People's Party Seeks Skilled People To Work Without Pay

Whenever an organization claims that one its core missions is to achieve a living wage and economic justice for all, but it then proceeds to advertise a whole slew of time-consuming, unsalaried professional jobs in media and graphic design, you can pretty much assume that it's the same old neoliberal bullshit dressed up in the usual shiny progressive veneer. As long as you're "passionate" about social and economic justice, the stilted pitch implies, the need to eat and pay rent becomes superfluous.

Such is the disillusioning case with Nick Brana's "Movement for a People's Party" PAC, which burst upon the scene last summer to much fanfare and special appearances and endorsements by the usual YouTube celebrities and everybody who's anybody on the progressive scene. Yours truly, usually a tad on the cynical side, was initially so impressed by all the earnest enthusiasm that I posted their entire five-hour streamed inaugural marathon right here on these pages, and also signed up for their email list.

 At first quite sporadic, these emails have begun arriving in my inbox at a faster clip in the past few weeks. All of them ask for a 10 dollar donation through a fundraising app. A reader of this blog was getting the same emails, so he emailed me, asking if I'd look into the group. 

My advice: donor beware. First of all, this is not a political party. It was incorporated in 2017 in the State of Michigan as a non-profit political action group called People For a Working Democracy. According to the most recent IRS filing available online, in 2020 it collected $75,000 in small donations in the last two months of the year. The group spent the bulk of this money on trademarked merchandise, legal fees, web services, a donation processing app, logo design, video conferencing fees and other business-related services. No donations were used for candidate recruitment and training, which was the stated goal and purpose of the People's Party PAC. To be fair, they were still setting up shop at the time. The real tell won't come until the 2022 filings, with donations and media presence largely expanded and when details like salaries and expenditures for candidates and local campaigns must be reported under law.

Let's talk more about the money. The recent MPP emails mostly come from Zeynab Day, just hired by Brana to be his PAC's executive director. Until this past February, Ms. Day had been employed by a different PAC called Brand New Congress (BNC), itself an offshoot of the Justice Democrats PAC, which is most famous for recruiting and training Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of The Squad.

According to a post on her Twitter account, Day was fired as BNC's communications director because of the abuse, inequity and rampant miscommunication among its Board of Directors, salaried workers and unpaid volunteers. She wanted to be transparent about it, but she didn't really communicate whether or not these nonspecific workplace issues and anonymous staff complaints had anything to do with conflicts between the salaried employees and the unpaid volunteers.

Before herself becoming a top salaried internal employee of Brand New Congress, Ms. Day had been listed by the Open Secrets website, which exposes the money in politics, as the group's top "vendor/recipient," collecting $96,693 for her consulting work for the PAC in 2020.

Anyway, let's get back to the job listings at the MPP PAC. Before you can even apply for an unpaid position, you must first read the section about being a good person who is always kind to her fellow workplace "beings."

Without the People's Party sternly admonishing its worker-peeps to "avoid perpetrating violence against one another, whether it be physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual," who knows what mayhem might otherwise ensue in the paid/unpaid workforce? Most potential bosses, after all, only brag that they are equal opportunity employers, not the referees in a boxing ring or wardens in a prison on the verge of an inmate riot.  I wonder if mass mayhem has been a problem in the past, or whether the MPP PAC staffers are only paranoid about being viewed as either bullying Bernie Bros, or their Bro-victims in waiting. Could they really be so terrified of having their very souls sucked out of their bodies by spiritual abusers? 

So just in case you do volunteer, only to later feel like the soul is getting sucked out of you so hard that you want to assault the "being" in the next cubicle, you will be duly and cordially invited to appear before the People's Party "Regenerative Culture Circle." This mental health opportunity applies to suckers and suckees alike.  You will have the free choice of offering testimony in front of the Full Circle, or you may engage privately with one special counselor in order to reach specific goals, ranging from Support to Prevention to Intervention to Redress to.... Transformation. 

