In this centerfold we are focusing on California, where the poverty rate is the highest in the nation. In this state, what you might call an insurgency is developing—an uprising of people who are struggling for their very survival. The Democratic Party is splitting, polarizing, and dividing between its corporate wing and its progressive wing. The fight for immediate demands—for the right to health care and housing, for protection from the climate crisis—is the driving force behind the call for new Democratic leadership. People oppressed because of their race and/or immigration status are at the heart of the growing movement.
At the same time, people are organizing against mass incarceration, the expansion of jails, the killing of our youth; they are organizing to resist ICE and protect migrants and immigrants from deportation and imprisonment. As we report this month, in California, organized resistance is also growing against police sweeps of houseless communities and the growing criminalization of houseless people, which includes proposals to force people into shelters and mental health facilities that don’t exist. On another front, city-by-city, people are organizing to oppose school closures and the push for more charter schools which drain public school budgets. At the community college level, students and faculty are taking stands against the criminal disinvestment in higher education.
An emerging, diverse, multi-ethnic class—a new part of the working class —fuels this movement. Members of this new class can’t get a secure foothold in the rapidly automating economy of California, or they have lost the foothold they once had because their jobs have been eliminated or downgraded due to the rise of robotics.
We have choices as we organize and vote. We don’t have to accept the plans of the wealthy corporations to abandon and drive out the millions of human beings that they no longer need in the high-tech economy. We can stand up for the equal dignity and sacred value of every human life on the planet, and all life on earth as we know it. As another winter begins, deluging with rain the multitudes living on the street, we need to think about housing, health care, and education for all our people—not the profits of the billionaire corporate class.
