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SFist has noted in the past that columnist Heather Knight has emerged, in at least some ways, a spiritual successor to C.W. Nevius at the Chronicle. While not as stridently critical as Nevius was of SF progressives on topics like homelessness, Knight has been taking on the Board of Supervisors on various issues, and things have been escalating in recent weeks.

Critiques of the Supes from Knight are by no means new, but she has some particularly notable bones to pick with the likes of Aaron Peskin and Dean Preston lately, and it's basically get-out-the-popcorn time as Peskin has started lashing back, referencing Knight's column during public meetings.

Let's start back in March, when Knight delighted in an effort by Supervisor Myrna Melgar to track the number of times that male supervisors spoke during meetings versus women, and the number of times they interrupted. Whose picture tops the column about the results of Melgar's data study? Peskin's! And Knight points to the fact that Melgar is the lone female on the Land Use and Transportation Committee with Peskin and Preston, and she barely gets a word in edgewise. "Those men make up two-thirds of the committee, but talked a combined 84% of the time," Knight notes, from Melgar's data.

Knight's April 21 column was a Nevius-esque salvo against the evils of SF bureaucracy for small businesses, focusing on ice cream shop owner and SF native Jason Yu. He reportedly spent 16 months and $200,000 trying to open his shop, Matcha n More at 20th and Valencia streets, and he was blocked essentially, as Knight frames it, over objections from a nearby competitor, Garden Creamery. Yu abandoned his plans rather than lose more money on the project, and Knight pointed out that Yu didn't get to benefit from the streamlined approvals process that is now possible under Mayor Breed's Prop H.

Then two weeks ago, on May 5, Knight wrote a column that got the hackles up of many SF progressives, running with the headline, "Is San Francisco more conservative than Moscow? Top San Francisco official says yes." That top official was SFTMA Director Jeffrey Tumlin, and she quoted him as saying, having worked on transit projects in Moscow himself, that San Francisco is "definitely" more conservative than Moscow.

"San Franciscans, on a national political metric, we are far to the left," Tumlin said. "But when it comes to our own city, we are so resistant to change that the result is a lot of conservatism."

Many critics of SF politics and the development and planning process here have noted this contradiction. One article that got a lot of attention in the last decade was this 2014 piece for TechCrunch by Kim-Mai Cutler that focused on how SF's resistance to change over five decades was responsible for the present-day housing crisis.

But when Knight took Tumlin's comments and wrote "the idea holds true on a host of major issues including housing, climate change, small business reform and addressing our drug crisis," essentially accusing the Board of Supervisors for embracing the status quo, you know that's a declaration of war.

Tim Redmond, the editor of 48 Hills one of the last bastions of capital-P Progressive commentary in SF came out swinging a few days later with his own column.

"If you know the history of post-War San Francisco, you know that 'progress' and 'change' in [the] local economy has been driven almost entirely by a small number of powerful people, mostly white men, who sought to redesign the city for their own profit," Redmond writes. "They destroyed light industry and blue-collar jobs to build financial-services and tech offices... They encouraged the gentrification of neighborhoods all over the city... They wiped out Black and Brown communities... So: Communities resisted. People fought back against unchecked development... Some of us would like to say: Slow down. Protect existing vulnerable communities first. Save historic and environmentally sensitive areas. Use government to regulate these changes so that they dont overwhelm what is frankly a pretty fragile city and tax the people who get rich from them to protect the people who the late-capitalist idea of progress leaves behind."

But now, Knight has come back with a new column, and it's focused squarely on Peskin and Preston, stemming from a Monday meeting of the above-mentioned land-use committee on which Melgar also sits. There was a proposal up for discussion that Knight highlighted back in November, backed by Mayor Breed and Supervisor Matt Haney, they would end the ability of a single SF citizen to appeal any project they care to appeal that comes up for city approval.

The proposal would require anyone looking to file an appeal at the city to gather 50 signatures or the sign-off of five supervisors in order to get an appeal hearing scheduled. The proposal came after two gadflies had caused an estimated 100 hours of work for aides and supervisors by filing multiple appeals between them last year of various emergency measures by the SFMTA and city making it a "pandemic hobby" to complain that everything requires CEQA review, even in a pandemic. The Board of Supervisors unanimously rejected every appeal.

