The Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission will use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific research and “national security” work. The White House compares its urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project: the program that created the first atomic bomb.
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There has been a momentary lull in the mass demonstrations against Trumpian fascism. We haven’t seen a “No Kings Day” since March 28 (although one is being scheduled for October), and it’s been almost four months since the most robust May Day participation in this country since the 1940s. Thus as we count down to the November 3 election it is all the more important to get out on the streets on Labor Day, Monday September 7, to rebuild the public profile for mass action, which in turn supports enthusiasm for progressive candidates and ballot measures.
Traditionally Labor Day is the official kick-off within the labor movement to canvassing in an election year. This time around in California the difference is that it features a rejuvenated left edge to the state’s unions in the wake of the important decision at the August 4 California AFL-CIO convention to support the Billionaire Tax, Prop 40, along with Prop 3, the Education and Health Care Act. Enactment of this dual hit on ruling class income and wealth will produce a fairer share of taxes paid by the state’s richest residents to support public education and health care.
It will also send a signal to the most reactionary tech bro capitalists that their insane level of political spending can’t buy our democracy.
Historic Opportunity
The marquee political campaign for California DSA this year is our Tax the Rich effort. Our state council endorsed both measures before any other organization in the Golden State. As a result we have set up committees and working groups in our chapters, held (and continue to hold) educational forums and trainings, and crafted materials to use in educating our members, unionists, and the electorate.
Due to our level of preparedness, our chapters are in good position to work with local central labor councils and their new mandate to support Props 3 and 40 across the state on Labor Day and onward toward the election. One example: East Bay DSA is partnering with the Alameda Labor Council to phonebank and canvass for the two tax the rich measures along with candidates for office endorsed by both groups.
The increased cooperation between organized labor and DSA has been driven by the tremendous successes of DSA’s electoral program around the country. There is a new level of respect within unions for the hard work and principled cooperation of socialists in politics.
The labor movement, for its part, is more prepared for Labor Day than I’ve seen in a long time. The California Federation of Labor Unions has posted the upcoming activities of its councils well in advance of the holiday and is organizing for marches, picnics, and other actions and celebrations. See the local events here.
This Labor Day let’s continue to build on the synergy. A strong socialist presence at Labor Day events will grow both movements.
Revealing Results of a Berkeley Community Health Study
I operate a physical therapy clinic in downtown Berkeley, Calif., which has been in service to the community for over 35 years. I have worked here for fifteen years and witnessed the deterioration of our healthcare system firsthand as it relates to addressing the functional mobility needs of our community members.
Through daily interactions with patients, I’ve seen consistent patterns of discrepancy between insurances and access to care. However, these valuable insights remained largely anecdotal. So we sought to formally document them in a proposed community-based study, which would confirm that these factors result in perpetuating inequities in our community.
True experiences and obstacles
Our clinic teamed up with UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies and two community organizations, Healthy Black Families, Inc., and the Friends of Adeline, to highlight the true experiences and obstacles our patients face when attempting to access care.
The study attempted to understand the level of recognition and attention that patients received from referral sources and insurance providers when trying to navigate these realities.
Our aim was to transform these observations into actionable knowledge and present it to our city, county and state governments.
Community physical therapy clinics face deteriorating support systems.
We formulated a successful grant application on this subject for a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Grant, which awarded us the opportunity to formally study our community’s access to care.
The study cohort consisted of patients from different insurance coverages who were placed into a listening study. The study design included three workshops with 27 participants and a facilitator who administered the questions. All of the workshops were video- and audio-recorded and later transcribed and interpreted by three different readers (no AI).
As our recordings demonstrate, the majority of patients from the most vulnerable socio-economic bracket covered by Medi-Cal were people of color and senior citizens. We juxtaposed their experiences to others in the listening study, who are cash-paying clients and higher-income private insurance members.
This study revealed clear and substantial inequities present in the healthcare system. It also revealed a disconnect between the city of Berkeley and its community healthcare clinics, which the city supports materially.
