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Home→Tags 2020 elections

Tag Archives: 2020 elections

11/18 Rev. Raphael Warnock for Senate

The Progressive Wing Posted on November 18, 2020 by BennyNovember 18, 2020

Birdies – do you think we ought to add Rev Warnock to our Senate Progressive Candidates list?

I think he’s got potential. I noticed that Breitbart and some of the RWNJ rags are trying to frame Warnock as someone who can’t be a moral authority from a church and support the legality of Roe v Wade. Warnock was endorsed by Planned Parenthood last May, but I guess no one took his candidacy very seriously then. He says that reproductive rights are very much aligned with his views of healthcare and justice.

Warnock how the Democratic Party’s support for abortion rights fits with his role as a “minister, a leader of the church, (and) a man of God.”

Warnock serves as the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both Martin Luther King Sr. and Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastors.

The pastor responded to Bryant’s question by declaring that he believes that health care is a “human right” and “something that the richest nation in the world provides for its citizens.”

“[A]nd for me, reproductive justice is consistent with my commitment to that,” he stated. “I believe unequivocally in a woman’s right to choose.”

Warnock argued that a woman’s decision to have an abortion as “something that we don’t want government engaged in,” adding that such a decision is “between her and her doctor and her minister.”

Regarding climate change, he supports moving towards a GND. According to his campaign’s website, Warnock believes

Reverend Warnock believes that solutions to climate change are moral issues and that we can act on the consensus that already exists among Americans by ignoring Washington special interests and putting effective, common sense policies in place. Starting with rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and restoring America’s place as a leader in the fight for climate justice we can achieve this. As a Senator, he will advocate for the United States to:

  • Rejoin the Paris Climate Accords and build upon the international commitment to fighting climate change;
  • Work to reverse the Trump Administration’s attack on the Environmental Protection Agency and standards for clean air and water;
  • Prepare Georgia’s coastline for rising sea-levels with investments in green infrastructure, structural reinforcement and climate science;
  • Push for investment in resources, infrastructure, and education in communities of color to benefit in energy cost savings;
  • Advocate for marginalized people to receive training and education to participate in the green new economy and jobs;
  • Set goals for carbon reduction and robust climate standards for newly manufactured cars and infrastructure;
  • Encourage investment in clean energy and commit to transitioning to a clean economy by 2050; and
    Hold polluters and utility companies accountable

One can tell that his work with Rev Barber and Al Gore illustrates he’s not a newcomer to environmental justice. From his website:

Reverend Warnock has focused on the work of environmental justice throughout his time at Ebenezer Baptist Church, helping organize and lead a public interfaith mass meeting on climate change with the Reverend William Barber II and Vice President Al Gore. He is proud to have the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters and is committed to fighting climate change and environmental racism in the U.S. Senate.

His emphasis on climate justice is guided by his faith and his understanding that “the Earth is the Lord’s.” He believes that we must be stewards of the earth our children will inherit, and that we all should have the right to clean air and water. He also understands that our harm to the planet often causes those who can least afford it to experience the most tragic consequences, often communities of color and lower income populations.

Understanding the disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized communities, Reverend Warnock’s view of environmental justice doesn’t just focus on addressing long term challenges, but everyday problems. That means addressing the lack of access to clean water and air in many impoverished communities and the higher share of income many Black and brown households pay in energy bills, often as a result of limited cost saving tools like alternative energy sources. He also believes in working toward a clean economy that will create jobs, reduce pollution, and produce a world that our children can inherit.

I’d like to nominate Rev Warnock to be added to our candidates list (maybe start it as a 2021 list?) and have a link added to his profile.

Thoughts? Feel free to add other things you may like or have concerns.

Posted in Activism, grassroots | Tagged 2020 elections, GA-Sen, Rafael Warnock, US Senate

3/31 Sanders to Appear on The View Tomorrow; To Briahna With Love; Evening OT

The Progressive Wing Posted on March 31, 2020 by BennyMarch 31, 2020

TOMORROW: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. @BernieSanders joins us from Vermont to discuss the latest on the coronavirus pandemic and more. pic.twitter.com/OhlDMmk2m1

— The View (@TheView) March 31, 2020

So how much grief will Whoopi give Bernie this time.

This op-ed in LAT deserves some attention. Kudos to a birdie for retweeting this piece.
Black voters pragmatically support Biden to beat Trump — but we deserve Sanders’ big agenda

Just as in the civil rights movement, black people are the moral vanguard, clarifying our national purpose at a key moment and breaking a paralysis of consensus. The South Carolina message was clear: The racist must go. We must beat Trump, and we’ll beat him with Biden.

