The DSA's AFROSOC Caucus channels Stalin

The official Afro-Socialist and People of Color caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America succeeded in forcing the cancellation of an online forum co-sponsored by the Lower Manhattan and Philadelphia units of the organization because it didn't like what the speaker was going to say.

That speaker was to be Adolph Reed, a Black Academic, holding forth on "Dangers of Disparity Ideology," which, as best as I understand it, is that the questions of the race (and unstated but implicit, ethnicity/nationality) of Covid-19 victims should be ignored so at to not to obscure the issue of class.

If I can be forgiven for being so old, Reed's theses is the sort of idiocy I've been hearing since I was in high school and sneaking into Students for a Democratic Society meetings at the University of Miami in 1969 where adherents of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party's "Workers-Student Alliance" Caucus sang the praises of the strategy, "Black and white, unite and fight," i.e., putting aside issues of race.

But the truth is that this idea --and especially grey versions of it, not quite so starkly Black-and-white as I painted it above-- have a huge amount of currency in the new socialist movement that has arisen in the United States in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and Sanders 2016 and 2020.

Yet the statement put out by AFROSOC demanding Reed's scheduled webinar be turned into a debate (with whom? we were never told!) says quite clearly that all the comrades who are inclined to agree with him should be driven out of the DSA: "It is a reactionary and class reductionist form of politics that should have no place in DSA."

Read it again: "should have no place in the DSA." In this way, the statement makes clear no debate was wanted or intended.

Inside the AFROSOC/POC Caucus, the trick that was used to impose this Stalinist notion was to present for a vote two options: demand that the event be cancelled or that it be turned into a debate.

The point was to make it seem like demanding the debate was something other than censoring Reed and preventing him from having his say.

But "demanding a debate" --especially under current Covid-19 circumstances-- the day before an event is not a serious demand.

The word "debate' was just a way of provoking enough of a ruckus so that the event would be cancelled. And the result was that the lead sponsor, a Lower Manhattan DSA branch committee, did cancel it, supposedly because Reed decided to withdraw, some said, but who knows.

So let's not bullshit each other: the effect was exactly what was intended. Reed's viewpoint is simply verboten, not allowed, beyond the pale: "a reactionary and class reductionist form of politics that should have no place in DSA."

This idealist, moralistic way of posing the question, a "form of politics that should have no place in DSA" brings out sharply what it wrong with it: right now, it does, in fact, have a place within the DSA. That is material reality. The actual truth of the DSA as it exists: not a statement of what I wish would be true, but, on the contrary, simply a statement of the facts on the ground.

Let me repeat: it is a fact the those ideas are in the DSA, shared to a greater or lesser degree by many members.  Hence the importance of a real discussion, and even debate, and thus the attraction of the debate demand. The Caucus rejected demanding that the event be cancelled but through the 11th-hour debate demand, in practice, on the ground, in the real world, it led exactly to that outcome: cancellation. That is what was wanted by the instigators: "should have no place in DSA."

But if you really think you can dictate that people abandon their erroneous opinion, you might want to check how far the Catholic Church got with its campaign against the heretical idea that the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around. You can force someone to recant. But it still moves.

It will take time, discussions, and most of all experience in further struggles for those current DSA members who hold ideas like Reed's to discard them. And some never will. Believe me. Been there. Done that. Despite that some --many-- will be excellent socialist militants, in real life, on the ground.

Yet there may come a time when people with such ideas and those of us who reject them might not be able to coexist in a common organization. But the Afrosoc position paper claims that the moment has already arrived:

Efforts like these have proven to be incapable of building a multiracial working class base for socialist politics. More importantly, events like these undermine the organizing work DSA is doing in Black, Indigenous and people of color communities. DSA already gets smeared for being too white (which it is) as if it’s irredeemably white and that only communicates to BIPOC folks that they shouldn’t join DSA. What do these DSA organizers think they’re saying to their BIPOC comrades by hosting this kind of event? How do they think this event is going to help in our efforts at recruiting a more diverse DSA?

