I was a Justice Democrat. Now I’m joining the People’s Party

My name is Lisa Ring and I’m a two-time former candidate for Congress endorsed by Justice Democrats and Our Revolution. Today I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining the People’s Party as our new development manager.

Like so many of you, I’m fed up with the two-party system and I’m here to do something about it. I believe in the power of the people to transform this country. That’s what led me to activism in my 20s, inspired me to organize the Coast of Georgia for the past seven years, and drove me to run for Congress in GA-01 against a multi-millionaire Republican incumbent. We knocked on more than 50,000 doors and I advanced to the general as the Democratic Party nominee in 2018. I want to bring what I’ve learned to the People’s Party.

I had my political awakening at just 12 years old when Ronald Reagan became president and immediately cut Social Security benefits for my widowed mother and me; benefits we had depended on since my father’s death two years earlier. That made an indelible impact on me. I noticed the swift erosion of policies meant to protect people and the environment and saw the growth of corporate power that has become so pervasive it affects every aspect of our lives.




I'm here for the People's Party. Will you build it with me?



My eyes were opened to the world of activism when I became a canvasser in Philadelphia at the age of 18. I am a mother of four (three now grown) and I’ve been a stay-at-home mom on and off for nearly three decades. I have also been a corrections officer and the executive director of an anti-recidivism program for convicted felons. These experiences have given me a sense of empathy for all and a responsibility to create a better future.

In 2016, I organized Coastal Georgia around the delegate elections and served as a Bernie delegate as well as co-chair of the Georgia Bernie Sanders delegation. We Georgia delegates were energized both before and after the 2016 election and we all continued the political work we had started.

Right behind my pride for my children is my pride for the races I ran and the difference we made here in my district, in the state of Georgia, and throughout the nation. With the support of groups and individuals such as Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, labor unions, Nina Turner, Marianne Williamson, and so many committed progressives, we won 42 percent of the vote in the 2018 midterm election against a wealthy incumbent in a highly Republican district. We did this by knocking on tens of thousands of doors, attending hundreds of events, and fighting for a strongly progressive platform. We did better than any Democrat in nearly 30 years and I ran my campaign my way, with no compromise, through grassroots organizing and small-dollar donations without corporate money.




I'm done with the corporate parties. Chip in if you are too




Unfortunately, my own party was the biggest obstacle to victory. Despite my longtime work within the Democratic Party, my success at organizing and mobilizing a district that had been neglected for decades, and the support I generated and brought with me, my own party chose to disregard me and to actively sabotage my campaign. Some Georgia Democrats never moved past my being a Bernie delegate and some did not agree with my unapologetic progressive policies. But the determining factor for success in our two-party system is corporate money. I couldn’t be bought or coerced, so I was always an outsider in the Democratic Party.

I’m here to ask grassroots members like you to believe in the future we’re creating, the future that moved me to join the People’s Party, and contribute the small and recurring donations that are crucial to our success. We don’t have any corporations or billionaires bankrolling our work. We have you.

Now is the time to give the people of this nation the basic rights that they are calling out for: Medicare for all, peace and prosperity, and economic, racial, and environmental justice. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity and humbled by everything that countless thousands of people have poured into this movement before me.

Let's do this.

Lisa Ring
Development Manager
People’s Party

Netanyahu's demise: sign of deeper Israeli political crisis?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SRKYsCLMos

Colombia: The Crisis That No One Talks About Anymore

https://www.resumen-english.org/2021/06/colombia-the-crisis-that-no-one-talks-about-anymore/




By Alejandra Garcia on June 10, 2021

Photo: radiomacondo.fm

Colombia is no longer news. In the past 24 hours, over 50 people were injured by agents of the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD) during a new night of terror and police brutality. But few outlets of the mainstream media are covering the reality of this Latin American country, whose people have been protesting in the streets against President Ivan Duque for over one month. In fact coverage of this significant countrywide social uprising in the face of violent repression is practically nonexistent in the vaunted news agencies based in the US.

The fact that at least 70 demonstrators have been killed in the country in just one month amid the social outbreak is of no concern to the corporate media, which have echoed Duque’s insults to his own people. “Vandals, terrorists,” the president has called the protesters, who are mostly young people, women, social leaders, members of the LGBTI community, farmers, Indigenous people, and workers.

From time to time, EFE brings out reports on how the protests are coming to an end because social anger has subsided. “The ‘takeover of Bogota’ deflated with a march that was barely attended,” reads its most recent publication, which alludes to the call made by the National Strike Committee (CPN) to Bogota’s citizens to peacefully take to the streets this Wednesday.

A different story is told by Portafolio, a local newspaper: “Thousands of people marched chanting slogans against Duque and police brutality to the Tequendama hotel, where the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) is meeting with NGOs, victims, and institutions during its working visit to the country to verify the human rights situation amid protests.”

Despite the heavy rain that fell on the city, there were balloons, slogans, flags, and tears for the victims of homicide, arbitrary arrests, rape, and police violence. As night fell, the agents of the state returned to attack the capital’s citizens with short and long-range weapons and tear gas canisters.

