Let’s Seize the Moment

By Maria Svart

I’m sitting on a panel on Medicare for All (M4A) at the Women’s Convention in Detroit in October. And I’m realizing again how critical DSA’s work is in this moment. There are 4,000 women at this conference. Probably a few hundred of them identify as socialists.

How to Sustain the Resistance to Trump and Win

Paul Engler, Sophie Lasoff

The Resistance Movement against Trump has been powerful —  but how do we keep it going?

We are in the midst of one of the largest social movements of our time, with record numbers engaged after decades of demobilization. The Women’s March was the largest single day of protest in American history, with about four million people participating.

By Harlan Baker

Frances Perkins

“At the time she was a socialist she couldn’t vote,” says Chris Cash about Frances Perkins. “It was no secret she was a democratic socialist. It was her camp.”

Cash does educational outreach at the Frances Perkins Center, which is tucked away in a small alley off the main street in the picturesque town of Damariscotta, Maine. Although the center doesn’t highlight Perkins’s socialist sympathies, it aims to educate the public on her legacy, which was inspired by her socialist sympathies.

By Lion Summerbell

In October, the Trump administration was expected to announce the loosening of regulatory restrictions on the sale of small arms. In practice, this would mean Commerce taking over licensing of small arms sales from the State Department. Under the Obama Administration’s Export Control Reform, the Commerce Department was meant to assume sole supervision of defense exports. Small arms would have gone over to them in 2013, but then Sandy Hook happened, and White House scuttled its plans in the face of a potential public backlash.

By November, no announcement had yet been made. Stephen Paddock murdering 59 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on October 1 may or may not have had something to do with that. If so, this will be the second time that the only thing stopping a new wave of small arms proliferation turns out to be a lethal abundance of small arms. 

By George Lakey

A century ago, the Nordic countries were in such bad shape that masses of their people emigrated to the United States and Canada. Scandinavians had extreme inequality, major poverty, and faux democracies run by their economic elites.

Today, they are at the top of the international charts, playing tag with each other for “firsts” in individual freedom, income equality, shared abundance, and real democracy. Fierce class struggle made the difference. In the 1920s and 1930s, Swedes and Norwegians pushed their 1 percent out of dominance to invent what economists call “the Nordic model.”

By Immigrants’ Rights Committee- DSA

On September 5, 2017 President Trump repealed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA has provided legal protection for 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the United States as children by their families, but its repeal threatens to divide families, pull children out of schools, and force workers to quit their jobs.

By Lawrence Wittner

In recent months, advances in the North Korean government’s nuclear weapons program have led to a sharp confrontation between the government leaders of the United States and of North Korea.  This August, President Donald Trump declared that any more threats from North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”  In turn, Kim Jong Un remarked that he was now contemplating firing nuclear missiles at the U.S. territory of Guam.  Heightening the dispute, Trump told the United Nations in mid-September that, if the United States was forced to defend itself or its allies, “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”  Soon thereafter, Trump embellished this with a tweet declaring that North Korea “won’t be around much longer.”

Statement of the National Political Committee of Democratic Socialists of America

November 25, 2017

President Trump came to office allegedly aiming to “drain the swamp” of privileged “special interests.” But the tax proposals put forth by Trump and the GOP are a gift to these same interests, an all-out assault on equality, and class warfare waged by capital. We urge all DSA locals to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and Jobs with Justice rallies against the tax cuts at local Senate offices on Wednesday November 29th! Check with your local CWA or Jobs with Justice office. At a minimum call your Republican Senators and urge them to vote no. Click here to see how.