If you want even more cult in your culture, let it also be known that the People's Party PAC will tolerate no criticism either of itself or of its paid or unpaid workers to people outside of the Circle of the organization. Job applicants are also admonished never to bring any of their violent tendencies outside of the healing safety of the cult party.

As we strive to grow the movement, we also look to minimize the risk of government repression. In a nonviolent and open setting like ours, it is unacceptable and unsafe to discuss or engage in actions that involve violence or property destruction. Governments have a long history of heightened repression to those actions.

To that end, the People's Party takes a tip from the same neoconservative US surveillance state which it purports to despise, and adds this nugget to its Volunteer Manifesto:

We affirm the need to balance transparency and security. Anyone bringing another individual to a demonstration or other action should provide the details necessary for risk assessment (tactic, tone, etc). However, it should be remembered that this is a public organizing space, that our ability to vet participants is limited, and that actions can be and have been compromised by excessive transparency.

Now that we've all gone perfectly clear, can we please, please, please finally check out those unsalaried jobs and their stringent requirements?

Your wish is my command, but let's keep this inside info just between us for now, okay? They want to get the word out, but not to get it out to the wrong people.

 Position title

Social Media Contributor - Twitter

Description

The People's Party is looking to recruit passionate people with significant social media experience who would like to contribute their time on a volunteer basis to build a new major political party.

About Us

Our aim is to represent the interests of the wide majority of the people and create a system to sustainably maximize well-being for ALL.

We believe we all deserve a system that honors everyone for the content of their character, not the color of their skin, the land where they happened to be born, or the numbers in their bank account. One that brings powerful law-breakers to justice. One that makes sure the planet and it's (sic) magnificent beings are cared for before any corporation exec’s profit margins. One where the power of our nation’s wealth serves all of us, not just failed banks or masters of war.

It is our goal to change hearts and minds, unify around a revolutionary progressive platform, and activate people to build a mass movement by organizing around progressive issues and initiatives with allied groups to network our movement, unions, and organizations into a coalition.

We are creating a culture of care, respect and healthy collaboration and teamwork. We embrace diversity and avoid perpetrating violence against one another, whether it be physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual. We aim to foster a compassionate environment that supports and uplifts people. With these principles and goals in mind, we commit ourselves to our community guidelines.

We are currently building the party state by state and working on our first slate of candidates.

Responsibilities

• Attend bi-weekly Media & Messaging Working Group meetings
• Attend Twitter Circle meetings
• Create social media posts
• Curate content
• Research
• Write social media plans
• Manage social media accounts
• Work with the Creative Arts Working Group to create visual content
• Respond to social media messages

Qualifications

• You are passionate about building a major new political party
• You recognize that the current two party duopoly cannot be reformed from within
• You have significant social media admin experience, either from a volunteer or paid position
• You have experience as a Instagram admin of or contributor to a large account
• You have experience working on a team
• You're a quick learner
• You think outside the box
• You agree to our community guidelines

The positions described here are volunteer positions, to be performed on a purely voluntary basis, with no payment or expectation of payment from the People’s Party or anyone else. Volunteers selected for these positions are not employees of or independent contractors with the People’s Party.

Apply Now

Other pay-less media jobs in the Passionate Peeps PAC are similarly pitched, with the same grandstanding, virtue-signaling, collective passion-generating rhetoric to get candidates all fired up and ready to volunteer for the ephemeral cause. Think outside the box even as you remain strictly confined within the Circle!    

If art is your shtick, but you don't think you have the talent of a Hunter Biden in order to justify selling your paintings for as much as $500,000 apiece to anonymous buyers, then you might as well work against The Man by joining the Peeps. Salivate over this opportunity if you dare, but please remember to drool nonviolently:

Responsibilities

• Attend Creative Arts Working Group meetings
• Help dream up and create graphics for our website, emails, social media, advertising, and more
• Work in a team environment

Qualifications

• You are passionate about building a major new political party
• You recognize that the current two party duopoly cannot be reformed from within
• You have graphic design experience
• You can provide examples of your relevant work
• You have the necessary software for the positive (for example Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, etc.)
• You have experience working on a team
• You're a quick learner
• You think outside the box
• You agree to our community guidelines

MPP, in its no-pay job postings, effectively acknowledges the truth that it is not - at least not yet - a real political party in any sense of the word, with no bylaws or formal platform beyond the nearly identical talking points and sloganeering of the Squad, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress and any number of other PACs,  progressive Democratic veal pens and the echo chamber microphones of hundreds of YouTube celebrities. Its creation of a top-down "mass movement" betrays its modeling and direct evolution from Nick Brana's Our Revolution fundraising PAC.

