I don’t consider myself a ‘progressive’ or a ‘leftist’. Let me explain…
First of all, where do we even get these terms? The concept of a “leftist” as associated with a certain set of ideas comes from the French Revolution. The rising national bourgeoisie sat on the left in the National Assembly. They wanted an end to feudalism and monarchy, market freedoms, certain forms of equality and private property. That revolution helped usher in the shift from feudalism to capitalism, born on the industrial revolution and a new mode of production.
Of course the French Revolution looms large in history and set the stage for the development of working class theory. I fully understand that there a global resonance to the concept of “leftism”. However, in the context of the United States, with its two main corporate political parties, the concept of “left” loses much of its meaning. In our context, the vast majority of “leftists” are essentially a part of the Democratic coalition by necessity (and I don’t blame them for that).
So what about “progressive”? The term can be dated back to the “Progressive Era” and the corresponding activism during the Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century. One hundred years after the French Revolution, in the wake of the Civil War, with the slave power vanquished and Reconstruction defeated, the rapid industrialization of the second technological revolution proceeded in the United States. Robber barons, strikes and labor wars, monopolies and trusts dominated the day. Progressivism brought a push to expose injustice and promote demands for government regulation of industry. However, just as today we distinguish between the poor organizing the poor vs. the rich organizing the poor, class-conscious historians like Gabriel Kolko have shown that it was the capitalists themselves that pushed for reforms and regulation in order to preserve their class position for the long haul.
So, let’s think for a moment beyond political labels. I don’t organize people on the basis of their self-described political identity. I organize the unorganized, on the basis of our position with respect to and our relationship to the economy. Which is that we don’t have an ownership interest in, a controlling interest in the economy. I organize the 140 million people who are poor or near poor, those with the most to gain and least to lose from a fundamental transformation of society. And the objectively revolutionary class comes from both the “left” and “right” on the political spectrum.
I’m not interested in just “fighting the right’, I’m interested in fighting the billionaires and the system they uphold. The billionaire class lined up behind Biden in 2020 and behind Trump in 2024. They don’t have lasting political allegiances. They act as a class, in their class interests. But we don’t – not even (and sometimes especially) “leftists” and “progressives” because those terms become reasons to keep ½ of our class OUT.
The left/right or partisan divide is one of the ways that the ruling class controls the working class in this country. People root for their team and can’t think critically about what’s actually happening or what is true – on both sides of that divide. There’s Red and Blue versions of MAGA that both want to turn back time – one to a pre-civil rights era, and one to a New Deal era. Neither are desirable or possible.
The Republican Party in its original form emerged in the lead-up to the Civil War, as neither the Democrats or the Whigs could resolve the contradictions of the slave system. It was born in March of 1854 in the small town of Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the founders is recalled as saying “we came into the meeting Whigs, Free Soilers, and Democrats, and we came out Republicans.”
The way some of the “leftists and progressives” talk today their quote would be “we came into the meeting progressives, leftists, and ultra-leftists and we came out ….” Nah.
The 140 million draw from every political persuasion. Many are part of the tens of millions who don’t regularly participate in the process no matter what label is associated with their voting record.
We can either be the “left wing” church or we can be the church of the poor and dispossessed. We can either be the “left wing” veterans or we can be the veterans group that is for the poor and dispossessed. We can either be the organization focused on “turning the state blue” or we can be an organization that fights for the poor and dispossessed. As soon as we start considering ourselves the “democratic” version of what the republicans have then we are proxy soldiers in the ruling class’ game. We can be the [insert your thing here] of the Democrats or we can be poverty abolitionists engaged in a class struggle.
There are fissures happening in both parties and new forms are sure to emerge. Some of them will be imposed from above and some of them will come up from below. I’m not discouraging anyone from voting or participating in the political process, but this is about building what MLK called “the new and unsettling force”. That force that is capable of transforming this society from the bottom up is not simply found among the poor who vote Democrat.
I’m looking to move people wherever they are on the political spectrum in a few key areas. Recognizing that their problems are not theirs alone. Helping them see below the surface of what is happening and connecting their experiences and insights to a bigger picture. Many people are ready to skip over platitudes and signifiers, and knowing all the right things to say. They want real material changes that can only come from class struggle.
For those coming into activism now, it’s easy to understand why someone would feel pressure to identify as a liberal, progressive or leftist. That’s what it seems to mean to be a good person. But those labels aren’t as meaningful as you think they are. The most important thing to be able to do is connect with our family, neighbors and communities who are hurting. Connect with people from the falling middle. Connect on the basis of our experiences and where we are in relation to the economy, not on the basis of what corporate media talking points we listen to. Don’t let the ruling class keep dividing us based on the “left/right’ binary.
Be part of a movement to abolish poverty. A movement that cuts across racial, geographic, and party lines. Leftism is a barrier to entry that I’m not willing to put up. I am of, by and for the working class. I’m not here to unify the left, I’m here to unify the bottom.
It is with great pleasure and humility that I have been invited as a guest here today. I would like to start off with congratulating you on a successful selection of officers using a one man one vote method that has made this Federation a democratic union whose officers report to the membership. You have chosen well and I would like to congratulate Anthony Sessa and his team of officers on their reelection. I am heartened to know that my home Federation is in good hands going forward. I would also like to congratulate Brother Justin Brown and Frank Parell on their recent election by the membership to lead the Commuter Railroad System Federation. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my friends from METRA, Manuel Zavala. After a long hard struggle our Chicago Brothers and Sisters have been able to achieve self determination for METRA members.
I remember my first meetings with the METRA members and their rank and file leadership. I saw a System designed for white freight union officers that made no sense. Three federations literally fed off a group of urban minority commuter workers who were gerrymandered in such a way they were politically marginalized in their respective assigned Federations. We can thank the vision and the backbone of President Simpson for putting an end to this structural racism with his program for single systems on single roads. It is good to see that METRA brothers and sisters enjoying self determination and their own organization upon which they can be proud.
One man one vote and one passenger rail system under the leadership of General Chairperson Anthony Sessa have produced the best contracts in the Brotherhood and the strongest on the ground trade union organization anywhere in this Union. And this will be necessary in the very trying times that we find ourselves in and the bloody struggles that are to come. We need to understand a little history that started before most of you were born to understand the current struggle whose outcome will literally determine the future quality of our lives. The last 50 years have seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to our Corporate Masters we also know as the 1% in the known history of the world.
To illustrate this I want to tell you a little story about what life was like for the unionized working class in America when I graduated from highschool in 1972. We had problems for sure, like getting drafted and bleeding out for Corporate profit in some rice paddy in South Vietnam. But we also had opportunity that simply does not exist now. You could get your high school diploma and walk off the stage and the next day go to work building cars on an assembly line, working in heavy industry or refining, construction etc. In those days one salary on 40 hours a week would support a family of four, be able to buy a small house, a car, go on vacation each year for a couple of weeks and send your kids to college. The work was hard but that life existed in 1972 because of the strength of the labor movement and the blood sacrifices that were made in the decades prior. There were still huge problems for those not in a union and poverty was rampant but the conversations we were having were reducing the work week to 32 hours, retiring with a full pension at 55, providing income and housing and free higher education for all Americans and ensuring no one would go hungry or unhoused.
The Corporate Masters fought back these last 50 years with their control of the two party system. Democrats and Republicans in a bipartisan manner destroyed this life. Now two jobs with overtime barely pays and sometimes not at all pays the bills. College and vacation are distant memories. All of the wealth that is created in the country is literally sucked up by the 1%. While the Democrats will eat us a little slower than the Republicans they do fiercely believe in only a two party system that always ensures one of them is in power. Our Corporate Masters love it because they own the majority of the Democratic Party and all of the Republican Party.
While they have us arguing about immigrants, guns, affirmative action, and women with dicks and men with breasts and abortion rights for women they have picked our pockets clean and tightened their noose of corporate power around out necks so tightly that we can barely breathe.
In this period union membership declined from 30% of the private sector to currently 6%.
There has been a decline in real income for all workers when on average the American worker had stronger real incomes in the 1970s than they do today.
Every dollar of wealth in this country the 1% has 30 cents, the bottom 50% has 2-3 cents and the rest of the 96% splits the 67 cents. This is a huge transfer of wealth. There is plenty of money in this country to feed, house, provide free health care and education and retire everyone at 55 in this country but it is concentrated by neoliberal public policy in the hands of the 1%.
These horrifying statistics represent an all out assault on the American working class and reflect what happens when you eviscerate the private sector labor movement.
There were turning points during this period that accelerated our decline. The election of Ronald Reagan who placed neoliberal program of the Democrats and Republicans on steroids. Let me give you some examples of what this means. Neoliberalism, in simple terms, is an economic and political theory that favors free markets and limited government intervention. It emphasizes the idea that markets are the most efficient way to allocate resources and create wealth. Key policies often associated with neoliberalism include deregulation, privatization, and reduced social welfare spending. It has produced a country of massive inequality, significantly reduced standards of living and economic uncertainty for most of us and obscene wealth for our rulers.
Eight months after Ronald Reagan was elected there was the PATCO strike in August of 1981. Many of you were not even born yet and most probably are not even aware of this event.
PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) was a union representing 13,000 federal air traffic controllers. Air traffic control work was stressful and often required long hours and the workers struck to correct these conditions. Despite being a federal union, PATCO had endorsed Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election believing he would be sympathetic to their cause. The union struck on August 3, 1981 despite federal law prohibiting strikes by government employees. The strike immediately disrupted flights nationwide.
Reagan ordered controllers back to work within 48 hours citing national safety and illegality of the strike. When 11,345 controllers refused to return he fired them permanently and banned them from federal service.
Labor historians mark the PATCO strike as the beginning of the modern era of weakened unions in the United States. It demonstrated that even a skilled, highly trained, and previously politically influential workforce could be defeated by coordinated state action. The balance in power in labor relations shifted decisively towards employers influencing U.S. workforce dynamics for decades.
The real crime was the total capitulation of the leadership of the United States labor movement and their criminal class collaboration. Lane Kirkland and his Vichy roundtable of collaborators refused to stand up to strikebreaking and union busting and instead elected to lay on their back with all four paws in the air hoping to get a belly rub from our masters. If ever in this country a general strike was required it was in August of 1981. Instead they did not even call for a massive rally in DC after the firings. The following year in September 1982 the AFL CIO call for a Solidarity Rally to protest Reagan economic policies and the theme from the collaborating leadership was to register to vote. Over 500,000 angry trade unionists came to the rally making it one of the largest rallies in history and were sent home to vote.
This brings us to the election of Donald Trump and his program to weaponize neoliberalism with total disregard for the rule of law and begin to build the structural foundations of fascism. He has done more to harm American workers in his first few months in office than any other President in history. His crimes against the American worker and fundamental democratic rights of all are to numerous to list here. These are very dark days for our movement and our working lives. How we respond to these conditions will determine the very quality and sometimes existence of our working lives and our fundamental freedoms. His acceleration of the wealth transfer on the backs of the sick and poor and working class can only be described as criminal.
This is our PATCO moment. If you respond with wait and see and accommodation we will lose. Lawyers will not be able to file lawsuits to fix this problem. The Democratic Party has some good people in it who are worth supporting but the gerrymandered political system is controlled by the big money oligarches. The electoral path is necessary but not to be relied upon.
The fascist formation under the MAGA banner that has control right now of government are busy criminalizing immigrants, medicare and medicaid recipients, homelessness and gay people and strengthening their white supremacist structures. Soon they will cancel the prevailing wage and seek to privatize public transportation. We will need to respond not with lawsuits and electing weak and feeble democrats but with strikes and massive civil disobedience.We should begin to make allies with the emerging people’s movements like the Nonviolent Medicaid Army, the Poor People’s Campaign and March on Harrisburg to name three of the many who we should support.
The most important thing we can do right now is begin to establish self defense formations in every yard and section house and gang in our union. These self defense operations can begin to map out the weak points for battle and join the broader social struggles in their areas to prepare for the class war to come. They can train and educate themselves and the members they work with on the need to be prepared and to take action in the form of political strikes and civil disobedience against the government and our employers. It will take time but patience and solidarity and strength will be our foundation. Our employers fear self and independent organization of workers more than anything else. We need to start now and build these formations underground as committees in our local unions and in conjunction with members of the other crafts and with the highest levels of solidarity.
