Friday, April 24, 2026
Thursday, April 23, 2026
Mayhaps: May Day and the Rebirth of Labor’s Imagination Labor
Mayhaps: May Day and the Rebirth of Labor’s Imagination
Apr 20
Written By Fred Glass
For many years I taught labor history at night to working students at City College of San Francisco. Since Bay Area workers and their unions had carried out two consequential general strikes (San Francisco in 1934, and Oakland in 1946), each semester I assigned my pupils an essay question: Is it possible—or even desirable—for our region’s workers, if faced with oppressive circumstances, to replicate those feats today?
My students’ essays appeared along a range of responses between two poles. On one end, no, not possible, even if desirable, due to changed conditions like suburban distances between home and workplace, along with the decline of union density. On the other, yes, both desirable and possible, because new communications technologies allow ideas and organizing to spread rapidly online, and labor’s steep decline means that workers are angry enough to make it happen. Few students in either camp thought it would be an easy lift, reflecting a general sense of limited horizons for labor-led progressive change in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.
The 1946 Oakland General Strike was the very last one American workers had managed to put together, literally a lifetime ago. But metaphorically, post-January 23, 2026, we might now be onto a new calendar. In the wake of the powerful “No Work, No School, No Shopping” day that erupted in the Twin Cities, alongside a steady drumbeat of growing demonstrations and electoral successes against the Trump regime, there’s wind in the sails for mass action on May Day 2026.
Just in my neck of the woods many events have already taken place, and more are on the boards, combining planning, training and coalition building for that once-unpopular holiday, officially observed in one hundred or so nations across the globe but not in the country that birthed it. I hear from a friend in Minneapolis that he’s been going to meetings attended by hundreds of people dedicated in a serious way to making May 1 another day of action.
We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of what happened January 23. In the midst of a brutal occupation by poorly trained, heavily armed troops operating with seeming impunity on behalf of their fascist mission of ethnic cleansing, the ordinary people of Minneapolis organized themselves to defend their streets, their democratic rights, their immigrant neighbors, and their idea of a decent society to demand “ICE out!”. Somewhere around 75,000 people showed up on a cold Minnesota winter day to freeze the gears of the local economy and the occupation.
It was pretty close to a general strike, and unlike all the other dozen-plus city-wide general strikes in American history it was waged not around an economic struggle between workers and bosses, but on behalf of a political idea, more like what happens every so often in other countries. Which is very much in the spirit of May Day.
Tools are there to be found
Doing such things will not suddenly become easier. The Minnesota circumstances are unique, with an unprecedented level of assault running into a recent baseline increase in labor-community alliance and activism. The ICE invasion reignited the embers of powerful alliance-building and union contract victories that peaked in 2024. But every city has its own local history, culture and traditions of collective action, and despite the diminished capacities of the labor movement, the tools are there to be found—providing they are sought out seriously.
One hurdle is the legitimate fear of labor leadership over legal consequences for calling a general strike, forbidden by the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, a federal legislative backlash by the Republican-controlled Congress against the 1946 strike wave. Unions can be fined and labor leaders jailed for overtly calling for sympathy strikes. Thus while mostly supportive behind the scenes, unions were muted in their participation in the May 1 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations and the November 2011 “Day of Action” in Oakland that shut down the docks and shuttered many businesses in support of Occupy Oakland’s call for a general strike.
Read more.
https://www.californiadsa.org/news/mayhaps-2026apr
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
May Day Organizing. National Education Committee
solidarity and to push for progress.
Across the country—from fruit fields in California to classrooms in Chicago, from kitchens in Queens to loading docks in Atlanta—working people are rising up. NEA members are joining other laborers, parents, education workers, immigrants, students, and neighbors demanding stronger, safer, and more dignified communities.
NOT Business As Usual. NEA Community Organizing Kit.
NEA Toolkit: https://www.nea.org/mayday-toolkit.
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Timothy Snyder : Super Power Suicide.
substack.com/pub/snyder/p/superpower-suicide?
https://superpower-suicide?open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/superpower-suicide?
War and AI; Bernie Sanders
May Day Mobilization -NEA
A step toward unity.
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Monday, April 20, 2026
A Day Without Immigrants + Sacramento
Friday, May 1 @10am: NorCal Resist 20th Anniversary of A Day Without Immigrants march and rally. Gather at Southside Park at 10 am. The event will include a rally at Southside Park, a march to the John Moss Building, as well as an art action with community speakers, musical performances, and food and beverages with NO ICE!
Call them detention centers or concentration camps -- whatever you call them, they’re inhumane, morally bankrupt, and political liabilities. Trump's trying to expedite construction of new camps, but because of the public outcry, he’s hoping to keep the whole business out of the headlines.
So let’s get loud about it. Let’s start with some facts and context.
Detention expansion is key to Trump’s goal of one million deportations. Last week, we finally got the Department of Homeland Security’s 161-page 2027 budget proposal. In it, DHS brags about a record-breaking 440,000 deportations last year, and promises to more than double that to one million of our neighbors deported annually.
