In Brazil’s First Elections Under Bolsonaro, Black Women are Fighting Back

Amidst violence and COVID-19 restrictions, Black women in Brazil are mobilizing to win seats in the November 15th municipal elections and open the gateway to electoral power. Brazil ranks 132nd out of 192 countries in women’s representation.




November 14, 2020 Bruna Pereira/ Macarena Aguilar OPENDEMOCRACY




https://portside.org/2020-11-14/brazils-first-elections-under-bolsonaro-black-women-are-fighting-back




“When she was murdered, the Black women’s movement dealt with this collective trauma by turning it into institutional political action,” says Ana Carolina Lourenço, co-founder of Mulheres Negras Decidem (Black Women Decide). She is referring to Marielle Franco, the Black, queer Rio de Janeiro councilwoman and an outspoken critic of police brutality, who was assassinated before Brazil’s 2018 general election.

Worldwide, Brazil ranks joint 132nd out of 192 countries in terms of women’s representation in legislative bodies, lagging behind most of its regional neighbours. At the local level, only 12% of city halls are run by women, and Black women – who make up 27% of the Brazilian population – govern only 3% of municipalities.

But more than 1,000 Black women all over Brazil raised their hands to run for office following Franco’s murder in 2018, a 60% increase on the previous election cycle in 2014. Even the increase in the number of women candidates today is seen as part of the mobilisation that started in response to Franco’s murder.

The 2018 elections were a pivotal moment for the participation of women in Brazilian politics. Between 2014 and 2018, the number of women in state and district government grew from 120 to 164 – a 37% increase. At the federal level, 51 women won a seat in the 513-strong House of Representatives in 2014, and 77 in 2018 – a 51% increase.

Mulheres Negras Decidem, a collective created in 2018 to raise the profile of Black women candidates and to create and present data about the challenges confronting Black women in politics, gained momentum as part of this movement.

Lourenço traces the wave of Black women involved in politics back to the formative decades of the 1990s and the start of the 2000s. Through affirmative action, Black women started to access universities, and many gained experience in government when the Workers’ Party was in power between 2003 and 2016.

As a result, more women candidates than ever, including Black women, are set to contest municipal elections this month – the first elections since President Bolsonaro took power. These women are braving violence, and opposition from the mostly all-male conservative parties who still rule Brazil.
Stronger together: collective candidacies

For Taina Rosa, running for city council in Belo Horizonte, capital of the south-eastern state of Minas de Gerais, it all started last year at the iconic Ocupa Politica gathering. There, she met a number of prominent women involved in politics and “instantly decided I wanted to be part of this movement of Black women occupying politics,” she recalls.

“That same day, I talked to Lauana and we created Mulheres Negras Sim (Yes to Black Women).”

Lauana Nara is her political partner in this ‘collective candidacy’.

“We chose this name deliberately to emphasise a ‘yes’ to life in view of the many murders of Black women, and a ‘yes’ to our presence in the spaces of power from which we have always been excluded,” explained Rosa.

First adopted in 2016, collective candidacies like that of Mulheres Negras Sim have transformed Brazil’s political landscape, so that it is more representative of the country’s racial mix and includes more women. The concept is simple. A group of people with a common goal run together for the same seat. If elected, one of the members serves as the official representative, but the group makes decisions together.

Inspired by the experience of successful collectives such as Juntas in Recife and Bancada Ativista in São Paulo, this approach was the obvious choice for Rosa.

“I never thought of adopting another model,” she said. “My experience in politics has always been one of solidarity. In order to make our demands, we join forces.”

“Lauana and I intend to run a campaign that involves dialogue and brings politics close to the people,” adds Rosa, who describes herself as “a daughter of social and Black movements from the favelas, and a product of affirmative action”.

Their campaign promises include combating institutional racism, distributing resources fairly to reach the poorest people, and investigating the murders of Black youth in marginalised neighbourhoods. They also promise to do more to address the rampant gender-based violence during the pandemic and to create 24-hour childcare to support women who are left at home with their children.
Training women for politics

Roberta Eugênio, from the non-profit group Instituto Alziras, which trains women candidates on campaign and communication strategies, as well as how electoral legislation and financing works, says that women have always been engaged in politics.