This is preposterous. To think some Black or Latinx activist is going to be held back from joining the Metro Atlanta DSA, my chapter, because in New York a committee from one of a half dozen branches held an online forum that promoted supposedly bad ideas to literally handfuls, if not dozens or even a hundred people, is absurd.

On the contrary, I think a group really grappling with these issues both in theory and its activism would prove immensely attractive to young militants. Those are the sorts of issues that hooked me into getting involved in SDS way back when.

But the same can't be said of a group where you suddenly face peremptory demands coming out of the blue to brand as anathema certain ideas and shut down all discussion of them (and with the supposed moral authority of ALL the "people of color" in the organization, even though fewer than 30 actually voted, out of hundreds or perhaps thousands of POC members).

But the issue of why the DSA has not become a more diverse organization is an immediate and pressing one. And I wish I had a comprehensive formula for solving this, but all I have is a very modest grain of sand.

Delegates to our last DSA convention ratified by an overwhelming margin --the highest of any resolution by far-- a text saying the DSA should orient to Latinx communities beginning with establishing a Spanish-language web site with its own editorial board.

Given the weight that the Afrosoc/POC statement on Reed's forum gives to making sure even a local New York online event "is going to help in our efforts at recruiting a more diverse DSA," one would think a body that is supposed to be the primary expression of oppressed minorities in the DSA in general would have assiduously followed, step by step, the efforts made by the national staff and National Political Committee to implement this convention mandate.

Has the Caucus done that? No it has not. And how do I know that? With apologies to Bernie:

I wrote the damn resolution.

The tremendous concern of those who run this DSA grouping for getting people who are not white anglos to the DSA has been absent in this case even though the resolution specified a goal of 90 days, and we've already tripled that.

And this Caucus has not lifted a finger --nay, not even a toenail-- to push for the implementation of this resolution. Shutting down Adolph Reed from having his say under DSA auspices to literally several if not dozens of comrades who mostly would not agree with him anyways was of overriding importance.

Trying to get the DSA to address the tens of millions of people in this country whose primary language is Spanish ... that can wait. Forever.

What this suggests to me is that this DSA Caucus might be vulnerable to being accused of fraud. Despite the claim that it is representative both of Blacks and other "People of Color," in reality Latinos are officially 18% of the U.S. population, by far the largest nationally oppressed group in the United States, but it does not seem to strike the Caucus leaders that their priorities and actions should conform to that reality.

Which raises the obvious question: if this caucus doesn't work, why not organize a Latine caucus? And the answer is that the DSA has been such a catastrophic failure in attracting Latinx people, and in providing vehicles through which a message like this can reach a large percentage of the membership, that trying would likely be a waste of time.

But if that is so, can the DSA really become the organization so many members want it to be, the political expressions of the multinational/racial U.S. working class?

Official: April jobless was 19.5%, not 14.7% Unofficial: the truth is even worse, 31.6%

It was there, not quite in plain sight, but buried on page 11 of a 14-page FAQ on the impact of the pandemic on the jobs report, which was referenced in a technical note attached to the end of the mind-numbing statistical dump that the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues once a month....

7.5 million were counted as just absent, not unemployed

Basically, the survey takers classified many millions whose work places had shut down as absent but employed (like for example someone on vacation or ill, whether with or without pay). The Bureau of Labor Statistics admits they should have been classified instead as being on temporary layoff. 

It turns out that people being surveyed for the unemployment report are asked whether they were at work during the reference week (the week that includes the 12th day of the month), and if not whether that was because they were laid off, furloughed, on vacation, ill, etc. or absent for some "other reason." People who say they were furloughed or laid off but expect to be called back to the same job are unemployed. Those absent due to vacation, illness or whatever, including "other reason" are still employed.