At Monday's meeting, Peskin and Preston tabled the proposal, and Knight is fuming. Peskin even called out Knight, though not quite directly, saying during the meeting, "Fundamentally, this is a solution looking for a problem," and noting that the ordinance was tied to "the subject of however many articles in one Chronicle columnists thing, column."

Knight got a quote from the mayor's office, from spokesperson Jeff Cretan, who said, "Its really challenging when we talk about changing the status quo in San Francisco, and we cant even get these tailored solutions to get rid of bureaucracy approved."

That column prompted another foe of Knight's, the blog District 5 Diary, to pen its own response today, calling Knight a "status quo megaphone" for City Hall/the mayor.

Anyway, the war goes on. Yes, the Chronicle has been more on the business-friendly, centrist end of the media spectrum for the past two decades, and they've never really employed a progressive counterpoint columnist to the likes of Nevius or Knight. But doesn't anyone see the absurdities at work here?

As Peskin himself said during the absurd debate over that Ferris Wheel, the "bright side" to moving into post-pandemic normalcy is that they get to have "these kinds of squabbles again between the Board and the executive branch."

Read more here:
Chronicle Columnist Heather Knight Is Basically at War With Progressive Supervisors - SFist

Tony Blair has long claimed to know what is necessary for progressives to become, in his term, change- makers. His recent essay for the New Statesman, in which he prescribes how the Labour Party can be resurrected as a progressive force, is no exception. His opponents are always small c conservatives, unable to grasp what the future demands.

Once, it was globalisation that defined the progressive task. Now, it is the 21st century technological revolution. This, Blair says, represents the most far-reaching upheaval since the 19th-century Industrial Revolution; progressives will succeed if they are the ones who understand this revolution, [and] show how it can be mastered for the benefit of the people.

Whatever the structural force for change Blair identifies, the world is always fast-forwarding to the future at unprecedented speed, where opportunities only go to those swift to adapt, as he told the Labour Party conference in 2005. This is how he believes time works: of course, history has a direction, he insisted to Jason Cowley in an interview in 2016. To be a progressive, for Blair, is simply to hitch ones political commitments to the ride.

In reality, Blairs rhetoric is an unreliable guide to how New Labour governed during his premiership between 1997 and 2007. New Labour did not succeed by mastering globalisation. Only in finance was Britain aligned with economic globalisation, and here the party merely encouraged the City to continue what it had already been doing since the 1960s. It did not reskill British workers to make them more competitive. While it presided over an expansion of university education, the system failed to produce a vanguard of a new knowledge economy. If a central feature of globalisation in the 2000s was the creation of integrated Atlantic-Eurasian supply chains, British manufacturing firms were a sideshow. Unlike their counterparts in Berlin, for example, Blairs governments lacked a strategy to build export markets in China. Instead, the growth in UK employment during the New Labour years depended on the domestically focused service sector.

[See also:Labours loss of Hartlepool is the final death rattle of a movement that has abandoned its heartlands]

For all his man-of-the-world presentation, Blairs rhetoric never really attempts to explain real-world change. In his 2005 conference speech, he claimed that to stop and debate globalisation was as pointless as discussing whether autumn should follow summer. But whether globalisation is defined as the internationalisation of economic activity that began in the 1970s, or the increase in the movement of people around the globe, it is obviously not a physical force beyond human agency. Before the breakneck ascent that began in the 1990s, a period of globalisation had already risen and fallen between the 1870s and the early 1930s.

In thrall to the idea that the future makes the times faster, more exciting, Blair is selective about what change progressives must understand in order to win power. The second age of globalisation is now giving way to trade wars, national industrial strategies that break up international supply chains, and tighter borders. The only sign that Blair acknowledges this is by dropping the word globalisation from his vocabulary. Instead, he now insists that it is the technological revolution that divides the world into those who are equipped to adjust and those who, stuck in the past, will fail.

Change that appears, as Blair sees it, historically misdirected does not attract his attention. While Brexit has profoundly altered British politics over the past seven years, his latest intervention on Labours mortality crisis bypasses it. This conveniently allows him to ignore the fact that by casting the EU as a symbol of political and economic modernity, Blair and his acolytes downplayed the scenario in which Labours anti-EU voters would adjust to the changing times by simply deserting the party.

