bourgeois democracy is where the masses currently engage in politics. Getting DSA people elected helps us with not getting thrown into camps and killed which is what the current government is doing and also helps to bring people into a funnel towards communism. The ends is not the means.
The easiest dub. DSA could win in some republican districts by being a one issue platform of anti data centers.
Growing a leftist bloc in the belly of the beast has not seen anywhere close to this much motion in my lifetime. Your job as an organizer is not to naval gaze at libs and reactionaries for liking to vote. It’s to go to where the working class is currently at and funnel them into a movement of class solidarity.
I pointed to quite a few things in this comment that it changes for organizers. If you are a socialist and don’t consider yourself an organizer, you’re a complainer on a the internet. What does that change?
Behind the scenes, the reason DSA needs the Dems is because of all the data they have on voters and the infrastructure that comes with that data. The issue is they’re not building their own infrastructure to hold onto that data. If the uniparty finds a way through laws or other means to strip DSA from using it, the electoral strategy is pretty much gone.
I’m already tired of the Ultra moniker and it’s only been like a week since they moved on from tankie. I find it really odd to be against electoralism in the Empire when that’s where the masses are. Elections have a long history and people love voting.
The reality is once your candidates win and invariably they are tied-up by the systemyou have something to point to. When they don’t follow through on their promises you can once again ask for more and point to elections are not enough. A win-win for organizers. Even Kshama’s long standing criticism of the progressive Dems can only be done because they won elections. It gives all of us a frame of reference, including those in power.
But anyways the article is mid. Kshama and those around her are awful at organizing the masses, but good at getting a select few to be devout to the Kshama banner and that’s the last thing we need. Organizers talk about the $15 min wage they did more than a decade ago (in collaboration with other orgs and unions) as their big claim. There have been no new leaders that have come from their movement and anytime a new socialist steps up outside their org in the community Kshama immediately comes out to shit on them. I really hope they go away, but I know they have the funding to continue fucking up organizing for a long time.
PSL are not Trots, Trots whole MO is to be sectarian.
Not to mention the numerous labor unions her org has tried to take over and force a quick strike leading to everyone getting fired. Her political instincts are awful.
They joined and then immediately alienated all the black and brown people in the org.
He got it! Let’s fucking go!
I don’t have many rules for these candidates and really couldn’t care less if they call themselves Socialists or not. Protect leftists from getting murdered, don’t rip into AES, and stop funding the military/be anti zionist anti imperialist . Outside of that have some progressive agenda and I’m good. They ain’t bringing in the change we want regardless. That’s on us to organize.
We can’t have multiple discussions? These are the discussions happening, we should think about how to frame them.
I turned off this interview, Norm was flinging awful opinions everywhere. Starting with talking about his good friend Noam Chomsky and i turned it off when he started blaming Arab racism on woke. He says some vile shit I don’t agree with.
I think the best way to call this out is to demand Jewish people and their groups end all ties to Israel. Rather than labeling all Jewish people as [insert trope here] or giving a xenophobia pass bc of the ongoing genocide.
Yeah I thought that said 500k
If they weren’t also libs that would be a good thing. When you have power use it
Alex what is a faraday cage
Them not having trust in adults and pro genociders is about as hopeful as you can ask
In the late summer of 2016, as the city scrambled to reinspect apartments for lead paint hazards, Mikaila’s blood lead level hit 37 micrograms per deciliter, nearly eight times the amount that prompts Health Department action.
After the Housing Authority told the Health Department that the lead could not have come from its apartments, Mikaila’s family said she was still not herself, by turns lethargic and hyperactive. Occasionally, said her grandmother, Ordeen Broomes, she wailed with discomfort. A third blood test in late September 2016 showed she still had very high levels of lead.
So the Health Department returned to both apartments and again found lead, according to city records, this time in dust on the floor. At this point, the Housing Authority relented. Workers came with a bucket of cleanser and a special vacuum to suck up the dust.
But no one looked for the source of the lead-riddled dust, according to city records reviewed by The Times. The Housing Authority declined to comment on Mikaila’s case, citing the pending litigation.
Mikaila, now 5 and a kindergartner, has not required any special attention at school, her mother said. Still, said Max Costa, a professor and chairman of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine, her experience is “going to totally affect her life, and there’s no way you can reverse it.” The family’s observations are consistent with those effects, Mr. Costa said.
Ms. Broomes, who works for the Parks Department, wants to get her family out of public housing. But it is a struggle.
On a recent evening, she sat at her dining room table holding her head in her hands. A cockroach fell from a kitchen cabinet. Another climbed the wall.
About a year after Mikaila tested positive for lead, maintenance workers painted, patched over a large hole in the wall and laid new tiles on top of her crumbling linoleum floor, Ms. Broomes said. Problems persisted, she said, but saving money for a private apartment or a house was difficult.
As she spoke, Mikaila, sitting beside her, arched her eyebrows at the thought of a house.
“I want stairs for my room,” Mikaila said. “I want stairs so I can go up the stairs so I can go to my room. I want to get a back garden and I want to plant some seeds.”
This spring, the judge in the tenants’ case ordered new inspections, saying there was a “credibility issue” with testing overseen by the Housing Authority.
A new round of visual checks this year found hazards such as peeling paint in 92 percent of the apartments that were checked.
Federal authorities have said the city Housing Authority failed to conduct lead paint inspections and then falsely claimed it had. The revelations have hurt Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reputation as a champion for public housing.CreditJeenah Moon for The New York Times
Not that long ago, the city was busy trying to convince a court that lead was a widespread hazard throughout its public housing. In 1989, city lawyers sued companies that made lead paint, accusing them of knowingly selling a poisonous product, much like the successful lawsuits against tobacco companies.
