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The hedge fund Elliott Management, whose owner has lavishly entertained Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, has argued that recent anti-fraud rules from the SEC are unconstitutional — and could try to bring a case before Alito to strike them down.

Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito poses for an official portrait at the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court building on October 7, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

The hedge fund of Justice Samuel Alito’s billionaire benefactor has been using a recent Alito-backed Supreme Court ruling to try to pressure federal regulators to back off new financial rules designed to fight fraud, according to documents reviewed by us.

The hedge fund, Elliott Management, has been arguing that the rules are unconstitutional, and could ultimately try to bring a case before Alito to strike down the new regulations if they are enacted. The high court is currently considering a petition to hear a separate case involving the same firm.

ProPublica this week reported that Elliott Management founder, president, and co-CEO Paul Singer provided an undisclosed private jet flight to Alito, and has been a major donor to the Judicial Crisis Network, a dark money group that has funded campaigns to install conservative judges throughout the judiciary — including Alito. The justice has declined to recuse himself in past cases involving the hedge fund.

Elliott’s efforts to weaponize a recent Supreme Court case to block anti-fraud rules — and to potentially use the high court to kill them — spotlights how judges are in key positions to help billionaires who provide them with gifts and other largesse.

At issue is a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposal that would require investors to more quickly disclose when they acquire a major stake in a company. A faster disclosure timeline threatens the business model of firms like Elliott Management, which acquire stakes in companies, demand changes, and then profit when their position becomes public and the company’s stock price jumps.

“The 2008 crisis had many chapters, but a form of security-based swaps — credit default swaps — played a lead role throughout the story,” said SEC chair Gary Gensler when he announced the rules in December 2021, also pointing to the role of these swaps in the recent collapse of Archegos Capital Management. “As part of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, Congress granted this agency broad authority with regard to security-based swaps, including three important authorities we’re acting upon here today.”

Elliott has been at the forefront of the financial industry’s aggressive campaign to block the rule, submitting comment letters to the SEC and meeting with agency officials.

“This would pose an existential threat to the activist investor’s business model,” Elliott Management’s lawyer said to an SEC advisory committee about the proposal.

The firm has also cited the Supreme Court’s recent landmark six to three West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency decision, which Alito supported, and which a Singer-led think tank has cheered. Singer’s executives and lawyers have insisted that the rule would be an illegal exercise of SEC authority under that ruling, which restricts the power of agencies to interpret laws.

“Although the comment periods for those proposals have closed,” Elliott Management wrote in an August 2022 letter,

BLOCKthe West Virginia decision postdates the comment periods in both instances and merits the commission’s careful attention given its effect on ‘all corners of the administrative state.’ . . . West Virginia thus amplifies the concerns expressed in our previously submitted comment letters and further underscores the need for the commission to abandon these misguided Proposals.

Elliott Management’s law firm, Ropes & Gray, as well as Elliott-linked lobby groups, also sent separate letters to SEC regulators demanding they halt the rule.

Elliott Management did not respond to a request for comment.

In early June, the SEC finalized part of the proposed anti-fraud rule, but just reopened the public comment period for the disclosure rule that Elliott was fighting.

Nonetheless, the SEC’s proposed rules set up a potential court battle between the agency and Elliott, which could ultimately be decided in part by Singer’s Alaska fishing partner, Alito.

Last year, the Financial Times reported that the hedge funds and industry groups fighting the rule — including Elliott Management — were “laying the groundwork for litigation” in the case that the proposed rules were finalized.

Right now, the high court is considering a separate petition to take a case involving the bankruptcy of the Elliott Management–backed firm Windstream Holdings. Elliott has filed a brief asking the court not to take the case. Alito has not said whether he will recuse himself.

Revelations about the financial relationship and legal interplay between Singer and Alito come weeks after similar revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas accepting undisclosed gifts from billionaire Harlan Crow before Thomas changed positions on a landmark legal doctrine and supported rulings that benefit Crow’s real estate investment firm.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

La “Conferenza sulla ripresa dell’Ucraina”, svoltasi a Londra, segna il passaggio a una nuova  fase della guerra contro la Russia: USA, NATO e UE non solo continuano ad armare le forze di Kiev, ma si stanno preparando a trasformare l’Europa …

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Workers at the Wabtec locomotive manufacturing plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, have walked off the job. Their demands get to the heart of bigger questions about the nature of work and the role workers can play in fights like climate change.

