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“I want to be clear that my enemy is Zohran Mamdani’s enemy, right? And it’s the same billionaire class that, again, put $54 million dollars to try to destroy him. But it was the people organized that defeated that. They defeated not just Andrew Cuomo, but the entire establishment ruling-class apparatus. And that should be the takeaway that all of us bring with us. That when we are organized, when we are passionate about our clear vision, there is no force on earth that can beat the people when they are properly organized. And that’s what we’re offering the people of District 15.”

Learn more about Andre Easton’s platform and sign up to canvass, phone bank, or donate at andreforthebronx.nyc.

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The Trump administration completed demolition of the East Wing of the White House last week to make way for a sorely needed ballroom. Amidst a contentious government shutdown, and precarity for the working class, the Trump administration has made sure to prioritize the important things: leisure and luxury for the elites. As if working people needed this perfectly illustrative — and grotesque — symbol of the growing class divide.

Presumably aware of the optics nightmare it would be to use taxpayer funds for such a flagrantly unnecessary project, the White House has said no tax dollars are being used for this $300 million endeavor (up from the $200 million price tag given by Trump at the end of July). Instead, it’s being funded through private donations and Trump himself, who has pledged $22 million.

While this project might not be siphoning off taxpayer money in the most direct sense, those funding it represent some of the most powerful corporate actors profiting off working people through labor exploitation, tax breaks, public subsidies, monopolistic control, the military-industrial complex, and government capture.

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Donors include defense contractors Palantir, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton; tech companies Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Coinbase; and communications companies T-Mobile and Comcast. (The full list of donors is below.)

Corresponding contribution amounts have not been disclosed, though Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company and owner of YouTube, agreed to a $24.5 million settlement over Trump’s YouTube suspension following Jan. 6, with $22 million of that directed to the Trust for the National Mall, which is overseeing funding and construction of the ballroom.

Palantir, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton have extracted billions through taxpayer-funded federal contracts with the DHS, DDS, and ICE, while Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Meta have built empires on union-busting, surveillance capitalism, and antitrust violations.

Utility and energy monopolies such as NextEra Energy and Union Pacific have used political influence to protect profits at the expense of workers, consumers, and the environment. Meanwhile, consumer corporations such as Comcast, T-Mobile and tobacco giants Altria and Reynolds continue to extract wealth through deceptive billing, addictive products, and monopolistic control.

While Palantir profits off our private data and outfits Trump’s deportation machine with surveillance tech; Blackstone gobbles up housing, driving up rents and making cities and towns unaffordable; Microsoft and Google provide tech support for Israel’s genocide of Gaza, and Lockheed Martin manufactures the weapons used to drop the bombs; Amazon has laid the foundation for the modern union-busting playbook, pouring millions into crushing workers; and Union Pacific spews hazardous waste into the environment, leaving the mess for us all.

Not only that, many of these same corporations bankrolling the renovation are cashing in on Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Estimates say the law’s revived tax breaks for capital and R&D spending could deliver between $55 and $75 billion to tech giants Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Tesla. For this year alone, analysts estimated Alphabet’s share of the public pie at $17.3 billion, Amazon’s at $15.6 billion, Microsoft’s at $12.4 billion, and Meta’s at a hair under $11 billion — public giveaways to the companies now underwriting this “privately funded” White House addition.

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Remember the Trump administration’s “loyalty scorecard” for corporations? I would guess these companies are hoping these donations, composed in large part from money sucked from the public, will bump up their loyalty scores. And if that’s the case, it does appear to be working. Last week, donors — including representatives from Amazon, Lockheed Martin and Google — were invited to a White House dinner to celebrate their willingness to shower Trump with working-class blood money.

Corporations aren’t the only ones looking to prove their loyalty to Trump. Billionaire Republican backers also feature heavily on the list of donors. Paolo Tiramani, founder of Boxabl, has donated $10 million in stock. Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of private equity ghouls Blackstone; Harold Hamm, founder of the oil company, and fracking specialists, Continental Resources; José Fanjul, sugar industry magnate; and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, founders of the cryptocurrency Gemini, are among the billionaire donors. (Again, the full list is below.)

Again, whether the ballroom is being funded directly with our tax dollars is irrelevant. Together, these donors are ripping off working people, funneling tax dollars back to themselves through tax breaks and subsidies, and using those gains to consolidate an authoritarian order that serves only themselves.

Connected to the White House via a glass bridge, the new ballroom is expected to be an overwhelming 90,000 square feet — far larger than the 55,000 square foot White House itself. Even with its massive size, Trump insisted earlier this summer the East Wing would remain untouched: “It’ll be near it but not touching it — and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” (Interestingly, the classified Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC, which has grown out of the former World War II-era bomb shelter, sits beneath what was the East Wing.)