Biden was the loyal sideman to the first black president, Barack Obama, who gave rise to massive white resentment that Trump successfully harnessed in 2016. That alone was more than enough reason for many black voters to give Biden the go-ahead in South Carolina. What has happened next, Biden’s much-analyzed momentum, is the domino effect of black voters’ certainty.

This may all work out just fine as far as ending Trump’s reign, a goal that the coronavirus pandemic only makes more urgent. And yet the black certainty that will have saved us in the short term is a problem in the long term.

Black folk are too certain. We vote pragmatically. We vote not for the candidate who will do us the most good but for the one who will do us the least damage. We choose politicians who won’t create solutions for our many legitimate crises but who will put the brakes on the worst offenses that already exist. (Trump certainly qualifies as such an offense.) We don’t vote ideology because we usually can’t: United States history has been so hostile to black interests and racial equality that there usually aren’t mainstream candidates who truly represent the way we think, what we believe. Politically, black people have to be on the defensive — voting for what someone isn’t, not for what he or she is.

Voting defensively is not always a waste; in 2020, it has never felt more crucial. But the desperation fueling black defensiveness is obscuring something important. In 2020 we could be choosing ideologically at long last. Bernie Sanders mainstream candidacy, and its socialist-friendly agenda, addresses much of what black people prioritize, from ending mass incarceration to tackling homelessness. His campaign has proved that electoral politics can represent a deeply held belief system: ideology.

Sanders’ unwavering progressivism is also supposed to be his fatal flaw: He’s not practical or realistic. But where has realism gotten us? I think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham jail in 1963, which he wrote to white liberals — his putative civil rights allies — who were counseling patience and incremental change in the face of fierce Southern resistance. King was having none of it. For him, dramatic change was practical , demanding it was the only choice if segregation were to be defeated. Call that unrealistic and revolutionary, but it was utterly necessary.

In the decades since King’s death, many black people have lost touch with the necessity of idealism and imagination. They have forgotten that those are the only things that ever worked for us.

After South Carolina, the black vote — secured by the Voting Rights Act, one decidedly revolutionary thing King forced into law — was tracked from state to state, almost fetishized. The scrutiny was all about the horserace and how black folks might get Democrats across the finish line in November. Beyond the Obama connection, no one talked about Biden as a supporter of black voters’ interests.

No one mentioned the former senator’s troubling record on school busing (not even Kamala Harris, who famously took him to task on the debate stage last year, but who endorses him now) or how he cleared the way for Clarence Thomas’ retrograde hijacking of Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court, or how he embraced the Clintonian approach of talking empathetically about race and equality but tacking right in order to compete effectively with the white majority Republican Party. That strategy worked, but with black people as the biggest losers.

As for Sanders, the tenets of racial equality are baked into his agenda. He has weathered criticism from black people that, like most white progressives, he emphasizes economic problems over racial ones. But his ideology is worth our consideration. Another complaint is that he isn’t a Democrat, but that’s the point — in order to maintain his agenda, he can’t be. I heard a black man in a grocery store line loudly decrying Sanders’ socialism; I couldn’t help responding that government policies for and about the common good —socialism — have been the only thing that’s come close to helping black people on the scale we deserve to be helped.

I am not officially endorsing Sanders, a position that is almost moot. I am saying that black voters have the rare opportunity to consider the change his candidacy has offered and how that change could finally make the Democratic Party accountable to them, its most reliable and potent bloc.

But Democrats won’t be held accountable — again — because the overwhelming fear of a Trumpian future, intensified by the way COVID-19 painfully lays bare our crisis of national leadership, is making pragmatists of us all.

For black voters, pragmatism is familiar, a default position. But it should never be mistaken for all of who we are, or what we

Just as in the civil rights movement, black people are the moral vanguard, clarifying our national purpose at a key moment and breaking a paralysis of consensus. The South Carolina message was clear: The racist must go. We must beat Trump, and we’ll beat him with Biden.

Biden was the loyal sideman to the first black president, Barack Obama, who gave rise to massive white resentment that Trump successfully harnessed in 2016. That alone was more than enough reason for many black voters to give Biden the go-ahead in South Carolina. What has happened next, Biden’s much-analyzed momentum, is the domino effect of black voters’ certainty.

This may all work out just fine as far as ending Trump’s reign, a goal that the coronavirus pandemic only makes more urgent. And yet the black certainty that will have saved us in the short term is a problem in the long term.

