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The DNC Chair Race Is Over. Now Comes the Real Battle.

Mother Jones

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And to think, that was the easy part. Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez was elected as chair of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday, edging out Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison in the first competitive election for the job in decades. The 55-year-old Perez, the first Latino chair of the party, will now inherit the most thankless job in politics—rebuilding a party that is at its lowest point since the 1920s.

The race was often miscast as a proxy fight between supporters of Bernie Sanders and supporters of Hillary Clinton, a framing that was unfair to both Ellison and Perez, dynamic and progressive political operatives running for a job often reserved for staid political figures. In the end, Perez’s win was not a rejection of Ellison’s vision of the party; in key ways, his campaign was an affirmation of it.

Party chair is a position typically of interest only to political junkies. But with organizers still amped up from the presidential election, the race had the feel and structure of a competitive primary, with a half-dozen candidate forums across the country and an intensive push from rank-and-file voters that recalled previous courting of superdelegates. “I’ve been lobbied consistently by phone, by email, by Facebook, by Twitter for the last month,” said Melvin Poindexter, a DNC member from Massachusetts who was supporting Ellison.

Ellison, for his part, tried to tamp down the barrage of phone calls on his behalf, which one state party chair unfavorably described as “anarchy.” But aggressive lobbying proved critical. Kerman Maddox, a DNC member from California, explained that he’d chosen Perez in part because “Tom called me more than any of the other Democratic candidates”—a sentiment echoed by other voting members.

After the results were announced, a dozen Ellison supporters—including the congressman’s brother, Eric—chanted “party for the people, not big money” from the back of the Atlanta ballroom, with a few cries of “bullshit!” thrown in. While the formal final vote, sealed on the second ballot, was 235 to 200, in a show of unity, Perez was subsequently elected by acclamation. In his first move as chair, he announced that Ellison had agreed to serve as his deputy chair.

“If you’re wearing a ‘Keith’ t-shirt—or any t-shirt—I am asking you to give everything you’ve got to support chairman Perez,” Ellison told the room. Afterward, they switched campaign pins in a show of solidarity.

In the run up to the vote, some Ellison backers argued that there was no real case for a Perez chairmanship—that he was running as a check on Sanders’ influence and little more. But DNC members I spoke with seemed to understand Perez’s pitch quite clearly: he was a turnaround artist who had retooled complex bureaucracies toward progressive ends, first at the Maryland Department of Labor, then at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and finally as President Barack Obama’s Labor Secretary. If progressives had forgotten what they liked about Perez, they needed to look no farther than the conservative Breitbart News, which once heralded Perez “the most radical cabinet secretary since Henry Wallace,” the New Dealer who eventually bolted the Democrats to mount a third party challenge in 1948.

The fights that Perez has waged over the course of his career track closely with those Ellison cut his teeth on in Minneapolis—housing discrimination, voter suppression, and living wages. Neo-liberal stooges still have a place in the Democratic party. But the DNC chair isn’t one of them.

Beyond their shared political priorities, Perez even offered a similar diagnosis as Ellison. The party had become top-heavy, focusing too much on the presidential race, and had neglected to compete on a county-by-county level. He advocated something resembling a restoration of former chair Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, and proposed to spend more time knocking on doors in off-year elections. There was no talk of compromising with President Donald Trump; Perez dubbed him “the worst president in the history of the United States.”

Ellison sought to win the same way he always has, through a mastery of coalition politics. His backers included American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Rep. John Lewis, and Sanders—many of whom found themselves on opposing sides during the president primary. The threat by OJ Simpson counsel and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz< to leave the party if Ellison won did not appear to have a substantial effect on voters. (Maybe they were waiting to hear from F. Lee Bailey.) He ran not as Sanders 2.0, but as a restoration of an even older form of Democratic progressivism, one evoked by the spruce-green colors on his t-shirts and tote bags—the campaign colors of his political idol, the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone.

