Category Archives: Activism

6/28-29 News and Open Thread

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Update:

Nina Turner Is Running to Join the Squad

Before there was the Squad, or even the glimmer of a movement by insurgent progressives to challenge incumbent congressional Democrats, a progressive Black woman legislator in Cleveland contemplated what to many Democrats was unthinkable at the time: challenging a respected Black congresswoman from the left in a primary, in this case Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio, in 2012.

In the end, Nina Turner didn’t run against Fudge, but even announcing she was considering it made her an outsider to establishment Democratic Party politics. In a way, she’d always been one. She had come up as a college professor, city council member, and state senator, always a Democrat. But one of her earliest moves was backing a 2009 ballot initiative to reorganize the Cuyahoga County government that many local Democrats strenuously opposed. It passed overwhelmingly.

Turner again made establishment enemies when she went from publicly supporting the Ready for Hillary super PAC—the unofficial stalking horse for the presidential candidacy of the former senator and secretary of state—to becoming a top surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders in his 2016 primary campaign.
The Political Revolution Comes to… Buffalo?
Now Nina Turner may be poised to actually join the Squad. In her run to fill the seat vacated when Fudge became the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the former Ohio legislator has the endorsement of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush, four women of color who either defeated an incumbent or ascended after an incumbent stepped down. She’s also backed by Progressive Caucus chairs Pramila Jayapal and Katie Porter, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison—and, of course, Bernie Sanders.

One of 13 Democratic candidates in the race, Turner is leading in campaign funding—her campaign announced in mid-June that she had raised over $3 million—thanks largely to her ability to tap into Sanders’s movement. Her volunteer events often brim with die-hard supporters of the Vermont senator. At almost every gathering, Turner tells her audience that her focus is on “‘the least of these’—the poor, the working poor and barely middle class.” She’s running on Medicare for All, free college, a $15 minimum wage, criminal justice reform, and voting rights.

The key to this race, though, will be winning over her district’s many Biden supporters—the president won roughly 80 percent of the general-election vote here last year, as did Clinton four years earlier—without losing her admirers on the Sanders left. She’s already drawn fire from a leftist fringe for her perceived betrayals, most notably for defending members of the Squad who declined to “force the vote” on Medicare for All earlier this year. “For the love of God, do not throw away the Squad members!” she told a lefty podcaster. Meanwhile, her leading rival, Cuyahoga County councilwoman and Democratic Party chair Shontel Brown, is running on her ties to the president. A recent ad includes a photo of Brown with Biden and features a cable host telling Turner, “You’ve been highly critical of President-elect Joe Biden.” The ad closes with: “I’m Shontel Brown, and I’ll work with Joe Biden.” (By press time, Clinton had endorsed Brown.)

“Highly critical” of Biden might be an understatement. A July 2020 Atlantic feature on how Trump could win in November featured this colorful quote from Turner about how, despite Sanders’s endorsement, she still wasn’t keen on voting for Biden. “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.”

Turner has praised Biden as president, especially his Covid response. But will those earlier attacks hurt her? “I think it hurt her in the beginning, but I think people have gotten past that,” says Turner backer Samara Knight. “People are hungry for change. Nina brings hope.” Knight, an executive vice president of SEIU 1199, is a Biden supporter and also backed Clinton in 2016. Her union endorsed Turner after interviewing both her and Brown. “She’ll fight for us,” Knight says.

Brown has recently floated tributes to Israel at the top of her campaign website, as she’s welcomed support from the PAC Democratic Majority for Israel, which spent $1.4 million on ads attacking Sanders in 2020. The group is attacking Turner now for past statements conditioning US support for Israel on justice for the Palestinians.

“I’m a Democrat,” Turner tells me flatly. She runs through her party bona fides: as a city council member and state senator representing the city of Cleveland; as a Barack Obama delegate, twice, to the Democratic National Convention; as the Democratic nominee for Ohio secretary of state in 2014; as the engagement chair of the Ohio party. No one can take that away from her just because she supported Sanders, she says. “Sometimes, challenge isn’t pretty.”