UE workers on strike in Erie, Pennsylvania, June 22, 2023. (Alex N. Press / Twitter)

On the evening of June 22, members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) crowded into Iroquois High School to vote on whether they would accept what their boss was offering them. They are employed by Wabtec (an abbreviation of Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation), at a four-million-square-foot locomotive manufacturing plant in Lawrence Park, on the east side of Erie, Pennsylvania.

Lawrence Park was built by General Electric (GE), which ran the plant for more than a century before the company spun off its $4-billion-a-year transportation arm in 2019, transferring ownership to Wabtec. The area still feels like a company town: the roughly four thousand residents are tied to the plant in countless ways, and UE signs dot Lawrence Park’s Main Street, affixed to telephone poles and stuck in front lawns.

At Iroquois High, the members of UE Local 506 and Local 618 (the latter consists of the plant’s clerical employees whose jobs have not been eliminated by automation, now numbering in the single digits) were voting on Wabtec’s last, best, and final offer for a new four-year contract. They struck for nine days to win that first contract in 2019, defeating some of Wabtec’s most egregious proposals but giving up certain provisions they had enjoyed under GE, some of which they hoped to win back during the current negotiations. The company’s 1,400 workers have now been without a contract since June 10, when that first contract expired.

Months of bargaining failed to produce a tentative agreement, and the company’s actions only increased the workers’ frustration. Hours before the contract expired, Wabtec informed Local 506 president Scott Slawson that it was considering permanently subcontracting out 275 union jobs, which members read as a threat. That interpretation was only confirmed when the company then told Slawson on June 20 that it would rescind that move should the workers accept the offer.

As Slawson told me, “We deal with an employer that negotiates with threats, and that has to be taken into consideration. It’s difficult to negotiate with somebody when they put a gun to your head rather than looking you in the eye.”

Around 6:00 p.m. on June 22, the verdict was in: this offer wasn’t good enough. Members of the UE locals overwhelmingly voted to reject the offer, and supplies were immediately taken out of Local 506’s union hall as members set up picket lines at the plant’s gates. With their rejection of Wabtec’s offer, the workers are now on strike.

There are several points of disagreement between Wabtec and its workforce. The workers want the right to strike over grievances, a right they held for eighty years when the plant was run by GE but gave up in their first contract with Wabtec. Without that right, they say that the company feels empowered to systematically violate the contract, and workers have little recourse.

As a May report from the Illinois School of Labor and Employment Relations found, under Wabtec, grievances are less likely to reach closure than they were under GE, more likely to drag on for months or even years, and more than twice as likely to be rejected.

Chief steward Leo Grzegorzewski says that 95 percent of grievances that reach the third and final step are rejected by Wabtec, forcing the union to go to arbitration, a route that costs UE around $9,000 each time. Since 2019, around sixty-eight grievances have reached arbitration. According to UE, the number of grievances reaching the final stage of the grievance procedure has increased tenfold since Wabtec took over the plant.

In other words, without the right to strike over grievances, the workers are governed by a managerial dictatorship, with the employer free to ignore terms of the contract it may find onerous and workers waiting years to see any resolution for these violations.

Another noneconomic proposal concerns green locomotives: the workers want to build them, and they want Wabtec to commit to working with them to push for higher governmental standards that would incentivize the industry to move toward less-polluting rail engines.

UE also represents workers who are employed in rail yards: it is workers like these who bear the cost of the rail industry’s pollution, and they want to change that. Toward that end, the union is calling for upgrading locomotive stock to modern “Tier 4” standards for long-haul routes and to zero-emissions technologies in rail yards. A recent report from the University of Massachusetts Amherst finds that building such locomotives would create between 2,600 and 4,300 jobs in the Lawrence Park plant, as well as three to five thousand additional jobs in Erie County. According to Slawson, Wabtec has “flat out rejected” collaboration on the issue.