Despite these assurances, the East Wing was demolished in quite Trumpian fashion — during a government shutdown, while the National Capital Planning Commission, responsible for federal building projects, was closed. The White House claimed it did not need approval for the demolition, though the National Trust for Historic Preservation urged a pause and the completion of “legally required public review processes.”

Constructed in 1942 by FDR — champion of New Deal politics, the closest we’ve come to a politics of care for the American public — the East Wing would seem an emblem of everything Trump hates. Its sudden demolition to make way for a garish new symbol of fascistic consolidation of state and corporate power at the expense of working people seems appropriate in this second Gilded Age. Not content with merely tearing down a historic piece of “the people’s house” to remake in their own vulgar likeness, Trump and the elites are rubbing our noses in it.

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Corporate/Institutional Donors include:

• Altria Group

• Amazon.com, Inc.

• Apple Inc.

• Booz Allen Hamilton

• Caterpillar Inc.

• Coinbase Global, Inc.

• Comcast Corporation

• Hard Rock International

• Google (via YouTube settlement)

• HP Inc.

• Lockheed Martin Corporation

• Meta Platforms, Inc.

• Micron Technology, Inc.

• Microsoft Corporation

• NextEra Energy, Inc.

• Palantir Technologies Inc.

• Ripple Labs Inc.

• Reynolds American Inc.

• T‑Mobile US, Inc.

• Tether America LLC

• Union Pacific Corporation

Individual/Family Donors include:

• Adelson Family Foundation

• Stefan E. Brodie

• Betty Wold Johnson Foundation

• Charles & Marissa Cascarilla

• Edward & Shari Glazer

• Harold Hamm

• Benjamin Leon Jr.

• The Lutnick Family (e.g., Howard Lutnick)

• Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation

• Stephen A. Schwarzman

• Konstantin Sokolov

• Kelly Loeffler & Jeff Sprecher

• Paolo Tiramani

• Cameron Winklevoss & Tyler Winklevoss

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Ashley Bishop spoke with Jared Abbott, the center’s director, about what the group’s Rust Belt Survey reveals about working-class voters’ growing disillusionment with the Democratic Party. Abbott breaks down what they’ve called the “Democratic penalty” — the steep drop in support candidates face simply for carrying the party label — and traces it to decades of corporate-friendly policymaking and broken promises that have eroded trust among working people.

Produced with the Labor Institute, the Labor Education Action Research Network at Rutgers University, and the Jacobin Foundation, the survey also finds strong support for independent, worker-led politics outside the two-party system. Rust Belt voters, it suggests, are hungry for economic populism — a politics that reins in corporate power and puts working people first.

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The first of two debates for the election for mayor of Tel Aviv took place Thursday night. Excuse me — New York City. Well, you’d certainly be forgiven for thinking it was the former. Israel-Palestine — and when I say Israel-Palestine, I mean, “Why won’t you condemn Hamas?” — dominated the two-hour debate. Issues more relevant to working New Yorkers, like the affordability crisis, received secondary billing.

With only two weeks until the general election, the race has narrowed to Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. (If you’re not familiar with Sliwa and wondering about the gradient shading across his forehead, it’s a tan line from the self-proclaimed “iconic” red beret he’s been wearing for the last several decades.)

The debate opened strong with both Cuomo and Sliwa demonstrating that they had no idea how headlines work, and by 17 minutes in, they hit their most discussed topic: Israel-Palestine.

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Despite the moderator beginning this segment by acknowledging that “of course, the mayor has no direct role in foreign affairs,” this block lasted roughly 13 minutes — leading the segment on education, which lasted just over 10 minutes. Surprisingly, crime and the NYPD was the third longest block at under nine minutes.

Other issues, which again have direct impact on the daily lives and futures of working New Yorkers — like the cost of groceries, housing, and child care — received far less than their fair share of airtime. The longest segment on the affordability crisis, at six and a half minutes, was of the “but, how will you pay for it, idiot?” variety. Cuomo did not offer up any policy proposals of his own to address working class discontent.

This did not go unnoticed by Zohran who remarked:

“I just have to say, it’s been an hour and 20 minutes of this debate and we haven’t heard Governor Cuomo say the word affordability. That’s why he lost the primary. That’s why he’ll lose the general election.”

Climate change — yes, this is a local issue; think flooding, storms and heat waves — via enforcing Local Law 97, New York City’s flagship climate legislation, received two and a half minutes of airtime. (That’s less time than Cuomo spent insisting that Zohran’s real objective is “legalizing prostitution.”)

