In the summer of 1936, New York City opened 11 large outdoor swimming pools across the city that each could hold upwards of 1,000 bathers. It was the height of the New Deal with ambitious public works projects being carried out across the country. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration provided the resources and here in New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia got the job done. Ninety years ago tonight, LaGuarida and other dignitaries presided over the opening of the Sunset Pool in Sunset Park. They were joined by a delirious crowd of 50,000 people, according to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The Indypendent’s Theodore Hamm has the rest of the story below.

The hunger for a government that meets the needs of the people, not just the very rich has fueled a string of leftwing victories in this year’s Democratic primaries. In Maine, Graham Platner, a fiery Marine veteran and oysterman, running from the left crushed centrist Gov. Janet Mills by 53 points in a June primary. Platner dropped out of the race earlier this month when he was credibly accused of rape by a former girlfriend.

Platner’s army of supporters pivoted quickly and on Saturday swept county conventions across the state and clinched the nomination for their new candidate, Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger and union leader who previously served as president of the Maine State Senate. Mark Read, a longtime New York City activist who returned to his native Maine in 2020, fills in the rest of the story here.

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NYC’s New Deal Era Pools Opened with a Splash 90 Years Ago This Summer

By Theodore Hamm

On Monday, July 20, 1936, the Brooklyn Eagle’s front page highlighted the latest developments in the Spanish Civil War, which saw New York City leftists join the fight against fascism. The borough’s large circulation daily newspaper also furnished plenty of local information, including that the day’s high temperature would reach 85 degrees.

That evening brought Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and throngs of working-class New Yorkers to Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. As the next day’s Eagle reported, 50,000 enthusiasts flocked to the grand opening of the park’s grand new public swimming pool.

“This is the finest swimming pool in the country,” La Guardia advised the roaring crowd, “and it’s all yours.” An Eagle photo showed him switching on the dazzling underwater lighting system, illuminating the evening sky. Outside the facility, 200 cops tried to keep the delirious masses from “breaking into the pool grounds and mobbing the speakers’ rostrum.”

The Eagle said that folks turned out from “all of Brooklyn” for the festivities, which included a performance by a Parks Department diving troupe. Sunset Park would be the first of four pools that opened in the borough that summer (in Red Hook, Brownsville and Greenpoint). In mid-August, La Guardia and Moses received a similarly rousing response at the Red Hook launch.Funded by FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), 11 outdoor pools opened across the five boroughs in the summer of 1936. Ninety years later, all remain operational. They provide enduring monuments to the New Deal and its vision of an expansive public sector that provides goods and services for working people.

The extent to which FDR-era policies exacerbated racial inequality (particularly via redlining) is a matter of ongoing controversy. Throughout La Guardia’s first term (1934-37), he and Moses confronted charges of discrimination regarding public amenities, with Black leaders arguing that white neighborhoods received preferential treatment. At the opening of the Central Harlem pool (now known as Jackie Robinson) on the second Saturday in August 1936, the feisty mayor shot back at his detractors.

The New York Times reported that 25,000 people attended the ceremony at what was then called Colonial Park. Tap dance legend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson headlined the entertainment. La Guardia declared that the sparkling new pool refuted charges by the “knockers” (critics) of his administration’s distribution of resources. “Come around and look at this pool,” the mayor urged.

During LGA’s first term, Moses oversaw the construction of pools, the building and/or renovation of city parks and the makeover of the Central Park Zoo. In 1937, La Guardia, a very liberal Republican, easily won reelection over a conservative Democrat. The city’s network of public pools would continue to expand through the early 1970s.

Although Mayor Mamdani regularly touts La Guardia as his inspiration, it is difficult to see how he can match LGA’s enhancements of the city’s parks and recreation. There is no spigot of federal funds comparable to what the New Deal brought to the city—and that’s not only because the Republicans are in control. Pro-corporate Dems rarely invoke the positive legacies of the FDR era.

The New Deal is “at the core of our party’s identity,” Mamdani recently told the New York Times, but “you can’t see it around you anymore.” At the city’s 11 WPA pools, FDR’s ghost hovers.

Perhaps Mamdani and Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura can devise new funding streams and hatch creative plans for legacy projects. It’s still early in the leftist administration. That we’re now celebrating 90 years of summer swimming should at least inspire Mamdani and Shimamura to think big.

Ted Hamm’s Meet Mayor Mamdani is available from OR Books.

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While Trump’s thirst for power is undeniable, he is ultimately the tool of a new tyranny rising in this country that dwarfs anything we’ve seen before. A small group of Silicon Valley billionaires and trillionaires are pushing a rapid rollout of Artificial Intelligence that reorganizes society in ways that would only make them richer and more powerful.

Corporate CEO’s have predicted that tens of millions of jobs would be destroyed including half of all white-collar jobs — many of these jobs would be the kind of entry level jobs that college graduates have previously used to launch their professional careers. Blue collar jobs like truck driver and taxi driver are also facing extinction as driverless trucks and cars are introduced to the roads.

Education is increasingly undermined by AI as students turn to chatbots to do their “thinking” for them and in many cases this trend is encouraged by educators. Mass-produced AI slop could replace much of the arts, And on it goes. Employers can slash payrolls and pocket the profits. And for AI companies, the biggest payoff is yet to come. According to Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the plan is to put all this intelligence on a meter and charge people for it like water or electricity.

No one asked for this. And while some brave souls are asking how AI might be tamed and regulated or even brought under public ownership so that its vast powers can be used to serve the common good, that’s not where we’re headed as long as this process is under the control of capitalists such as Altman, Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who are aided at every turn by leading politicians from both political parties, above all Trump.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary War pamphleteer, wrote in 1776.

New Yorkers got a brief reprieve on Tuesday when Kathy Hochul, who is up for re-election this year, signed an executive order pausing the construction of large data centers for up to one year.

Here at The Indypendent, we’re committed to covering this sprawling, epoch-defining story so that you can understand how AI is changing the world around us, the movements that are rising to confront it and how our political system is responding (or not) to these developments.

While AI feels like it lives in the clouds, it actually requires land, water and power to fuel the massive data centers that are the backbone of the industry. Rural communities all over the country are fighting back against this digital colonialism. We recently profiled a struggle in Western New York against what would be the largest data center in this state so far. Various local groups including the Tonawanda Seneca Nation have banded together. Here are some highlights from our coverage.

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INDY COVERAGE

Western New York Resists Mega-Data Center Plan

By Allie Tutich

Stream U.S. Data Center is seeking to construct a 2.2 million-square-foot data-center complex near Alabama, a town of about 1,800 people halfway between Rochester and Buffalo.

Parents, Teachers Push Pause on AI Rollout in Schools

Parents and teachers are becoming increasingly concerned about the rapid rollout of AI under Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the New York City public school system, the largest in the nation with 900,000 students.

By Ella Spitz

With AI Booming, Corporate CEOs Are Bragging About Their Mass Layoffs

It’s all about boosting shareholder value as the traditional compact between employers and employees disintegrates in front of our eyes

By John Teufel

The Tribeca Film Festival AI Movies Is Not Just Bad, It’s Cynical

If Dreams of Violets is the best AI can do, then it is possible it will never be able to replicate even passable visual art.

By John Teufel

Gavin Newsom Opens the Floodgates to an AI Takeover in California

A likely 2028 presidential candidate, California’s governor favors “after the fact” reporting requirements and opposes regulating the actual construction, creation, and use of AI products.

AI in the Hospital: Striking Nurses Grapple with Fast-Changing Tech

How important is human connection in medical care?

By Elsie Carson-Holt

Educators Should Be AI Antagonists

The use of artificial intelligence in schools is dangerous and should not be welcomed, says this school librarian.

By Ben Mankoff

INDY RADIO NEWS

On next Tuesday’s Indypendent News Hour 5-6 pm on WBAI-99.5 FM and streaming on wbai.org, we’ll speak with State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, a democratic socialist and former tech worker who has become a leader in the Albany in the struggle to enact a statewide data center moratorium.

THIS IS AN AI-FREE ZONE

All articles in The Indypendent are written, researched and edited by human beings. No AI slop here! Your generous support makes all our work possible. Become a paid subscriber to this Substack page today!

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Many people in this country still object to the idea of masked agents jumping out of unmarked cars and shooting their neighbors in the head with no provocation. To that end, there will be a 6 pm rally today at Foley Square to demand the full investigation and prosecution of the ICE agents who carried out these vigilante murders, and the complete abolition of ICE, an agency founded in 2002.

Tune in for an update on the Foley Square protest tonight on The Indypendent News Hour, which airs from 5-6 pm on WBAI-99.5 FM and streaming on wbai.org.

Meanwhile, some of our neighbors have been busy keeping tabs on ICE vehicles and where they are parked when they are not being used to abduct people. For more, see the article below.

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Protesters Allege Hudson River Park Garage Still Allowing ICE Vehicles to Use Space

Nuriel Vera-Degraff, July 14

More than 70 demonstrators chanted “Hey neighbors! ICE parks here!” while rallying outside the Hudson River Park Trust’s Pier 40 parking garage Sunday, protesting the alleged continued presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles in Pier 40 Parking after the expiration of ICE’s contract with the garage.

Protesters chanted and held signs while passersby walked past the rally, which was organized by Rise and Resist. A smaller group of protesters took photos of suspected ICE vehicles in the garage before being escorted out by NYPD officers. Two organizers delivered brief speeches to close out the event.

The Trust, a publicly-owned corporation overseen by a board of directors appointed by New York State and city officials, ended its latest five-year contract with ICE following public pressure and a direct condemnation from Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.

Despite the contract expiring on June 30, anti-ICE organizers reported witnessing four suspected ICE vehicles — including one that was involved in an abduction in Corona, Queens last December — parking in the garage on July 7th, one week later.

While the other three suspected ICE vehicles have not been witnessed in abductions, Julie DeLaurier, an organizer with Rise and Resist, said that the group considers them highly suspect because their license plate numbers are directly adjacent to that of the vehicle involved in the December abduction.

A spokesperson for the Hudson River Park Trust said that “the Trust did not extend or renew the contract with ICE that ended on June 30. As is usual for the end of a parking agreement, the spaces were vacated and the associated parking passes were deactivated. The Trust is looking into the new assertions regarding parking.”

Before the small group of protesters went in for a “neighborhood inspection” of the garage, Jamie Bauer, another organizer with Rise and Resist, said that “We’ve been told by [the Trust] that all ICE vehicles are out of there, and we don’t know whether they’re misinformed, or they’re lying to us, or we’re misinformed. And the only way to straighten it out is to go in and take a look around.”

Most of the roughly 10 “inspectors” took photos of suspected ICE vehicles through garage windows while two members of the group spoke with NYPD officers. After several minutes, a team of six police officers told the inspectors that they were trespassing and forced them to leave the garage.

While walking out, DeLaurier noted that the garage was “open to the public,” prompting one police officer to retort that DeLaurier had “no business” in the garage.

The Rise and Resist organizer replied: “I do have business here. You know what my business is? Protecting my neighbors. I’m protecting our neighbors from ICE. What are you doing to protect our neighbors from ICE?”

DeLaurier added that “[the NYPD] are not our target here. We hope that the NYPD will do the business of its sanctuary city and protect our neighbors from ICE.”

New York City’s sanctuary city status means that the NYPD cannot legally cooperate with ICE on civil immigration enforcement. Still, officers routinely assist ICE operations indirectly, in the form of crowd control during abductions, fingerprint sharing, and joint operations with related federal agencies.

Despite being forced to leave the garage, the Rise and Resist inspectors seemed satisfied with the photos they had taken, and said that they would soon run the plates against their database of confirmed ICE vehicles.

The rally united a diverse group of protesters — young and old, transplants and longtime residents, experienced organizers and budding activists — with the common goal of protecting immigrants.

