First Event Held by DSA For Bernie

DSA North Texas for Bernie is a committee within DSA North Texas that will be working over the next few months (and hopefully beyond) to elect Bernie Sanders, while also pushing forward a socialist vision for the world we could have. While our focus is in Dallas, we will also build a presence, as capacity allows, to lead efforts in other parts of our region, particularly where Bernie had a strong showing in 2016. Our committee is comprised of a campaign coordinator and four subcommittees: Research & Data, Field Work, Comms/Media, and Fundraising. We will be doing this work as an IE, or an Independent Expenditure. Our first public event had over 30 people in attendance, and we look forward to seeing everyone at future events!

To join our efforts, please fill out this form.

Flyering Campaign at West End for People's Climate Plan

The DSA NTX Ecosocialist Working Group have been developing our socialist response to the Dallas Climate Plan since we discovered early in 2019 that plans for an official Dallas Climate Plan were in the works. We set out to produce a short list of specific and concrete ecosocialist demands or goals that we as the DSA want to work for going forward in Dallas, demands which would both constitute a real response to climate change and benefit and strengthen the working class and oppressed. 

We were guided by our local work on public transit and environmental justice and pollution, by the national DSA Ecosocialist Green New Deal principles, and by the history and theory of similar documents of specific socialist demands from socialist parties of the past, outlined in Parker McQueeney’s article “Why Socialists should have a Political Program”. Our current ecosocialist program for Dallas, a set of 20 demands in 5 categories, can be found at https://dsantx.org/peoplesclimateplan/. 

We completed our work on the program in time for the second round of public feedback to the official Dallas Climate Plan process. We put together a two sided one page flyer with our complete program on one side and the program divided into suggested responses to the city’s open ended online survey questions on the other. From October 26th through the remainder of the month, we handed out flyers to DART riders at the West End DART station, asking that people fill in the city’s survey online with at least some of our suggested responses. This was an excellent opportunity to talk to people about ideas from our program like free public transit for all and energy democracy. The deadline for responses has been extended to Nov 7, if you are a Dallas resident and haven’t filled out the survey yet!

We had a lot of good conversations with DART riders about our program, and many people took flyers and said they would fill out the online survey. The city has not done a good job reaching out to residents about the survey; only one person we talked to at West End Station had even heard of the survey and filled it out already, because they were a city employee. And before we began flyering, only 300 people in the entire city of Dallas had responded to the survey. 

On October 28, we had a joint event with NTX Our Revolution to hear a presentation from City of Dallas employees on the current state of the Climate Plan process. The presentation was informative; we found out that there will be several more opportunities for us to talk to the public and put pressure on city officials between now and the final presentation of the complete Climate Plan on Earth Day 2020. 

It is our hope that with enough responses to the city of Dallas survey in support of our ecosocialist program points, and with continued public outreach and pressure around our ecosocialist program, the city will at minimum have to research the legal and other obstacles to taking over Atmos and Oncor, or to providing free public transit at the point of service, and make that research public. This will give us a road map to organizing for free transit and energy democracy in Dallas going forward.

October General Meeting

At our October general meeting, we had our first constitutional convention. We had an open discussion on several resolutions and bylaw changes which had been submitted prior to the meeting. The proposed bylaw changes can be viewed in full at the links below:
 

• Code of Conduct
• Co-chair monetary asks to be transferred to Treasurer
• Ranked Choice Voting
• Voting on working group leads
   

After discussion, these friendly amendments were added:

• Ranked Choice Voting
• Co-chair monetary asks
• Working Group Voting

Chapter voting on these bylaws and amendments will take place at this Sunday’s November general meeting. Additional, our chapter will present the candidates for these elected positions at the meeting:

• Co-chairs (3 positions)
• Secretary
• Treasurer

The electoral working group provided a brief presentations on the state elections which consisted of ten constitutional amendments and a House district race for Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson’s previous seat. Other working groups provided quick updates before we broke out into working groups.