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Articles by Fred Glass
Why we need to use the “F” word — California DSA
There’s no good reason to believe Donald Trump, a serial liar of the first magnitude, any time he opens his mouth. His propensity to evade the truth, fudge, misdirect and outright lie is well documented. Yet a recent moment in the bright light of national media exposure may be an exception to that rule. I’m referring to the fascinating press event shortly after Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York and he and Trump chatted in the Oval Office in front of reporters.
The Citywide General Strike Has a Rich History in America
Unions, community and faith groups, and small businesses are preparing for a day of “No Work, No School, and No Shopping” on Friday in the Twin Cities in protest against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion and January 7 murder of Renee Good. Hundreds of businesses have pledged to close; hundreds more plan to remain open but donate the day’s proceeds to victims of the ICE assault and organizations seeking to protect them.
What California History Has To Say About the New York Mayor’s Race
What California History Has To Say About the New York Mayor’s Race Published July 19, 2025 One hundred and fourteen years ago a democratic socialist was poised to become Mayor of Los Angeles. Not yet the sprawling megalopolis of today, the city nonetheless ranked second largest in California, and was growing fast. A socialist in the top municipal office?
Proposed legislation would create a disaster
Proposed legislation now making its way through Congress would create a needless, self-inflicted humanitarian and economic disaster for Indiana and the country, harming not only those of us facing hunger, but all Americans.” The U.S. House of Representatives has approved proposed legislation that would cut $300 billion in funding for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps people with low income buy nutritious food.
Make May Day Great Again
When my children were little in the late 1990s, we attended an annual May Day event in verdant Tilden Park, near our home in Berkeley, California. Each year a flyer, resplendent with Walter Crane illustrations, would appear in our mailbox inviting us to come celebrate.
What If It Is Fascism?
In one respect it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump and the other MAGA leaders in charge of the federal government are fascists or simply corrupt authoritarian oligarchs — it’s bad either way, and we need to get rid of them and their policies and turn around the social forces that gave rise to them.
Best Guess: How do we defeat the fascists? — California DSA
Forward toward the… I have never been one of those people who think it’s a good idea to call for a general strike to deal with a problem, even if the problem—say, the United States going to war under false pretenses—would deserve to be met with that solution. Why not? Because there are sound reasons why we’ve only seen around fifteen (depending on how you define them) citywide general strikes in nearly two hundred and fifty years of American history, and none since 1946.
International Workers Day 2024 — California DSA
May 1 Events Across the Golden State International Workers Day is approaching, and socialists and union activists are ramping up for events around California. As is often the case, the celebrations are joined with ongoing struggles for justice on a number of fronts. Below are the events that we know about. There may be more! For background on why we celebrate May Day, go here.
Mayor Todd Gloria’s Brick Wall?
There are moments when I feel a fleeting sadness when watching San Diego’s City Hall telenova. It’s not the same as the melancholy following seemingly endless May Gray or June gloom, because then memory serves up the counter argument that the sun will come, eventually. Our municipal malaise has no track record over the past half century of curing itself as our city rights its course. What’s a concerned citizen to do?
Words and History: The Trouble With “Genocide Joe”
Words and History: The Trouble With “Genocide Joe” Published April 15, 2024 "History is more or less bunk.” This quaint expression, uttered by Henry Ford in 1921, reveals that words, like history, can mean more than meets the eye. Taken out of context his comment can signify almost anything, like the classic Sam Cooke song lyric, “Don’t know much about history”.
Leading the fight against hunger through a shared responsibility and commitment
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Fred Glass and Neil Steffens: Leading the fight against hunger
The faces of hunger may surprise you. Many who need assistance are middle-class families, the working poor, children and the elderly. No one should suffer from a lack of access to quality and nutritious food — but they do. In fact, close to 1 million Hoosiers need food assistance. Food insecurity can dash the aspirations of children, and lead parents and other adults to make difficult compromises about what bills to pay and what other needs to meet.
The Elephant in the Room — California DSA
As we all know this is an election year. California Red recognizes that there are different points of view within DSA regarding how the organization should approach electoral politics in general and the presidential election this year in particular. We welcome submissions on the topic.