The lawsuit failed. Nycha’s own design specifications showed that except for two developments — Williamsburg in Brooklyn and the Harlem River Houses in Manhattan — the authority had never used the specific type of lead at issue in the suit. Another type of lead was more commonly used on building components, but that was not part of the lawsuit.
From 1998 to 2004, Nycha inspectors testing a sampling of apartments concluded there was lead in less than a third of its buildings. The inventory became a kind of bible: The apartments in buildings that were not on the list, such as the Gowanus and Tompkins Houses, where Mikaila lives, were assumed not to have lead.
But Nycha could have known something was most likely wrong with the list by watching its youngest tenants.
New York State law requires children to be screened for lead exposure even before they can walk, and annually up to age 6 if they are at particular risk. If the amount of lead in a child’s blood hits a certain threshold, it sets off a mechanism: The doctor contacts the city Health Department, which sends an inspector to test the child’s home for lead paint.
In 2015, 171 children in New York City public housing tested positive for elevated lead, down from 517 in 2010.
The Housing Authority was ordered by the Health Department inspector to remove lead in a child’s apartment an average of two dozen times a year from 2010 through 2017, records show.
But city and court records show the authority rebutted the Health Department’s findings as a matter of routine.
Deborah Morrison measured her son Saheed’s growth on a door inside her home at the Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn.CreditKholood Eid for The New York Times
The Health Department would do a test using an X-ray fluorescence device called an X.R.F. analyzer, which looks like a ray gun and can measure lead through layers of paint. Nycha would follow up by digging out samples in the apartment and sending them to a lab, called a paint-chip test.
In a 1999 affidavit, Brian Clarke, then the coordinator of the Housing Authority’s lead detection and abatement unit, had disparaged the paint-chip technique. “A false negative can result,” he said in an affidavit.
But the paint-chip test eventually became the Housing Authority’s preferred method to challenge the Health Department’s tests.
“By the course of business, when we issue violations, Nycha does their own check,” Michel Meulens, a Health Department inspector, testified in October 2017 in a trial involving a child who tested positive for lead in 2003. The case ended in a settlement.
Mr. Clarke, who declined to comment for this article, would eventually rise to the upper echelons of the authority, as a senior vice president for operations. He was one of several top executives to be forced out late last year over his handling of the lead paint scandal. Shola Olatoye, the chairwoman of Nycha, was also among the executives who were ousted. She declined a request for comment.
The goal in challenging the Health Department’s findings, much like it was for the paint companies years before, was to shield the city from lawsuits by showing that the high lead levels in these children came from somewhere other than the home where they lived and played, officials said. The stakes are high: In January, a jury ordered Nycha to pay $57 million to the family of Dakota Jade Taylor, a child with high levels of lead in her blood. The sum is being negotiated.
The authority believed its approach was valid because the Health Department so often rescinded its orders, Stanley Brezenoff, the interim Nycha chairman, said recently in an interview.
The Housing Authority cannot say precisely when it began challenging the city’s own findings of lead. Staffers recalled that the practice dates at least to the late 1990s, Jasmine Blake, an authority spokeswoman, wrote in an emailed statement.
It continued until September when, after inquiries from The Times, the de Blasio administration reversed course.
“We are now in a posture of not contesting,” Mr. Brezenoff said. “Whatever the merits of a particular case, or whatever is involved, we’re accepting whatever the finding of the Health Department is.”
It was a lesson private landlords learned years ago. “There’s a concern and a fear on the part of the owners about liability. They just do it,” said Frank Ricci, director of government affairs for the Rent Stabilization Association, which represents residential building owners. “The landlord calls a certified contractor to come and correct the condition wherever D.O.H. has designated they’ve found lead.”
Warring between government agencies has bewildered families.
Deborah Morrison, 51, a substitute teacher and resident of the Gowanus Houses, recalled when her son, Saheed, tested positive for lead in 2010. Now a soft-spoken 11-year-old, Saheed excels in designing cartoon characters on his phone but needs special help in school. Saheed Morrison, 11, near a wall where lead was detected in his home at the Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn. Health inspectors found lead at a second location in the apartment, but the Housing Authority disputed the findings.CreditKholood Eid for The New York Times
Ms. Morrison said Housing Authority workers used gypsum board to cover a portion of her bedroom wall, close to where Saheed had slept in a crib for the first years of his life.
She did not realize until told by a reporter that the authority had successfully disputed a Health Department finding of lead e paint in a second location, on a hallway pipe. No work was done there, according to city records.
“See, now you got me, because I didn’t even know there was two,” she said.
Lead paint had been found during renovations in the mid-1990s in the Gowanus Houses, Barry Stabile, a former Housing Authority employee involved in the work, said in an interview. But based on its sampling from 1998 to 2004, the Housing Authority did not include the Gowanus Houses on its list of complexes assumed to have lead paint. That did not change even after Saheed tested positive, and the authority worked on his home.
So when federal regulators visited the Gowanus Houses in 2015 on a routine inspection — when Saheed was 8 and Mikaila barely 2 — they did not treat the peeling paint they saw almost everywhere as a health hazard, according to HUD.
Neither did the Housing Authority. For both agencies, the deteriorating paint was just a maintenance problem.
This year, Mr. de Blasio promised to spend $80 million for testing next year to figure out, once and for all, where the lead paint is. The city will be inspecting apartments built before 1978, approximately 140,000 units out of 176,000 that the Housing Authority maintains, and the inspectors will be relying mainly on X.R.F. analyzers for the hunt.
Cue up Flo Rida