Videos posted on social networks show a group of demonstrators rushing several bloodied bodies to nearby hospitals. Other videos show people placing makeshift tourniquets over the face of a protester who was hit by a tear gas canister in his eyes.

Twitter has become an indispensable platform for denouncing the police brutality to which Colombians have been exposed. Thanks to these testimonies, the NGO Temblores reports that 70 people have been hit by firearms, 50 journalists have been harassed, assaulted, and detained, and 29 civilians have been arrested for documenting agents’ excessive use of force.

The government remains silent and immobile in the face of the ongoing human rights violations occurring in Colombia. Duque comes out of his burrow to point the finger at other governments in the region as responsible for the crisis he himself unleashed. He has set his sights on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, but this is not news either.

It is not a surprise that the Organization of American States (OAS) Secretary-General Luis Almagro has recently requested the suspension of Nicaragua’s membership, due to the “unprecedented onslaught” of President Daniel Ortega against his opponents. It is worth clarifying that the “onslaught” refers to the house imprisonment of opposition leader Cristiana Chamorro, who is under investigation for money laundering, abusive management, and ideological falsehood.

While the OAS sets its sights on Nicaragua, Almagro remains silent on the 1,248 victims of physical violence and the 45 homicides committed by members of the security forces from April 28 to May 31 in Colombia.

The European Parliament, which is also part of Duque’s support network, has not raised its voice against the police brutality encouraged by the Colombian government to contain the protests either. However, it has wasted no time in trying to break relations between Havana and Brussels “for the violations of civil liberties” that are taking place on the Caribbean island.

“Everyone is to be blamed for this crisis: the strike, Santos, Maduro, the pandemic, the Indigenous people, and the cousin of the girlfriend of the neighbor’s son. Everyone, but the government. This is how these rulers are who we have to go through life with, crying when they are not in power and accusing the opposition when they are in power,” said Colombian journalist Adolfo Zableh.

Colombia hurts, it hurts to see it so beaten and alone. But the pain is inescapably necessary, according to Zableh. “At last we understand that public interests are above private interests and that fattening ourselves with our hands full while others starve is the wrong way. The privileged ones have experienced just over one month something faintly similar to what the rest of the country has gone through their entire lives, and Duque is panicking.”

Internet: The Dictatorship of the Algorithm

https://www.resumen-english.org/2021/06/internet-the-dictatorship-of-the-algorithm/




By Angel Guerra Cabrera on June 10, 2021

The dictatorship of the algorithm is the title of a very interesting Cuban documentary premiered on the island on June 4 on television (see its official FB page). Directed by Javier Gómez Sánchez, it effectively dismantles not only the economic and political interests behind algorithms, those supposedly neutral mathematical models, but also the intensive use of the Internet by the United States as a weapon in its multidimensional, or fourth generational, war against Cuba. In any war the objective is the annihilation of the opponent, in this case “regime change”, who knows at what human cost in a country historically so guarded of its sovereignty and independence. This statement is not a slogan, it is backed up by conclusive facts such as the defeat of the mercenary invasion of Playa Giron and all the attempts to subdue the Cuban revolution by violent means.

The prolonged and bloody campaign of State terror against the island, also dismantled attempt after attempt, should not be forgotten. In view of these failures, it is significant that both political parties in the United States, from the administration of George W. Bush until today, agree on the soft coup as the magic formula that can suddenly create the perception of a defeated revolution. To achieve this, they make massive and very aggressive use of social networks.

According to official data, Washington invests 50 million dollars annually to promote “democracy” in Cuba, but this figure is much lower than the real one, since the largest part of the funds is a declared secret with the argument of protecting the recipients, or because it is part of the CIA budget. A significant portion is destined to sustain a huge digital media set-up whose sole purpose is subversion, regime change in Cuba, as explicitly stated in the Helms-Burton law of 1996, which is possibly the most barbaric and shameless attempt to give a semblance of legality to the monstrous interference in Cuba’s political destiny. Dozens of groups and individuals on the island receive money from the U.S. taxpayer as “activists”, “independent journalists” or “artists”. In the case of the recently launched Movimiento San Isidro, the sponsorship of the U.S. government and its embassy in Cuba is graphically documented. The movement, of course, is just a figure of speech; it is a pro-U.S. concoction of the worst taste, totally alien to the democratic ideals of which the Cuban Constitution and political order are radical bearers. It was, however, part of the recent attempted soft coup in Cuba and continues to be part of that criminal scheme.

The dictatorship of the algorithm documents the machinery of seduction and terror that Washington is trying to impose on the island through social networks, aimed especially at the new generations. On the one hand, to create a taste in the subject and then attract him by offering him the object that matches that taste. On the other hand, to discipline audiences so that they do not think with their own heads, so that individuals do not dare to express their own criteria, because it breaks with the supposed consensus existing in the group and exposes the offender to the virtual firing squad in the sort of public square that are the networks. In the case of Cuba, the demonization of whoever dares to pronounce words as organic, endearing and typical of the daily life of the island as revolution. Or as odious but omnipresent as blockade or empire. In order to disqualify, terrorize and isolate those who utter them, Washington’s mercenary media have created the label of “officialist”, which frightens not a few young people educated in the idea of rebellion. It is an offensive against nothing less than the revolutionary institutionality in general and the institutions of culture in particular, defective as everything human, but as important as they have been throughout years of revolution to make culture massive and encourage the emergence of talents. All this drama is explained in the film made by a mostly young group of communication scholars, artists, students and a former state security agent, whose approaches are talented, honest, sensitive and up-to-date on the evolution of cyberspace and its ambushes on an international scale.