But their involvement has mostly been in neighbourhood associations, where they have fought for basic sanitation, healthcare, education and childcare. “What we are seeing now is a recognition of, and support for, their formal involvement,” she said.

This year alone, Eugênio has coached almost 2,000 pre-candidates, from a wide spectrum of political parties, on how to run for the position of councillor or mayor in the upcoming elections. Half of the trainees were Black women and many will run for office in some of Brazil’s remotest regions.

Eugênio feared that the impact of COVID-19 would deter women from campaigning, but she was encouraged by the high turnout for her course. “Municipal elections are a gateway for women to access formal politics,” she explained.

Instituto Alziras research found that towns run by women mayors were almost 50% more likely to have gender parity in local government offices.

“Even if the number of women elected in a few weeks increases by just 1%, 2% or even 3%, which seems like a little, the multiplier effect is big,” she explained. Many more women now have the tools and networks to continue the race until, eventually, they make a breakthrough.

According to the Superior Electoral Court (which regulates Brazil’s electoral system), 34% of candidates registered to contest city council positions are women, of which 16.8% are Black. The race for mayors isn’t as promising: only 13% of candidates are women, of which 4.5 % are Black.

For the last decade, Brazil has required that 30% of each party’s candidates be women, but that has done little to boost the participation of women in state and national legislatures. Parties often ran ‘ghost’ women candidates just to meet the quota and gave them little support or resources.

Another law, passed shortly before the 2018 elections, required parties to allocate at least 30% of taxpayer-financed electoral funds to women. But again, in many instances, parties used women candidacies to siphon money to male candidates.

Ana Carolina Lourenço from Mulheres Negras Decidem notes that quotas for women do not necessarily mean greater inclusion of Black women, who are still the most underrepresented group in Brazilian politics. But she acknowledges that laws passed post-2015 to boost women's political participation have helped to empower women within political parties, and increase accountability and the involvement of civil society.
Backlash and hate speech

Ironically, as Black women in politics gain visibility and collect victories, so does Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-rights agenda, which impacts them disproportionately.

“Bolsonaro’s politics and speech clash directly and obviously with the Black women's movement,” said Lourenço. “All the public policies that his government destroys, or enacts, affect our priorities, which include defending human rights as well as mainstreaming race and gender in public policies.”

Violence against women running for office is also on the rise. A few days ago, federal representative, Talíria Petrone, said she had received death threats. “Attacks on women and Black bodies should not be normalised in any context, including in the exercise of parliamentary mandates and in electoral processes,” Petrone said in a statement urging followers to sign an international petition calling for her protection. Since 2017, when she became a council member in the state of Rio de Janeiro at the same time as the late Marielle Franco, Petrone has received regular threats.

A recent study by Instituto Alziras found that violence – along with inadequate funding and lack of visibility in the media – was one of the key factors still keeping women out of politics. “Violence against female political candidates starts with minor provocations, which are considered harmless. And then it escalates,” explained Eugênio.

Training for prospective candidates by women’s groups usually includes advice on online security and what to do if they become victims of different kinds of violence.

Rosa recalls a string of hate and racist messages that appeared in the chat during an online meeting of Mulheres Negras Sim in late September.

“I fear that this direct violence on my body may continue,” she said. “You see, Bolsonaro’s hate policy does not suit us. We need to bring our culture into politics, so that it stops being grey and starts to reflect our population.”

Trump Fleeces Supporters On His Way Out

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gf-IUypXeA&ab_channel=SecularTalk

Biden Wins, But Now the Hard Part Begins

Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies have yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that getting Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission.




November 14, 2020 Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy THE INTERCEPT




https://portside.org/2020-11-14/biden-wins-now-hard-part-begins




WITH PENNSYLVANIA, Wisconsin, and Michigan now squarely in Joe Biden’s corner, the former vice president has secured the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidential election. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, President Donald Trump held leads in all three states, but as votes from Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other urban areas were counted, Biden climbed ahead. On Friday morning, after Biden overtook Trump in the Pennsylvania vote count, Decision Desk HQ called the race for Biden.