Event Routes - Indianapolis Business Journal
Event Registration Speaker / Moderator President & Chief Executive Officer Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana Fred Glass is the President/CEO of Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana, the state’s largest hunger relief organization and one of the leading food banks in the Feeding America Network. He has spent a career in various leadership roles where his values-based leadership and collaborative spirit have led to success. Fred is a prominent Indianapolis attorney, most recently with Taft Law.
A Road Map to Organize Contingent Faculty in Higher Education
A number of small but annoying errors mar Power Despite Precarity.
Falling in Love on a PATCO Picket Line
In 1981, seven months after taking office, former Hollywood actors union leader Ronald Reagan sent his infamous signal to the world that the official attitude of the United States government toward trade unions would henceforth be unremitting hostility.
Voters Will Opt to Tax the Rich - If They Know How the Money Will Be Spent
At a moment of stubborn party identification in a nauseating culture war, ballot initiatives are an attractive means of pursuing progressive reforms. Many state minimum wages around the country have been raised through ballot initiatives, despite heavy (and well-funded) opposition by local Chambers of Commerce.
California’s Proposition 15 Ballot Measure Is About Rolling Back Neoliberalism
One evening in the early 1990s I found myself in a Los Angeles restaurant across the table from a young United Teachers Los Angeles staffer as we prepared his local for a possible strike. Over the course of our conversation, we agreed that the strike would be unnecessary if corporations and the wealthy paid a larger share of taxes to support public education.
Schools and Communities First! Vote YES on Proposition 15
For California workers, their families and friends, a vote for Prop 15 on this November’s state ballot should be a no-brainer. For more than 40 years the state of California has been robbed of billions of dollars a year by a corporate tax loophole. Unlike in virtually every other state in the country, here commercial property owners don’t pay taxes on current market rate assessments of their property’s value. Instead, they pay based on what the property was worth when they purchased it.
Prop 15 - Overturning Austerity 101
Overturning Austerity 101: California’s Prop 15 Will Tax the Rich California’s November ballot will feature a challenge to the notorious Proposition 13, which in 1978 helped to inaugurate the decades-long neoliberal assault on labor. Prop 13’s anti-tax, small government campaign, with a dog-whistle racist subtext, created a national template for conservatives to simultaneously attack public sector unions, public employees, and the people they served.
Step Up Time for California’s Billionaires
by Fred Glass on June 16, 2020 With the Movement for Black Lives raising the call to defund the police and redirect funding to programs more likely to enhance public safety like public education, housing, and mental health services, we should consider how these municipal issues play out against the backdrop of the pandemic-induced state budget crisis.
State of Resistance - California Fights Back
State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future, by Manuel Pastor (New Press, 2018, 278 pages) California Fights Back: The Golden State in the Age of Trump, by Peter Schrag (Heyday Press, 2018, 112 pages) 29 January 2017: San Francisco International arrivals terminal. Protesting Trump ban on Musilms.
Brazil (1985) – Review by Fred Glass
by Fred Glass During the long-awaited year 1984 a veritable deluge of articles, books, talks, speeches and more were given over to discussion ad nauseam of Orwell’s book and prophecies. Nineteen Eight Four became the province, in 1984, of a battle for the most prevalent interpretation of totalitarian society—whose resembles it more, “theirs” or “ours”: the USSR or the USA.
Teachers striking to end policies that gut public institutions
A weeklong strike of Los Angeles teachers is about to end. Oakland teachers are preparing to strike. Their goals are remarkably similar and simple: a wage that allows them to live somewhere within reasonable commuting distance from the schools in which they work, and the resources to enable them to do their jobs and deliver the education their students deserve.
How Our Inequality Corrupts Success
Inequality.org: At what point do material rewards for success, however defined, become problematic? Anderson: Anyone who accumulates great wealth needs to ask two questions. First, did they acquire that wealth in ways that made people better off and the world a better place to live in? Or did they acquire their wealth at others’ expense, in ways that made others suffer, that corrupted public institutions, or that undermined environmental sustainability?
