by Alfrieda Hylton | Jul 16, 2021 | Blog, Criminal Justice, Featured, overdose crisis, Race
The War on Drugs has been with us for more than fifty years, and hasn’t been a war on drugs at all. It’s been a war on people: people like me, and my family. Black people. The part where it was supposed to decrease drug use? That part failed. I live in Prince George’s...
by Brenda Siegel | Jul 7, 2021 | Blog, Criminal Justice, Featured, Opioid Crisis
On June 1, Vermont became the first state in the nation to remove criminal penalties for possession of “therapeutic amounts” of buprenorphine. This amounts to a one- to two-week supply of this lifesaving treatment for people who suffer from Opioid Use Disorder....
by Ellen Glover | Jun 17, 2021 | Blog, Featured, overdose crisis
Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “full scale attack” on drug use. It was the beginning of the War on Drugs. Nixon — and many presidents since — promised the War on Drugs would save lives. Trillions of dollars later, incarceration...
by Ben Levenson, Connie Huynh | May 20, 2021 | Blog, COVID-19, Featured, Health, International, Trade
Even as COVID-19 vaccines roll out in the United States, there is no end in sight to the pandemic for the vast majority of people in the world. Many in Central and South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East won’t get access to COVID vaccines until 2024. This is...
by George Goehl | Mar 8, 2021 | Blog, Featured, Organizing
The time has come for an organizing revival. Where we celebrate the evolution of this craft, and reground in organizing fundamentals that transcend form and context. We have shifted an organizing field that was largely designed to win the best thing possible in the...
by Tom Conway | Mar 7, 2021 | Blog, Featured
Patricia McDonald layered on sweaters, socks and mittens and huddled under blankets for 15 hours as the temperature in her Duncanville, Texas, home plunged to 42 degrees last week. Well after the water in her kitchen froze, McDonald decided she’d had enough and braved...
by Eshawney Gaston | Mar 6, 2021 | Blog, Economy, Featured, I Speak
I’m one of America’s millions of essential workers. We’re working in your children’s schools, at your grocery stores, and at drive-through windows. We’re cleaning your homes. And we’re struggling so hard to make ends meet. Congress is debating whether to raise the...
by Steven Rosenfeld | Mar 5, 2021 | Blog, Election, Featured
After winning a lawsuit to take possession of all of the 2020 presidential ballots and election equipment in Arizona’s most populous county, Arizona’s Republican-led Senate is poised to take 2020’s post-election brawls into new territory where investigating unproven...
by Tom Conway | Feb 16, 2021 | Blog, Featured, Future of Work, I Speak
Dave Dell Isola, the son and grandson of union members, grew up grateful for the family-sustaining wages and benefits that organized labor won for working people. But he never fully grasped the might of solidarity until he and his wife, Barbara, and their two sons...
by Jeff Bryant | Feb 16, 2021 | Blog, Education, Featured
Supporters of public education and school teachers were relieved to see Betsy DeVos leave her job as head of the Department of Education, knowing full well the education policies she and former President Trump supported would go nowhere in a President Biden...
by George Goehl | Feb 12, 2021 | Blog, Featured, I Speak
There’s no getting around it. Organizing is hard. But the context you are organizing in right now? It’s a whole different thing. When I was coming up, the expectations felt big. People in the neighborhood were being screwed seven ways to Sunday. So, each night we’d...
by Kaniela Ing | Feb 9, 2021 | Environment, Featured, Future of Work
Luxury development, Hawai'i coastline Photo credit: Kai Nishiki It’s invigorating to see some of our leaders finally reckon with the most abiding problem of American climate politics: that green does not always mean equitable. Many well-meaning climate policies have...
by Jodi Risper | Dec 22, 2020 | Blog, Criminal Justice, Election, Featured
Black People Showed Up for Biden; Now We Need an Attorney General Who Will Show Up for Us President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris have both struggled to answer for their histories of promoting “tough-on-crime” policies which have harmed Black...
by George Goehl | Nov 14, 2020 | Blog, Democracy, Election, Featured
Like all of us, I’ve sorted through many feelings this week. And, there’s been one constant. Gratitude for organizers. If you take organizers and the local institutions they’ve built off the table, Donald Trump is a two-term President. I feel certain of that. To be...