[See also:Politics is turning on its axis and the one politician who gets this is Boris Johnson]

Blairs present story about real-world change is so high on the abstract idea of a new-tech future that it is insensitive to the most monumental specific change now under way. We may be living through something comparable to the start of the Industrial Revolution. But if we are, it is because governments across the world profess a commitment to replacing the energy-basis of most economic activity by 2050 or 2060. Clean energy is not one more instance of upheaval, as Blair classes it, in a list that also includes nutrition, gaming, financial payments, [and] satellite imagery. Nor does it, where public services are concerned, demand an overhaul of health and education; Blair has been calling for those since he became Labour leader in 1994.

Rather, the principal political question the future is now asking all politicians is whether another energy revolution can be realised without jettisoning the idea of economic and technological progress on which Blairs world-view depends. In material terms, radically curtailing the use of fossil-fuel energy is not an instance of linear history. Absent an unprecedented expansion of nuclear power, it is a project to reverse the shift from low-density biomass energy to high-density fossil-fuel energy that began the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, by moving back to lower-density energy in the form of renewables. It aims to reset time so that our present civilisation does not meet the same ecological reckoning that has helped end every other civilisation that has existed, including the Roman world.

If this energy revolution is to succeed, it will indeed require a huge technological leap. But it takes an impressive amount of faith that history is unidirectional a view that is now being put to the test to think that such an uncertain future is tailor-made for any political project, especially a political project like Blairs: one so ideologically fixed that it is unable to confront the world as it really is.

The rest is here:
In Blair-world, tech is the bright new progressive cause. But he ignores the real reasons for change - New Statesman

Members of the National Organization for Women protest outside the Manhattan DA's office on October 13, 2017, after District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. made the decision not to pursue sexual abuse charges against movie producer Harvey Weinstein. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

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New York CityOne of the more consequential political races in America will be decided here on June 22. And it has nothing to do with Andrew Yang.

On the day Democrats in New York City will choose the candidate who will probably become the next mayor, Manhattanites will be effectively electing their next district attorney. Its the sort of race that will have far more of a seismic impact on the city and nation than the attention its been paid would indicate; the winner will be setting a criminal justice agenda that will inevitably ripple outward to DAs across the country.

Part of this has to do with the offices sheer size: The outgoing DA, Cyrus Vance Jr., presides over 500 prosecutors and a budget that nears $170 million. Manhattan is the beating heart of the real estate industry, Wall Street, and the white-collar crimes that seize headlines. Vance has crossed paths with the likes of Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

His failures, to most of the public, have been of the high-profile variety: not prosecuting Weinstein much sooner, not prosecuting the Trump children at all, and bungling the Strauss-Kahn case.

Regular watchers of Law and Order and other police procedurals are acquainted with another version of the office: a tough but fair institution wrangling with a procession of criminals that hard-bitten, if well-meaning, prosecutors and cops must lock up.

But a darker reality pulses belowthe office, under Vance and his predecessors, has been overly punitive and even predatory, according to legal observers and public defenders who have battled it on a daily basis. It is a place, they say, where the progressive reforms that have swept up offices around the nation have been, at best, begrudgingly or belatedly acknowledged.

Where do we start with how repressive, how predatory, that prosecutors office has been for communities of color in Manhattan? asked Rigodis Appling, a member of Black Attorneys of Legal Aid and a longtime public defender. I really think they think its their job to simply protect property and they charge things as such. When you value property more than human life, thats where it becomes disturbing and youre not doing justice.Current Issue

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There are eight Democrats running to replace Vance, who faced mounting pressure not to seek reelection. With scant polling available and a number of contenders who have raised north of $1 million, no single front-runner appears to be dominating the field. Unlike the mayoral race, this is technically not a municipal contest, which means no ranked-choice voting: Progressives do run the real risk here of splitting votes and allowing a more moderate candidate to triumph.

The winner would only be the fourth Manhattan DA since 1942. Before Vance won election in 2009, Robert Morgenthau and Frank Hogan each held the post for decades.

Danny Frost, a spokesman for Vance, argued that the DA had made great strides beyond his predecessor, Morgenthau, cutting prosecutions in half and investing forfeiture funds into various reform initiatives, including the Manhattan Family Justice Center.

Many of the candidates running espouse the principles of reform that have come into vogue in the last four years, as progressive prosecutors like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, and Kim Foxx in Chicago have taken power. The contenders fall into various camps: the former prosecutors, a civil rights attorney, a public defender, and an elected official. Some are traditionalists, wary of the left flank; others race headfirst into reform.

