By Mark Gruenberg
WASHINGTON: Socialist senator Bernie Sanders is out on the stump again, helping lead, in a big way, the opposition to Donald Trump where other Democratic Party lawmakers have not. And people—tens of thousands of them coast to coast—are responding.
The latest proof occurred on April 12 in Los Angeles. Sanders, Vermont’s 83-year-old independent senator and one of the longest and most consistent supporters of workers on Capitol Hill, drew what the Los Angeles Police Department, not known for inflating crowd counts, said was 60,000 people to downtown L.A.
Sanders has been out campaigning for months, drawing huge crowds, even in red states, of people angry and upset by President Trump’s killing of programs and policies important to the people. His “Fighting Oligarchy: Where Do We Go From Here” tour partner is often Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the outspoken progressive lawmaker from the Bronx. Both declare the U.S. is ruled by an oligarchy.
Given the depredations foisted on the nation by the Republican president, and his chainsaw-wielding partner, billionaire Elon Musk, Sanders and his allies are marshaling people to fight back in the streets.
Sanders stepped up where others, notably Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., feared to tread. Schumer was seen by many progressive lawmakers and others as having caved in to Trump and the GOP on a key budget vote, providing needed Democratic support to sidetrack the party’s best leverage, a filibuster, against a bill that would lay the groundwork for continued cuts harmful to workers and their allies for the remainder of the year and going forward from there. He has even faced some demands that he resign in favor of a younger, more progressive figure in the party.
Michelle Allen, grassroots director for Food and Water Watch, comparing Schumer to Sanders, said, “I think he [Schumer] is being more conservative,” Allen made the comment on April 13 at a Zoom session of the Progressive Democrats of America. “I agree,” said Progressive Democrats of America’s chief Alan Minsky at that gathering.
“We are living in a moment of extraordinary danger,” Sanders told the Los Angeles crowd. “How we respond to this moment will not only impact our lives but will impact the lives of our kids and future generations.” The outcome could also determine “whether the planet Earth survives,” he declared.
“We’re living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of the country. We’re living in a moment with a president who has no understanding or respect for the Constitution of the United States. And let us make no doubt about it: Moving us rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society,” Sanders said of Trump.
“I’m no longer talking about how we’re moving to oligarchy. I’m talking about how we are living today in an oligarchic form of society,” he told the crowd, capping an L.A. rally which lasted five hours and included noted performers Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Joan Baez, all longtime progressives, as well as Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.
“If we are here to defeat him,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd about Trump, “we must defeat the system that created him. Money in politics is the hand of oligarchy.”
“The feeling of the water rising up to our throats, the impossibility to afford anything easily, the fear of speaking up, the deeply bitter and toxic division driven more by algorithms on social media than individual thought, the crumbling of our rights and protections–understand that all of this is what it means and what it feels like to be governed by billionaires,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
“It’s the same old exploitation,” of workers by the rich, added Service Employees President April Verrett. “We are the ones who are going to save us,” declared Georgia Flowers-Lee of United Teachers of Los Angeles.
“When Musk fires workers, we fight to give workers a raise. Raise the wage to $17!” exclaimed Khanna another progressive leader, referring to the federal minimum wage.
Crowds, and voters, are enthusiastic. Since the minimum wage was last raised, in 2009, to $7.25, more than half of all states—blue, purple, and red—and cities from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles on down, have all raised the minimum wage.
Senators aren’t. During a vote-a-rama on a budget bill days before, they defeated Sanders’ minimum wage hike on a party-line vote in the GOP-run Senate.
Sanders isn’t just traveling to deep blue states and areas. Earlier on the same day, he was in California’s evenly split Central Valley and he then hit the Coachella Music Festival.
The day before took the anti-oligarchy tour to Tucson, in swing state Arizona, to deep-red Idaho the day after, and to deep-red Montana on April 16, his tour schedule says. In Montana, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez will be joined by a third firebrand: Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: People’s World
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