Texas Republicans are committed to minority-rule reactionary politics. They recently legislated to suppress the vote, created penalties for cities that reduce police budgets, protected marauding oil and gas interests after a catastrophic grid failure, and enacted the most draconian abortion ban in the country.
But even in the belly of the beast, organizer-turned-city-councilmember Greg Casar has managed to advance a progressive agenda. Since 2014, Casar has served on the Austin City Council, where he has coordinated city-level pushbacks against Republicans’ state-level class warfare and Democrats’ shortcomings and evasions. With creative organizing and a clear focus on popular working-class issues, Casar has demonstrated that even in Texas the Left has legs.
Casar is now setting his sights on Congress. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), he’s hoping to become Texas’s addition to the Squad, representing the urban and exurban Thirty-Fifth District. Alex Birnel spoke to Greg Casar for Jacobin.
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Before I was elected to office, I was an organizer at Workers Defense Project, which is our statewide immigrant worker center. We were taking legal action against employers that were underpaying our members or in some cases not paying our members at all for the work that they did.
A lot of the work that I was doing was direct advocacy, organizing workers to advocate at city hall to win policy change in the construction industry in particular. Because in Texas, we...
A British science journalist-turned-attorney who initiated a lawsuit that saw a Harvard University-affiliated cancer centre pay $15 million (11 million) to settle claims of alleged data misreprese...