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Holding red and white signs, they protested outside Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcettis election party on Tuesday, demanding the city take a tougher stand against deportation.

The next day, they rallied in support of the International Womens Day strike, demanding social and economic equality for women.

These werent liberals. They were card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America, one of the fastest growing groups on the American left.

The surge of activism sweeping the U.S. since Donald Trumps election has energized the nations largest socialist organization, which has tripled in size over the last year to claim more than 19,000 dues-paying members. Thats a record for the DSA, which was founded in 1982.

People really felt that they had to do something to combat the incoming Trump administration, said David Duhalde, the deputy director of the Democratic Socialists of Americas national leadership, which helps coordinate chapters spread across 40 states. Were not only somebody you can resist Trump with, were somebody you can build a better world with.

Theres no doubt that the grassroots group forms only a small part of Americas swelling ranks of activists. The American Civil Liberties Union amassed hundreds of thousands of new members after Trumps victory. The fast-growing and liberal-centric Indivisible movement claims 4,500 associated groups compared with the 121 chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America. As far as political parties go, California alone boasts 8.7 million registered Democrats.

But unabashed socialism hasnt had this big of a voice in American politics in decades, and many leftists say they feel energized. New members of the Democratic Socialists of America say they want build a grassroots movement engaged at the local level and either pull the Democratic Party leftward or shove it out of the way.

Thats why, on election night, as Garcetti won one of the most commanding mayoral victories in Los Angeles history, dozens of socialists protested outside his election party. A few of the groups provocateurs infiltrated the well-dressed crowd of Democrats inside, where they shouted against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: I.C.E. out of L.A.!

If youre gonna do it, have some fun, said Josh Androsky, a 30-year-old stand-up comedian who co-chairs the Los Angeles chapters agit-prop committee and who joined after Trumps election. A large portion of our members were radicalized by the election and the Democrats failing over and over again.

The Democratic Socialists of Americas membership spike seems driven by three factors: younger Americans, who polls say are more open to socialism than previous generations; the 2016 Democratic primary campaign of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-described democratic socialist whose race ignited a grassroots following but also left bitter feelings about the Democratic Party; and the galvanizing effect that Trumps election has had on left-leaning Americans, who have increasingly turned to grassroots activism.

Kevin Joerger, 24, of Los Angeles, is the classic example. He first got involved with politics when he volunteered for Sanders campaign, and when Trump won, I had to do something more to stay sane, Joerger said.

Although he rooted, sort of for Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election, the Democratic Party didnt satisfy him. Joerger said he felt that big business had taken over politics and that capitalism had failed Americans individually, and he wanted to be part of a movement in my community and see change locally, and not just nationwide.

So he joined the Democratic Socialists of America, which places more power in the hands of its local chapters rather than its national leadership and stresses building coalitions with community groups.

Among leftists, the DSA is considered a big-tent organization. Decisions are made by topic-specific committees instead of through adherence to rigid ideology, which allows for a relatively wider range of opinion than other groups. The group also takes a more incremental approach to reining in free-market capitalism.

As we are unlikely to see an immediate end to capitalism tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people, says the groups website. Our vision is of a society in which people have a real voice in the choices and relationships that affect the entirety of our lives.

Its yet to be seen what kind of impact the group might have. Socialism has never been a dominant force in American electoral politics. Previously, its most successful American leader was Eugene V. Debs, who won 6% of the presidential vote in 1912 running on the Socialist Party of America ticket.

And although some conservatives view the Democratic Socialists of America as subversive radicals, other leftists see them as not nearly radical enough.

The farthest they can go is supporting elements such as Bernie Sanders, Marc Wells, a Trotskyist, said disdainfully as he handed out leaflets for the World Socialist Web Site at the International Womens Day strike in Los Angeles, where some Democratic Socialists of America members had also gathered. The site is published by the International Committee of the Fourth International, which, like other Marxist groups such as the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, advocate harder-line approaches than the DSA.

In Wells view, Sanders and pseudo-left reformism only perpetuates capitalism rather than leading to a necessary revolution, and the result is that the working class is led back into the Democratic Party. By contrast, Wells said, We seek to prepare the working class to seize political power.

