Campaign for America's Future

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What Will You Remember When You Vote? by Michaela Lovegood

I will remember when I vote on November 6 that the only reason my brother is still alive is because Tom Wolf, the governor of the state where he is currently on death row, issued an executive order to stop executions in Pennsylvania.

If Wolf loses in November, it’s likely that his opponent will reverse this executive order, and my brother will die before attorneys can offer him the mental health defense he deserved in 1994.

My brother was born with a congenital heart defect and several brain defects. He was convicted of murder, based on a forced video confession and a worse-than-shoddy public defense.  He grew up in group homes, as did my mother, who was raped and became pregnant with him when she was eleven.

That’s why I pledge to vote on November 6 – on my, her and his behalf. So much is at stake right now. I will Remember In November: take the pledge with me.

Black people should not have to live with targets on our backs. Black people deserve proper healthcare and mental health services. Black people deserve proper legal representation. Black people should NOT be tortured to make untrue confessions.

I will remember in November that every 28 hours, a Black person is shot down by law enforcement. Here in Chicago, Police Detective Jason Van Dyke was finally convicted for the murder of Laquan McDonald – a rare case where a police officer was held accountable for the murders they commit.

But I also remember that former Chicago Police Department Captain, John Burge, who tortured more than 120 black people in his custody over 20 years, received only a 4 and a half year sentence, and was able to keep his pension.

I will remember all this and more when I vote. Will you?

When I remember and when I vote, I am comforted to know that I am not alone: I am part of a movement. I have taken a pledge to be a Political Healer – this groundbreaking initiative, developed by People’s Action, supports the voices, votes and power of womxn and queer, trans and gender non-binary people of color.  These are the same voters we need to turn out in this election in order to have a Progressive Blue Wave.

The Political Healers Project is part training, part base-building, and totally revolutionary. Created by Take Action Minnesota leader Arique Aguilar, this explores how womxn of color can transformationally use healing as a tool for political change in a world organized against their survival. Together, we reclaim public and political arenas, and learn how to bring our talents and visions out of private spaces to make change in the wider world.

Keep your eyes peeled for these powerful womxn in their signature purple stoles at your next local direct action or polling place — through partnership with People’s Action Institute, this project has already trained more than 280 Political Healers in 11 states.

I will remember in November that despite the dominant narrative, the enslavement of black people in this country has not ended. Whether it’s through the death penalty or police murders, the killing of Black people is a baked into the history and culture of the United States.

I will remember in November that our political system allows abusers like Kavanaugh to be elected to the highest court of the land. It is our political system that perpetuates the structures that continue to target black people, women, young, queer, disabled and non-Christian people.

These aren’t necessarily things that I want to remember. I don’t want to always be present to anger, outrage, fear and panic – for myself and for my Black comrades and communities. But if I don’t remember, I become complacent and numb. And when I do remember, I discover the power we have, together, to create change.

We can be the change that we need. And that power starts when we vote.

Will you join me at the polls on November 6, when we vote for our values?

What will you remember when you vote?

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How Teachers Might Save Arizona Schools from the Kochs by Jeff Bryant

“A change in education is Arizona’s No. 1 issue,” Garcia said in a televised debate. “It is my strength, it is Ducey’s weakness, and it’s going to be the difference.” (Photo: Victoria Pickering/flickr/cc)

The moment Beth Lewis realized the powerful political forces she was up against was when she was seated in the gallery of the Arizona House watching Republican legislators, one-by-one, fall into line to support a new bill she and her fellow teachers had come to the capitol to oppose. Republican Governor Doug Ducey and others “working the bill” on the floor took any wavering members into a back room for a “conversation,” while lobbyists in the wings nodded and hand-signaled with lawmakers to track the bill’s progress. When the bill’s handlers agreed a vote was in order, it passed easily. Then, “it was like a party,” Lewis recalls, with lawmakers high-fiving each other and lobbyists shaking hands and backslapping. “It was sickening,” she says. “I realized our state legislators weren’t at all interested in representing the people.”

The bill, which the State Senate also passed and the governor quickly signed, opened up education savings accounts, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, to all of the state’s 1.1 million students. The new accounts, previously restricted to students with special needs and students attending schools receiving a grade of D or F on the state’s school report card, would provide $4,400 a year, 90 percent of the amount of money the state would typically send a district for enrolling a student, for a family to spend as they wish on their children’s education. Students with disabilities and poor students would receive more money than other students.

For parents to receive the money, on a debit card, they must agree not to enroll their children in a public school—essentially giving up their children’s right to a free public education. Other than that, the program has few regulations and there’s little oversight in how public money is being spent. For that reason, Lewis, an Arizona public school teacher, and others who oppose the bill, call the savings accounts “vouchers” that drain funding from public education.

The lobbyists working the House floor that night were from the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing advocacy group based in Arizona with extensive connections to the Koch brothers and a number of organizations and networks with close Koch ties including ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), the State Policy Network, and the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. For years, Charles and David Koch and their associated foundations have invested heavily in electing Arizona lawmakers, including Governor Ducey, and expanding the education savings accounts was one of their crowning achievements.

Passing the bill was also a moment of triumph for the education agenda of the Trump administration. Shortly after news of the passage of the voucher expansion broke, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos tweeted, “A big win for students & parents in Arizona tonight with the passage of ed savings accts. I applaud Gov. @DougDucey for putting kids first.”

But in the upcoming Arizona midterm elections, that achievement is at risk, as Lewis and her colleagues with Save Our School Arizona have successfully pushed a referendum onto the ballot, Proposition 305, that lets Arizona voters decide the fate of the bill. Should the initiative fail, the Koch brothers’ plan to expand vouchers would be defeated.

Arizona Democrats running for office, including Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Garcia, who is taking on Ducey, have embraced opposition to the voucher program and thrown their support behind teachers who are calling for more funding of public schools.

Should pro-education candidates win, and Prop 305 go down in flames, the teachers would have led a remarkable campaign that not only would be a victory for public schools but also would threaten to topple the Koch brothers’ political empire in the Grand Canyon State.

Before There Was #RedforEd

“The teachers’ protest movement, which calls itself #RedforEd, has transformed the political battleground” in Arizona, says an article in the New York Times.

The weeklong walkouts that happened earlier this year demanded higher teacher pay and more funding for schools. #RedforEd not only won concessions from Ducey and the state legislature; it culminated in placing a referendum on the ballot, called InvestInEd, that would have raised income taxes on individuals and households earning more than $250,000 and directed the increased revenues to public schools. However, the State Supreme Court struck the initiative from the ballot, for technical questions about its wording.

But months before there was #RedforEd, there was the fight against school vouchers.

After Lewis and her colleagues watched the statewide voucher expansion pass in the Arizona capitol, they began to meet regularly and formed Save Our Schools Arizona. At first, their effort to overturn the legislation got few supporters, Lewis recalls, even among teachers. Few understood that “scholarships” is just another word for “vouchers” and that “empowerment” actually means parents have to give up the right for their children to receive a free public education.

The “turning point,” according to Lewis, was the revelation that citizens could use a petition campaign to refer legislation to a ballot. That gave anti-voucher advocates a specific goal and steps—how many signatures they’d need and how many volunteers they’d need to recruit to circulate the petitions.

A Costly Program for Wealthier Families

Also aiding to their communications effort was an accumulation of evidence of how poorly the voucher program measured up to its purported intention to “save” low-income families from “failed” public schools.

Most of the students who participate in the program, 70 percent, come from some of the state’s most highly rated schools—rated A or B on the state report card. Only 7 percent of the money is being used by students leaving D- or F-rated schools. The majority of these families are also not low-income, but instead reside in the wealthier suburban communities in the state.

Other analyses have found that the vast majority of parents participating in the program use the money to pay for private school tuition. Given that most private schools in Arizona are religious schools, a reasonable conclusion is that the education saving accounts are mostly subsidizing wealthier families’ desires to leave public schools to seek out religious educations for their children.

Furthermore, since the average payout from the voucher program is $5,700 per year for children without disabilities, and the average private school tuition in Arizona is $6,126 for elementary schools and $19,162 for high schools, the vouchers are supplementing parents, who may already be able to afford private schools, with a “coupon” that heavily discounts the tuition. Families of students with disabilities, who receive $19,000 in voucher money on average, could even be “profiting” from the program, as there is very little to no monitoring of how they spend from the accounts.

Currently, Arizona’s voucher program drains $141 million from the public school system, and in fact, costs the state an additional $62 million each year—roughly $4,700 per student, adding 75 percent more to what the state pays to educate a regular public school student.

Kochs vs. ‘a Bunch of Volunteers’

Armed with information about how the voucher program was defrauding the state of millions of education dollars, the SOS Arizona team formed their campaign to get 75,321 signatures to place Prop 305 on the ballot.

“We did most of our outreach through social media,” recalls Sharon Kirsch, another leader in SOS Arizona. “SOS never had any money.”

Kirsch, a university professor, became interested in overturning the voucher expansion after she saw the bill zoom through the State Senate without serious consideration of what the expansion would do to public schools. Its sponsor was former State Senator Debbie Lesko—a recipient of large campaign donations from the Koch brothers and other conservative donors—who now sits in Congress and is up for reelection in November. Lesko is also Arizona state chairman for ALEC.