Sandy Radoff, a core member of Rise and Resist who grew up in North Dakota but has lived in New York City over 50 years, has been protesting ICE because of the role immigrants play in New York City. “Immigrants make New York, immigrants are New York, and we can’t stand by and watch our neighbors being kidnapped and do nothing,” Radoff said.

Some protesters called on city officials to do more against ICE. Radoff said that “I hope [Mayor Mamdani] could join us and make it difficult for ICE vehicles to park, and to continue to speak out on behalf of immigrants.”

The rally outside Pier 40 is part of a broader strategy of targeting garages where ICE vehicles may be parked to impede their operations. “If we can make it really, really tough for ICE vehicles to find a parking spot in New York, maybe they will be able to do less and less of what they’re doing,” Radoff said.

In addition to making sure that the Trust no longer allows ICE vehicles to park at Pier 40, Bauer added that Rise and Resist also wants to “put every other garage in New York on notice that we won’t tolerate ICE vehicles in their garages, and that if they have ICE vehicles parking there … we will go, we will protest outside of them, and we will try to get them as much bad publicity as we can to hurt their business.”

Bauer and DeLaurier delivered two speeches at the end of the rally. Bauer emphasized Rise and Resist’s broader garage-targeting efforts, while DeLaurier fired up the crowd. “We are here to say no ICE here, no ICE anywhere in New York City,” DeLaurier said, concluding her speech.

“We were here, we saw, and guess what? We’ll be back.”

By Nuriel Vera-Degraff

On May 31, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir marched down Fifth Avenue as a part of New York City’s annual Israel Day Parade. He was joined by many of the state’s most prominent Democratic politicians including Governor Kathy Hochul, Senator Chuck Schumer and Attorney General Leticia James.

In another sign of collapsing support for Israel, Ben-Gvir cancelled a planned appearance at the UN on Tuesday in the face of a flurry of protests led by the Palestine Youth Movement-coordinated “Stop Ben-Gvir Campaign.” More than 150 protesters celebrated Ben-Gvir’s cancellation at a PYM-led rally also held on Tuesday in a plaza across the street from United Nations Headquarters.

Two recent winners in New York’s Democratic primaries — Darializa Avila Chevalier (New York’s 13th Congressional District) and Aber Kawas (New York’s 12th State Senate District in Queens) — were part of the speaking program, alongside various PYM organizers and an assortment of other speakers.

“Today we see another sign that our movement is winning, because what I was told was that Ben-Gvir was supposed to be here in New York City … but he’s not here because we organize,” Avila Chevalier said in her speech.

“He’s not here because the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Hind Rajab Foundation, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and thousands of youth built legal pressure and organizing pressure so intense that a sitting minister of a genocidal government looked at New York City and decided he cannot show his face here,” she added.

A spokesperson for Ben-Gvir did not respond to a request for comment from The Indypendent.

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Dr. Husaam Abu Safiya

Speakers also criticized Israel’s ongoing detention of Palestinian political prisoners, frequently referencing the specific case of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian doctor who has been arbitrarily detained without charge or trial in Israeli jails since December 2024.

“What Israel is doing to Dr. Abu Safiya is not an isolated case, but it’s part of a systematic targeting of Gaza’s health care workers as part of Israel’s genocide. Specifically, this is a medicide,” said Dr. Salman Khan, a New York-based infectious disease specialist who has completed multiple medical missions in Palestine.

“Meanwhile, these clowns behind me want to cheer on while we’re talking about human beings, healthcare heroes, being tortured and kidnapped and subjected to horrific abuse. Shame!” added Dr. Khan, referring to a small group of counterprotestors

Ben-Gvir, who has served as the Minister of National Security since 2022, leads Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Power”), a far-right and anti-Arab party in Israel. Ben-Gvir is also a leader in the settler movement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank — an occupation which is illegal under international law. After having been convicted for inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization by Israeli courts prior to holding public office, Ben-Gvir has played a key role in Israel’s systemic violence against Palestinians as National Security Minister.

The Stop Ben-Gvir campaign included a petition with over 7,000 signatures, calling on Attorney General James to “pursue a full legal indictment against [Ben-Gvir],” “seek accountability for war crimes committed against New York residents in Palestine,” and “halt the illegal sale of occupied Palestinian land within New York State.”

The petition also demanded that the UN “suspend the Israeli delegation’s U.N. credentials ahead of the September General Assembly, including Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.”

In addition to the petition, the campaign relied on a legal strategy with support of institutions like the Hind Rajab Foundation and the Center for Constitutional Rights, who filed complaints with the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to investigate Ben-Gvir.

Nas Issa, a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement’s New York City chapter, said that “the culmination of these pressure efforts was to basically make it reputationally, politically, and legally risky enough that Ben Gvir canceled his intended visit to the UN.”

While Ben-Gvir canceled his planned visit to the UN on Tuesday, PYM and the Stop Ben-Gvir campaign are continuing their pressure campaign, still calling for Attorney General James and the UN to fulfill the full list of demands outlined in their petition.

“What we’re doing here today is not only to keep up the pressure on Attorney General Letitia James, as well as our New York state and local officials, but to also say that the movement doesn’t start and end with Ben-Gvir, and that we will continue to make sure that all war criminals cannot travel freely to our city,” said Ysabella Titi, another member of PYM’s NYC chapter.

The press office for Attorney General James did not respond to a request for comment from The Indypendent.

Declining Support for Israel

The cancellation of Ben-Gvir’s visit comes in the wake of a shifting tide in American public opinion about Israel and Palestine. According to a public poll released by the Pew Research Center this June, 60% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Israel, up 7% from 53% last year.

“It is clear that Americans all over the country and in New York do not want their tax dollars and their money to be aiding and abetting war, and it is clear that people do not want a war criminal in their midst, and that Israel … is not the ally that people in the United States want their government to continue to have a relationship with,” said Kawas who won her Democratic primary by over 20 points.

Organizers from PYM and the Stop Ben-Gvir campaign were pleased that Kawas and Avila Chevalier spoke at the rally.

“It’s not just the two people who are here with us today, but the fact that they represent their constituents who consist of a wide variety of New York populations that are outraged by what they see happening in Palestine … and at the same time that Palestine is no longer this poison pill for congressional elections in the United States,” said Issa.Israel’s notorious National Security Minister Itomar Ben-Gvir stayed away from a U.N. policing summit he was scheduled to attend following a flurry of protests.

The PYM organizer added that “it’s a growing sign of our power as a movement, and I think it’s heartening to see elected officials also come and echo and propagate our demands to bring these people to justice.”

Avila Chevalier hopes that the newly-nominated bloc of progressive elected officials — many of whom, like herself, have backgrounds in grassroots organizing — will more effectively bridge the gap between efforts taking place inside and outside the walls of Congress.

“As an organizer, one of the things that was always hard for me was the way that our leadership wasn’t responsive to our movements and to the organizing work that we were doing,” said Avila Chevalier. “There is a new wave of folks that are coming into office, not just myself … who are really grounded in this work and in this vision … they’re the type of people who will be also responsive to our movements.”

Over the past decade, it has also grappled with a vibrant labor movement that has taken root at the Ivy League School with different locals representing thousands of workers across a variety of job titles.

On Monday, one of those union locals representing 1,600 postdoctoral workers, who play a key role in advancing Columbia’s scientific research, held a lunchtime rally with negotiations stalled on a new contract and the old contract hours away from expiring. And the union was not alone.

Three leftists — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander — who won their congressional primaries last week came out to show their support for postdoctoral workers whose collective bargaining agreement was about to expire.

Two of those winning candidates — Avila Chevalier and Valdez — have an adversarial history with the university. Avila Chevalier was arrested during the 2024 Gaza encampment protests on the campus lawn at Columbia. Valdez served for several years on her UAW union local’s bargaining committee where she sat across the table from university officials who told her they were too cash-strapped to meet her union’s demands. Both vowed to stand by the postdoctoral workers until victory.

Welcome to the future, Columbia!

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Dream Team of Three Congressional Primary Winners Joins UAW Union Rally for Columbia University Researchers

Darializa Avila Chevalier, Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th congressional district, joins unionized postdoctoral workers at a Monday rally outside the Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights. Credit: Roman Broszkowski

By Nuriel Vera-DeGraff

Three recently elected Democratic nominees for Congress — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander — spoke at a Tuesday rally for CPW-UAW Local 4100, the union that represents 1,600 postdoctoral workers at Columbia University.

The lunchtime rally was held in a pedestrian plaza outside the university’s massive medical center in Washington Heights. Drawing over 200 participants, it took place on the day CPW-UAW’s current contract was set to expire and right before a bargaining session between the union and Columbia. As of Wednesday afternoon, the university and the union have yet to settle on a new contract.

CPW-UAW won its first contract in 2020 after unionizing in 2018. With their second contract expiring, the union is asking for pay raises that match the rate of inflation, a housing guarantee, additional protections for international workers, and increased childcare for its members.

In addition to the left’s congressional dream team of Avila Chevalier, Valdez, and Lander — UAW endorsed all three in their primary contests — the rally featured speeches from Brandon Mancilla, the Director of UAW Region 9A (which covers eastern New York, New England, and Puerto Rico), and multiple CPW-UAW organizers.

Union organizers stressed their bargaining demands, criticized Columbia for the pace of negotiations, and emphasized solidarity with organized labor movements at other universities. They also noted Columbia’s $16 billion endowment, which makes it one of the wealthiest universities in the country.

The rally took place in New York’s 13th congressional district, which will almost certainly be represented by Avila Chevalier starting next January. A former Columbia student and member of UAW Local 2325, which represents legal advocates and attorneys, Avila Chevalier said in her speech that she “will be with [CPW-UAW] in this fight for many years to come.”

Valdez was on the bargaining committee for UAW Local 2110, which represents technical, office, and professional workers at Columbia. “Anytime a union is taking on Columbia, know that I will be there with you in that fight,” she said in her speech.

After the rally, Valdez connected her personal experience on the bargaining committee to her likely future work in Congress. “We need people in Congress who have sat across the table from a boss and bargained … I sat in that room,” she said, referring to the building where CPW-UAW’s bargaining team negotiated with Columbia an hour later.

Lander stressed solidarity in his speech. “UAW has been there for me, and I was sure as heck gonna be up here for you. Something powerful is moving in New York City right now,” he said. “The word for that spirit that is moving in this city is solidarity.”

Later on, Lander linked CPW-UAW’s negotiations with Columbia to a broader attack on free speech and working conditions at universities across the city and nationwide.

“Unless we stand up for the concept of higher education that is a resource for everyone and not a privilege for the few, unless we stand up against the assaults of the Trump regime on higher education, and unless we realize all those fights are one big fight, we are going to wind up worse off,” Lander said.

The Tuesday rally was the first time the three congressional nominees had been together in person since their primary elections one week earlier, a fact that Lander highlighted during his speech.

All three nominees ran on left-wing platforms and were endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. While Avila Chevalier and Valdez were endorsed by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, Lander was backed by the Working Families Party — a coalition of labor unions and community organizations that also endorsed Valdez’ opponent, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso — in the June 23rd primary.

Despite their ideological differences on issues like Palestine, Lander and Valdez both committed to working together in Congress towards their shared goals.

“Certainly in the context of the United States Congress, the WFP-backed candidates and the DSA-backed candidates have an immense more in common than we do differences,” Lander said.

Valdez emphasized fighting a common enemy: “In my shop at Columbia, I didn’t agree politically on every single thing with my coworkers … but we were up against a pretty bad boss, a pretty wealthy and powerful boss, and that if we were going to win … that was going to require us working together.”

“That’s the orientation I take to Congress too, and I’m going to build coalition with anyone who wants to see a dignified and equitable world for working people,” she added.

CPW-UAW organizers were grateful to have Avila Chevalier, Valdez, and Lander as political allies. “They’ve always been supportive of our campaigns,” said Stefano Cataldi, an organizer and higher education delegate with CPW-UAW.

“We hope that they can continue to show power to the big landlord and the big corporations who are running these businesses … at the national level for everybody else,” Cataldi added.