Duhalde, the DSAs deputy national director, said the group is flexible and willing to change compared to other leftist approaches. Theres been a huge generational shift of millennials who are going to reinvent the socialist project, Duhalde said, adding that more than half of new members who joined since Trumps victory are younger than 30.

Many new members say they heard about the group on Twitter, where Democratic Socialists of America members and supporters often put red rose emojis next to their user handles, an armband for the digital era. New enlistees have posted photos of their membership cards, which show their names along with the title official socialist organizer.

One of the groups biggest online boosters is the actor and comedian Rob Delaney, star of the TV show Catastrophe, a Sanders supporter who regularly exhorts his 1.36 million Twitter followers to join the Democratic Socialists of America.

Like many DSA members, Delaney favors single-payer healthcare, in which the government covers healthcare costs, and hes been impressed by the government-run National Health Service in Britain, where he films his show. He once carried $50,000 in medical debt in the U.S. following surgeries hed needed after a car accident even though he was insured, and he thinks the system is unfair to women as well as the poor.

If you're not lying to yourself you recognize that income inequality and systemic racism/misogyny work really really well to keep the poor poor and make the rich richer. And that's not okay to me, Delaney said in private messages on Twitter.

DSA's ideas weave all that together in a very pragmatic and actionable way. And they're fantastic organizers, Delaney continued. DSA espouses and promotes these issues in a way I really really like and believe is the best way to defeat Trump and the GOP.

matt.pearce@latimes.com

@mattdpearce

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Seeing red: Membership triples for the Democratic Socialists of ... - Los Angeles Times

In November 1848, a socialist activist gave a speech at the 13th annual meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. "Mr. Inglis" began his remarks well enough, reported the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, who was also there to give a speech that day, "but strangely enough went on in an effort to show that wages slavery is as bad as chattel slavery."

Douglass soon became infuriated with the socialist speaker. "The attempts to place holding property in the soilon the same footing as holding property in man, was most lame and impotent," Douglass declared. "And the wonder is that anyone could listen with patience to such arrant nonsense."

Douglass heard a lot of arrant nonsense from American socialists. That's because, as the historian Carl Guarneri has explained, most antebellum socialists "were hostile or at least indifferent to the abolitionist appeal because they believed that it diverted attention from the serious problems facing northern workers with the onset of industrial capitalism." The true path forward, the socialists said, was the path of anti-capitalism.

But Douglass would have none of that. "To own the soil is no harm in itself," he maintained. "It is right that [man] should own it. It is his duty to possess itand to possess it in that way in which its energies and properties can be made most useful to the human familynow and always."

Douglass favored the set of ideas that came to be known as classical liberalism. He stood for natural rights, racial equality, and economic liberty in a free labor system. At the very heart of his worldview was the principle of self-ownership. "You are a man, and so am I," Douglass told his former master. "In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living." Referring to his first paying job after his escape from bondage, Douglass wrote: "I was now my own mastera tremendous fact." This individualistic, market-oriented definition of liberty put Douglass squarely at odds with the socialist creed.

The abolitionist-turned-socialist John A. Collins offers a telling contrast. In the 1840s, Collins went on a fundraising trip to England on behalf of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He returned home a devotee of the English socialist George Henry Evans.

The "right of individual ownership in the soil and its products," Collins declared, are "the great cause of causes, which makes man practically an enemy to his species." Collins now thought private property was the root of all evil.

He didn't remain much of an abolitionist after that. "At antislavery conventions," the historian John L. Thomas has noted, "Collins took a perfunctory part, scarcely concealing his impatience until the end of the meeting when he could announce that a socialist meeting followed at which the real and vital questions of the day would be discussed."

Perhaps the most significant left-wing attacks on the abolitionists were found in the pages of the socialist journal The Phalanx. "The Abolition Party," complained an unsigned 1843 editorial, "seems to think that nothing else is false in our social organization, and that slavery is the only social evil to be extirpated." In fact, The Phalanx asserted, the "tyranny of capital" is the real problem, because capitalism "reduces [the working class] in time to a condition even worse than that of slaves. Under this system the Hired Laborer is worked to excess, beggared and degraded.The slave at least does not endure these evils, which 'Civilized' society inflicts on its hirelings."

