LA Progressive

New Nuclear Weapons? Not for the U.S. Dick Price of the LA Progressive has a conversation with Bill Astor about our nuclear arsonal.

It's always the right time to stop building more weapons of mass destruction To prevent the apocalyptic consequences of yet another nuclear arms race, the US should act to decrease “investments” in new nuclear weapons while cutting current arsenals by negotiating and enacting new arms reduction treaties. Together, the US and Russia already possess ten thousand nuclear warheads, enough to destroy life on earth and several other earth-sized planets. We need desperately to divest from new nuclear weapons, not “invest” in them.

To read the article discussed here, go to:

https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/new-nuclear-weapons

The main executive leadership of the Democratic Party is the Democratic National Committee (DNC). It is generally responsible for the affairs of the Democratic Party including planning how to support Democratic Party candidates running for local, state, and federal office across the nation. The election to choose the next chairperson of the DNC is anticipated to take place on February 1, 2025. But, before the February election, one must first become a candidate.

Former 2024 presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson, has written a letter to the members of the DNC announcing her desire to serve the party as chair of the DNC. She is also asking them to sign a petition that would begin the process of making that possible. The signing of the petition is not an endorsement. It simply allows potential candidates to have an opportunity to make their case with the DNC. The LA Progressive supports democracy and democratic processes. We urge any DNC member reading this to sign the petition. We also ask all readers to share this message.

Here is Marianne's letter directed to members of the Democratic National Council, which will elect a new leader in early February to reinvent the Party, not merely rebuild it on old models:

This year’s election of a DNC Chair feels different than in past years. Before now, the party had faced defeats to be sure. But our playbook still basically worked. The waters were turbulent at times, but our ship was steady.

This year, the party faces a more critical problem than we have ever faced before. The MAGA phenomenon now challenges the very way that politics are done in America, and the traditional tool kit of party organizing will not be enough to meet the moment.

Renewing the Democratic Party

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President Trump has ushered in an age of political theatre – a collective adrenaline rush that has enabled him to not only move masses of people into his camp but also masses of people away from ours. It does not serve us to underestimate the historic nature of what he has achieved.

In fact, it’s important that we recognize the psychological and emotional dimensions of Trump’s appeal. We need to understand it to create the energy to counter it. MAGA is a distinctly 21st century political movement and it will not be defeated by a 20th century tool kit. Data analysis, fundraising, field organizing, and beefed-up technology – while all are important - will not be enough to prepare the way for Democratic victory in 2024 and beyond.

Read Marianne's petition to DNC members (only DNC members can vote, but all can read)

That’s why I have decided to run for DNC Chair this year. Running for the Democratic nomination for President twice, I have traveled extensively throughout this country speaking with voters. I’ve witnessed up close the fraying bonds of affection between the party and the working people of the United States; I met many who had been traditional Democratic voters yet had lost hope that the party had their back. In the 2024 election, throughout my campaign I warned of a coming electoral disaster if Democrats did not listen more deeply to the pain of people throughout America.

My experience of what went wrong has given me insight into what needs doing to make things right. (See my manifesto for a Renewed Democratic Party.) As Chairwoman, I will work to reinvent the party from the inside out. For if we want a new President in four years, and a new Congress in two, then we must immediately get about the task of creating a new party.

As the rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Syria Liberation Committee) seized Damascus, Syria’s capital, on December 7, 2024, the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad boarded a flight to Moscow, Russia. It was the end of the rule of the Assad family that began when Hafez al-Assad (1930-2000) became president in 1971, and continued through his son Bashar from 2000—a 53-year period of rule. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which seized Damascus, was formed out of the remnants of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra (Front for the Conquest of Syria) in 2017, and led by its emir Abu Jaber Shaykh and its military commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

Vijay Prashad discusses this and more in this information packed conversation with Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive. To read Vijay Prashad’s article in its entirety go to:

The Fall of Assad

If we have learned anything about Donald Trump over the past decade, it’s that even his most outlandish threats against democracy should be taken seriously. This applies not only to his promises to exact revenge and retribution on his political opponents and critics, but also to his expressed interest in serving a third term (or more) as president.

