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Speaking of bernin', last week, Bernie Sanders’ ActBlue account was on fire following his announcement for a 2020 run raising a record setting $10,000,000!
Following an historic fundraising week of grassroots small donors, Bernie headed to Brooklyn to launch his campaign in what was said to be a test of whether or not could still draw huge crowds. And that he did. 15,000 were estimated to have turned out at Brooklyn College on the snow covered, historic campus where Bernie Sanders attended his first year of college stomping his 2016 kick off rally in Vermont where 5500 were in attendance.
Bernie chose Brooklyn to launch his campaign to honor his family history as the son of immigrants who landed on the shores of the United States with little money and big dreams.
"I learned a great deal about immigration as a child because my father came to this country from Poland at the age of 17, without a nickel in his pocket. He came to escape the crushing poverty that existed in his community, and to escape widespread anti-Semitism. And, it was a good thing that he left Poland when he did because virtually his entire family there was wiped out by Nazi barbarism."
Hillary Clinton along with Democratic presidential hopefuls Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Julián Castro gathered with civil rights leaders including Jesse Jackson to commemorate the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”—the day in 1965 when peaceful marchers were battered and teargassed by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Clinton was there to receive the 2019 International Unity Award and delivered a speech, saying, “We are living through a full-fledged crisis in our democracy.”
And then it was off to Chicago where he rallied at the Navy Pier, not far from the college where he graduated from and was a student activist who protested housing discrimination and was arrested for protesting school segregation.
In Chicago, where he graduated from college in June 1964 less than a month before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, Sanders recalled his activism — and arrest a year earlier at a protest against school segregation on the city's South Side — more enthusiastically, but still paused at the conclusion to explain why he told the story.
"The reason I tell you all of this is because my activities here in Chicago taught me a very important lesson that I have never forgotten," Sanders said. "And that is that whether it is the struggle against corporate greed, racism, sexism, or homophobia, environmental devastation, or war and militarism, real change never takes place from the top on down. It always takes place from the bottom on up."
But even as Sanders broadened the scope of his stump speech to include more details about his youth, his message never strayed far from the core argument that would vault him to political stardom decades later. Sanders' vow to uproot and discard the private health insurance industry and deliver a single-payer system still drew the loudest applause from an already spirited crowd. The twin spectacles of Brooklyn and Chicago will also validate the belief among Sanders' allies that his support is stickier than many observers, including some wishful Democrats, might have hoped or predicted.
Recognizing the interconnected nature of of racial, environmental, social and economic justice, Bernie's platform is built on these four pillars of interdependent and overlapping categories because one cannot be achieved without the others.
“I want to welcome you to a campaign which says, loudly and clearly, that the underlying principles of our government will not be greed, hatred and lies. It will not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and religious bigotry. That is going to end. The principles of our government will be based on justice: economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice. Today, I want to welcome you to a campaign which tells the powerful special interests who control so much of our economic and political life that we will no longer tolerate the greed of corporate America and the billionaire class – greed which has resulted in this country having more income and wealth inequality than any other major country on earth."
RACIAL JUSTICE
"Our campaign, as you know, is about fundamentally ending the disparity of wealth and power in our country, when so few have so much and so many have so little. But as we do that," he said, "we must end the disparity within the disparity."
Sanders did not shy away from race in his speech.
While indicating his support for criminal justice reform and an end to cash bail, Sanders noted police violence against “people in the minority community,” naming Chicago’s Laquan McDonald. He said that black men are sentenced to 19 percent more jail time for committing the same crimes, and the war on drugs has disproportionately targeted people of color.
SOCIAL
600,000 PEOPLE, DISPROPORTIONATELY PEOPLE OF COLOR, WERE ARRESTED FOR POSSESSION OF MARIJUANA IN 2017.
IT IS TIME TO DECRIMINALIZE MARIJUANA, EXPUNGE PAST MARIJUANA CONVICTIONS AND END THE FAILED WAR ON DRUGS.
BERNIE SANDERS (@SENSANDERS) FEBRUARY 28, 2019
ECONOMIC
There is profound economic insecurity. That is the sort of thing that happened in the late '20s and 1930s and that we overcame with New Deal democracy, which became a role model for market dynamism that was tempered by fairness for everybody," Strine said.
Even Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, appointed by President Donald Trump, has stated that income and wealth inequality are diminishing the country's overall prosperity and need to be corrected through policies.
The best news of the Democratic presidential campaign so far? Both @BernieSanders & @ewarren are talking about the interconnected struggle for racial & economic justice, which is the narrative we need to build a winning electoral coalition.
PEACE
Bernie Sanders, Feb 2019:
"American troops have been in Afghanistan for nearly 18 years, Iraq since 2003 and in Syria since 2015.The American people do not want endless war. Congress must reassert its Constitutional authority over the use of force and responsibly end these interventions"
EIGHT MEMBERS OF Congress have taken a pledge to work to bring ongoing U.S. global military conflicts to a “responsible and expedient” end, the result of a first-of-its kind lobbying effort by military veterans on Capitol Hill.
The pledge was written and organized by a group called Common Defense, made up of veterans and military families, which advocates for scaling back U.S. military commitments overseas. Common Defense boasts of more than 20,000 veteran members in all 50 states, and it threw its endorsement behind almost 30 candidates in the last midterm election cycle.
FREEDOM
Man's red flower
It's in every living thing
Mind, use your power
Spirit, use your wings
Freedom