“Building green locomotives is essential to the future of our country, and will benefit the local economy here in Erie,” said Slawson in a statement announcing the strike. “Unfortunately, Wabtec’s unwillingness to work with us to resolve problems, either through the grievance process or through contract negotiations, is a major impediment to that bright future.”

The significance of the fight inside the sprawling Wabtec plant couldn’t be clearer: manufacturing workers are striking a Fortune 500 company for the right to some measure of control over the shop floor. They want their expertise, including on the matter of green locomotives, respected. Wabtec refuses to accede to those demands, instead choosing to run roughshod over their rights.

UE has represented workers in the plant since 1938. It had been the first union chartered by the then-new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and by the end of World War II, UE had five hundred thousand members. But the union was decimated by the Red Scare: refusing to accede to anti-communist hysteria, UE withdrew from the CIO in 1949 (and was formally expelled months later) as its counterparts in the labor movement labeled it “communist dominated.”

Some of its leaders were, in fact, members of the Communist Party, but the label was applied indiscriminately, with little respect to the accuracy of the charge (much less the possibility that membership in the party was not relevant to whether one could join a union). Local 506 was not led by members of the party, but that did not stop John Nelson, its longest-serving president, from becoming the first union leader fired by GE over the matter in 1953.

Outside Local 506’s hall today, a historical landmark bears tribute to Nelson, noting that “he defended workers’ civil liberties while UE represented him in court. He died prematurely at 42.” Inside the hall, a portrait of Nelson hangs on the wall beside ones of James Matles, one of UE’s founding officers, and James Kennedy, another founding officer and the local’s first president.

UE remains a key pole for the left wing of the US labor movement. During the pandemic, it partnered with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to create the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), an effort that assists workers in early-stage organizing that existing unions rarely have the resources or inclination to support. That project has had a hand in several new union campaigns in recent years. Most recently, the group was central to the organization of Barboncino, a pizza restaurant in New York City, which will vote on unionizing via a National Labor Relations Board mail-in ballot election in the coming weeks.

During the 2019 strike at Wabtec, Slawson traveled to Brooklyn to speak at a Bernie Sanders rally, leading the crowd in a strike chant and laying out the stakes of the fight to the many Sanders supporters who had little knowledge of strikes, much less the working conditions at the Wabtec plant.

“For decades, working people and the communities that they live in have been beaten down by greedy corporations while they pay themselves millions in bonuses and stock options,” said Slawson from the podium to the thousands-strong crowd. “This is wrong. It’s a failed model, and we at 618 and 506 in Erie, PA, and our community intend to change that.”

Sanders, in turn, used his lists to text and email people in Pennsylvania to turn out supporters to a UE rally outside Pittsburgh, where Wabtec is headquartered.

Now, the workers at Wabtec are again fighting for demands that go beyond the bread-and-butter matters familiar in union contracts. (Though they are fighting for that, too: Wabtec refuses to put an end to the wage progression introduced in the prior contract, which amounts to unequal pay for equal work.) Theirs is a conflict over questions central to the socialist project: Who controls the shop floor, workers or the boss? Can we force an employer to treat workers with dignity and respect? And if the people who produce polluting machinery want to contribute to a green economy, will the public be on their side, or can a corporation force the continuance of a status quo that is destroying the planet?

Those are high stakes, and in a former company town in the Rust Belt, 1,400 locomotive manufacturing workers are now risking their livelihoods by using their strongest means of leverage to build a future better than the one envisioned by their employer. Solidarity will be crucial to ensuring they, and we, win.

Depleted uranium has been linked to an explosion of cancers and birth defects in Iraq and is rejected even by US allies. So why is the Biden administration approving its use in Ukraine?

The US will send depleted uranium rounds for the Abrams tanks it has supplied to Ukraine for its war effort. (Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

It seems like an obvious point that if you want to help a country fight a war, you should try to do so in a way that doesn’t do more harm than good — say, by exposing its people and food sources to toxic ammunition with a track record of long-term negative health effects.

