As a quarterly journal there’s no way to ever get ahead of the news cycle. In Trump 2.0, it’s impossible. The cycle starts and stops everyday with new outrages, advances, and retreats. As I write, the DOGE forges ahead without Musk, while he tries to mend fences that Trump claims to be uninterested in repairing. For all of the pundits who have bemoaned the lack of protests this time around, thinking wistfully of the Women’s March among other things, but also the airport protests in New York City opposing travel bans, we have now action aplenty as immigrants and their supporters resist the efforts of ICE and federal intrusions in the workplace, which are now being abetted by the National Guard and US Marines.
Whole communities and families have gone into hiding, while others are standing up. Most of the demonstrations are peaceful. Some object to many waving Mexican flags. Other reports mention people wearing purple shirts, underlining the participation – and rage – of SEIU members over the arrest and injury to the California State Council president, an observer rather than a participant who was hurt, arrested, and released. Abrego Garcia, wrongfully deported to a hellhole prison in El Salvador, and now needlessly charged with trafficking so that the administration can pretend they had cause without admitting error, was returned thanks to the work of CASA in Maryland and the National Day Laborers Network (NDLON). In terms of resistance, perhaps there won’t just be flashes of resistance, but more sustained efforts supported by unions and large community-based organizations? There participation and leadership could make a huge difference.
We can’t keep up with the news, so our job has to be trying to look underneath and look at what’s coming. Many voices in this issue try to do exactly that. Frank Strier, a former professor in California, who has written about gun control for Social Policy in the past, makes a case not for simply enforcing the Constitution, but amending it to meet the moment. No one will hold their breath, but it makes you think. The second part of Mike Miller’s argument for training “from the bottom” looks at the nuts and bolts of moving people in communities to organize. Bruce Boccardy, another frequent contributor, again tries to help us understand all of this from the perspective of workers and how they are impacted by the economy.
In this same vein, we wanted to share two pieces that came our way that move the needle forward. One is from Lynn Parramore and INET dissecting the way that Musk, corporations, and the billionaires are gutting the government for their own ends, not some budget cutting bonanza. The other is an interview that came to us from a relatively new online publication, Hammer & Hope, by John Hopkins professor Hahrie Han, long a student of organizing, who interviews the key organizer in Minnesota’s ISAIAH organization about how they have built power for change in the state in these difficult times.
The excerpts look forward and backward. Tracey Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, organizers and strategists behind the Los Angeles Tenants Union and its creative use of rent strikes, share a case study from their new book on how power for tenants can be built. Eric Blanc looks at a similar problem in building power in the workplace. Both worry about how to get organizations to scale. Blanc makes the argument that we need labor organizing models that allow workers greater ability to self-organize. Josh Silver looks at one of the great work of community organizations to end redlining and force more equitable lending regardless of race, income, and more. There are many lessons here. One is simply that we can win big. The other is that we have to build the capacity for continued struggle in order to protect the victories. Lending in our communities continues to be an issue, just as there continues to be concerted efforts to dilute the Community Reinvestment Act over the last almost 50 years.
James Mumm is on time with a review that looks at how immigrants have organized and are sustaining their movement. These are the people every country should be fighting to bring into their countries.
In our columns, Phil Mattera reminds us that despite the abandonment of corporate accountability by the federal government, states have a role here, and many have led the way and won’t give up the fight. Drummond Pike sees echoes of the unresolved issues from the US Civil War in our current civil and political unrest. John Anderson worries about the demise of the New Democratic Party in Canada, and what it might teach all of us and itself about how to recover a critical world in politics. Geogory Squires joins Silver in looking at the history and future of the Community Reinvestment Act and its importance. I offer some crazy sounding ideas about how to turn the benefit cutbacks in the Republicans budget bill into a fight to retain the rights for recipients by converting the bills draconian requirements into organizing tools.
I’m not saying there’s something for everyone in this issue, but if you’re looking for some light in these dark times, there are some high beams in this number that might help you find your way along the road.
Good Idea or Potential Fiasco?
The Spanish philosopher Santayana cautioned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (Put more colloquially, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”)
Indeed, the past often informs the future, serving as a beacon for reform. We can, for instance, juxtapose key current issues with those that inspired the original Constitutional Convention in 1787 Philadelphia. There, the Constitution’s framers rejected the weak Articles of Confederation. Instead, they replaced them with: a) a stronger central government, and b) a bill of individual rights protecting life, liberty and property.
There’s a familiar myth in American politics: that of the no-nonsense business leader who cuts through red tape and gets results. It fuels the belief that running a country is just like running a company — and that executives, with their boardroom instincts and bottom-line mindset, are exactly what government needs.