 Brana, the national outreach director of Sanders's first primary campaign, had found himself out of a job when his "Draft Bernie" campaign to lead a new party flopped after Hillary Clinton won the 2016 nomination - and Bernie not only stayed with the Democrats, he ignored Brana.  MPP seems to aspire for parity with the larger, much older and more established Working Families Party, which itself is also not an independent third party. It functions mainly to put progressive pressure on Democratic candidates before endorsing them in local, state and federal elections, thus giving liberal politicians the opportunity to appear on a second ballot line on Election Day. Politicians openly drool over these endorsements The most notorious recent example is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who courted the WFP endorsement in 2014 when progressive anti-corruption candidate Zephyr Teachout was threatening him with such a strong primary challenge that even the staid New York Times backed her upstart candidacy.

 Once Cuomo nonetheless shockingly won the WFP endorsement by gaslighting the Families party before going on to win the Democratic primary, he promptly thumbed his nose at the "third" party by suddenly losing all of his newfound progressivism. He made it a giant middle finger, just in case, by also launching his very own fourth party, which he cynically named The Women's Party. In the next election, when the WFP endorsed Cynthia Nixon over Cuomo in the primary, they still granted Cuomo the ballot line in the general in the interests of their own continuing viability.

The Trotskyites over at the World Socialist Website had the "pseudo-left" MPP pegged as "unserious" as soon as it streamed its inaugural convention, aptly noting that Brana had invited the libertarian former Minnesota governor, Jesse Ventura, to be a featured speaker. Ventura ostentatiously wore a Navy SEAL pin during his endorsement of the People's Party, perhaps to hammer home the point that anti-war activism is not, to put it charitably, high on their bucket list.

In fact, most of the featured speakers urged a nose-holding vote for Joe Biden, if only to defeat the unfriendlier Trumpian style of fascism. Only journalist Chris Hedges denounced both establishment parties and criticized Bernie Sanders as a sheepdog herding disaffected citizens into the Democratic fold. Another keynote speaker, firebrand Nina Turner, is now running for a House seat on the Democratic primary ticket. There is no more talk from her about forming a third party, of the People or otherwise.

Here's my take. The People's Party PAC is just one small moving part in the dysfunction, finger-pointing and backbiting currently roiling what Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs once derisively called "the professional left." If you tune in to one of the many progressive YouTube channels, you're more likely to hear endless discussions about the ugly feud between The Young Turks and journalist Aaron Mate than you are to learn about such policy matters as Medicare For All and the increasingly prevalent wildcat strikes which are getting far less attention than they deserve. Maybe it's because they're not properly registered as PACs or are otherwise drawing outside the lines of electoral politics.

As a former MPP volunteer described it last month on the "Rising" program, her experience with Brana's organization was not only depressing, it was chaotic. Instead of plotting direct actions or recruiting candidates, she said that staffers in her particular New York group ended up debating about whether white people should be allowed to use the N word. Apparently, the issue was considered rectified when, she asserted, all the black volunteers were summarily purged by PAC leaders from the group before they ever had a chance to appear before one of those creepy Circle tribunals.

    Notwithstanding the conservative-leaning "Rising's" own possible motives in airing the dirty linen in Brana's PAC, racial tensions among liberals and progressives do exist. So do class tensions. That's the secret that they don't want leaked out, especially to their enemies on the professional right, who will have an absolute field day with it. So the racism and racialism component in all the recent in-fighting in progressive groups should be openly discussed, not euphemized or suppressed. Above all, the race and "woke" angle's purpose and provenance should be recognized for what they are: a very powerful divide-and-conquer, gaslighting, guilt-inducing means of control by the ruling elites over the rest of us. This has been going on in America since at least the late 17th century, when the very concept of race was first manufactured, to become an article of faith and so very, very lucrative for the owning classes down through the generations.

