No We Can’t, Without a Revolution: Why Bernie Sanders Is More of a Realist Than Barack Obama

Without a political revolution, Sanders’ agenda is sure to fail. And he knows it.

BY Darlena Cunha

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18931/no-we-cant-bernie-sanders-is-more-of-a-realist-than-obama

“I believe that, as hard as it will be, the change we need is coming, because I’ve seen it, because I’ve lived it.” 

“We can seize this future together.”

“If you are willing to work with me … then I promise you change will come.”

President Barack Obama said these things on the campaign trail in 2008 and 2012. His stance didn’t waver; his hope didn’t crumble. President Obama truly believed in “Yes, we can.” And he brought us with him.

He brought us as far as he could, anyway.

Obama believed we would close Guantanamo Bay; he believed we could make college affordable. He believed he could close the tax loopholes that benefit huge corporations at the expense of individuals, that he could push through universal healthcare with lower premiums.

Obama believed we could do all of these things within the system we gave him. He thought he could create change by working inside the establishment, changing the policy that sits atop the current structure of our democracy.

Obama believed in us, as we are. He was a young candidate. His tenure in politics had been relatively short. He had a revitalizing naïveté about him. “Yes, we can” stood for: Yes, we can make our politics work. Yes, we can work inside this box to make them happen together.

It was a powerful message, and it was necessary to pave the way for Bernie Sanders’ message, which is, “No, we can’t. Unless we transform the system.”

Sanders, unlike Obama, is bluntly calling for a political revolution. He is not working around the faults in our system, but laying them bare. The type of change Sanders is using to woo voters doesn’t stay inside our current political box. It is appealing because it tosses that box in the dumpster. And it would not have resonated without Obama’s “Yes, we can” going first and showing us the limits of what is possible within our current constraints. 

We look back at that refrain and think, “Well, we tried.” We tried, and we’ve been in gridlock financially and politically for seven years. But we tried. The voter base that leans progressive now has viable proof that we have done everything we can within our system. Congress is in such gridlock that Republican leaders are refusing to hear nominations for a Supreme Court Justice. Because of this, voters are ready for the bold statement, “No, we can’t.” 

Bernie Sanders has surprised the country and the mainstream media with his persistent popularity, shooting up from “protest candidate” (as rival Martin O’Malley initially dismissed him) to Hillary Clinton’s only threat. 

Having been in politics for decades upon decades, Sanders has no illusions about the presidency or the Congress. As he said on CNN back in 2012:

I think that many people have the mistaken impression that Congress regulates Wall Street. … The real truth is that Wall Street regulates Congress. 

He reiterated that sentiment in a Democratic debate in October 2015: 

We need to raise the public consciousness. We need the American people to know what’s going on in Washington in a way that today they do not know. 

Bernie Sanders came to the campaign trail effectively screaming, “No, we can’t.” No, we can’t—unless we break the corporate chokehold on our democracy. No, we can’t—unless we muster a popular uprising strong enough to transform the structure of our government.

If voters heed this call, if we elect Bernie Sanders as our next president, we know it must also go beyond “the Bern.” A president cannot overthrow core tenets of rotten policy without the political muscle of Congress. As we gear up to vote, we must remember that we’re voting not for one day, or for one year. We tried to let a president do it by himself. This time, we need to give the president not only the White House but a Congress to work with. Because no, we can’t. Not right now.

Sanders is of course no shoo-in for the White House, or even the nomination. But even if we get a President Clinton (or, heaven forbid, a President Trump), we’ve acknowledged how deep our problems run and how we indeed need nothing short of a political revolution. 

Darlena Cunha

Darlena Cunha is a former television producer. She has written for Time, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, the New York Times, McSweeney's and elsewhere.

The Story Behind the Immigrant Workers in Bernie Sanders’ Stirring New Ad Lauding Worker Organizing

BY Michelle Chen

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18944/bernie-sanders-coalition-immokalee-workers-florida-tomato-pickers

Bernie Sanders’ newest campaign video, which will air tomorrow night on the Spanish-language channel Univision, features the candidate ceding the spotlight to a representative group that doesn’t get a lot of play in most political ads: a migrant mother, speaking entirely in Spanish, who works in Florida's farm fields. The story behind the workers featured in the ad is one of quiet and passionate organizing far outside the Beltway.

Eight years ago, the Senator from Vermont came to Capitol Hill with a message from Florida. Bernie Sanders had just seen hell on earth, and he wanted everyone in Washington to know. He helped coordinate a Senate health, education and labor committee hearing on the tomato pickers of Florida. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) were a fairly obscure group back in 2008—pre-Occupy, pre-Fight for 15, two years after the immigration reform movement had just suffered a defeat in Congress.

At the time, the economy was hurtling into the Great Recession, and the Latino migrants of Florida’s tomato fields seemed a far cry from the financial panic on Wall Street. But the workers had a story to tell, after struggling since the early 1990s for fair wages and rights at work: they had long suffered daily abuses, wage theft and oftentimes literal enslavement.

