National Welfare Rights Organization 1968/Jack Rottier

Right-wing talk-show host Glenn Beck has called her “one of the nine most dangerous people in the world.” DSA is proud to call her an honorary chair. Political scientist and sociologist Frances Fox Piven has inspired and angered political activists for decades. Almost 50 years ago, the Nation published an article by her and her colleague and husband Richard Cloward in which they argued that, with Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, poor people should claim the welfare benefits to which they were entitled. The result would swamp the system and lead to something new, a guaranteed annual income, which would end poverty as we knew it. The Cloward-Piven strategy, as it became known, was seen as a way for powerless people to take advantage of disruptive moments to make more than incremental gains. Later, the strategy was expanded to include massive voter registration drives. Cloward and Piven, with George Wiley, helped found the National Welfare Rights Organization, which, for a few years, was the militant voice of heretofore voiceless welfare clients. Michele Rossi talks with Piven about the impact of Bill Clinton’s so-called welfare reform and its enduring impact on the poor. —Ed.

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kloniwotski/Flickr

By Michael Hirsch

The figure of a gryphon, the legendary feral, clawed, winged creature that nests above the one-square mile City of London, Britain’s financial industry (akin to Wall Street, but with its own legal authority, too) is an apt symbol for an untrammeled center of global capital. A creature of prey, it is redolent as the guardian of ill-gotten, even murderous gain. What else is the financial center of the United Kingdom, which introduced the tax-free zone that modeled capital flight around the world?  The City predates the Cayman Islands or Switzerland as tranches for tax avoidance and is a main locus for starving the welfare state.  

Portland DSA Collecting Signatures For Bernie

By Dustin Guastella

Scene I: You’ve set up your table. The Socialists for Sanders sign can be seen from ten feet away. You’re wearing a DSA T-shirt. The table is stocked with flyers on Bernie’s positions. The sign-up sheet is in front of you. You’re building DSA and Sanders’s campaign. Someone walks up to the table.

Scene II: You’re at a party and somebody notices your Sanders button or T-shirt. “He seems like a nice guy, but what does he stand for?” “I like his ideas, but I really want a woman president.” “He doesn’t have a chance.”

By Bill Barclay

Every year sometime in early April we reach the point where the average U.S. female worker has earned as much as the average male worker did in the previous year. It’s called “Equal Pay Day.”

But there’s another pay day we should be marking: the day on which the typical U.S. CEO of a large company receives as much compensation as the average worker will for the entire year. In 2016, that came very early: about lunch time on January 5^th, the second work day of the year. The remaining 258½ days are gravy for the CEO. He – and it usually, although not always is a he – is piling up pay that the typical worker will never get.

Metro Atlanta DSA members (from left to right) Barbara Joye, Minnie Ruffin, Barbara Landay, Brandon Payton-Carillo, and Adam Cardo marching to a Bernie fundraiser in Atlanta in September. Photo: Reid Jenkins.

By Elizabeth Henderson

From Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, to New York City and Washington, D.C., DSA locals and organizing committees are recruiting members, developing leaders, and connecting with new communities through work on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Conversations with local leaders from around the country show that people are more receptive to talking about socialism as a result of Sanders’ candidacy.

By Rev. Andrew J. Wilkes

We live in strange times. We have a black president using race-neutral framing for social justice, alongside a Black Lives Matter movement using structural racism framing for participatory democracy. Killer Mike, a Southern rapper best known for his work with the Grammy Award-winning superduo Outkast, has endorsed a sitting U.S. senator and self-described socialist, Bernie Sanders. Some black preachers, apparently, are tripping over themselves to cozy up to Donald Trump or reposition themselves within the arc of Hillary Clinton's historic candidacy. Strange times indeed.

Municipal sanitation workers went on strike in March 1968 for higher wages, union recognition, and respect for black personhood. Credit: AFSCME

By Thomas F. Jackson 

In 1968, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300 municipal sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and medical establishment blind to their existence.