Welcome once again to a $27-group / Political Revolution open thread — a weekly place where you can sit back, relax, and enjoy some inspiring quotes, good music, and (most importantly) a picture or two of Noble Fur.
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Wait, it’s Sunday again already?
How on earth did that happen? It can’t be Sunday night already. Next thing you’ll be telling me it’s the month of May already, or some other equally impossible thing...
Once again I’m short on time and running late, so let’s get down to tonight’s quotes...
Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own - indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. Recognizing that sustainable development, democracy and peace are indivisible is an idea whose time has come.
~ Wangari Maathai
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A man who calls Black Lives Matter activists "terrorists" shouldn’t be given a platform to peddle hate and conspiracies here in New York.
That’s why I‘m calling on the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police to cancel former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke’s keynote at their upcoming conference in Albany.
That’s a quote from Cynthia Nixon, who’s running for the Democratic nomination in the New York governor’s race. If you’re not familiar with who David Clarke is you can learn more from this Daily Kos diary by Jen Hayden. And if you’re not familiar with Cynthia Nixon you can learn more about her at her campaign website.
Or, you can learn more about her by reading a few more of her quotes:
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Domestic work makes all work possible. The women of color and immigrant women who make up the majority of this workforce deserve recognition, dignity, and respect.
~ Cynthia Nixon
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Governor Cuomo has been focused on making superficial, cosmetic changes to the NYC subway rather than fixing the real problems. Adding Wi-Fi and digital displays won’t help New Yorkers who depend on the trains to get to work every day. We need real change.
Our subway now has the worst on-time performance of any major transit system in the world. It’s time to give the MTA the money we were promised for repairs, and stop asking New York City or its riders to foot the bill to clean up Cuomo’s mess.
Average train speeds are slower now than they were in the 1950s, and delays on the MTA have tripled in the last 5 years. Every day, the subway gets more crowded and less reliable. As governor, I will immediately make the emergency rescue of our transit system a top priority.
~ Cynthia Nixon
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Many Honduran families came to this country years ago, escaping a horrific hurricane. Today many of those families have US-born children.
New York needs to protect these families from Donald Trump’s divide and conquer agenda.
~ Cynthia Nixon
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My rent platform — Rent Justice For All! — is the most progressive and expansive tenant protection program in the country. It will provide affordable homes to more than 3 million households and prevent thousands of evictions.
In the last eight years, Governor Cuomo’s real estate donors have dictated housing policy in our state — and the results have been disastrous. It’s hard to do right when you’re getting millions of dollars to do wrong.
Since Andrew Cuomo took office, we have lost at least 75,000 units of rent stabilized housing to the vacancy decontrol threshold. I will work with state lawmakers to create and pass legislation to re-regulate these apartments and fight for Rent Justice For All.
Under Cuomo, landlords are rewarded with large rent increases in exchange for evicting people from their homes. This system invites speculation and drives up housing costs. We’re going to protect people from unfair rent increases or sudden evictions.
Under Cuomo, housing code enforcement has been defunded and the funding for Housing and Community Renewal, the state agency responsible for enforcing tenants’ rights, has declined by 62%. I will significantly increase funding for HCR to make sure all homes are safe and stable.
Half of our state residents are renters, and under Governor Cuomo, New York’s renters have been left behind. Across the state, low and moderate income tenants are paying more than 50 percent of their income on rent. Enough is enough! We need Rent Justice For All!
~ Cynthia Nixon
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Currently, New York only offers rent stabilization protection in NYC, Nassau, Rockland and Westchester. I will expand rent stabilization protection to one million households in the five boroughs and one million tenants outside of NYC who currently live without any protections.
We have to stop rewarding landlords who are stripping tenants of protections and pushing families out of their homes. We can’t afford not to act — because shelter and housing should be a basic right for all New Yorkers. The time for bold action is now.
As Governor, I will make sure we close the loopholes which are being exploited to harass and evict thousands of New Yorkers including the
❌ Vacancy decontrol loophole
❌ Vacancy bonus loophole
❌ Preferential rent loophole
~ Cynthia Nixon
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And here’s a quote from a recent Glamour magazine interview with Cynthia Nixon. She was asked:
You’ve talked a lot about "better Democrats" and "real Democrats." What does "a real Democrat" mean to you in 2018?