But that myth collapses under the weight of what corporate leadership has actually become — and what happens when it migrates into public office.
Read more: They Looted Companies — Now They're Looting the Government
Part II
Editor’s Note:
This is Part Two in Mike Miller's "Teaching 'From Below' How the World Works," which contains many insights and examples in a master class on community organizing. Part one ran in the last issue of Social Policy (issue 55 #1). Both parts will be available on request to publisher@ socialpolicy.org in the 3rd quarter of 2025
Generally, “conflict tactics” are thought of as militant, confrontational, “direct action.” While sometimes effective in winning a result, these tactics often don't engage large numbers of everyday people (except in unusual circumstances where they may applaud those so engaged, but don’t think of themselves as possibly being among them.) Usually, such tactics rely on the dedication of young people.
In 2023, the “Minnesota Miracle” secured one of the strongest social safety nets in the country for Minnesota families, made possible through a suite of ambitious policies passed during Tim Walz’s term as governor — despite Democrats having only a one-vote majority in the State Senate. None of it would have been possible without years of organizing that built a multiracial constituency prepared to stand together to fight for a bold agenda, despite counterattacks designed to divide their support. How did that multiracial constituency develop, cultivate, and exercise its power in the policymaking process? In this interview, Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the statewide faith coalition ISAIAH and current chair of Faith in Minnesota Action PAC, describes what Ella Baker called the “spadework” needed to form such a constituency. It depended on developing a group of organizers equipped to navigate the complexity of building and holding together a truly multiracial coalition in one of the most divisive moments in American history. What does it take to cultivate the kind of leadership needed to negotiate power laterally among different constituencies, and then to use that power to build a shared governing agenda with elected officials? When we talk about the craft of organizing, we often spend so much time on processes of individual leadership development to build power that we are not able to spend as much time on what it takes to wield power. This interview bucks that trend, articulating the core questions and capacities we should be thinking about to wield authentic, multiracial governing power for America.
Read more: Creating a movement across generations, races, and faiths in Minnesota.
US Corporate Class Delight
The oligarchs are laughing. The corporatists are laughing. They are laughing at working people as the big con continues. They are laughing at the corporate Democratic Party whose genetic code lacks the heart to challenge the autocracy now unfolding. “Good billionaires vs. bad billionaires.” Really?
Excerpted from Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis (Haymarket 2024)
In October 2018, Leslie Hernandez stood in the hallway of Hillside Villa, a stucco and concrete complex home to 124 households, trying to communicate with her neighbor Benson Lai, a Cantonese speaker in his early sixties. Bilingual in English and Spanish, Hernandez turned to her hands. She held up an official notice of a rent increase that had been given to tenants throughout the building and tore it in half. Then she took the pieces and tore those too. When Lai nodded in response, Hernandez knew she had started something. Soon, she’d call it a tenants’ association. Though privately owned, Hillside Villa was developed through a combination of state-subsidized loans and tax breaks, tied to a thirty-year covenant to keep rents low. But that covenant ran out in 2018. The landlord, Tom Botz, wanted to see rent doubled.
Read more: EXCERPT - "Hillside Villa Is Our Place, We Will Not Be Displaced”
An excerpt from We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Unionism is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (UC Press, 2025)]
Among those wings of the labor movement still interested in unionizing new workers, the basic case for how to scale up today remains the same as it’s been since the 1990s: fund good organizing. Many union organizing directors and staff organizers made this case to me, while complaining of labor’s insufficient focus on growth. As one regional organizing director in the Midwest put it, “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we know how to win—but we need real resources to make that happen.”
Where you live often determines your life chances, and lending discrimination places residents of communities of color at significant disadvantages. Recent research by Raj Chetty reveals that “All else equal, low-income boys who grow up in such areas (areas with lower income) earn about 35 percent less on average than otherwise similar low-income children who grow up in the best areas for mobility. For girls, the gap is closer to 25 percent.” The research found that neighborhoods with large populations of lower income and African American residents in some of the largest cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, and Milwaukee in our country have some of the “worst odds.”[i]
How Immigrant Leaders Transform Migration into Movement
Dreaming of Home: How We Turn Fear Into Pride, Power, and Real Change by Cristina Jiménez. St. Martin's Press: 2025.
When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse by Norma Ryuko Kawelokū Wong Roshi. North Atlantic Books: 2024.
"Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world." —Dolores Huerta
"Here we are in the convergence of global environmental phenomena, collapsing economies, mass migration," writes Norma Ryuko Kawelokū Wong Roshi in her transformative work When No Thing Works. This convergence, she explains, creates a sensation that everything is accelerating—"much more going much faster"—a collective quickening that shapes our lived experience in profound ways.