Just a few hours before the election, there was an indication Ellison might come up short when the committee members voted on a resolution that would reinstate the party’s ban on corporate donations. The ban, which was first implemented by president-elect Barack Obama in 2008, had been dropped last year by the previous party chair, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Ellison had supported the reinstatement of the ban and envisioned a party’s fundraising model in the mold of Sanders’ small-dollar campaign. Perez never committed to reinstating the contribution ban.

The resolution brought on the most contentious 10 minutes of a weekend that, up until then, had been a love-fest. Bob Mulholland of California, the leading critic of the ban, chided critics as naive. He cited corporate opposition to ousted North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory as proof that corporations aren’t all evil. Supporters of the ban, some of the new party leaders whom had been recently elected to their posts with the backing of Sanders’s supporters, implicitly tied the resolution to the senator’s one-time candidacy, warning that the party risked alienating voters who cared about money in politics. Jessica Sell Chambers, a Sanders backer and the newly minted national committeewoman from Wyoming, offered a succinct appraisal: “I belong to the party of the people and the last time I checked corporations aren’t people.”

Inside the Westin, where Democrats began assembling on Thursday, the notion that the chair candidates were engaged in a rancorous, existential fight seemed far-fetched. Perez, who was hoarse from two days of lobbying as he made a last-minute push Friday night, had taken to calling the event “Unity Saturday.” Even the most die-hard Ellison supporters were optimistic that the party would be in good hands win or lose. Each of the leading candidates devoted portions of their stump speech to a call for unity no matter who won.

“I really just want to like put at least four of them together,” said Dolly Strazar from Hawaii, a Sanders supporter who ended up backing Perez. Another voting member, Aleita Huguenin of California, predicted that the fight would quickly simmer down. “I’ve been through too many of them,” she said. “People are a little disappointed, they have two dinners, and will be back together.”

In reality, the contentious fight over the future of the party never really described the DNC race—but there is such a battle playing out across the country. Already, Sanders supporters, both organically and with the support of the Senator’s non-profit Our Revolution, have begun targeting the party’s apparatus at state, county, and local levels. They are poised to take over the California Democratic party in May, after winning a majority of delegates to the state convention in January. The Sanders wing is ascendant in Nebraska and Wyoming, and setting its sights on Florida and Michigan. Beyond party positions, re-energized Sanders supporters are talking openly about primary challenges to Democratic officeholders who support Donald Trump’s policies.

Less than a year after only 39 of 447 DNC members endorsed Sanders’ presidential campaign, his chosen candidate came about 15 votes short of taking over the whole thing. The numbers reflect Sanders’ forces growing strength in the party, a gradual upheaval that may only be sped along by Perez’s victory. DNC members from Wyoming—where the Vermont senator notched a huge caucus victory but due to party rules emerged with few delegates—who are not on board are feeling the heat. When Bruce Palmer, the party’s vice chair, told me he was supporting Tom Perez, he conceded that it may be to his own detriment. After all, he’s got an election next month.

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The DNC Chair Race Is Over. Now Comes the Real Battle.

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Tom Perez Was Just Elected DNC Chair

Mother Jones

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Tom Perez was elected chair of the Democratic National Committee in Atlanta on Saturday. Perez, who ran the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama and later served as his Secretary of Labor, edged out Keith Ellison, a Muslim congressman from Minneapolis, in the first contested race for party control in decades. After a congested first round of balloting, the other candidates dropped out of the race and the race proceded to a head-to-head second ballot. Perez received 235 votes. Ellison notched 200.

Immediately after his election, Perez asked and received unanimous consent from the assembly of Democrats to name Ellison as the party’s deputy chair.

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Tom Perez Was Just Elected DNC Chair

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Climate activists are rooting for Keith Ellison to head up the Democratic National Committee.

Democratic Party insiders will vote for a new chair this weekend. The winner will get the tough job of trying to rebuild a damaged party.