Not so for the governments most ardently backing Ukraine’s war effort it seems, with the Wall Street Journal recently reporting that Joe Biden’s administration is set to supply Kyiv with depleted uranium rounds for the Abrams tanks it approved in January. If the supplies go through, the United States will become the second country to provide Ukrainian forces with the toxic ammunition, after the UK government made headlines for doing so this past March.

The UK and US governments are insisting, as they long have, that depleted uranium is harmless.

Given that both are now going to be sending the rounds to Kyiv, we’re likely to hear this case being made more and more, both by these governments themselves and by the small army of commentators and weapon-maker-funded think tank experts recruited to fight the “information war” over this conflict.

We should be very suspicious. There’s a reason why the use of such shells is so controversial and widely rejected, and why their use over the years by the US, British, and Russian militaries has been so widely criticized.

The US Environmental Protection Agency explicitly says that depleted uranium “is dangerous when it is inside your body” and that it’s a “serious health hazard” when ingested or inhaled, and it urges Americans to get as far away as possible even from firing ranges where the substance is still used in ammunition. The US Department of Veterans Affairs likewise calls it “a potential health hazard if it enters the body.”

The UK government itself recognized the health risks in the past, even as it handed the rounds to its soldiers to use in foreign wars. A leaked 1997 British Ministry of Defence (MoD) paper caused embarrassment when, in the face of its minister’s denials about depleted uranium’s dangers, it stated that exposure “has been shown to increase the risks of developing lung, lymph and brain cancers.” Despite dismissing it as a discredited paper written by a trainee, two years later, as the UK prepared to invade Iraq, it handed out information cards to its troops warning them that depleted uranium “has the potential to cause ill health.”

Today the MoD cites research from the Royal Society, the UK’s leading national scientific academy, as proof that the health and environmental impact of depleted uranium in Ukraine “is likely to be low.” Yet as Declassified UK has pointed out, not only has the Royal Society not published anything on the topic since 2002, charging that it’s not “an active area of policy research,” but it actually rebuked the Pentagon when it tried to pull this same trick during the Iraq War in 2003. At the time, the Royal Society, described by the Guardian as “incensed,” told the paper that troops and civilians were at short- and long-term danger from the substance, especially children.

That cutoff date for the Royal Society’s research is significant, since the US coalition forces’ liberal use of depleted uranium in Iraq, in an estimated more than three hundred thousand rounds, was followed by an explosion in cancers and birth defects in the country, particularly in Fallujah. One study of more than seven hundred households in the city likened it to the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing — worse, even, since Fallujah saw a markedly bigger increase in leukemia than was documented after the atomic bombing. One of its authors called it “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied.”

So it’s no wonder that other, friendly governments have routinely objected to the presence of depleted uranium in their countries. A leaked diplomatic cable showed that the discovery of such rounds being used by US forces on a Kuwaiti base sparked a minor diplomatic incident between the country and Washington in 2009. The same year, the Belgian parliament unanimously voted to ban investment in depleted uranium weapons.

A public outcry led the MoD to stop test-firing the rounds on a military range in Scotland in 2013. After what one South Korean legislator described as an “endless debate,” the country last year finally returned 1.3 million of the rounds to the United States that it had been storing in a warehouse. Even weapons maker Lockheed Martin, not exactly known for putting moral concerns over profit, ceased production of the stuff shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, only saying that the decision came down to “sustainability” and not financial reasons.

In fact, the UN General Assembly has adopted resolutions in both 2020 and 2022 calling for raising awareness about depleted uranium’s health and environmental effects, and to work to protect against and address those harmful effects — resolutions that the vast majority of the world’s nations voted for. Only five countries didn’t both times: France, Israel, the UK, the United States, and Liberia.

The relative lack of outcry about the Biden administration’s decision stands in stark contrast to the outrage whipped up the very same week over Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book set in Russia. Even though Gilbert’s book takes place a century ago, has nothing to do with war or certainly its glorification, and is simply about a Russian family living in exile from the Soviet government, the mere act of setting a story geographically in Russia was declared such an unspeakable crime in the current context that she ended up pulling the book.

