BRIEFS

Supporting the Reclaim Rent Control Campaign in 2021
The rent control campaign continues on into 2021. We know this has been a hard year for so many people, and not everyone is in a position to give, but if you are able, please consider giving to support the Reclaim Rent Control campaign.

Funds are used to hold events, engage the public, and pay organizers to win the changes we need to win reforms and stop displacement.

Learn more about the Reclaim Rent Control at http://reclaimrentcontrol.org/

Virginia Political and Electoral Organizing for 2021 and Beyond – Saturdays @7pm Co-op Meetups
If you are aware of issues facing a majority of Virginians and have a desire for Virginia to be a true commonwealth that works for ALL, then you are invited to take this survey as the first step in achieving this goal. The data collected helps inform the direction and approach we take when planning new grassroots initiatives such as follows.

A number of progressive leaders from various communities in Virginia have come together to organize for Virginia’s 2021 elections and beyond. As part of that effort, we conduct weekly Zoom meetings Saturdays @ 7pm. The goal is to work towards building a statewide political co-op in Virginia similar to the RI Political Cooperative, as suggested by Krystal Ball of Rising in this segment. One of the major objectives of this co-op would be to develop an Inclusive Policy Platform which all candidates running for public office in Virginia would agree to run on and pledge to implement as a team.

If interested, please complete the survey and send your request for Zoom link to [email protected]. Looking forward to connecting and working together! Peace and Solidarity, Aliyah K

#ForceTheVote activists to rally in DC this weekend
Activists in the DC area have organized a march on the Capitol to demand a floor vote in the House for Medicare for All. Speakers will include progressive luminaries like former Bernie Sanders national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, candidate for Florida Congressional district 24 Christine Olivo, National Coordinator for Movement for a People’s Party Nick Brana, and many others. The event is not formally endorsed by DSA, but members from DSA’s Medicare for All working group will be participating.

Meet each day (1/2, 1/3 & 1/4 @ 9am EST) at Spirit of Justice Park. Three days of protests and marches to the US Capitol Building to #ForceTheVote on Medicare for All. The march/rally will end around 12pm every day.

What to bring: Your mask, warm clothes, walking shoes, your ID, signage + posters, water, snacks. This is supposed to be a low-risk event, and encounters with police are not expected.

MDC DSA CALENDAR OF EVENTS

NATIONAL DSA CALENDAR OF EVENTS

Saturday, January 2 – Monday, January 4

9am – 12pm | Force the Vote Rally

Friday, January 8

7pm | Our Revolution MoCo Legislative Priorities Town Hall
With Dels. Julie Palakovich Carr, Gabe Acevero, Vaughn Stewart and David Moon.

Tuesday, January 12

5:30pm | ONE DC’s Shared Work Training
Join ONE DC for their Shared Work Training, a workshop with direct testimony from DC residents around Black unemployment, learn about the Shared Work program from NELP Staff Attorney Nzingha Hooker and hear from Addy Baird, a Shared Work participant, on best practices when approaching an employer about the program.

More information about the program can also be found here. Register here for Zoom access and more info.

INFO ACCESS

Publications Schedule — Our Publications Working Group will publish MDC DSA’s January weekly Updates on Fridays — January 8, 15, and 22 — and the February issue of the Washington Socialist will be emailed Friday, January 29. To submit articles for the monthly Washington Socialist newsletter, send them to [email protected]. Contact us at that email address OR join the #publications Slack channel if you are interested in joining the Publications Working Group — to get vital information to ~3,000 local chapter members and another ~3,000 nonmember activists in the DMV who get the Update too.

And speaking of Slack — Are you an MDC DSA member who wonders how to get on our chapter Slack? Just email [email protected] and identify yourself as a member. Put “request for #Slack” in the subject line. Use the email address by which national DSA knows you. If you are a new member, forward the email receipt that national DSA sent you acknowledging your status. Please be patient; our admin committee is loaded with chores and shorthanded to boot. Our Slack platform, with numerous channels for all our caucuses, branches, campaigns and working groups, is a great place to get connected with the kind of socialist work YOU want to do in DSA.

