Forbes | Progressives Need To Rethink Poverty Solutions Forbes More than 50 years ago I entered the war on poverty as a foot soldier with all the eager enthusiasm one could muster. The attempt to eliminate poverty, enthroned in the bills passed by Congress and spearheaded by President Lyndon B. Johnson was a noble ... |
See the original post:
Progressives Need To Rethink Poverty Solutions - Forbes
Perimeter Progressives, a local group formed in response to President Trumps election, drew more than 60 residents and several elected officials to its debut meeting Feb. 28 in Dunwoody.
Joe Seconder, a well-known Dunwoody bicycling advocate who created the group, told the crowd that he intends to focus on local politics with an appeal to both Democrats like himself and disaffected centrists as well. He spoke of city-level organizing as a way to push changes up to the federal level, though he didnt specify any agenda.
The Perimeter Progressives logo on display at the Feb. 28 debut meeting at Cafe Intermezzo in Dunwoody. (Photo John Ruch)
We can meet in the middle, Seconder said, kicking off the gathering at Caf Intermezzo, a coffee house near Perimeter Mall. But he also joked, This is the celebration party for Hillary [Clinton] winning Dunwoody in liberal-rousing election results in the Republican-dominated area. State Rep. Sam Park (D-Lawrenceville) also spoke briefly, calling for making Georgia blue from the statehouse to the White House.
Other officials in attendance included Dunwoody City Councilmember Lynn Deutsch, who declined comment, and Chamblee City Councilmembers Thomas Hogan II and Brian Mock. Stumping for votes were Ron Slotin, a Democratic former state senator from Sandy Springs now running for the 6th Congressional District seat, and Keenan Pontoni, the campaign manager for Jon Ossoff, another Democratic candidate in that race. Sally Harrell, a Democratic former state representative who briefly joined the 6th District race, also attended.
Residents of such areas as Brookhaven, Sandy Springs and Gwinnett County made the trip for the event.
For longtime liberal activists like Keith and Nancy Kaylor of Dunwoody, the event was exciting. The Kaylors have both run for local and state offices and once formed a small Dunwoody chapter of the national political and socializing group Drinking Liberally.
Perimeter Progressives founder Joe Seconder, left, holds the microphone for Dunwoody Elementary student Carter Dyche, who led the group in the Pledge of Allegiance. (Photo John Ruch)
Im totally awestruck at how many people are here, said Keith Kaylor, explaining that his group used to be lucky to draw five people. With Trumps election, he said, A lot of people really were complacent and we got a big shock.
Others were drawn by the groups appeal to centrism and local politics. Robert Wittenstein, president of the Dunwoody Homeowners Association, noted that Seconder spoke of the group representing a spectrum of political opinions, and Im somewhere in the middle.
Held on a covered patio with a buffet and bar, and only brief remarks from Seconder and Park, the low-key event was more cocktail party than political party. But where politics came up, they were decidedly left-wing.
Tamara Johnson-Shealey, a Democrat who has unsuccessfully challenged Dunwoody Republican Fran Millar for the local state Senate seat, worked a table at the door, signing up people to volunteer on progressive campaigns. And the guest speaker announced for the groups next meeting heads an effort to elect candidates who support abortion rights.
Ron Slotin, left, a Democratic candidate for the 6th Congressional District seat, and state Rep. Sam Park (D-Lawrenceville) pose while chatting outside before the Perimeter Progressives meeting. (Photo John Ruch)
The meeting opened with a Pledge of Allegiance playfully led by Carter Dyche, a Dunwoody Elementary School fifth-grader sporting a John Lewis Speaks For Me button, which he said he got from the congressman and Civil Rights leader during an office visit. When Seconder later mentioned Clintons strong showing locally, Dyche called out, Shes the president of Dunwoody!
At least 60 people attended the first hour, and organizers later said a total of 104 people signed in over the course of the evening. Seconder said the group raised more than $750 in donations at the door.
