Support REAL rent control for Montgomery County — pivotal hearing Tuesday, March 24 for HOME Act
Tuesday, March 28, will be a crucial inflection point in the campaign for rent stabilization in Montgomery County. There will be a public hearing on two competing rent stabilization bills: the socialist-backed HOME Act (16-23), which would cap rent increases to 3%; and the capital-backed “Anti-Rent Gouging” Bill (15-23) which would codify unaffordable, double-digit rent increases.
Now is the most important time to get involved in this fight. This event is THE opportunity to show the council which bill has public support. If you can spare even just an hour of your time, showing up to this hearing will have the largest impact! There will be two public hearing sessions for both bills at the County Council Building in Rockville: an afternoon session at 1:30pm, with about 10 speaker slots, and a longer evening hearing at 7pm with 30–40 speaker slots.
Please use the RSVP form to indicate which session(s) you plan to attend and what accommodations you need to participate, including transportation needs. Additionally, HOME Act Coalition member Sunrise Silver Spring will be hosting an art build this Sunday, March 26 at 2pm at the Silver Spring Library to create signs for the hearing. RSVP here to join the art build!
Socialist mechanics to set up two FREE brake light clinics on Saturday, March 25 — DC canvassing & mechanic training this Sunday, March 19
On Saturday, March 25 – tomorrow!! – Metro DC DSA is hosting two brake light clinics (after a successful one last fall) as a way to build community support for getting police out of traffic enforcement by having volunteers replace car brake lights for free. The clinics will be held from 11am to 4pm at the following locations:
The process for fixing brake lights is simple, but helps reduce community interactions with police and provides an opportunity to educate the community on legislation pending in DC and in the greater DMV.
March General Body Meeting ballot sent to members — voting ends TOMORROW, Saturday, March 25
MDC DSA members in good standing were sent an OpaVote ballot by email Tuesday evening. This ballot contains three questions:
You can click on the links above to view the full text of the questions.
Voting will end at 11:59pm TOMORROW, Saturday, March 25. If you did not get a ballot and believe you should have, and have confirmed it’s not in your spam folder, please reach out to [email protected].
BRIEFS
Metro DC DSA’s first happy hour of 2023 — TOMORROW, Saturday, March 25
Saturday night marks our chapter’s first happy hour of 2023. Join us TOMORROW, March 25 as we gather for drinks, comradeship and fun at the DMV’s only bar combining pinball with hammers and sickles — Lyman’s Tavern. If you’ve never been to a Metro DC DSA event before, this is a great chance to make new friends and meet the people you’ll be organizing with! And if you’ve been with the chapter for years, it’s the perfect time to relax with comrades. Starting at 7pm until the last DSA member decides to go home! Sign up here; food and outdoor seating are available, and the bar is a 10-minute walk from the Metro.
Stomp Out Slumlords DMV-wide meeting — Wednesday, April 5
On April 5, Stomp Out Slumlords will host an in-person meeting with tenant leaders and organizers from across DC, Maryland and Virginia. We will talk about how the fight for rent control in Montgomery County intersects with issues all tenants face (even in DC!), hear from the organizing committee about the rent strike in Brightwood Park, get an update from the Marbury Plaza rent strikers on the first hearings in the attorney general’s lawsuit and discuss what’s next for new organizing projects. The event will take place at 6pm at MLK Library (901 G St NW, Washington, DC 20001).
Stomp Out Slumlords — call for Spanish-speaking volunteers
Despite these successes in fighting alongside tenants to improve their living conditions, Stomp Out Slumlords desperately seeks more Spanish speakers! Our NoVa contingent is organizing in a massive, majority-Latino building in Alexandria and is running out of linguistic capacity, while our DC contingent consistently gets more Spanish leads than we can adequately investigate. If you speak Spanish and you want to learn more about tenant organizing, please email [email protected] about volunteering — you will be trained and ready to go, no matter your experience!
Workers prepare protest in DC in support of DC food service workers — April 12
The workers of Compass DC prepare food for numerous universities and museums throughout the District without benefits or a living wage. UNITE HERE Local 23, which represents the workers, is holding an action on Wednesday, April 12 from 4 to 6pm in front of the World Bank (1818 H Street, NW) to tell Compass: Workers need a raise! You can also support the workers by signing UNITE HERE’s petition.
National DSA panel on "Confronting the Threat of the Far Right" — Monday, April 3 at 8pm
What is today’s far right and how can DSA contest it? Despite defeating Trump in 2020, conservative and capitalist forces remain entrenched in American society. The National Political Education Committee is hosting an online panel including our local comrade Bill Fletcher to define and analyze the nature of the right-wing in the US and discuss methods to combat it. Sign up here.
Baristas tell Starbucks execs to stop union busting
Wednesday, March 22 saw a National Day of Action from Starbucks Workers United, coinciding with Howard Schultz’s last shareholder meeting as CEO. Approximately 100 unionized or unionizing cafes went on strike to call attention to the company’s “egregious” union busting tactics, workers’ low morale and labor cuts. MDC DSA members showed up in solidarity at multiple stores throughout the region as the nationwide wave of unionization continues to grow.
INFO ACCESS
Publications schedule: The April issue of the Washington Socialist will accompany the March 31st Update, and has an article deadline of TOMORROW, March 25. Send articles to [email protected] and access any current or past Update anytime here. April Updates are scheduled for Fridays, the 7th, 14th and 21st and the May Day issue of the Washington Socialist accompanies the Update of Friday, April 28.
About MDC DSA: The local chapter’s website is here. There is a rich array of info there for newer comrades who seek a campaign to embrace and for the DSA-curious to see how the campaigns interlock to dismantle capitalism and promote the socialist future. The road map of MDC DSA’s activism — campaigns, working groups, etc. — is here. And here is an introduction to the chapter including our branches covering the DMV.
We learn, and relearn, to apply our thought and action as socialists in new and archived sessions of Socialist Night School.
Weekly Update Tip Line: The Metro DC DSA Tip Line is live. If you have news or events that you think should be promoted in the weekly Update, please submit it to the form above. Include your contact information and all possible details for consideration. Deadline is Thursdays at 4pm for the following Friday publication, but please don’t wait till the last minute.
COMMUNITY BULLETIN
Anticapitalist Open Mic Night | After the Storm In partnership with the Scooby Doo Mansion, After The Storm is hosting an open mic night where we can engage in listening and anti-capitalist visioning with each other. Join us on Saturday, April 8, from 6 to 9pm for optional writing time and open mic sharing.
Racial Equity Symposium | Empower DC The DC Council has added requirements for a “racial equity lens” to be applied to development plans. Join Empower DC for a Racial Equity Symposium to hear experts tell how activists can maximize its effect. It’s TODAY, Friday, March 24 at 1pm. Sign up here.
ESSENTIAL TRAFFIC
Any member or reader with a tip on leftish-oriented material available online without a paywall is invited to contribute. Comrades put it in #publications Slack; readers send to [email protected]
DC Mayor Bowser proposes cutting free Metrobus, adding $500 million traffic camera expansion in 2024 budget: Why fund free Metrobus, public housing repair or emergency rent assistance for DC’s working class when you could devote half a billion dollars to expanding the District’s traffic cameras? DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed 2024 budget reveals, once again, where her priorities lie. Read more in DCist.
Dirty real estate done dirt cheap: Real estate firms are buying up rent-stabilized apartments in Southeast DC to exploit tenants using public-housing vouchers. The voucher program is meant to encourage affordable housing and bridge the gap between tenants’ incomes and market rates. Developers like Sam Razjooyan, however, buy cheap apartment buildings, delay repairs to push current tenants to leave, and then charge higher rents to new tenants that use vouchers, as DCist details. The result is a public subsidy of real estate companies that charge sky-high rents.
Will there be litigation about the children and pets? Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter-convulsing call for a Red state/Blue state “national divorce” has brought the usual thumb-sucking and brow-knuckling responses. However, one academic identifies in The Conversation, that “… all this secession talk misses a key point that every troubled couple knows. Just as there are ways to withdraw from a marriage before any formal divorce, there are also ways to exit a nation before officially seceding… I have studied secession for 20 years, and I think that it is not just a “what if?” scenario anymore… [I and my co-author on a book on the subject] frame secession as an extreme end point on a scale that includes various acts of exit that have already taken place across the U.S.” And some of the possible material consequences of splitsville are outlined in this piece in The Hill.
24/7 Workplace? S. Korea youth push back against lengthened official work week: Young workers in the bustling economy told the right-wing government “no way” when a 69-hour work week was proposed. Workers in the home of Samsung and Hyundai already put in more hours per year than any other rich industrial country. “South Korea’s current system … is already punishing, with employees allowed to work for 40 hours regularly and 12 hours of overtime per week.” From Portside.
…But here, the voice of the CEO is heard in the land. Meanwhile, evidence is building that corporate capitalists in the US fear they are losing control of the workplace, post-Covid. They are muttering, without much evidence, that remote workers are just not as productive. Meanwhile, Chinese bosses are out-brutalizing our CEOs, meaning they might be winning, worries Steven Rattner in the NYT. He quotes a tech boss who worries that new hires, working remotely, are suffering from “lack of an office culture.” Meaning CEOs are missing the sucking up and kowtowing that used to make work so much more rewarding – for them. In a masterstroke, Rattner notes “Then there’s Silicon Valley Bank. Even as Covid faded, much of the bank’s leadership team remained dispersed around the country, which hindered communication and collaboration.” Well, that settles it.
Workers in France continue uprising: “Protesters angry with President Emmanuel Macron and his plan to raise the pension age blocked access to an airport terminal, sat on train tracks, clashed with police and threw projectiles at a police station in a day of demonstrations across France.” French workers continue to stand against Macron’s neoliberal pension reform.
The flame of thought, the magnificence of art, the wonder of discovery, and the audacity of invention all belong to revolutionary periods when humanity, tired of its chains, shatters them and stops inebriated to breathe the breeze of a vaster and freer horizon..
- Virgilia D'Andrea
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