Black folk are too certain. We vote pragmatically. We vote not for the candidate who will do us the most good but for the one who will do us the least damage. We choose politicians who won’t create solutions for our many legitimate crises but who will put the brakes on the worst offenses that already exist. (Trump certainly qualifies as such an offense.) We don’t vote ideology because we usually can’t: United States history has been so hostile to black interests and racial equality that there usually aren’t mainstream candidates who truly represent the way we think, what we believe. Politically, black people have to be on the defensive — voting for what someone isn’t, not for what he or she is.

Voting defensively is not always a waste; in 2020, it has never felt more crucial. But the desperation fueling black defensiveness is obscuring something important. In 2020 we could be choosing ideologically at long last. Bernie Sanders mainstream candidacy, and its socialist-friendly agenda, addresses much of what black people prioritize, from ending mass incarceration to tackling homelessness. His campaign has proved that electoral politics can represent a deeply held belief system: ideology.

Sanders’ unwavering progressivism is also supposed to be his fatal flaw: He’s not practical or realistic. But where has realism gotten us? I think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham jail in 1963, which he wrote to white liberals — his putative civil rights allies — who were counseling patience and incremental change in the face of fierce Southern resistance. King was having none of it. For him, dramatic change was practical, demanding it was the only choice if segregation were to be defeated. Call that unrealistic and revolutionary, but it was utterly necessary.

In the decades since King’s death, many black people have lost touch with the necessity of idealism and imagination. They have forgotten that those are the only things that ever worked for us.

After South Carolina, the black vote — secured by the Voting Rights Act, one decidedly revolutionary thing King forced into law — was tracked from state to state, almost fetishized. The scrutiny was all about the horserace and how black folks might get Democrats across the finish line in November. Beyond the Obama connection, no one talked about Biden as a supporter of black voters’ interests.

No one mentioned the former senator’s troubling record on school busing (not even Kamala Harris, who famously took him to task on the debate stage last year, but who endorses him now) or how he cleared the way for Clarence Thomas’ retrograde hijacking of Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court, or how he embraced the Clintonian approach of talking empathetically about race and equality but tacking right in order to compete effectively with the white majority Republican Party. That strategy worked, but with black people as the biggest losers.

As for Sanders, the tenets of racial equality are baked into his agenda. He has weathered criticism from black people that, like most white progressives, he emphasizes economic problems over racial ones. But his ideology is worth our consideration. Another complaint is that he isn’t a Democrat, but that’s the point — in order to maintain his agenda, he can’t be. I heard a black man in a grocery store line loudly decrying Sanders’ socialism; I couldn’t help responding that government policies for and about the common good —socialism — have been the only thing that’s come close to helping black people on the scale we deserve to be helped.

I am not officially endorsing Sanders, a position that is almost moot. I am saying that black voters have the rare opportunity to consider the change his candidacy has offered and how that change could finally make the Democratic Party accountable to them, its most reliable and potent bloc.

But Democrats won’t be held accountable — again — because the overwhelming fear of a Trumpian future, intensified by the way COVID-19 painfully lays bare our crisis of national leadership, is making pragmatists of us all.

For black voters, pragmatism is familiar, a default position. But it should never be mistaken for all of who we are, or what we want.

I do not care what you think of me when I say this.

This video of @JoeBiden struggling to answer a simple question about his response to the coronavirus, where he has to check a page of notes, then messes it all up, is disturbing.

Pretending otherwise is problematic. pic.twitter.com/4Ue834giJc

— Shaun King (@shaunking) March 31, 2020

Shall we lighten up a bit with some music, art and other tweets, news, et Brie has been catching all kinds of hell on twitter.

I’m team Briahna, misfit black girl island. 💯

Ignore the foolishness from centrist twitter and send our girl some love today! ❤️ pic.twitter.com/BzIyZBXkqe

— Dr. Victoria Dooley (@DrDooleyMD) March 31, 2020

We need to lighten up.

Good! See you in the comments!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 2020 elections, Bernie Sanders, Briahna Joy Gray, Joe Biden, The Movement, The View

3/16 Open Topic: Post-Debate and other Weighty Matters

The Progressive Wing Posted on March 16, 2020 by orlbucfanMarch 16, 2020

Where are The Women’s League of Voters when we need them? This thread is Open.

Continue reading →
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 2020 elections, 2020 Issues

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  • Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) – WON
  • Ro Khanna (CA-17) – WON
  • Summer Lee (PA-12) – WON
  • Mark Pocan (WI-02) – WON

Senate

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  • Katie Porter (CA) – 2024
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State & Local Races

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