Gilbert’s book wouldn’t have had any impact whatsoever on the Ukrainians suffering from Moscow’s invasion one way or the other. But there’s a very real risk Ukrainians could suffer terrible long-term consequences from these depleted uranium rounds, on top of everything else they’re going through. That those who most loudly proclaim their solidarity with Ukrainians have little to nothing to say about the latter says a lot about the perverse nature of US discourse on this war.

Socialists have a noble history fighting for more and better public parks — not just because everyone loves the park, but because public goods like parks are a challenge to the logic of capitalism.

People enjoy a spring day at Prospect Park in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Justin Heiman / Getty Images)

Every year I’ve lived in New York City, a day unexpectedly arrives — usually in May or June — when I step outside, take a deep and appreciative breath, and realize that for the past several months, I’ve been suffering from mild seasonal affective disorder. Basking in warm sunlight again, I watch the rest of the city come back to life. I get a particular buzz walking by or through the city’s parks, our collective sites of celebration for the return of warmth, where music blasts from boom boxes and portable speakers, and the whiff of the masses grilling and chilling is heavy in the air.

It’s easy to take the city’s parks for granted. But when more and more social interaction takes place from behind computer and phone screens; when fewer and fewer people meet their romantic partners through real-world social networks; when fewer Americans report having close friends than ever and more say they’re spending less time with those they do have and feeling increasingly lonely — the very existence of public spaces for leisure, open for all to enjoy free of charge, is something to cherish.

Those spaces haven’t always existed. In the United States and elsewhere, public parks, recreation centers, and swimming pools were the product of social turmoil and political struggle, with socialists often playing key roles in creating and defending such spaces. Nobody’s thinking about class struggle as they flip hotdogs on the public grill. But because they serve the collective good rather than private profits, public parks are a challenge to the logic of capitalism.

Public Parks, Socialists, and the New Deal

Public parks have been championed by nonsocialists, of course. Progressive reformers and landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who were responsible for designing New York’s Central Park and Prospect Park, believed in common green spaces accessible to all. But because of their commitment to defending and expanding public goods in the face of the capitalist desire for endless accumulation, socialists have a particularly distinguished record of building public parks and other spaces for public recreation.

That socialist legacy can be seen in New York City‘s parks, many of which were built or renovated during the Great Depression era under the mayoralty of Fiorello La Guardia. Mayor La Guardia was not really a socialist, though he sometimes called himself one and often worked with socialists. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1916 as a Republican, but in his 1924 campaign for Congress, La Guardia left the Republican Party and ran on the Socialist Party line. He soon returned to the GOP, where he remained until joining the socialist-led American Labor Party in 1936. La Guardia was a staunch New Dealer and an ally of Socialist congressmen Victor Berger and Vito Marcantonio, a supporter of La Guardia who took his seat in Congress when the latter became mayor.

Jacob Riis Park in Brooklyn. (Wikimedia Commons)

According to historian Gerald Meyer, as mayor, La Guardia “created a social democratic metropolis, bit by bit.” La Guardia made use of funds provided by the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) and other New Deal agencies to embark on a massive program of constructing and upgrading public infrastructure. That included parks and swimming pools: Red Hook Park, Randall’s Island Park, Williamsbridge Oval Park, Orchard Beach, Astoria Park Pool, and Jacob Riis Park are all products of this New Deal bonanza, as is the McCarren Park Pool, the Prospect Park Zoo, many additions to Central Park, and public playgrounds throughout the city.

Socialists also played important roles in inspiring, and then helping to implement, the federal New Deal programs that made La Guardia’s achievements possible in the first place. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reforms — especially those passed in 1935, the “Second New Deal” — built a modest welfare state, made massive investments in public infrastructure, created millions of public sector jobs, and institutionalized collective bargaining rights for workers.

Attacking the capitalist system was the last thing on the mind of Roosevelt or his supporters, but the New Deal enormously expanded the state’s role in the economy, materially benefiting and empowering working people at the expense of big business. What made those reforms possible was, in large part, explosive growth in left-wing organization and disruptive protests and strikes across the country, often led by communists and socialists. Liberal politicians supported New Deal legislation as a way of restoring order and staving off the threat of a socialist revolution.