It's capitalism itself which ultimately survives and thrives on the elites' controlling and exploitative ''divisiveness" narrative. It's reached the point that progressive groups find themselves conducting internal witch hunts and using authoritarian measures just to avoid being labeled as racists or sexists.

The gaslit end up becoming the gaslighters, huddling within their repressive circles and conducting secretive purges from within their own ranks to retain what little power they still have left.

Black and Blue In America

Culture wars which pit various factions of the poor and working classes against one other are almost always created by and waged for the ultimate benefit of the oppressive oligarchy.

That is why the Movement For a People's Party, whose 4+-hour streamed convention on Sunday was trending at #2 on Twitter, is receiving so little media coverage. It's the bloody and sometimes lethal street battles between social justice protesters and right-wing militias in a few US cities that are gobbling up all the headlines. 

It's as though a story about the burgeoning solidarity among regular people must not be allowed to take attention away from the professional marketing of fear. The increasing numbers of people who are refusing to succumb to fear and hatred of the "other," and who are also taking steps to politically organize themselves outside the confines of the two-party system strikes fear into the heart of the ruling class.

If all we hear about are Trump's tweets, and tut-tutting punditry about Black on Black violence, Black on White Violence, White on Black Violence, White on White Violence, Antifa and QAnon Violence, the propaganda about Russian Interference in Our Democracy, it just sucks us into their divide-and-conquer program and deflects our attention away from the real war, the violent class war of the Rich against the rest of us.

It tries to transform our fear of Covid-19 into fear of the Other. It tries to redirect our rational anger about the failure of the corrupt political duopoly, to both prevent disease outbreaks and to ameliorate the devastating social and economic effects of the pandemic, onto one or the other of the senile presidential candidates. The ruling "donor" class, through its political operatives, has made the conscious choice to abandon tens of millions of vulnerable people to needless suffering and death, while Wall Street posts record gains.

So, who are you going to vote for, Trump or Biden? Which side are you on - Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter? By presenting us with such limited choices and bemoaning the "divisiveness" without exploring the longstanding, underlying causes of it, maybe the Duopoly can lull us or scare us into thinking that we have no choice at all. And that it's all our fault.

For starters, one thing we should keep in mind is that protest-busting cops function as the hired weaponized buffer zone between citizens and the ruling class. The fact that America's municipal police forces have been become increasingly militarized in recent decades, with even small town departments now heavily fortified with tanks, drones and grenade launchers, is testament to the essential brutality of thst real war, the class war of the rich versus the rest of us. The oligarchic forces, be they Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, DEA, ICE, National Guard, Homeland Security, Border Patrol or cops on the beat, are mainly comprised of working class people from the same distressed communities where "civilian" jobs have been destroyed by the cruel ravages of neoliberal capitalism and its corporation-serving "free trade" deals. All you need to achieve the  American Dream of a secure job and a decent wage is a gun, a uniform, and a pension -which may or may not be there for you once Wall Street gets done fiddling with it.

Donald Trump does not, of course,  give one single damn about either police officers or about the marginalized assault rifle-toting vigilantes acting in his name and upon his inflammatory tweeted instructions. Nor do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris give one solitary damn about the Black victims of the police violence and privatized prison gulags which they have funded and championed and overseen their entire political lives. Cops, vigilantes and protesters: they are but interchangeable pawns and props and scapegoats in the cynical power game.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose $50 billion-plus personal fortune makes him one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, did in fact boast that "I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world."

This man, an honored prime time speaker at the Democratic National Convention a few weeks ago, had launched his own ill-fated run for the presidency last year by apologizing for using this private army to racially profile ("stop and frisk") Black and Brown men in record, relentless numbers for the crime of merely existing. His neofascist policy, eventually declared unconstitutional, was what really "inflamed tensions" between communities and the private army acting at the behest of Bloomberg and the other lords of capital. These armed forces were not a few "bad apples," These were regimented troops under strict orders to fill a quota imposed by a racist billionaire mayor and even funded by some of the same corporations now trying to make a cynical buck off the Black Lives Matter movement.