Donald Trump thinks that young girls should get by with fewer dolls, but there is apparently no limit to the number of regulatory gifts he is offering corporate America. Long-standing rules are being brushed aside, while laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act are not being enforced. Entire agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been put in limbo. Investigations launched by the Biden Administration are being abandoned. Dubious pardons are being offered to corporate criminals.
Read more: EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS - The Other Corporate Restraints
I usually write about money issues – taxes, economic policy, the outrages of our billionaires, or perhaps the terrible business consequences of a draconian immigration policy. What follows, though, is a reach for me: trying to draw from history some understanding of what our current political brawl portends.
Josh Silver has written a most compelling story about the Community Reinvestment Act, a federal law enacted in 1977 that basically bans redlining. In ”Ending Redlining through a Community Centered Reform of the Community Reinvestment Act” Silver offers a comprehensive overview of the history, contemporary controversies, and potential futures surrounding this vital law. (See excerpt earlier in this issue) I was honored when he invited me to write the Foreword for this book just published by Armin Lear Press. What follows is that Foreword.
Read more: COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT CORNER - The Long and Rocky Road of the Community Reinvestment Act
As some dance to the siren song of authoritarianism now echoing throughout the MAGA movement, it is worth remembering what true political leadership looks and sounds like.
The Big, Beautiful Budget Bill has passed the House, but has not made it through the Senate. Something will get done there, one way or another, and then the conference between both Houses will try to make the sausage, so that Trump and the rich can live with it, no matter the debt or disaster wracked on the American people. For them to be happy, means, regardless of the gaslighting from the Speaker and the President, lower income and working people will pay the freight with reduced and difficult access to Medicaid, food stamps, and what is left of the safety net.
The reduction in entitlements will be achieved in two ways. First, there will be new work requirements. All able-bodied will have to establish that 80-hours a month they were either working, going to school, or volunteering for a nonprofit. What eligible beneficiaries are not blocked by this barrier, the government intends to pushout bureaucratically through paperwork requirements and deadlines. In the Arkansas trial on similar requirements, 18,000 were quickly denied Medicaid coverage because they lacked access to computers to comply or missed deadlines. Squeeze people in this double-sided vise, and 14 million are expected to lose coverage over a decade.
First, a disclosure of sorts. I first drew a paycheck as an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization in the late 1960s, before founding ACORN, initially as an affiliate of NWRO. I know a bit about organizing recipients to win their rights to benefits. I can’t help but keep up with this. In the same way that I rue the loss of density for union members in organized labor, I also am horrified at how difficult it has become in many states for eligible people to access the increasingly miserly benefits provided by state welfare systems. All of which had me trying to read whatever fine print existed for this latest assault against lower income workers and their families.
With that admission, here’s a wild, radical bundle of ideas for how take this disaster and make it a tool for change and progress. We create a benefit rights organization that will provide assignments for recipients to do volunteer to continue to qualify. This formation would also collect records of hours spent so they are available to state authorities. Just as we trained welfare recipients to be something akin to jailhouse lawyers who were well-versed in every section of the welfare manual, whether in Massachusetts or Arkansas, so that they could help people apply and represent people in hearing appeals, some of these mass numbers of volunteers would be deployed to offices and front door stalls and tables to help offset the paper cuts denying eligible people of their benefits.
Yes, this organization would have to be buttoned up tight, because some states, thwarting the requirements and determined to deny recipients their rights to these entitlements, will begin investigations and more to disqualify the volunteer hours and the organization’s ability to coordinate them. Yes, the tasks would be enormous to daily provide work for thousands or tens of thousands of recipients and to then keep up with their timecards. Yes, at the same time these work volunteers could add capacity to an almost infinite number of nonprofits and their missions in service to communities. Yes, they could also hit the doors and deliver flyers to hundreds of thousands daily in order to get this program to scale.
And, yes, it would take money – a lot of money -- to get this altogether so it was ready for primetime, when the requirements are set to begin January 1, 2027. It would take millions in fact to start even a pilot in five states or so, and many more millions to get to scale once the model is proven and in the field. Yes, we would need some of the pro bono legal time that Trump is trying to monopolize to pushback against the state and federal attacks once these bureaucracies realize that the cutbacks they planned for these entitlements were being stymied and repurposed.
I could go on, but let me finish with one comment and one question.
The comment is simple: we could do this. It is in fact what we know how to do. It’s part of the muscle memory of not just welfare rights organizing, but any rights organizing that looks for handles and then uses them to build mass organization.
The question is equally simple: I’m serious, so who is with me?