Trump has been musing about serving three terms for a long time. In a 2018 fundraiser with donors at Mar-a-Lago, he praised Chinese President XI Jinping for being elected president for life, calling Xi “great,” and suggesting, “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” At a campaign rally in Wisconsin in August 2020, he declared: “We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

His latest remarks on the subject were delivered on Nov. 13, when he told a gathering of House Republicans, “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure out something else.’

The full article, written by Bill Blum, can be found here:

https://www.laprogressive.com/election-and-campaigns/trumps-third-term

The LA Progressive can be accessed on all social media as well as our website:

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Henry Giroux joins Dick and Sharon in a conversation about neoliberalism and its impact on education. Henry believes that for decades, neoliberalism—a predatory form of capitalism—has waged a relentless war on the welfare state, dismantled the public sphere, and eroded the common good. Disguised in the rhetoric of freedom, it elevates market logic to the status of a governing ideology, insisting that every aspect of society must conform to the demands of economic activity. In practice, neoliberalism concentrates wealth in the hands of a financial elite while celebrating unrestrained self-interest, extreme individualism, deregulation, and privatization. It reduces citizenship to consumerism and strips public life of its collective purpose, creating a society where everything is commodified, yet nothing of real value is safeguarded. Within this framework, the devastating social costs of its policies—ranging from systemic racism and militarism to staggering inequality—are not merely tolerated but normalized. Neoliberalism is a systemic force of political, economic, and cultural violence, fostering despair while obliterating any vision of justice, solidarity, or care.

The 2008 financial crisis laid bare the catastrophic failures of this system, exposing its inherent corruption, its indifference to human suffering, and the complicity of the Democratic Party in preserving the status quo. This was no anomaly but a revelation of a deeply entrenched order that privileges markets and whiteness over life itself. Between 2020 and 2023, the Covid-19 pandemic further stripped neoliberalism of its veneer. To read this article in its entirety, go to:

https://www.laprogressive.com/education-reform/conscience-in-education

Bernie Sanders and others in the political class believe that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class and that, as a result, the working class has abandoned the party. Then, Trump duped the working class by appealing to hate, the most primal of instincts. Which resulted in many working-class voters joining Trump. For reasons that do not make sense since, unless one looks deeper, the working class has been taken for a ride. Bill Blum, Sharon Kyle, and Dick Price dive into a conversation looking for the deeper explanation for the working-class alliance with Donald Trump.

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The Democratic Party is dead. The Republican Party is dead too. It died a while back, but nobody knew it because before anybody could check its pulse, a collection of crazies assumed its identity and rallied behind The Great Orange Father. But everybody knew the Democratic Party died because on election day, after a flamboyant, dramatic swoon, it crashed to the ground — says Mark Fancher, attorney and contributor to the LA Progressive. This conversation between Mark Fancher, Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive took place shortly after the November 5, 2024 election but has been a reality for quite some time before the election.

For more about the LA Progressive, go to https://www.laprogressive.com

To read more of Mark Fancher’s articles on the LA Progressive, go to: https://www.laprogressive.com/author/mark-fancher

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Charisse Burden-Stelly is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, intellectual history, and political and historical sociology. Her research pursues three complementary lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the transnational entanglements of U.S. capitalist racism, anticommunism, and antiblack racial oppression. The second excavates twentieth-century Black anticapitalist intellectual thought, theory, and praxis. Burden-Stelly’s third area of focus examines theories and discourses of economic development in the African diaspora.

Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive sat down with Burden-Stelly to discuss racial-capitalism, a concept that grounds the history of capitalism in the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, especially Black people. The concept of racial capitalism asserts that racialized exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually reinforcing. Burden-Stelly has published work that appears in journals including Small Axe, Monthly Review, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies and the LA Progressive.

https://www.charisseburdenstelly.com/

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It’s the day after election day, USA 2024, and Dick and Sharon are weary. They’re weary of the pervasive misogyny coloring the current political landscape—a hue that now stains even the nation’s highest offices. They’re sick of the unapologetic, gendered vitriol aimed at figures like Vice President Kamala Harris, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Dick longs for a bygone political era that might have provoked scandalized gasps and swift reprimands for what has become normalized today. Sharon wonders if the bygone era that Dick seems to remember ever existed at all.

Marianne Williamson ran for president of the United States in 2020 and 2024. In this interview with Dick Price and Sharon Kyle of the LA Progressive, Marianne speaks frankly about her experiences on the campaign trail but more specifically, with the DNC.

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