.” 

Besides, he believes that Samantha is a lesbian. (Spoiler alert: much to Simon’s love-struck chagrin, Bullock’s gaydar is right.)

Casual Racism

Simon’s New Left idealism is now further tested amid Freako’s “dark, depraved beauty, which reeked of musty maleness that gave rise to a loose-knit, shambling ‘esprit de corps, wrapped in a kind of casual racism and sexism so expansive, so deeply rooted, it had started to feel—Simon not being of this world, and without standing perhaps to judge his co-workers’ cultural values—like just another flavor of assholism.”

When that “assholism” takes the form of a nasty campaign by Bullock to make Tanager’s life miserable on the job, Simon’s own personal class struggle ends in a parking lot brawl between two “union brothers.” It doesn’t end well for the new hire and little resembles more heroic scuffles, between labor and management, in Salt of The Earth. 

But it does lead Bussbaum to bid blue-collar life adieu and head for the greener pastures of California. (Tanager and her female partner leave for the more tolerant Texas oasis of Austin.)

Proles was definitely not written as a how-too manual for members of the Rank-and-File Project, a present-day effort to “recruit, educate, and support a new generation of activists who will join the fight for working-class power by taking union jobs on the shop floor.” 

But the book should be required reading, in such circles anyway, due to its deft exploration of the nexus between the personal and the political. Any left-wing “salt” trying to befriend un-class conscious (and sometimes weird) co-workers, while dealing with draining night shifts, imperious managers and not much nicer union bosses, will find humorous respite in Barry Bergman’s fictional rendering of his real-life experience with the “salt of the earth” in Arizona fifty years ago.

“The new lords of the global village are not just Wall Street insiders or run-of-the-mill plutocrats; they are a disparate, distinctly more anarchic group of powerful forces.”

Just in time for the midterms, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have delivered an incredibly relevant new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, that quite plainly lays out what is at stake in the coming election. We are living under a new form of authoritarianism that has already deeply weakened our democracy and threatens to push us over the cliff toward a dystopian future where only our new oligarchs will be able to survive the harsh social, economic, and environmental realities we face.  

Klein and Taylor survey the landscape of contemporary analyses of authoritarianism and name the present system “End Times Fascism,” a unique strain of political disease that has flourished due to several factors that have emerged out of the circumstances of our current Gilded Age.  What characterizes the malady that afflicts us? In sum, we are ruled by a nearly totally unaccountable elite.  As they note:

At its core, end times fascism is a crisis of rampant impunity born of concentrated power and wealth.  Far too much money, information technology, and weaponry have been allowed to concentrate into the hands of the few, and that unchecked power has deranged our elites, goading them to take risks that put our societies and countless species at risk.

And if the risks taken by contemporary elites seem to be crossing lines that other members of the traditional oligarchy were loath to trespass, that’s because they are.  The new lords of the global village are not just Wall Street insiders or run-of-the-mill plutocrats; they are a disparate, distinctly more anarchic group of powerful forces.  End times fascism is not the product of a coherent movement: “rather than a monolith, it is an alliance of very different groups, each one racing toward a different but related apocalyptic dream, sutured together in common cause . . . religious end timers, the tech end timers, and the ethno-nationalist end timers.”  

Hence the ongoing barrage of assaults on everything from education, civil rights, and freedom of speech to environmental sustainability and democratic institutions of all kinds seems like an unfocused shotgun blast because it is coming from several different angles all at once. Rushing towards climate catastrophe, unchecked oligarchy, and patriarchal, white supremacist retrenchment as the AI onslaught undermines our sense of reality and ability to think critically is only possible because the chaos creates polycrises and a blitzkrieg of disruptions makes it hard for the average person to get a clear cognitive map of power.  

And the resulting radical uncertainty unmoors people from their traditional bearings and allows the end times fascists to portray themselves as our saviors from the very threats that they have unleashed on the world.  We might not survive them, but they don’t care.  Their end game is not to save anything but themselves.  

As Klein and Taylor argue:

[F]ascist movements claim to be defending powerful institutions—the nation, the market, the military, the family—from internal and external pollutants.  In the logic of fascism, the task of defeating those threats and reimposing order, requires emergency measures, often destroying many of the very institutions fascists claim to be defending.

Enter Trump and company as they prepare to contest what is looking like a tsunami of Democratic voters this November.  The huge margins they will likely lose by in most places have made their task harder, but this has not deterred them. After discovering that their initial attempts to interfere with the midterms would not bear fruit, the MAGA right has simply found new roads to the ruin of American democracy. 

Seymour Hersch outlines their most likely next move on his Substack: 

So here comes the GOP’s Plan B, which still depends on election deniers who have been voted into office in states with contested Senate seats that could decide the fate of Trump’s last two years in office.

I was told that the targets, in terms of putting election deniers to work, are now limited to five states where a few thousand votes could make the difference in the political makeup of the Senate: Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas. The election counting machinery in each state is now in the control of elected Republican voting officials who are Trump supporters. In two other states, Georgia and North Carolina, Republican candidates are in trouble and Democratic candidates are comfortably ahead in polling.

“If the election is close,” one insider explained to me, “you would only have to disqualify as few as seven thousand voters” in primarily Democratic precincts “to change the outcome.” One thought now, I was told, is to call on election deniers in the toss-up states to find ways to use existing federal data, verified or not, to challenge thousands of votes in key Democratic precincts. (Trump said yesterday that he would not rule out invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, if he deems it necessary. Let us call that Plan C.)

Hence, it would not be wise to let the ugly polls for the GOP make us complacent or allow Trump’s increasingly pathetic public persona to lead us to underestimate the danger we face.  

In sum, the crazier Trump seems, the more likely it is that he may just try to do the previously unthinkable and bring more troops back onto American streets.  His Triumph of the Will style taxpayer funded TV ads are signaling how he will portray himself as a defender of American institutions as he blithely destroys them.  

Trump is the very embodiment of an end times fascist.  As Klein and Taylor argue, “We should believe our eyes.  The most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”  

Vote and be vigilant, dear reader. The end times fascists will not go gently into their good night.  

Indeed, even if we are successful in pushing back against the tide of authoritarianism in the midterms, so much more remains to be done.  Klein and Taylor note that the task at hand will require us commit to the continuous work of occupying and defending the “paradise” of the “here” and “now.”   Following Walter Benjamin, they call for a “messianism of the here and now” that is best embodied at present by the movement, with DSA at its center, that brought Zohran Mamdani to power in New York.  

Mamdani’s campaign does not give us the perfect answer, but it does show us some of the rules of the road:

There is no cut-and-paste formula for fighting end times fascism; every front will take on the character and texture of its place.  There are, however, some guiding principles that are beginning to emerge across locations, and the Mamdani campaign embodied many of them.  Start from love of place; conjure a radically inclusive future where everyone can afford dignified lives: embrace common goals across difference; get outside and gather offline and in person; take on the powerful joyously, draw on history and don’t be afraid to stir the soul.

We need to build a world where we start to see “the word neighbor growing to expand to include thousands of people we have never met and who have yet to arrive.”  More than anything else, Klein and Taylor suggest, we need to never lose sight of either what we are fighting against nor what the future we want should look like.  

This article first appeared in The Jumping Off Place

“Our territories, our homes, our waters, the future of our children are at stake.”