DSA on the Daily Show

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-8-2012/the-socialist-network

The California Budget and the May Revise

 Governor Brown  slashes schools and  social services, but  California will not end corporate tax avoidance.

The proposed California  budget for next year says that income will be  $15.7  billion less than available revenue.   

The report is here.  http://www.dof.ca.gov/documents/2012-13_May_Revision.pdf

Austerity does not work !

California does not have enough money to continue the funding of schools, universities, fire and safety, and social services.  The Republican Party has consistently refused to raise taxes to pay for these services.   So, the Republican legislative blocking  has forced the following cuts : MediCal, child care, Cal Works, Nursing homes, In Home Supportive Services, Cal Grants ( college tuition), and a forced employee pay cuts (5%) – such as a 4 day work week.  These cuts are from the 2012  budget. Today’s May Revision provides level funding for k-12 schools, however if the  Governor’s tax proposals are not passed in November, there will be an additional $5.6 billion dollars  cut from  K-12 schools.  These are called trigger cuts.  They will be automatic if the  tax initiative is not passed.

These draconian cuts are imposed because the state will not- or can not – deal with corporate tax evasions.  We know of $10 billion in tax evasions from Apple, and there probably is a similar tax evasion by Google, Yahoo, and other internet companies. 

California is  not broke , but corporate tax subsidies are destroying our schools and our social safety net. 

We suffer from two problems: a huge concentration of income at the very top of the income distribution and a tax system that fails to tax  that concentration.  Our tax system asks those with less to pay more and those with more to pay less.

 The state fell over $6 billion behind state forecasts for this year.  Thus, the legislature  again faces cuts as proposed by the Governor today.   More cuts to schools, more cuts to social services, health care,  child support, police and fire protection.

            This approach to economics is called austerity.  It doesn’t work.   Governor Brown cited Ireland, Greece, and Spain in his budget  revision talk, but he continued the  austerity policies that have ruined these economies.  Austerity  does not work.  Austerity makes the economy worse – and thus further reductions of tax receipts and further cuts.

        The economic crisis of 2007 to the present made matters worse.  The state took in some $30 billion less in taxes and thus had less to send to the schools.  School budgets have been cut by some $10 billion.  K-12 education receives about 40% of the California budget.  Thus any decline in the state budget leads directly to cuts in school services.

            The question for the corporate agenda, promoted by  the Chamber of Commerce among others  is can the economy prosper with a poorly educated work force.  California grew and prospered from 1970- 1994 based upon a well educated work force.  Then, in the 1994-2008 period over $10 billion of tax cuts were passed – making the current crisis much worse.  Last   week we learned that Apple, and other corporations, are avoiding over $10 billion in taxes by moving one small office to Nevada.   California suffers from a decade of  corporate tax cuts and public disinvestment. 

    California public schools are in crisis- and they are getting worse. This is a direct result of massive budget cuts imposed by the legislature and the governor in the last four years.  Total per pupil expenditure is down by over $1,000 per student. The result- massive class size increases.  Students are in often classes too large for learning.  Supplementary services such as tutoring and art classes have been eliminated.  Over 14,000 teachers have been dismissed, and thousands more face lay offs this week.

            California schools are now 47^th. in the nation in per pupil expenditure and 49^th in class size.  Our low achievement scores on national tests reflect this severe underfunding.

California suffers from a decade of disinvestment in education and in infrastructure.   We   need to invest in roads, bridges, telephone lines, communications systems, parks, clean energy and quality education.  These are the down payments that make prosperity possible.   The Republican Party is blocking all efforts to raise taxes ignoring the undeniable  historic evidence that prosperity depends upon having a viable educational system and a well functioning infrastructure.  And the Democrats in the legislature and the governor’s office are simply saying, “we must cut”, the Republicans make us do this.