Democratic voters will decide in an August 3 primary. An internal poll released on June 1 showed Turner at 50 percent and Brown at 15 percent, trailing “undecided.” But observers say the race could tighten, given Brown’s access to outside money.

Not a lot of news as the Senate and Congress are on recess. But still plenty of things to discuss! Place your comments below.

6/19 Juneteenth and Open Thread Weekend

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1st annual Juneteenth holiday in the US. Of course, post office will be delivering mail, but next year, they will get a day off…along with the bankers.

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/06/19/juneteenth-texas-emancipation-day/

Setting the pace for Fort Worth’s Juneteenth caravan on Friday is 93-year-old Opal Lee. The activist and educator will lead her community on foot for two and a half miles — a distance that represents the number of additional years it took before enslaved people in Texas were informed of their freedom after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lee has pushed for Juneteenth — celebrated every year on June 19 — to be recognized as a national holiday for more than 20 years. She’s too persistent to give up now, and this year in particular, she has the wind at her back as people across the country echo her calls.

“I have persistence in my DNA. There’s absolutely nothing that I start that I don’t want to finish. I gotta finish this,” said Lee, who added that she wishes she was young enough to be out there protesting in the streets against the police brutality that has taken the lives of so many black Americans. “I just gotta see it be a national holiday.”

Opal Lee in February during the Las Vegas leg of her walk from her Fort Worth home to Washington, D.C. The months-long walk …
Credit: Courtesy of Opals Walk 2 DC Team

Juneteenth, also known as “Black Independence Day” and “Texas Emancipation Day,” has taken on additional meaning this year as Texans head into almost a month of protests against police violence and racial injustice following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson and Mike Ramos at the hands of police.

The fight to make Juneteenth a national holiday has gained additional momentum this year from the corporate world. Some businesses have decided to give employees the day off, while prominent employers from Twitter to the National Football League have declared Juneteenth a permanent company holiday.

On Monday, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat, introduced a resolution — as she has for the past eight years — with the same goal. With 202 cosponsors, the bills’ supporters quadrupled this year compared to previous years. While Jackson Lee has been one of Juneteenth’s fiercest congressional advocates in recent years, similar legislative attempts date back to at least 1996.

In 1980, Texas became the first state to adopt Juneteenth as a state holiday. Today, it’s officially recognized in all but three states: Hawaii, North Dakota and South Dakota.


More tweets, videos, songs, news, etc in the comments. See you there.

4/21 News Roundup and Open Thread

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The sound doesn’t work unfortunately until the 9 1/2 minute mark, but it’s a great speech about the courage of the witnesses. Keith deserves a lot of credit.

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4/13 News Roundup & OT

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Biden Wants to Spend More Than Trump to Maintain a Bloated Defense Budget

Robert Reich knows a thing or two about federal budgets, and the economist who has served in three presidential administrations says there is something wrong with Joe Biden’s plan to increase Pentagon spending above the levels proposed by former President Trump.

“The Pentagon already spends: $740,000,000,000 every year, $2,000,000,000 every day, $1,000,000 every minute,” says the former secretary of labor. “The last thing we need is a bigger military budget.”

Unfortunately, that’s what the president is seeking. This has led Reich to announce that he is “frankly disappointed that Biden’s proposing $715 billion for the Pentagon—an increase over Trump’s $704 billion defense budget—instead of moving back toward Obama-Biden era levels of defense spending, or less.”

How Antidiscrimination Law Fails Black Mothers
“Or less” is the right direction, especially at a moment when Republican deficit hawks are circling in preparation for attacks on domestic spending that is essential for working families who have been battered by the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden’s $1.5 trillion budget plan has much to recommend it. The president is seeking significant increases in funding for education and proposing to invest in criminal justice and police reform, combating gun violence, and other worthy efforts. “However, despite the positive investments in these programs,” says Representative Barbara Lee, “I was incredibly disappointed at the significant increase in Pentagon spending to even higher levels than the Trump administration. With so many people across the country struggling to make ends meet, the last thing we need to do is increase investment in wasteful Pentagon spending.” Noting that “this budget adds twelve billion new dollars for weapons of war,” the longtime critic of endless wars asks us to “just think how that same amount could be used to invest in jobs, health care and fighting inequality—especially as we fight back a once in a century public health and economic crisis.”