Ten people are in the running, but the victor is likely to be one of the top two contenders: Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison or former Labor Secretary Tom Perez. Ellison backed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary last year, and Sanders is backing Ellison in this race. In 2012 and 2015, Ellison and Sanders teamed up to push a bill to end subsidies for fossil fuel companies.

Climate activist (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben argues that Ellison, a progressive who is “from the movement wing,” would help the party regain credibility with young people.

A coalition of millennial leaders endorsed Ellison this week, including a number of activists from climate groups. “We want a chair who will fight to win a democracy for all and overcome the profound crises of our time — from catastrophic climate change to systemic racism, historic economic inequality to perpetual war,” they wrote.

350 Action, the political arm of climate group 350.org, endorsed Ellison earlier this month:

And Jane Kleeb, a prominent anti-Keystone activist and a voting DNC member, is backing Ellison too:

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Climate activists are rooting for Keith Ellison to head up the Democratic National Committee.

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Standing Rock is burning.

Democratic Party insiders will vote for a new chair this weekend. The winner will get the tough job of trying to rebuild a damaged party.

Ten people are in the running, but the victor is likely to be one of the top two contenders: Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison or former Labor Secretary Tom Perez. Ellison backed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary last year, and Sanders is backing Ellison in this race. In 2012 and 2015, Ellison and Sanders teamed up to push a bill to end subsidies for fossil fuel companies.

Climate activist (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben argues that Ellison, a progressive who is “from the movement wing,” would help the party regain credibility with young people.

A coalition of millennial leaders endorsed Ellison this week, including a number of activists from climate groups. “We want a chair who will fight to win a democracy for all and overcome the profound crises of our time — from catastrophic climate change to systemic racism, historic economic inequality to perpetual war,” they wrote.

350 Action, the political arm of climate group 350.org, endorsed Ellison earlier this month:

And Jane Kleeb, a prominent anti-Keystone activist and a voting DNC member, is backing Ellison too:

Original article – 

Standing Rock is burning.

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Exxon just decided to keep a big chunk of its tar sands in the ground.

Democratic Party insiders will vote for a new chair this weekend. The winner will get the tough job of trying to rebuild a damaged party.

Ten people are in the running, but the victor is likely to be one of the top two contenders: Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison or former Labor Secretary Tom Perez. Ellison backed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary last year, and Sanders is backing Ellison in this race. In 2012 and 2015, Ellison and Sanders teamed up to push a bill to end subsidies for fossil fuel companies.

Climate activist (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben argues that Ellison, a progressive who is “from the movement wing,” would help the party regain credibility with young people.

A coalition of millennial leaders endorsed Ellison this week, including a number of activists from climate groups. “We want a chair who will fight to win a democracy for all and overcome the profound crises of our time — from catastrophic climate change to systemic racism, historic economic inequality to perpetual war,” they wrote.

350 Action, the political arm of climate group 350.org, endorsed Ellison earlier this month:

And Jane Kleeb, a prominent anti-Keystone activist and a voting DNC member, is backing Ellison too:

Source: 

Exxon just decided to keep a big chunk of its tar sands in the ground.

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Why Tom Perez Is a Strong Competitor Against Keith Ellison in the Democratic Party Race

Mother Jones

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Progressive Democrats gazing upon the fight for the leadership of their party ought to be delighted. The two leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee—Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Labor Secretary Tom Perez—are each battle-hardened and experienced progressives with much to offer their partisan comrades. Yet the contest for the DNC’s top post has widely been cast as a clash between wings of the party, with Ellison as the champion of the insurgent left and Perez as the candidate of the establishment. That depiction misrepresents the face-off and fixates on the wrong question: who has better progressive street cred? With the Democrats deep in the hole—a minority in both houses of Congress, out of the White House, holding only 16 governor slots and merely 31 of 99 state legislative chambers, and lacking a deep bench or a flock of rising stars—the tussle for DNC chief ought to focus on who can best do the nuts-and-bolts job of rebuilding the party from the ground level.