Relying on a network of volunteers—made up mostly of retired educators, parents, and community activists—SOS Arizona submitted 111,540 signatures in August 2017.

After SOS Arizona announced it had successfully gathered more than enough signatures to place the referendum on the ballot, the Koch network intervened again. On the night SOS delivered the signatures for review by the secretary of state’s office, Lewis recalls, they were told “both sides” would be allowed to be present at the review. Who was the other “side”?

“All of a sudden all these men in dark suits came into the room,” says Lewis. “They paired up with each examiner from the state and hovered over their shoulders, pointing to signatures they felt should be challenged or thrown out.”

The “suits” were from Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing pressure group that operates as a political arm of the Koch brothers to advocate and lobby at state and local levels for small government, deregulation, privatization, and anti-labor union policies.

“When I investigated what these right-wing organizations were doing to oppose us,” Kirsch explains, “I realized how strategic they’ve been. They’ve been working on their privatization efforts for years. They fund teams to work full-time on the issues. They’re breeding their own PhDs through academic centers they sponsor. And we just have a bunch of volunteers.”

Americans for Prosperity, along with the American Federation for Children, formerly led by Secretary DeVos, sued to block the referendum. But in January 2018, a judge dismissed the lawsuit.

In the meantime, Governor Ducey was meeting with donors in the Koch network, pledging to go big on passing Prop 305 and asking for their support. “This is a very real fight in my state,” he said. “I didn’t run for governor to play small ball.”

“In 2018, Koch donors see Arizona as ground zero in their push,” the Washington Post reports, and Koch brothers’ money has continued to pour into the state through Americans for Prosperity and the Libre Institute, an astroturf group spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to a local news outlet, “targeting Arizona Latino families with ads, mailers and phone calls” urging them to vote “yes” on Prop 305.

“We had to bring in Spanish-speaking volunteers to counter the propaganda being spread by the Koch Brothers’ Libre group,” says Kirsch. “We reached out to community organizations like LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona),” an Arizona-based grassroots group advocate for social and economic justice in the Latinx community. “They’ve been very helpful in spreading our literature,” Kirsch says.

In addition to its stealth campaign in the Latinx community, supporters of school vouchers also created a #YesforEd campaign that mimics the logo of the teachers’ #RedforEd campaign—a blatant attempt to mislead voters about the initiative and convince them to vote yes.

“This is the lowest of the low when it gets to political dirty tricks,” says Dawn Penich-Thacker of SOS Arizona. “They are obviously trying to mimic #RedforEd,” and create the false impression that a “yes” vote on Prop 305 supports teachers and public-school funding, when it would in fact do the exact opposite.

‘Education Is the Driving Issue’

While SOS Arizona has tried to keep its effort to block voucher expansion nonpartisan, its cause has champions running for office in the Democratic Party.

In the race for governor, Democratic candidate David Garcia is stridently opposed to the voucher expansion and urges voters to vote no. Should Garcia win, he would be the state’s first Latinx governor, but education issues could be what propels him over the top.

“A change in education is Arizona’s No. 1 issue,” Garcia said in a televised debate. “It is my strength, it is Ducey’s weakness, and it’s going to be the difference.”

Ducey has extended his small lead in recent polls, but Garcia insists the surveys likely miss a rising new electorate in the state that includes Latinx voters and teachers and pro-education voters energized by #RedforEd and the presence of Prop 305 on the ballot.

Someone with insights on both those issues—the rising power of Latinx voters and the significance of education in the Arizona elections—is Alex Gomez, the co-executive director of LUCHA.

She tells me LUCHA recently completed an effort to register over 20,000 new voters in the Latinx community and is now canvassing them to ensure they vote. Working with other like-minded organizations, LUCHA’s goal is to turn out 190,000 new voters from the Latinx community in the midterm elections.

LUCHA supported the educators who walked out of schools statewide this spring. “The midterms caught its wind after the teacher strike,” says Gomez. “That moment when there were 75,000 people at the capitol was a big part of building momentum. It became so clear that the legislature is more interested in their corporate donors than in doing the right thing for education and moving the state forward.”

Gomez expects its support for Garcia’s pro-education platform and opposition to Prop 305 will energize new voters, particularly those in the Latinx community who “are very grateful because no one has ever come to them before.”

“Education is the driving issue in Garcia’s campaign,” she says, and “we’re encouraging voters to vote against 305.

In many down-ballot races, Democratic candidates are uniting around education and opposition to Prop 305. In the race to unseat Debbie Lesko in U.S. House District 8, Hiral Tipirneni has drawn a sharp contrast to the Republican incumbent on education, calling Lesko, “the ringleader behind the infamous voucher bill, which takes our tax dollars out of public schools and uses them to pay for private school tuition.” Tipirneni nearly defeated Lesko in a special election in April.

In state legislative races, two Democratic candidates and LUCHA endorsees, Raquel Terán, running in Legislative District 30, and Gilbert Romero, in LD 21, are canvassing and phone-banking on Prop 305 and urging voters to vote no.

‘No Hiding Behind the Curtain’

Those leading the opposition to Prop 305 hope to do more than just defeat the bill; they want to expose the corrupt network behind the effort to privatize Arizona public schools and change the conversation about what would truly help education in the state.

“Teachers are carrying the torch against privatization in ways they never did before,” says Lewis. “They have a level of understanding of the issues I’ve never seen before.”

“Even if we defeat 305, I know folks at Goldwater are already crafting a new bill to replace the voucher bill with something else,” says Kirsch. “But people are paying attention in ways they never have in the past. They’re changing the conversation to making public schools the priority instead of all these other schemes that take money away from them.”

“We’re leaving everything out on the field and are really hopeful about the results,” says Gomez. “Even before election day, we’ve already won because we’ve exposed the corruption of the Republican Party. There’s no hiding behind the curtains anymore.”

First published by the Independent Media Institute.

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People's Champions Run to Win From Maine To Arizona by Leigh Friedman

One week out from the midterm elections, here’s a final snapshot of People’s Action’s electoral program. With so much at stake in these elections, People’s Action and our member organizations are running our biggest program ever.

We are so proud to support our endorsed candidates up and down the ballot. Here are three who really inspire us.

ILHAN OMAR — U.S. HOUSE, MINNESOTA’S 5TH DISTRICT

Ilhan is truly the advocate for all people. She has a vision for Minnesota that includes immigrants, women, incarcerated people, among LGBTQIA+ people among others. She began her progressive work at only 14, when she served as an interpreter for Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party meetings. Two decades later, she proves that she is a devoted activist, educator, and legislator.

MANDELA BARNES — LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, WISCONSIN

Mandela’s six-year track record in state politics gives him the experience in winning big reforms, not just winning big elections. He knows change goes way beyond who is elected to office. Mandela’s vision is all about opportunity for everyone.

RAQUEL TERAN — ARIZONA STATE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Raquel has deep roots in her community, a longtime advocate for immigrants, teachers, workers, and all Arizonans. Raquel is an ardent leader for women’s rights and healthcare for all.

Here are three U.S, House races that our member organizations are doubling down on.

KATIE PORTER — CALIFORNIA’S 45TH DISTRICT

Student Action is hustling on college campuses to turn out the student vote for Porter, who was an early endorser of Medicare for All.

ANTHONY BRINDISI — NEW YORK’S 22ND DISTRICT

Citizen Action of New York has had an active program in this district for months and is readying a big GOTV operation in this neck-and-neck contest.

ANDY KIM — NEW JERSEY’S 3RD DISTRICT

New Jersey Citizen Action and New Jersey Organizing Project are mobilizing complementary universes of voters to topple GOP incumbent Tom MacArthur, a key architect of the Obamacare repeal.

  These three ballot initiatives are worth watching, too.

Passing Universal Home Care in Maine

Maine People’s Alliance is working hard to ensure voters say Yes on Question 1.

Fighting for Climate Justice in Washington State

OneAmerica Votes and WashingtonCAN! are both throwing their weight behind the campaign to pass Initiative 1631.

Capping Loan Shark Interest Rates in Colorado

Colorado People’s Action is rallying voters to pass Proposition 111.

We are testing and scaling up our use of tools and creative tactics.

MobilizeAmerica is a great tool to recruit volunteers to knock on doors, make calls, and send texts with organizations and campaigns, both in person and virtually.

Phone2Action triples the impact of digital activists by compounding emails, texts, and tweets to legislators and regulators on issues like stopping Trump and the EPA from repealing the Clean Power Plan and the #StopKavanaugh confirmation fight.

Remember in November is a relational voter contact program grounded in the work of Political Healers. Political Healers center the stories and power of women of color and engage voters, family, and friends to remember what is at stake when we vote. The Remember in November site encourages people to record and share a short video about what they are remembering when they vote, send a digital or printed postcard to friends and family, download a GOTV toolkit, and more.