When it came to attacking free labor, the socialists and the slaveholders adopted certain identical positions. For example, the South's leading pro-slavery intellectual, the writer George Fitzhugh, argued that free labor was "worse than slavery" because it meant that the capitalists were free to exploit the workers. The idea that "individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least," Fitzhugh wrote, was nothing but a lie: "It has been justly observed that under this system the rich are continually growing richer and the poor poorer." As for the pro-market writings of Adam Smith and others, Fitzhugh dismissed them as "every man for himself, and Devil take the hindmost."

Douglass, meanwhile, took a page from John Locke's notion of private property emerging when man mixes his labor with the natural world: "Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses," he marvelled, "we are called upon to prove that we are men!"

Having experienced slavery firsthand, Douglass had no doubt that free labor was infinitely superior to it.

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Frederick Douglass Hated Socialism - Reason.com - Reason

Many of us know that Rabi Ray, a contemporary of Biju Patnaik, went on to become the speaker of ninth Lok Sabha in the year 1989. But little is known about his student life and his contribution to socialistic political ideology. As the student union president of Ravenshaw College, he burnt the Union Jack and unfurled the Tricolour in the campus. In 1960, he was one of the founding members of the socialist movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, Aruna Asaf Ali and Ram Manohar Lohia and was the general secretary of the new Socialist Party. He worked incessantly for achieving a casteless, secular, democratic and equity-based society based on the seven revolutions propounded by Dr Lohia, the visionary and philosopher of socialism.

My first interaction with Ray was in 1963, when he asked me to accompany him to a meeting organised to condemn the 1962 Chinese aggression. Lohia addressed the meeting, the reason the venue was jam-packed. Rays equation with Lohia was visible and gave students like me the impetus to work towards achieving Lohias dream under Rays leadership. In 1964, on my return from Allahabad University to Cuttack as a law student, I worked along with him. In 1967, Ray spearheaded the Congress Hatao Abhiyan along with socialist ideologue N K Choudhury, the CM of Odisha from 1950-56. In 1967, Ray got elected to the Lok Sabha and Lohia chose him as leader of Socialist Party in the House. As a parliamentarian, he is credited with using his mother tongue Odia to deliver his maiden speech, which made N Sanjiva Reddy, the then speaker, scramble for references where the provision of using constitutionally-recognised languages for making a speech in Parliament was mentioned.

He joined his other mentor JP by voicing dissent against the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi and was jailed for 19 months. As Janata Party secretary general, he led the 1977 campaign. As health minister under Janata rule, he brought about revolutionary changes. As Speaker in 1989, his rulings on anti-defection law and recommendations against a sitting Supreme Court judge made history. In 1991, he refused to take the speakers post with the BJPs support. After 1996, he bade goodbye to parliamentary politics and formed Lok Abhiyan to tackle the countrys problems till he fell seriously ill. His death has marked the end of an era. With Rays heavenly departure, the light of socialism has been extinguished. May his soul rest in peace, but be engaged to usher in a socialist society wherever it has reached.

Email: smohanty1944@gmail.com

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The light has gone out of socialism - The New Indian Express

One day, President Donald Trump is at a prayer meeting talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger being lousy on TV, and on another, he is naming the brilliant Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as his national security advisor. I will hereby be an unsolicited national hope advisor. Do the second kind of thing much more and wholly eradicate the first kind of thing, Mr. President, and save us from a grave public enemy.

That would be the kind of socialistically inspired future represented by Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. She wanted more freebies but less freedom, more spending, more regulations, a marketplace coerced into failures, identity-group divisiveness, contemptuous elitist supremacy and judicial power usurping democracy along with constitutionalism.

President Barack Obama was also a champ at all of this, and while the public mostly liked him, many did not like what was doing. Thus, after his eight years in office, Democrats had lost a net of 62 seats in the House, nine seats in the Senate, 12 governorships, more than 900 state legislature seats and the presidency, according to a Fox News report. Republicans took charge, and there is now an extraordinary opportunity to reverse a big-government trend threatening to encapsulate us for eons.