Lee was once a lonely voice on behalf of cutting Pentagon spending. But the California Democrat now has allies in powerful places. “I have serious concerns,” says Senate Budget Committee chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), “about the proposed $753 billion budget request for the bloated Pentagon—a $12.3 billion increase compared to the last year of the Trump Administration. At a time when the U.S. already spends more on the military than the next 12 nations combined, it is time for us to take a serious look at the massive cost over-runs, the waste and fraud that currently exists at the Pentagon.”

Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) is blunter: “We’re in the midst of a crisis that has left millions of families unable to afford food, rent, and bills. But at the same time, we’re dumping billions of dollars into a bloated Pentagon budget. Don’t increase defense spending. Cut it—and invest that money into our communities.”

That’s not a radical response. When Data for Progress surveyed voters nationwide last year about budget priorities, 56 percent supported cutting the Pentagon budget by 10 percent to pay for fighting the coronavirus pandemic and funding education, health care, and housing. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats expressed enthusiasm for the proposed cut, which was striking. Even more striking was the 51 percent support it got from Republicans.

When the idea was raised in Congress in July of 2020, 93 members of the House of Representatives voted for a 10 percent cut, as did 23 senators. That wasn’t a win, obviously, but it was a groundbreaking show of support for reduced spending on the military-industrial complex.

Can congressional progressives build on that base of support to alter priorities in the Biden budget? It won’t be easy. Centrist Democrats will be cautious about cuts, and Republicans can be expected to demagogue the issue. But progressive caucus members have had success in pushing the new administration to abandon some of the worst Pentagon initiatives of the Trump years. For instance, a new letter signed by 70 House members commends Biden for “[his] first steps toward ending U.S. support for the war in Yemen, including announcing an end to U.S. military participation in offensive Saudi actions; a review of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia for use in its six-year air war in Yemen; and a revocation of President Trump’s terrorism designation against the Houthis, with the express purpose of averting a hunger crisis.” (The letter urges the president to go further and “use all available U.S. leverage with the Saudi regime to demand an immediate and unconditional end to its blockade, which threatens 16 million malnourished Yemenis living on the brink of famine.”)

One of the key movers in the fight to end US support for the war in Yemen, Representative Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), thinks the time is right to push the administration and Congress for a broader rethink of spending priorities.

“A proposed increase of $13 billion in defense spending is far too much given [the Pentagon budget’s] already rapid growth at a time of relative peace,” says the Wisconsin Democrat who with Lee cochairs the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus. “We cannot best build back better if the Pentagon’s budget is larger than it was under Donald Trump.”

Pocan has ideas for where to make cuts. For instance, he says “we must stop funding for former President Trump’s excessive $1.5 trillion nuclear modernization plan and complete a new nuclear posture review as each of the last three presidents have done. The United States has far more nuclear weapons than are needed for our security, so let’s stop funding the waste.” In addition to arguing for “no new spending on nuclear weapons,” Pocan points to the need to audit Pentagon waste and accountability measures to eliminate slush funds.

That’s a message that will resonate with the American people, says Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who maintains that there is a growing awareness that “it is simply inexcusable to continue to shower weapons manufacturers with hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon waste.”

Advocacy groups share the view that this is precisely the right time for members of Congress to make the case for tightening the bloated Pentagon budget. “Following a year of deadly proof that throwing money at the Pentagon does not keep us safe from modern day threats, it is unconscionable to not only extend Trump’s spending spree, but to add to it,” says Win Without War’s Erica Fein. “Deadly pandemics, climate crisis, desperate inequality—the greatest threats to global security do not have military solutions. Yet while we’re repeatedly asked how we will afford to address these truly existential threats, the same question is never asked of adding to the Pentagon’s already-overstuffed coffers. Let’s be clear: continuing to funnel near-limitless resources into the pockets of arms manufacturers while underfunding public goods only undermines the safety of people in the United States and around the world.”