For any questions on our electoral program, please contact:

Laurel Wales, Deputy Director of Movement Politics — lead for our 2018 field organizing

Mehrdad Azemun— lead for our 2018 Federal Elections strategy

Ryan Greenwood, Director of Movement Politics

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We Won't Let Them Take Away Our Right To Vote by Keith Sellars

Keith Sellars is one of twelve residents of Alamance County, North Carolina who was arrested and jailed in 2017 for the “crime” of voting, allegedly in violation of probation or parole  – even though Keith was mailed a voter registration card and cleared by poll workers. These charges were part of a concerted effort to intimidate Alamance voters by the county’s Republican District Attorney, Pat Nadolski, who is currently running to become a Superior Court Judge.

On October 27, Sellars and fifty other members of Down Home North Carolina, a grassroots advocacy group that is part of the People’s Action national network, marched  through downtown Graham, North Carolina, past the Confederate memorial and courthouse where Sellars was sentenced to cast early votes in midterm elections.

This “Party To The Polls” was a festive celebration of democracy, with barbeque, puppets and street musicians, but Sellars shared these heartfelt words before the march with those gathered to support him in his courageous choice to stand up to voter intimidation in Alamance County and across the nation.

My name is Keith Sellars. I live in Haw River, North Carolina. I am the father of 4 beautiful girls and one very protective son. I was born and raised in Alamance County, North Carolina, and have called no other place home.

I am also one of the so-called ‘Alamance 12.” In January of 2017, I received a call to notify me that my vote would not count, because I had not yet completed my parole. I was assured that I would not be prosecuted. But that was not the case.

I, along with eleven others, were targeted and charged with felonies for doing what we were told we COULD and SHOULD do: VOTE!

I have voted many times in my life. It started back in my twenties, when I realized that I wanted to make a difference because I was not happy with the way things were – especially for young people of color like me.

But I am not going to lie. Every time I went to court, I felt demoralized and scared for what would happen to me. Thankfully, I had great lawyers from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the amazing support of local groups such as Down Home North Carolina and the NAACP, who packed the courtrooms every time we had to show up.

Eventually, I was able to resolve these charges and settle for a misdemeanor. While that was a relief in many ways for me and my family, I knew from the bottom of my heart that this was still wrong.

THIS WAS NEVER ABOUT PROTECTING DEMOCRACY. They wanted to intimidate us, make an example out of us and scare thousands of potential voters with court records away from ever voting again.  It’s also important to note that nine of the twelve people criminalized by Alamance County for voting are African Americans.

Their strategy was very effective. I know many people who will not vote this election because they saw what happened to us. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I would ever vote again.

You see, life is already very complicated for people like me. Between pulling together gigs to make ends meet, ensuring my children get picked up from school, and all the difficulties that come with being poor, being civically engaged is hard to make a priority.

But just as much as I just felt like disappearing sometimes, I knew that I couldn’t.  I knew that I had to stay here and fight back: fight for the world that my children and I deserve.

This is why I joined Down Home, and why I decided I must vote now. This is why I continue to organize, to ensure that everyone who can vote gets out there.

Because if voting didn’t matter, they wouldn’t work so hard to keep us from voting. If voting didn’t matter, people wouldn’t have lost their lives fighting for the right to do so.

It is our right to vote – but the thing about rights is they only mean something if we exercise them. So that is why I am here today. Because we can no longer let them scare us. We can no longer let them silence us.

I came out to Graham because I decided to vote, and want to let people know that they are not alone.

We are the Many, and they are Few – and if we decide to stand together, to make our voices heard, no one and nothing will stop us.

Now let’s go cast this ballot. Thank you.

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Celebrating Victory for Survivors of Hurricane Sandy by Krista Sperber

It’s been a long road, but we’ve traveled it together. On the sixth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy joined members of the New Jersey Organizing Project to announce what we hope will be important steps towards finally bringing all of our families home on the Jersey Shore.

Standing with Senator Cory Booker, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. and other elected officials, NJOP member Doug Quinn – who is himself still not home – thanked Governor Murphy, and reminded all of those gathered that much remains to be done.

“We are hopeful that this new $50 million dollar program to help people cross the finish line and freezing, reducing and eliminating clawbacks will give families more hope, more opportunity and more stability. We’ve fought long enough and families have been through too much,” Quinn said, as he introduced the governor.

“We cannot stop until every family, in every impacted community, is once again able to walk back through the doors of their homes,” said Murphy said to the crowd gathered at the Union Hose Fire Company station. “There’s 56 in Union Beach alone; that’s 56 families still waiting to write the end of their Sandy story.”

NJOP’s Sandy story was born out of born out of suffering, but it has made us stronger – as individuals, and as a community. Indeed, at the NJOP we have discovered how much stronger we can be when we stand together – and organize.

Just two weeks, ago, on October 13, we gathered in Manahawkin for our first annual convention to talk about our shared priorities: full and fair storm recovery for every family, preparing for the next storm, and the fight to keep healthcare affordable.

We talked about how we had learned that the state is sitting on $1.2 billion in Sandy recovery funds. We also talked about how to make the right choices in upcoming elections, and how to hold our elected officials accountable.

We shared with each other about our struggles with the problem-fraught RREM program, the injustices of the National Flood Insurance Program, the need for rental assistance and the clawbacks – letters that Sandy survivors received in the last days of the Christie administration demanding they repay what they had been told by the state was grant money to get home.

“There are people here today who haven’t even been able to even start rebuilding because they don’t have enough funding, and others who thought they were finished, even though they followed the rules and did all they were told, the state wants back tens of thousands in grant funds,” said Quinn.

That same day, dozens of NJOP members wrote letters to Governor Murphy, asking him to take action to address these urgent issues, and to start to disburse some of the $1.2 billion in Sandy recovery funds that are still in state hands.

Not long after we sent those letters, we got word from Governor Murphy’s office that there would be some good news coming for Sandy survivors on the six-year anniversary of the storm.

So we thank Governor Murphy – first for meeting with us as a candidate, then for following through on his promises to act with these two important new programs: $50 million dollars in zero interest, zero penalty loans to act as a cross the finish line fund for families who have exhausted their grant monies and are stuck without enough to finish the job, and a freeze on clawbacks and a process for homeowners who received clawback letters to have them reduced or forgiven based on need.

But most of all, we thank our members – for coming together in our darkest days, then sticking together until we achieved what many said was impossible. We thank you for standing with your neighbors, and for coming together to create NJOP. This victory belongs to you. Thank you for believing in grassroots power. We couldn’t have done it without you.

There’s still more to be done. Who’s going to do it? We are. If there’s anything Sandy taught us, it’s that when we stand together, we are powerful. And whenever we make moves forward – like on the foreclosure bill – we have to keep everyone’s feet to the fire, so there are no problems with the implementation.

We don’t have all the details yet, but we know that today, we took a big step forward. We also know that all of us, together, will make sure this gets done and helps as many families as possible.

Thanks for all you do. Today, we are more hopeful than ever.

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It Takes a Village to Make a Hate Crime by Daniel Doubet

Saturday morning, a gunman killed 11 Jewish people who were worshiping at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The gunman stated his reasons on social media before his attack: “his people” were “being slaughtered” because a Jewish organization was “bringing in hostile invaders,” a reference to their support for refugees.

This is reported to be the worst attack targeting Jews in United States history.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote that the rise of Pennsylvania’s racist right is a warning to the nation. Today, as I learn about these events some 50 miles away from my home, I find myself in an all-too-familiar state in the face of such an abomination. As the details roll in, I feel a terrifying worry for friends, anguish at the sheer brutality of the attack, and anger at the assailant and all of the people who were complicit.

How could somebody do something like this? How could somebody feel so much hate? What can I do?

But as the suspect’s motivation became clear, I found some answers to those questions.

PA gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner on August 17, 2017

How Could Somebody Do Something Like This?

The assailant’s reasoning neatly mirrors the narrative Republicans have deployed ahead of the midterms. With a caravan of displaced refugees from Honduras making their way north to the U.S., right-wing media has been ablaze with hysterical concerns of invasion.

Scott Wagner’s campaign for Pennsylvania Governor has amplified this thread:

Rush Limbaugh and right-wing agitators on Fox News question whether the caravan of refugees, fleeing conditions of violence, is some kind of manufactured and orchestrated conspiracy. President Trump himself echoes this theory. Oh, and to be clear, Glenn Beck is on record saying it was George Soros, specifically, orchestrating and funding the refugees.

For his part, Scott Wagner has publicly called Soros a “Hungarian Jew” who has a “hatred for America” and has alluded to him as a distant, menacing, conspirator in Tom Wolf’s reelection bid, making a starkly naked anti-Semitic evocation of Jews as manipulating world affairs.

 How Could Somebody Feel So Much Hate?

It truly takes a village to create a hate crime, and it is abundantly clear that the suspect in Saturday’s attack got all of these messages loud and clear from right-wing media and candidates. Because Robert Bowers felt so much urgency and fear about a hostile invasion, orchestrated by Jews, he went to a local synagogue and killed as many as he possibly could.

This atrocity is unconscionably brutal and disgusting as a discrete, horrific event. It leaves us with a sense of utter devastation for those who were lost, concern for those who loved them, and a sense of futility at its terrible finality for those innocent lives.

I would suggest we should reserve anger and action for those who pushed the stories of invasion and conspiracy that Bowers took both seriously and literally. President Trump and the Republican Party, in deploying strategic racism, demonstrate sheer contempt for all voters, and their need to hide the effects their policies have had on the people.