Functionally, this segment on Israel-Palestine amounted to little more than a series of gotcha questions aimed at Zohran. In addition to the “Israel-Hamas peace deal” (a peace deal characterized by continued Israeli airstrikes), Zohran was prompted to explain “confusing” remarks he made on Fox News in which he refused to say explicitly that Hamas should lay down its arms.

On Wednesday, Zohran said:

“I don’t really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the question of justice and safety and the fact that anything has to abide by international law, and that applies to Hamas, and that applies to the Israeli military.”

He amended this statement on the debate stage:

“Of course I believe that they should lay down their arms. I’m proud to be one of the first elected officials in the state who called for a ceasefire. And calling for a ceasefire means ceasing fire. That means all parties have to cease fire and put down their weapons.

“And the reason that we call for that is not only for the end of the genocide, but also unimpeded access of humanitarian aid. I, like many New Yorkers, am hopeful that this ceasefire will hold. I’m hopeful that it is durable. I’m hopeful that it is just. And for it to be just, we also have to ensure that it addresses the conditions that preceded these conditions, like occupation, like the siege, and apartheid.”

Cuomo was not asked in turn whether Israel should be prosecuted for continued crimes against humanity; whether he would arrest Netanyahu if he returned to New York City under charges of war crimes by the International Criminal Court; or about his own cozy relationship with Netanyahu as part of his legal defense against those charges.

Instead of engaging with Zohran’s call for “unimpeded access” to humanitarian aid in Gaza, we got this:

“The assemblyman will not denounce Hamas. The assemblyman will not denounce Hasan Piker, who said America deserved 9/11. The assemblyman just said in his response, well, it depends on occupation. That is code meaning that Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish state, which he has never acknowledged. That is ‘from the river to the sea.’ That’s why he won’t denounce ‘globalize the intifada,’ which means ‘kill all Jews.’”

Clearly, Cuomo still sees painting Zohran as an untenably radical leftist as his best chance at unseating the frontrunner.

Rather than forcing Cuomo to defend his record of support for a genocide or the false assertion that “globalize the intifada” means “kill all Jews,” Zohran was pushed into a defensive posture over a record of support for the most basic human rights. Though, this should come as no surprise after watching mainstream media assist in manufacturing consent for this genocide over the last two years.

We can take this tally further, too. Policing protests — in direct reference to Zohran’s participation in pro-Palestine protests that have shut down Grand Central — and free speech rights were prodded along the Israel-Palestine thread. If we add up the amount of time spent on issues related to Israel-Palestine, that’s close to 21 minutes. If we include one question asking whether candidates would boycott any parades — likely in reference to the “Israel Day on Fifth” parade — that bumps it up to 22 and a half minutes, or 18.5% of the debate. (Sliwa was adamant that “all parades have the right to exist in New York City” and attending as many as possible would be a priority of his mayoralty — presumably wearing a sash and a top hat at all times.)

Public safety issues — including four and a half minutes on whether Zohran wants to legalize prostitution — came in second at around 19 and a half minutes. Critically, less than fifteen minutes of the debate was spent on the affordability crisis. This total includes that six and a half minutes spent answering how New York City — the wealthiest city in the U.S. — could possibly find the money to pay for Zohran’s policies. The rest of the conversation on affordability included six minutes on housing and less than two minutes on wealth inequality (all of which was Zohran). Trump and his policies — like ICE and the presence of National Guard in the city — received 14 and a half minutes.

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Israel-Palestine is one of the seminal international and domestic political issues of our time. Banishing it from the electoral discourse is neither desirable nor practical — especially when it’s been a critical point of contention throughout the campaign. But the way these questions are framed and engaged with here — as a discursive trap for Mamdani and an opportunity for Cuomo to reassure voters beyond his record that he won’t rock the boat or deviate from the status quo — is morally reprehensible.

There’s a place for talking about protests and anti-Semitism in the city (though it should be abundantly clear by now that fears of anti-Semitism have been used as a sinister ploy to restrict free speech and demonize the left). These are real issues relevant to New Yorkers.

But while 18.5% of the New York City mayoral debate was spent re-litigating who’s for a free Palestine and who’s wrong, New Yorkers were robbed of an opportunity to hear how Cuomo (and Sliwa, lest we forget him) plan to respond to the affordability crisis. It bears repeating that the affordability crisis, and a slate of policies aimed at alleviating the burden on the working class in this city, is what got Zohran on that debate stage — not his social media game, as Cuomo seemed to indicate. Never mind that this verbal song-and-dance grotesquely reduces the entire conflict — a genocide that has killed at least 67,000 people — to a rhetorical ambush.