Those counted as employed but absent for "another reason" jumped from 620,000 in March to 8.1 million in April. After much explicating and analyzing, adding and subtracting, the FAQ admits these are really virus layoffs.

And thus we come to question 14 of the FAQ:  "What would the unemployment rate be if these misclassified workers were included among the unemployed?" (And, yeah, it was in bold in the original.)

If the workers who were recorded as employed but not at work the entire survey reference week had been classified as “unemployed on temporary layoff,” the overall unemployment rate would have been higher than reported....

 If these 7.5 million people were to be considered unemployed on temporary layoff, the number of unemployed people in April (on a not seasonally adjusted basis) would increase by 7.5 million from 22.5 million to 30.0 million.... The resulting unemployment rate for April would be 19.2 percent (not seasonally adjusted), compared with the official estimate of 14.4 percent (not seasonally adjusted). Repeating this exercise ... with the seasonally adjusted estimates ... yields a similar 4.8 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate for April—or 19.5 percent, compared with the official seasonally adjusted rate of 14.7 percent. [Emphasis added]

How can one possibly justify reporting such a colossally flawed statistic? Well, "According to usual practice, the data from the household survey are accepted as recorded. To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are taken to reclassify survey responses."

But even that correction paints a false picture. The government also keeps track of people who have been looking for a job but not in the previous four weeks (2.3 million so called "discouraged" workers), as well as those who have only been hired to work part time but want full time jobs (10.9 million "underemployed").

Together with the officially unemployed, these are included in another unemployment measure, called "U-6".

The April report pegs it at 22.4% using raw figures and 22.8% with the seasonal adjustment. Adding the 7.5 million "misclassified" (their word) brings it up to 27.3% and 27.7%, assuming the seasonal adjustment would also be 0.4%.

And there's still one more problem.

The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job, at 9.9 million, nearly doubled in April. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the last 4 weeks or were unavailable to take a job.

It is pure sophistry and bad faith to say that in the middle of a pandemic where the government is ordering people to stay at home, shutting down schools and closing businesses and plants, those five million extra people that just showed up aren't obviously people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

Especially when the rate of labor force participation and the percentage of the population that has a job both plunged to levels not seen since Richard Nixon was President, as the report itself explains. That pretty much proves that what you've just done is disappeared millions of people from the statistics.

I leave aside the cynicism of saying that people who don't have a job, want one and are wuilling to take one but don't fit the government's definition of "looking for a job" should not count as unemployed.

So here is what we have: 22.5 million officially unemployed in the monthly report. Add to that 7.5 million misclassified, 2.3 million discouraged, 10.9 million underemployed and 9.9 million who want a job but don't count. That's 53.1 million, and works out to 31.6%.

On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, what if Covid-19 were the cure, not the disease?

We just blew through the 50th anniversary of Earth Day without even noticing.

I'm old enough to remember the first one, and that I was an 18-year-old college freshman who thought there was some validity to it but mostly the focus needed to be on Imperialism and the Vietnam War, as well as racism, which was the war at home. I thought mostly the liberals were using the environment to distract us.

Just saw a link to something being promoted by Michael Moore, "Planet of the Humans," with tagline something like "what if a single species dominated the entire planet?" Posted on account of Earth Day.

Didn't watch it; watched something else and then wrote this instead.

Despite most definitely being of that generation, I don't believe in Gaia or all that crunchy granola kind of thinking. I don't believe the planet or the universe is conscious, a spirit being ...

But for some reason, I do believe in poetic justice. And while I don't believe this pandemic is the cure outraged deities have prescribed for the infestation of this planet, yet the next one might be ... a simple virus, with an incubation period of a few days, like this one, including a period during which you're contagious but asymptomatic, but with the mortality of Ebola, untreated AIDS or perhaps just this mortality, but like the Spanish flu of a century ago, killing mostly younger adults, not the elderly.

Not the physical disappearance of every last homo sapiens on the planet -- there are usually survivors -- but enough initially to cause civilization's collapse and that collapse taking care of most of the others.