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All are reckoning with two competing currents: the demands to radically overhaul a system that has imprisoned too many people of color and growing calls, from conservatives and law enforcement, to hunt for a solution to New Yorks spike in shootings and murders.

Im running against a bunch of former prosecutors who have been complicit in and propped up and perpetuated this system, said Eliza Orlins, a longtime Manhattan public defender who has also been a television personality. Ive been in the trenches fighting this office.

Under Vance, certain reforms popular with progressives have been implemented, including a decision to no longer prosecute those who jump subway turnstilesbut public defenders view of the office is particularly dim. Orlins, who served as a public defender with Legal Aid, and other progressives describe Vance as a prosecutor relentlessly committed to going to trial to win cases against poorer, nonwhite defendants. In Manhattan, juries tend to be whiter and wealthier and more favorable to law enforcement than the more working-class, diverse juries in the outer boroughs.

Appling described troubling trends: Vances prosecutors charging people who steal packages from building lobbies with burglary, a violent felony, which can carry years in prison, as opposed to petit larceny, a lesser charge. The office is willing to charge defendants who are caught up in predatory NYPD practices like Operation Lucky Bag, in which police planted a bag, usually with money or other valuables inside, in a public place and waited for someone to take it, arresting them on the spot.

Before New York state reformed its outdated discovery laws, public defenders said Vances office was notorious for withholding information from the defense until right before trial, creating undue pressure on terrified defendants to plead guilty to inflated charges.

The discovery practices of the Manhattan DA were the impetus behind changing the discovery laws, said Nick Encalada-Malinowski, the civil rights campaign director at VOCAL-NY, a reform group. There are a certain set of candidates who are interested in shrinking that system.

Orlins is one of two candidates, along with civil rights attorney Tahanie Aboushi, who have said theyd slash the DAs budget by 50 percent if elected. Both are heartened that Krasner, a former public defender, beat back a law-and-order challenger on Tuesday.

We can restructure the office where we are trimming the fat, said Aboushi, who is endorsed by the Working Families Party and successfully sued the Fire Department for discrimination against Black firefighters. We should be focusing on serious crimes.

In their voting guide, Five Boro Defenders, a collective of public defenders and civil rights attorneys in New York, graded all the contenders on their ability to do the least amount of harm with an office that has traditionally had a carceral mission.

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Orlins was one candidate rated the highest. The other was not Aboushi but Dan Quart, a State Assembly member who has a long legislative record of pushing criminal justice reforms in Albany, including ending the ban on gravity knives, which are often carried by blue-collar workers but used to be illegal, allowing Vance and other DAs to rack up more prosecutions.

Im the only one with a real record of achieving results on decarceration, says Quart.

Another top contender in the progressive lane, Alvin Bragg, has won the backing of Preet Bharara, Charlie Rangel, Jerry Nadler, and several large labor unions. Bragg, who grew up in Harlem and served as the chief deputy attorney general in New York, made a name for himself seeking full transparency into how the NYPD handled Eric Garners death. He speaks often about his experience as a Black man being repeatedly stopped by police.

All of my policies have emerged from my really having experienced almost every part of the criminal justice system, Bragg said. My brother in-law living with me after getting out of incarceration. Me having been stopped three times at gunpoint growing up.

Among the four candidates competing for the left lane in the primary, there are some clear differences. In a voter guide assembled by the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, Bragg said he would not reduce the budget of the DAs office at all. Only Aboushi and Orlins would eliminate pretrial detention altogether. Quart was the only candidate to say he would request only supervision on a defendant, not electronic monitoring. All but Bragg said theyd try to reduce the number of people in jail pretrial by at least 80 percent.

In addition to two former prosecutors with lower levels of name recognition and endorsements, Liz Crotty and Diana Florence, Lucy Lang, a Vance ally, is campaigning on the premise that someone who has worked as a prosecutor in the Manhattan DAs office can also fix it. The former head of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College, Lang has won the backing of several reform-oriented prosecutors across America, including Kim Gardner in St. Louis.

My candidacy is informed by and supported by people most directly impacted by the system, said Lang, who has said shed beef up the sex crimes unit in the DAs office. People who have been incarcerated, people who have been impacted by violent crime.