Because of the myopic focus on getting Zohran to defend his record of solidarity with Palestine, civil disobedience, support for the working class, and to condemn Hamas, Cuomo was able to obscure his lack of material policy ambitions. (Informing those of us under 40 what he did when we were five doesn’t count either.) Cuomo’s plan — if through some catastrophe he wound up in Gracie Mansion — seems to be mayor only for those who support him: Bill Ackman and the rest of the donor class.

So what did we actually learn from this debate? Aside from that Sliwa was apparently “shot in the back of a yellow cab in 1992 by the Gottis and the Gambinos,” a whole lot of nothing — besides that a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty looks more and more inevitable.

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Last night the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, organized a rally at the United Palace in Washington Heights under the banner “Our Time Has Come.” Despite the rainy weather, the line of attendees holding umbrellas in rain gear already stretched down the block an hour before the doors were scheduled to open.

Speakers included New York Attorney General Letitia James, making her first public remarks since her indictment by the Trump administration last week; City Council Member Chi Ossé; comedian Gianmarco Soresi, who emceed the rally; former head of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan; and WNBA player Natasha Cloud, whose remarks elicited chants of “Free Palestine” from the crowd.

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Despite the big names and palpable excitement from the 3,200 supporters in attendance — arguably the most telling part of the night came when host Gianmarco Soresi called for everyone who had canvassed or phone banked for the campaign to turn their phone lights on. By the time Soresi had finished speaking, more than three-quarters of those in attendance (by my eye count) had their cellphones lit and raised. It’s no longer a novel insight, but it bears repeating that this is one of the decisive differences between this campaign and other efforts from Democrats — one that Mamdani mentioned in his 20-minute-long address at the end of the rally.

“And to those who doubt, who cannot quite believe, who share our vision but fear allowing themselves to hope, I ask you: When has dignity ever been given?

“The same questions asked of us were asked of organized labor, were asked of the civil rights movement, were asked of any who had the nerve to demand a future they could not yet see: Could they not wait? Could they not see that they were asking too much?

“They knew that we do not get to determine the scale of the crisis that we face. We only get to decide how we respond. We know that every great victory must be won because it will never be given.

“When organized labor won the weekend so that working people would have time to rest — that was power won, not given. When those who came before us marched for voting rights and civil rights, they triumphed because they dared to dream, not because they were given permission by a political establishment content with the status quo.”

Before the primary, Zohran’s campaign inspired more than 50,000 people to sign up to do the hard work of politics — to demand that our uncertain future take a shape that serves us, the working people of New York City. With an affordability crisis rampaging the city, a fascist in the White House, and our only real stopgap measure a bunch of establishment Dems busy kowtowing to their donors, victory won’t so much be hard-won as wrested from under the fingernails of the powerful.

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Three weeks out from the general election, the latest Quinnipiac poll shows Zohran leading at 46% — his closest rival, disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is lagging behind at just 33%. And it’s worth remarking that were these numbers reversed — with Cuomo leading Zohran by 13% (or even 1 or 2%) — the establishment would be more than happy to just call it a day.

While the race feels like a foregone conclusion — barring some cataclysmic Cuomo-level scandal — Soresi joked during the rally that the last time he felt so confident that a Democrat was going to win was 2016.

Soresi is right to comment. This isn’t a time for a preemptive celebration — the working people of New York City (and I would say the left writ large) deserve more than a moral victory, as Zohran remarked earlier in the campaign. But we have one advantage that Hillary never had: genuine enthusiasm. Enthusiasm enough to inspire a growing army of working people to knock on doors and call up strangers.

This willing engagement isn’t just for Zohran or his social media game; it’s for his policies. Fast and free buses, affordable housing, universal child care, city-owned grocery stores, and the feeling that more is possible — these things will never be given. If we really want our time to be now, we need to keep up the fight through November; then the real (harder) work to see these policies come to fruition can start.

(Jacobin published Mamdani’s full speech here.)

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“The American labor movement is one false dawn after another. When I first got involved in unions, you had the UPS strike of 1997, which people said, this is going to change the movement. This was a huge strike. It was very successful. This was going to drive things. And then two years later, you had the battle in Seattle, the WTO protests where environmentalists and union people were side by side, fighting. And it felt like this was going to bring something—and then it didn’t.

And so, there’s lots of reasons to be skeptical. But what I would say is that the last five years—despite the last seven months being terrible—the last five years have seen more labor energy and more labor success than we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

“Who’s Got the Power: The Resurgence of American Unions” is out on October 14. You can pre-order your copy here.

Watch the full interview with Dave Kamper above.

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