What Can We Do?

We have less than ten days until an election – and the only cure for futility is action. There are no shortage of opportunities to stand up directly people like Scott Wagner, who peddle in hate and xenophobia.  It is not hyperbolic to say that “leaders” like Wagner are Fascists, both in rhetoric and in policy. It is the responsibility of all who want democracy and freedom to survive in this nation to vote.

Every person has the capacity to reach out to their neighbors with good candidates, or with grassroots groups like Keystone Progress, Reclaim Philadelphia, Lancaster Stands Up, the 215 People’s Alliance and other People’s Action groups across the country to make an impact on this year’s election.

There are more of us than there are of them. And while some may argue that we should not politicize this event, it’s exactly because the event is explicitly politicized by the killer’s intent that we must take a stand, politically, right now.

One year ago I wrote, “Join us in believing that the people of our commonwealth will come together in 2018 to reject hate, and elect leaders who work for all of us.” The moment to act is upon us: we must vote.

All of Us

But there’s more that we must do: even if we strike a blow against fascism at the polls, Donald Trump will still be President of the United States on November 7. We must work together to hold even the best new leaders accountable. Beyond that, each of us can work to challenge the poisonous right-wing narratives that fill the air around us.

The right has developed a profoundly powerful propaganda machine, and many of us have given up on trying to engage with those who subscribe to it. It may be time to try again – because the evil and absurdity of all this has just been laid bare. Conspiracy theories about invasions and Jewish ringleaders aren’t just harmless, idle talk. People died because of this. And unless we can bring our friends and neighbors back to reality, it will happen again.

Lastly, each of us has the power to reflect on the hate within ourselves. Robert Bowers’ psyche was deeply ensconced in the hateful rhetoric of these fascists, but anti-Semitism, white-supremacy and xenophobia are central through systems and structures across our society.

So it is impossible, even for those of us who can identify this strategic racism for what it is, to escape the grasp of these oppressive forces within ourselves. Those kernels of hate find their way into both the hateful and the hated. for us to build the power we need we must engage in the hard work of identifying and overcoming its manifestations within us all.

The good news is we don’t have to do this alone. In fact, we must rely on our deepest relationships with others, because it is hardest to see yourself. Only when each of us is committed to ending hate, inside and outside ourselves, will we never again see the horrors that we have today.

[takebackthedream]

China Grabs 3.4 Million American Jobs  by Leo Gerard

Everything is great, right? Unemployment is the lowest in half a century. The economy is churning out a high GDP. Home values are rising rapidly again. Inflation remains low.

Still, the stock market has been crashing in recent weeks. Investors don’t like President Donald Trump’s trade war with China. It makes them nervous.

Photo credit: USW / unionpix.com / cc

Nervous? They have no idea. Since 2001, when the United States agreed to allow China into the World Trade Organization, U.S. workers have been nervous every day. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. They fear losing their jobs to China. And rightly so. A new study by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows the growth in the U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2017 cost 3.4 million American workers their jobs.

Trump’s tariff war hasn’t solved this problem. The August trade deficit with China was the highest on record, at $38.6 billion, and the deficit for 2018 is projected to be the largest ever. The trade deficit – that is, the billions more that China sells in the United States than the United States sells in China – is what kills jobs. As that deficit rises, more work to produce goods and services is done in China. If the deficit declined, or trade balanced, more work would be done in the United States. That is the administration’s goal. If it could be accomplished, workers’ job anxiety would ease.

Of the jobs lost between 2001 and 2017, nearly three quarters were in manufacturing – 2.5 million. Those were good, family supporting jobs. The shock, fear and anger workers feel when they learn that their factories will close and that their work will be moved offshore is palpable in the viral video of Carrier officials telling 2,000 workers in Indianapolis in 2016 that the corporation intended to close their factory and ship the jobs to Mexico.

Among the 2.5 million who lost jobs since 2001 is Lisa Crissman of Western Pennsylvania. She was struck down twice. The second time was earlier this year when her employer, Pittsburgh Glass Works, laid her off as it prepared to permanently close its auto windshield factory in the little town of East Deer, Pa., and move half of the work to Mexico.

The first time it happened was in 2012 when the auto mirror manufacturing company Flabeg closed its Brackenridge, Pa., factory. The year before, Crissman and her Flabeg co-workers had made 14 million auto mirrors in Brackenridge, accounting for 70 percent of the domestic market.

At both jobs, Crissman was a member of the union I lead, the United Steelworkers, and made good money and got good benefits. The Flabeg workers received federal Trade Adjustment Assistance because the company offshored the work. Flabeg told the federal government it was transferring mirror fabrication to China and Brazil because its American factory couldn’t compete with low-cost mirrors imported from Asia. It closed the Pennsylvania plant for cheap labor and lax environmental protections overseas.

Crissman lost her job to an underpaid worker denied union benefits in China. Her husband, coincidentally, lost his job at about the same time when the hydroelectric plant where he worked was sold, and the new owners laid off workers with the most seniority. Crissman recalls her daughter fearing that the family would lose their home to foreclosure.

The two experiences taught Crissman a bitter lesson. She says, “No job is secure. Nothing is set in stone. Nothing is safe.”

That is the way U.S. factory workers live now: nervous. Any day could be their last on the job. Any day, their work could be shipped to China. Finding new work that pays a living wage is difficult in many places. Crissman managed to get another good job, but then it too disappeared. Multiply her experience times 2.5 million. That’s the anxiety that hovers over U.S. factory floors, no matter how skilled, dedicated and efficient the American workers are.

EPI figures that growing trade deficits with China and other countries altogether cost America 90,000 factories and 5 million jobs in the past two decades.

Small towns across America have suffered just as workers have. After a factory closes, unemployed residents move away for new work, shops close, and mayors lacking tax revenue cut services. The upshot is hollowed out shells of towns. Pittsburgh Glass Works was the largest employer and taxpayer in East Deer Township.  The township, unsure of its finances after Pittsburgh Glass Works announced the closure, immediately postponed improvements at its Memorial Park.

While jobs like those at Carrier and Pittsburgh Glass Works continue to move to Mexico, the trade deficit with China accounts for the majority – 78 percent – of the U.S. manufacturing jobs lost since 2001, according to the EPI report titled, “The China Toll Deepens.”

The loss was not concentrated in just one state or region, like Michigan or the Midwest. Every congressional district in every state bled jobs. Michigan, famous for auto and auto part manufacturing, is not even among the 10 states that lost the most jobs as a share of total employment. Those are New Hampshire, Oregon, California, Minnesota, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, Wisconsin and Texas.

Workers laid off because of trade, like Crissman, lost wages totaling $37 billion per year from 2001 to 2011. But there was another, even more dramatic effect on the earnings of American workers as a result of the growing import competition with China and other low-wage countries. EPI figures imports from low-wage countries cut the earnings of America’s 100 million workers without a college degree by 5.5 percent, or $1,800 per year per full-time worker. The total cost to them — $180 billion in 2011 alone.

That money, EPI says, went instead to CEOs, highly paid professionals with college degrees and corporate profits. It went to the guys who gamble on stocks and who now think a trade war could cut their earnings, guys who probably have no idea what their free trade demands have already cost American factory workers.

When China gained access to the benefits of the World Trade Organization in 2001, it agreed to abide by what are essentially free market rules. But it has not. Its prices are lower because the Chinese government subsidizes exports, providing its industries with perks like loans that don’t have to be repaid, free or cut-rate raw materials, and discounted utility bills. While it suppresses unions that would enable workers to bargain for decent wages, it keeps people employed by subsidizing overproduction of materials like steel and aluminum, then dumps the excess at below-production-cost prices on the international market.

These market-distorting practices kill industries in market economies like the United States, Canada and European Union.

The Trump administration has imposed a series of tariffs on imports, mostly on China, to apply pressure on Beijing to stop violating trade rules. The administration hopes this will begin to cut the trade imbalance and the loss of U.S. factories and jobs.

The researchers at EPI believe it’s not enough, though. They say the dollar is overvalued by 25 to 30 percent, which acts as a tax on U.S. exports and a subsidy on imports. Currency manipulation and misalignment by China, Japan and other countries must be confronted, or the United States will continue to lose its manufacturing might and its vital, middle class jobs.

[takebackthedream]

Education Matters More Than Trump to Wisconsin Democrats by Jeff Bryant

Local issues hold the key to many midterm elections, despite all the talk about how President Donald Trump is nationalizing these races and Democrats should follow his lead and do the same. It’s important to know that in many places, voters still care first about issues that affect them at home, more than the latest outrage coming from the White House.

One of those places is Wisconsin, where deep cuts to education by the incumbent Republican governor, Scott Walker, have put it at the top of many voters’ priorities.

Wisconsin, which went for Trump in 2016, has been under Republicans’ control in both legislative chambers and the governor’s seat and mostly sends Republicans to the U.S. House. If a “blue wave” is truly to take place in November, it will have to include Democratic victories in Wisconsin. And it will have to include a new direction for education in the state.

“Education is either the top one or two issue in this election,” says Matt Brusky, Deputy Director at Citizen Action of Wisconsin. Health care is Badger State residents’ other top priority, he adds.