by Miles Mogulescu | Sep 1, 2020 | Featured, Politics
1932 paramilitary rally, Spandau, Germany. Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia Commons / cc My political views have pretty much been aligned with those of the activist left for my entire life. I supported Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic Party nominee for...
by George Goehl | Aug 3, 2020 | Election, Featured
As a young organizer, I was told we shouldn’t engage in electoral politics - that it was dirty, and a distraction. But after a long run of not winning what we most needed, it became crystal clear that operating only in a landscape created by someone else was not...
by Church | Jul 31, 2020 | Blog, COVID-19, Criminal Justice, Featured, Health
Photo credit: Monroe County Sheriff / Twitter / cc In May, Citizen Action of New York, part of the People's Action national network of grassroots groups, learned of a man being held in indefinite detention because of COVID-19. We asked him if he would be willing to...
by Miles Mogulescu | Jul 31, 2020 | Blog, Democracy, Election, Featured, Protest
Photo credit: Spider Martin GPA photo archive / flickr / cc John Lewis, the Georgia Congressman who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was one of the "Big Six" civil rights leaders who organized the 1963 March on Washington, is being...
by Sondra Youdelman | Jul 31, 2020 | Blog, Democracy, Economy, Featured, Health, Jobs and Growth, Protest
One of every five working Americans – more than 32 million people – have lost their job to COVID-19. A tsunami of evictions will come unless lawmakers take meaningful action now. Unemployment is rising - again. Hunger is rising, too. And cases of COVID are rising...
by Ravi Mangla | Jul 28, 2020 | Criminal Justice, Democracy, Featured
Photo credit: Sgt. Joe Davis, Utah National Guard / cc For decades, we’ve been told that policing is a public good: available to all, for the benefit of all. But in practice, that’s never been true. One of the basic measures of a “public good” is that it’s accessible...
by Miles Mogulescu | Jun 30, 2020 | Blog, Election, Featured
“Don’t Mourn, Organize.” - Union organizer Joe Hill, before his unjust execution in Utah in 1915 “Shut up and dribble.” - Laura Ingraham to LeBron James for commenting on racial justice Dear LeBron, Basketball fans endlessly argue about who’s the greatest player...
by Steven Rosenfeld | Jun 15, 2020 | Democracy, Election, Featured, Politics
Photo credit: National Archives, USDA / cc The signs kept coming that Georgia’s June 9 primary would not go well. On the last day of early voting, the Friday before the election, Jon Ossoff, a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, waited for more than three hours to vote...
by Joy Blackwood | Jun 15, 2020 | Blog, Democracy, Featured, Military, Politics, Protest
Photo credit: Ted Eytan / Flickr / cc “Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man (or woman), you take it.” - Malcolm X So much has changed in our nation’s Capital since my last Letter from D.C. That time of hope...
by Jeff Bryant | Jun 12, 2020 | Democracy, Education, Featured
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr / cc As American deaths from COVID-19 crested 100,000, the New York Times reported U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos declared her intention to “force” public school districts to spend a large portion of federal funds they’re...
by Warren Tidwell | Jun 11, 2020 | COVID-19, Environment, Featured, Future of Work, Immigration
Photo credit: Hometown Organizing Project / cc Workers throughout Alabama are reaching out to me to sound an alarm on what they are seeing inside meatpacking plants.This piece started out as an informative piece on how and why the COVID-19 virus is spreading rapidly...
by A.J. Albrecht | Jun 10, 2020 | Environment, Featured, Future of Work, Inequality
Photo credit: Government Accountability Office / cc The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on disturbing injustices in our food system—reaffirming the need for systemic change. Slaughterhouses (euphemistically called “meatpacking plants” by the meat...
by Miles Mogulescu | Jun 9, 2020 | Blog, Election, Featured, Inequality, Race, White Nationalism
Whitehall Street, Atlanta Georgia, 1864. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / cc Billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Jamie Dimon may personally associate with individual African Americans, Latinos and other minorities. They might even employ them. They...