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3/27 Killer Mike Calls Jeff Bezos “Part of the Planter Class” at Bessemer Amazon Facility Rally; News Roundup & OT

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Killer Mike gave a great speech at the union vote rally in Bessemer, AL yesterday. Here’s the video. Lasts about 8 1/2 min. 1.2K people tuned in live, which is pretty good considering it was a Friday afternoon event at 3pm.

Bernie Sanders spoke after Killer Mike and here’s a report of his brief remarks:

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a former presidential candidate, spoke Friday afternoon at a rally in Birmingham to support Alabama workers seeking a union at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer.

“If you succeed here, it will spread all over this country,” Sanders said from a stage set up in a Southside parking lot behind the office of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in Birmingham.

“They know that it is not only workers here who are sick and tired of outrageous working conditions,” Sanders said. “A union is not going to solve it all, but what it does do is allow you a seat at the table.”

Votes will be counted Tuesday in the election, which will decide whether workers will be represented by the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union.

“When you go against one of the largest corporations in the world and you do it alone, you’ll have no power,” Sanders said. “But when you stand together in solidarity with each other, you can negotiate for a better work day.”

Sanders noted that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, worth $180 billion, is the richest man in the world, yet Amazon distribution center employees work in overheated conditions and are punished for taking more than two brief bathroom breaks on a 10-hour shift and barely have enough time to eat lunch.

“Enough really is enough,” Sanders said. “How much money do the richest people in this country require? How much in profits do the largest corporations really need?”

The union vote will send a message, he said.

“So, what this is about today is to say to this large, powerful profitable corporation, ‘Treat your workers with respect and with dignity.’ We’re not dealing with a mom and pop operation here. We’re dealing with a trillion-dollar corporation, that makes huge profits, that can certainly provide the kind of wages and benefits that working people desperately need.”

Two workers at the Amazon center in Bessemer also spoke at the rally.

“It’s just time to fight,” said Darryl Richardson, who initiated the unionization effort. “It’s time for us to stand together and fight.”

Richardson said that when he was a new employee waiting to be assigned to a station, he was written up for not being at his station. “If you leave your station you have to clock out,” he said. “I got a write-up for waiting for them to assign me to a station. That’s one of the reasons I thought we needed a union.”

He only gets two breaks a day on a 10-hour shift, and it’s nearly impossible to get to the bathroom and back to the station in the time allotted, he said.

Linda Burns said that after taxes are taken out, her weekly pay is $300. “With one hand, I have to pick up 1,000 pieces (shipments) in one hour,” she said. Getting to the lunch room and back on a 30-minute lunch break leaves about 10 minutes to eat, she said.

She had to get a second job and also attends nursing school on the side, she said. If she’s one minute late, she loses an hour of pay, she said. “We cannot fight Bezos by ourselves,” she said.

Sanders noted that in Europe, Amazon workers are represented by unions.

“People are afraid to stand up for their rights,” Sanders said. “They’re afraid they’re going to get fired.”

He noted that Amazon has criticized his efforts to support unionization. “It’s not Bernie Sanders they’re afraid of,” he said. “It’s the power of the workers.”

Workers are being intimidated and called in to meetings where they are told a union is not in their best interests and they are being urged to vote against it, Sanders said.

Even if the unionization effort in Alabama fails, it’s been a success, Sanders said.

“This is historically an anti-union state,” he said. “A major point has already been made.”

Bernie at Bessemer Screenshot 2021-03-26 153400.jpg

Bernie at Bessemer Screenshot 2021-03-26 153400.jpg

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3/9 PM News Roundup & OT

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

This is the tweet I posted this morning:

Now, see what happened. Some positive news from DCCC. Caught me by surprise.

House Democrats end controversial consultant ban

House Democrats’ campaign arm is officially ending its controversial ban on political consultants who work with candidates challenging sitting Democratic incumbents in primaries, clinching a major victory for progressives.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), the newly installed chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, officially reversed the policy on Tuesday morning. He initially pledged to nix it during his campaign for the chair role and finalized it this week.

Though it was in place for fewer than two years, it still stymied some liberal primary challengers and incensed the left, which celebrated its end.