It’s tempting to view this contest as mostly symbolic. The Democratic primary battle of 2016 pitted Bernie Sanders’ revolution against Hillary Clinton’s pragmatic centrism. Many of Sanders’ supporters saw her as a corporate Democrat out of touch with—but eager to exploit—the party’s progressive grassroots. Many of Clinton’s supporters regarded him as an insurgent who was no true Democrat but happy to trigger tension within the party for his own political advancement. And since Election Day, there has been much jabbering about the rift that remains, with this talk concentrating on the resentment festering among Sanders fans who believe party insiders conspired to sink his candidacy.

So Ellison, one of the few House Democrats to endorse Sanders’ presidential run, has been seen as something of a consolation prize—or an offering that can help heal the fractured party. His early entry earned him a rash of key endorsements, including from Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Sen. Chuck Schumer. For a few weeks, Ellison, with support from both ends of the Democratic spectrum, seemed like a unity candidate on an easy path to victory.

Then Perez joined the race. He was not a last-minute contestant shoved into the contest by Democratic establishmentarians looking to thwart Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the House—though some Obama loyalists within the party were clearly not keen on Ellison. Perez, who has been busy finishing up at the Labor Department before handing over the keys to Trumpsters, merely needed more time to make his decision, according to his camp. Yet when Perez, who had endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race, announced his bid, several unions, including the AFL-CIO, which have worked closely with him, were already on the Ellison Express. (Perez has since been backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers, the United Farm Workers, and the International Association of Fire Fighters, and the Democratic governors of Colorado, Louisiana, Rhode Island, and Virginia.) And with Perez’s entrance, some Sanders folks started claiming that the Evil Empire—that is, the poohbahs of the party—was once again seeking to crush a progressive insurgency. (Ellison backers have been ticked off that his Democratic opponents have pointed to a handful of Ellison’s remarks and his associations with radical black Muslims in the 1990s to undermine his bid.)

This wing-versus-wing dust-up is unfortunate for the party. The vote for DNC chair—the person who will be stuck with a mountain of mundane but important tasks and responsibilities—probably should not be predicated on symbolism. Nor should it necessarily be a contest over competing issue platforms—unless the issue divide truly defines the future course of the party. And that’s not what is at stake here. Certainly, Perez, while serving in President Barack Obama’s cabinet, did not oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was backed by the president, and Ellison was a critic of the trade pact. But there’s truly not much ideological distance between the two. They are both grassroots-minded progressives. Ellison, before being elected to the House, was a community activist and operated a civil rights, employment, and criminal defense law practice in Minneapolis. Perez, the Buffalo, New York-raised son of two parents exiled from the Dominican Republic, was once the head of CASA de Maryland, an organization advocating for and providing services to immigrants.

And there’s no big difference in their big-picture approaches to what must be done within the DNC. Ellison’s website declares, “We must energize Democratic activists across the country and give them the tools to build the Party from the bottom up. Beyond a 50-state strategy, we need a 3,143-county strategy…We must also reclaim our history as the Party that stands with working people.” Perez’s website says, “In the years ahead, we must strengthen our team, and our bench, from the ground up. And we must stand up to protect President Obama’s accomplishments. But most of all, we need to listen. We need to listen to Democrats at every level, empowering them to fight for progressive values and a vision of opportunity and optimism. And we need to listen to voters, up and down the ballot, who are asking us to stand behind them.” You could transpose these statements and not notice it.

At this point, the Democratic Party needs much rebuilding—which entails fundraising, strategizing, candidate recruitment, messaging, organizational development, and more—from local precincts to the national level. So it might be best if the selection of the DNC chief was more job interview and less political wrestling match. Yeah, right. But many of the 447 members of the Democratic Party’s national committee, who are the only voters in this contest, might actually view the race in such a way. (This group includes state chairs looking for a national chair who will get them the help and resources they need to succeed at home.) And for them, Perez’s resumé could hold strong (and progressive) appeal. (Association declared: Perez is a neighbor, and several times I have socialized in groups with him.)

Perez has had multiple successes overseeing large organizations. After a career that included a stint as a civil rights attorney in the Justice Department (during the George H.W. Bush years) and as a special counsel to Sen. Ted Kennedy on civil rights, criminal, and constitutional issues, Perez was appointed by Obama to run the civil rights division of the Justice Department. As Mother Jones reported a few years ago,

During the George W. Bush years, the division had been marred by partisan politics and declining civil rights enforcement. But since Perez took the helm, the division has blocked partisan voting schemes, cracked down on police brutality, protected gay and lesbian students from harassment, sued anti-immigrant Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio for racial profiling, stood up against Islamophobia, and forced the two largest fair-housing settlements in history from banks that discriminated against minority homeowners.

While Perez was heading the civil rights division, it mounted a record-breaking number of probes into police abuse, and it achieved wide-ranging agreements to clean up police forces accused of misconduct.

After taking charge of the Labor Department in 2013, Perez fired up that agency. As Politico noted,

It was one of the federal government’s sleepier outposts for most of the dozen years that preceded Perez’s arrival just over one year ago. But Labor has been newly energized under Perez. “Enforcement activity is up,” Alfred Robinson Jr., who was an acting wage and hour administrator for the Labor Department during the George W. Bush administration, noted earlier this month in a blog post. The department has also raised its public profile on issues like minimum wage and paid medical leave and lavished favorable attention on companies that give employees what Perez calls “voice.”

At Labor, Perez was in charge of an organization with 17,000 employees, a multi-billion dollar budget, and offices throughout the nation. And he pocketed a number of policy wins. He expanded the overtime rule for millions of workers. He helped resolve the Verizon strike and achieved protections for Verizon’s retail workers. On his watch in 2016, the department collected $266 million in back pay owed to workers. He pushed for expanded paid sick leave. The department issued a new rule to protect workers in construction and manufacturing from exposure to dangerous levels of silica dust, which can cause disease and cancer. It raised the minimum wage and and provided extended overtime protections for 2 million home health care workers. The department issued an important conflict of interest rule forcing retirement advisers to place clients’ interests ahead of their own, an Elizabeth Warren-like measure that could save Americans billions of dollars per year.

Perez has had an impressive run at Labor, overseeing a big bureaucracy and achieving results. He has put his values into practice. Ellison has done similar as a member of Congress, mounting grassroots campaigns, raising money for Democrats across the country, and pushing pro-consumer financial reform legislation as a member of the House financial services committee. If DNCers want to send a welcoming signal to aggrieved (rightly or wrongly) Bernie-ites when they vote on February 24—and avoid possible further acrimony between Party HQ and progressive activists—Ellison is the obvious choice. But if there is more to the vote than that—and this race is removed from the never-ending conflict between the party and its progressive base—Perez is a strong contender. He is a solid progressive with a record of getting stuff done. His prospects will be shaped by whether party officials (they are the only ones who have a vote) consider this contest an act of atonement and reconciliation or a hiring decision.

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Why Tom Perez Is a Strong Competitor Against Keith Ellison in the Democratic Party Race

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Radiation City’s Feast of Retro Pop

Mother Jones

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Radiation City
Synesthetica
Polyvinyl

Courtesy of Polyvinyl Records

Drawing on from ’60s easy listening and ’70s dance grooves, among a host of other sources, the third album from Radiation City offers a feast of attractive pop that sounds great in the background—kudos to John Vanderslice’s shiny production—but also holds up under closer scrutiny. Like spiritual and stylistic cousins the Bird and the Bee, minus the sardonic undertone, the Portland, Oregon combo uses retro as a ruse, with poised singer Lizzy Ellison gently suggesting a melancholy heart full of desire and regret. For all its breezy allure and obvious echoes, from Paul McCartney (“Juicy”) to bossa nova (“Separate”) to James Bond themes (“Butter”), Synesthetica is subtly original and quietly powerful work.

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Radiation City’s Feast of Retro Pop

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