But many young socialists and communists saw the New Deal as a first step toward a fuller democratization of the economy, the beginning stages in shifting economic power away from capitalists to public control. They joined the Roosevelt administration in large numbers and often came to occupy high-ranking roles in the federal bureaucracy, including at the WPA, which put millions of people to work building public parks across the country.

Central Park in New York City. (Wikimedia Commons)

On this score, the national achievements of the WPA and other agencies like the earlier Civilian Conservation Corps and Public Works Administration are staggering. The WPA alone, according to scholar Richard D. Leighninger Jr, “built 2,302 stadiums, grandstands, and bleachers; 52 fairgrounds and rodeo grounds; 1,686 parks covering 75,152 acres; 3,085 playgrounds; 3,026 athletic fields; 805 swimming pools and 848 wading pools; 1,817 handball courts; 10,070 tennis courts; 2,261 horseshoe pits; 1,101 ice-skating areas; 228 band shells and 138 outdoor theaters; 254 golf courses; and 65 ski jumps.” It was also responsible for 9,300 new auditoriums, gyms, and recreational buildings.

The US government’s massive buildout of public parks and recreational venues made the United States a more beautiful, enjoyable place to live. That buildout would have never happened without socialists first helping foment an insurgency of workers and the poor that shook the country to the core, then playing key roles in running the bureaucracy that brought these projects to fruition.

Parks and Rec and Propaganda

In a handful of cities, American socialists were building public parks and recreation centers long before the New Deal.

The “sewer socialists” were influential in the politics of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the first half of the twentieth century, sending the first socialist to Congress (Victor Berger) and holding the mayor’s office almost uninterrupted from 1910 to 1960. Milwaukee’s Socialist Party leaders focused on rooting out municipal corruption and improving the quality of life for all residents. The city’s first socialist mayor, Emily Seidel, started the city’s public parks system, which remains a visible and widely enjoyed legacy of the sewer socialists to this day. (The creation of public parks was also a signal achievement of municipal socialists in Reading, Pennsylvania, another of a handful of cities where socialists had significant electoral success.)

Lake Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Wikimedia Commons)

Along with the parks, Milwaukee socialists spearheaded the creation of a citywide system of “social centers” — public recreation centers, open to children and adults, that featured pool tables, basketball games, swimming pools, and classes in various subjects. They were motivated in part, says historian Elizabeth Jozwiak, by the belief “that in addition to participation in civic activity, all residents deserved access to wholesome cultural and recreational facilities” — especially the city’s working-class youth, many of whom had stopped going to school at a young age in order to work.

But socialists also saw the social centers as places where unfettered discussion and political education could take place — places where, in other words, they could educate the public on the need for socialism. “The primary goal,” Jozwiak writes, “was to establish the social centers as a strong, familiar presence throughout the city, where people would learn about Socialist beliefs and activities at a basic level, in their own neighborhood.” For Milwaukee socialists, the goal of providing spaces for free play and discussion for all was inseparable from the goal of getting people to understand how socialism served their common interests.

Milwaukee was not the only place where socialists championed public parks and recreation as part of a broader political strategy. In Sweden in the late 1800s and early 1900s, well before they won control of government, socialists first began creating unofficial public parks out of necessity — they couldn’t find regular places to hold party meetings. So they started purchasing land and building “People’s Parks” (Folkets parker) and “People’s Houses” (Folkets hus), open to everyone, where party members could gather.

Palace Park in Malmö, Sweden. (Wikimedia Commons)

From their inception, like the social centers in Milwaukee, these places played a dual role: they were locales for the party to organize, strategize, and carry out political education, but they were also centers of working-class leisure and cultural life. This was intentional: the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetarparti, SAP) thought workers deserved to enjoy open, beautiful green spaces as well as art, music, and dance. The People’s Parks “charged the democratic goal of economic emancipation with the more immediate desire for a life beyond toil,” write geographers Johan Pries, Erik Jönsson, and Don Mitchell. They continue:

In the parks, working people could do more than organize and patiently await a better future. They could have a taste of the good life on the weekend, in the sort of green and spacious landscapes once reserved for the leisure class, all the while serving the cause.

