Democratic Socialist Officials Admit Party Is in Dire Straits: 'This Will Require Us to Make Painful Decisions'
The reds are in the red — and they don’t like it a bit.
The Democratic Socialists of America — political home of leftist luminaries like Reps. Andrea Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow “squad” members — is in a financial hole so deep, it’s looking at layoffs for the noble proletarians on its staff.
And after months of the group making headlines for its support for Hamas terrorists, its activists just can’t understand why.
“This should actually be a really favorable time for DSA,” noted a column written by three members of the party’s National Political Committee.
The column was published Thursday in The Call, a publication of the Bread and Roses caucus — a Marxist wing of an already leftist organization.
“We’re living in a moment when revived labor struggles and the fight for a free Palestine are galvanizing so many Americans, particularly young people.”
Yeah, well, that might be the problem, but we’ll get to that in a second.
Meanwhile, even in “galvanizing” moments, life still costs money. And apparently, the DSA just doesn’t have enough of it.
A National Political Committee memo authored by the same three leftists who wrote the column — Alex Pellitteri, Kristin Schall and Laura Wadlin — stated that the party’s “in a financial crisis and staff-related costs account for 58 percent of our total expenditures and 72 percent of our projected income.”
“The current deficit will force us to make a 7-figure budget cuts,” the memo explained. “This will require us to make painful decisions that will impact all levels of the organization.”
The proposal includes asking employees to leave voluntarily — and get a severance package. If that doesn’t produce enough savings, the involuntary layoffs could begin.
“We will first ask for volunteers from both director-level and bargaining unit staff to have their position cut and receive severance,” the memo said. “If necessary, we will then explore initiating lay-offs according to the DSA union’s contract.”
That might sound like exactly the kind of memo that would come out of a capitalistic corporation facing a rough economy and announcing that it would have to trim its payroll.
That’s because — leaving aside the problem of political ideologies — the DSA is exactly like a corporation that has to trim its payroll.
Corporations exist in a market economy to provide goods and services to willing consumers. The DSA is a political party, that needs to appeal to a willing public.
Clearly, it’s not doing that — and that is where the DSA leftists who think their support of Hamas should be doing wonders for membership and fundraising are dead wrong.
As the ultra-liberal publication The Atlantic pointed out in November, the DSA’s support for Hamas has destroyed its credibility even among many of those who were credulous to believe that leftist crap in the first place.
As Politico reported in October, in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, the organization’s local chapters came down repeatedly on the side of savages who slaughter the innocent, rape and torture women and behead babies. Now, what is it about that that decent, sane Americans might be just a little put off by?
Michigan Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar, in fact, publicly announced he was breaking with the DSA because of it.
Even more importantly, leftist support for the Jew killers of Hamas isn’t likely to go down well with Jewish Americans, traditionally a source of support and money for liberal organizations.
And social media users noticed:
DSA better known as Democratic Socialists of America is so deep in a 7 figure hold that they are having massive layoffs.
They also lost support from Jewish progressive for support of H@mas.
Socialism will never work. https://t.co/z6HrnjKibJ— FinesseNYC (@alldaynightNY12) January 22, 2024
In today’s edition of Get Woke Go Broke- we have DSA members wondering why their financing has dried up since embracing Hamas and organizing antisemitic protests.
AOC’s communist party never really understood finance and is now forced to make layoffs- https://t.co/o7TRRF21wK— RealNewYorker212 (@RealNewYorker2) January 22, 2024
The root cause of this: DSA didn’t study Stalin’s and Mao’s works hard enough. How can you write your 5-year plan without it?
Also, did you try purges? Voluntary staff layoffs are capitalist.
— Hound Fella (@Delay__Delay) January 20, 2024
For the moment, at least, the proposed voluntary separations-then-layoffs plan isn’t going into effect. An alternate plan put forward by another caucus of the DSA, called Red Star, calls for a hiring freeze, leaving currently open positions unfilled; it was endorsed on Sunday by the Bread & Roses brand of lefties.
(As an aside, imagine how stomach-turningly dismal it must be to live in a world occupied solely by competing factions of Marxists.)
But that doesn’t mean the idea is going away.
As the Red Star proposal noted: “We agree that staff costs may need to be reduced, but also acknowledge that after investigation we may find that even deeper cuts than those proposed by [Bread & Roses] need to be made. If layoffs are necessary, they must be well-planned and performed with clarity and respect for DSA’s affected staff.”
Again, that could have been written by an HR department in any Fortune 500 corporation.
And a corporation that’s selling a product like the DSA’s — its morally bankrupt economic vision of socialism, its morally depraved support for terrorist murderers — is headed for financial bankruptcy, too. In the DSA’s case, that likely means layoffs.
Any country that was part of the old Soviet Union could tell the DSA members that things could be a lot worse. (Remember, comrades, some animals are more equal than others — some animals will always be more equal than others.)
As the late, great Margaret Thatcher said, socialist governments “always run out of other people’s money.”
Socialist political parties do, too. And when you’re selling what no sane, decent human being wants to buy, you deserve what you get.
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