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Sanders To Meet With Deray McKesson:
Today the Bernie Sanders campaign agreed to meet with activist DeRay McKesson and have a conversation about the candidate's new racial justice platform, Politico reports.
McKesson started garnering national attention for his organizing work during protests that followed the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. His aims, as he says, are clear: Stop killing us.
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It's hard to say that Bernie wouldn't have met with a prominent activist—one who was recently named of one Fortune's World's Greatest Leaders, and one who'd recently met with Hillary to discuss similar issues—if it weren't for Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford interrupting Bernie's speech at Westlake Center earlier this month, but the fact that Bernie's campaign was so quick to respond to McKesson's tweet suggests that they're listening to these young activists and are willing to keep listening.
Speaking of meetings:
Bernie Sanders met with civil rights leader Jesse Jackson on Monday in Chicago amid an active push by his campaign to more forcefully address race and criminal justice issues.
“Sen. Sanders is a long-time friend of Rev. Jackson. They held a very productive, hour-long meeting at Operation PUSH headquarters on important issues confronting the country and the African-American community,” Michael Briggs, Sanders’ campaign spokesman, said in an email to CNN.
Jackson tweeted about the meeting on Monday, noting that Sanders’ wife, Jane, joined the gathering.
“Meeting today with @SenSanders and wife today @RPCoalition Headquarters,” he wrote.
Jackson and Sanders have history together: The independent senator endorsed Jackson’s failed 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns.
Representatives for Jackson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
LiL B Is Still Speaking About Bernie To The Media:
Lil B landing a TV deal wouldn't be much of a surprise at this point, The Based God has made several TV appearances in the past month discussing his political opinions as they relate to the upcoming election. Today, he took to MSNBC to discuss the #BlackLivesMatter movement and Bernie Sanders with Michael Eric Dyson.
On the issue of whether or not #BlackLivesMatter protesters have treated Bernie Sanders, who's speeches the group has disrupted recently, fairly, Lil B said the Senator has handles the situation "with class," and that all the protesters want is Sanders' empathy. B also went into details about issues he finds near and dear, including climate change, criminal justice and transgender rights, indicating that the rapper truly has evolved on the issue.
Machining Union Members Are Upset About Their Leaderships Endorsement:
The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) announced Friday that it would endorse Hillary Clinton as its preferred Democratic presidential candidate. The machinists are now the third AFL-CIO union to endorse a candidate, following National Nurses United’s endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders four days ago and the American Federation of Teachers’ Clinton endorsement on July 11.
“The IAM will not sit on the sidelines while this fight is so clearly underway,” said IAM International President Tom Buffenbarger in a press release. “Hillary Clinton has been a strong supporter of this union for years and she is now the target of unprecedented attacks, financed on a scale never seen before. The time to help is when help is needed most, and we intend to do just that.”
The IAM’s justification of their endorsement this early in the presidential race mirrors the remarks made by AFT president Randi Weingarten shortly after her union’s endorsement. “If you want to shape something, you get in before the primaries,” she said. Like the AFT, the IAM endorsement was based largely on the results of an internal survey of members—a method that some members of the union have questioned.
“I cannot describe how disappointed I am with the IAM endorsing Hillary,” says Al Wagner, a journeyman auto technician and member of IAM Automotive Mechanics Local 701 in Chicago. “The IAM is a great union and I am very proud to be a member. But the leaders went about this endorsement the wrong way.”
On Symone Sanders:
The sudden gains of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders's campaign last month were punctuated by a series of awkward confrontations with Black Lives Matter protesters, causing some to question whether the progressive candidate was serious about addressing racial inequality and injustice. Then, on July 23, the campaign hired a young 25-year-old black activist named Symone Sanders, a former communications officer with Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, a Black Lives Matter supporter, and a youth chair for the Coalition for Juvenile Justice. She immediately created a bridge between activists and the Sanders campaign, and helped put out a policy on addressing racial inequality.
But there's still an uphill battle for the senator and his grassroots campaign, which rejects super PAC funding (the kind of funding that wins politicians elections) and will need to broaden the senator's appeal beyond its mostly liberal white supporters. As the national press secretary, Symone Sanders will very much be in the foreground of the campaign as it seeks to spread the senator's message — and his appeal. She spoke to Cosmopolitan.com about her new position, the Black Lives Matter movement, and her advice for young women and girls who want to get involved in politics.
Tell me about how you met Bernie Sanders.
