This Labor Day, we at Paper Street would like to take a moment to thank, to recognize, and to appreciate all our brothers, sisters, friends and allies across all 50 states who have given themselves to the fight.  I look around and I see some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever known.  I see so much potential in what we can get done.  Many of you have made untold personal sacrifices, suffered through mess after mess left by unfit leadership, and experienced a demoralizing trend of lack for accountability.  Many of you have given this fight the best years of your lives, and some, even more than that.  The way we’re currently doing things has cost some people their very lives.  I know far too many people who have died on the campaign trail across this country since I entered the fray in 2016.

And I’ve also come to know far too many trust-fund kids looking to carve out wealth for themselves from the political organizing sphere, with no actual interest in hard work or what actual accomplishment they leave behind.  We continue to have this debate election year after election year, and the establishment wing of the party who is here to collect checks continues to make every attempt to stifle the progressive movement whose only goal is meaningful progress.  Meaningful progress that would cost the establishment the excess that has been enjoyed for as long as I’ve been alive.  And when I say excess, I mean the amount of campaign money I’ve seen wasted by people who grew up wasting money is simultaneously astounding and appalling.  Even now, we have Hak Jeffries going to Jared Kushner and tech billionaires with his hands out, instead of fighting the system that propped those individuals up.

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This debate does not continue indefinitely, it does have an endgame.  And as we approach that point ever more rapidly while our country is being deconstructed at the whims of the wealthy before our very eyes, we are faced with the bare truth laid out before us.

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If you are seeking a cushy, comfortable job, in politics and organizing, with a pay range far above the average US worker,

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Then I’m afraid you are fundamentally in the wrong place,

At most definitely the wrong time,

Looking for the wrong thing.

And the time is near when you’ll have to come to terms with the reality that the environment we’ve created that allowed what you’re seeking, is the direct cause of the rot at the heart of our democracy.

There is real, hard work to be done.  The kind that the donor class don’t want to write checks to fundraisers for over the phone.  The kind that will keep you working 14 hours a day 7 days a week until the goal is accomplished.  Until it is done.  So for those of you in this category, if you come from a situation in which you “want for nothing”, are you willing to work as hard as those who want for everything?

The point was summed up perfectly by Paul Rivera, the author of the recent DNC 2024 autopsy when he wrote that our current state of disaster is a product of “the sway of an operative class that had become generationally wealthy off politics while steering democratic strategy.”  No wonder Ken Martin tried to bury that chapter of the report.

And I fully recognize how uncomfortable this makes a portion of you who I have come to know, and worked with over the past decade.  And to those of you, I ask that you pay this heed now.  If you’re not comfortable releasing your tax returns and standing behind the work you did, then the voting public whom your paychecks revolved around may be far less forgiving in the way they communicate this political reality to you.

To the rest of us,

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Happy Labor Day from Paper Street