When asked on Tuesday about next steps if the bargaining session proved unsuccessful, union organizers had their minds set on future escalations — including a potential strike.

“We’re definitely prepared to do whatever it takes, what’s necessary to survive in this city. We definitely have the power, and we definitely have the people,” Cataldi said. “But we really hope that [Columbia] can understand that they need to address these demands, and we can avoid going into a strike.”

Pierre-Jacques Brun, a former bargaining committee member and the current financial secretary of CPW-UAW, said that “we are ready to go through a strike authorization and ask our members if they want to strike … Overwhelmingly, I think members will say yes to [a strike].”

After the rally, CPW-UAW’s bargaining committee negotiated with representatives from Columbia. According to Anna Yoney, a unit chair and bargaining committee member with the union who spoke with The Indypendent early Wednesday afternoon, the bargaining session that started at 1 p.m. lasted until nearly midnight.

“We went into that session to both reiterate and stand behind [our] demands, but also to make our best effort to reach an agreement with Columbia before expiration,” Yoney said. “We tried our best.”

CPW-UAW’s current contract with Columbia expired on Monday at midnight. While working conditions are required to continue according to the expired contract, the union can no longer raise grievances against Columbia for any violations of new standards established in a future contract.

With the contract expiring, CPW-UAW leadership will now assess the will of their membership before pursuing further escalations. “The willingness of our members to take action is only increasing now … Our plan will be to continue to escalate,” Yoney said. “We take [the contract’s expiration] very seriously … so we’re definitely trying to move as fast as possible without compromising our core demands,” she added.

Yoney said that a strike “is definitely on the table, but we need to go back to our members and see exactly where they’re at.”

The Tuesday rally — and particularly the presence of Avila Chevalier, Valdez, and Lander — seemed to have made an impact on negotiations.

“The political allies we brought to that rally, the amount of people, the energy, just the fact that they stayed in the room with us that late — it shows that they felt the pressure,” Yoney said.

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That separate march was dubbed the Queer Liberation March. It drew tens of thousands participants. It has continued every year since. On Sunday, thousands of rebellious queers took to the streets again. It was, as always, a protest not a parade.

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Queer Liberation March Celebrates Pride Without Cops or Corporate Sponsors, Again

Luce Miyar-Mullan, June 30

On June 28, the Reclaim Pride Coalition held their 8th annual Queer Liberation March (QLM): a two-mile march from Union Square to Foley Square. The march was established in 2019 in response to New York City’s increasingly corporatized Pride Parade.

While more than a million people attended the mainstream Heritage Pride Parade down Fifth Avenue Sunday afternoon, the thousands of marchers who gathered at Union Square presented a much different scene. There were no corporate floats, no police barricades, and little of the spectacle that defines Manhattan’s official Pride Parade. Rather than a parade, QLM is a protest that not only commemorates Stonewall, but carries on the rebellious legacy of the 1969 uprising.

“What happens on the West Side does not need to happen the way that it does,” Said Jay Walker, one of the key organizers of QLM since its inception in 2019, referring to corporate Pride’s heavy police presence and barricades along Fifth Avenue.

For one first-time attendee, it was the corporate hypocrisy that drove them to QLM: “Corporations will recolor their logo for June, and then will be donating to actively get rid of our rights,” they said.

A host of other political movements were represented at Sunday’s march. Many of them anti-war and, particularly, anti-imperialist. There was no shortage of Palestinian flags, “Hands off Cuba” posters, and banners calling for the abolition of ICE.

“In any type of successful liberation movement, variety and inclusivity are really important… To bring everyone to the movement and make everyone feel welcome,” Said Bea Hagen, 25, who identifies as trans and nonbinary.

For one protestor, Janice, who held a sign that read “U.S. Hands Off Cuba” on one side and “End the Muder of Black and Brown Trans Women” on the other, anti-violence is the essential link.

“Black trans women, in particular, have a lifespan of about 34 years. Because regular Pride is so corporatized it’s not protecting them in the same way.” Janice said, addressing the symbiotic relationship between violence and capitalism. “The Queer Liberation March was created in response to cops being there and Macy’s having a float. This isn’t just the LGBTQIA+ fighting back and saying ‘we’re still here’, it’s also a push against capitalism.”

There was a specific focus on recognizing the trans community at Sunday’s March, particularly trans women of color, who continue to face disproportionate discrimination and violence while remaining marginalized at many mainstream Pride celebrations.

Speakers and marchers returned to a common theme throughout the afternoon: protecting the most vulnerable members of society — whether trans people, immigrants, others targeted by state-sanctioned violence — is the responsibility of the community.

The march concluded with a set of speeches held at Foley Square. They shared the refrain “Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe!”

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From The Indy archives…

Reclaiming the Revolutionary Spirit of Stonewall at the Queer Liberation March

by Emma Gaffney, June 2, 2019

On the night of June 28, 1969, Jay Toole awoke from her park bench bed in Washington Square Park to the sound of chaos. Another police raid was underway at the nearby Stonewall Inn. She, along with several of her homeless neighbors, rushed to the dive bar where they were plunged into the center of a riot. “[The cops] were pushing us all down towards the women’s prison, which was on Greenwich Avenue,” Toole said. Toole and hundreds of her queer peers were set upon by armed police, targeted simply for who they loved and the way that they dressed.

Standing outside of the Stonewall Inn on Sunday morning, hours before the whole area was thrown into a flurry of rainbow madness and 50 years after that fateful night, Toole — now 71 and a self-proclaimed “butch” — retraced the events of the riot.

When Toole arrived, many had already been arrested or beaten — a common occurrence with the raids on gay bars in the 1960s — but this time the patrons of the bar refused to give in. “It was time for us to push back and we all came together to do that,” Toole, recalled as she prepared to join another act of rebellion — this time against the official Pride march commemorating the queer rights movement she helped to initiate.

After years of mounting frustration with the New York City Gay Pride parade’s embrace of corporate influence, queer activists and allies took to the streets Sunday in a defiant move away from the mainstream Pride celebration. An estimated 45,000 marchers, adorned with politically charged banners and protest signs poured into the Lower Manhattan streets yelling, “We will not be quiet, Stonewall was a riot!” The Queer Liberation March retraced the route of the original Pride march held one year after the 1969 Stonewall riots that ignited the modern LGBTQ+ movement.

Toole, along with numerous other attendees, explained that she chose to attend the Queer Liberation March instead of the official Pride parade because she is tired of what it has become — a festival of corporate branding with an overbearing police presence. Many queer people say that the official parade has led to a feeling of disenfranchisement within the community; that the commercialization of Pride has pinkwashed an event that was born out of a need for public and political visibility.

Along with the corporate floats, only registered marchers are able to participate in the corporate parade, a rule which has been enforced by the use of wristbands and barricades over the past few years. This was certainly not the case at the Queer Liberation March, however, where organizers actively encouraged engagement with the event. As the protesters marched, they enticed the crowd to get involved, chanting, “off of the sidewalks and into the streets!”

“Here today we are reclaiming Pride and everyone can march with us,” Toole said.

By allowing anyone to spontaneously join and focusing on politics instead of rainbow-clad corporations, the Queer Liberation March sought to recapture the original vitality of the Christopher Street Day March, the title of the first Pride march, held in 1970.

“[We are] tapping into the energy, the spirit and the commitment of what happened at Stonewall 50 years ago and what that fight was all about,” said Leslie Cagan an organizer with Reclaim Pride and former national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice.

Incensed by the over-policing of the modern-day parade, Reclaim Pride made it their mission to keep the police presence at the march to a minimum. The recent apology by NYPD Police Commissioner James O’Neill for the department’s role in the Stonewall Riot felt hollow to many, said Cagan who added, “the real apology that we want is a change in policy.”

“[The police] are not fighting for queer liberation or human rights, they fight for an institution that is making the world less safe for queer people,” said Jake Powell, a member of ACT UP (AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power), who told The Indypendent that they felt the apology was insufficient. Powell said they hoped that the Queer Liberation March would help energize a newfound political tenacity which will endure far beyond the 50th-anniversary celebration.

“There is a time for joy and partying,” Powell added, “but Pride is also about highlighting the hardest parts about being queer in this world. I hope Pride will push the envelope harder and that we will all fight harder for trans liberation, for immigrant trans women who are dying, that our queer community will stand up. We’re not free until we are all free.”

As the march charged forward from its starting point at Sheridan Square, up through an unbarricaded Sixth Avenue toward Central Park, it grew and gained momentum. The marchers paid their respects to those in the LGBTQ+ community who have died from AIDS and all forms of violence by participating in moments of silence. The protest culminated with a rally held on the Great Lawn. The atmosphere was pensive, inclusive and peaceful as marchers sat together on the lawn and quietly listened to the orators on the stage.

The speakers included trans activist and lawyer, Cecilia Gentili and performing artist and LGBTQ+ rights activist Staceyann Chin. Writer Janus Rose read a statement from the currently incarcerated whistleblower, Chelsea Manning.

“We are here because we know that rainbow-branded storefronts are not signs of acceptance but of oppression with better marketing,” Manning told the crowd via Rose. “We are here because we know there should be no Pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.”

GECo members gathered in Central Park from June 14-20 to run a 26.2 mile marathon each day followed by guest speakers and political discussions. If you are wondering, what’s the connection between long-distance running and climate activism, or what it feels like to run a marathon every day for seven consecutive days — our knees and ankles get sore just thinking about it — scroll down to read the full article below by our summer intern Nuriel Vega-DeGraff. It’s his first feature piece for us. Way to go Nuriel!

Last Laps at the Aqueduct

Speaking of racing, the horses ran one last time yesterday at The Aqueduct, the seedy, run-down racetrack that opened in 1959 when horseracing was still popular in New York City. The Indypendent’s Theodore Hamm recently paid a farewell visit and wrote, “The Aqueduct’s grandstands provide a whiff of 20^th-century New York City. Tobacco smoke fills the air, mainly from cigarettes but also via a few cigars. A bit of weed blends in. It’s like the good old days in the top row seats at Shea Stadium.” For the full story, click here.

More Election Analysis from John Tarleton

Indy Editor-in-Chief John Tarleton co-hosted WBAI’s four-election night special and shared his thoughts about the socialist sweep in New York City with a national audience on Democracy Now!. Tonight, he will appear on WPKN-89.5 FM/wpkn.org out of Bridgeport, CT from 8:00 to 8:30 pm with Scott Harris, host of Counterpoint, a weekly public affairs radio program syndicated on 70 stations nationwide.

And, don’t forget to tune into tomorrow’s edition of The Indypendent News Hour on WBAI-99.5 FM and streaming on wbai.org from 5-6 pm.

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“Join Us for the Long Run”: Marathoners Celebrate a Week of Running and Climate Activism in Central Park

Nuriel Vera-Degraff Jun 29

At the starting line of the 2025 Chicago Marathon, Matt Bourland was wearing a custom jersey with ‘Free Palestine’ written on it.

“I thought it was important to slightly decenter myself,” he said. “There’s this reading of running that is very individual and sometimes comes off as very selfish, just feeding the ego and spending a bunch of money to go and do these large races … but I think running can be a very powerful action.”

That’s where he met Kenny Moll, after noticing that Moll had ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Fuck ICE’ written on his chest. “Something I immediately respected about [Moll] was his using his privilege to center what’s important, which is the liberation of all people,” Bourland told me.

Now, Moll and Bourland are two co-founders of the Global Endurance Collective (GECo), a volunteer-run nonprofit that mobilizes “runners, walkers, bikers, skaters, and movers to take action for social and climate justice.”

GECo came a few years after Moll started A Week for the World in 2023. Living in Chicago, he challenged himself to run seven marathons in seven days to raise money and awareness for the climate.

“I was looking for a way to combine my passion for environmental activism and protecting the planet, working with people, building community, and my passion for running.”