However, if there is a single candidate looming over the rest, its the primarys most prolific fundraiser: Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor. Married to Boaz Weinstein, a multimillionaire hedge fund manager, Farhadian Weinstein has raised more than $2 million by aggressively targeting Wall Street megadonors. She veers to the right of several Democrats in the race, speaking more on the campaign stump about rising crime rates and gun violence, and is viewed as a candidate who would not greatly depart from Vances traditionalist approach. She is also one of the only candidates who will not rule out entering into information sharing agreements with federal agencies like ICE and Homeland Security Investigation. Expected to advertise far more heavily than most of the Democrats, Farhadian Weinstein took a measured view of Vance as her rivals pounced on her fundraising. The office has done some things well, some things less well, she said.

For Farhadian Weinstein, a key focus would be gender-based violence. We will be taking on violence against women, she said.

Her prominent progressive rivals, with time ticking down in the primary, are not holding back against her. Her ties to Wall Street are very problematic, Aboushi said, pointing to donations as large as $35,000 sent to Farhadian Weinsteins coffers. For some people, thats an annual salary.

Farhadian Weinstein, dismissing these criticisms, pointed to the large amounts of money her rivals have raised, including those whove taken cash from law firms that might have business in front of the DA.

I really caution others to not put out purity tests they cant pass, she said.

Read more:
Will New York Join the List of Cities With Progressive DAs? - The Nation

Dont be fooled by the Supreme Courts rejection of former President Donald Trumps baseless challenges to the results of the 2020 election. The high tribunal is no friend of liberals and progressives.

Of all the fevered dreams of the American right, nothing approaches the desire to overturn Roe v. Wade and revoke the constitutional right to abortion.

With the addition of three Trump appointeesNeil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrettconservatives now hold a solid 6-3 majority on the nations most powerful judicial body. No longer constrained by the need for compromise and caution, they are poised to drive U.S. law dramatically to the right.

By the time the court concludes its current term at the end of June, it will hand down decisions that could gut Obamacare, undermine the Voting Rights Act, elevate religious liberty interests above other Constitutional rights, and deal organized labor another major setback.

And the potential damage wont stop there. Next term, which begins in October, the court will pass judgment not only on Mississippis draconian abortion law, but also on a new and far-reaching Second Amendment appeal from New York.

Heres a closer look at the key cases.

Health care:

All eyes are onCalifornia v. Texas, the latest assault on the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

As originally enacted, the individual mandate in the ACA required most people to obtain health insurance or pay a monetary penalty. In 2012, the Supreme Courtupheldthe mandate as a proper exercise of Congresss power to levy taxes.

In 2017, however, Congress got rid of the penalty as part of the Trump Administrations outrageously pro-corporate tax reform legislation. Although Congress did not explicitly repeal the mandate and left the rest of the ACA intact (remember John McCains famous thumbs-down vote on the Senate floor?), a coalition of largely GOP-controlled states led by Texas filed a federal lawsuit to declare both the mandate and the entire ACA unconstitutional. District Court Judge Reed OConnor, a George W. Bush appointee and a Federalist Society member who may just be the most reactionary jurist in the country, agreed, and issued a sweeping ruling that, if upheld, would overturn the entire ACA.

Urged by California and a group of largely Democratic-led states, the Supreme Court opted to review the case, and conducted oral arguments in November. If the court affirms Reeds decision and strikes down the entire ACA, it will commit an act of judicial barbarism. Should the court topple the mandate but preserve the rest of the act, the result would be less egregious, but would likely fuel additional challenges to other sections of the ACA.

Such a challenge is currently underway in another lawsuit pending before Judge OConnor that aims to invalidate the acts requirement that birth control, cancer screenings and other forms of preventive care be covered by all health insurance policies.

Voting rights:

Voting rights are another area that have come under threat by SCOTUSs new conservative majority, most recently with a pair of cases from Arizona, Arizona Republican Party v. Democratic National Committee and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee.

In its 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court declared the pre-clearance requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) unconstitutional. The preclearance process, as set forth in sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, was a bulwark against voter suppression, compelling states and local governments with a history of voting discrimination to obtain advance approval from the Department of Justice or a panel of federal judges before instituting changes in election procedures.

Preclearance placed the burden of proof and the costs of initiating litigation on the proponents of voter suppression. Shelby County flipped the burden, forcing defenders of voting rights to file and fund expensive lawsuits against suppression measures under section 2 of the VRA.

The court is now reexamining section 2 in the Arizona cases. Depending on the scope of its ruling, the court could deal another crippling blow to voting rights amid a massive upsurge of voter suppression bills introduced in states across the country in the aftermath of the 2020 elections. Oral arguments were heard in March.