At the same moment that those votes from heavily progressive cities beset by protests were putting Biden over the top, House Democrats were locked in a tortured, three-hour conference call on Thursday. Centrist after centrist lambasted the party’s left for costing it seats in the lower chamber and threatening its ability to win the Senate. It created a surreal juxtaposition: Had progressive organizing on the ground around left-leaning issues driven registration and turnout for Biden where he needed it, or had it hurt the party more broadly? Or was it both?

The fiercest criticism was leveled by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA official who won an upset victory in rural and suburban Virginia in 2018. Her victory was symbolic, in that she toppled Dave Brat, the tea party upstart who had himself toppled Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014, presaging Trump’s rise a year later. In 2018, Brat accused Spanberger of endorsing and being in league with, by dint of her party identification, Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi — even though she theatrically distanced herself from all three, as well as former President Barack Obama. Her rousing defense — “Abigail Spanberger is my name!” — earned her a viral clip at a debate with Brat:

:



Spanberger won a narrow victory and spent 2019 and 2020 further distancing herself from the party’s progressive wing. She is once again locked in a close count, but appears to again have the upper hand, poised for reelection.

It has not diminished her rage toward the left. On the call Thursday, Spanberger vented not at “abolish ICE” but at “defund the police,” the slogan that gained mainstream currency following the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Rep. Conor Lamb, whose special election victory in 2018 was a bellwether of the coming blue wave, backed Spanberger up. “Spanberger was talking about something many of us are feeling today: We pay the price for these unprofessional and unrealistic comments about a number of issues, whether it is about the police or shale gas,” Lamb said. “These issues are too serious for the people we represent to tolerate them being talked about so casually.”

But Lamb’s criticism of his party colleagues goes to the heart of the flaw in the argument. Lamb wasn’t forced to defend defunding the police because of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other members of the Squad. Rather, it was Lamb who went to a Black Lives Matter protest and took a maskless photo with a (white) woman holding a “defund the police” sign. His GOP opponent hammered Lamb for it. Most centrist politicians think of politics as top-down — a strategy that’s decided upon and then implemented. But “defund the police” — whatever one thinks of the slogan — came from the protest movement that grew out of Minneapolis, not from the messaging department of the Squad Central Committee.

Democrats actually benefited from a surge in voter registrations amid the protests, as noted by Tom Bonier, head of the major Democratic data firm TargetSmart.



Party leader James Clyburn, the Democrat from South Carolina whose endorsement of Biden launched him to the nomination, warned on the call that if Democrats ran on Medicare for All and other progressive issues, they would lose the upcoming Georgia Senate special elections that will determine control of the upper chamber and dictate whether Biden and the Democrats have the possibility of implementing a legislative agenda. (Alaska’s Senate seat, a contest between Republican Sen. Al Sullivan and independent challenger Al Gross, is still up for grabs. While Sullivan is currently ahead, the count of the remaining 44 percent of votes — absentee ballots — won’t begin until Monday.)

Even so, progressives defended a number of Republican-leaning seats. Democratic Rep. Katie Porter won reelection by 8 points in California’s 45th District, covering Orange County and Irvine, which she flipped in 2018. Further south, Rep. Mike Levin, who flipped the 49th District two years ago, won reelection, beating his Republican opponent by 12 points. Both are co-sponsors of the Medicare for All bill in the House, as are Jared Golden in Maine, Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Josh Harder in California, and Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania, who all won reelection in swing districts. And Rep. Tom Malinowski also defended his northern New Jersey district with an 8-point win, again holding onto a district he flipped in 2018. Cook Political Report had rated both Porter and Malinowski’s districts as R+3, and Levin’s as R+1.

Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies have yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that getting Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission. As attention will shift to the Georgia special elections, can Democrats rally the troops simply to help Biden confirm slightly more progressive cabinet nominees? What is the Democratic agenda that the party can pledge to voters to inspire them to vote in that January special election?