by Tom Conway | Jun 8, 2020 | Blog, Democracy, Election, Featured, Inequality, Protest
Photo credit: Rosa Pineda / Wikimedia Commons / cc When demonstrations erupted across the country after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers, Donald Trump portrayed the protesters as America’s enemies. Trump called them “thugs,” “lowlifes” and...
by April Short | Jun 5, 2020 | Blog, Election, Featured
Photo credit: Tim Brown / GPA Photo Archive / cc Even before COVID-19, the U.S. has had one of the lowest voter turnout rates among developed countries. This is a critical election year, and even before the pandemic, it was a voting season unlike any before in...
by Kenza Hadj-Moussa | Jun 4, 2020 | #PeoplesWave, Blog, Democracy, Featured, Protest, Race
Memorial to George Floyd in Minneapolis. Photo credit: Take Action Minnesota / cc First published by Take Action Minnesota on June 4, 2020 Today, George Floyd’s memorial was held in Minneapolis. The pain, rage, and grief across the Twin Cities is palpable. At the same...
by Steven Rosenfeld | Jun 3, 2020 | Blog, Election, Featured
Voters in line in Union City, Georgia. Photo credit: All Voting Is Local / Twitter / cc More in-person voting sites in metro areas. Better information about where polls have been relocated. More public education about how to vote from home and what to do if an...
by Rick Krajewski, Nikil Saval | Jun 2, 2020 | Breakfast, Democracy, Election, Featured
Philadelphia politics are being transformed: block by block, and door by door, upstart candidates for the multiracial working class are stepping up. The same grassroots organizers who helped elect a progressive champion as the city’s District Attorney in 2017 – Larry...
by About Face | Jun 2, 2020 | Blog, Democracy, Featured, Military, Organizing, Protest
An Open Letter from Veterans to Recently Activated National Guard Troops Attention Members of the National Guard, We write you as fellow veterans and service members with full knowledge of what’s at stake as many of you are being asked to mobilize against civilians in...
by Thom Hartmann | Jun 1, 2020 | Blog, Criminal Justice, Featured, Supreme Court
When you tell people they won’t be held accountable for their actions, it almost always ends badly. That’s what’s happened with our police and our social media, two institutional pillars of personal and political society in America today. Removing those dual...
by Tom Conway | May 31, 2020 | Blog, Featured
Rich Carmona spent decades upgrading his 1970s ranch home in Midland, Mich. He lovingly installed new flooring and doors and remodeled the bathrooms. After finishing the kitchen 18 months ago, he finally had the house the way he liked it. Then the 96-year-old...
by Alan Barber, Hebah Kassem, Sanjeev K. Sriram MD | May 27, 2020 | Blog, Featured, Health, Inequality
Photo credit: Sara Eshleman, DOD / cc From alarming death rates for Black, Latinx and Indigenous people to the fact that women of color make up an astonishing percentage of the essential workers putting their health on the line, the coronavirus pandemic is hitting...
by Bernie Horn | May 26, 2020 | Blog, Election, Featured, Health, Politics
Photo credit: Dylan Harukami, USAF / cc COVID-19 has killed 100,000 Americans so far and, due to his numerous lies and mistakes, Donald Trump is substantially to blame. Let us focus on one particular catastrophic mistake, discouraging Americans from using masks in...
by Thom Hartmann | May 25, 2020 | Blog, Conservatism, Democracy, Featured
Photo credit: DOJ, Wikimedia Commons / cc Trump’s first national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, had a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, just after President Obama had imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016...
by Jeff Bryant | May 22, 2020 | Blog, Education, Featured
Zia Middle School, Las Cruces, NM. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / cc “I think we’re all going to be different after this,” Mary Parr-Sanchez told me in a phone call, “but I don’t know how.” Parr-Sanchez is the current president of NEA-New Mexico, the National...
by Steven Rosenfeld | May 21, 2020 | Blog, Election, Featured
Photo credit: DOD / cc More than 30 statewide elections are being held between now and August 18, previewing how unfamiliar or difficult absentee voting may be across America this fall. The next big test is June 2, when eight states and the District of Columbia hold...