I worked for Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, which is a consumer advocacy think tank, but we worked on global trade issues. Sen. Sanders is a champion of trade, so he's like a work hero. I'd been following what he's doing. The campaign reached out to me. They said they came across my résumé and they liked what they saw, so they wanted to bring me in and have a conversation, so I sat down; I talked to the campaign manager. Then I met with the communications director and we chatted. And then I didn't hear anything.
About two weeks after that, I got a call on my cell phone. It was a blocked number. I said, "Hello?" The caller said, "Oh, this is an aide for Sen. Sanders. We're just wondering if you had time to meet with him today." Of course, I made time for the senator. We met, we sat down for an hour and a half, and had a great conversation, and he asked me if I was still interested in working on the campaign and I was like, "You know, I think that would be of interest to me." I officially had a job offer a couple of days after that.
Click Here If You Like Charts:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, as a campaign trail Jane Austen might have written, that a candidate lacking a small fortune early must be destined to want for support later on. Perhaps it is so — one of the more effective ways to predict winners and losers in election season is to compare the contestants' bankrolls. Fundraising, more than anything else, measurable or not, is the political pundit's North Star.
For Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the money game is scheduled to be a losing one. He does not, like Hillary Clinton, have a super PAC dedicated to collecting unlimited sums of cash and putting them to use on his behalf. Even as Sanders does well with traditional fundraising, Clinton's operation and haul remain light-years ahead. If fundraising decides this primary fight, Sanders will finish second- or even third-best.
Those are the caveats. Here is the argument: Sanders and Clinton are a whole lot closer than the conventional wisdom suggests. By definition, a wave is destined to crest and break. But the tides, belonging to an altogether more complicated science, promise new swells to follow the broken ones. The next rush could be considerably stronger, or it could flatten out. Here are five indicators suggesting the political currents are running in Sanders' favor:
Burn Em For Bernie:
Next year will be a monumental year for marijuana legalization.bernie sanders marijuana
As a movement we are heading into our third national election cycle as a legitimate political force. It started when the first two bricks in the wall of prohibition fell on election night in 2012, when the voters of Colorado and Washington voted in favor of the legalization and regulation of marijuana. Some may even recall that marijuana legalization received more votes in Colorado than President Obama did during his successful reelection campaign.
In 2014, two more states were added to that list (Oregon and Alaska), along with the District of Columbia. Since then, activists around the country have been racing to add their states to the list of those who are 420 friendly. In 2016, as many as eight more states are looking to legalize marijuana, with at least five or six of those campaigns being in strong positions to make it happen.
Considering that the Obama administration was still ignoring our movement in 2012, the upcoming election in 2016 is most certainly going to be the first Presidential election in which we will be taken seriously.
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The very fact that big money politics has left marijuana on the back burner for so long is exactly why I believe the marijuana industry should be supporting Bernie Sanders for President.
I believe that Bernie Sanders is the best candidate running for President, not only for his stance on marijuana, but also because he wants to fundamentally change the political system that has left us out in the cold for decades. I think that with the support of the cannabis industry he can win the Democratic nomination for President and help bring some rationality to the marijuana conversation nationally.
Sanders As The Best Bet For The Environment:
For environmentalists, Bernie Sanders just might be the best candidate. For the “drill, baby, drill” crowd, he might be the worst.
Climate change and the environment are central issues to his campaign.
He says the U.S. must take a leading role in confronting climate change by moving our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy.
“Unless we take bold action to address climate change, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back on this period in history and ask a very simple question: Where were they?” Sanders said on his website. “Why didn’t the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth, lead the international community in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing the devastating damage that the scientific community told us would surely come?”
Sanders led the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. He introduced (with Sen. Barbara Boxer) what some consider the gold standard of climate change legislation to tax carbon and methane emissions and secured $3.2 billion in the economic stimulus package for greenhouse gas emission-reduction grants, according to his website.
Details On The Chicago Trip:
The veteran senator has packed stadiums on the West Coast and drawn hordes at the Iowa State Fair. By comparison, Monday's event was a low-key affair — a $50-per-person fundraiser that drew more than 600 people.
But attendees still got the Sanders experience that has come to define his campaign: a nearly hourlong speech punctuated by repeated references to the country's growing wealth divide. Appeals to the crowd as "brothers and sisters." Pledges to provide tuition-free college, enact a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage and go after corporations that avoid paying taxes by parking money overseas.
"When we talk and use words like greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are just a few of the adjectives to describe Wall Street," Sanders said. "I find it very interesting that some kid who gets picked up for smoking marijuana can have an arrest record, but the crooks who destroyed our economy don't."