From the progressive perspective, it’s an easy question to answer, and Ocasio-Cortez has made the argument herself repeatedly: It’s better to have Democrats in control so that the left can push them to be better, whereas Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown himself immune to protest from the left. But that’s not a message from the party itself.

And if Democrats don’t find a message — or insist on spending the next few weeks attacking its left flank — then they have little chance of winning the Senate. Mike Siegel, a Democrat who ran and lost as a populist progressive in suburban Texas, said on this week’s Deconstructed podcast that without a persuasive message coming from the top of the ticket, he was unable to convince disaffected voters that he was serious about fundamental change. Without the Senate, Biden will be a badly hobbled president, the kind that is routinely dealt a blow in the first midterm. While Spanberger and Lamb may be angry, it appears that both will still win, as will dozens of their colleagues who first won in 2018. In 2022, they may look back on this election fondly if they don’t deliver something for the people who elected them.

THE FEARS PUT forward by centrist Democrats are the flip side of the same political vision that Trump used to fuel his base. In nearly every one of his rallies this fall, he singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar for attack, arguing that she was so toxic in Minnesota that she would deliver the state’s suburbs to him. He made the same claim about Rep. Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and about the rising strength of the left in Philadelphia, which he singled out during the first presidential debate, claiming that “bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

Yet Trump’s hopes were dashed. “He effed around and found out,” said Omar on Deconstructed when asked about Trump’s strategy of demonizing her to win suburban votes. Indeed, not only did margins for Democrats expand in the suburbs in Minnesota, but Omar’s strength in Minneapolis also helped power Biden to the win.

The same is true of the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia, where strong left organizing catapulted Biden past Trump in two of the three states that were crucial to the incumbent’s 2016 victory, and a third (Minnesota) that the Trump campaign hoped desperately to flip.

In the late summer, as the GOP was knocking on a million doors per week in August, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee resisted a return to in-person canvassing — even though it had become apparent that there was a safe way to do so — and advised their surrogates to do the same.

In Minneapolis and Detroit, Omar and Tlaib both rejected the advice of the Biden campaign and instead sent volunteers to persuade people not just to come out to vote for their member of Congress — after all, they had effectively no GOP competition in their general elections — but to do their part in ousting Trump by voting for Biden. In Philadelphia, where leftist candidates have romped over the past four years, thanks in part to a robust organizing community that saw two of their leaders elected to the state House on Tuesday, unions and organizers spent the final stretch of the campaign knocking doors in areas where voters felt ignored by the Democratic Party.

It’s too early to know precisely what effect the progressive canvassing operations and organizing had on the vote, as that will require a deeper dive into the data to determine how many irregular or first-time voters were pushed to the polls. Turnout surged everywhere — Biden garnered more votes than any presidential candidate in history — but it’s clear, at minimum, that Trump’s high-profile attacks against Omar and Tlaib did not deliver him those states, and there is preliminary evidence that their operations were disproportionately beneficial to Biden.

In Detroit, voter turnout reached its highest point in decades, election officials reported, even as the city’s population has declined by 10,000 since 2016, and 3,000 people in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, died from Covid-19. Overall in the county, Biden won 587,000 to 264,000, a net of 323,000 votes, though more are still left to be counted. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in the city of Detroit by about 1,000 votes, but outperformed her by 67,630 votes throughout the entire county; that bump helped put him over the top in a state that Clinton lost by some 10,700 votes.

With about 90 percent of the votes in her district counted, Tlaib already has more than 220,000 votes, having beaten her Republican opponent by some 170,000 votes and counting. That’s a significant jump from 2016, when John Conyers Jr., who previously held the seat, won it with fewer than 200,000 votes.

Oakland County, the suburbs outside Detroit, also went strongly to Biden. Clinton netted roughly 54,000 votes there in 2016, but Biden won it by 110,000 votes.

In Minnesota, Omar’s district saw explosive growth in turnout, with more than 400,000 people casting votes. The district netted Biden more than 250,000 votes in a state he won by just 232,000. And despite Trump’s hopes, the suburbs did not recoil at Omar, giving Biden a bigger margin than Clinton won there.