For a time, the parks grew in significance, eventually coming to host world-famous performers like Frank Sinatra and Quincy Jones. Once the SAP became the party of government, the parks gradually lost their political importance. But many of them were preserved as official, state-owned public parks.

Parks Against Capitalism

Public parks are not in themselves socialist, despite what both defenders and opponents of socialism sometimes say. A socialist society is one in which society’s productive resources are collectively owned and democratically run; the existence of publicly owned outdoor recreational spaces is obviously compatible with a society in which the vast majority of society’s resources are privately owned, as has always been the case in the United States.

Prospect Park, Brooklyn. (Wikimedia Commons)

Yet it’s not wrong to see a connection between public parks and socialism. Because public parks and recreational venues are publicly owned, operated for the common good rather than private profit, and generally open to all without regard for ability to pay, they do not obey the logic of for-profit capitalist enterprises or commodities. And as socialists from Milwaukee to Malmö have recognized, they provide rare spaces for collective enjoyment, discussion, and education of the kind we’ll need to build a better world. Green spaces where we can toss frisbees or soak up the sun, it turns out, have political value too.

My first spring park excursion this year was an evening a couple months ago, when the air was still brisk but didn’t require a coat. I picked up a tall boy from a corner store and made my way past the food trucks in front of the Brooklyn Museum and the pedestrians and bikers crunching together near Grand Army Plaza, eventually getting onto the walking path that leads into Prospect Park from the north side.

After wending onto a small trail that led me to the main lawn, I found my friends drinking beers in a small circle, listening to music on a small speaker; similar groups were scattered around the grass, along with dogs and people playing catch and flying kites. It was a totally ordinary scene, but being there — enjoying the park’s respite from the atomized concrete chaos of the city — filled me with a sense of relief and gratitude. You only need a few moments like that on a warm spring evening to know that socialists have been right to care so much about public parks.

Kevin Van Streefkerk, a 37-year-old father and state employee in the California governor’s office, now faces several felonies after allegedly killing his five-week-old baby. On Tuesday, he was apprehended and charged with one count of first-degree murder, intentional murder, heinous murder, and assault on a child aged eight or younger, leading to death.

The El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office stated that deputies were called to a location in Cameron Park, approximately 30 miles east of Sacramento, regarding reports of physical abuse against an infant on June 17th. The infant had sustained numerous injuries and was immediately brought to a hospital in critical condition. Sadly, the baby was declared dead the following day, which happened to be Father’s Day.

As investigators gathered more evidence, Van Streefkerk was arrested for the infant’s murder. He is currently being held in the El Dorado County Jail with no bond.

Brian Ferguson, a California Office of Emergency Services spokesperson, released a statement. He said, “We are shocked and saddened to learn of the circumstances around this event. We are coordinating closely with the law enforcement agencies on their investigation, and it is our understanding that the alleged events occurred outside of his capacity as a state employee.”

The investigation into the infant’s death is still ongoing.

The Nutt family of Riverdale, Utah, are pleading to parents to ensure their children are wearing helmets after their 11-year-old daughter, Payge Gould, sustained a fatal head injury when she fell off her hoverboard on Wednesday, June 14. Payge was described by her mother, Gypsi Nutt, and sister, Taylor Gould, as the family’s comedian, “always making us laugh” and “very giving,” especially to those who didn’t have friends.

That evening, she called her mother to inform her of the fall, which seemed mild, with no signs of swelling or bruising. However, when Nutt checked on her daughter at 2 am, she was found unresponsive, prompting a call to 911. Then, the medical staff informed them that her injury was more severe than anticipated, with a crack in her skull that could have been avoided with a helmet.

According to GiveSendGo, after Payge hit her head, it was only a matter of time. It stated, “They ran tests and gave Payge a short 48-72 hours to live. She had bleeding on the brain and a long-line fracture in her skull. It wouldn’t have mattered if she had gone into emergency at the time of the fall. Her head took a traumatic blow, and it was only a matter of time.”

In the wake of this devastating news, they faced the difficult decision to donate her organs, a choice made in honor of Payne’s giving nature. Through this, the Nutt family hopes to inspire others to become organ donors and serve as a reminder for parents to ensure their children are wearing helmets. They have also set up a fund to help with their expenses.