As the community clinics that support Medicaid clients do not provide physical therapy (PT) services under their umbrella, they must refer PT to an outside clinic. However, the reimbursement levels are so low for these services that the majority of the clinics refuse to accept these patients. Facing this obstacle, affected patients typically discontinue pursuit of care and their physical mobility becomes significantly impacted or lost altogether, further damaging their overall health and generating a greater burden to their community.
Study findings: themes and solutions
Our findings also illuminated the disconnect between those who seek care and those who are providing it. After studying the transcripts, five key themes were identified, which will be brought to the attention of city, county and state policymakers to address potential solutions:
1) The need for Medicare for All to address delayed treatment, and lack of insurance coverage.
2) The negative effects of virtual physical therapy (isolation, lack of physical touch, static vs. dynamic assessment).
3) No health without care (positive effects of manual physical therapy, human touch, one-on-one care).
4) The importance of preventative care (independence and mobility impact quality of life, reduction of negatively impacting social networks and, thus, the greater healthcare system).
5) A disconnect between city of Berkeley support of the Lifelong Medical Care clinics that request PT, while not supporting PT clinics as part of their structure.
The overarching voice of the Medicaid group, in contrast to the private-pay groups, underscores the perils of accessing care, continuing care and the debilitating cost to members to the detriment of their communities and the healthcare system as a whole.
The hardworking staff at Berkeley Community Physical Therapy.
Our study focused intentionally on insurance levels that point to socio-economic sectors as opposed to race/ethnicity. However, because we identified participants by their insurance coverage, we know that 50 percent of the participants are below the poverty line (very low or extremely low-income bracket).
Our study clarified the fact that this portion of the population must wait for extended periods of time while their physical status deteriorates, as opposed to participants who have direct access to care with no waiting times.
The listening study also emphasized the importance of manual therapy care and one-on-one care, which many insurance carriers no longer reimburse for. The classic relationship between the physical therapist practitioner and the patient that used to be based on face-to-face, hands-on care has been replaced by “patient mills,” where patients are being given exercises and monitored by unlicensed aides and hardly ever physically touched.
This approach is used to bridge the financial gap of poor reimbursement by the practitioners to make up for the loss in revenue. The study overwhelmingly revealed the effectiveness of manual therapy and direct care in healing the patients who participated in the study or, to put more simply, people before profit.
The cost of “wealthcare”
The political and economic system in which Californians are presently ensnared orients state healthcare policy around private ownership and above all, profit. The actual cost of this “wealthcare” regime is orders of magnitude higher than the exorbitant profits investors extract. Indeed it is a price Californians pay with their bodies, their community, and their human agency. Quoting from the most recent DSA Program, Workers Deserve More: “The political and economic system under which we live is built on private ownership and profit at all costs. As capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism. Big business makes deals with the government to line their pockets.”
The study highlighted the positive effects of preventative care and manual physical therapy.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the health care system, with big hospital systems being rewarded huge profits at the expense of our communities. As community clinics are driven under and funding is lost, our traditional safety nets disintegrate for the benefit of a small handful of privileged oligarchs.As community clinics (which have historically treated the working-class) are driven under and funding is directed upwards, our traditional safety nets are being disintegrated for the benefit of a small handful of privileged investors. We must go beyond merely countering this moral calamity by organizing local DSA chapters to demand that California’s top public institutions center the findings of this study and others like it to fund policy and programs that foster community-based health care accountable to elderly, disabled and underprivileged Californians. We must also demand our elected representatives center community-based healthcare hand-in-hand with adequate reimbursement through policies that strengthen and center patients and their healthcare providers above the interests of the medical insurance industry.
Cancel Thanksgiving? A Progressive Guide for Handling the Holidays
It’s a good thing that labor journalist and author Matt Witt was not running for governor of Wisconsin this year like DSA candidate Francesca Hong. Democratic primary rivals and Republican opposition researchers would have badly distorted the message of Witt’s new book Make Holidays Your Own (Common Ground Press). It encourages creative rethinking of family gatherings and community practices on major holidays.
In their effort to discredit Hong, her foes in both parties created what the New York Timescalled a “social media kerfuffle” over old social media posts dissing Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.