“It’s an enormous win,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a recent interview, before Maloney’s decision was formally announced, noting the move would open “a door for our party to leverage strength from all parts of it.”

“The escalation and aggression against the progressive wing of the party with an explicit forward-facing ‘blacklist’ created a lot of dissuasion against candidates even considering grassroots organizing firms,” she said.

Enacted in 2019, the new policy forbade the committee from contracting with or recommending to any House campaign a consultant or firm who worked to primary a sitting Democratic incumbent. It spurred an unexpectedly strong backlash — but was popular with members who are more prone to primary challenges and don’t want their party apparatus, to which they pay dues, to enable their opponents.

The ban had long been an informal practice at the DCCC, but codifying it sent progressives into a tailspin. Coming just months after Ocasio-Cortez felled a member of Democratic leadership in 2018, the groups that propelled her to Congress claimed it was an establishment attempt to blunt their movement.

“We have primaries to make sure we have the best and the brightest in every party,” said Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.), who successfully ousted a Democratic incumbent last year even after the new policy forced several of her consultants to quit suddenly. “So primaries should be unencumbered by outside forces.”

Maloney reversed a policy created by his predecessor, Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), in a somewhat tacit acknowledgment that it had backfired. It created enmity within the conference and a fierce clash with members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the then-co-chairs. Ocasio-Cortez, a powerful force among the party’s liberal wing, was so outraged that she declined to pay any dues to the committee and instead donated directly to candidates.

The rule was seen as an overture by Bustos to two key constituencies in the Democratic party: moderates who helped win the majority and feared challenges from the left; and the congressional Black and Hispanic caucuses, which have both seen an influx in primary challengers in recent cycles.

The CBC, in particular, made a show of banding together to block the left from ousting one of their own: Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who faced a challenger backed by a coalition of progressive groups, including the Justice Democrats. Beatty won, but now-former Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), a CBC member whose family has held his St. Louis district for decades, lost to now-Rep. Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist also backed by those groups.

Not everyone lauded Maloney’s decision.

“I think that’s inappropriate,” said Democratic Rep. Jim Costa, a member of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition from Central California, in an interview before the decision was finalized. Costa easily beat a progressive challenger in 2020.

“We’re supposed to be a team,” he said in an interview last week, adding that members shouldn’t help primary other members. “It’s the same principle as far as I’m concerned. We’re either a team, or we’re not.”

Still, DCCC remains a powerful gatekeeper and retains a significant amount of leverage. Even without an explicit rule in place, it can still choose to which vendors it doles out millions of dollars of TV and polling contracts for its independent expenditure arm. And it will have a large role in steering top challenger campaigns toward certain consultants and firms.

“No one should be looking for work around here if they want to go after one of our members at the same time,” Maloney told POLITICO last month. “But I don’t think the blanket ban ever made sense. And we’re gonna replace it with a new approach.”

During her tenure, Bustos included a question on a form for firms that wish to be on a DCCC-approved vendor list. Consultants had to attest that they understand the “DCCC will not conduct business with, nor recommend to any of its targeted campaigns, any consultant that works with an opponent of a sitting Member of the House Democratic Caucus.”

The 2022 version of that form, which goes live Tuesday morning, will not include such a requirement.

Yet contentious primaries might be unavoidable in the 2022 cycle. Redistricting will almost certainly place members in new territory and make them more vulnerable.

Primary challenges — and the amount of support they receive or don’t receive from top firms and strategists — have been a thorny issue inside the caucus for years. Some successful challengers have won with the help of prominent Democratic pollsters or media consultants, including Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who ousted incumbent John Tierney in 2014 and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who beat Mike Capuano in 2018.

Part of progressives’ argument against the ban was that it led to less competition and deprived other candidates of more diversity and talent in the ecosystem of groups that work with campaigns.

“It ultimately, I think, works against especially newer vendors, vendors of color, people who might have just come up more in the last decade in the business and who might have been taking more diverse types of clients,” Pocan said in a recent interview. “It’s good for the process to not have some arbitrary rule out there.”

The committee has been able to increase the amount it spent with diverse vendors, jumping from $4 million in 2016 to $28.6 million in 2020, according to DCCC data. A new policy for 2022 also requires approved vendors to attend a diversity, equity and inclusion training offered by the committee.