Brusky should know. He and and other members of this progressive grassroots group,  which is part of the People’s Action national network, have been going door to door across Wisconsin to canvass for candidates that support the group’s Rise Up platform, an eight-year plan to move the state towards guaranteed comprehensive healthcare, environmental safeguards, criminal justice reform, and equality of educational opportunity.

When I called Brusky, he was gassing up his rental car after knocking doors in Fountain City, where locals are struggling with a school consolidation due to lack of funding from the state. “Education is usually a top issue in the state because of what Walker has done to it,” he says. “Almost all candidates are running on it.”

“It is moving to see how education has become a headline issue for the election,” says Julie Underwood, a University of Wisconsin professor. “During the public hearings on the last budget, over 30 percent of the public comments had to do with public education, and there has been a focus on education issues in candidate forums and debates.”

‘An Arms Race Over Who Can Sound the Best’

The race between Walker, who was elected in 2010 as part of the Tea Party wave that swept Wisconsin, and his opponent, long-time state schools chief Tony Evers, has become especially focused on education – “an arms race over who can sound the best,” says Robert Kraig, Citizen Action of Wisconsin’s Executive Director.

Under Walker’s leadership, the state has slashed education spending to levels below what they were in 2008 and redirected millions in education funds to private alternatives such as charter schools and voucher-funded private schools. Under his leadership, the state enacted Act 10 – a crackdown on teachers job protections’ and collective bargaining rights – which has resulted in widespread teacher shortages and inexperienced staff. In contrast.

In contrast, Evers calls for a double-digit increase in school spending, a repeal of Act 10, limits on the state’s voucher programs, and increased financial transparency of private schools that receive voucher money.

Yet astonishingly, Walker claims he is the “education candidate” in the election, pointing to recent funding increases he signed, that despite their impressive sticker price, still provide less per pupil than in 2011, in inflation-adjusted dollars.

“Walker can try to pump up his education credentials, but the problem is he is a long-standing incumbent with a clear track record,” says Kraig, “The fact he has done a lot to try to change his education profile is evidence, given his campaign’s immense polling apparatus, the he must know the issue is causing people who voted for him in the past to vote against him this time.”

“Clearly Tony Evers has the best grasp on the issues,” says Underwood. “He has been a teacher, administrator, and state superintendent.  He understands that public education is the heart of a community and critical for our democracy. Although Scott Walker claims to be an education governor, public education has been greatly damaged during his term.”

‘Public Schools Under Attack’

In down-ballot races, education issues diverge somewhat, depending on community characteristics. “In the suburbs,” says Brusky, “most of the talk is about losing programs and the needs for holding local referendums” to shore up budgets. “Schools are getting crushed” In rural communities, he says, with many having to consolidate or close altogether.

The candidate who seems to have set the pace on education for other Democrats to follow is Marisabel Cabrera who ousted her incumbent opponent Josh Zepnick in a district on Milwaukee’s south side in the Democratic primary. She does not face a Republican opponent in November.

Cabrera is an unabashed advocate for public schools, saying, “We continue to see our public schools under attack, and it’s time to stand up and put an end to the takeovers, the cuts in funding, and the sale of public buildings to private interests.”

In interviews and candidate debates, Cabrera explicitly opposed school privatization, while Zepnik expressed support for voucher programs.

Another down-ballot candidate, Julie Henszey, running as a pro-education candidate in State Senate District 5, says, “Schools still face class sizes that are too large, special education programs that are underfunded, and a lack of investment in art, music, libraries, and physical fitness … The trend has been to siphon millions of dollars in public money over to private schools through less accountable, and less successful, voucher schemes.”

In addition to endorsing Evers, Cabrera and Henszey, Citizen Action of Wisconsin is also backing Jeff Smith, running for a state senate seat in the western part of the state that includes Eau Claire and many rural communities. Smith, who was elected to Wisconsin’s State Assembly in 2002 but was ousted in the 2010 Tea Party wave, got his start in politics as a public school parent activist, who served on a statewide education task force, then ran for office because he saw the need for funding schools.

Smith’s platform calls for raising education funding back to previous levels, ending the state’s “failed voucher school program,” expanding early childhood education programs, and mandating universal kindergarten.

Democrats Have the Education Advantage

None of this is to say Trump is not a factor in Wisconsin midterms, or that Democrats are unified on education.

While Kraig can’t personally attest to knowing many Wisconsin voters who voted for Trump and are now poised to vote Democratic, he hears secondhand accounts of voters flipping from Republican to Democrat and notices the enthusiastic reception Democratic candidates are getting in traditionally red parts of the state while rightwing campaign funders and groups, such as the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, are investing heavily in areas where their candidates have easily won in the past.

And Democratic candidates in the state often present a muddled message on education issues, says Kraig. For instance, when Republican candidates threaten to remove insurance coverage of pre-existing conditions from the Affordable Healthcare Act, Democrats tend to rally around in unified opposition.

“Threats to insurance coverage of pre-existing conditions are a political third rail,” Kraig argues, whereas, “we have not defined what a third rail would be in education.” While Democrats have created a clear idea of what a pro-healthcare candidate is, according to Kraig, “we haven’t created a clear perspective of what a pro-education Democrat is versus one who isn’t.”

Nevertheless, the impact education is having in Wisconsin’s midterm races appears straightforward, given the record Walker and his Republican allies have of enacting historic cuts and their antipathy for teachers, and Democrats are at least united in opposition to that and are using their opposition to their advantage.

Recent polls show the face-off between Evers and Walker is a toss-up, and Democrats could win two more seats this election, just a 12 percent change, to gain a Senate majority and have a chance to win 15 House seats, representing a 15 percent gain, to have a majority in that chamber.

[takebackthedream]

Keith Ellison for Minnesota Attorney General by Elianne Farhat

We can imagine a world where everyone can live free, joyful lives, regardless of what they look like, where they came from, or how they worship. We can imagine a democracy that’s by the people, for the people, and is representative of the people. We can imagine a future where the feminine is highly respected, and no one is held back or harmed because of their gender or sexuality.  

At TakeAction Minnesota, we believe achieving justice and strengthening our democracy requires us to take on some of the biggest challenges in our society, including systemic racism, unbridled corporate influence, and gender oppression.

First, at TakeAction Minnesota we believe women, women of color, and survivors. We believe them because we are them. Our member leaders, our staff, our board, we’re a majority women & femmes organization. We listened to Karen Monahan as sisters and survivors. 

TakeAction Minnesota is a member-led organization. This post took a while because our internal process took time. We’re grateful so many of our supporters have been patient.

I hope this provides insight and background into TakeAction Minnesota’s endorsement process, our grounding values as a people’s organization that centers women, especially women of color—and why we wholeheartedly endorse Keith Ellison for Attorney General—and how we got here.

From mid-July to mid-October, our leadership assembly, made up of member leaders of diverse races, ages, identities, and backgrounds from across the state, went through a thoughtful and deliberate process about our endorsement of Keith. Our process was grounded in and guided by our core values: we love and support each other, we have enough, we tell the truth, we heal together in public, and we figure it out together.  

This led to internal conversations between members of our leadership assembly and Keith. The long-term public relationship between TakeAction Minnesota and Keith formed the foundation of our exchanges, which centered mutual accountability and co-governance. For us, holding people we are in relationship with accountable is an act of investment and love toward building the world we imagine; it is not a punitive or one-sided act. As long as the process, set and held by our leadership assembly stayed on course, our endorsement would as well.

The conversations with Keith were authentic, powerful, hard, messy, and beautiful—because at this most critical time, we got to have real discussions about gender oppression and the role of cis men in dismantling the patriarchy.

At TakeAction Minnesota, we believe that authentic leadership means bringing our whole selves to the table. We can’t take out pieces of ourselves or our experiences. As community organizers, we believe in building powerful public relationships with each other and with elected officials.

We also refuse to reduce our human complexity to an either/or – at TakeAction Minnesota we operate with both/ands. In moments like these, our first instinct is often to find the “Truth.” But, the reality is there is no one, singular “Truth.”

In our complicated world, filled with infinite love and also indescribable pain, we must allow for multiple truths and resist the temptation to force a false choice. That means we believe women. We believe hurt people hurt people. We believe in restoration. And we believe in building transformative relationships that allow us to navigate a complicated public arena. We are all in for the messiness because the only way forward is through it.

Keith Ellison, candidate for Attorney General

Our conversations with Keith were rooted in TakeAction Minnesota members’ own experiences and the values we strive to live out: we believe that when private pain is brought into public memory we can work toward healing and justice. Keith brought his authentic self forward as well. He has continued to show up, have the important conversations, and be the trusted and respected public leader many of us have known him to be for years.

In our conversations, it was clear to me Keith is engaged in a process of discernment and reflection that we all must be engaged in, especially men. Justice and full liberation require each of us to examine our biases, decide how we show-up in this moment, renew our commitment to each other, and ensure every person’s humanity and dignity is protected.

At this point, we’ve had more discussions about gender justice with Keith Ellison than any other elected official in the state of Minnesota. Over the past three months, Keith showed up, listened, and went down this powerful path with us. When many people would have retreated, Keith opened up and earned our trust and respect through his brave, vulnerable leadership.