Some of the attendees mingle at the Perimeter Progressives meeting. (Photo John Ruch)
Several attendees noted that the group is part of a wave of new and revived grassroots liberal groups that has followed Trumps election. A very similar group is the Roswell-based Needles in a Haystack, founded in 2012. Other such liberal groups mentioned by attendees were a Gwinnett area chapter of the Indivisible movement; the Huddles that have come from the Womens March demonstrations in January; and Team Seven, a group of progressive activists that has quietly worked on Dunwoody and Sandy Springs elections for a few years.
Im seeing this all around the district, said Slotin. There are progressive groups popping up everywhereIts almost forming neighborhood by neighborhood.
The welcome table at the Perimeter Progressives meeting. (Photo John Ruch)
This election cycle has more groups than usual, said Pontoni, who also served as campaign manager for Michigan state Rep. Gretchen Driskells unsuccessful challenge of an incumbent GOP congressman in the November election.
People are starting to pay attention, especially to local politics, said Johnson-Shealey.
Democracy is a muscle, Park said in an interview before the meeting. To see it beginning to flex and people beginning to wake up is very encouraging.
Perimeter Progressives next will start monthly meetings at the Dunwoody Branch Library. The guest speaker at the March 8 meeting will be Melita Easters of Georgias WIN List, a political action committee aimed at electing Democratic women candidates who support abortion rights.
For more information, see perimeterprogressives.org.
Original post:
Perimeter Progressives political group draws crowd for debut - Reporter Newspapers
ATLANTA One of the protesters in the Atlanta Convention Center, angry and upset over the vote, directed his chants at the atrium full of Democrats.
Party for the people! Curtis Ries yelled. Party for the people!
Tom Perezs narrow victory over Keith Ellison in election to chair the Democratic National Committee a race progressives considered an urgent existential choice between the establishment and grassroots did not spur the massive backlash DNC officials feared in the end. But Ellisons defeat did leave some young, liberal activists with new disdain, as 28-year-old Ries put it, for institutional leadership for the party, for elected officials, the 447 DNC members with a say in the chair.
Liberal support for Ellison, a Minnesota congressman beloved by Bernie Sanders voters, was a very clear message, given to the party by its progressive base, by young people, Ries said. The DNC instead decided that they knew better.
The same frustration cycled through social media into this week: #DemExit hashtags, Facebook statuses on quitting the party, a Medium post for disappointed progressives advising activists to leave behind an organization of paying, craved, cynical lip-service and leaders who live to serve the establishment.
A party chair race rarely decides the direction of a political movement, and this one didnt. Perez, the 55-year-old former labor secretary, is taking the helm of a party still contending with ideological differences and unresolved questions about how Democrats will handle pressure from the left to resist President Trump at every turn.
Since the vote, Perez and Ellison have put forth a united front, making stops in Washington on Tuesday for the first time as chair and deputy chair of the DNC.
But in the wake of a the long-fought chairs race, where Perez was cast as an insider, he is also facing a group of young and progressive grassroots activists and voters who view Democratic Party politics with distrust, unease, or from a remove.
Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders former campaign manager, a Perez critic, and supporter of Ellisons, said that Saturdays vote had likely reinforced that distance.
I think there are a number of people now who have increased skepticism about the party, Weaver said after the DNC vote. It is incumbent on Tom Perez and the rest of the DNC to reach out to people who feel separated from the party, bring those people in, and let them know that the party is a place that welcomes them.
Sanders himself told CNN on Sunday that Perez would have to change is to figure out how we elect national Democratic leaders, adding that he was not quite impressed with the process that exists.
If we do not bring this new generation into institutional politics now, they may never get there, said former DNC chair Howard Dean, a backer of another candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., who bowed out before voting. And that would be the end of the Democratic Party as a functional institution.
Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, one of several liberal groups that backed Ellison, said the congressmans experience as an organizer made him an ideal figure to close the gaps on the left. To actively build bridges between the Democratic Party and the grassroots base, he said.
Of Perez, Green said, This was not an ideological battle.
Perez, he noted, would have been PCCCs first choice for U.S. attorney general had Clinton won.