A Week for the World fell short two days because of the very same climate crisis that Moll was running to fight: “the same wildfires that turned New York skies orange migrated into Chicago.” But Moll wasn’t finished.

The next year, 2024, he brought A Week for the World to New York and expanded the project’s reach by having more runners join throughout the week and including a speaker series after each day of running. Moll, Bourland, and other athletes and advocates founded GECo in 2025 to facilitate and broaden the project’s continued growth.

In 2026, from June 14th to 20th, members and friends of GECo gathered at 6 am each morning in Central Park for the fourth year of A Week for the World. After running up to 26.2 miles in laps surrounded by lush greenery, runners heard from lineups of organizers, advocates, content creators, and students as part of the event’s daily speaker series.

On Friday, the sixth day of the weeklong challenge and the sixth iteration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday, I listened to the speakers (the lineup included the activist-lawyer Steven Donziger, racial justice activist and elite runner Russell Dinkins, and community organizer, EMS worker, and climate advocate Michael Magazine) and spoke with participants afterwards.

Reflecting on the project’s evolution, Moll stressed the importance of collectivity: “It’s not just an endurance challenge anymore. It really is a week of community building and a week of activation for our planet.”

Jamilah Maronde, a GECo co-founder who has been involved with A Week for the World since its inception in 2023, was on the same page. “This started as one person, one man who wanted to do something instead of nothing,” she said. “Today, there are [hundreds of] people that come out during the course of the week to get involved in all different kinds of ways.”

“[We’re] the antithesis of closing doors in the running community.”

Amid the seemingly ever-increasing popularity of running, GECo seeks to actively resist the growing corporatization and commodification that have accompanied the sport’s rise. While massive, corporate-sponsored races can often be cost-prohibitive (the entry fee for the New York City Marathon is $333 this year), Maronde believes that A Week for the World sets itself apart from most races by being free and open to all.

“You don’t have to pay to come run, we’re using public space, our priority is making this inclusive and accessible rather than making it highly commercialized … running is supposed to be a sport that is very easily accessible,” she said. “You shouldn’t need expensive gear to be able to do this, yet all these brands and companies tell you that you do.”

Moll agreed, noting that A Week for the World tries to open doors into the running community instead of closing them. “This is a free event. People are allowed to come out, get free drinks, free food, free water. We have infrastructure to allow people to run however long they want,” Moll told me.

“Running is political.”

At first, it may be hard to understand the link between running and climate justice — or between running and any kind of social or political change, for that matter.

Joe Blanchet disagrees: “Running is political.”

A GECo co-founder and content creator who makes fitness content mixed with political information, Blanchet ran his first-ever marathon and delivered a speech on the sixth day of this year’s A Week for the World.

After his marathon, Blanchet explained why the connection seems so obvious to him. “For those who have thought about it, [running] is explicitly political,” he said. “We run outside, we run in public space, we run on sidewalks, and your taxes go to sidewalks. It can be as basic as that.”

The connection seems to go further. “Running is now a form of radical rebellion, when they’re trying to limit humans’ bodily autonomy, where humans are allowed to exist, and who is allowed to exist in certain spaces based on their identity,” Blanchet added. He also cited how climate policy and funding for local governments directly impact the availability and quality of everyone’s running environments.

For Blanchet, running intersects with both climate injustice and systemic racism. “Black communities are not only disproportionately impacted by climate change and environmental damages, but they’re also impacted by a cultural and physical limitation — access to running isn’t for them,” he said, citing racial stereotypes around the sport and access to running spaces.

“Kenny showed me that I do have time for activism.”

Jillian Calero is another GECo co-founder and an obstetrics and gynecology physician’s assistant from the Bronx. Last week, she became the first woman to complete the full weeklong, running seven marathons for a total of 184 miles in seven days.

Six days and over 150 miles into the challenge, Calero told me that despite feeling “a little tired,” with some soreness “here and there,” her body was holding up without much of a hitch. The mental component seemed to be proving more difficult: “The first two days you think, ‘Oh, I ran two marathons, but I still have five more,’ which is a little daunting.”

With an impressive amount of energy given how much she’d been running, Calero then walked me through what goes through her mind while she clicks off the miles. “On hot, humid days, you think a lot about the climate crisis and how this is going to affect summer running and fall marathon training … I do think about the climate crisis a lot when we’re running.”

A Week for the World was instrumental in bringing Calero into the world of social change.

“I have a busy life … in my head, I don’t think that I have time for activism, and Kenny showed me that I do have time for activism. This is me showing myself that I have time, that I play a part, and it’s also showing others that they can play a part in the climate revolution,” she told me.

After her seven marathons, Calero plans to pursue climate organizing in the Bronx. She wants to work with members of her Hispanic community (her family is from Puerto Rico) and specifically investigate the health of children and pregnant mothers in the area.

“The future’s bright for us, and we need to figure out what it looks like.”

Asiah Quattlebaum, a climate organizer and a featured speaker on day six of A Week for the World, thinks that GECo is coming at the perfect time. “[The climate justice movement] has died down recently … a lot of folks are burnt out,” she said. “But we still need to continue the work … That’s why something like [GECo] is super good, so we can get new people to be part of our fight.”

Quattlebaum has witnessed firsthand how A Week for the World activates people into the climate organizing world: “A lot of the runners were asking, ‘How can I get more involved?’ That’s amazing!” She lauded GECo for specifically targeting “ordinary people who are normally not political, or not involved in climate organizing or electoral work” as part of their mobilization efforts.

But the runner-activists at GECo, the Global Endurance Collective, are just getting started. “I think the future’s bright for us, and we need to figure out what it looks like,” Bourland told me. Moll, who created the first Week for the World three years ago, has a simple and cheeky ask: “Join us for the long run.”

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The Rent Guidelines Board has a deliberative process that weighs the evidence and the competing claims of tenants and landlords. This includes public hearings in all of the boroughs except Staten Island. Our reporting partners from DocBloc covered the Queens, Bronx and Manhattan public hearings and were back last night at El Museo del Barrio where the RGB met. To see the crowd’s reaction when the RGB’s eight members announced their unanimous decision, click here. For the full story see below.

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Tenants Celebrate Historic Two-Year Rent Freeze

By Doc Bloc

Written collectively by Arman Amin, Monica Furman, Liz June, Ash Marinaccio, Karina Ordóñez, and Nuriel Vega DeGraff

New York City tenants have won a historic victory as the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) voted Thursday night to freeze rents on one and two-year leases.

The energy before the meeting was palpable despite the sweltering heat as hundreds of activists, organizers, and tenants waited to get into East Harlem’s Museo del Barrio, with ice pops and bottled water being passed around for temporary relief. Multiple chants echoed down the line: “Fight, fight, fight! Housing is a human right!” and “Up with tenant rights! Down with real estate!” The Rude Mechanical Orchestra energized the crowd with songs as they edged closer to the museum’s auditorium entrance. Attendees wore colorful shirts representing tenant organizing groups like CAAAV, NYS Tenant Bloc, and Met Council on Housing while waving multilingual posters declaring the need for a rent freeze.

This is the first time since the RGB’s inception in 1969 that it has enacted a freeze on multiple-year leases, demonstrating the growing power of the city’s tenant movement. Organizations like CAAAV, CASA and NYS Tenants Bloc have been working tirelessly to win a rent freeze that will protect nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments that are home to 2.4 million New Yorkers. Activists knocked on doors, collected signatures, and packed each hearing over the last month. Many of them also worked to elect Zohran Mamdani who made freezing the rent his top campaign promise.

“Working class and immigrant tenants fought for the first-ever rent freeze on all leases for 2.4 million rent-stabilized tenants,” said CAAAV Chinatown tenant leader, Linda Lin. “We made history today, carrying the legacy of generations of tenant leaders across the city. The Rent Guidelines Board has answered to the tenant majority and the voices of working class New Yorkers. Rent freeze is the start. Tenants are united and ready to win even more.”

Who Rent Stabilization Protects

Rent stabilization exists to protect the working people of New York; 37% of low-income NYC households live in rent-stabilized housing, according to the Community Service Society (CSS). While the state’s biggest landlord lobbies, such as the Real Estate Board of New York, the New York Apartment Association, and the Small Property Owners of New York, have been fighting to overturn and strip back rent-stabilization, tenants have organized to ensure the policy serves its true purpose: to protect New Yorkers and keep them in New York.

Under Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, the Rent Guidelines Board hiked up rents four years in a row by a total of 12% while the net operating income for rent-stabilized landlords grew by 30%. Studies by CSS have affirmed that tenants have seen no improvements to their apartments despite rent increases. Rather than investing rents into repairs and maintenance, rent-stabilized landlords used tenants’ rent to finance their debts or buy new properties, betting on their ability to destabilize apartments and displace existing tenants in favor of those who can pay more.

Darios Gordon, Executive Director of The Met Council, one of the oldest tenant activist groups in New York City noted, “A lot of people were traumatized from the Adams administration 12% increase.” When prompted about future movement to make the city more affordable, Gordon stated, “For two years, their rent will not go up starting October 1st, so that’s actually, really amazing… [It’s] the next step the city should take to make the city even more affordable. So now, the next thing is a [rent] rollback.”

Over the course of the meetings across the five boroughs, the Rent Guidelines Board heard over 300 in-person testimonies and received over 700 audio-visual submissions from the public.

The freeze also helps immigrant communities stay in New York City, as Farhan Rahman, an immigrant from Bangladesh, expressed.”We love New York City, we’ve already been thinking about having to move away, and we really don’t want to. We know immigrants and the working class are the people who have built the city, and we want to continue to stay here.”

“This historic two-year rent freeze is more than a victory on paper. The biggest thing tenants won, besides the freeze, was confidence in our collective power,” said Joanne Grell, CASA Leader in the Bronx and Co-Chair of the NYS Tenant Bloc’s Freeze the Rent Campaign. “Once people discover their power, they begin to imagine what else is possible. For years, tenants were told we could not truly influence the decisions that shape our lives. But we organized, spoke out, and proved that when we stand together, we can win together. Tonight we celebrate. Tomorrow we keep organizing. Together, we keep moving forward. This is just the beginning.”

Rent Rollback

Following the historic announcement, tenants and organizers poured out into the courtyard in front of El Museo, sharing tearful hugs and defiant cheers of victory. For organizers for housing justice, the message is clear: the battle is won, but this is only the beginning. To counteract past rent increases that were unjustified, they say the next step will be to fight for a rent rollback which the RGB is also empowered by law to do.

Although the rent freeze is a city issue, its impact is intertwined with the historic results from Tuesday’s Democratic primary where nine out of the 10 candidates endorsed by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America won their respective races.

Two winning DSA candidates who came out of the tenant movement — Samantha Kattan (District 37-Western Queens) and Illapa Sairitupac (District 65-Lower Manhattan) celebrated alongside tenants and organizers after the RGB’s vote. “It’s very much a city board appointed by the mayor,” Kattan noted, “but there are so many things that you can do at the state level to support rent stabilization and tenants … [the rent freeze] is history-making.”

Sairitupac — who is also part of the Cooper Square Committee, a tenants’ rights organization in the East Village — looked towards the future: “Let’s keep building tenant power,” he said. “Let’s keep building tenant associations … I want to be an organizer in office, I want to be someone who’s always hearing my constituents on the ground.”

This article was coauthored by members of DocBloc’s Artist as Citizen Journalist Initiative which brings together theatre artists and journalists to share in civic reporting and the growing need for community-based storytelling.The ACJ initiative tests a hybrid model of reporting and performance, positioning theatre artists as civic witnesses and collaborators in local journalism. To learn more visit docbloc.org or connect on Instagram @docblocprojects.

Previous RGB Coverage by The Indypendent

Queens Tenants Rally Against Rent Hike As RGB Public Hearings Get Underway

The Bronx Is Still Burning for a Rent Freeze

“Freeze the Rent! Melt the Ice!”