We have a stalemate at the state and national level and this government dysfunction makes   the current depression last longer.  We will have an opportunity in November to slow  the decline, but not to reverse the policy.   This depression will continue until we require the corporations to pay their share of taxes.  Corporations  benefit from our  taxes.  They get roads, bridges, an educated work force, police and fire protection, etc.

As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said,   "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.'' 

Chicago 

Latest "Talkin Socialism" podcast. This one is an interview with Melinda Powers, the lead attorney in the recently concluded successful case against the 2003 arrests of people opposing the Iraq War (city to pay $6.2 million to arrested protestors).  

Melinda is asked, by Tom Broderick, about the current and possible future practices of the Chicago rulers towards protests and opposition, such as are occurring occurred during the NATO meeting.

http://northshoredsa.org/talkin_socialism_05-12-2012.mp3

 

http://northshoredsa.org/talkin_socialism_05-12-2012.ogg 

Student Demonstrations

 Sacramento DSA, and the new UC Davis YDS participated in the day long demonstrations and occupation  at the California Capitol in Sacramento on March 5, as a part of the demand to  adequately fund public education.

More than 6,000 students from Central and Northern California marched on the California Capitol today to demand full funding of education,  student debt relief and Tax the Millionaires to pay for it. The impressive demonstration was organized primarily by student associations of the community colleges, the CSU and U.C. campuses in the northern half of the state.

Key legislative leaders John Pérez and Darrell Stienberg addressed the crowd and offered legislation to fund public education- which they can not pass do the constitutional requirement of a 2/3 vote to raise taxes. Student leaders and community organizer Van Jones also spoke.

A labor based rally at 5:30 supported the occupation and promoted the Tax on Millionaires.  Sacramento DSA is collected signatures to place this initiative on the ballot.

Sacramento DSA members tabled at the 11 Am demonstration. East Bay DSA members also participated in the mass demonstrations.   UC Davis YDS members participated along with some 350 others  in the occupation of the capitol during the PM.

YDS members at the rally. 

Arrests were made after 8 PM of some 68 occupiers.  None of the DSA nor YDS members were arrested.   Photos available at We used our blogs and facebook to tell the story to our allies.

A Brief Report of Democratic Socialists of America’s National Convention, 2011

                  These last two months have reawakened the American Left. The Occupy Wall St. movement has brought hundreds of thousands of progressives into streets across the country. The Occupy climate has rained down several progressive legislative victories and it is in this environment that the Democratic Socialists of America, our nation’s largest socialist organization, held its national conference. I attended as the delegate from the Sacramento Local.

50th Anniversary of The Other America.

The Other America: Re-Discovering Poverty

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the “discovery” of poverty in “affluent” 1960s America by democratic socialist Michael Harrington in his classic book THE OTHER AMERICA.   That book is credited with drawing the attention of the Kennedy administration to the problem of poverty, and helped launch LBJ’s “War on Poverty” in 1964.

Contrary to the right-wing attacks on the “War on Poverty,” the poverty rate in the U.S. dropped from 17% in 1965 to 11% in 1978.  The War on Poverty created Medicare and doubled Social Security payments, indexing them to inflation, which lead to a dramatic drop in the poverty rates among the elderly, from 30% down to under 10%.  

Since 1978, however, things have gotten worse, not better.  The poverty rate increased throughout the 1980s, reaching 15%, fell briefly back to 11% in 2000, and is now back up to 15%.  So while the initial anti-poverty programs of the Johnson administration had some success, ultimately the war on poverty failed to erase the scourge of poverty in America.

First, as Dr. Martin Luther King pointed out, the Johnson administration waged the wrong war--in Vietnam.  Ever since, the U.S. government, both Democratic and Republican administrations, has been more committed to funding the “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower warned us about than to addressing poverty and it’s many underlying causes and consequences.

Policy makers did latch on to one concept from Harrington’s book, the “culture of poverty.”  Harrington painted a bleak picture of the lifestyle and living conditions of the poor, but while he saw the “culture of poverty” as the consequence of deprivation and lack of resources, the American elites saw something else, a culture that creates and reproduces poverty.  The problem, they determined, was not the lack of good jobs, money or resources, or the growing inequality in U.S. society; it was a lack of “good values”.  Thus, since the 1980s, the U.S. government has been engaged in a war on the “culture of poverty,” not a war on poverty and its real causes.

Today nearly 16% of the U.S. population (49 million people) are poor, according to the official government definition of poverty ($22,811 for a family of four, $18,000 for a mother and two children).  Nearly half of those official poor have incomes less than 50% of the official poverty level.  If we define poverty as half of the median household income ($25,000), over 19% of Americans are poor (it’s less than 10% for most western European countries).  In the U.S. 22% of children live in poverty (compared to under 5% in Western Europe), and 1 in 4 African Americans and Hispanics are poor.  According to the Brookings Institute, one-third of Americans live in or near poverty.  

Like the 1960s, we were led to believe that with the economic growth of the 1980s and 90s a rising tide would lift all boats.  It did not.  While productivity increased dramatically the past 30 years, wages have not.  For most U.S. workers wages have been flat, or declined, over this time.  So where did all the rewards of that “productivity” go?  For the last 25-30 years, over 90% of total growth in income in the U.S. went to the top 10% of Americans (mostly the top 1%), leaving the other 10% of income to be shared by the bottom 90%.  The wealthiest 400 people in the U.S. have more net worth than the bottom 50%.  

Given the growing disparities between the top 1% and the rest of Americans, shouldn’t U.S. policy makers be looking at the growing concentration of wealth and income, along with power, which has crippled the U.S. economy, and produced policies that benefited the top1% over the bottom 99%?  Instead, we have more calls to cut top tax rates further, from 70% before Reagan down to 25% or less!  Instead of more investments in successful social programs like Medicare and Social Security, we are being told that bottom 90% must sacrifice their “entitlements” to fund more tax cuts and reduce the national debt.

It is time to re-discover poverty in the United States and wage a real “war on poverty.”  The “invisible poor” of The Other America are now very visible--they are working class families losing their jobs and their homes.  They lack money, not values. We lost the war on the “culture of poverty,” it’s time to focus on the roots causes of poverty.  The working class, including the working poor, has been losing the class war and it is time to fight back.  

Jim Maynard,

Memphis Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

Here is the Nichols Speech. It is worth it.

 See the national web site at dsausa.org

Let’s Talk Democratic Socialism, Already

After 30 years of failed neoliberalism, we need a real alternative.

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." With all the right-wing hoopla about how President Barack Obama is waging class war, you might be surprised to learn that Warren Buffet said these words in 2006. The billionaire investor was acknowledging 30 years of a widening income gap--but I'll go a step further. I believe that unfettered capitalism is inherently undemocratic and that human action can significantly democratize our political system. That's why I'm a socialist.

Corporate America's assaults on working people--seeking profits through offshoring jobs, busting unions, paying politicians to slash corporate taxes and deregulating the banks--have ruined our economy. Meanwhile, millions of workers have been thrown from their jobs while unions are scapegoated for manufactured budget crises at the state and local levels.

The accident of birth should not determine the course of a person's life. Government expenditures are an indication of a society's priorities, and it is both economically and morally imperative to provide a safety net for those who suffer the most in a downturn. Without massive public investment in healthcare, education, infrastructure and green jobs--which could be funded by progressive taxation of income along with a tax on financial transactions--our future is bleak. With high unemployment and anemic demand, the economy will continue to limp forward. Those lucky enough to have work will likely remain afraid to agitate for better conditions.

Right now, we need more jobs and better pay for less work. In the long term, ordinary people need more power--through unions, worker councils and seats on the board in the workplace, and in politics, through a public campaign finance system that provides sufficient exposure to all candidates. We need a political economy that allows everyone space and time for personal growth and thoughtful participation in the decisions that profoundly impact their lives.

I feel so strongly about these values that I recently quit my job as an organizer for SEIU to become the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which has its roots in both the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington and the New American Movement, a nonsectarian organization that grew out of the American New Left and whose founders were instrumental in establishing In These Times back in 1976.

DSA's strategy is to push American politics to the left by strengthening social movements such as Occupy Wall Street. Movements are the only force capable of making elites respond to popular demands. That doesn't mean we ignore elections. Among other races, the organization is looking forward to helping socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) win re-election.

I was raised in a union family that directly benefited from the kind of government programs that DSA fights to protect and expand--like the GI Bill. As a bi-racial woman, I experienced oppression and learned that the world isn't fair, despite what I was taught in school about the American Dream. When I attended a DSA youth section event at the University of Chicago, I realized that the patterns I had seen all my life signal structural problems. Capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy--they are linked structures of oppression that must be dismantled.

Analyzing these structures is critical to forging a political strategy to challenge corporate power. But doing so is not the only reason I decided to become DSA's national director. Some may argue that I should work in a more mainstream organization and "get more done," but without a clear alternative to the Tea Party narrative, national politics will continue to slide to the right. In the current climate, even the most moderate reforms are red-baited. We need a strong socialist organization in the United States to counter Republicans' (and often Democrats') dangerous buffoonery.

As 30 years of neoliberal economic destruction come home to roost, more and more people are beginning to question the wisdom of capitalism and becoming open to socialism--DSA's membership has grown 60 percent since 2003. I believe that someday soon American politicians will stop fearing the s-word, and start enacting systemic change.

Maria Svart, who joined the Democratic Socialists of America in 2004 as an undergrad at the University of Chicago, is now the group’s national director.

DSA has produced literature to help you get our messages out. It is in Word document format, so that you can add local contact information or adapt it to local needs.

 Media work.            

An Alternative to Republican Budget Slashing and Bashing of Unions.

See linked page.  The People's Budget. 

We need an emergency jobs program - now. 

Unemployment and underemployment remain at crisis levels. We need jobs—and we need them now.  Wall Street has gotten its bailouts. Now it’s past time for Main Street to get some immediate help.

Counties, states and cities  are again cutting services; police, fire, health care.  And the state has cut k-12 education and higher education and now will cut more if Republicans continue to block  tax extension on the rich.  These cuts are a direct result of the looting of the economy by finance capital  in the economic crisis.

            At the same time,  GE, Bank of America, Exxon, etc. manages to evade taxes while off-shoring jobs.   In a struggling economy, these companies obtain tax refunds, while bringing in billions (GE earned 14.2 billion and received a tax benefit of 3.2 billion).  Offshore tax havens, tax loopholes and tax breaks (tax expenditures), allow these corporations to rake in billions while you and I   struggle to pay our  taxes. 

            And the shell game goes on –  Read the entire piece here. 

Tea Party activist seeks to qualify an Arizona  SB 1070 style proposition in California.

 The times are difficult.  In the middle of an economic crisis  in the nation and the world, we are facing an  anti immigrant  campaign again.  The world is experiencing a major restructuring of the global economy.  This restructuring is directed by the transnational corporations to produce profits for the corporate owners.  The impoverishment of the vast majority of people in pursuit of profits for the minority has pushed millions to migrant in search of food, jobs, and security.  Global capitalism produces global migration.  NAFTA produces a new wave of migration.

            Economic hard times often result in anti immigrant campaigns, they did so in 1878, in 1910, in 1930, in 1950, in 1994, and now in the crisis of 2007/2011. The nation  including California continues to  suffer a severe recession.  Twenty Six million  are unemployed and under employed. This crisis was created by finance capital and banking, mostly on Wall Street ,ie. Chase Banks, Bank of America, AIG, and others.   Finance capital produced a $ 2 trillion bailout of the financial industry, the doubling of the U.S.  unemployment rate and the loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in 2008.  Fifteen million people are out of work.