The lefts objection to Perez has to do in part with his entry into the race, and is centered not on policy but proximity to the Democratic Party establishment.
The week after the presidential election, Ellison launched his chairs bid and quickly secured top endorsements from Sanders and House and Senate Democrats, positioning his campaign as the link between grassroots activists and Washington.
One month later, Perez got in the race, followed by news reports declaring him the preferred candidate of Barack Obama. When Joe Biden endorsed weeks later, Sanders released a statement Do we stay with a failed status-quo approach?
Together with his role as a prominent surrogate for Hillary Clinton in last years campaign, the establishment label stuck. (Perezs resume is less commonplace: He is the first Latino chair of the DNC, a civil rights lawyer, and has only held public office once, on the Montgomery County Council in his home state of Maryland.)
In the three final days before this weekends vote, as the candidates made their final appeals to the DNCs 447 voting members in the meeting rooms and lobby bar of Atlantas Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel, there were warnings among progressives that a Perez victory would incite a revolt among the already alienated left wing.
Weaver, the former Sanders manager, made a splash in a MSNBC hit where he called Perezs candidacy divisive and referred to him as a candidate of the inside whose election would send a horrible message to millions and millions of people. A Glenn Greenwald column in the Intercept called him a party functionary.
When voting ended, the only brief protest inside the Atlanta Convention Center came from Ries and the other Ellison supporters.
The DNC race, the first contested chairs vote since the 1980s, spanned 15 weeks and drew a total of 11 candidates. Perez and Ellison, the frontrunners from the start, went through two long and tense rounds of votes on Saturday before the former labor secretary clinched the majority of votes from DNC members.
See the rest here:
Keith Ellison's Loss Leaves A Sour Taste For Progressives - BuzzFeed News
On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to a nightmare: The election of a hyper-right-wing, single-party government led by people whose values they didn't share, and who didn't reflect the cultural, racial and gender diversity of their hometowns and neighborhoods.
It's a nightmare that a lot of red-staters have been calling "reality" for a long time.
Candice Russell was watching election-night coverage with friends in her hometown of Seattle when the returns came in.
"They were so afraid," Russell, who's now a reproductive justice advocate in Texas, recalls. And yet, a voice in the back of her head didn't feel particularly charitable toward her company: You're safe! You're fine! You're the last people he's going to come for!
Russell's mind turned to the state she now calls home, the place she thought she might leave for good after last summer's Supreme Court ruling striking down parts of Texas' omnibus anti-abortion law: "What would my life look like back home if I chose to go back [to Texas] as a Jewish, queer Latina who talks about abortion on TV?" she wondered. "What happens to me in a Trump administration?"
She decided to find out. Russell cut short a planned two-month West Coast vacation, packed up her dog, and drove halfway across the country to resume the work that has changed and challenged her and even caused her to lose a job after an employer saw Russell tell her abortion story on CNN.
"If I'm going to be afraid, I'm going to be afraid for a reason," she says. "And I'm going to be in a place where I can make a difference."
While much of America comes to grips with the revelation of single-party rule by bigots, another swath of the country is shaking its head in recognition: The red-state progressives battling local and state government officials, law enforcement entities and courts who, through voter suppression, gerrymandering and an incredible fundraising capacity, have subverted the will of the people for years, and sometimes decades. Attacks on trans Americans' right to use public facilities? North Carolina fought back first. Appallingly restrictive anti-abortion laws? Struck down thanks to the persistence of Texas abortion providers. "Papers please"-style deportation forces? Brought Arizona activists to the forefront.
Some of these movements have names Moral Mondays in North Carolina, or the "Unruly Mob" that stood behind Wendy Davis, or the #NoDAPL collective. There are the OKC Artists for Justice, who made rapist cop Daniel Holtzclaw a household name; the people of Ferguson, Missouri, who took to the streets to demand justice for Michael Brown and black men like him; the Texas Christians who've given sanctuary to immigrants despite threats and harsh rhetoric from state leaders.
If the United States is to survive the Trump administration, we must look to the center the geographic center, and the South for leadership in the resistance. That is where we will find many of our most resilient political activists and organizers.