Indy Radio
For more coverage of the rent freeze and what comes next, tune into the Indypendent News Hour next Tuesday 5-6 pm on WBAI-99.5 FM and streaming on wbai.org.

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Hakeem Jeffries Was One of the Biggest Losers in New York’s Democratic Primary Blowout

By Theodore Hamm

In the run-up to the June 23 primary, Hakeem Jeffries picked his battles — and lost all of them.

The top Democrat in the House made a strong push for Adriano Espaillat but did not wage a similar effort for incumbent Dan Goldman. Although Antonio Reynoso aligned himself with Jeffries, the party leader did not return the support.

In a state Assembly race in a district that overlaps with the Central Brooklyn portion of Jeffries’ House terrain, DSA-backed Eon Huntley joined fellow socialists Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez (and progressive Brad Lander) in the winners’ circle. A strong plug from the national Democratic leader did little to boost incumbent Assemblymember Stefani Zinerman, who finished over 20 points behind Huntley.

“The roof is collapsing on the Democratic Party establishment,” anti-left analyst Van Jones insisted on CNN. In his view, the “insurgency” led by both Mayor Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is “both a movement and a machine at the same time.” While Mamdani campaigned hard for both Valdez and Avila Chevalier, AOC sat out both races, leaving little doubt about who is the New York City left’s leader at the moment.

The NYC-DSA’s voter-mobilization operation is indeed proving to be a well-oiled machine. Antonio Reynoso’s 21-point loss is a clear sign that the socialist left — rather than the Working Families Party and its entourage of progressive unions — now controls certain areas of the city.

In a recent podcast, NYC-DSA co-chair Grace Mausser told host Ben Max that after opting not to back a proposed challenge by Chi Ossé to Jeffries in this year’s primary, the group is now “surrounding him” with their elected officials, aiming to “exert pressure” on the national party leader to move leftward. Jeffries, a stalwart AIPAC ally, is most unlikely to do so on Israel-Palestine. Will the veteran corporate Democrat now call for the expansion of social spending?

In a lengthy May profile in the New Yorker, Jeffries assured reporter Jason Zengerle that if the Democrats gain control of the House after the midterm elections, “Our focus will be to deliver on our promise to make life more affordable for the American people. We’re going to aggressively move forward with a legislative agenda that is designed to bring down the cost of a house, bring down the cost of health care, and bring down the cost of groceries, along with utility bills and child care.”

Earlier this month, the deliberative Democratic boss created five “cost of living” working groups that will put forward specific proposals. That AOC was named co-chair of the health care committee may suggest some newfound interest from the leadership in Medicare for All — but Jeffries also appointed Alabama’s Terri Sewell, a proponent of strengthening the current health care system, as co-chair.

The current vagueness of the national party’s agenda hardly inspired voters to turn out in the primary. Meanwhile, the platforms of both Avila Chevalier and Valdez called for vast expansions of the social safety net, with the former calling for beefing up Social Security and the latter proposing universal rent control. Such measures are not what the party’s Wall Street donors want.

Despite his newfound alliance with AOC, Jeffries also remains a DSA antagonist. Along with allies granted anonymity to hurl insults at socialists in the New Yorker profile, the party leader lobbed his own grenades, at one point claiming that the DSA disdains public housing residents.

“Chi would have won,” NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo tweeted soon after the polls closed on June 23, referring to the primary challenge that did not happen. It’s hard to imagine that Jeffries would not agree (at least in private). The ball is now in his court.

Ted Hamm’s Meet Mayor Mamdani is available from OR Books. Use coupon Indy15 at checkout for 15% off (valid through June 30).

To see The Indy’s John Tarleton discuss the election results on Democracy Now!, click here. To listen to our four-hour election night special on WBAI, click here. To see all of our previous coverage of the democratic socialist candidates who won big on Tuesday night, click here.

The Indypendent has covered DSA’s rise to power over the past decade, introducing little-known left candidates to our progressive audience via our monthly newspaper, our website and our weekly radio show that airs Tuesdays 5-6 pm. We capped off that coverage Tuesday night with a four-hour election special on WBAI. The next morning, Indy Editor-in-Chief John Tarleton appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss the New York City primary results and the impact they could have on the Democratic Party across the country.

Below is coverage we did of seven of DSA’s winning candidates who will take office next January in Washington, DC and Albany.

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Here’s Why Darializa Avila Chevalier Can Win Another Shocking Upset for the Left in NY-13 (February 2026)
By Cole Sandick

Q&A Interview with Darializa Avila Chevalier (February 2026)
By John Tarleton and Nuriel Vera-DeGraff

Radio Interview with Darializa Avila Chevalier (February 2026)
By Indypendent News Hour

Next Step, Congress: Claire Valdez Rides a Movement Moment (June 2026)
By John Tarleton

Radio Interview with Claire Valdez (June 2024)
By Indypendent News Hour

“Workers Deserve It All”: Radio Interview with Claire Valdez (May 2024)
By Indypendent News Hour

State Senate Candidate Aber Kawas Touts Support for Affordability Agenda (March 2025)
By Lyna Bentahar

DSA-Backed Immigrant Rights Attorney Challenges Adams ally in Immigrant-Heavy Queens Assembly District 38 (May 2026)
By John Tarleton

Radio Interview with Assembly District 38 Candidate David Orkin (May 2026)
By Indypendent News Hour

Anti-Poverty Activist Takes on Real Estate Fat Cat in North Brooklyn Assembly Race (December 2025)
By Sander Hicks

Radio Interview with Assembly District 56 Candidate Eon Huntley (June 2026)
By Indypendent News Hour

Department Store Worker Eon Huntley Pitches Socialist Solutions in Bid for Brooklyn Assembly Seat (February 2024)
By John Tarleton

Diana Moreno Enters Race for Zohran Mamdani’s Queens Assembly Race Vowing to Put Children First (November 2025)
By John Tarleton

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Retiring congresswoman Nydia Velasquez has anointed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso as her successor. Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NYC-DSA’s army of door-to-door canvassers are backing Valdez who represents a Queens Assembly district in Albany. With election day tomorrow, the race appears to be a tossup. The Indypendent recently caught up with Valdez. We discussed why she thinks putting a former low-wage worker and union activist in Congress is a good idea, what it was like to speak out against Israel’s Gaza genocide from Day 1 when that wasn’t an easy thing to do plus how much we should cut the military budget in the wake of a failed war in Iran.

Next Step, Congress: Claire Valdez Rides a Movement Moment

By John Tarleton

The Indypendent: You’ve made your previous experience as a low-wage worker and a union activist a major theme of our campaign? Why do you think those experiences matter and how would it inform your work in Congress?

Claire Valdez: The experience of being a low-wage worker and feeling trapped in your job and feeling you have no control over your life is a very common one in New York City and in the United States. The less common experience is having the opportunity to organize with your co-workers for more and to actually have power to be able to sit at the bargaining table to win better wages and working conditions, and feel like you aren’t alone, and that you do actually have political control, not just over your work life, but over your whole life. That’s an experience that I want as many people as possible to have.

The federal government can also play a role in making sure that working people have dignified, safe, stable housing, dignified, safe, stable jobs, health care that is free at the point of service, and that we aren’t tying ourselves to these forever wars and to genocide and spending billions of dollars on things like ICE that don’t build stability and safety in our communities. We need to make sure that people have real power in their lives, and have the federal government be a part of that.

What are some memories that stand out from your time in your union?

I remember walking into my first union meeting and seeing 200-300 people in this auditorium, talking about our contract — about what we thought we deserved, and if we thought we could win more. It was just a profoundly democratic experience. It showed that I wasn’t fighting for myself by myself, that I had 500 coworkers that were standing with me at any given moment. I was proud to stand with them too.

You moved to New York City a decade ago and have been derided as an outsider by some of your critics. What are your thoughts on this kind of New York nativism?

People come to New York City from all over the world for all kinds of different reasons.The story of New York’s 7th congressional district is one of artists and workers and immigrants who have made beautiful communities and are being displaced by private equity and the real estate industry who have identified our neighborhoods and our homes as vehicles for profit. So many establishment Democrats have taken their donations, have made partnerships with these entities that are pushing people out. We’re the ones fighting against a system that has displaced many people over decades. As socialists, we’re the ones saying that we need really strong tenant protection so people can stay in their homes. We’re the ones who are saying we’re not going to take a dime from real estate.

So you believe older residents and newer residents have more in common than what divides them?

Absolutely. We’re all being displaced by the same forces. We don’t build power by trying to pit neighbors against each other. We know who the enemies are. It’s A&E and Bronstein and Pinnacle. These huge development corporations that are coming in and trying to build luxury towers over our working-class neighborhoods. Those are our enemies, and when we organize together, we can win against them.

You and other DSA electeds joined protests against Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza from its onset in October 2023. What was that like to go up against the whole political and media establishment that backs Israel to the hilt?

It was a really difficult political moment. The Netanyahu government was making explicitly genocidal statements. They intended to carry out a genocide, and that is what has unfolded over the last two and a half years. Many Democrats either put their heads in the sand or condemned the protesters. People have come around now that political opinion has shifted on this. But, that should not have taken more than 60,000 people dying and being murdered.

The federal government spends about $1 trillion per year on the military. Your website talks about cutting that spending by a fraction. What kind of fraction do you have in mind?

Well, we’ll see. I would like to see it cut

10%? 20%? 50%?

I’d like to see it cut very substantially. Bernie Sanders has talked about a 10% cut. I think we can go further, especially with a trillion dollars. Imagine what we could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on in the United States every year. Medicare for All, ending homelessness, making sure that everyone has nutritious food, rehabilitating our public housing. And it’s not just the public benefits that we can shore up, but the new ones that we can bring into being if we had that kind of funding and reoriented the way that we think about our budget away from the idea that our safety requires militarism and and death and destruction, when it actually requires public education, public health care, public housing, and things like that.

Visit indypendent.org for more interviews with insurgent candidates running in the June 23 Democratic primary including Darializa Avila Chevalier, Conrad Blackburn, Aber Kawas and David Orkin.

Listen to our June 2, 2026 interview with Claire Valdez on The Indypendent Radio Newshour on WBAI.

For more information on where you can vote, see vote.nyc. If you want to see if there are any democratic socialists you can vote for tomorrow, see ballot.socialists.nyc.

However, a rent freeze can’t just be implemented by mayoral decree. The Rent Guidelines Board first must weigh the competing claims of landlords and tenants and hold public hearings in each borough. The last of the four public hearings was held Tuesday on the Upper West Side. Tenant groups rallied and marched outside and testified forcefully inside.

The Indy was there to cover it all. We were also present at earlier public hearings in Jamaica, Queens and the South Bronx. The RGB will announce its final decision at his next public meeting Thursday June 25 at El Museo in East Harlem. It is considering both a one and a two-year rent freeze. The Mayor has appointed six of the nine Board members so there is good reason to be hopeful. But he has also kept quiet since taking office lest landlords later argue in court that he unfairly biased the Board’s deliberations.

“Freeze the Rent! Melt the ICE!” (Manhattan)

The Bronx Is Still Burning for a Rent Freeze

Queens Tenants Rally Against Rent Hikes As RGB Hearings Begin

To bring you this coverage, we teamed up with Docbloc, a New York City-based collective of theater artists who work at the intersection of citizen journalism and who will subsequently turn their reporting into a theatrical production. Indy Editor John Tarleton visited the Docbloc team in May and led a Reporting 101 Workshop so they could be prepared to cover the RGB hearings.

Sunday: John Tarleton to Talk at the Brooklyn Ethical Culture Society

The Indy’s Editor-in-Chief aka “Pastor John” will be speaking this Sunday at the weekly service of the Brooklyn Ethical Culture Society at its headquarters at 269 Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. John will reflect on the 25-year history of The Indypendent, which he co-founded, how we can best respond individually and collectively to the moral collapse of the Trump Era and dedicate ourselves to building something better than the old status quo of Wall Street bailouts and Forever Wars that preceded it. He will also share a few stories from the years before he arrived in New York when he worked as a migrant fruit harvester and hitchhiked 75,000 miles across 17 countries, meeting and learning from people from all walks of life.