Deportation camps are central to how they get there. DHS itself says the new camps are “critical to meeting…[the] tasked goal of arresting and removing one million aliens per year.” Detention Watch Network’s toolkit explains that the agency is looking to construct a couple dozen to house upwards of 10,000 people each, often for months on end in cramped and horrific conditions.
These camps are moral abominations. Since Senator Jon Ossoff started an investigation into ICE’s camps last year, he's received more than a thousand “credible reports of human rights abuses": mistreatment of pregnant women, separation of children from parents, physical and sexual abuse, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions. One grim statistic captures the scale of this horror: The death rate in ICE detention is increasing. In 2026, we’re seeing an average of more than one death every week.
These camps are also a political liability for Trump and his allies. The regime is trying to keep the escalation quiet because the more people hear about these camps, the more they oppose them. That backlash is a real problem for the GOP.
The peak number of detentions in US history came on January 24, the same day DHS agents murdered Alex Pretti for exercising his First Amendment rights to defend his neighbors. Public opposition exploded, the political winds shifted, and Trump made a tactical retreat. After their defeat in the Twin Cities, the White House advised Republicans to stop talking about mass deportations, and the number of detainees has dropped -- but the DHS budget proposal makes clear the regime still plans a massive escalation.
Grassroots activists are throwing sand in the gears, though, successfully rallying public opposition to the camps, including in red states. We’ve seen successful grassroots and legal campaigns in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, Texas, Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Michigan -- in Tennessee, the opposition of GOP candidates for governor and two dozen local GOP officials successfully killed a project.
On April 25, we're making a big stink. On Saturday, we’re joining Detention Watch Network and other partners on a national day of action against these camps. The regime can try to dramatically increase construction, but they can’t make us be quiet. As long as we have First Amendment rights, we intend to use them in defense of our neighbors. Read on for more ways to stand Indivisible with your community.
In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible
Your weekly to-dos
- Keep telling Congress: Trump's war has to end. Despite his erratic announcements of victory/ceasefires/imminent war crimes, Trump's war on Iran grinds on, at the expense of thousands of lives across the region, the wholesale disruption of the world economy, and soaring costs for Americans. We must meet Trump's incompetence and inconsistency with a steady determination of our own to neither give up nor give in. Tell your Members of Congress: Either they do all they can to end the war that Trump and Israel launched, or the blood is on their hands, too. After sending an email via the above link, please call your representative and your sena
I had conversations with high schoolers and retirees alike who were looking to get into organizing for the first time. There was urgency in those conversations. There was clarity, and resolve — but also hope, and joy. A sense that it is we, together, who make our futures. That no one is coming to save us, and that this is not a cause for despair, but for action. We alone are responsible for our democracy. We alone can build a future of dignity, peace, and abundance for all the people of this city and state.
No Kings was not the struggle. It was a place to meet, to count ourselves, to feel in our bones that we are not alone. The struggle is what comes next: in your union, in your neighborhood association, in your DSA chapter, in your school board meeting, in the conversations you have with your coworkers about why things are the way they are and how they could be different.
Saturday, April 18, 2026
May Day and A Day Without Immigrants
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Monday, April 13, 2026
Trump is in Trouble
Heather Cox Richardson. Letter from an American.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-10-2026?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
There is a great deal of important organizing in defense of democracy going on including the mass marches and hundreds of local actions of March 28. The next mass national action is scheduled for May 1, 2026. These events offer opportunities to connect with new people and groups, to deepen their engagement, to advance the advocacy for democracy within these movements and to build cooperative relationships between national and local resistance.
Sunday, April 12, 2026
Trump's Assault on Democratic Media
Last fall, Donald Trump signed a terrifying presidential directive called NSPM-7, ordering the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to investigate and disrupt progressive organizations and activists as potential “domestic terrorists.”
Now Trump is asking Congress to provide a huge increase in funding to ramp up the NSPM-7 crackdown.
This comes after the New York Times reported that the IRS and FBI have formed a joint task force under NSPM-7 to “attack the funding” of progressive groups, and leaked emails from inside the FBI indicate that state and local police are being enlisted to target progressive groups as well.
Friends, this is one of the biggest threats to democracy that almost no one is talking about.
The corporate media are so cowed by Trump’s bullying that they’ve barely even mentioned NSPM-7, so Inequality Media Civic Action is using our massive following across social media to sound the alarm and demand that Congress reject funding for these attacks on our First Amendment rights.
Under NSPM-7, the Justice Department is directed to create a secret list of organizations and individuals who hold any one of a long list of vaguely defined left-of-center views, including “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Americanism,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” or opposition to “traditional American views on family.”
Trump’s budget proposal further states that counterterrorism funding will be used to target progressives who “exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications.”
In other words, if you’re on the internet and oppose Trump’s agenda in any way, you could be on Trump’s secret domestic terrorist blacklist and get a knock on the door from the FBI.
These are the actions of an unhinged authoritarian dictator, and Trump must be stopped.
Unfortunately, the corporate media has been utterly silent about the threat of NSPM-7, so we’re ramping up our public education campaign and mobilizing opposition to Trump’s massive new funding request to implement this draconian assault on speech.
Robert Reich,
This is how democracies are killed.