Religious liberty:

Far-right Christian views of abortion, health care, and sexuality are also getting renewed attention in SCOTUS, as in the case of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia.

Since its 2014 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, the Supreme Courts conservatives have been on a mission to uphold the religious liberty interests of privately held corporations that exclude birth control coverage from employee health-insurance benefits, religious schools that receive public funding for infrastructure improvements, bakers who refuse to decorate wedding cakes for gay customers, and, more recently, churches that object to COVID-19 lockdown regulations.

In Fulton, Catholic Social Services (CSS), a faith-based foster-care agency that refuses to place children with LGBTQ+ parents, is trying to extend the religious-liberty winning streak. CSS argues it should be exempt from Philadelphias nondiscrimination policies governing foster-care and adoption placements. If the recent past is any prologue, dont bet against CSS. Oral arguments took place in November.

Labor:

Labor rights and the ability of workers to organize, too, seem ready to take a hit in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid.

The Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts has never been kind to organized labor. In 2018, the court held in Janus v. AFSCME that the collection of fair-share fees from nonconsenting public employees to finance collective bargaining violated the First Amendment.

In Cedar Point Nursery, the court has been asked to scuttle a 1975 California law championed by Cesar Chavez that allows organizers temporary access to farms and fields to encourage workers to join unions. A group of growers contends the law allows for acts of trespass in violation of their property rights under the Fifth Amendment. Oral arguments were heard in March.

Gun ownership:

In its landmark 2008 opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to gun ownership.

Heller dealt specifically with the right to keep guns in the home. Since then, gun rights organizations like the NRA have worked to bring another test case to the Supreme Court to extend the right to bear arms beyond the home.

They may have found their vehicle in New York State Pistol Association v. Corlett, which challenges a New York law that places strict limits on the issuance of concealed weapons permits. If the lawsuit succeeds, there will be even more lethal weapons in our communities. The case has been placed on the docket for the courts next term, which commences in October.

Reproductive rights:

Of all the fevered dreams of the American right, nothing approaches the desire to overturn Roe v. Wade and revoke the constitutional right to abortion. The case of Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization may make the rights dream a reality.

At issue is a 2018 Mississippi law that bans almost all abortions after fifteen weeks, roughly two months earlier than the standard for fetal viability set by Roe. Like Corlett, Dobbs has been placed on next terms calendar. It promises to be a blockbuster.

Predicting the precise outcome of Supreme Court cases is often difficult. Its always possible that the Justices who comprise the courts conservative majority will take a scalpel rather than an axe to their deliberations in the pivotal cases before them. But one thing is certain: The power is now in their hands.

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Unequal Justice: The Supreme Court's New Right Turn - Progressive.org

U.S. Sen. Edward Markey marshaled a progressive young fan base that helped his re-election and now hes taking criticism from some of the same people as they urge him to take a harder line with Israel in his comments on the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

More than 700 people, including former Markey campaign staff and progressive activist allies of his from last years tough re-election fight against then- Rep. Joseph Kennedy III, signed a statement demanding that Markey use his position as a Senate Foreign Affairs Committee member to end what they called U.S. complicity in the Israeli occupation and apartheid of Palestine.

As the young people, organizers and advocates who are responsible for Sen. Markeys victory, we are upset and disappointed by his recent statement on Israels illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the statement said. They wrote that he followed in the footsteps of Donald Trump by saying its a both sides issue, which ignores the current and historical power imbalance between Israel and Palestine Sen. Markeys refusal to support justice in Palestine is antithetical to the progressive movement that won him re-election.

On Saturday, as more than 1,000 people attended a pro-Palestinian rally outside the Boston Public Library, Markey said in a statement: There is no justification for Hamass bombardment of Israeli civilians with rocket fire, but he also called on Israel to seek an immediate ceasefire and said the U.S. must engage more heavily in the region to protect civilian lives and to facilitate a lasting peace that allows Palestinians to live with dignity in their own state.

I am deeply alarmed by the deadly violence taking innocent lives in Gaza and Israel, Markey said. Rather than escalating this violence in a way that would cost hundreds, even thousands, more civilian lives, Israel must seek an immediate ceasefire.

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Progressives push Markey to defend Palestinians in escalating conflict with Israel - Boston Herald