In Pennsylvania, where ballots are still being counted, Biden outperformed Clinton in Philadelphia’s suburbs, including Montgomery, Chester, Bucks, and Delaware counties — giving him a crucial boost even as voter turnout in the city of Philadelphia dropped. In other parts of the state, he flipped back to blue the counties of Eerie and Northampton, which both voted twice for Obama before flipping for Trump.




BOTH OMAR AND Tlaib faced competitive primaries, which they won comfortably, and they never really stopped campaigning into the general election. Their teams worked together, swapping notes on how to safely canvas in a pandemic, and also worked closely with Rep. Mark Pocan, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who represents Madison, Wisconsin. Omar’s team made 1.4 million attempts to reach out to voters through phone, text, or in person. They knocked on more than 150,000 doors, hitting everyone in the district more than twice on average, according to Jeremy Slevin, Omar’s communications director. A record 400,000 people voted in the district, netting Biden 253,000 votes. Biden visited St. Paul, but not Minneapolis, where his wife Jill Biden visited early last month.

Omar’s campaign hired dozens of organizers to turn out voters when Minnesota started early voting in September, the Washington Post reported. They knocked throughout October and up to Election Day, especially targeting voters who sat out in 2016. Omar was also one of the only Democratic Farmer-Labor Party candidates to continue canvassing, the Star Tribune reported.

Tlaib’s campaign focused on voters who turned out in 2012 and stayed home in 2016, and knocked 16,000 doors in the six weeks leading up to Election Day. They made close to 150,000 calls and sent 100,000 text messages and 100,000 pieces of mail. “Our message was more about Democrats up and down the ballot,” said Tlaib’s Communications Director Denzel McCampbell.

In Philadelphia, Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive group focused on working-class issues founded in 2016 by local organizers, has helped grow a squad of their own in state and local office. Two Reclaim Philadelphia alums, Nikil Saval, who helped found the group, and Rick Krajewski, previously a staff organizer, won their elections to the state House on Tuesday. A coalition of local and national groups in the city — including Saval and Krajewski’s campaigns, other local elected officials, and unions — knocked 370,000 doors in the weeks leading up to Election Day. That included West/Southwest Philly Votes, the unions Unite Here and Service Employees International Union, campaigns for State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, and City Council Members Kendra Brooks, a WFP council member, and Jamie Gauthier. The 215 People’s Alliance, another local grassroots group, made a total of 35,000 calls and texts to Philadelphia voters, and provided 5,650 meals to voters and poll workers with help from the People’s Kitchen, a local food security project. National groups like For Our Future and Changing the Conversation knocked doors in Philly as well.

There were a number of virtual organizing operations as well. The Working Families Party’s $1.5 million Vote Today Program netted 93,400 conversations about early voting, 76,900 commitments, and more than 2,000 newly registered voters in Philadelphia. They recruited just under 500 volunteers for the effort, which extended to protests and dance parties at “count every vote” protests on Wednesday and Thursday. Nuestro PAC, a group that worked to turn out the Latino vote, run by former Bernie Sanders adviser Chuck Rocha, spent $2.1 million on bilingual outreach over the last four months.



Organizers with West/Southwest Philly Votes, a partnership between Krajewski and Gauthier’s campaigns, knocked 20,000 doors between October 3 and Election Day, an effort that took about 345 three-hour volunteer shifts. Members from SEIU’s Local 32BJ joined that effort, said Rachie Weisberg, field director for West/Southwest Philly Votes.

Reclaim partnered with the campaigns for Krajewski and Fiedler to knock doors, said Amanda McIllmurray, Reclaim Philadelphia political director and Saval’s campaign manager. Together with PA Stands Up, a coalition of grassroots organizing groups that grew out of a response to the 2016 election, 8,000 volunteers across local groups made just under 7 million calls, sent just under 2 million texts, and reached 400,000 voters statewide.