Sunday’s service begins at 12:30 and John will speak from 1:00-1:30pm. The event is free and all are welcome. RSVP here to attend in person, or watch via livestream.

To help you keep track of the most important races, we’ve produced an election guide that highlights the leading candidates, their backgrounds and where they stand on key issues. We also have a feature interview with Assemblymember Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist who is running in this year’s most closely watched primary race — the three-way battle between Valdez, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and City Councilmember Julie Won to succeed retiring Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez. Many of the toughest races in the city are being run by candidates, like Valdez, who are backed by the 14,000-member New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. In a guest op-ed for The Indy, longtime NYC-DSA organizer Eric Thor describes the “DSA Difference” — a robust internal democracy and an unwavering commitment to pro-working class politics — that has allowed the member-led organization to become a political powerhouse over the past decade.

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New York Primary Coverage

NY’s 2026 Democratic Primaries: The Left vs. Establishment Divide Deepens
By John Tarleton

Next Step, Congress: Claire Valdez Rides a Movement Moment
By John Tarleton

Op-Ed: What Makes NYC-DSA Endorsed Candidates Different from “Progressives”
By Eric Thor

For more Indy election coverage, tune into The Indypendent News Hour’s election night special next Tuesday June 23 from 8-11 pm on WBAI-99.5 FM and streaming at wbai.org.

More Coverage from the June Indypendent…

Parents, Teachers Push Pause on AI Rollout in NYC Schools
By Ella Spitz

Western NY Resists Mega-Data Center Plan
By Allie Tutich

How Revolutionary Politics Makes Art and Spirituality, Better
By Nicholas Powers

When The Victim Becomes the Survivor
By Karen Malpede

Remembering When NYC Was Under Military Occupation for Seven Years
By John Tarleton

Overseers Everywhere—Still We Rise
By Renee Feltz

By the way, we have a great line-up for this evening’s Independent News Hour on WBAI 99.5 FM with Editor-in-Chief John Tarleton and Co-Host Amba Guerguerian! Ash Marinaccio will have a live report from the Rent Guidelines Board’s final public hearing on the proposed rent freeze. This one is in Manhattan. The board will announce its decision on June 25. In our second segment, we will speak with Native American theater director Opalanietet about the premiere of his Native play, Stand-Off at Hwy. #37, at Theatre Row this week. Finally, we will get an update on the Summer of Ludd festival. Like a true Luddite, their spokesperson will join us in studio to discuss the event based out of Tompkins Square Park from June 28-July 5 that celebrates living consciously with a lot less technology.

Hasan Piker Headlines NYC-DSA Rally in Bushwick Two Days Before Start of Early Voting

Nuriel Vera-Degraff

Leftist streamer, influencer, and political commentator Hasan Piker joined the slate of candidates endorsed by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America for a rally titled “A City to Win” last Thursday, two days before the start of early voting.

“New York is the tip of the spear in terms of revolutionary politics that will change the dynamic in the entire country in a better trajectory,” Piker said.

Nine of the 10 candidates endorsed by NYC-DSA were present at the rally, which took place at a Bushwick event space: Claire Valdez, Aber Kawas, Conrad Blackburn, Christian Celeste Tate, Eon Huntley, Samantha Kattan, Diana Moreno, David Orkin, and Illapa Sairitupac. Piker, the nine candidates, and a slew of other speakers were joined by a crowd of more than 200 people, most of them DSA members.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running to represent New York’s 13th congressional district in Upper Manhattan and parts of the West Bronx, was unable to attend the rally but was present in the form of a life-size cardboard version of herself.

Piker, who rose to fame by streaming on Twitch and boasts more than 10 million followers across various platforms, has been traveling around the United States this year, mobilizing his online following to support socialist and progressive candidates challenging establishment Democrats across the country.

The speakers — candidates and DSA-affiliated advocates alike — consistently emphasized the core issues shared by DSA and their endorsees: affordability, housing, healthcare, war and genocide, abolishing ICE, and taxing the rich. Most speakers included calls to action in their remarks, encouraging audience members to sign up for canvassing shifts.

Complementing speakers’ repeated calls to action, the rally’s emcees regularly paused between speeches, directing the audience’s attention to the various DSA organizers in the crowd who were holding up clipboards with QR codes linked to sign-up pages for canvasses and phonebanks.

“The way socialists make change is getting millions and millions of people to know what the hell is happening in these elections, and we have to talk to our neighbors, so who’s going to sign up to canvass today?” asked former NYC-DSA co-chair and rally co-emcee Jeremy Cohan.

Piker, 34, delivered the last speech of the night, where he connected the slate of NYC-DSA candidates to a broader movement for socialist and anti-establishment politics in the United States.

“From the student movements to the door knockers to the old white suburbanites, from the disenchanted liberals who voted for Hillary Clinton, who now say Bernie was right, to the excited socialists who are always there, more and more people recognize the extraordinary times that we are living through, and they want something different,” Piker said. “People, in other words, are demanding a politics that works for them.

“I thought we were so far away from socialism,” he added, “and we might still be far away from socialism, but we do have an opportunity right here, right now, more than ever before, and we must seize that opportunity, and you all must continue your own disciplined organizing for that to happen. That is the challenge.”

Piker then made the case for disciplined and sustainable organizing that goes beyond electoral efforts. “It’s more than just elections. It’s work like organizing tenant unions. It’s work like international solidarity movements,” he argued. “But it’s also work like labor organizing or work like political education of yourselves and others.”

Piker echoed the collectivist sentiment shared by many of the rally’s speakers, hoping that the NYC-DSA slate “will do even more than Zohran can. I hope that although Zohran was the first in New York City, by the end of these midterms, Zohran will seem unremarkable — because by then we will have elected so many brilliant fighters into legislative offices throughout New York City and state.”

In his speech, Piker also seemed to acknowledge his somewhat controversial status: “I’ve been under a lot of attack as of late.” Because of his uncompromising criticism of Israel, Piker has angered Democratic Party elites even as he has built a massive following among younger voters who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024.

After the rally, The Indypendent spoke with five of the nine DSA candidates present: Kawas, Blackburn, Celeste Tate, Moreno, and Sairitupac.

The candidates expressed gratitude for Piker’s support, and some took it as proof of NYC-DSA’s success. Moreno said that she saw the influencer’s backing as a “testament to the work that NYC-DSA has built over the years … it’s a big deal, because he is very much the pulse sometimes of the left … I’m so glad that he came out to support us, and also, as he said, to remind us that we are the vanguard of the movement against fascism.”

Every candidate interviewed shared unbowed excitement for the respective campaigns, leading into the final stretch. When asked about balancing the goals of DSA with the needs of their respective districts, candidates emphasized the interconnectedness of local and national issues.

Blackburn, for instance, doesn’t “see it as having to balance the needs, because our needs are all the same. We need stable housing. We need to be able to afford groceries. We need to be able to afford healthcare.”

When asked whether they would endorse and campaign for future slates of NYC-DSA-endorsed candidates, each of the five candidates The Indypendent spoke with committed to doing so.

“I will endorse, I will support. I know what solidarity is,” said Blackburn.

Celeste Tate built on Blackburn’s sentiment: “That’s part of what movement building is. This isn’t about me. I’m a stand-in right now. This is about uplifting all of us together.”

“This is not an individual project, this is a movement project,” said Moreno.

By Avi Aronsky

Although Madison Square Garden is entrenched in the public mind as the one and only home of the New York Knickerbockers, a closer look at the franchise’s genesis may well surprise a few readers. On November 11, 1946, the team indeed played its very first home contest at “the world’s most famous arena” (the third, Madison-and-50th iteration). However, the vast majority of Knick games in Gotham during that inaugural season were held at a leased venue around 1.4 miles to the south.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, MSG was hopping with proven money makers, such as the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, ice shows, the New York Rangers, and college basketball doubleheaders. Ned Irish, the Knicks founder who crucially doubled as the Garden’s top promoter and acting president (his boss, General John Reed Kilpatrick, was still in the army), had serious doubts as to the staying power of professional hoops. As Matthew Goodman relates in The City Game, “‘The way college basketball draws,’ [. . .] Ned Irish was once heard to say, ‘the Knicks are nothing but a tax write-off anyway.’”

Against this backdrop, only six out of New York’s 30 home dates were at MSG during that first year. The rest of the matches took place at the 69th Regiment or Lexington Avenue Armory, between E. 25th and 26th Streets – a few blocks from the two even older iterations of the Garden overlooking the eponymous park. That said, popular sources, like Basketball Reference and Wikipedia, erroneously identify the renowned building as the site of games irrefutably played at the military installation.

A stout, red-bricked edifice trimmed with limestone, the Armory opened its doors in 1906. The Beaux-Arts style National Historic Landmark consists of two wings: a three-story administrative building; and indoor drill grounds. Compared to the Garden’s 1946 capacity of just over 18,000, this venue seated roughly 5,600 basketball fans. Although the Knicks spruced up the latter court with overhead lighting and a new parquet, it retained the feel of a slightly battered minor-league stadium. One Knick fan, John Grasso, who attended games at the Armory, described it as “about the size of a big high school gym.” At least tickets prices were more affordable. Compared to $5.00 at MSG, the most expensive seat on Lexington Avenue went for $3.50 (or 58.38 today, adjusting for inflation) that inaugural campaign.

The first Knick game at the “drillshed” was held on Saturday, November 16, 1946. Previewing the matchup, The New York Herald Tribune noted that “It still must be proved that basketball fans will storm the gates of an armory with as much enthusiasm as the gates of the Garden.” Like the opener at MSG, “there will be pre-game festivities. . . , including set shooting and foul-throwing contests for cash awards.”

After bowing in overtime to the Chicago Stags at MSG earlier in the week, the Gothamists were seeking their first home triumph in franchise history, against the Pittsburgh Ironmen, before an announced crowd of 3,603 fans – a far-cry from the 17,205 at the Garden on Monday. The visitors raced ahead early behind the offensive prowess of John “Brooms” Abromovic, who would finish with 29 points. However, “Ossie Schectman, Leo Gottlieb and Sonny Hertzberg, the New York set-shot trio,” the Trib’s Irving T. Marsh reported, “began to hit.” Erasing an 11-point deficit, the Knicks knotted up the game with two minutes remaining. In the extra period, former NYU star Ralph Kaplowitz scored all five of New York’s points to secure a 64-62 victory.

The Armory would continue to serve as the Knicks’ alternative venue for twelve more years. Starting in 1951, the facility even hosted, due to prior scheduling commitments at the Garden, all the team’s home matches over three consecutive NBA finals, none of which New York managed to win. On April 10, 1953, the Knicks hoped to fend off elimination before a capacity crowd of 5,200 against the redoubtable George Mikan and the defending champion Minneapolis Lakers. After taking Game 1 of the series on the road, the Gothamists were bested three times in a row. New York’s widely-respected coach, Joe Lapchik, tried to shake things up by benching Dick McGuire, the team’s struggling All-Star point guard, in favor of Ernie Vandeweghe. Concomitantly enrolled in medical school at Columbia University, the guard would be hanging it up after the season in order to begin an internship in pediatrics at Bellevue Hospital. What’s more, his son Kiki played for the Knicks between 1989 and 1992.

According to The Trib’s Leonard Koppett, the hosts “stayed even for about 19 minutes, when Vandy went out and the score was 29-all.” However, the Laker reserves fueled a run that left New York down nine at halftime. Minneapolis’s starters, including future Hall of Famers Vern Mikkelson, Jim Pollard, and Slater Martin, picked up where the bench left off. By around the eight-minute mark of the third quarter, the Gothamists found themselves in a 55-to-35 hole.