It was unsurprising, therefore, when the New York City police union blasted Bloomberg for the fake apology he offered in the standard venue beloved of any pandering Democratic politician worth his salt - a Black church.

“Mayor Bloomberg could have saved himself this apology if he had just listened to the police officers on the street,” said the union’s president, Patrick Lynch. “We said in the early 2000s that the quota-driven emphasis on street stops was polluting the relationship between cops and our communities. His administration’s misguided policy inspired an anti-police movement that has made cops the target of hatred and violence, and stripped away many of the tools we had used to keep New Yorkers safe.”

That's all well and good. But I'm waiting for that magical day when the cops in riot gear being deployed all across America to quash the biggest protest movement in US history finally do the right thing. I hope they do what Tsar Nicholas II's own private army did during the March 1917 mass demonstrations against that particular authoritarian regime. I'm waiting for them to mutiny, to put down their arms and their tear gas canisters, and to take the side of the protesters.

How long can it humanly take before sheriff's deputies and city marshals get disgusted enough to side with their own neighbors and refuse to serve millions of landlords' warrants on all the renters facing eviction this year because Congress has refused to offer emergency relief to them?

Matthew Desmond writes in the New York Times that

Marshals that carry out evictions are full of suicide stories: the early morning rap on the door followed by a single gunshot from inside the apartment, the blunt sound of giving up. From 2005 to 2010, years when housing costs were soaring across the country, suicides attributed to eviction and foreclosure doubled.

A survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control has revealed that the stress of the pandemic caused one out of every four young adults to seriously contemplate killing themselves within the past 30 days. Unpaid caregivers, essential workers, and Black and Brown people also reported harboring suicidal thoughts at rates far above average. Recommendations by study researchers include the government giving more financial support to individuals and localities in order to reduce mental stress and racial disparities in health care.

In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, published last fall just before the Covid-19 outbreak, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton write that paradoxically enough, it is the for-profit US healthcare system itself which is the leading cause of these deaths by suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse. The costs of our privatized, for-profit healthcare system are "like a tribute that Americans have to pay to a foreign power," similar to the unconscionable reparations Germans were made to pay after World War I. 

The obscene amount of money that impoverished Germans had to pay to the victors was proportionately far less than Americans have to pay for medical care today, the authors write.  Even if our system were delivering results, which it is not, the cost would still debilitate the economy. Although avuncular billionaire Warren Buffett compared our health care system to a tapeworm, Case and Deaton aptly describe  it "as more like a cancer that has metastisized throughout the economy."

Couple that with suicide-inducing evictions and egregious rent hikes, and you've got yourself a state that has gone far beyond failed.

Just as our health insurance premiums and deductibles and "surprise" medical bills sent out by private equity-owned hospitals are tributes imposed by the oligarchy on those whom they've effectively colonized, so too are rents.

Political economist Thomas Piketty in his book Capital and Ideology also compares the victims of contemporary predatory capitalism to the colonized subjects of an imperialistic foreign power: 

"In other words, the rest of the world labored to increase the consumption and standard of living of the colonial powers, even as it became increasingly indebted to those powers. The situation is like that of the worker who must devote a large portion of his salary to pay rent to his landlord, which the landlord then uses to buy the rest of the building while leading a life of luxury compared to the family of the workers, which has only hhis wages to live on. This comparison may shock some readers (which I think would be healthy) but one must realize that the purpose of property is to increase the owner's ability to consume and accumulate in the future."

Lacking even a wage with which to pay the tribute of rent, or a basic guaranteed income or health care in the middle of a pandemic, people are realizing that their choice is not limited to Trump and Biden, or choosing between protesters and cops.  The choice is between succumbing to despair and taking to the streets. Or starting a third political party. Or joining a revolution that's overdue by about 250 years.