That comes from the link I actually did click on the YouTube page where Michael Moore's post also appeared, which was to a documentary about the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations more than a thousand years BC.

It explored the theses that the root cause may have been climate change ... the sudden emergence of a much drier climate in the eastern Mediterranean.

Which is the other fevered Covid-19 nightmare: it is neither the wipe-out pandemic, nor a foreshadowing, but a distraction from finally trying to ward off the climate going crazy, as it appears to have done at the end of the bronze age.

You may think we're scientifically and technically advanced enough to cope. That may be, but it may also be true that our political class and institutions are so corrupt and decrepit as to put salvation beyond our reach.

Look at Western Europe and the USA: China gave us the sincerest possible warning: they did complete lockdown on a province with more people than Italy or Spain.

We blew it so completely that both here and there we have infections and deaths orders of magnitude greater than China's.

Were I to believe in Gaia, I might think the Coronavirus was mostly her way of warning us to fix the way we handle our common affairs. Whether climate change or another pathogen, we cannot continue as we are and survive, at least not most of us.

Coronavirus: either very low risk or deadly, urgent health emergency ... but not both

The following is something I posted on a bulletin-board service in my neighborhood that I belong to. Someone posted a viral email from James Robb, MD, a virus doctor. It provoked a lively debate about the U.S. Government's actions on coronavirus. The link above has the email as well as background info on Robb. I also checked him out on the Internet, and the top anti-bullshit site Snopes.com has even more background info. Dr. Robb may be mistaken, but he is totally legit.

What, me worry? Boomers should realize that
this is not about "the" future but about our future.

On the facemasks debate: what the government is trying to convince us of --facemasks provide NO benefit-- is patently false, as the viral letter from the virus doctor explains. By preventing you from touching your face, and especially your nose and mouth, you avoid contamination from viruses on the surfaces you touched.

However, when you think about it, it is obvious this can only be minimal protection, and there is a very strong argument to be made that, given the shortage, every last mask should be reserved for use by actually infectious patients (so they don't spread the disease) and especially for our health care providers.

And that should be done by the government simply taking control of the entire supply. Eminent domain. And, of course, pay compensation to the owners and suppliers.

But Trump won't do that so we get the cock-and-bull about the face masks being so absolutely useless and worthless that people shouldn't buy them so that they can be available for medical use where they are most needed. One or the other. Confiscate all the face masks and punish the sellers because they're a fraud or requisition them as a desperate necessity.

I wish the government would stop treating us like children.

I watched Mike Pence's press conference Wednesday. The risk is low, just ignore it, go about your normal life, nothing to see here. If THAT were true there wouldn't be a White House task force meeting around-the-clock and holding daily press briefings. The White House hadn't had a press briefing for most of a year before this. Now every single day. Really?

And then I saw that in Seattle, people with "underlying" medical issues like high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, pregnancy or cancer, as well as those over 60 should stay home and especially avoid places where there are people, and the more people the more you should avoid them.

You know how that makes a cancer survivor with high blood pressure and heart disease who is about to turn 69 feel? Grateful not to be pregnant or have diabetes, but I've changed my twitter handle to "Likely coronavirus fatality."

For whom the bell tolls, or why my name on Twitter is now "Likely Coronavirus Fatality"

And so it begins ...

In Kirkland, a Seattle suburb, a 59-year-old man with no travel or other known contact with the epidemic died Friday. He tested positive for the virus, and was the first American to die of the disease.

Also in that same suburb, although no link to the dead man has been reported, a long-term-care nursing home is off-limits after a resident and a caregiver both tested positive for coronavirus. Fifty more patients and caregivers have come down with symptoms, but their tests aren't done yet.

A nearby fire department station has also been declared off-limits because of exposure to ill seniors at that nursing home. Two dozen firefighters and  have been quarantined, along with two police.

Three days earlier, on Wednesday, we were told a woman from Vacaville, California, an hour northeast of San Francisco, had tested positive for the virus.