To that end, Rolling Stone asked a half-dozen red-state organizers on what works when governments stop working for the people, and start working against them.
Stay mad and lose big"The national left, if there is one, has spent the last decade having an incredible tolerance for the agony and the neglect that many red states have faced," says Missourian Pamela Merritt, co-founder of the reproductive justice groupReproaction. "They're going to get a dose of what that feels like in their own blue heaven."
Now is the time to channel that newfound anger, Merritt says, and not to focus on caution and compromise. Senate Democrats voting for Trump nominees? Unacceptable. Bernie Sanders willing to work with Trump? Nope. She uses what she calls the "soda pop" metaphor to get her point across, urging organizers, activists and folks on the ground not to settle for Sierra Mist when what they want is a Sprite even if they know they won't get either.
"There's a certain point where you are negotiating where you become Sierra Mist," she says. "As you lean into that negotiation and that appeasement, then you start to just become really bad, flat Sierra Mist, and at some point you're just water in a can, dressed up, but it's not a soda at all."
Clear messaging and confident demands that don't compromise values builds solidarity and shows allies, especially friendly elected officials, that you're serious about creating change.
"If we take that path of caution, I think we lose a tremendous opportunity," says Merritt. "I'm saying this after some great reflection. I think the fate of the republic is at hand right now."
Turn to each other, for each otherWhen government becomes unpetitionable, and losses are assured, the South knows how to create alternative, extra-institutional support systems, says Mary Hooks, co-director of the 25-year-old Southerners on New Ground, which she half-jokingly refers to as "a membership-based organization of dangerous homosexuals, fighting for the liberation of all people across race, class, gender, sexuality."
"One of the gifts, frankly, of organizing in the South and more hostile places, is relationship-based organizing," says SONG co-director Paulina Helm-Hernandez. "It isn't a secret here, who's hostile and who's not."
SONG has the power of what the organization calls its "kinship network," a mutual agreement of support and solidarity that has folks taking in undocumented relatives when they're in danger of deportation, sharing recipes for natural medicines and historic food traditions, and, more broadly, Helm-Hernadez says, "fortifying ourselves to do what is necessary and not allow this moment of fear to turn us against each other."
Anti-immigrant lawmakers try to divide communities of color between those who have documentation and those who don't; others prey on homophobia and transphobia in culturally conservative areas, pitting labor activists against their LGBTQ neighbors. But for SONG, everyone's freedom is tied up in everyone else's, leaving no room for what Helm-Hernandez calls the "transactional cynicism" of traditional politics. It's about freedom, not favors.
"Our lives are connected and so are systems of oppression," says Hooks. "The way we organize must be a reflection of that. We don't believe we should be organizing in silos."
Train for the marathon, not the sprint.If you know the name Daniel Holtzclaw, it's likely thanks to the nonprofit OKC Artists for Justice. Holtzclaw attacked women, some of them sex workers, who'd already had interactions with law enforcement women who, in the eyes of a public steeped in rape culture, didn't fit the bill for sympathetic survivors. OKC Artists for Justice centered those women in their advocacy efforts around the Holtzclaw case anyway.
Executive Director Grace Franklin says her group "focused on sexual assault, [saying,] 'That is wrong in all ways and all contexts and all scenarios; you cannot justify it.'"
That required hard conversations about the community's beliefs about sex, race and gender conversations Franklin knew she wouldn't just need to have once or twice. Preparing for that kind of long-term investment in cultural and political change is essential, she says, to sustainable movement-building.
"It's an exciting time for activism, for really engaging," says Franklin, "and hopefully people will not do it as a sprint." Trump may be the nemesis of the moment, but, she says, "it's not just dealing with him. It's dealing with Congress, what's happening locally, in your states and your cities."
That requires a multi-faceted approach to resistance, she says, that has to be "ready for some losses."
"You're gonna lose a few things, but don't let that deter you," she says. "There's gonna be cuts to arts programs, reducing federal funding for programs that protect women and children. Maybe you don't come out and protest. Maybe what you do is give money."