SEIU members also held their own canvass, knocking 70,000 doors statewide, 30,000 in Philadelphia, and 20,000 in surrounding suburbs. They also knocked doors in Allegheny, in the Western part of the state, and other areas and made 2 million calls statewide

The most significant push came from Unite Here, a hospitality workers union that deployed hundreds of members to knock on 300,000 doors in Philadelphia between October 1 and Election Day, the largest such operation targeting Black and Latino workers in the city. Statewide, the union knocked 575,000 doors. They got 60,000 people in Philadelphia to pledge to vote for Biden, 30,000 of whom did not vote in 2016. (Trump won the state by 44,000 votes that cycle.)

“We saw the effects of everything that’s happened since 2016, with police brutality, right — with Covid-19 and with the pandemic in general,” said Brahim Douglas, vice president of Unite Here Philadelphia’s Local 274. “We wanted to engage our neighbors in places where typically, folks don’t go to,” he said, like his neighborhood in North Philadelphia and where hopelessness as a result of the pandemic is prevalent.

“This stuff affects our communities,” said Douglas, referring to Covid-19. Last month, he lost his 21-year-old niece to the coronavirus; her 1-year-old daughter had also contracted the disease. “In the Black and brown communities, Covid has affected — here in Pennsylvania — a lot of us. And we have a president that took that stuff for granted, and I think that’s the hurtful part.”

Americans Vote For Paid Time Off & Higher Taxes On The Rich

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P0zubKnwes&ab_channel=SecularTalk

Demanding White House Climate Office and 'Fierce' Cabinet Picks, Groups Urge Biden to Claim His 'FDR Moment'

"Democrats have a once-in-a-generation moment to deliver policies at the scale of the crises our generation is facing."



by
Jon Queally, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/11/demanding-white-house-climate-office-and-fierce-cabinet-picks-groups-urge-biden




The left is not waiting for permission to be heard—and they have some "fierce" Cabinet picks in mind for Joe Biden as well as a plan to help save the planet from climate destruction and the U.S. economy from ruin.


While a coalition of progressive advocacy groups is circulating a memo on Capitol Hill arguing that bold, transformative policies in the next Congress will be essential for the Democratic Party to win the kinds of policy changes that will improve the lives of ordinary people as well as solidify the party's electoral prospects above and beyond what was seen in 2020, a related effort launched Wednesday morning is pressuring President-elect Joe Biden to move swiftly to make tackling the climate crisis by making a major national economic mobilization and energy system transformation plan central to his first-year agenda.

First reported by the New York Times, organizers from the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats began an active campaign Wednesday for Biden to create a White House Office of Climate Mobilization as well as to appoint bold, progressive leaders to prominent executive branch posts as a way to transform the nation and achieve lasting change after four years of destructive environmental policies and regulatory rollbacks by the Trump administration.

The groups argue that trying to compromise with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, should the GOP retain control of upper chamber, would be a disastrous miscalculation and are urging Biden to take bold steps with his executive authority and other tools.

According to the groups:

Biden has a ten-year window to stop the worst and most permanent effects of climate change. He can avoid Mitch McConnell's forced delays by creating a brand new executive office and senior position with wide-reaching power to combat the climate crisis—just as we mobilized to defeat the existential threat of Nazi Germany in WWII.


This new position will convene and coordinate across the president's Cabinet agencies and, ultimately, hold every federal department accountable to the national project of stopping climate change.


The Office of Climate Mobilization will deeply embed this mission into all of our spending, regulations, policies, and actions. The Office of Climate Mobilization will not require Mitch McConnell's approval. Joe Biden can and must appoint a qualified leader who is trusted by the climate and environmental justice community.

Alexandra Rojas and Varshini Prakash, executive directors of Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement respectively, explained there is no more time for incrementalism and corporate-friendly half-measures on the part of Democrats—not when the planet is burning and the economy is on the verge of seismic collapse.

"President-elect Biden must embrace this historic moment by keeping the party united and appointing progressive leaders who will help him usher in the most progressive Democratic administration in generations," said Rojas.




As part of the new campaign push, the groups launched a new website—ClimateMandate.org—and released this video to help deliver their message:



"Democrats have a once-in-a-generation moment to deliver policies at the scale of the crises our generation is facing," said Sunrise's Prakash, who also served as an adviser in the Biden-Sanders task force on climate policy that came together after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) left the primary.