Keith embodies the kind of co-governing relationship we believe in at TakeAction Minnesota and our journey with him will continue. We’ll continue a longer-term member-led process of relationship building with Keith but we’re ending our short-term process this week.

The future we believe in and the future we imagine won’t happen if we sit this race out. It won’t happen if we stay silent. 

We want to have hard conversations like we had with Keith when serious issues come up. We don’t believe anyone in our society is disposable, or that we can dismantle the patriarchy and end gender oppression by terminating people from their positions. That’s got to happen through honest, trusting, and powerful relationships, dialogue, and cultural and systemic change.

We cannot sit this one out.

We’re clear on our values—and what the stakes are.

The future we’re fighting for won’t happen if a key statewide office is held by Keith’s opponent—someone who has stood against workers’ rights, reproductive justice, immigrant rights, transgender students, the affordable care act, marriage equality, voting rights, and more.

Keith’s opponent has called for policies that lead to more mass incarceration and he’s stood by while right wing interest groups deploy every racist, Islamophobic tactic they have to in an attempt to make voters fearful and distrust Keith because he’s a Black man.

Our future is worth fighting for—and we’ll create it together. Thank you for everything you do every day to take our boldest dreams closer to reality. 

Let us know what you’re feeling. Take a minute to share your thoughts with us here. 

[takebackthedream]

Mainers Ask Voters to Support Home Care and Question 1 by Lauren McCauley

In an effort to make the stakes clear in the upcoming vote on universal home care in Maine, supporters of Question 1 from across the state are posting dozens of videos to social media explaining why passage of the referendum is so important to them personally, and for the state.

“In the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity of taking care of four different family members. I believe that people should be allowed to grow old with dignity and remain in their homes as long as possible,” said Frank Ayotte, an Air Force veteran from Auburn, in one video. “That’s why I’m voting yes on one this November.”

In another, state Rep. Kim Monaghan of Cape Elizabeth says that she “absolutely” supports Question 1. “It’s such an important issue,” she says. “And as Maine is number one in the aging community, it is extremely important to allow many of these people the in-home care that they deserve.”

In addition to highlighting personal stories, the Yes on 1 campaign says it also hopes the grassroots videos, which are being shared on the group’s Facebook page, will “help break through a wave of confusing ads and outright lies from the nursing home lobby and their allies, who are opposed to Question 1.”

The videos stand in contrast to the opposition’s campaign ads that feature politicians including Governor Paul LePage.

The No on 1 campaign is backed by a number of major industry groups including the Chamber of Commerce, the Maine Bankers Association, and the Maine Health Care Association, the state’s nursing home lobby. The groups have branded the initiative a “scam,” and claimed it would impose a tax on families, despite the 1.9 percent payroll only applying to individuals who make above $128,400.

“It’s time for the wealthiest 2.6 percent to pay a bit more of their fair share to guarantee that no more seniors or veterans are forced from their homes,” Mainers for Home Care campaign manager Ben Chin in a press statement.

In the videos, many supporters agree that the tax, which was designed to narrow the payroll tax loophole for wealthy earners, would go far in lifting up everyone in the state.

“All my life i have worked with the elderly,”Jennifer from Bangor shared in a video. “The families can’t do this alone and we need help from other people.”

“When one walks the depth of a disease with others,” she added, “you will know [that] one person, one family cannot do this alone. They’ve worked all their life, they’ve given, it’s time for them to receive.”

[takebackthedream]

Riding Backroads for Change in Rural Wisconsin by Jeff Smith

Everyone knows the truck – it’s a red pickup with a big, hand-stencilled sign in the back that says, “Stop & Talk.” If you travel the back roads of western Wisconsin, most people have met its driver, the “stop and talk guy,” Jeff Smith. That’s because this Eau Claire native has logged thousands of miles in his grassroots candidacy for Wisconsin’s State Senate in District 31, which includes parts of nine counties.

Smith is a bit like George Bailey, the small-town hero of Frank Capra’s classic 1946 film, “It’s A Wonderful Life.” After high school, Jeff ran a successful window-cleaning company in Eau Claire with his father, then got involved in activism when his children attended the city’s public schools. He served on a state task force for educational excellence and was elected to Wisconsin’s State Assembly in 2006. After four years advocating for early education and the environment, he lost his seat in the Tea Party wave that swept Governor Scott Walker into office, and later tipped Wisconsin to Donald Trump in 2016.

Now Smith and a rising generation of activist politicians are poised to take Wisconsin back for progressive values this November. Adam Kruggel, an organizer for People’s Action, caught up with Smith on the campaign trail to get his insights about the challenges faced by rural America, and what his priorities for the state will be.

  OF: Where do you come from, and why have you given your life to public service?

That’s kind of a long story (laughs)… public service became a part of me when my children started going to school and I started volunteering in the schools. I not only saw the school’s needs, but I saw the schools and these children who have different needs that I wanted to be a part of. I guess that it just became natural to me – we’ve got to be there, to make sure that their future is bright.

I grew up in Eau Claire, it’s the heart of my district. I’ve lived there all my life – one of those people who never really traveled very far. It’s just a part of me. I grew up in a family with seven children, and my father had a small window-cleaning business. I started working when I was twelve years old. Saturdays and some nights he’d drag me along, scrubbing floors, doing all of the extra things that he had to do back in those days. But after that, getting out of high school, he really wanted and needed someone he could depend on to work with, so he asked me to stick with him, and I did.

So I ended up buying the business from him and it worked out well for me. I moved -in to doing a lot more of the bigger kind of contracts, and became one of those people – like Spiderman hanging from buildings – but I also ended up also turning a small, two-man business into twenty-two employees, which moved me into being able to be more active as a community member, and I found that was really my calling.

OF: Why was it so important to run for office now?

Originally I ran for office because I saw the need for funding our schools – that’s where I really became more aware of the needs. And I just got really frustrated with the politics going on in our state at that time – that was back in 2002. I just had to step up – I was already a town chair, I was on the governor’s task force for education, I did all of these other things, but I realized that if I was going to make a difference, I had to be one of those policy-makers, not just a policy follower.

So I was determined to do that, and I actually ran in a district, my district, that was held by a Republican for fourteen years. I wasn’t supposed to win, wasn’t given much chance and wasn’t given much help. But I won, and held that for two terms, lost in this Tea Party revolution thing.

But it’s too important – I didn’t go into this because I needed money; because I was making money as a businessperson. I didn’t go into this because I needed the title, because it’s not much of a title. I went into it for our future – and that hasn’t changed. So that’s why I’m still doing this, why I got into organizing. And I’m so grateful that I actually have made that connection with Citizen Action of Wisconsin and People’s Action, because that gave me this purpose and that venue to continue to be active.

OF: What is at stake in this election for Wisconsin and the country?

There’s so much at stake. As you know and I know, western Wisconsin is like the epitome of what went wrong, in an area that voted for Obama twice, and then turned around and voted for Trump. It takes people like me who live there and have lived there my whole life, and have witnessed that, I think, to step forward and say, “That’s not right, and that’s not who we are.”

We are people who are very proud of our environment: the people I work with and am associated with, the environment is the important piece of our being. So when we are going to leave behind potentially poisoned water – that scares the heck out of people. They, and I, don’t want to be known for that, and responsible for that.

When we see our rural schools closing because the funding isn’t there, and politics is getting in the way, our people can’t get health care access, and our clinics and our elderly care homes are closing in small communities, so they have nowhere to go, that’s a huge issue where I come from.

So these are really important issues, and this is the time. If we don’t do it now, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.

OF: What is the path forward for Wisconsin and the country at this time?

I can just speak for where I come from, and why people flipped from being Democrats to Republican, or going very Conservative. It’s because they don’t feel they’re being heard. They’re not being heard. I know that’s rhetoric everyone’s heard before – it’s said over and over – but I don’t think they really know what that means.

What it means, from what I’ve observed, from talking to people, ‘cause I’ve talked to thousands of people, is that every time we as progressives talk about, or get behind a community or a population that is being underserved, the white male working class people out there who are in rural areas feel like we don’t mean to serve them. Or that we’re in opposition to what their needs are. That’s what’s happening –they don’t feel like they’re being heard, and we have not projected the message out there well enough that when we are out there trying to protect and trying to lift other populations up, we totally get we’re lifting everyone up. We just have not done a very good job of getting everyone to understand that.

OF: How have you tried to address that conflict in your campaign?

To start with, when I get elected, I am very obviously out there that I am a liberal progressive. The thinking behind a lot of the Democratic Party’s campaigning is that they have to run to the middle, and they have to sound conservative to get those votes – I am going to prove them wrong. I am going to prove them wrong.

We’re going to have a progressive, liberal Democrat representing western Wisconsin, in a very rural district, because I talk to people. I’m out there out in the open with my truck with a big sign that says, “Stop and Talk to Me!” People are welcome, and that’s all they really want – someone they can talk to, who listens to them, and responds to them.

OF: What is the agenda that will help move Wisconsin and the country forward?

We most definitely have to address the move to let corporate America determine whether we regulate or don’t regulate. We need to address that: we just cannot wipe out regulation and think corporate America is going to do the right thing.