Confront and call in when the left considers some of its own expendable, or their rights negotiable.An essential component of running this marathon, according to all of the organizers interviewed, is for the left to reckon within itself and confront tough realities about race relations within the movement. It's not enough for white folks who didn't vote for Trump to rest on that knowledge when the vast majority of people who look like them sent him to the White House.
"The system of white supremacy cares about no one but itself and is going to do everything it can do ... to protect itself," says Monica Simpson, executive director of the Atlanta-based, women-of-color-led collective Sister Song. Trump's election, she says, is "a wake-up call for those well-meaning white people. Are they willing to make the change or not?"
In short, this isn't a moment to spend reassuring the "good guys" the good white women, the good Christians that they're not like their conservative counterparts. Rather, it's a moment for the most marginalized in the movement to set the terms of unity.
"Every single battle is a battle to hold the front," says Reproaction's Merritt. "You don't want to take steps back" by sacrificing people and principles.
Candice Russell, the Texas abortion activist who works with the group We Testify, says that often means turning over leadership to people who don't fit into neat narratives of how an advocate should look and be. Russell says that after she testified during the reproductive rights protest in Austin in 2013, she struggled to find a place within organizations that didn't seem to want her. She'd showed up to the capitol in her work clothes, fresh from bartending at a "faux Irish Hooters."
"All I wanted to do was meet people and get involved, and because I didn't fit into what a repro rights activist looked like I'm not white, I don't have a secondary education, I literally came [to the capitol] in bar shorts I didn't fit the aesthetic and I didn't know the language," she says.
"People like me fall through the cracks," says Russell. "All we have is this fire that says we want to [lead], and what I ran into was a bunch of white women with educations telling me that that wasn't good enough."
And so the resistance, if it is to sustain itself, has to learn from red-state success stories and their moments of failure.
"We have all these people who are on fire, all these women who went to this march for the first time, wore the pussy hat, who never felt politicized in their lives before," says Russell. "I think we have a second coming of that awesome opportunity."
Sign up for our newsletter to receive breaking news directly in your inbox.
Read the original here:
Red-State Progressives Hold the Blueprint for the Trump Resistance - RollingStone.com
Democratic US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks after winning at his 2016 New Hampshire presidential primary night rally in Concord. (photo credit:REUTERS)
WASHINGTON Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who enjoys widespread support among liberal Democrats, told a gathering on Monday that progressives should embrace both the founding principles of Zionism as well as the inherent justice of the Palestinian cause.
Speaking before a conference held by J Street, a liberal Jewish American organization that primarily lobbies for a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians, Sanders said that those of us who support Israel have got to tell the truth about policies that hurt the chances of a peaceful resolution.
There is no question that we should be and will be Israels very strong friend and partner in years to come, he said. But we also need to recognize that the Israeli occupation runs contrary to American values and I believe, Israeli values as well.
We need to end this 50 year occupation, he said.
But Sanders said it was particularly important for progressives in the Democratic Party to acknowledge the moral foundation of the Jewish state of Israel a state that began as a progressive enterprise, he argued. Such an acknowledgment does not contradict the need for an independent and dignified Palestinian state.
Sanders campaigned for balance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Democratic Party Platform last year after campaigning with unexpected success against Hillary Clinton for the partys nomination. He ultimately lost, but secured enough support to earn significant representation on the partys platform committee.
Sanders criticized US President Donald Trump for his failure to endorse Palestinian statehood and to wholeheartedly condemn antisemitism nationwide.
The democratic socialist linked a spike in antisemitic incidents with Trumps political rise, and took note of his hesitance to speak out on the matter for weeks. Trump offered prepared remarks condemning antisemitism as an evil scourge last week.
Relevant to your professional network? Please share on Linkedin
Prev Article
UNHRC can not show bias to members
Two killed in overnight shooting incident in Netanya
Next Article
Read this article:
'Particularly important' for progressives to embrace Zionism, Bernie Sanders says - Jerusalem Post Israel News