Kathy Hochul is on the warpath. She’s holding hostage the final stage of budget negotiations to push through her toxic priorities: egregious bail rollbacks, tuition hikes, and charter schools. She’s pushing to privatize our schools and bust our unions. And as a comrade on Twitter put it: “Governor Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of one of the bluest states in the country, is essentially filibustering the Democratic legislative supermajority until she can remove civil rights protections to throw more Black people in jail.”

The only way to push back against Hochul’s sinister vision for our state, and to seize our future, is to turn on the heat of our mass movement. We need to tell the legislative heads that are negotiating with Hochul right now—Carl Heastie (speaker of the NY Assembly) and Andrea Stewart-Cousins (majority leader of the NY State Senate)—that we won’t let them fold to Hochul. And we need to tell Hochul that however much power she has over our undemocratic budget process, the working people of this state won’t stand for her cruel and corporate agenda.  

So we’re taking to the phones, to bring more New Yorkers into this fight: to defend ourselves against the worst and to push our working class priorities over the finish line. Join us on ZOOM on Monday, April 10th at 6pm.

This is the culmination of yers of campaigning: NYC-DSA has been fighting like hell inside and outside of the legislature to get a budget that takes the cost of living crisis head-on by building cheap public renewable energy, stopping people’s rent from skyrocketing with Good Cause eviction protections, making our public colleges free again, and taxing the rich. And we’ve gotten the legislature’s proposals to incorporate some of our key demands.

Every step of the way, the budget process is designed to disempower working people. Enough of us coming together can wreck the Governor’s plans and get us a budget that instead advances a working people’s program.