Wielding a full-court press, center Connie Simmons, Vandewiegh, and the rarely-used guard Jerry Fleishman mounted a furious comeback, which was abetted by Mikan’s foul trouble. With 35 seconds left, McGuire finally netted his first bucket of the game to pull New York within a single point. However, that was as close as the foul-plagued Knickerbockers would get. The Lakers pulled away for a 91-84 victory and the club’s fourth title in five years. Heart-wrenching as the defeat was for the Gotham faithful, their club would not reach the rarified air of a championship series for another 17 years.

The 69th Regiment Armory would host a few NBA All-Star games as well. The Knicks’ final assignation on Lexington Avenue was a nationally televised matinee against the Cincinnati Royals and sharpshooter Jack Twyman on January 16, 1960. Ending their 14-year run at the drillshed with a flourish, New York set a team record for most points at the venue in a 132-106 rout.

Between 1946 and 1960, the fortunes of the pro-game had steadily improved; and the Knicks were easily the league’s most profitable outfit. Moreover, the point-shaving scandals that rocked college basketball during the early 1950s severely hindered most of the big programs in the New York metropolitan area. For example, CCNY, LIU, and NYU all downgraded their basketball programs in the aftermath of the revelations. “It’s quite feasible,” Charley Rosen posits in The Chosen Game, “that had the scandals of ’51 never happened, the BAA-cum-NBA would have taken a backseat to college hoops for at least another decade.” As the ensuing table illustrates, the number of Garden dates mounted in lockstep with the growth of the pro game and the Knicks’ fortunes at the turnstile.

Breakdown of Home Contests between 1946 and 1960*

* Game data were gleaned from sundry media reports, whereas the attendance figures were published by the Association for Professional Basketball Research.

With the establishment of the American Basketball Association in 1967, the New York Americans (currently the Brooklyn Nets) wanted to book the drillshed as its home court. However, the Knicks pressured the venue, along with other arenas throughout the city, into refusing their adversary’s overtures on grounds of “territorial rights.” As a result, the Americans had to settle for the remote, if stately, Teaneck Armory in New Jersey.

This episode did not spell the end for basketball on Lexington Avenue. In 1972, the Baruch College Statesmen, a nearby Division III program, moved in. By this juncture, though, the building was well past its prime. “Because temperatures routinely dipped to 40 degrees,” Corey Kilgannon recounted for The Times, the Armory was dubbed “the Icebox.” That said, the frigid conditions did not deter rats from interrupting “locker room pep talks.” Moreover, “National Guard troops would idle trucks inside the armory during practice and delay games by conducting military exercises. Once, the team showed up for practice to find police chalking the outline of a dead body on the court, apparently a suicide from the armory’s homeless shelter.” Not surprisingly, Baruch bolted to a high school gym about ten block south (Xavier) in 1982 (though they continued to practice at the drillshed for a few more seasons). That same year the municipal college also changed its name to the Bearcats.

Over the decades, the 69th Regiment Armory has accommodated a plethora of different events. Apart from serving as the headquarters of the eponymous unit to this very day, it has catered to tennis and boxing matches, fashion shows, fundraisers, and art exhibitions. Most notably, the building hosted the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art (or the Armory Show), where many Americans got their first glimpse of Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other continental masters. Immediately following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, friends and relatives of missing victims hung pictures of their loved ones, exchanged information, and found solace at the drillshed. At the time of this writing, the historic venue is finally undergoing major renovations.

“Freeze the rent; Slam the door; Knicks, Knicks, Knicks, in four,” chanted Bronx tenants before last night’s Rent Guidelines Board public hearing held at Hostos Community College.

Six of the nine RGB’s nine members have been appointed by Mamdani. They are weighing public testimony at hearings like this before they announce final decision — to rent freeze or not to rent freeze? — on Thursday June 25.

We had a team of reporters there last night as Bronx residents shared their stories. You can see the full report below and a gallery of photos from last night on our Instagram page. Also, click here to see our coverage of last week’s RGB hearing in Jamaica, Queens.

Also, don’t forget to catch today’s edition of The Indypendent News Hour from 5-6 pm on WBAI-99.5 FM and streaming on wbai.org. Our co-hosts John Tarleton and Amba Guerguerian will speak in the first part of the show with two democratic socialists running for the state legislature in Central Brooklyn. In the second half of the show, we’ll hear from a pair of military veterans who are calling for U.S. troops to be prepared to disobey unlawful orders from Donald Trump and his henchmen.

The Bronx is Still Burning for a Rent Freeze

Written collectively by Arman Amin, Monica Furman, Liz June, Ash Marinaccio, Karina Ordóñez

“Freeze the rent; Slam the door; Knicks, Knicks, Knicks, in four,” chanted Bronx tenants as they marched down the Grand Concourse and rallied outside the heavily policed Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) Public Hearing in the main theater of Hostos Community College/CUNY on Monday night, demanding that the RGB stop landlord bailouts and freeze rent for the 2.4 million rent-stabilized tenants in the city on both one- and two-year leases.

Organizers from the New York State Tenant Bloc, CASA, CUNY CARES, Bronx Defenders, Met Council on Housing, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Youth Alliance for Housing, along with Councilmembers Pierina Sanchez and Althea Stevens, marched and rallied against predatory landlords, refuting landlords’ attempts to use their borough to block a citywide rent freeze.

“For 32 years I worked. I’m a disabled senior, with a disabled dependent…My rent went up $300 a month,” Patricia Jewett testified before the board. “We can’t afford to eat chicken. We have to eat soup.” At night, I have to worry about whether I’ll have an eviction notice on my door – and it ain’t because I owe rent. It’s because they are always trying to find a way to put out the tenants who have been there. They want us out so they can get new blood in. It’s disgusting,” Jewett closed.

According to the NYS Unified Court System Division of Technology and Court Research, 1 in 11 households in the Bronx have an eviction filing.

“Tenants know what the data shows because we live it every day,” explained Sumathy Kumars, NYS Tenant Bloc Executive Director. “Tenants are facing wartime inflation, federal benefit cuts, and ICE threats, while landlords have seen their operating incomes and profits rise for years. Landlords continue to push for a blanket rent hike, but tenants refuse to reward them for long-term neglect or bail out their bad bets. Tenants need and deserve a rent freeze on one- and two-year leases. We’re turning up in record numbers at the RGB hearings to demand it, and we’re going to win it,” Kumars finished.

Currently, multiple subsidy programs are available to landlords. The Mayor’s new housing plan has allocated $2.2 billion to remove the most neglected buildings from landlords’ hands if they will no longer manage their upkeep. A recent report by Moody’s Analytics found that a rent freeze would not be the economic catastrophe that landlords predict.

Andrea Ngoulou, an organizer and tenant in a Bronx rent-controlled building, said, “There’s black mold. There are rat infestations. We recently had a bedbug infestation. One tenant’s entire ceiling collapsed on them in the middle of the night.”

Ngoulou commented, “People deserve a safe space to live with dignity and respect. You know, we’re people. We’re not cattle, we’re not animals, and we deserve to be treated humanely. The way they treat our living arrangements, our quarters, is a direct reflection of how they see us as people, and it’s less than.”

The misconception that housing remains a “youth issue” faded as stories emerged of people in their 60s and 70s organizing for tenant rights in their spare time. Tenants described living in their apartments for decades, only to be tricked into leaving and forced to resort to shelters. The most vulnerable were those who lifted their voices and waited in the hot sun to be screened through metal detectors.

Nilda Peña, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who has called the Bronx home for 25 years, described the Bronx as “all that she had known since immigrating. New York in general is expensive; the Bronx was cheaper to live in.” She described how much she loved the programs in her community for young people and seniors, and how she wanted to be around her loved ones. However, as rent continues to rise, she worries about having to leave.

South Bronx resident Alexander Ruiz referred to the building standards and living conditions in the area as “neglect,” saying the people who own these buildings do not care. He stated, “The fact that individuals don’t even know how dangerous the presence of black mold is, but it’s commonplace in a lot of these buildings, is violent.”

Ruiz described a rent increase as the most violent thing this Board can do to NYC residents, advocating for a rent freeze as the bare minimum for Bronx residents and potential systemic change to make the Bronx more affordable.

While tenant groups and organizers showed up in droves to advocate for their right to dignified and affordable housing, they also made it clear that appealing to the Rent Guidelines Board itself was not a real pathway to change. “It’s time for our yearly humiliation ritual,” noted Marcelo Lopez (Unity Democratic Club, DSA, WFP) regarding testifying before the Board. “But the problem is, there is nothing your mandate can do to actually impact the housing crisis. You must freeze the rent, because there is no positive effect to raising it. There is not going to be a magical increase that people will just be able to pay more, and it will fix all the repairs that were ignored for decades. None of that is possible. We are asking you to freeze the rent because it is what is correct to be able to maintain people in their homes.” Marcelo Lopez.

“I worked hard to get a promotion. These landlords aren’t doing a good job. If you’re not doing a good job, why should you be paid more?” said another organizer for the Democratic Socialists of America.

Andre Easton, an independent congressional candidate for District 15 and member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, remarked on the limitations of the process. “I think all decisions that affect working-class people should be publicly discussed, should be publicly debated, and should be beholden to the consensus of the masses of the working class. If we are not the ones who determine how a decision is made, then it cannot be said that we live in a democracy.” He also clarified that although this hearing is participatory, it is not democratic. “I think that it is an attempt to acknowledge the desire of the working class. We don’t want it to be a performative gesture. We want it to be an actual demonstration, an actualized expression of the will of the masses of people, and only we can make that happen.”

So how do we make it happen?

When it comes to housing, Easton isn’t alone in his view that power is in organizing. “The working class is the decisive factor in history. Regardless of whether we win or lose, whether we sink or swim, it all depends on how well we are organized and how well we channel our desires into discrete, disciplined structures that are beholden to our interests. That’s the only thing that’s gonna give us the world that we deserve. We’re not gonna be able to vote our way. We have to actively participate in shaping the world that we want to see.”

This article was coauthored by members of DocBloc’s Artist as Citizen Journalist Initiative which brings together theatre artists and journalists to share in civic reporting and the growing need for community-based storytelling.The ACJ initiative tests a hybrid model of reporting and performance, positioning theatre artists as civic witnesses and collaborators in local journalism. To learn more visit docbloc.orgor connect on Instagram @docblocprojects.

Overseers Everywhere—Still, We Rise

by Renée Feltz

The Overseer Class: A Manifesto
By Steven W. Thrasher
Amistad, 386 pages, May 2026

In The Overseer Class, scholar, journalist and activist Steven Thrasher lays out his theory of the “phenomenon in which people from marginalized populations amass power not by uplifting people from the communities they come from, but by collectively cracking the skulls of their own.”

For his take on this familiar problem, he draws on contemporary theorists like Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, whose book Elite Capture shows how “a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential,” as well as authors James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, whose work and lives were aimed at overthrowing the overseers he describes.

“When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else,” he quotes Morrison telling her students in 2003. “If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

With similar passion, Thrasher offers a powerful cultural and political critique, academic analysis, and — as his book’s subtitle suggests — “A Manifesto.” Almost Chomsky-like both in his explanation of how we are groomed through the media and propaganda, and in his approach, Thrasher provides so many examples to define his terms and their nuances that it becomes implausible to disagree with him (and embarrassing when he names some of your favorite films or TV shows).

Look no further the 2023 news cycle “dominated with a powerful message of state-approved genocide of an indigenous people” in Gaza, Thrasher writes, and how “that lethal message was largely delivered by Black Americans.” Key figures included: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre; United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and her Deputy Robert Wood, who cast the lone vote in the U.N. Security Council against a ceasefire that December, “acting as a kind of global Black cop for the ruling class.”

While he does call out “overseers who specifically have ill intent,” Thrasher focuses overall on class dynamics. “When it comes to how racial capitalism is maintained,” he writes, “the systemic, economic dynamics of an overseer class of people are indispensable to upholding hierarchies of patriarchy, race and cis-heterosexism.”