Finally I want to say something about Union dues and then I will shut up. If you are the member who thinks that union dues are a cost benefit accounting where you pay dues and somehow you get higher wages, good benefits and rights on the job you are the problem and the reason we will lose this coming struggle. Unions are not an insurance company. You pay dues for the right to have voice in the Union as you prepare with your brothers and sisters to speak with one voice as you seek to advance our collective good. Now we must organize to take action as one to confront the greatest danger our movement and the American working class has faced in our lifetime. Dues don’t guarantee you anything except a voice in the struggle to defeat the attacks that are coming.
The following is a rough transcript of a presentation I did on the July Statewide Call of Put People First! PA
Put your seatbelt on, we’re about to go for a wild ride.
We’re going to try to do something really important and special which is to talk about federal policy from the perspective and the analysis of the working class.
Not what the mainstream media is giving us, not filtered through the lens of one section of the ruling class or another, but based on our own understanding, our own analysis coming out of our study, our history, our experiences and our reading and understanding of what is happening.
We’re going to talk about what we in the Nonviolent Medicaid Army call the “Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires”. It really is a big beautiful bill, if you’re a billionaire – so we want to put that right out there.
This bill is 900 pages, so it’s a bit intimidating to read it closely and understand it. First I want to say that when Put People First! PA introduced our own bill in the Pennsylvania legislature in the 2021-2022 legislative session, to institute a Public Healthcare Advocate, our bill was 18 pages long. We got all this pushback from state legislators who said “This bill is WAY too long, no one’s going to read it. Can you get this bill down to 2-3 pages?” But we notice that’s a bill that’s coming out of the working class struggle. But when there’s a bill that’s coming out of the billionaire class it can be 900 pages and it’s not a problem.
The length of the bill is actually significant here.
We have to first ground ourselves in the fact that this is our money!! The federal revenue, where do we get the money that’s in our budget? Forty-eight point five percent (48.5%) comes from individual income taxes. The taxes that we pay on the money that we make by selling our labor – the exploitation of our labor. Then payroll taxes, which is another form of taxation on our labor. So 83% of the money that the federal government has comes from our taxes. In other words, it’s OUR money. This is our money that they control. We as a class do not control OUR money. The billionaires, the ruling class that is behind our political system, are deciding what to do with OUR money.
Breakdown of where money comes from in the federal budget
What’s in the budget? Here’s a breakdown, this is an overview. Social Security, Medicare, Militarism – I’m not going to say “national defense”. It’s really not defense, it’s militarism, it’s the war economy. Health, including Medicaid and other health programs. Interest on our debt, and “other” things.
Pie chart of federal budget
The “other” category is a lot of really important stuff. It includes all of SNAP which is our food, TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) also known as welfare, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, Housing Assistance. All of that is less than 10%. Veterans benefits and services – less than 5%. When you see that money for militarism, remember that none of that is going to veterans. Education, transportation, all of these are in the “other category” and they’re very small amounts of the total federal budget.
So now let’s get into the Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires. One of the reasons we want to break it down and break it down from the vantage point of the working class is because you’re going to see different things in the media depending on the sources that you’re looking at. Depending if it’s coming from the Democratic Party perspective or the Republican party perspective. So the Republicans are selling this as “working family tax cuts” and then we’ve got Bishop Barber calling it the “Big, Ugly, Destructive, Deadly Bill”. So we’re seeing this polarization where one side is like “this is awesome, this is actually going to help working people” and the other side is “this is evil, this is mean, this is cruel and cruelty is the point”. But I don’t think that either of those perspectives are coming from the lens of really trying to understand what’s going on here, and also let’s put it into a context of “how did we get here?”
It’s not enough to stay in this battle of “oh it’s good, no it’s evil”. I think that’s not really going deep enough. And we really have to go deeper in understanding what’s happening here.
So let’s look at some of the things that are being touted as the positive things in this bill. It would be a lie to say that the bill is just an expression of pure evil. Something that came up from the Eye of Sauron. There’s a lot of stuff that is in the interest of the billionaire class. And we know that those things are not in our interest and that’s where the conflict arises. That’s where the problem actually comes in. It’s not because of EVIL people. It’s because of a system that is structured to prioritize the needs of capital accumulation over human life. Is that evil objectively, is that morally wrong? Sure it is.
But it’s not because those individual people are evil and greedy, it’s because we live in a system that prioritizes the needs of capital over human life. And that means that we’re going to die. That’s what that literally means. But we have to understand what’s beneath these narratives.
So there’s a few things that you’re going to hear when you see the headlines and you see Congresspeople touring across PA or our state, touting the benefits of the “Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires”
There’s an expanded low income housing tax credit in the bill, which is supposed to increase the affordable housing supply – BUT that’s a tax credit for developers. That is money going to people with money. It is not going to us, it is not giving us money to get access to housing, it’s not making housing a human right, it’s not making housing free for all. It is money going to developers to “incentivize” them to build affordable housing. Similar to the way that the ACA gives money to insurance companies to “incentivize” them to cover people. So again, it’s taking our money to subsidize the developers and the capitalists to “do the right thing”. So it’s a false solution in that way. But it’s there. Will it result in more low income housing? Who knows. It’s not a real solution. But they’ll say that it is something that’s going to benefit the working class. Specifically in the realm of housing, which as we know is impossible to get, it’s impossible to afford.
Some of the crumbs for the working class included in the bill
There are these “Trump accounts” for newborns. So this is a new thing that’s in the bill. Every child born gets a $1000 government funded account and tax deferred contributions. So that’s a little bit of crumbs. There’s something there that they can say that they’re doing.
No taxes on tips, that’s been a big talking point. There is tax relief for service workers, up to $25,000 in tipped income, and $12,500 in overtime pay that can be deducted. But that is phased out for anyone making above $160,000 and it expires in 2028. So one of the things we’re going to see over and over again is that the tax cuts for the wealthy are made permanent and the tax cuts for us are all temporary.
And then there’s this child tax credit increase. They’ve said that they’re boosting the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200 to $2,500 per child. But a lot of low income families won’t actually qualify for the full amount if they’re not already paying $2,500 in federal taxes. So this is another thing, it looks good on paper but it may not actually provide the benefit that it appears to.
They’re also touting no taxes on social security. I got an e-mail from the federal government for some reason about taxes on social security saying that 88% of seniors will pay no taxes on their benefits. But the reality is that 64% of seniors are already exempt. So it’s not going from 0 to 88% it’s going from 64% to 88% and it does not eliminate taxes but it creates a new deduction which will shrink the portion of benefits subject to taxation. It will ALSO expire in 2028.
So once again, there are some things that they are going to be talking about on these tours but we have to know that they are not real solutions, that they are not providing the kind of real benefits that we actually need. They essentially amount to crumbs. And all of the benefits are temporary when it comes to the working class.
We’re not trying to sit here and be partisan about this. We are politically independent. We do not take our marching orders from either of the two parties of Wall Street.
Here’s how you will be affected:
Summary of the distinction between the benefits to the ruling class vs. the working class
So when we think about who this bill is really for, this is why we call it the “Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires” because they say “Oh we’re going to cut taxes for people making this amount” but it’s basically chump change. Here’s why we always talk in Put People First! PA about both raw numbers and disproportionality. Sometimes people are constantly trumpeting this disproportionality piece, which is important – but they leave out the raw numbers. For example, they leave out the fact that there are 66 million poor white people in the U.S. today. But in this case, I want to draw out the disproportionality. They’re going to be like “Well in raw numbers, the people making between 53k and 93k that’s where most of the tax cut is going” because that’s like 75 million people or something. But it DISPROPORTIONATELY benefits not only the top 1% but the top .1% But I was on a Town Hall with a Congressman the other day who said “No no no, it’s not true that this is a tax cut for the wealthy because ‘most’ of the tax cut is going to middle class people. But the reality is that working class people (because middle class is a false narrative) – working class people are getting crumbs, even if because of our vast numbers they can add it up and say “most of the tax cuts are going to working class people”. But in reality it is disproportionately benefiting the wealthiest people in our society.
For example, this bill is a big boon for folks who own private jets or who want to buy private jets. If you go out and get a private jet you can now deduct %100 off of your taxes. So the private jet companies are super excited about this bill and they think it’s going to open up a new era of people traveling in private jets.
News headline about private jet companies excited about the bill
So what else are they doing with our money?
ICE funding is going to jump from 10 billion to 27.7 so it’s almost tripling. There’s a 150 billion increase for the war economy or militarism. There’s a billion in new tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry. And the bill adds 3 trillion to the national debt. As we can see when it comes to billionaires, the whole question of the national debt just gets thrown out the window – it’s not an issue anymore. It’s only an issue when it comes to funding for healthcare, and for food, and using OUR money to benefit the masses of people in OUR country. Which is the way that you know that we are not in power, the working class is not in power, and we weren’t in power BEFORE this election either, let’s be real!
Overall, what are our takeaways? How can we generally understand the Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaries?
Summary of how we can understand the “Big, Beautiful Bill for Billionaires”
Now let’s talk about Medicaid. As Rica said, we approach our understanding of this from a place of political independence. We have been fighting Medicaid cuts since the great Medicaid purge under the Biden administration. You wouldn’t know it from watching the news, from even seeing the protests and mobilizations that are happening on the ground. You wouldn’t know that 25 million got cut from Medicaid under President Biden, because it’s not really talked about as being a problem. This image is from the Department of Human Services website where they were tracking the cuts that started on April 1, 2023. Over the course of 1 year, more than 600k people in PA were cut from Medicaid. Over 280,000 because of paperwork issues, and more than 350,000 were cut because of income fluctuations. That’s more than 600k in just ONE year. That’s why we have been conducting our Medicaid cut-offs Organizing Drive. As Frank said in the video that we watched, we have been letting everyone know that when you get cut from Medicaid you have the legal right to file an appeal, and last year PPF-PA had a 93% success rate in winning those appeals and we’re going to keep doing that.
Graphic showing the Medicaid cut-offs in PA between May 1 2023 and May 1 2024
So these are the cuts that actually happened under the last administration. We know about them – they actually happened. The projection of healthcare cuts in PA due to the Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires: 270,000 projected to be cut from Pennie. 323,400 projected to be cut from Medicaid. That’s a total of 593,000 over the next 10 years. So let’s think about that for a minute. More than 600k cut from Medicaid in 1 year, under president Biden. Approximately 600k are projected to be cut from healthcare over the next 10 years under Trump. So that’s really interesting. This is still a problem, Medicaid cuts = death. We know that, we lived through it, we have been living through it.
But we need to be aware and understand the context of how we got here, because in the first place, if the last administration had actually enshrined the Medicaid Expansion, maybe we wouldn’t be here now. They’ll tout Medicaid expansion all day long. We need Medicaid expansion. These terrible Red States need Medicaid expansion, they’re so evil. Well guess what, we had Medicaid expansion and then they took it away. They took it away from the entire country. And if they had enshrined Medicaid expansion, instead of just using it as a political football, maybe we wouldn’t be in the situation that we’re in today, with the administration that we have today, with the 90 million people who didn’t even vote in the last election. Maybe we wouldn’t be in that position now.
Take a breath.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s comments upon the passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires”
This is the narrative (the speaker’s comments above) and I think it’s a very powerful narrative. It’s going to be very persuasive for people, so we have to think about not just “this is mean and this is evil” but understanding that when they’re talking about healthcare costs, and they have to do this to preserve Medicaid because healthcare costs are out of control – it is true that healthcare costs are out of control. That’s not a lie, that’s not a fabrication. But why?
Why is that? One third of people in the U.S. don’t have a primary doctor. 40-50% of us delay or don’t get care because of costs. Our working conditions, our housing conditions, our food system, our environment and our overall living conditions are making us sick. And the lack of preventative care in the healthcare system means that by the time we’re forced to get care we’re much sicker. 60% of adults in the U.S. have chronic health conditions and 40% have two or more. So we’re being set up and by the time we get healthcare we’re very sick. Another reason healthcare costs are out of control is because of price gouging by big pharma. I could have included here a photo of 5 cents to manufacture a common pharmaceutical but they charge $1000 a pill for it. At the end of the day the reason healthcare costs are out of control is that Wall Street owns our healthcare system and they are trying to make as much money as possible off of it. That’s the reason why healthcare costs are out of control, not because my neighbor is on Medicaid, or my cousin or my partner is on Medicaid, that’s not the reason.
Other aspects of the bill:
Summary of some other aspects of the bill
So what do we do? Organize, organize, organize.
We gotta tell the truth. We’re not here to do partisan politicking. We’re not here to lie to the people about Medicaid cuts and how they’ve been happening and when they started and what this real fight is.
We’re not here to lie to the people and tell them this is just about mean, greedy, evil people doing mean, greedy, evil stuff.
We’re going to tell the truth about how we got here.
We’re going to tell the truth about why healthcare costs are out of control.
We’re going to tell the truth about people on or excluded from Medicaid.
We’re going to tell the truth about the need for political independence.
We’re going to tell the truth about how we must build permanently organized communities.
And we’re going to tell the truth, that Healthcare is a Human Right!
Fight, fight, fight!!
View the full recording of the statewide call here.
First off I just want to say that this is a stressful time for almost everyone. This is not an easy period that we are living through – whether we’re accustomed to ongoing crises or we’re more recently waking up and feeling it. My heart and love goes out in solidarity to all of us who are experiencing fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, disillusionment, and many other challenging emotional states and real life consequences resulting from the crisis in the capitalist system.
But there is “hope”, many say, as evidenced by participation in the April 5th protests around the United States, broadly cast as “anti-Trump and Musk”.
My socials are filled with folks proclaiming how “hopeful” it is to see so many people take to the streets in these symbolic protest actions. And along with that “hope” comes the withering criticism of those of us with a “critique”.
We’re just so naive/misguided they say.“How can anyone sit there and criticize folks who are getting activated for not being “correct” or “radical” enough? We have to meet people where they are!”
And to that – I completely and unequivocally agree! My criticism is not with the people who showed up for this rally. That would be ridiculous. We need masses of people taking action together, now and always!
But I don’t believe that the turn-out is in and of itself a beacon of hope. It’s an indication of possibility, but it will take much more to turn that possibility into real hope. Just as faith without works is dead, hope without clear, connected, competent and committed leaders is empty.
Do you remember, or have you ever heard or read about what happened on February 15, 2003? 6-10 million people worldwide took to the streets to protest the Second Gulf War. The largest protest in human history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Wall Street interests prevailed, the war proceeded, slaughtering 1,000,000 Iraqi people in the course of the war and its aftermath. The U.S. service members who were forced to wage this war were crushed by Gulf War Syndrome, depression, and PTSD, as well as chronic health conditions from toxic exposures.
On November 4, 2023, the largest protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people took place around the globe, with estimates of more than half a million in the streets. The Israel-led and U.S. backed genocide rages more ferociously than ever. One child is killed every 30 minutes in Gaza.
In the course of the summer of 2020, an estimated 26 million people participated in protests connected to the George Floyd uprising. 4,600 people were killed by the police in the U.S. during the Biden administration. White people comprise the largest number of those killed by the police, while Black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by police with figures for Indigenous people ranging from 3-7 times more likely.
In his important book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution”, journalist and author Vincent Bevins examines the global wave of protests between 2011 and 2021, asking the critical question: Why have the upsurge of protest movements around the world not resulted in serious and lasting change?
Which brings me back to my point – what exactly is my criticism? Do I stand against “hope”?
Of course not!
And yet, I do believe that our hope must be based in reality, not fantasy.
Our hope must be based in each other, not the misleaders who have kept us on a treadmill of hope and despair, mobilization and demobilization, lying to us about the source of why things have gotten steadily worse across the entire working class in this country for the last 50 years.
Our hope must be based in each other, not the party that the ruling class used to continue to degrade the position of the working class through NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement (1993) which resulted in massive industrial job loss; Welfare Reform (1996) which replaced a social safety net with market-driven “workfare”; the Telecommunications Act (1996) which led to the rise of media monopolies and the age of disinformation; financial deregulation and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (1999) which led to the 2007-2008 financial crisis; the Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008), or the bailout of Wall Street at the expense of the working class, and the Affordable Care Act (2010) which preserved, expanded and protected the private insurance system that profits off our sickness and death.**
These are among the policies that helped pave the way for the degradation of our living conditions such that we now count 140 million people in the ranks of the poor or those of us one healthcare or housing emergency away – nearly half the country.
Just like we can’t expect an engine that runs on fossil fuels to belch out anything but polluted air, we can’t expect an economic and political system that runs on systemic racism, poverty, environmental devastation and militarism to produce anything but more of the same.
So I’m here for the big tent – believe me! The tent I’m building is big enough for 140 million people – and guess what – those people are hurting – across the color line, the party line, and the urban/rural divide. I’m not here to listen to anyone speaking from the podium who says that the problem is chiefly or exclusively Trump. I don’t want to go back to the normal of 2023-2024, when 25 million people were kicked off of Medicaid in this country. We need to go forward.
I’m here for the big tent – but my tent does not include the billionaires and Wall Street – the economic forces behind the two party system in this country.
I’m here for the big tent – but I refuse to be operationalized and co-opted by one section of the capitalist class in order for another section to prevail. We’ve been there before – we went from the period of Reconstruction after the civil war to the backlash of the Redeemers. We went from the upsurge of independent working class organization in the wake of the Great Depression to the New Deal Coalition which saved capitalism from itself. I refuse to set the table for the capitalist class to continue to eat while we starve.
The nationwide rallies can be hopeful IF:
The people attending and organizations turning out their members demand of the official sponsors that no politicians be allowed to speak from the podium. The primary task of these figureheads is yoking us to a hamster wheel of 1) mobilization, 2) demobilization and 3) voting for the bad or the worse because they are yoked to a system that puts profit over our lives and planet. Here’s a great example of what it means when poor folks take the stage.
They become moments to raise class consciousness, unite across issue silos, and talk about the fundamental problem. We are not a compendium of identity groups who need “allies”. We are a diverse working class trying to survive a war being waged on us by Wall Street, whether we currently know it as such or not. We need to get together, desperately, and see our common problems. We need people from the ranks of the organized poor to grab the mic, teach the historical and economic roots of this current crisis, shift the focus away from “experts” and “VIPs” and help the poor and dispossessed to understand ourselves as the only people capable of unsettling this society and putting us on a path of transformation. Here’s a great example from the Rev. Joe Paparone in Albany, NY.
We use them to bring people into the politically independent organizations of the poor and dispossessed. Many people are ready to mobilize, but not yet ready to organize. However, we need to train thousands of leaders NOW as we prepare for much bigger eruptions and outbursts that will inevitably result from the unsustainable organization of and relationships that govern our global economy. Those upswings and outbursts will not as easily be led, co-opted, and directed by the powers that be. As we raise the consciousness of the people turning out for “Hands Off”-style demonstrations, we can immediately begin to help those who gravitate toward us to see themselves as PART of the working class, not simply the “middle class”. This is the beginning of the journey for many folks getting mobilized right now. The work of member-led, staff free networks like the National Union of the Homeless and the Nonviolent Medicaid Army point the way forward.
Thank you for all that you do every day to put people first.
**[For further reflection: For those of us who voted for this party that has pursued these policies for the last 50 years – have we been voting against our own interests? Should we be held accountable – as everyday people with no property and power to speak of – for the massive social dislocations, hollowing out of our industrial base, depression of wages, culture of misinformation, out of control healthcare costs, the opioid crisis, deaths of despair? Are these things our fault for voting this way? Or were we simply making the best choice we felt we had at the time?]
There is a broad and fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the state in our society today.
The state is not merely elected politicians. As we’re (re)learning in real time, the state is an incredibly deep far-reaching apparatus of 3 million people who carry out the functions of the executive, legislative and judicial branches.
It’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), it’s USAID, it’s the Pentagon, it’s FEMA. It’s the IRS and the EPA. It’s 438 federal agencies and sub-agencies.
The state is an instrument of the class that rules. And what class rules, you ask? Well, spoiler alert, it’s not the working class. The Trump administration is funneling state control to an even fewer number of billionaires, but the reality has been (and will continue to be, should the nation be able to flip flop back to Democratic control in 2028):
Which all goes to show why this tweet is a great example of our miseducation as a class:
I hope you’re getting the point here – even before the intensifying and direct billionaire takeover of the state now playing out before our eyes, the politicians were “an executive committee to manage the affairs of the [capitalist class]”
The guts of the state apparatus are being exposed for the first time in our lifetimes. Let’s learn the right lessons, and not allow the billionaires to continue to confuse us anymore about the role of the state.
Stay tuned for part 2: Why I Don’t Believe in Comparing Social Change to Science Fiction where I will look at some current and historical examples of the state working in the interests of the vast majority (true democracy) rather than in the interest of a tiny minority.