The outspoken state legislator and former restaurant owner from Madison lost her August 11 primary despite polling very strongly beforehand. Given the annual sense of foreboding that overtakes millions of Americans when tense family re-unions draw near in late November, Hong’s past call for Thanksgiving to be “cancelled”—because of its connection to “colonialism”—probably had its local fans.
Under fire on the campaign trail, Hong did concede that bringing people together around a table can be “a good thing.” But, according to the Times, she also courted controversy by “questioning the value of Valentine’s Day and Christmas trees.” So not only Wisconsin turkey farmers, but gift card sellers and Christmas tree growers—if sufficiently miffed—might have voted instead for the moderate Democrat from Milwaukee, David Crowley, who won the primary.
And even if Hong had prevailed, according to the Times, she faced the challenge of winning over voters like John Wilson, a 61-year-old pharmacist from Platteville WI, who usually “leans Democratic.” However, when asked whether he favored Hong or U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, Wilson chose the latter because “you have to take people at their word” about serious matters like Thanksgiving.
Tiffany has strong views on holidays too; in 2021, he was one of 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth Day a federal holiday, which won’t be popular with African-American voters statewide.
Just A Few Days Off
In the future, left-leaning candidates can avoid even momentarily distracting flaps like this by reading Matt Witt’s book—hopefully, before pulling the trigger on Twitter in a moment of pique. The few paid days off that most Americans get to enjoy should not be cancel culture targets, when, as the author argues, they can be celebrated in ways “more historically accurate, meaningful, inclusive and fun.”
In Make Holidays Your Own, Witt offers much creative advice about dealing with that day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day and eight others; his focus is on countering their crass commercialization, historical baggage, stultifying traditionalism, or exploitation by the right.
See, for example, the garish 250th birthday party staged on July Fourth of this year in Washington, D.C. by the White House and its corporate funders. While no doubt critical of that, Abdul El-Sayed, the successful Democratic Senate primary winner in Michigan is definitely tiptoeing around the issue of fireworks on the Fourth.
As the Times notes, “he has deleted a number of videos and posts where he floated the idea of abandoning fireworks on Independence Day.” El-Sayed’s press spokesperson is now reminding voters that he “is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander.”
In other words, he’s an All-American guy! As Witt explains, “In every culture, holidays matter. They come with a message and symbols— with a story that reinforces a certain way of looking at society and passes on certain values to the next generation.” According to the author, what’s good about remaking holidays, in ways that send a different message, “is that you don’t have to convince everyone in your community who doesn’t agree. They can celebrate however they want and so can you.”
A Labor Day History Lesson
And sometimes the development of alternative celebrations—such as the reclaiming of May Day by the modern day, more immigrant-influenced U.S. labor movement—can lead to two opportunities to picnic, protest, and march, rather than just one!
As a former communications director for the United Mine Workers and Service Employees International Union, the author delves most informatively into the political agenda behind the creation of Labor Day, as a counter to nascent working-class internationalism in the late nineteenth century.
Readers will learn that it was a corporate Democratic President—rather than any anti-union Republican—who first tried to erase the memory of May 1 as an international workers’ holiday born in the U.S.A., and replace it with an end of summer day off out of step with the rest of the world.
Thanksgiving can be a dangerous holiday in various ways.
To add insult to injury, May 1 then got officially rebranded, during the McCarthy era, as Law Day—although nobody, even corporate lawyers, get time off for that. Yet, thanks to multiple MAGA threats to the “rule of law” since Trump got re-elected, more than a thousand California bar members used their lunch hour to stage a first-time ever May Day-style protest in downtown San Francisco.
As Witt recounts, massive demonstrations seeking shorter working hours occurred in Chicago and other U.S. cities on May 1, 1886. When repeated on May Day four years later, workers in “dozens of countries in Europe and Latin America also held rallies and marches to support the eight-hour day demand.”
Thereafter, much to the alarm of “robber barons” here and abroad, May 1 protests became “an annual event for workers all around the world” and an expression of cross-border solidarity between labor radicals of varying stripes.
Forget May Day?
By 1894, however, a business-backed resident of the White House named Grover Cleveland needed a “sop to unions.” He had, after all, just called out federal troops to crush the Pullman strike organized by the American Railway Union, a pioneering alternative to craft unionism led by future Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs (who was jailed for his role in the strike).
At Cleveland’s request, Congress declared that workers should be given a day off, every year, on the first Monday in September so that, as Witt notes, “actions taken by U.S. unions would not be coordinated with their counterparts in the rest of the world.”
Today, Labor Day is a paid holiday for about 3 in 4 workers in the U.S. Ironically, the lowest paid workers are the least likely to have the day off with pay. That includes non-union workers in food service, retail, hotels, agriculture, delivery and janitorial services, as well as part-time workers, or those whose companies claim are ‘independent contractors’ rather than employees.
On the holiday counter-programming front, the good news is that May Day (as noted above) has made a major come-back over the last two decades. There is also “the shining example of the transformation of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day as now observed in many cities and states.”
Thanks to the efforts of progressive veterans’ groups like Veterans for Peace and Common Defense, at least some commemorative events on Memorial Day and Veterans Day now focus on peace and justice issues, rather than uncritical celebration of past wars.
In his chapter on Martin Luther King Day, the author suggests a range of activities that “can be about the movement and not just the man.” (This is advice that venerators of Cesar Chavez are taking, but only belatedly, after recent revelations about his history of sexual abuse while president of the United Farm Workers.)
Witt reports that all proceeds from his book are going to Rethinking Schools, a
…national nonprofit organization that supports social, economic, and environmental justice teaching at a time when the very idea of public education is under attack. Rethinking Schools’ materials have been used by tens of thousands of educators and have reached millions of students.
Let’s hope that Make Holidays Your Own also gets into the hands of many educators who have to come up with fresh ideas for in-school celebrations of holidays, that cannot be cancelled even in blue states—but of course, don’t want their personal creativity in the classroom (or pet peeves) unleashing a conservative backlash of the sort that did not help Hong.
After six months of nonstop right-wing bloviating about the Terrible Horrible No Good Billionaire Tax (Proposition 40 on the upcoming November California ballot) and an accompanying “No” campaign supported by some leading liberal allies, there is new wind in the sails of progressive tax politics.
"I don't know how to lead a labor organization that stands to the right of the Democratic Party on economic issues", said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, the state affiliate of the AFL-CIO, just before her convention voted on August 4 to support the Billionaire Tax.
Representing some two million plus workers within fifty unions, the CFLU wasn’t the only major organization to come out for Prop 40, a temporary 5% wealth tax on 250 California individuals, earlier this month. Gonzalez was referring to the endorsement delivered just days before by the California Democratic Party (CDP), which raised a single digit-laden hand at Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the most prominent opponents of Prop 40 (along with probable next Governor Xavier Becerra).
Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, told her convention delegates how embarrassing it would be to get outflanked to the left on economic issues by the Democratic Party.
Newsom seemed to think he could play it both ways, opposing the actually existing billionaire tax proposal in his own state, while calling for imaginary/aspirational higher taxes on billionaires and corporations at the federal level in preparation for his all-but-announced run for president. This transparently opportunistic ploy didn’t cut it with either the CDP or the delegates to the labor fed convention. As icing on the cake, the 100,000-member California Nurses Association also came out for Prop 40 the day before the CFLU convention.
But as promising as all this movement may be for progressive tax advocates in the Golden State, the greater lesson may be in what it portends for messaging strategies more broadly in the midterm elections.
Slow drip
For the past two months, directly after the California Democratic primary eliminated Tom Steyer— the only major gubernatorial candidate supporting the Billionaire Tax—a slow drip of labor and liberal organizations trashed the proposal with reasoning ranging from somewhat principled to proven lies curated by $100 million in billionaire PAC monies. A week after the primary the 300,000-member California Teachers Association (CTA) and the state Building and Construction Trades Council (BTC) went public with their opposition, followed by Planned Parenthood, the California Medical Association and others.
Why did the CTA—a leading advocate of the other progressive tax on the ballot, Prop 3—oppose a temporary tax meant to backfill a $20 billion per year hole in the state’s Medicaid budget created by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill? Some 14 million Californians are supported by Medi-Cal, the state version of Medicaid. The coming massive reduction in federal Medicaid funding, which pays for tax cuts for the richest Americans, directly impacts the students and families served by CTA members. As most teacher unions ritually announce in defense of their students every time a state public health budget is slashed, “You can’t teach a child who comes to your classroom sick.”
The answer is complicated, and I have addressed it in detail elsewhere. The short version is that the union that sponsored the Billionaire Tax, SEIU-United Health Care Workers, designed the tax to send 90% of its revenues to address the Medicaid problem, and the remaining 10% to be split among other services. This violated the understanding in Sacramento that 40% of general fund revenues should go to public education. It also raised, possibly, a hurdle to passage of Proposition 3, the Education and Health Care Act, planned by the longstanding progressive tax coalition CTA is part of before UHW launched the Billionaire Tax.
Prop 3, an income tax on the top two percent of taxpayers in the state, has no lack of supporters. The coalition did its homework and by last year everyone to the left of Attila the Hun was on board its project, which is to make a temporary tax that currently brings in upwards of ten billion dollars a year for schools and services permanent.
DOA?
As the organizations, or at least their leaders, were piling onto the anti-Billionaire Tax train, pundits rushed to pronounce Prop 40 dead on arrival. Mainstream media reportage breathlessly announced the “split” in the labor movement. Op eds in major newspapers by right wing think tank wonks distorted the numbers to “prove” that the mechanism of the tax couldn’t work. Political newsletters pondered the arcane mysteries of Proposition 98, the ballot measure passed by voters in 1988 that mandates 40% of the California state budget to education.
Undeterred, SEIU-United Health Care Workers (UHW) plugged away. Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna splashily supported the tax. It collected signatures and courted coalition partners like California Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which provided a dual endorsement of the Billionaire Tax and Proposition 3 early in the year. California Teamsters and California AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), along with two large hotel and restaurant union locals, came on board both taxes as well. UHW suffered and survived negotiations with Newsom’s office to relinquish the ballot measure if the Governor and Legislature would agree to a reduced 2% tax, an offer that Newsom rejected. It sent its organizers to talk with California Democratic Party delegates and unions in the labor federation.
Molten Reservoir
The persistence paid off. Rumblings of discontent bubbled up within labor at top-down leadership maneuvering against what seemed to most rank and filers a righteous cause. One sign of what was to come emerged a week before the CFLU convention, when the local San Diego labor council and building trades council both voted to support the Billionaire Tax.
This points to a more significant issue than the infighting within labor and purportedly progressive organizations over a couple taxes. It should come as no surprise that a year and a half into the ruinous Trump 2.0, there is an enormous molten reservoir of electorate anger at billionaires— especially the insufferably arrogant tech bros leading the charge against the Billionaire Tax—ready to be tapped.
Shifts in the electorate
Much of the attention around shifts in the electorate has been focused on the war inside the Democratic Party between youthful DSA and other left candidates for office versus old guard centrist Democrats. But equally significant to understanding what is and isn’t going to work in the mid-term elections is something that has always been the case: that the voters, when given the opportunity to vote to tax the rich, generally do so with enthusiasm. And when the theme is folded into the campaigns of left candidates—as in Mamdani’s in New York—it helps, both because of what it promises to fund on behalf of working people, and because it puts meat on the bones of populist economic appeals.
An opening now exists in the Golden State, three months before the election, to craft a united tax the rich campaign with national implications. California, launchpad to neoliberal tax politics with Prop 13 in 1978, can redeem this stain by passing the first state level wealth tax in the nation’s modern history at the same time as making a more traditional top bracket income tax permanent. Passage of both will not erase California’s vast economic inequalities overnight. It will not even mean that the rich are paying their fair share of taxes—just a fairer share. What it can do is firmly underscore the immense importance in elections of acknowledging economic inequality and doing something about it.
What will be needed to win both Props 3 and 40, against the tsunami of fascist billionaire anti-tax spending, is a common progressive tax message and grassroots campaign, an approach that will more likely bring victory to both measures than separate campaigns that ignore their commonalities. This common messaging should contain at its center the idea that education and health care are rights, not privileges, and that passage of both measures would represent the wealthy finally paying a fairer share for that common good.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has proposed a sweeping rewrite of federal radiation protection regulations.
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