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Tag Archives: The Movement

8/3 OH-11 Special Dem Primary Election & Open Thread

The Progressive Wing Posted on August 3, 2021 by BennyAugust 3, 2021

Greetings Birdies!

Today is the Dem primary in OH-11, although early voting started July 7th.

Nina Turner and Shontel Brown face off in a high-profile Ohio special House election

Former state Sen. Nina Turner and Cuyahoga County Council member Shontel Brown are the frontrunners in a multicandidate Democratic primary for the special election in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District.

In March, the seat was vacated by then-Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge, who stepped down to become the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Joe Biden.

The racially diverse, reliably Democratic 11th district stretches from Cleveland’s east side to Akron, with a mix of working-to-upper-middle-class suburbs including Euclid and Shaker Heights. The district backed Biden by a margin of 60 percentage points, 79.8 to 19.2%, over former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

The winner of the Democratic primary will be the overwhelming favorite to win the Nov. 2 general election.

Turner, who served on the Cleveland City Council from 2006 to 2008 and was a member of the Ohio Senate from 2008 to 2014, became a nationally-known figure as president of the political organization Our Revolution, which was spun off from the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and has led the largest outside grassroots mobilization effort for her campaign.

Last year, Turner was a national co-chair for the 2020 Sanders presidential campaign, and she has been a leading voice for progressive issues, including a $15 minimum wage and student loan debt cancelation. She has attracted the support of progressive stars such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, who view her as a like-minded ally who will demand real accountability in Congress.

Brown, who also chairs the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, has promoted herself as an ally of Biden who would not shift the agenda of the narrow Democratic majority too far to the left. Her more moderate stances have attracted the support of party stalwarts like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking Black lawmaker in Congress.

The race has become increasingly heated in recent weeks, with Brown seeking to use Turner’s national profile against her, portraying the former state lawmaker as a Democrat who wouldn’t be a reliable partner with the White House. Turner has rejected such assertions and recently released a pointed television advertisement that questioned Brown’s ethics.

While some groups have deemed the race as a proxy between moderate and progressive Democrats, the race is much more nuanced on the local level.

Turner and Brown have deep roots in the community, and both have indicated that issues such as poverty and criminal justice reform would be major priorities if elected to office.

Turner spoke to Insider in March and explained the need to combat economic inequities, a huge issue in the Rust Belt district.

“Having one job should definitely be enough and we’ve got to work to make sure that’s the case,” she said. “COVID-19 has only exacerbated social, economic, racial, and environmental fissures, and we need to center poor people and working-class people in a way that gives them a shot to live their measure of the American dream. This is going to require us to see the system through a different lens.”

Polls will close at 7:30 ET.

TYT will have live coverage. Likely Politico, AP, Cleveland.com, and NYT will also cover the race the live. I will post some live links after we open Benny’s Tavern.

Benny's Bar Midtown 2020-11-03 171651.jpg

Benny’s Bar Midtown 2020-11-03 171651.jpg

This also serves as an open thread.

Who do you think he's supporting in the #Ohio11 congressional primary? pic.twitter.com/aGdLVJr27k

— 📸 Bryan Giardinelli (@BreatheNewWinds) August 3, 2021

Bar is open!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 2021 elections, Bernie Sanders, Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats, Nina Turner, Oh-11, Our Revolution, special election, Squad, The Movement

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

3/27 AOC Blasts the Coronvirus Bill as ” Shameful”; Der Herr Invokes DPA for Ventilator Production; Bernie Live Tonight; TGIF & Late Afternoon/Evening OT

The Progressive Wing Posted on March 27, 2020 by BennyMarch 27, 2020

AOC worked up a Bernie Sanders’ righteous rant in the House today, while debating the Senate bill:

"There should be shame about what was fought for in this bill and the choices that we have to make." – @AOC pic.twitter.com/EN5XwYzUuv

— SocialSecurityWorks (@SSWorks) March 27, 2020

About the bill going to Trump’s office:

More than 150 million households would receive checks under the legislation, which will send payments of $1,200 to many individual Americans plus $500 for children. People with incomes above $99,000 are not eligible, and the total benefit is phased out for people earning between $75,000 and $99,000.