The Cuban government… has the vigor, the forcefulness, the cultural and moral strength to encourage the debate convened by the eighth congress of the Communist Party of Cuba on the development of the strategy to defeat the imperialist enemy in the battle of ideas in social networks. And also, how to use these networks to form patriotic, socialist, internationalist values, to create ethical standards and aesthetic tastes at the height of the revolutionary project.




Source: La Pupila Insomne, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

Why Does Joe Manchin Succeed While Progressives Get Embarrassed?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN61De27GAg

An Impregnable Castle

https://www.resumen-english.org/2021/06/an-impregnable-castle/




By Atilio A. Boron on June 9, 2021

Pedro Castillo reaches the final stretch of the electoral recount with a difference of some 80,000 votes in his favor. The only thing missing is the official ratification of his victory, something that should be resolved in the next hours. The ambiguity of the figure is due to the infinitesimal variation that could result from the examination of observed tally sheets, incorrectly filled out or with illegible signatures. But, even so, the victory of the rural teacher is irreversible, and that explains why since Tuesday afternoon the rumor and lie mill of the Peruvian and continental right wing has begun to beat the “fraud” patch. But Adriana Urrutia, the political scientist of the Civil Association Transparency, institution that deployed 1,400 observers in Peru and in the voting centers abroad, immediately rejected this accusation by declaring that “there is no evidence that allows us to speak of electoral fraud”. This affirmation coincides with the one made by the observers of the Inter-American Union of Electoral Organizations and no less than the envoys of the OAS.

Fake news

Once loquacious Peruvian celebrities such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Jaime Bayly have suddenly come to a resounding silence. The former wrote that he “burned with the desire” to celebrate the triumph of the hyper-corrupt Keiko who until a few months ago was the favorite target of his most furious and devastating attacks. As Jorge Luis Borges would say, this somersault was not the product of love but of the terror that his tormented colonialist soul felt at the mere possibility that a man of the people, a humble rural teacher, could achieve what he could not in 1990 and that is to be president of Peru. And now he burns, but with hatred and fury, before the blinding light of a character who he defamed, insulted and fought viciously and relentlessly. Bayly, another spirit colonized to the marrow, got tired of defaming the figure of Castillo; he accused him of being a Chavista, Castro-Chavista, leftist, communist and even insinuated that he could be a “Shining Pathist”. As it happens here in Argentina, pseudo-journalism does not recognize ethical limits of any kind. Its spokespersons can lie on a daily basis and with absolute impunity. The complement of fake news and the media shielding cultivated by the media hit men is lawfare. Whatever Bayly says against the future Peruvian president, there will always be justice to protect the publicist of the empire.

In proportional terms, Castillo took almost half a percentage point advantage over Keiko Fujimori. Undoubtedly it has been a very close election. But to those who claim that that is not enough difference I remind them that in 2016 Keiko lost to another corrupt, Pedro Pablo Kuczinski, by 40,000 votes and 0.20 of the total valid votes. Now the difference is double, in absolute and percentage terms. There is no reason whatsoever to disregard the Cajamarca native’s victory. In democracy, whoever has more votes wins, and Castillo has more than enough. John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960 by a percentage difference equal to 0.17 percent; why is that percentage good in the United States and a much higher one would not be good in Peru?

Why Castillo won

Castillo’s victory is an encouraging event because it shows that if there is a candidate who faithfully represents and interprets popular sentiment, all the powers of the establishment can be defeated. The businessmen who threatened to close their doors and leave their workers in the street; the lying and manipulative media oligarchy; the traditional political class; high state officials and even most of the Peruvian national soccer players, apart from Vargas Llosa and Bayly, fired against him. Castillo campaigned with zero money, no image consultants and no expensive electoral consultants. He did not need any of that. He won because he listened to the popular clamor, he knew how to hear the voice of the street.

Vargas Llosa got screwed

Not only did he win the election, he also had the pleasure of defeating Keiko by a 65 to 35 percent margin of the votes in Arequipa no less, the home Vargas Llosa his most bitter slanderer who, also for that reason, must be burning like a medieval fire as he wondering how could this happen? He, who was accustomed to alternating between presidents and kings, with ministers and eminences; to being treated with the distinction due to a Marquis of the Kingdom of Spain, was beaten in the land of his birth by a humble teacher from Cajamarca, from Chota to be precise, who overnight seemed to personify the features of some of the most admirable heroes of Vargas Llosa’s novels. Moreover, I would say that many of them must be enjoying the sweet taste of revenge against the writer who created them and who, when he leaves the world of fiction, becomes the mortal enemy of his beloved creatures, eternal dreamers and fighters for a better world.




Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

Matt Taibbi - A Dangerous Moment for the Democratic Party

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbW5oZsaKv4