The Price of Innovation for Silicon Valley’s Workers
Yet as it has grown, the tech giant has shifted towards hiring more contract workers instead of full-time employees. Contractors often have lower wages, fewer benefits and more job insecurity. Bloomberg reports that contractors now make up the majority of Google’s global workforce. Meanwhile, Google has driven up the cost of living near its Mountain View headquarters, pricing more and more residents out of their homes.
Restoring Power to the Global 99%
A prominent Filipino activist and political leader reflects on the history of global inequality trends and how to take power back from today’s hyper-rich. Originally published by ActionAid Academic and activist Walden Bello is a former member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines. The billionaire class is out of control. Unless we rein them in very soon, we will never be able to end global poverty or meet the broader UN Sustainable Development Goals.
What does the 1 percent owe you?
A new interactive website is vividly showing how much income and wealth individual Americans would have today had we not seen over the past four decades a meteoric rise in economic inequality. Making economic statistics engaging can be devilishly difficult, especially when those stats span over decades. Okay, the rich are getting richer and the poor are struggling, but just what exactly, you might be wondering, do the inequality numbers mean specifically for me?
The Spanish Left's Anti-Inequality Plan
Despite disappointing election results, Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias has had an impact on his country’s political landscape and vows to continue to fight to reverse extreme inequality. After weaker than expected results in Sunday’s election, Pablo Iglesias, leader of the Spanish Podemos Party, vowed to continue to push the young party’s ambitious anti-inequality and anti-austerity platform. Pablo Iglesias, leader of Spain’s Podemos Party.
Inequality in America's Political Class
The wealth gap between the presidential candidates and average Americans could hardly be more stark. In the lead-up to his New Hampshire primary victory, Senator Bernie Sanders boosted his public support by blasting Hillary Clinton’s lucrative ties to Wall Street. This public concern over Clinton’s relationship with the financial industry speaks to more than the issue of campaign contributions.
In Search of Our First Trillionaire
No 13-digit fortune has yet appeared on the horizon. But if we wait until we get close enough to see one, warns wealth analyst Bob Lord, we may find our plutocracy set eternally in concrete. We can draw from the annual Forbes 400 data, notes inequality analyst and activist Bob Lord, some compelling reasons to see a trillionaire in our future.
A Piketty ‘Inflection Point’ Heads Up
The concentration of America’s wealth may be reaching a point where any further gains for the top 1 percent must literally come at the direct expense of everyone else. The exquisitely succinct equation at the heart of Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century — r > g — has impressed readers worldwide. Just three symbols. Even Einstein, for his masterwork, needed five.
A united effort of striking teachers and parents can raise pay and school quality
A united effort of striking teachers and parents can raise pay and school quality The strikes of education workers in four states against austerity are of larger significance than just a simple uptick in worker militancy, with implications for reshaping national politics and rethinking a major Supreme Court case.
The Tax-the-Rich Animation that Riled the 1%’s Most Fervent Cheerleaders - Inequality.org
All the complainers singled out one particular six-second scene in the movie: a visual representation of the decades-old trope that “trickle down economics” might be best understood as the rich urinating on the poor. This “pee scene” featured a top-1-percenter standing above the heads of the bottom 99 percent, ensuring them that his own enrichment would be good for them, too. Hannity et al did not treat this scene as a visual metaphor.
Labor movement’s uneven history on race is relevant today
In the solidly Democratic state of California, normally calm and reasonable people are finding themselves in discussions about seceding from the rest of the country — or, if inclined toward individual solutions, compulsively checking the price of Canadian land — when considering the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. Party loyalty aside, about a quarter of us have even more at stake.
Fred Glass and the State of IU Athletics - Hoosier issues - Washington Times Herald: National Sports
I think the answer to both of those is no. I don’t foresee … I place a very high premium in keeping all of our sports. It’s a great tradition at Indiana to have a broad-based offering of sports. It’s a value of the Big Ten to have a broad-based offering of sports. We have a lot of economic uncertainty ahead, but the last thing I would do to solve them is to drop a sport. It’s too important to maintain those opportunities for student athletes. Our budget last year was about $83 million.
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