We need to raise wages. In Wisconsin, I hear Republicans now in forums that we’re in, all they want to do is brag about that: “Oh, we have an incredibly low unemployment rate.” I say we may have a low unemployment rate, but what’s really incredible is the low wages. And they have been stagnant for 40 years.

So you can talk about unemployment all you want, but when people have to hold two to three jobs to be able to pay the bills that they used to be able to do forty years ago with one job, something is wrong. And that’s probably the most important issue now for any family right now: the wages, stagnant wages, whether or not they can afford to pay for their health care or even have health care access, whether or not they can afford to pay rent, which is also going up exponentially, but the wages are the same, or buy a house – that’s getting to be out of the picture for most people.

OF: What’s your message for the progressive movement around the country?

We’re all in this together. There aren’t any heroes out there – no individuals you’re going to just grab on to and they’re going to drag you to the top. We’re all in this together, and it’s going to take a movement, not just certain individuals, if we’re all waiting for someone to step forward. I love Elizabeth Warren, but one person can’t do what needs to be done, at any level of government. And it’s going to be a movement of everyone coming together. And we always constantly have to keep preaching that. Because we can’t let the egos of the politicians get away from them – to think that they are going to be some sort of heroes. Because they have to keep listening, and they have to keep embracing everyone around them to lift us all up.

My friend Tina Quackenbush, with the Ho-Chunk Nation, wanted me to know about her uncle Bill Greendeer, who has introduced and actually passed a bill in the Ho-Chunk Nation, to put into their constitution the rights of nature – so that air has rights, water has rights, and the earth has rights.

Tina said, “Well, they think corporations have rights. So we want nature to have rights!” I am so inspired by that – I can’t wait to introduce that in the state of Wisconsin.

[takebackthedream]

Organizing for Hope on the Jersey Shore by Joe Mangino

The New Jersey Organizing Project is a marvel. This Jersey Shore grassroots group was born after Hurricane Sandy when neighbors in towns like Stafford, Brick and Seaside Heights came together to rebuild homes and lives, with a little help from their friends.

No one embodies this resilience more than NJOP’s co-founder, Joe Mangino. This wildlife biologist and small-business owner unexpectedly became a community activist when his own home was destroyed by the storm. He immediately started helping his neighbors, ripping out drywall and helping to gut and rebuild over 800 homes, saving taxpayers $4 million in cleanup costs.

When Governor Christie failed to deliver aid to Sandy survivors, leaving many still homeless, Mangino went to Iowa to publicly confront the then-candidate for president about his unkept promises.

Mangino and the NJOP have since won fifteen million dollars in rental assistance, helped pass a bipartisan bill to prevent foreclosures, and are now fighting to unlock $1.3 billion in Sandy aid that New Jersey has yet to disburse.

Now Joe is running for mayor of Stafford, his hometown:  the local Democratic Party club, and the current mayor, John Spodofora – a Republican – encouraged him to run, based on his advocacy. So now Mangino, the accidental activist and a lifelong Independent, is an accidental candidate.  

We caught up with Mangino at the NJOP’s first annual convention on Manahawkin, NJ, to talk about what’s next for the organization and his candidacy. Joe is smart, sincere, and undeniably cool. Dressed in beach-casual shorts and American-flag socks in the October chill, he told me about the NJOP, his run for mayor and the challenges Sandy survivors still face, six years after the storm.

OF: How did you find yourself running for mayor of Stafford?

“After the primary, people were kind of scared about the team that won. They were running on national issues, things that don’t necessarily affect Stafford Township. A lot of residents were very concerned about that, because they’re worried about who’s going to pick up their trash, who’s going to plow the roads, how much are they going to pay in taxes.

A lot of people reached out to me because they know I’ve been active in the community, kind of urging me to get involved in this race, to run for either council or mayor. The Democrats reached out to me because there was an open spot, and they felt that because of some name recognition and the work I’ve done in the community, they felt I would be a good candidate for Mayor of Stafford.

I gave it careful thought, and knowing how much I love this town and I don’t want see it go backwards, I want someone who’s going to take it into the future in a positive way, I felt like, well, I’m the guy who’s going to do it – so I jumped into the race, and here I am.

OF: How does running for office relate to your work with NJOP and your goals?

My experience and the things I’ve learned through NJOP have helped prepare me for this next step, to become mayor of Stafford. Honestly, prior to everything I’ve gone through with Sandy, I was a pretty introverted guy – still am – so to me this is a challenge. But we can’t make good change without challenging ourselves. For me, this is just another challenge that I’m willing to accept because I know I’m going to grow, and that growth becomes positive growth for the town, because I have nothing but good intentions.

I’ve been invested in this town, I just want to make sure that the people of Stafford get put first, and the only way we can do that is by putting party politics aside so everybody knows I’m all about the people first here in Stafford.

OF: What are the top challenges faced by Stafford and other survivors along the Jersey Shore?

“For us, it’s being prepared for the next storm. Extreme weather, sea level rise and climate change are huge issues in our community. Our tourism industry is very important, so we need to make sure that we’re prepared for the next event, whether it’s the next Sandy or just the continuing rising of the seas. We’re seeing it right now – we have a high tide that’s flooding the streets, and there are no storms around. So preparedness is very important.

Two is taxes, and making sure that our residents can afford to stay here, live here peacefully, and not struggle. A lot of our residents are fixed-income seniors, so they’re worried about cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. So we want to make sure that not only are their property taxes are reasonable, but they can have other services they need to have a decent life here in Stafford.

OF: How does this relate to the bigger fights in your congressional district and the state?

Right now, we have to make sure that we elect the right people, who are going to stand up and represent what we want. Right now in New Jersey there are some  pretty extreme people who want to take health care away from people, who aren’t fighting for us when it comes to reforms for flood insurance, which is a big issue around here.

So, yes – part of the work we do with NJOP is educating the people on the issues so they can in turn see who the right choice may be.  

So we’re trying to get that message out: educate on who the right candidate is, who is the right group you can work with. And if you want to share your voice, come to a group like the New Jersey Organizing Project. Because we can put all those voices together and speak very loudly.

You’re at the top of a slate, what does it mean to be doing politics differently in New Jersey and engaging people in the process?

“This is the first time I’ve run a campaign. I would never consider myself a politician, I’ll never have to call myself a politician, so they way I’m approaching this is how I’ve done everything in life, and over the last few years: I get the community involved. I need their voices, because this isn’t just me, and that my council would be running Stafford Township – this is the people running Stafford Township.

What’s nice about our ticket is it is a diverse ticket. For the council candidates have three men and three women. We all come from different age groups and different backgrounds – two lawyers, a tax advocate, an information technology specialist, a retired teacher, and I have quite a diverse background myself on all the various things I do, especially with my volunteer work and community organizing.

So we represent a bunch of different areas where we have expertise. What brings us together is we’re all community oriented: we’re always looking for the best interests in our community, we’re always volunteering our time, trying to make a positive impact in town.

You know what you need – I can’t just sit there and come up with ideas and say, “hey, this is great for the town” – you have to tell me what’s good. But then I’m going to challenge you to get involved and help us in that process, bringing this town forward, to satisfy your needs and make sure everyone is treated equally and fairly in Stafford Township.

We’re going to be the voice of the people. And as I’ve been telling people, when you vote for me and my team, you’re voting for yourselves. Because the only way I know how to do this is by getting you involved, and we work together as a team for this community.“

[takebackthedream]

Rising Teachers Put Education On The Ballot In Fall Elections by Jeff Bryant

Hundreds of educators are running for office in this November’s midterm elections. This year’s Educator Spring brought teachers into the streets in massive protests that thrust education issues into electoral contests up and down the ballot, and pushed education-related initiatives onto ballots in 16 states, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress. “From taxes to bonds, governance to vouchers, education is on the ballot this November,” says the analysis. “Voters should not miss the chance to make their voices heard.”

In states such as Arizona and Georgia where gubernatorial candidates are locked in tight races and Democrats anticipate gains in state legislatures, state ballot measures that focus on education could help provide the difference between victory and defeat.

At least one study on the impact of ballot initiatives on voter turnout has found in midterm elections they can increase turnout at 7 to 9 percent in initiative states compared to non-initiative states, while turnout in presidential elections tends to be 3 to 4.5 percent higher in initiative states than in non-initiative states.

Ballot measures have the power to “transform low information midterm elections to high information elections,” according to the study, and the presence of “even one initiative ballot is sufficient” to boost turnout.

School Privatization at Stake in Arizona

In what is perhaps the most-heated ballot initiative contest, in Arizona, voters will decide whether a state school voucher program providing taxpayer money for families to pay for private school tuitions will be expanded.

The massive #RedForEd teacher walkout that occurred in the state this spring resulted in a grassroots campaign to place an Invest in Education income-tax measure on the November ballot. Having that measure in the election, with the referendum to expand vouchers, was expected to bring out pro-education voters. But now that the state Supreme Court has ruled to remove the income-tax measure from the ballot, its supporters can focus their wrath on the voucher issue.

Incumbent Republican Governor Doug Ducey has come out strongly in support of the school voucher plan while his opponent Democratic nominee David Garcia is urging voters to vote no on the measure.