So the Senate’s lone socialist paid a visit to Immokalee. He spent days touring their work sites, walking alongside the workers as they lined up to grab work shifts at the edge of dawn, accompanying them to sun-scorched fields where they hauled bucket after bucket of greenish unripened tomatoes that eventually made their way into burgers and grocery aisles nationwide, to consumers oblivious to the drudgery and abuse behind their cheap meals.

Sanders discussed the workers’ plight in an interview with the Coalition’s homegrown low-power FM station. And back on Capitol Hill, he amplified the workers’ message of corporate accountability and economic justice. The unrest that would explode after the 2007-2008 financial crisis was still on the horizon, but Sanders struck a chord with the disaffected when he announced an initiative he was spearheading with Senators Ted Kennedy, Richard Durbin and Sherrod Brown to pressure Burger King and the producer-cartel Florida Tomato Growers Exchange to agree to CIW’s reform program: an additional penny paid to workers per pound picked.

The fair wages scheme, the core of a national Campaign for Fair Food, leveraged consumer and worker pressure outside of a formal collective bargaining structure or legislative mandate. CIW organizers recognized the global and horizontal nature of the agribusiness system and sought to restructure the “farm-to-table” supply chain by forming a broad-based social contract, popularized through colorful protest and outreach campaigns. Workers had been mobilizing well before Sanders lent his support, but his visit helped raised the national profile of the migrant workers' initiative as a human rights campaign.

Announcing the senators' backing of the fair wage program, Sanders said, “the struggles of the Immokalee workers resonated well beyond the local fields. He warned:

In the United States today the truth is that millions of American workers are being forced into a race to the bottom. … As poverty increases and as the middle class shrinks, these workers are seeing their standard of living in rapid decline. They’re working longer hours for lower wages…What we have on the tomato fields here in Florida are workers who in fact exist at the lowest economic rung of that race to the bottom.

Evoking solidarity across sectors and communities, Sanders urged the public to “deal with this issue from the understanding that if we look the other way, and accept the terrible exploitation that is taking place here, every American is endangered as the race to the bottom accelerates.”

His words anticipated a grassroots surge that would later fuel other movements galvanized by the economic crisis, including the Fight for 15 and the mushrooming of grassroots worker centers for non-union, low-wage, immigrant workforces.

The CIW's campaign also helped illustrate the connection between the food system and the financial system that foreshadowed today’s food justice movements, focusing on sustainable production and humane working conditions across the supply chain: “The American people need to know why financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and others …who are prepared to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses for their top executives, are not putting pressure on companies like Burger King to do the morally right thing.”

Today, the Fair Food campaign has secured agreements with an estimated 90 percent of tomato growers and four major fast food brands, including McDonald’s and Burger King. The organizers are now trying to lock down the mainstream supermarket sector after scoring agreements from Walmart, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Lacking the full force of a labor union, the CIW hasn’t resolved all the problems in the industry. But it has provided significant wage increases and instituted comprehensive safety standards. Under a comprehensive Code of Conduct, workers have sought recourse for more than 1000 disputes over issues like wage theft and sexual and verbal abuse.

The new Sanders campaign video captures the tenor of 2008, when economic collapse was upturning the status quo and forced some once-divided groups to adopt a common language of class struggle. The five-minute video is more of a miniature documentary about a worker-led campaign that forged a template for labor organizing in a globalized economy—perhaps a metaphor for the Sanders' campaign, but also an example of how Sanders and his backers see his campaign as bigger than this election cycle. The video does not highlight Sanders's presidential platform, but speaks to a deeper grassroots ethos of social change from which his politics emerged.

One of CIW's member-activists, Udelia, reflects on the group’s progress over the past several years. “Politicians never came to Immokalee” before Sanders’s made his visit, she recalls. “He didn’t keep silent about what he witnessed here in Immokalee. … There are now more rights and worker support. We started to see changes in our wages. It really improved our lives. I could buy small things for my children. This changes a person.”

The Coalition is now embarking on a multi-state protest march, while their old ally Bernie is barreling ahead on the campaign trail. Their two intersecting paths, which will cross soon in the Florida primary, continue the momentum that started eight years ago. The sense of collective outrage they articulated then has only grown louder, inspiring other grassroots movements and stoking fierce reaction from the right. Neither the workers nor the Senator expects immediate victory to be on the horizon, but they've never doubted they’re headed in the right direction. So far, neither have been proven wrong.

Michelle Chen

Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times, a contributor to Working In These Times, and an editor at CultureStrike. She is also a co-producer of Asia Pacific Forum on Pacifica's WBAI. Her work has appeared on Alternet, Colorlines.com, Ms., and The Nation, Newsday, and her old zine, cain. Follow her on Twitter at @meeshellchen or reach her at michellechen [at] inthesetimes [dot] com.

Tenemos Familias | Bernie Sanders

Shockingly, the Washington Post Investigated Itself for Anti-Bernie Sanders Bias and Found None

The paper had just run 16 negative stories about Sanders in 16 hours.