The bill includes almost $400 billion to help small businesses retain their payrolls and $250 billion to boost unemployment insurance, offering $600 per week for four months for laid-off workers, on top of whatever benefits their states may provide.

and

The bill includes almost $400 billion to help small businesses retain their payrolls and $250 billion to boost unemployment insurance, offering $600 per week for four months for laid-off workers, on top of whatever benefits their states may provide.

Melissa Kearney, an economics professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, said that the benefits in the bill — on top of savings people may already have — could be sufficient to tide laid-off workers through for up to three months.

“I’m quite pleased to see that this was passed so quickly and does include direct payments to households and expansion of unemployment insurance and loans to small businesses,” Kearney said.

The dealmaker’s dealmaker: Mnuchin steps in as Trump’s negotiator, but president’s doubts linger with economy in crisis

The legislation also contains hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency federal aid for large corporations suffering due to the coronavirus outbreak, a provision that sparked days of intense partisan conflict and a frenzied push from lobbyists and corporations eager to secure a chunk of the funding.

The final legislation will provide $25 billion in grants and $25 billion in loans to passenger airlines; $17 billion in loans to industries deemed critical to “national security” — a provision aimed at helping Boeing — and $425 billion in loans and loan guarantees for other large firms, a fund for which cities and states can also apply.

Trump touted the legislation in an interview Thursday night with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

“The workers are going to get $3,000 for a family of four. They’re going to get all sorts of things that they, frankly, in many cases, they wouldn’t have even gotten if they had the job, if they didn’t have to go through this hell. And it’s — it’s a wonderful thing,” Trump said.

The president went on to say “A lot of this money is going to save Boeing. It’s going to save the airline industry. And, you know, that means not only does it mean what it says, it also means tremendous jobs. We can’t let Boeing go. You know, Boeing had a problem, big one to start off with, and on top of it, this happened. And we’ll save Boeing and we’ll save the airlines and we’ll save other companies.”

The conditions on the large pool of funding became a major sticking point through congressional negotiations. Democrats won some concessions but not others. In the final bill, businesses receiving the loan cannot cut their employment levels by more than 10 percent until Sept. 30. They have some restrictions on executive compensation above $425,000 annually and cannot issue stock buybacks, a limitation supported by Trump.

Included are measures ensuring swift disclosure of funding recipients, as well as an oversight board to probe the Treasury’s decisions. The president, vice president, members of Congress and members of the cabinet are also prohibited from benefiting from the aid — a measure that also applies to their spouses and children. The direct grant funding for the airlines also has strict limitations and is required to go directly to workers or their benefits.

During debate ahead of the vote, with tensions running high, there was an uproar at one point as Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), tried to speak over her allotted time, wearing pink latex
gloves and gesturing in animation as she asked for more time to thank medical professionals at the frontline of the crisis.

“I rise before you donning these latex gloves not for personal attention, not for personal attention, but to encourage you to take this disease seriously,” Stevens shouted as she was gaveled out of order. “I rise for every American who is scared right now.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), from the epicenter of the health crisis in Queens, rose to denounce the bill and the choice lawmakers are being forced to make faced with legislation that she said creates a corporate bailout while also provided needed funds to hospitals and front-line workers.

“Our community’s reality is this country’s future if we don’t do anything. Hospital workers don’t have the necessary equipment,” she said, calling it “shameful, and the option that we have is either to let them suffer with nothing or allow this greed.”

Trump has also invoked Defense Production Authorization in order to speed the production of ventilators.

This is gonna age like that pic of all the European Royal families together right before World War 1 https://t.co/wU693GnvdI

— tyson brody (@tysonbrody) March 27, 2020

Bernie is hosting another coronavirus/healthcare panel discussion online tonight at 7ET:

Tonight at 7 p.m. ET, @BernieSanders “will host a livestream with doctors and nurses on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic,” his campaign announces.

— Adam Kelsey (@adamkelsey) March 27, 2020

TGIF…bar will open soon. More tweets, videos, and jibber jabber in the comments. See you there!

Posted in 2020 Elections | Tagged AOC, Bernie Sanders, GOP, stimulus bill, The Movement

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