A Transformative Role In American Politics... Bernie, AOC, Rebecca Parson

I don't know if I would have had the guts Ryan Grim showed earlier in the week when he went on Chris Hayes' show on Comcast-TV and denounced the network-- Hayes, as he noted, is the exception-- for blocking out Bernie. Corporate media-- corporate everything, corporate America-- is at war. They're at war with us. We need to fight back. Bigly.

Yesterday, AOC sent out a fundraising letter for Bernie. "The first time I heard about Bernie Sanders," she wrote, "I was waiting tables at a greasy spoon diner. I was working 12-hour shifts, scraping by without health benefits, and making less than a living wage. Like millions of working people, I had resigned myself to believing this was just the way things were." Did you ever experience that? I did. For years, I had to decide whether my last few dollars would feed my gas tank or my belly. (I was much thinner then.)

"Bernie," she continued, "helped many of us realize things don’t have to be this way. Working people don’t have to accept an economy rigged to protect the powerful. We can transform our country, if and only if we build a multi-racial, multi-gendered, multi-generational movement for change. This weekend I stood with more than 25,000 friends in Queens, New York to endorse Bernie for president."

The only reason I believed I could launch a longshot run for Congress is because Bernie’s campaign proved that you can build a grassroots movement and win. He showed what people-powered mass movement politics can accomplish at the ballot box.

Our priority is not only defeating Donald Trump in 2020. It is building a grassroots movement to dismantle the systems of which Trump is a symptom.

When we do that, we can affirm health care as a right and pass Medicare for All. We can pass a Green New Deal to decarbonize our economy and create millions of union-wage jobs. We can reform our criminal justice system, and make college tuition free.

We can do all of these things, but only if millions of us come together to form the greatest grassroots movement this country has ever seen.

78% is higher than 74%

We're enthusiastic about all of our candidates at Blue America-- like a parent. We don't favor one over an other. We love everybody equally. Sometimes, though, I detect a little something special from some of us in regard to one candidate from way up in northwest Washington. Rebecca Parson is a queer democratic socialist, a tenants rights organizer, a board member of Whole WA, which fights for single payer healthcare, and a commission on the Tacoma Commission on Disabilities. She's spent her whole life fighting for the poor and working class. Her opponent, Derek Kilmer, is chair of the New Democrats and fundraises and controls millions of dollars that he funnels to other conservative Democrats like himself. And as a member of the Trump-friendly Problem Solvers Caucus, he works to thwart progressive policies. He refuses to support Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, voted to cut food stamps for 1.7 million people, voted to weaken the political power of unions, and-- against the wishes of every union in the district-- voted to fast track the TPP.

There’s no excuse for this behavior in a progressive state like Washington that caucused for Bernie (though Kilmer used his superdelegate vote for Hillary Clinton) and in a district that has had Democratic representation for over 50 years, including during the 1994 Republican wave. But ultimately, this isn’t about voting data or polls. It’s about the morality of denying a working class district the policies it desperately needs: Medicare for All with drug treatment, the Green New Deal with a federal jobs guarantee, and a Homes Guarantee with universal rent control and the end of homelessness.

Kilmer is on the path of Crowley before him, who also chaired the New Democrats, and it would be a similarly huge upset to defeat him. Especially with that defeat coming at the hands of the first woman or LGBTQ person ever to run for that seat. Telling me I could share it with DWT readers, Parson told me, "Bernie's endorsement would mean so much, because it's him and his political revolution that convinced me running and winning was possible for me. Bernie endorsing a fellow democratic socialist in this race would be huge in getting it the national attention it deserves and helping us get the policies our people here need."

The only way the progressive policies that Bernie has been talking about his whole life-- and running on now-- are going to become law is to elect more progressives and especially more courageous progressives to replace reactionaries-- both reactionary Republicans and reactionary Democrats like Kilmer. Rebecca's campaign is a real long shot-- although not anymore a long shot than AOC's was in 2018. Many Blue America contributors took the shot with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Let's do the same now for Rebecca Parson this cycle. Please consider contributing to her and to the other progressive candidates on the ActBlue page you'll get to if you click on the 2020 thermometer on the right. Look at the names on that list. It takes political courage to take that stand, political courage we're going to need in 2021 and 2022 and beyond to start passing legislation to fundamentally change our country-- fundamentally change in a way Status Quo Joe has admitted he stands against, like Medicare-for-All.