The thing is, we may be cheated out of that chance if Trump does not give up on his stupidities and instead provides his enemies the wherewithal to stymie the best in him and turn the country back over to their contrary dreams. If he loves America, therefore, he should please, please quit obnoxious tweeting for starters. It is absurd and makes him look like a misbehaving child with a misused toy.

Then he should quit holding zany press conferences in which he overstates everything, insults everyone and further institutes enmity. He should in fact avoid adlibbing as much as possible. He is a non-linear, now-you-see-it, now-you-dont speaker who treats us to unconnected, unexplained phrases that can mean just about anything and are advantageously interpreted by critics as saying he favors hell over heaven.

Still more advice. He should quit substituting glances at a TV set for actual study. He should quit having reckless phone calls with heads of state. He should quit putting together policy plots with minimal trustworthy advice. He should quit the small-mindedness that puts claims of crowd size above real issues.

Yes, it is absolutely the case that his critics are often far worse than he is. Sen. Elizabeth Warren? Sen. Chuck Schumer? There is nothing polite to say. The reputable press is not so reputable when its commentators, for instance, issue baseless growls about anti-Semitism.

It is also despicable that protestors carry signs referring to Trump as anti-gay when there is absolutely nothing to back them up. It is simple-minded and worse for anyone to insist Trumps criticism of someone who is black is ipso facto racism, and yet we have seen it. In terms of evidence at this point, the Russian collusion theory is right up there with the birther theory. Vandalizing college students should be required to clean up after themselves before packing their bags and going home, and the leakers in the intelligence community should be worried about criminal prosecution.

There is lots of good in Trump, as seen in his executive orders on pipelines and absolutely smothering regulations, his choice for the Supreme Court, most of his Cabinet picks and, as mentioned earlier, his choice of McMaster as a top advisor.

He may very well do something about a crime rise the left uncaringly dismisses as nothing much. Watch for an improved world order. Some of his tax ideas are excellent, if not the one on imports, and we should replace Obamacare with something better, although prudence is needed. The wonders already happening in the economy are signs of how he actually could do splendid things.

But if Trump does not cut out the bad, there are those waiting in the bushes with a ruinous future in mind.

http://xeniagazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/web1_Ambrose-1.jpg

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at [emailprotected]. Column courtesy of the Associated Press.

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How Trump could lead us to socialism yet - Xenia Gazette

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Take the socialist economic model. The USSR forced it on the millions living under communist thralldom and confined them to endless poverty.

Stupid Western academics made their pilgrimages and came back brimming with praise having seen only a few cotton-wrapped showcases of the workers paradise.

Eventually, after 70 years and unimaginable sacrifices, it all went very predictably bankrupt under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since their liberation all the satellites have turned to capitalism and prospered.

If Scotland is ever to prosper again it will have to reject socialist economics

Frederick Forsyth

After the end of the British Empire most of the newly independent states chose the fashionable socialist economic model and slithered into bankruptcy with the best of intentions.

Remember the saints Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania? To rounds of applause from Britains academia they led their countries from prosperity to poverty.

Only Singapore, guided by Lee Kuan Yew, went for capitalism and became the richest per capita country in Asia.

Of course academics can always pursue will o the wisp theories. They never do anything practical and never have to bear the consequences of failure.

Our universities are still rife with hard-Left academics preaching poppycock to gullible students. In Africa Zimbabwe, once Rhodesia, was on independence the food bowl of the continent.

Then in 1980 came Mugabe. Today it is bankrupt and hungry, its currency worth no more than toilet paper. In South America Venezuela with its massive oil reserves was the richest country on that continent.

Then came Hugo Chavez, lauded and worshipped by idiots such as Jeremy Corbyn. Now dead he is succeeded by Nicols Maduro. Venezuela is destitute.

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Her people starve, desperate to cross the border each day to Colombia to buy basic foods. Ah, you may say, but that is all far away and nothing to do with us. Not quite.

So obsessed are people by the SNPs lust for an independent Scotland that it is overlooked that the Scottish National Party under Nicola Sturgeon is a hard-Left party and is destroying Scotlands economy.