She replied:
A real Democrat doesn’t slash taxes on the wealthy. A real Democrat doesn’t slash corporate taxes. A real Democrat doesn’t give away billions of dollars in economic development money to his cronies and his donors with no strings attached. A real Democrat doesn’t lose us $25 billion in revenue in eight years—money our state desperately needs to put into our schools, our transit system, and our public housing.
The fact of the matter is, our working class doesn’t look like the working class from 1955. Our working class is largely women and people of color—it’s people like social workers and daycare workers, people who run senior centers and after-school youth programs and people who work in schools.
We need to fund those things. We need to fund those things because we need those services. We also need to protect the people who are doing those jobs, and make sure there's $15 minimum wage—not just in the city, but in every part of the state.
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I considered using “Life After Sex ” as the subtitle of tonight’s diary, since as you’ve seen a good number of the quotes featured tonight are about Cynthia Nixon’s life now that she’s running for governor of New York rather than starring in Sex and the City.
But that sounded a little too click-baity, and I suspect Noble Fur wouldn’t want to be associated with click-bait, so I decided to use this as the title quote instead:
Democracy: by the people. For the people. This shouldn’t be complicated.
That’s a quote from Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the Michigan governor’s race. He also said:
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I dream of a future where no one is locked out of our politics because of race, class, creed, or sexual identity or orientation.
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When I was Detroit's Health Director, we delivered glasses to every kid who needed them (over 7,000). Why? Because if you can't see what's on the board, you can't learn what's on the board.
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After my time overseeing Animal Control as Detroit’s Health Director, we increased the live release rate from 28% to 63%. I’m proud of the work we did to help those who could not advocate for themselves.
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At the NRA convention, Donald Trump said “I want to thank all of you, the true American patriots of the NRA who defend our rights."
Real patriots care about American lives.
Gun reform isn’t about taking away guns, it’s about not taking away lives.
And for those of you who like hearing good quotes in addition to getting to read some, here’s a recently-released 30-second video featuring Abdul El-Sayed:
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Someone else who’s running for office in Michigan this year is Dana Nessel:
Dana Nessel, who may be Michigan’s next attorney general, knows why she decided to become a lawyer: “I was obsessed with To Kill a Mockingbird," the famous novel about a small Southern town and a country lawyer who values doing the right thing above all. “All I wanted was to be Atticus Finch when I grew up,” she laughed.
She has indeed fulfilled that dream in many ways. But in one important sense, may have done even better: She wins. In the novel, Atticus mounts a courageous and eloquent defense of a black man unjustly accused of attacking a white woman. But he loses in court, and his client is later killed by a mob.
Dana Nessel also has a track record of taking on impossible causes – and unlike Atticus, winning. Friends rolled their eyes when she agreed in 2012 to defend two gay nurses who wanted to jointly adopt three special needs children they were caring for. The state was happy to place the kids in foster care with April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, the nurses, but refused to allow both to jointly adopt them. Nessel challenged that, and not only did she badly beat Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette in federal court, the judge suggested she expand the case to include same-sex marriage.
She won on those grounds too, and her case was one of several that led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision recognizing that same-sex couples have a right to marry...
That’s a quote from an article by Jack Lessenberry which appeared recently in Dome Magazine.
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Of course, Michigan isn’t the only state with good candidates. Someone else well worth listening to is Paula Jean Swearingen, who’s running for the Democratic senate nomination in West Virginia this year. There’s a powerful story and video featuring her that I plan to include in next week’s diary, but this week as an introduction to her here are some things she has said about why she’s running and what she stands for:
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In the wealthiest nation in the world, nobody should have to beg for clean water, clean air and prosperity.
The political establishment has monopolized our wealth and power for long enough. The American people are ready for a new movement that creates systemic change. We can't expect career politicians, who benefit from maintaining the status quo, to create change, and fight for the people. I'm part of a national movement to create a democracy that works for all of us and finally moves West Virginia forward in a positive direction.