Wednesday, April 08, 2026
Teachers Defending Immigrants and Democracy
Teachers: Work Together to Defend Democracy.
As pressures on faculty from the Trump regime increase,
I am working on a project Defend Democracy using Google doc to assist teachers and faculty to work together standing up in support public education and our constitutional rights and responsibilities.
There is a great deal of important organizing going on.
We are gathering materials, resources, and lessons plans for teachers and faculty to assist in presenting knowledge, skills and attitudes which engage in and promote democracy. For example, there are important materials on the role of immigrants in the U.S. and how to support immigrant students during the current political assault are available. At times this part of the approach to promotion of democracy has been known as civic education.
Example of existing policy on dealing with Immigration Enforcement, Twin Rivers Unified School District. Sacramento, California.
Immigrants and Immigration Resources and Lesson Plans.
Association of California School Administrators.
https://content.acsa.org/immigrants-immigration-resource-guide/
Many more in the Google doc. Including Share my lesson plans from the American Federation of Teachers.
A first step is to consider: How are students understanding the current political/economy and the political forces advancing the authoritarian agenda in this age of AI and social media dominating more balanced news coverage.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CrLpHJXDvu87NS5VrwqUuvidD8dtVlNshImkg6ikrIE/edit?usp=sharing
If readers know of additional sources, please post links in the comments area of this blog.
In our defense of democracy, there is no neutral ground.
Teachers. Don’t give up on democracy.
Your participation is needed In this crisis of democracy. Lets work together.
Posted by D.Campbell
Tuesday, April 07, 2026
Timothy Snyder. The President Plans Genocide Tonight
It is our responsibility as citizens of this nation to say unambiguously that what Trump is now threatening is truly evil. It’s our responsibility as human beings to demand that Trump repudiate this threat to other human beings. It is our responsibility to call on all other Americans, in whatever capacity, to stand up against this despotic act of pure immorality.
Write. Phone. Shout. March. Trump has moved beyond indecency into the realm of insanity. This must be stopped.
.......
Timothy Snyder
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These are not the words of Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or Assad, or Putin. These are the words of the president of the United States, today.
Do not be distracted by circumstances. Of course there are emotions, personalities, politics, a war. None of this excuses that sentence. The reason we have a notion of genocide, and a convention on genocide, is to define certain actions as always and definitively wrong.
Are these “only words”? No, they cannot be “only words.” As any historian of mass atrocity knows, there is no such thing as “only words.” The notion of killing a whole civilization, once spoken, remains. It enables others to say similar things, as when another elected representative compared the entire country of Iran to a cancer that had to be removed.
Whatever happens tonight, the president, by saying such things, has already changed the world for the worse, and made acts of mass violence more likely. If we are Americans, he has also changed our country. He has changed us, because he represents us; we voted for him, or we didn’t vote and allowed him to come to power, or we didn’t do enough to stop him. These words are America’s words, until and unless Americans reject them.
Yes, there have been other genocides, and there are other politicians who endorse genocide. That makes the words of the president worse, not better. Yes, the United States has undertaken atrocities before. That makes it all the more important, all the more urgent, that we catch ourselves now. Neither the evil nor the good in our history determines who we are. It is what we do now.
If we do not say something ourselves about this horror, we allow ourselves to be changed.
Around the president there will be people, sadly, who work deliberately to normalize the language of genocide. There will be other politicians who find the right words to reject it. One can hope that there will be politicians who find the courage to remove the man who speaks genocide from office. And these words should lead to resignations by everyone who works closely with the president.
But we cannot count on politicians. This is ultimately up to us, the citizens: for our own sake, for the sake of the future of the country, for the sake of a possibility of new beginnings, we need to say something, to someone else, to ourselves: this is simply wrong.
Whatever happens tonight, or any other night in this war, is now legally defined by the president’s statement. In the practical application of the law of genocide, the Genocide Convention of 1948, the difficulty is usually in proving “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Henceforth the intent is on the record, in the published words of the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces about the death of “a whole civilization.”
Article III of the Genocide Convention makes it clear that not only the person who issues the genocidal order is guilty. Genocide itself is of course a crime, where genocide means the intent that Trump expressed, and actions such as killing members of a group, causing members of a group serious harm, or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” -- which would of course include actions such as destroying access to energy or water. But also defined as a crime are conspiracy to commit genocide, incitement to commit genocide, attempts to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide.
We all have good ethical and political reasons to reject the president’s words. But those who serve in government, and in the armed forces, have been placed under the legal shadow of genocide by what Trump wrote. To bomb a bridge or a dam or a power plant or a desalinization facility, very likely a war crime in any event, could very well have a different legal significance, a genocidal one, if it takes place after the expression of genocidal intent by the commander and head of state.
The concept of genocide was created by a survivor and an observer of atrocities, Rafał Lemkin, so that we could see ourselves, judge ourselves, stop ourselves. But genocide is not only a concept. It is also a crime under international law, signed by the United States in 1948 as a convention, ratified by the United States as a treaty in 1988. That makes the words I have quoted here the law of the land.
The president speaks genocide. And so we too must speak. Not only about crimes, but about their legal punishment.
https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/the-president-speaks-genocide?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
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