She had been hospitalized for ten days, first at a smaller hospital, before being taken to the U.C. Davis medical center in Sacramento. She'd had no travel outside the U.S. or contact with anyone who might have been exposed to Coronavirus so she wasn't tested until U.C. Davis doctors insisted the Federal Government's Centers for Disease Control bend its rules and test her because, although she had no known link to the epidemic, her doctors had ruled out all other causes for her illness.

After that first case, the CDC made more exceptions. So on Friday, another California woman with no know source of contagion became a confirmed COVID-19 patient, this one being treated at the Mountain View El Camino hospital. If you saw the news stories, notice how none of them mention Silicon Valley, though the hospital is a 10-minute drive from Apple headquarters.

Friday night, another unknown source case was confirmed out of Oregon, in Lake Oswego. The person had fallen ill February 19. After seeing it in the news, I had to Google it to find out it was just 8 miles south of the center of Portland. The patient is an elementary school employee. The school is now closed until Wednesday.

It was only on Saturday, after the emergency cover-your-ass press conference Trump called on hearing of the first dead American, that we learned of the CDC's hyper-restrictive tests policy.

The announcement was that the CDC had relaxed its rule of only testing people with travel to international virus hot spots or had other direct links to the epidemic. Now people hospitalized with a respiratory syndrome that aren't positive for a flu virus or bacteria can be tested, too. And local labs,  not just the CDC in Atlanta, will be able to test for the disease.

From this information we must assume there are now active outbreaks in the Seattle, Portland, Silicon Valley and Vacaville areas, and early in the week we will hear of dozens more cases there, as the work of tracing contacts and placing them under quarantine really gets underway.

But almost certainly there are other outbreaks --perhaps many more-- that will come to light now that the CDC has abandoned its head-in-the-sand no tests for 99.9% of Americans policy.

Especially in major transportation hubs, like Atlanta, where I live. If the virus is already widespread in the wild, how could it not be in the city with the world's busiest airport?

A number of cases wouldn't already have drawn attention because we're in the middle of a very active flu season: in the big majority of cases there is no difference a patient or doctor can see between influenza and COVID-19 without laboratory tests.

The WHO international expert mission to China report published on Friday, Feb. 28, emphasizes that most transmission in China has been within families. Many Chinese live in multi-generation traditional families that are rare in the United States.

The report notes that in the relatively few infections detected among minors (2.4% of the total) the children were tested because others in the household were sick. A Chinese CDC study of 44,000 confirmed cases said there were no deaths among children under the age of 10.

That's the good news. The bad news is that COVID-19 has it out for seniors. The majority of the deaths in the Chinese epidemic have been of people 60 or over.

The death rate among those over 80 that have been infected is 15%. For those reported as "retirees," it is 9%. Your chances of dying also are higher if you are male, have had cancer, have high blood pressure or have heart disease.

What they don't say is what are your chances if you are close to 70, retired, and a cancer survivor that's been diagnosed both with high blood pressure and heart disease, all put together.

And on top of that if you have the bad luck to live in a country run by a narcissistic jackass who insists on saying Coronavirus is a hoax to make him look bad and gives happy-talk press conferences highlighting how very few cases we've had but forgets to tell you we have so few because his CDC had been refusing to look for them.

So, yeah, they way things have been going, call me Likely Coronavirus Fatality.

Why I am withdrawing from the DSA Socialist Majority Caucus

[The Democratic Socialists of America held their national convention in Atlanta August 2-4. I was a delegate and candidate for the DSA National Political Committee. I was also a member of the Socialist Majority Caucus although not on its slate of candidates, in part, I am sure, because other caucus members realized, as I did, that increasingly my views diverged from the approach the steering committee had decided on with the support of active caucus members.

[That approach was to become, in essence, a faction like the other main factions operating prior to the convention, one called Bread and Roses (formerly the Spring Caucus and prior to that Momentum), Build (which curiously claimed not to be a caucus), and the Collective Power Network. 