~ Paula Jean Swearingen
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In America, every child deserves a chance to succeed. Equal and unlimited access to a quality education should be a right, not a privilege.
Educating the citizenry of a nation pays dividends in the long run, with the economy getting back much more than is initially put in.
Crushing student debt for higher education should no longer burden young people trying to improve their lives through hard work. We have the tools to build the best education system in the world! We just need the will to do it.
~ Paula Jean Swearingen
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Minimum wage has not kept up with the cost of living. It has been nearly ten years since the last modest increase the federal government was willing to pass. Over that same time, the wealth gap grew larger than ever. This is about justice and basic human decency. If you work hard and you work full time you shouldn’t live in poverty…
~ Paula Jean Swearingen
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I support strong unions and collective bargaining. I am forever proud to have stood on the lines and at rallies at the Capitol with the West Virginia teachers and public employees who helped reignite the Labor movement across the country.
~ Paula Jean Swearingen
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We can't let the tantrums of corporate lobbyists and their sponsored members of Congress poke holes in our progress through legislative deal-making. We must start looking toward the future.
~ Paula Jean Swearingen
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Yikes! I’m an hour late posting this already, so let me post a few more quick quotes without comment from me:
Did you know it’s legal for companies to pay people with disabilities pennies on the dollar for doing the same job as a worker without a disability? It’s a discriminatory practice – and I'm working to eliminate it.
~ Elizabeth Warren
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Amazon is using its enormous power to dissuade the city of Seattle from passing a modest tax on profitable corporations to address their severe housing crisis. This is what corporate power and oligarchy is all about.
~ Bernie Sanders
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For far too long, the United States health care system has put corporate profits over people's lives. That disgrace has got to end. Medicare For All!
~ Bernie Sanders
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Unbelievably, hundreds of thousands of low-income Americans are in jail because they can't afford cash bail, or are unable to pay fines owed to local governments. We should be attempting to alleviate poverty, not jailing people because they are poor.
~ Bernie Sanders
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I stand with the thousands of Puerto Ricans protesting the latest austerity measures. We must stop treating Puerto Rico like a colony and start treating the people of Puerto Rico as the fellow American citizens that they are.
~ Bernie Sanders
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The economy has been humming along nicely for people who are already at the top. But for more than a generation now, things haven’t gone so great for most workers. Wages are flat. Pensions are gone. Unions have been gutted. Health care and child care costs have exploded.
But I want to talk to you today about one problem that keeps millions of workers up at night: unpredictable schedules.
Too many retail, restaurant, and fast food workers don’t find out what their schedules will be, and how many hours they’ll get paid for, until the very last minute. Half of low-wage workers say they have little or no say over the hours they are scheduled to work. 20-30% are in jobs where they can be called into work at the last minute.
That’s why I’ve introduced the Schedules That Work Act to cut back on some of the most unstable, unpredictable scheduling practices…
Just think: Without a stable work schedule, how could you plan for anything in advance? How can you schedule childcare, doctors’ visits, parent-teacher conferences, or classes where you can learn new skills and get ready for a better-paying job?
And how can you set a family budget if you don’t know if you’ll be paid for 10 hours or 20 hours next week? You couldn’t.
Put yourself in one of these workers’ shoes (and remember, your feet are probably sore):
- A single mom who doesn’t find out that her hours are being canceled until she’s already arranged for daycare and driven halfway across town to show up to work.
- Someone who wants to go to school to get an education but can’t ask for a more predictable schedule without getting fired just for asking.
- A worker who is told to wait around on-call for hours with no guarantee of work hours, without getting anything for her time.
You’re overstretched, you’re stressed, and you just need a little relief. A little more security. A little more of a sense that you have a schedule you can predict, and wages you can count on.
That’s where the Schedules That Work Act comes in. Employers can still do their scheduling, and they can make changes as needed, but they should have some ground rules: they should provide schedules two weeks in advance. No more retaliation against workers who ask for schedule changes.
Workers told to wait on call for hours should get something for their time.
This is about basic fairness – and basic human decency.
~ Elizabeth Warren
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