Despite the ban, liberals still notched important victories. Three Democratic incumbents lost in primaries; two were longtime members who succeeded their fathers in Congress. Clay lost in Missouri, and Newman felled Rep. Dan Lipinski, a Blue Dog Democrat who opposed abortion rights and voted against Obamacare. A third, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, lost to now Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a middle-school principal backed by progressives.

And Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas),one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress and a vocal supporter of the blacklist, came within 3,000 votes of losing to Jessica Cisneros, a 26-year-old attorney backed by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Some consultants embraced the so-called “blacklist,” even forming a website, dcccblacklist.com, to connect candidates with firms who were not afraid to flout the DCCC rules.

“There just aren’t a lot of people who want to do Democratic consulting that hold the views of Bill Clinton and Bruce Reed anymore,” said Sean McElwee, co-founder of the Data for Progress, a liberal polling outfit. (Reed is a former chair of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and currently serves as a White House aide to President Joe Biden.)

McElwee’s firm polled in Bush’s race in Missouri and for Bowman in New York, but said Data for Progress lost a client in Texas, Julie Oliver, who was running against GOP Rep. Roger Williams thanks to the committee’s new policy. The group polled for Oliver in June before being replaced by a DCCC-approved vendor.

“Treating progressives like they’re something that must be crushed,” he said, “rather than partners who want to build a better party that is more durable is not a healthy tactic.”

3/9 News Roundup and OT

The Progressive Wing Posted on by

Progressive Takeover of Nevada Democratic Party Sparks ‘Mass Exodus’ of Staff, Consultants

Shortly after a slate of insurgent progressives endorsed by the Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America pulled off a clean sweep in Nevada State Democratic Party elections over the weekend, the party’s executive director notified newly elected chair Judith Whitmer that the entire staff, as well as every consultant, was quitting.

The “mass exodus” of party staffers following the progressive takeover of the Nevada Democratic Party leadership, as well as the establishment’s funneling of hundreds of thousands of dollars out of party coffers in anticipation of the results, is detailed in new reporting by The Intercept, which described the election outcome as the culmination of a years-long “battle between the insurgent progressive wing of the party and what’s known in Nevada as the Reid machine—a tightly run operation still guided by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.”

That fight, The Intercept’s Akela Lacy and Ryan Grim explain, “began five years ago, when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders organized support for his 2016 presidential primary run, while Reid was working behind the scenes to help his opponent, Hillary Clinton.”

“Over the next four years, outside organizations like DSA exploded in size and strength,” Lacy and Grim write. “The Sanders campaign focused on organizing tens of thousands of young Latino voters in the state, with the goal of activating people whom the party hadn’t bothered with before. And it worked: In the 2020 cycle, after investing heavily in Nevada, Sanders won a commanding victory in the Nevada caucuses. When the Sanders campaign ended, the organizers behind it were ready to take their project to the next level.”

The years of tireless grassroots organizing has paid off, as evidenced by former Sanders delegate Judith Whitmer’s win in the Nevada Democratic Party’s leadership elections on Saturday. Also emerging victorious were Jacob Allen for first vice chair, Dr. Zaffar Iqbal for second vice chair, Ahmad Adé for party secretary, and Howard Beckerman for treasurer, spurring what one local newspaper described as “a dramatic shakeup of the state party’s power structure.”

In a statement on Saturday, Sanders applauded Whitmer’s election at the hands of the state party’s governing members, saying the new party chair “knows that we must invest in year-round grassroots organizing focused on the principles of economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.”

“If we build a political movement that speaks to working people,” the Vermont senator added, “we will continue to build on our political success in Nevada.”

As the Las Vegas Review-Journal noted, “Whitmer has spent years organizing and encouraging young progressives to serve on the very state central committee that elected her. She was endorsed by the state party’s Left Caucus, which she founded, and the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.”

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3/6-7 Rev William Barber III States the Obvious; News & OT

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I’m pasting his thread here for everyone to see.

Rev Barber, thank you for stating the obvious. But will ConservaDems ever connect the dots as you did?

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