Sunday, April 24, 2016

It Won't Be Over Even if Hillary is Nominee: Sanders Allies Plot Meeting to Discuss Future of the Movement

The progressive movement that supported Sanders existed before his campaign and will continue after it. But Sanders has expanded it and unified it in a way that creates the potential for a powerful post-election force in politics if it can retain at least some cohesion....  http://portside.org/2016-04-23/sanders-allies-plot-meeting-discuss-future-movement
Bernie may not even be involved in this for all we know but we do know things have changed as the energy of the semi-anarchic Occupy Movement has shifted to the Bernie campaign.

There has been a shortage of stuff on education coming out of Bernie and his crew. Time to escalate the awareness. 

Real ed reformers must be involved in making sure that ed deformers don't jump in and make their phony case that deform is civil rights. (We've seen them to that in the Black Lives Movement).

Right now, despite some criticisms, NPE could be a force if it doesn't get side-tracked into the Randi/Hillary stuff which will be sold as real reform. Union caucus groups like CORE in Chicago and MORE could play a role -- MORE's Mindy Rosier is already deep in the Bernie movement. Some people on the left don't want to hear the words "social democrat" and spend their time attacking Bernie and his supporters. That is the same mentality that led to the left being decimated in Germany by Hitler. I'll take Finland and Denmark any day.

Full article below.
Alex Seitz-Wald
April 21, 2016
MSNBC

The progressive movement that supported Sanders existed before his campaign and will continue after it. But Sanders has expanded it and unified it in a way that creates the potential for a powerful post-election force in politics if it can retain at least some cohesion.

Key allies of Bernie Sanders are planning to meet in Chicago after the final votes have been cast in the Democratic presidential primary to plot the future of the movement galvanized by Sanders’ presidential campaign.

Sanders’ loss in New York’s primary this week has put the Democratic nomination almost certainly out of reach, leading many to wonder what will become of the millions of people who donated, volunteered, and supported his campaign, including many who seem unready to settle for likely nominee Hillary Clinton.

The two-day People’s Summit is timed for mid-June in order to fall between the final set of primaries in California and elsewhere on June 7, and the Democratic National Convention in late July. It aims to continue building the “political revolution” Sanders often invokes and to develop a “People’s Platform” of issues important to the movement.

“There’s a vibrant conversation going on about what happens to the movement after the primaries are over,” said Charles Lenchner, who co-founded the group People for Bernie, which is helping to organize the summit. “This is a collection of groups that share a lot in common and want to work together in the future and who represent a significant portion of the coalition that has come together around Bernie Sanders.”

The event’s partners include many key players — though far from all, at least for now — of the Sanders movement. Lenchner said many other groups are likely to join.

Their focus remains on the campaign, representatives of various groups involved in the summit said, but they wanted to create a plan to come together regardless of whether Sanders wins or loses.
Taking the lead are People for Bernie, which grew out of the Occupy movement, and the National Nurses United union, which has endorsed Sanders and whose super PAC has supported the senator to the tune of nearly $3 million this year.

They’ll be joined by the environmental group 350.org, which backs Sanders, various Sanders-aligned liberal groups like Progressive Democrats of America and pro-Sanders demographic groups. Also on the list is the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund, which sponsored Sanders’ earliest visits to the first-in-the-nation caucus state in 2014. And then there’s the Democratic Socialists of America.

Conversations have already started in lefty circles about what happens after the primary, with a range of ideas about possible organizations, tactics and priorities.

Sanders has always been as much a movement leader as he is a politician, and hundreds of volunteer groups sprouted up organically across the country to support his candidacy and supplement his campaign’s relatively light footprint.

Almost everywhere Sanders’ campaign went, local volunteers had been first, organizing and opening field offices, some of which were absorbed by the official apparatus. In New York, for instance, it was volunteer efforts — not the campaign — that worked to get independent voters to change their party registration before the October deadline.

The progressive movement that supported Sanders existed before his campaign and will continue after it. But Sanders has expanded it and unified it in a way that creates the potential for a powerful post-election force in politics if it can retain at least some cohesion.
“Maybe we’re on the cusp of some really interesting political changes,” Lenchner said.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm a lifelong Democrat and Hillary will never, Never, EVER get my vote.

Anonymous said...

The Hamison Theory of Neutrality of NPE is not a viable strategy for public school teachers hunkered down in urban trenches. Support for ESSA and AFT/NEA endorsements of Clinton are clear indications of appeasement and capitulation in regard to the education reform agenda. I am also a life long Democrat and I am not going to vote for Clinton. We have an abundance of black and Hispanic males serving long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses. We have a failed Middle East policy. My district is well on the way to total privatization. Would you like four to possibly eight more years of Obama's misguided priorities?

Abigail Shure

Anonymous said...

Thanks for President Trump.
Hope you are proud of yourselves.

Anonymous said...

Lemme guess. You voted for Nader in 2000, because Gore wasn't all you desired. That gave us GWB. I am aware of Obama's flaws, but one should never say, "I'll never vote for [ ]." An election is almost always a choice of the lesser of two evils. Should the Republican get in, you can kiss the Supreme court goodbye. Frankly, everytime I see a 25mph sign while driving, I swear I'll never vote for DiBlasio. But then I edit my comments. I'll never vote for DiBlasio provided he's not running against someone who will be worse.

ed notes online said...

I voted for Nader because I could in ny.
I'm hearing it can't get better until it gets worse. Let's not assume gore would not have been pressured into invading Iraq. Remembervlyndon Johnson?

Anonymous said...

There was no "pressure" on anyone to invade Iraq. That was an invention of the Bush administration, pure and simple. (although I agree that the old "JFK would have pulled us out of Vietnam had he lived" argument was nonsense). What does it mean to get worse first? The SC stopped the Paris accord on climate. Shall we lose 8 years or 16 before we even begin to get serious about that. What about women who won't be able to exercise choice? Shall we ask them to wait for this upcoming utopia that will arrive once things get really really bad?

And let's look at history. Let these pundits who want things to get worse first give us some examples of how things got so much better after they got worse? No way, Norm. Human history is a catalogue of one disaster after another with incremental change for the good stitched into the fabric. Hillary will appoint a liberal SC justice, or three. She'll move us in the right direction on climate change. She'll work for the environment, for women's rights. She'll try to manage the international disaster that GWB created, one that will continue to cause us misery for the next 30 years at least. I'm for Hillary.

ed notes online said...

Hillary will get nothing done with a republican congress and states under their control. They will wait her out for years before appointing a liberal justice. On education? Look at her history going back 35 years. Charters will flourish. Yet if I were the deciding vote I might still vote for her.

ed notes online said...

As for pressure to invade Iraq so many of us knew it was an invention. I view history not as an accident but as a movement from enough of the power structure to make it happen. I don't have faith gore would not have succumbed. And the financial crisis would have happened anyway. The actual president doesn't have as much impact as we think.

Anonymous said...

If it's Pres Trump, it's the democrats you should thank. When they stop taking teachers' votes for granted and actually scratch our backs after we've scratched theirs, then maybe teachers like me will start voting for them again. Lesser of 2 evils will not get me to cast my ballot for Hilary. If Hilary's the best the dems can offer up, I'd rather vote for a fascist orangutan...and it looks like I'm going to get that opportunity come November. Roseanne McCosh