Thank you!!

If you want to do mass socialist politics, not just talk about it, good to learn from the biggest and most powerful socialist organization ever seen in America: the "sewer socialists" of Wisconsin

www.laborpolitics.com/p/sewer-soci...

Discrimination wasn't fully eradicated in Milwaukee

But widespread academic and activist omission of sewer socialist antiracism is misleading

Overall, socialists built an exceptional degree of working-class unity in Milwaukee

Milwaukee's Garveyite leaders such as Carlos Del Ruy & Reverend Ernest Bland not only joined the Socialist Party, they even campaigned in Black communities for working-class white Socialist candidates vs middle-class Blacks

Victor Berger insisted that because of racial divisions & hatred, "the American proletariat is surely more poorly organized than any working class"

Black workers responded by consistently voting Berger back to Congress — and voting Mayor Hoan back to Milwaukee City Hall

As a congressman in the 1920s, Victor Berger took the lead in fighting all immigration restrictions, he explicitly included Blacks in his pension legislation, and he proposed bill after bill to ban the KKK & lynching nationwide

It's true Berger wrote a few indefensibly racist things early in his career, when Milwaukee was over 99% white

But once large numbers of Blacks arrived after WWI, Berger made a U-Turn & became one of the most high-profile anti-racist whites in America

Sewer socialist mayor Dan Hoan joined the NAACP in 1920, banned the KKK, boosted efforts to provide loans to Blacks to buy homes across the city, & received the strong backing of Black voters & Black organizations

Governor Hochul should listen to the experts at the Fiscal Policy Institute:

"Because fears of tax flight are unfounded, policymakers should support raising tax rates to fund essential programs such as universal childcare, affordable housing, Medicaid, and public transit."

Ignore all the scaremongering about tax flight

Not only did New York’s rich NOT flee after their 2021 tax increase, but the top 1% of earners move out of state *less* frequently than other income groups

Spent the last few months researching Milwaukee's sewer socialists — here's my new piece on this fascinating history and what New York, Seattle, and beyond can learn from it