Friends,

May Day has two meanings, both of which are directly applicable to today. It commemorates the solidarity of the labor movement (139 years ago today, workers gathered in the streets of Chicago to demand an eight-hour day).

“Mayday!” is also a distress signal used by pilots to indicate imminent danger or a life-threatening emergency (derived from the French phrase “m’aider,” meaning “help me”).

That about sums it up: Our solidarity is necessary to overcome the imminent dangers we now face — all from Donald J. Trump.

I doubt we can wait until the midterm elections to contain him. Unless we stop the damage he’s doing to both our democracy and our economy before then, much of it will be irreversible. It’s not even clear what sort of election we’ll be able to have 18 months from now.

Demonstrations are planned today in more than 900 cities against both the Trump regime and the oligarchy that supports and benefits from it. The official banner under which people will march today is, appropriately, “For the Workers, Not the Billionaires.”