"Young people helped deliver this historic majority to Joe Biden," Prakash added. "The Senate can't be an excuse; whether or not Mitch McConnell remains the Majority Leader, we need an Office of Climate Mobilization and visionary personnel in the Biden administration who are ready to use every tool in their disposal to create millions of good-paying green jobs."

The groups are also urging Biden to appoint progressives to key leadership posts, including Sanders for labor secretary, Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) for secretary of interior, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for secretary of treasury, Keith Ellison for attorney general, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) for secretary of state, and economist Darrick Hamilton for chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.


Based on key criteria—including having no ties to fossil fuel companies or corporate lobbyists and demonstrating a clear sense of urgency around the climate crisis—the groups put forth a full slate of possible Cabinet choices for the Biden team to choose from:























Arguing that the climate crisis presents an urgent and unique opportunity for Biden to have his "FDR moment," the group's website says that there will not be a better chance for him to erect a lasting legacy than the choices he makes out of the gates.

"We can unite our nation by solving the crises we have in common: Covid-19, climate change, systemic racism, and an economic recession," the site states. "Joe Biden must command the federal government with fierce urgency and bold creativity."

Report: Trump Feels Humiliated

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuvYVkF1cCc&ab_channel=TheRationalNational

Memo to Democrats: 2020 Elections Show Progressive Vision, Not Centrist Restraint, Is Winning Message for the Future

"Scapegoating progressives and Black activists for their demands and messaging is not the lesson to be learned here. It was their organizing efforts, energy, and calls for change needed in their communities that drove up voter turnout."



by
Julia Conley, staff writer



https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/11/memo-democrats-2020-elections-show-progressive-vision-not-centrist-restraint-winning




A memo to the Democratic Party from four progressive organizations outlines how through a number of unforced errors in an attempt to appeal to conservatives and moderates rather than the more forward-looking Democratic base, the party allowed the loss of a number of congressional seats—and now risks further alienating the racial justice organizers and working-class voters who helped deliver President-elect Joe Biden's victory.

The memo (pdf) from Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, New Deal Strategies, and Data for Progress comes a week after centrist Democrats including House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), and Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Penn.) explicitly blamed progressive policy proposals such as Medicare for All, far-reaching police reform, and a fracking ban for congressional losses.


"There is no denying Republicans levied salient rhetorical attacks against Democrats, but these will continue to happen as they do every cycle," reads the memo unveiled on Tuesday. "We cannot let Republican narratives drive our party away from Democrats' core base of support: young people, Black, Brown, working class,and social movements who are the present and future of the party."The accusations set off a fierce debate between progressives including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and their centrist counterparts, with progressives attempting to redirect Democratic leaders' attention away from broadly popular proposals and toward the party's lack of organization and willingness to play into Republican attacks aimed at dividing and conquering.

"Historic voter turnout by Black voters, Native voters, Latino voters, and young voters ensured victory for President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris," the groups added. "Scapegoating progressives and Black activists for their demands and messaging is not the lesson to be learned here. It was their organizing efforts, energy, and calls for change needed in their communities that drove up voter turnout."

Centrists in recent days have zeroed in on the rallying cry to "defund the police," which came out of the racial justice uprising that began in May, and the term "socialism" as reasons behind their own losses and near-losses.

"Not a single Democrat—progressive or otherwise—argued that Democrats should run primarily on these themes," the memo reads. "Moreover, these attacks will never go away, nor will demands for reform from social movements. The attacks are designed to stoke racial resentment, which is core to the GOP's election strategy. Our party should not feed into it."

The current anxiety about the phrase "defund the police" follows earlier Republican attacks in recent years regarding the Black Lives Matter movement and protests by Colin Kaepernick and other Black athletes, which Democrats distanced themselves from. Allowing the GOP to construct a narrative around "defund the police"—instead of reframing the debate around the specifics of the idea as outlined in the BREATHE Act, such as abolishing the Pentagon program which allows local law enforcement agencies to obtain military equipment—will only "demobilize our own base," the memo suggests.