[There was also a North Star Caucus that operated as an ideological tendency rather than a faction because it did not seek to place a slate of its own members on the National Political Committee. In my view the difference between a tendency and a faction is that the latter seeks to place its own people on leadership bodies, which tends to transform the group into a disciplined fighting organization, a faction.

[Simultaneously with publishing this, I'm also informing the caucus through its internal mailing list that I am withdrawing from the grouping.]

DSA members in the Socialist Majority Caucus and I'm sure others who read carefully  my campaign leaflet for our recent DSA convention cannot possibly have failed to understand that I was criticizing the way this and other caucuses wound up functioning:

    Finally, I am running against factionalism. We need to channel our discussions and collaboration through structures and spaces which are open to everyone in the DSA.
    Members have a right to form caucuses, but caucuses carry a price. Separate discussion lists, private zoom calls, by-invitation-only conventions, “whipping the votes” through one-sided phone conversations, these practices undermine the cohesion of the DSA and can even compromise the integrity of the organization.

What I wanted and understood to be an aspect of the Socialist Majority project originally was the idea embodied in the "this caucus is not a caucus" proposal for its name, a formation that, yes, favored a range of ideas we have in common, but especially what I thought was a common view on the right way to function in the "big tent," multi-tendency organization we are all for.

And that way is to combat the fragmentation into caucuses for essentially no good reason. And having ongoing caucuses now seems to me to be unjustified at this stage of the organization.

Even for a convention, factions should not be formed on the basis of affinity, agreement with general principles, friendships and associations developed through collaboration on common projects, followers of particular individuals, electioneering for leadership posts, etc., but --if necessary under certain circumstances-- on concrete differences over what the organization should be doing and how it should function.

The difference that justified a caucus in my view was precisely that we should not be functioning with these permanent factions but that they should be dissolved into the general organization, not by some sort of prohibition, but by convincing comrades not to function in this way. In addition, I think I made a mistake in supporting Single Transferable Vote (STV) election for the NPC, a type of proportional representation, which very strongly encourages factional functioning merely for electioneering.

I now think we simply should have let delegates vote for 16 people and, subject to our gender and people of color demographic requirements, let the raw number of votes for each determine the winners.

I really found extremely off-putting and essentially undemocratic the way caucuses tried to game the STV system by urging delegates not to vote their best judgement, but asking different comrades rank the candidates in various sequences on the basis of some formula or calculation. I think this sort of "tactical" voting undermines individual and collective integrity. We end up voting for a faction and not candidates. If that's the way it is going to be then it should be proposed, honestly, openly and transparently, that voting be for slates.

I realize I have an extremely distinct outlook. I may be the only one in this caucus or among the delegates who in the past was centrally involved in the leadership of a leading socialist organization that I helped destroy through undemocratic practices, trumped-up disciplinary expulsions, and all sorts of underhanded maneuvers and manipulations.

Nothing going on in the DSA today resembles what happened decades ago in the Socialist Workers Party, but at any rate, I think certain lessons are applicable.

Sill, I've decided not to try to start a discussion to convince comrades in this caucus to dissolve now.

I've realized from discussions in my local and at the convention that younger comrades find my views on these issues almost completely inaccessible if not downright incomprehensible. A discussion would be a fruitless exercise.

Better to concentrate on the practical work. And practical collaboration is now the best way to try to get away from the fragmentation of the DSA into rival factions.

On the results of the DSA convention: exhilarating but a little frustrating

This is what the future looks like: a convention of millennials committed to transforming the United States.

Some 1,000 delegates and I'm not sure how many volunteers and other members met in Atlanta August 2-4 for the biannual convention of the Democratic Socialists of America.

On the daily radio show I co-host, I said that as a delegate I found the convention incredibly exhilarating although at times frustrating -- and, ironically, for the same reason.

The DSA has grown explosively over the past few years and is now more than ten times the size it was when the Bernie phenomenon first exploded in the summer of 2015. That growth shaped the convention.

For a life-long socialist who first read the Communist Manifesto in high school more than half a century ago, and after a few years of radical upsurge had to live through decades of retreats, it was just incredible seeing this completely new generation of fighters grappling with how to advance a movement now looked to by literally tens of millions of people in this country.

Especially because this is a totally new generation, overwhelmingly without experience in the socialist or any other movement not weighed down by the mistakes of 20th century socialism. But this freshness also showed in so much time consumed by procedural wrangling, instead of political discussion. Yet the way the DSA is today, that was inevitable.

The main contested issue at the convention as I saw it was between a layer of comrades that wanted to foster greater decentralization by taking financial resources away from the National Office and giving them to local organizations. I think the claim to help especially the smaller Locals is legitimate and many delegates su[ported them. But the main resolutions proposed went beyond that, promoting a dis-empowering of the DSA as a national organization. But a more cautious resolution on the same issue (also by an Atlanta delegate) was approved.

The decentralizers lost by around a 55 to 45 margin on their resolutions, although I did not keep a close tabs on the exact count, and the margin might have been a little bigger. But a more cautious resolution on the same question (by one of our Atlanta delegates, by the way) was approved.

Dues sharing may seem like a strange main issue. But there was overwhelming consensus at the convention on the practical tasks and priorities for the DSA, things like medicare for all, an ecosocialist green new deal, tenant justice, immigrant and refugee rights, and, of course, backing Bernie -- to name just a few causes that DSA'ers are involved with.

On the resolutions I felt most strongly about, the one I wrote on orienting to the Latinx community starting with a Spanish-language web site, received the highest vote (88%) on the "consent agenda," a list of resolutions with so much support in a pre-convention delegate poll that they are voted and ratified as a group at the beginning of the convention.

The second-highest vote on that "consent agenda" was for an immigration resolution calling for open borders, which I also supported even though I would have changed some of the wording.

Another resolution also approved on that list was a resolution I co-authored on immigration work. It said, in part, "The National Immigrant Rights Working Group shall approach immigrant rights organizations ... to help to organize national-scale mobilizations" against Trump's immigration policies, and indeed the steering committee of the working group has already met and started to aggressively implement this provision.

A third resolution from Atlanta approved on the consent agenda was by City of South Fulton councilman khalid, demanding presidential candidates support reparations for Black people.

I did run for the national leadership but was not elected, nor did I expect to be. As the convention drew closer I realized that I wanted to focus on how the way I view things is very different from most other comrades, and on explaining why.

So among other things I wrote extensive comments on the Open Borders resolution, dealing with imperialism and Latino identity even though those were side issues and I supported and voted for the resolution.

I explained my overall priorities for changes in the DSA in a piece I published here and as a campaign leaflet that was distributed at the convention. That stressed the DSA needed to focus on the Latinx and Black communities, not mainly as a question of organizational resources but a political orientation. I also insisted this meant focusing on the South, and the real situation on the ground in these and other Republican-dominated areas needed to be taken into account in our national projects.
ts

Language justice and the DSA's internal culture in relation to the Latinx community were central topics in a blog post also published on an internal forum. The piece explained why I was refusing to sign a "motherhood and apple pie" transparency pledge that was backed by almost all other NPC candidates. My explanation also had an extensive polemic against the factionalism that was being promoted by the way most caucuses were functioning (and still are).

This may seem like a Quixotic campaign. But my original motivation in running for the NPC was to make sure that the Spanish-language web site and immigration resolutions were implemented if approved.

With the overwhelming support they received and seeing a number of millennial Latinx comrades who are strongly involved in the fight for immigrant rights running, and some were sure to be on the incoming NPC, that was no longer a big issue. So I decided to switch to a propaganda campaign that I hope started to raise some issues I care deeply about and I think will be important for the DSA going forward.