GOOD READS

From mid-December: Stream of a panel “Indigenous resistance in a world on fire” from national DSA Ecosocialists and others.

From The Intercept: A reconsideration of a classic work of labor history now being republished.

From the New Left Review: whatever happened to “fake news”?
“… the term fake news has barely been used in 2020 [actually, that’s news to us] when just three years ago it was rampaging across the media, with legislation drafted on it in various parliaments. It is not as if the world has grown more truthful over the past few years, yet now it seems to have been almost deleted from our vocabularies. Which suggests the opposite question: how come it was only in 2017 that a stunned humanity discovered that lies are told in politics and war?”

Subsiding or thriving as a concept, some of the main carriers of “fake news” nevertheless are the big social media and search platforms. Here’s a very thorough roundup of the issues surrounding the (highly recommended here) public control of those platforms as public utilities.

How hard is the climate fight going to be? One writer has said, in his article “Deep Adaptation,” that it’s already over and humanity and the planet lost. Others disagreed and pushed back. This NYT article rounded up the exchanges.

Circulated by our comrade Dave Richardson, from Common Dreams:
Neera Tanden and Antony Blinken Personify the ‘Moderate’ Rot at the Top of the Democratic Party

From Politico: Trump’s unplanned gift to Biden: Clean energy on the rise — Oil and gas producers are struggling amid weak prices and growing pressure to address climate change while wind and solar technologies are soaring — a trend that will assist Biden in making a U-turn in energy policy from the Trump administration’s.

Our local comrade David Schwartzman, a scholar and published author on the climate crisis, has a critique of a new film, “We Demand Tomorrow,” on Popular Resistance site: He calls the self-described Marxist documentary on the climate-extinction crisis “well worth seeing, with its deep analysis of capitalism.” but suggests that in the film, “the dismissal of the Green New Deal (GND) as another capitalist solution is not helpful. There are many versions of the GND, not only those promoted by “green” capital, but an alternative ecosocialist Global GND.”

From StreetsBlog USA, a review of the utterly awful 2020 for mass transit: With its instant 75% collapse in mass transit use and political institutions’ refusal to provide more than half of the financial support systems needed to survive the pandemic, “To say that 2020 was an unbelievable year in the sustainable transportation world would be a profound understatement — and to break it down into a neat list of wins and losses is an impossible task. Because in 2020, every “win” occurred against a backdrop of vast death, suffering, and injustice, and every “loss” happened amidst a surge in mutual aid, fierce advocacy, and stunning resilience at the community level.”

Where can labor and working people look in 2021 for next steps? Esther Wang in Jezebel proposes a candidate: Sara Nelson, the Labor Movement Leader We Needed Most

And a GREAT READ as Trump heads for the exit: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Huck and Jim fall in with the traveling con men who call themselves the Duke and the Dauphin, and the two stage a show in a small riverside town, which provides a few minutes of prancing and elocuting but not the promised full-length tragedy. As they bid the audience farewell,

“Twenty people sings out: ‘What, is it over? Is that ALL?’

The duke says yes. Then there was a fine time. Everybody sings out ‘Sold!’ and was a-going for that stage and them tragedians.

But a big, fine looking man jumps up on a bench and shouts: ‘Hold on! Just a word, gentlemen.’ They stopped to listen. ‘We are sold — mighty badly sold. But we don’t want to be the laughing stock of this whole town, I reckon, and never hear the last of this thing as long as we live. NO. What we want is to go out of here quiet, and talk this show up, and sell the REST of the town! Then we’ll all be in the same boat. Ain’t that sensible?’ (‘You bet it is! — the jedge is right,’ everybody sings out.) ‘All right then — not a word about any sell. Go along home, and advise everybody to come and see the tragedy.’ “

And that’s just how Trump sold his base.

Happy New Year!

Ages have come and gone, kingdoms and powers and dynasties have risen and fallen, old glories and ancient wisdoms have been turned into dust, heroes and sages have been forgotten and many a mighty and fearsome god has been hurled into the lightless chasms of oblivion.

But ye, Plebs, Populace, People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat, live and abide forever.
- Arturo Giovannitti