Scotland exports to England double her exports to the rest of the world combined, never mind the EU. And it is English subsidies to Scotland that keep her from going into receivership.

Recent analysis by economist David Owen revealed that public contentment can only be maintained by Edinburghs lavish expenditure, which since the crash of oil prices the Scottish government cannot afford.

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In 2015-16 state expenditure in Scotland was 12,800 per person as against 11,500 for the UK as a whole.

The trouble is, Scotlands small and shrinking tax base cannot pay for this so the Sassenachs have to step in. Outside the UK but still inside the EU (a miracle that Berlin would immediately reject) Scotland would simply be a North Sea Greece, in permanent need of bailouts.

Which is why Germany would reply: In your dreams. If Scotland is ever to prosper again it will have to reject socialist economics and revert to policies to boost growth.

But so far SNP supporters are content to live off Sassenach largesse and just keep complaining and voting for the SNP, which dominates the landscape. But when we get Brexit sorted it may be wakey-wakey time.

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The favourite torture and execution method of those monsters who control Islamic State seems to be decapitation. Now it appears that IS is being treated to a touch of its own medicine.

Commander after commander is being systematically erased, so fast they cannot be replaced. The instruments of this justice are our weaponised drones, acting on electronically garnered information. Nemesis is now digitised but no less fearsome for that.

The covert truth is that we are listening to every word they say, reading every syllable they write and watching every move they make. Six years ago, when drones were remote and obscure, largely confined to Predators hunting Taliban in Afghanistan with their Hellfire and Brimstone missiles, I was intrigued enough to research the new technology and write a book about them.

I called it The Kill List after discovering there really is such a list of kill-on-sight targets in Washington. Since then these unpiloted death machines have revolutionised warfare. Included in warfare one must include espionage.

The days of the shifty figure scurrying down a faraway alley to meet another shifty figure and collect a package to bring back to the West are gone. Digitisation means that a million documents can be concealed in a memory stick no bigger than a forefinger and brought out in a crevice you do not want mentioned over breakfast.

It need not even leave enemy territory: it can be beamed upwards to the waiting drone. Constant interception and observation mean that the terrorist commander can be found bowling across the desert in his Toyota and vaporised with a missile. But the threat is far from over.

As land ownership becomes impossible for the terror groups they are already converting to assassin gangs and singleton killers who come out of nowhere, uncaring whether they live or die. Most dangerous are those who have never been heard of or suspected, such as the lorry-borne killer in Nice last July who can mow down scores of pedestrians with a truck.

Stanley Baldwin once said: The bomber will always get through. He meant something with wings and engines. The phrase is still true but the bomber now has two legs. That is why we need our counterintelligence teams more than we have ever done and why the whingeing civil-righters are doing us no favours.

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So Parliament has passed the last hurdle to endorsing the white elephant HS2 railway project from London to Birmingham (first stage). It is so far costed at 55.7billion, a figure which no one really believes. With rolling stock and the usual time-and-cost overruns which dog every public project nowadays, it is more likely to come out at 80billion.

No one remotely associated with it will be in office when it runs the first service north and many wont even be alive so they dont care anyway. The oddities surrounding the HS2 continue but with an added new one.

When it was first proposed the onus was all on its speed which would cut hours off the rail time between the capital and the Midlands and finally the North. This has now been admitted to be more like 20 minutes from London to Birmingham city centre. But now no one is mentioning speed.

It is all about capacity. A sure-fire warning about a white elephant is when it starts for one much-trumpeted purpose but then is explained as needed for a completely different one.

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It becomes more and more puzzling that Theresa May will not call a snap election. The polls show she would have a mandate of her own a 100-seat majority in the Commons and a five-year term.

If a my-way Brexit negotiation were included in the manifesto it would be unchallengeable and her diehard enemies would probably be swept by the voters into oblivion. As Franklin Roosevelt observed: we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

The trouble with our establishment is that it is riddled with fear. (She could also add Lords reform into the mix to widespread public acclamation!)

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Scots must REJECT socialism to prosper! SNP is destroying economy, rages FREDERICK FORSYTH - Express.co.uk