BY Adam Johnson

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18956/shockingly-the-washington-post-investigated-itself-for-anti-bernie-sanders

On Tuesday, FAIR published a straightforward recapping of 16 hours of Washington Post stories that displayed a remarkable run of negative articles about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The FAIR post and a corresponding tweet went viral: retweeted thousands of times, shared on Facebookand Reddit thousands more, and written up in TruthDig,The Young Turks, USUncut and the Daily Caller.

Due to this surge of coverage of our coverage of its coverage (yes, media criticism gets somewhat meta), the Washington Post decided to respond to our criticism, staffing out the unenviable task to The Fix’s Callum Borchers, who gave us “Has the Washington Post Been Too Hard on Bernie Sanders This Week?”

Right off, the framing is inaccurate: The scope wasn’t “this week,” it was a 16-hour period after the Flint, Michigan, debate—and following a weekend in which Sanders won three of four state contests with Hillary Clinton. The do-or-die stakes for Sanders in Michigan couldn’t have been higher, and how one of the most influential newspapers in the United States covered his debate performance and his primary showing was important.

After arguing that working for the Washington Post would not impede his ability to show why the paper was in the right, Borchers begins by casting aspersions on Sanders conspiratorial partisans:

The notion of an anti-Sanders agenda clearly resonated—no surprise, given that the Vermont senator has complained about media coverage, generally, and the Post, specifically.

It doesn’t “resonate,” is the implication, because it’s actually true; it must be that Dear Leader has poisoned minds with thoughts of media conspiracy.

Borchers’ main effort is to narrow the definition of a “negative” story.

First, the definition of “negative” — in this case and in a lot of media griping — is overly broad. For example, the “negative” category, according to FAIR, included a story by The Fix's Philip Bump with the following headline:

“Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals.”

Bump pointed out that to keep a campaign promise — “At the end of my first term, we will not have more people in jail than any other country” — Sanders would need to set free roughly a quarter of the United States prison population, or about 567,000 criminals.

Is that negative? I mean, it’s math.

At a moment when even the Koch brothers are coming out against overincarceration, a story that thumbnails it as “releasing lots of criminals” can indeed be considered a negative framing, if not more importantly one that shortchanges readers’ intelligence and understanding.

Still, note that “negative” is not intended as the opposite of “factual.” When the George Bush Sr. campaign focused on Michael Dukakis’ prison furlough program—the so-called “Willie Horton” issue—its attacks were nominally fact-based. Yet many people saw them as an unfair exploitation of racial fears, and it was relevant to address them on those terms.

Bigger picture: The reason the graphic and FAIR’s blog post went so viral is because people can intuitively look at a litany of stories over such a short period and see bias. Nature made us pattern-seeking mammals for a reason, and the Washington Post’s post-debate coverage displays an obvious pattern.

And Borchers doesn’t so much deny that pattern as attempt to justify it:

It is important, of course, that a newspaper’s opinion and analysis pieces reflect a range of perspectives. Overall, I can confidently say the Post‘s do. But if you’re going to take a one-day sample — on a day when Sanders was coming off a debate performance that was widely panned — you’re going to find a lot of opinion and analysis that reflects that consensus.

His evidence, though, is unpersuasive; for evidence that Sanders’ debating was “widely panned,” he links only to a piece by Salon’s Amanda Marcotte—author of such articles as “Why I’m Supporting Clinton Over Sanders” and  “Let’s Storm the Sanders’ He-Man Women-Haters Club.”

It’s true that many corporate media pundits thought Sanders did poorly in the Flint debate, and that opinion was the content of many of the negative stories that FAIR highlighted. But that only spurs questions about the editorial choice to focus overwhelmingly on debate etiquette in a time period in which Sanders’ actual electoral performance included a victory in the Maine caucuses (announced during the Flint debate) and top pollings in two out of three states. The former reflects pundits’ opinions, while the latter reflects actual voters’ choices.

For a piece ostensibly intended to prove the Post unbiased, Borchers’ conclusion is problematic, in that it suggests that they are biased, but consider it compensatory:

Finally, even if we accept the idea that Post reporting, analysis and commentary combined to put Sanders through the wringer, I fail to see the inherent trouble. As I’ve written before, Sanders skated through the early portion of the primary season on stories about his “yuge” crowds and better-than-expected poll numbers. It was one of the perks of being an underdog.

Readers and voters don’t ask for media to use their coverage to offer “perks” or comeuppances to candidates as they see fit, but to render accurate coverage that reflects what voters are concerned about.

In this case, a dry-eyed reading suggests that the range of perspectives reflected by the Post's pundit roster simply does not include many people who identify with the challenge to the political establishment Sanders’ candidacy reflects—and considerably more people who feel an affinity with the network of political, economic and media elites who have thrown their support behind Clinton. That this should be reflected in their editorial decision-making is not particularly surprising, just worthy of consideration.

Adam Johnson

Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.