As a graphic released by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) points out, Medicare for All—another supposedly controversial proposal—has not been shown to harm Democratic candidates who openly support it, even in districts which lean Republican.


"Medicare for All is a winning issue!" tweeted DSA. "Anyone who claims otherwise is more interested in keeping corporate donations rolling in than actually winning."

In addition to falling prey to attacks over ideology, the groups wrote, the Democratic Party has in the post-election period begun attacking the very organizers who helped propel Biden to his presidential win—despite the fact that those same campaigners didn't share many of his policy priorities:


At the Congressional level, progressives never stopped knocking doors. For example, as the Washington Post reported on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's efforts to turn out voters in her Minnesota district: "Since the start of early voting in September, her campaign has been working to turn out every potential voter, including tens of thousands who sat out the 2016 election. The towns and counties of the Iron Range cast 180,023 votes four years ago; Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis, cast 679,977 votes. While the Biden-Harris campaign resisted in-person canvassing, Omar's campaign kept doing it, hiring dozens of people to knock on doors and pull out votes." Trump and the GOP really thought they could win Minnesota—what they didn't count on was 88% turnout in Ilhan's district with over 400,000 votes. The same was true of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib's campaign and district in Michigan, where she focused heavily on engaging low-propensity voters and folks who didn't turn out in 2016, contacting over 201,000 unique voters with information on how to vote for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Gary Peters, boosting turnout in Detroit and Wayne County, and helping deliver victory for the Democrats.

The memo emphasizes the material damage that can be done in future elections if centrist Democrats don't put to rest the notion that progressives and their demands are to blame for centrists' own losses—even as progressives themselves were successful after embracing policies like Medicare for All.




"This election, the Black youth leading the Black Lives Matter movement have turned their power in the streets into votes and have helped secure Biden’s victory in key cities," write the groups. "According to an analysis by Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, the protests drove up voter registration, with the earliest signs coming from Georgia, and helped close the enthusiasm gap that plagued Biden into the summer. Fast forward to election day: Black voters matched and exceeded white voter participation in key cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta, which delivered the presidency to Biden."

"Most impressively, in Georgia, young voters skewed heavily Democratic, casting ballots for Biden about 18%more than for Trump—especially young voters of color and young Black voters, 90% of whom voted for Biden," the memo reads. "If Black youth had come out in slightly lower numbers, Biden would lose the state and we would not have the opportunity we do in the Senate."

As the memo was released, Politico published an interview with Tlaib in which she expressed anger over centrists' recent attacks—making clear that the onslaught of criticism is aimed not just as her, Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and other progressive lawmakers, but at their constituents.

"We're not going to be successful if we're silencing districts like mine," Tlaib told the outlet. "Me not being able to speak on behalf of many of my neighbors right now, many of which are Black neighbors, means me being silenced. I can't be silent."

"If [voters] can walk past blighted homes and school closures and pollution to vote for Biden-Harris, when they feel like they don't have anything else, they deserve to be heard," the congresswoman, who won re-election with more than 67% of the vote, added. "I can't believe that people are asking them to be quiet."

Tlaib also tweeted about her interview, including the hashtag #EmbraceTheBase.


Economic justice is another area in which many congressional Democrats failed to offer a cohesive message aimed at rallying young voters and marginalized people at the polls this year, the memo says.

Although "60% of registered voters and 66% of independents think the country is rigged to benefit the wealthy and the powerful," centrist Democrats have shied away from embracing proposals like student loan cancellation, tuition-free public college, and imposing a wealth tax—despite the fact that all three issues are popular among voters across the political spectrum.

"Whatever moderates think of progressives like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, it is clear they have forged a far more compelling economic message than what centrists like Lamb or Spanberger have to offer," the memo reads. "A narrative that centers corporate power and the ultra wealthy as barriers toprogress on the economy is compelling across the political spectrum. Democrats should adopt it."

Ian Haney Lopez, a Berkeley law professor who wrote in the New York Times in September that Biden and the Democrats must "link racism and class conflict" and whose op-ed is mentioned in the memo, urged Democrats to read the document.


Read the full memo below: