LA Progressive

When I sat down recently with longtime organizer Eric Mann, I expected us to talk about movement strategy. We did. But before we got very far, Mann raised something more basic: friendship.

“What’s the point of trying to change the whole country if we don’t like each other?” he asked.

It was vintage Eric—part political theory, part personal reflection, and a reminder that movements are ultimately made of human beings.

Mann has been organizing for more than six decades. His political history stretches from the Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society to years as an autoworker and organizer in the United Auto Workers. Today he is co-director of Los Angeles’ Labor/Community Strategy Center, an organization that has spent decades joining grassroots organizing with political education and movement strategy.

But what has always interested me most about Eric is something else: he is a white man who has spent much of his political life trying to understand what it means to struggle for Black liberation.

That became the starting point for our conversation. To read this article in its entirety go to: LA Progressive

In this conversation, Peter Laarman tells Dick and Sharon how he resisted reading the sprawling new biography of James Baldwin—Nicholas Bogg’s James Baldwin: A Love Story—out of deep respect for this great writer. The reviews were all telling Peter that Boggs digs into the details of his subject’s sex life. This turned me off, says Peter, even though I am a gay man who has not been averse to slurping up the salaciousness in profiles of other gay icons. Peter went on to tell us the he resisted in this case, however, because he could not help recalling that Baldwin himself, who wrote beautifully and often about the challenges of intimacy and vulnerability, was forever reluctant to have his sexuality brought under the microscope. He thought it was vulgar. And to the end of his life, he also remained deeply conflicted about his attraction to men and sometimes boys, which is not at all surprising in view of his origin story and the straitened circumstances of his unlikely and difficult rise to recognition and respect. To read this story in full click here

lder activists talk a lot about “passing the torch” to the next generation.

After spending time with AngelMarie Taylor, I’m beginning to think we may have the metaphor wrong.

Young people like Taylor aren’t standing around waiting for somebody to hand them a torch. They have already picked it up. The more urgent question is whether those of us who have been doing this work for decades are prepared to support them, listen to them and help clear obstacles out of their way.

Taylor is a Youth Vanguard Organizer with Black Lives Matter Grassroots, and when I recently interviewed her, I was struck by the contrast between her youth and the amount of organizing she has already packed into her life.

During her years at California State University Channel Islands, she was active with groups including Students for Quality Education, the Black Student Union, reproductive and gender-equity organizing, Students for Justice in Palestine and Students Against Fascism.

But her activism started long before college.

It started when she was 10 years old.

Organizing Because Children Needed Lunch

Taylor told me that she and her siblings sometimes went to school without being able to afford lunch. Rather than accepting that as simply the way things were, she joined student government and began working to make food universally available at her school.

“I started as a student organizer when I was 10 years old,” she told me. “There were so many situations where myself and my siblings were going to school and could not afford lunch.”

That first experience taught her something enormously important: organizing could actually change conditions. To read the full article go to the LA Progressive

Mario is a longtime LA Progressive contributor, political strategist, broadcaster, policy commentator, and now Substack writer. He is also very funny—although he insists he is not a comedian.

“I hear that a lot,” he told me when we recently sat down to talk. “Sometimes the only way to deliver honesty is with a little bit of humor.”

The humor helps, because what we ended up discussing was anything but funny.

We began with California unemployment. From there we moved to federal budget cuts, local government austerity, corporate media, the manosphere, Latino men who shifted toward Donald Trump, the disappearance of pathways into the middle class, and finally to the question underneath all of it:

Can Americans who are being squeezed by the same economic system recognize one another as allies before we are persuaded to fight over the scraps?

Mario thinks we can.

But first, he says, we have to understand the frame.

California Unemployment Is Rising. The Media Is Missing the Role of Federal Funding Cuts

Read More

The Cuts Happened in Washington. The Pain Arrives Locally.

One of Mario’s central concerns is the growing disconnect between decisions made by the federal government and the consequences people experience months later in their neighborhoods.

Federal budgets are abstract.

A closed clinic is not.

A laid-off social worker is not.

A city eliminating services is not.

Neither is a family suddenly discovering that an organization it depended upon no longer has the staff or money to help.

Mario argues that this delayed effect allows political responsibility to disappear.

Donald Trump returned to office and his administration moved aggressively to cut federal spending, personnel, grants, and programs. Elon Musk became the public face of that campaign, at one point quite literally appearing onstage wielding a chainsaw as a symbol of government-cutting zeal.

The theater was memorable.

What happens after the theater is less visible.

Communities can absorb financial shocks for a while. States move money around. Cities tap reserves. Nonprofits reduce expenses. Agencies freeze hiring. Organizations stretch grants further.

Then the cushion disappears.

“And now people are feeling the cuts,” Mario told me. “Many times we don’t associate what we’re feeling on the ground with where the funding source is.”

That distinction matters.

Every February, the same poster goes up in the break room. Martin Luther King Jr., mid-speech, arm raised, quote stripped of context and shrunk to fit a frame. Every May 5th, someone brings tacos to the office potluck. Every June, a rainbow logo. Every November, a land acknowledgement read aloud before the meeting starts, then never mentioned again.

None of that is nothing. But none of it is the thing itself.

That gap — between the gesture and the structure underneath it — is where “liberal” and “progressive“ stop being interchangeable words people use loosely in the same sentence and start being two genuinely different theories about what’s wrong and what fixes it. The confusion is understandable. Both sides vote blue. Both sides say they’re against racism. But they disagree, sometimes sharply, about what racism actually is and what it would take to end it — and nowhere is that disagreement clearer than in how each camp handles race, specifically.

Two Theories of Change

The liberal approach starts from a basic faith: the system works, mostly, and where it doesn’t, it can be fixed from inside. Liberals believe in gradual progress through established institutions — courts, legislatures, HR departments, school boards. The strategy is to protect rights, expand access, and promote fairness within the current system. Legal scholar Ian Haney López calls this framework “Liberal Race Theory”: the belief that racial inequality can be overcome through gradual reform, legal protections, and equal opportunity, built on individual rights, colorblindness, and inclusion. In a conversation on the podcast The Weeds, López offered a shorthand for the split that’s stuck with me ever since: it’s like comparing Martin Luther King to Malcolm X. Same century, same enemy, fundamentally different theory of the case.

The progressive approach starts from a different premise: the system isn’t broken, it’s working as designed, and the design itself is the problem. Progressives argue the system is structured to produce inequity and must be transformed, not just improved. Where liberals focus on individual rights and access, progressives focus on structural inequality, corporate power, and historical injustice — the rules, not just who gets let into the room where the rules get made.

Neither camp denies that racism exists. The disagreement is about its address. Is it a bug — a set of individual failures, outdated laws, and unconscious biases that a fairer, more inclusive version of the current system can correct? Or is it a feature — something built into the foundation, requiring not reform but rebuilding? That question is the whole argument, and almost everything downstream of it — including how each side handles Black History Month — follows from which answer you start with. To continue reading this article click here.

Predatory lending, predatory treatment of low-wage workers, predatory destruction of small businesses through private equity vehicles, predatory violation of young girls and boys: it's all part of the same lawless romp for these high-flying folks.

Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive have a conversation with Peter Laarman, a retired minister who formerly led Progressive Christians Uniting in Los Angeles. Peter says, “When I studied my Bible as a kid in Wisconsin, I was always puzzled and even a bit disturbed by the way in which those prophets would almost invariably shmoosh together what seemed to me like very different offenses: sexual immorality, worship of false gods, and economic oppression. Is God equally pissed off about all these things? I asked myself: how very strange that God can’t focus His anger a little more precisely. Or maybe God enjoys being pissed off in general. As I say, it was all rather confusing to a teenaged farm boy.

Now that I am in my eighth decade, I think I understand these things a little better. In the first place, I understand that “God is angry” is the prophets’ way of saying something is deeply wrong. In other words, you don’t have to believe in an angry God in order to appreciate prophetic critique. And second, I understand that grouping together sexual violation, religious profanation, and economic exploitation is exactly the right way to frame moral rot at the heart of any nation, as these three forms of oppression usually run together.”. Peter Laarman’s column can be found at https://www.laprogressive.com/author/peter-laarman

Trump friend-turned-foe Conway has enraged the MAGA right by charging on X, “They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then [with Wessel], and what Trump and MAGA are doing today [with Kirk], are striking, chilling – and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.”

In a conversation with Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive, emeritus professor of history at the West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah, KY, Berry Craig explains why the comparison between the murder of Horst Wessel and Charlie Kirk is important to understand. This conversation was sparked by an article written by Berry Craig for the LA Progressive. Here is a link to that article:

https://www.laprogressive.com/progressive-issues/charlie-kirk-echoes-horst-wessel

Andrea Mazzarino, the co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project joins Dick and Sharon to discuss the consequences of war rarely discussed. While conventional casualty figures focus on battlefield deaths, Andrea Mazzarino asserts that the indirect toll—the number who die or suffer due to illness, malnutrition, disrupted infrastructure, lack of healthcare, mental trauma, and disability is significantly higher. Shockingly, of over one million lives lost, at least 800,000 are traced to these secondary effects. Mazzarino, who is also an activist and social worker, is the co-editor of the new book War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her extensive research in this field provides essential information for those who believe there are alternatives to war.

You kind find Andrea Mazzarino’s articles here:

https://www.laprogressive.com/author/andrea-mazzarino

Please support independent media and subscribe to the LA Progressive

https://www.laprogressive.com/

You can find us where ever you use social media

https://linktr.ee/laprogressive

The rapid rise of a pugilistic and politicized white evangelicalism occurred in direct tandem with the virulent reaction to the advances of the midcentury civil rights movement. Peter Laarman a retired minister who formerly led Progressive Christians Uniting in Los Angeles joins Dick and Sharon of the LA Progressive to discuss how white christian nationalism was sparked by the same elements that promote predatory capitalism.

To read the full article that launched this conversation, click here:

https://www.laprogressive.com/science-and-religion/dangerous-white-christians

If you appreciate the discussions here, please like, share and subscribe:

https://www.laprogressive.com/

In a political landscape increasingly defined by polarization and corporate influence, Jeff Mackler stands as a principled voice for revolutionary socialism. As the national secretary of Socialist Action, a Trotskyist political organization, Mackler has spent decades fighting capitalism, imperialism, and environmental destruction—often from far outside the mainstream. His is a politics rooted not in triangulation or compromise, but in unwavering commitment to justice, equality, and the working class.

Jeff Macker joins Sharon Kyle and Dick Price of the LA Progressive as they discuss his political activism and the future of the United States as it turns decidedly more authoritarian Mackler may not be a household name, but his life’s work spans from the streets of labor picket lines to the frontlines of the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. He’s been an educator, a climate organizer, a political prisoner advocate, and a two-time presidential candidate. His vision is not simply to reform the system—but to replace it entirely.

To read more content written by Jeff Mackler on the LA Progressive go to:

https://www.laprogressive.com/author/jeff-mackler

Please share this podcast