He considers “four types of marginalized people who advance into positions of power,” starting with “Uncle Toms,” a term he says is often mistakenly applied to sellouts. The titular novel, Uncle Tom, Thrasher clarifies, is about an enslaved man “whose power came from his attempt to protect other people even at the cost of his own suffering and life.” In contrast, ‘tokens” refer to someone who is “an isolated, minoritized worker with little or no real power and whose identity is subject to heightened scrutiny.” Meanwhile, Thrasher spends the most time describing “overseers,” those who are often a “historic first… but unwilling, and sometimes unable, to expand the number of people like them in their organization.” The type you want to be, he argues, is a “Toni” (named after Toni Morrison), because “a Toni does not want to be the ‘first and only’ and works their ass off to push open the door for other people who have not been welcomed inside.”

The book’s first chapter and many of its examples refer to police, but Thrasher also zooms in on corporate America, the U.S. armed forces, and the mass media, which he says pushes out propaganda, its subspecialty, copaganda and its sub-subspecialty, copablanda” — his term for “Black copaganda, which is meant to make Black cops killing Black people so quotidian and ‘blah’ as to be unremarkable.” Going through the decades, he starts with overseers on slave plantations and continues in through films and TV shows from today.

Thrasher taught social justice in reporting at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago, and draws on his decades of experience that went into his first book, The Viral Underclass, as well as his ordeal of being denied tenure and having his classes cancelled after he supported students who set up a Palestine solidarity encampment in 2024 to protest the Gaza genocide. When Thrasher linked arms with other faculty to stop police from violently evicting the students, he found himself brutalized in the process.

He told Democracy Now! at the time: “What they don’t like is that I am now applying the same social justice journalism principles that I’ve applied to race and that I’ve applied to LGBTQ people, to COVID and HIV, that I was now applying those to Palestine.”

In the book, he calls out the complicity of Phillip Brian Harper, his professor and former dean of the Graduate School at NYU; Brian A. Lewis, Chief of Police at Northwestern University; and Charles Whitaker, dean of the Medill School of Journalism.

“I used to be naive enough to think that Black university administrations would help people like me to navigate a career in primarily white institutions,” Thrasher writes. “But when I began speaking out against the decades-long colonial war in Palestine, I noticed something. In the same manner in which Sidney Poitier’s Lt. Tibbs is sent to the Black side of town to shake information out of a Black abortionist a white cop could never have gotten [near the end of] In the Heat of the Night, I believe Black administrators were hired into their position to crack our Negro skulls, to beat our critical impulses out of our black asses, and to murder our careers if called upon.”

On his book tour and online, Thrasher continues to call out new examples, noting recently how “Mamdani hired Edwin Raymond as a new sheriff, whose book An Inconvenient Cop I critique extensively in The Overseer Class.”

Thrasher’s book offers clarity at a time when “rainbow capitalism” is not a serious response to the growing authoritarianism of Trump’s billionaire-backed white nationalist regime. Thrasher makes it easier to see how the overseer class “is established at different levels in various sectors of American society, in order to navigate around this present reality so we don’t have to accept it as a certain future.”

In a way, Thrasher has put himself forth as another role model for all of us who refuse to keep our head down as we lift others up.

Note: Don’t miss Thrasher’s curated film series at BAM, June 5-11: Black Cops, Spies and Overseers

Renée Feltz is a longtime independent journalist and a former News Director at Democracy Now!

PAST COVERAGE: STEVEN THRASHER’S BOOK, “THE VIRAL UNDERCLASS”

COVID & Our ‘Manufactured Amnesia’

Steven Thrasher spoke to The Indypendent’s John Tarleton in 2023 about chronicling how AIDS disproportionately harmed marginal populations. Then he saw it happen again with COVID-19. Read his Q&A with John Tarleton about his book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide.

Hamm, author of Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up in the New Deal City Shaped Bernie Sander’s Politics—has seen this movie before. In 2025, Hamm had behind-the-scenes access to the Mamdani campaign which became the basis of his latest book—Meet Mayor Mamdani: The Spectacular Victory of a Democratic Socialist in New York City—which we are promoting at the bottom of this post. Author and activist Astra Taylor calls Meet Mayor Mamdani an energizing jolt of hope. The inside story of how it happened.”

For Indy readers who want to purchase the book, there’s a special 15% discount available. But first, let’s try this slice of Hamm all the way from Rhode Island or check out Hamm’s latest or the Israel lobby’s efforts to swamp New York’s June 23 Democratic primaries with big money.

From the Wrestling Ring to City Hall: Young Democratic Socialist Surges in Providence, Rhode Island Mayoral Race

By Theodore Hamm

A young democratic socialist state legislator makes a bid for city hall. The insurgent’s agenda identifies affordable housing as the central issue. The leftist lends theatrical flair to his campaign.

The stage is a bit smaller—the population of Providence, Rhode Island, is just under 200,000—but David Morales is taking the baton from Zohran Mamdani. Instead of lyrical dexterity, Morales is known for his aerial takedowns.

First elected as a Rhode Island state representative in 2020, Morales turns 28 one week after the Democratic primary on September 9. He is attempting to unseat Brett Smiley, a corporate Dem in his first term. Smiley recently vetoed legislation aimed at implementing rent stabilization in Providence—and, if elected, Morales vows to push it forward.

In mid-May, the Indypendent sat down with Morales at a downtown Providence café, where the upbeat candidate energetically explained the issues and mapped out his battle plan. Soon after announcing his mayoral bid last September, Morales noted, he brought a team of volunteers down to Astoria in order to knock on doors for Mamdani—and learn about Zohran for NYC’s organizing model. A recent Data for Progress poll showed the leftist candidate with an 11-point lead in the September showdown.

Morales’ family came to the U.S. from Monterrey, Mexico, and he was raised by his mother in Soledad, California, near Salinas. While raising David and his older sister, she worked in fields picking fruits and vegetables by day and as a cashier at convenience stores by night.

Morales wrestled in high school, although it was the traditional type. “For the record, they’re both real,” he says with a laugh, contrasting the amateur sport to the WWE variety. The latter may be scripted, but there is indeed plenty of athleticism.

Not making his high school varsity squads in either wrestling or baseball proved fortuitous for Morales, because he started taking college courses at night and joined the debating team. He took a particular interest in the minimum wage because of his mother’s economic hardship.

David volunteered for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, making phone calls to East Coast voters before his high school classes began. Sanders recently joined Rep. Ro Khanna and former Rep. Jamaal Bowman in endorsing Morales.

When he came to Providence in the fall of 2018 (in order to pursue a Masters in Public Administration from Brown University), Morales joined the local DSA chapter. The group backed his successful 2020 run for the state legislature. Since 2022 the chapter no longer supports candidates in Democratic primaries, but Morales says that “several” DSA members are currently volunteering for his campaign.

Word around town is that Morales is a fixture on the music scene. “I go to a lot of concerts but avoid the mosh pit,” he says, although he acknowledges that a wrestling ring is a similar setting. Back in Soledad, Morales recalls, “I was a really avid WWE watcher. My hero was Rey Mysterio,” the Southern California-born son of Mexican immigrants who pays homage to the lucha libre tradition.

Aficionados of pro wrestling and politics may connect Morales to Super Barrio, a leading leftist activist in Mexico during the 1990s. In 1998, former WWE star Jesse Ventura famously waged a successful grassroots campaign for Minnesota governor.

In 2021, as things began to open up after the pandemic, the Providence-based Renegade Wrestling Alliance hosted shows in Morales’ district. The legislator reached out to a promoter who proposed that a villain body-slam David while talking smack about Providence. Thus began a four-year partnership between Morales and the RWA.

Morales eagerly took classes in Worcester and participated in RWA events on a monthly basis until announcing his “semi-retirement” to run for mayor last September. After winning the RWA’s title belt in spring 2023, Morales says that he created a “new rule” requiring the champion to carry the belt wherever he went, which in his case included the statehouse.

Our conversation shifted back to the campaign, but as he got up to leave, I asked Morales when he planned to return the ring. “I just did,” he replied, pulling up a dazzling Instagram clip from his cellphone that showed him flying about in an orange business suit at a May 1 wrestling/burlesque event. “I’m just happy I didn’t throw my back out,” he said.

For more details on Morales’ agenda, check out his recent discussion with The Dig’s Daniel Denvir (go to 1:27:00 here).

The Indypendent is a New York City-based newspaper, website and weekly radio show. All of our work is made possible by readers like you. Please consider making a recurring or one-time donation today or subscribe to our monthly print edition and get every copy sent straight to your hom

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Cuba Solidarity Protesters Denounce U.S. Blockade & Invasion Plans

By Lyna Bentahar

Dozens of demonstrators convened Sunday in front of Moynihan Train Hall to protest the United States’ oil blockade on Cuba and raise awareness of the dire conditions there.

Virtually no fuel is allowed to enter the country since the Trump administration ordered the blockade in January, halting essential services like health care and sanitation.

At the same time, the Trump administration has threatened “take” Cuba, and media reports have suggested President Donald Trump has taken greater interest in the island since entering a stalemate with Iran in the war the United States has waged there.

“We really feel the threats are real,” Monica Moorehead, a political activist with the Workers World Party, said.

The average age of the protesters was considerably older than the left-wing protests of recent years in New York City. Danny Valdes, a founder of the organization Cuban Americans for Cuba and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, compared the Cuban solidarity movement to the DSA, which historically had a small membership base before the rise of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016.

“It’s the people who have been caring about Cuba for decades that are continuing to show up and have always shown up,” Valdes said of the movement.

“I’m hoping that DSA can step up in this movement, that some of these younger movements that came out for Palestine can come out for Cuba in the same way,” he said.

Valdes hoped to grow the movement by making it welcoming to people distrustful of the Cuban government.

Many of the protesters, however, were staunch supporters of the Cuban revolution. Members of the December 12th Movement, a pan-Africanist organization, after hearing Valdes and another DSA member speak, merely replied, “Liberalism.”

The United States has long maintained an embargo against the Cuban economy since 1959, the keystone of its regime-change strategy. The embargo has expanded over the decades, particularly under both of Trump’s terms. The sanctions contributed to a rise in poverty and infant mortality.

“There is no country in the modern history that has been subjected to what the Cuban people have been subjected,” Roger Calero, a protester, said.

The protesters now worry that the blockade is a prelude for the Trump administration to launch a war against the Caribbean nation. A recent YouGov poll found that most Americans oppose war with Cuba.

Some protesters carried Puerto Rican flags, which Valdes said was a reference to a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, a Puerto Rican writer, comparing Cuba and Puerto Rico as “two wings of the same bird.”

“Cuba broke off from U.S. hegemony, became independent,” he said. “Then we have Puerto Rico, which is a colony in all but name.”

PAST CUBA COVERAGE

Cuba’s Uncertain Future (Feb. 2024)

A Cuban-American socialist finds hope and heartbreak when he visits the island for the first time.

By Danny Valdes

Cuba’s Delicate Dance with a New Economy (Feb. 2021)

The Cuban government’s opening to capitalism is rife with contradictions in a society steeped in egalitarian ideals.

By Mario A. Murillo

Hope for Haiti: Trained in Cuba, Bronx Doctor Melissa Barber Drops Everything to Help Earthquake Victims

Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) trains aspiring doctors from around the world who want to serve the poor.

By Renée Feltz

INDY RADIO NEWS

On tomorrow’s edition of The Indypendent News Hour, we speak with Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist who is running for an open seat in New York’s 7th congressional district which spans North Brooklyn and Western Queens. NY-07, which voted for Zohran Mamdani by more than 50 points, is arguably the most leftwing congressional district in the country. We’ll also speak with Trevor Smith, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Black Liberation-Indigenous Sovereignty Collective about an upcoming series of coordinated events and mobilizations to push back on the Trump Administration’s whitewashing of American history.

The Indypendent News Hour airs Tuesdays 5-6 pm on WBAI-99.5 and streams on wbai.org. To listen to previous shows, visit our SoundCloud page.