The program currently provides some 23,000 qualifying families access to Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) that give them public education funds to spend as they please for education services. About 5,000 families currently participate in the program, mostly to enroll their learning-disabled students in private schools.

An analysis of the Arizona program mainly serves wealthy families leaving high-performing public schools in wealthy districts to attend racially and economically segregated private schools. A state auditor’s office identified more than $102,000 from the program being misspent in just a 5-month period, including parents who spent program monies after enrolling children in public school, parents who did not submit required quarterly expense reports, and parents who purchased prohibited items. The report recommends the state strengthen safeguards and enforcement measures rather than expanding the program.

Nevertheless, last year the state enacted a new law expanding the program from only students with disabilities or who are enrolled in underperforming schools to all 1.1 million public school students in the state.

A petition campaign waged by grassroots groups supporting public schools successfully challenged the law expanding the voucher program, gathering enough signatures to push the law onto a ballot referendum, called Proposition 305, where a no vote would prevent expansion.

A recent poll found that Prop 305 could pass, primarily due to voter confusion about the true nature of the initiative and a disinformation campaign about the initiative funded by the billionaire Koch brothers and the organization founded by education secretary Betsy DeVos. But grassroots efforts to defeat school privatization attempts have come from behind and won in the past despite the big money campaigns they fought against.

School Funding Needs ‘Yes’ Votes in Many States

In Georgia, Amendment 5  would amend the Georgia Constitution to authorize a school district or group of school districts within a county to call for a sales and use tax referendum to fund local schools. The state funds its schools less than it did in 2008 and ranks fourth behind Arizona, Alabama, and Idaho for making the deepest cuts, 16.5 percent, to education funding.

In Georgia, candidate for governor Stacey Abrams has campaigned for fully funding Georgia schools and strongly backs a yes vote on Amendment 5. Abrams, who, if elected, would be the first female African American governor in America, has also received endorsements from both state and national teachers’ associations.

Her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, has said little about his plans for education except for a vague pledge to raise teacher pay. Recent polls find the difference in voter approval for each candidate is “razor thin,” and a ground swell for Amendment 5 could only help Abrams over the top.

In Colorado, another state that saw a mass teacher walkout in the spring, voters have a chance to vote for increasing public school funding with a yes vote on Amendment 73 that would give a $1.6 billion boost to school funding in a state that has chronically shortchanged schools and created massive teacher shortages due to underfunding.

A yes vote on Amendment 73 would increase state income taxes for people earning more than $150,000 per year and increase the state corporate tax rate to 6 percent. These changes are estimated to generate $1.6 billion in revenue for fiscal year (FY) 2019–2020, all of which would support school funding.

Amendment 73 opponents have falsely framed the initiative, calling it a “massive tax hike” mainly to feed administrative bloat in the system. But supporters of the amendment point out that should it pass, 92 percent of Colorado taxpayers will see no impact on their state tax bill and school boards of the state’s largest school districts have already pledged the increased funds would go to vital classroom needs, including raising teacher pay, reducing class sizes, providing more mental health services, and expanding pre-k programs.

Some school funding ballot initiatives are not what they seem, which is the case in Oklahoma, where State Question 801 proposes to let schools use property tax revenue for operations in addition to paying for buildings and maintenance.

Oklahoma is another state that saw massive teacher walkouts this year to protest low teacher pay and drastic cuts to education funding, and the ballot question is a response to the walkouts placed on the ballot by outgoing Republican Governor Mary Fallin as a way to deflect criticism of the state’s negligence in funding education.

The state’s education association has come out in opposition to State Question 801 because although it provides school districts with some added flexibility it does nothing to address the matter at hand – the state’s drastic underfunding of schools. “It is a shell game,” the director of National Education Association in Oklahoma tells a local news outlet, “another gimmick.”

Grassroots opposition to Question 801 may help feed the campaign for Democratic governor nominee Drew Edmondson who is facing off against Republican candidate Kevin Stitt in what has surprisingly become a red-hot race. Edmondson forcefully opposes Question 801, saying “it would lead to inequities in funding and provide the Legislature a ‘cop out’ for school funding needs,” while Stitt favors the measure.

Education-related ballot measures aren’t confined to states that experienced teacher walkouts. Other initiatives that put education funding on the ballot include an amendment for a gas tax to support schools in Utah and a referendum in Ohio to provide extra funding for school safety.

But the ballot initiatives, wherever they occur, observed a reporter for Politico, “reflect education-related fights smoldering around the country.”

[takebackthedream]

To Jeff Bezos: Put Up $10m to Find Your Columnist’s Murderers by Miles Mogulescu

Dear Mr. Bezos:

You’re the richest man in the world, with a net worth of $160 billion according to Forbes.

According to Time Magazine, in early 2018 you were earning $230,000 a minute (which comes to $13,800,000 an hour.)

You’re also the owner of The Washinggton Post, whose columnist, American resident and Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi was reportedly tortured, murdered and dismembered in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul.

Your columnist’s murder was one of the most ghastly and heinous threats to a free press and a civilized world in recent memory.

As The Post’s owner, you have a unique responsibility to fight back to protect press freedom and free speech in America and around the world.

Sadly, we cannot rely on any of the relevant governments to identify the killers and bring them to justice.

The Saudi government has promised an investigation. But the murder and torture was almost certainly carried out by operatives of the Saudi government at the orders of, or at least with the consent of, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Asking the Saudi government to investigate a murder they may have ordered is as likely to reveal the truth as a Corleone family investigation of a hit job on the heads of the other five families.

President Trump has compared charges that the Saudi government was responsible for the grisly murder to the charges that Judge Kavanaugh was responsible for sexual assault on Christine Blasey Ford, of which he claims Kavanaugh was proved innocent. So any investigation over which The White House has any influence is bound to be tainted.

The Turkish government, which may have the most information on the murder (including a reported audio tape of Khashoggi’s torture and murder recorded inside the Saudi embassy) is unlikely to trust either the Saudi government, or a Trump-led American government, with its  most secret intelligence.

Which leaves us with you, Mr. Bezos.

Immediately put up $10 million – less than what you earn in a single day -to pay for a real investigation and information leading to the apprehension and appropriate punishment of the killers and torturers of one of your journalists.

Hire a crack team of intelligence and law enforcement professionals to find the truth and capture the perpetrators.

If Khashoggi’s murderers get away with their barbaric actions, it will intimidate journalists not only in Saudi Arabia and America but around the world.

Mr. Bezos, if you shake loose few million dollars of your pocket change to bring the murderers to justice, you will have helped defend a free press and helped fulfill your duty,  as the owner of The Washington Post, to let your employees know you will do what’s necessary to protect their safety.

And if you have any spare change left over, please donate it to organizations dedicated to defending freedom of speech and the press in America and around the world.

[takebackthedream]

Ben Jealous is the Leader of Vision Maryland Needs Now by Woody Woodruff

As Maryland prepares to name a new governor on November 6, voters have a clear choice: Ben Jealous, the Democratic challenger, or Republican incumbent Larry Hogan.

Jealous is the former Rhodes Scholar who in 2008 became the youngest-ever national leader of the NAACP at age 35. Hogan, 62, is an Arundel County property developer, son of a Congressman, who’s been a GOP insider since the 1980s, when he first attempted to win his father’s old congressional seat.

After several failed attempts to win elected office, Hogan got an appointed position in the administration of Republican governor Bob Ehrlich in 2008, which he then used as a launching pad for his own run for the governor’s office in 2014.

Jealous has put forward a platform of clear, progressive and achievable goals that include universal health care and kindergarten, debt-free college, a statewide $15 minimum wage and a 29 percent salary increase for teachers.

Ben’s done the math, and these goals are within reach: His plan includes realistic sources for the revenue these programs would need. Jealous would close corporate loopholes, increase taxes on the state’s wealthiest one percent, raise the cigarette tax and reduce spending on prisons by overhauling the criminal justice system.

Hogan’s platform, in contrast, is like much of his career: “go along to get along.” To his supporters, this makes him the last of a dying breed – a “moderate” Republican. But Marylanders know how much the state needs a change, and they also know that in the Trump era, there’s no such thing as a moderate.

Hogan’s fans include, since last week, the editors of the Washington Post, whose board just endorsed him. They praise his “middle temperament,” and call his “centrist approach to leadership” a “tonic in a venomous era.”

But the highest praise the Post can come up with for Hogan is for what he is not. By the Post’s own admission, Hogan “lacked, and continues to lack… a vision for Maryland’s future.” To them, that’s ok – as long as he keeps the wealthy residents of Maryland’s Montgomery County comfortably undertaxed.

So, to refresh the Post editors’ memory, here are a few good reasons NOT to vote for Hogan, that come straight out of his record as governor:

Hogan vetoed paid sick leave – meaning 700,000 working Marylanders have to choose between tending to a sick child and losing a day’s pay – and sometimes, a job.

He vetoed adding parents to Maryland’s State Board of Education, which would have put at least one representative on the state board with family issues in mind.

He vetoed a bill to stop the confiscation of property by police, an all-too-common practice that is often used in Maryland to bully and intimidate people in low-income communities before sentencing or exoneration.

Hogan has failed to stand up for public health and left the door open for Washington Republicans to undermine the Affordable Care Act in Maryland. He weakened restrictions on power plant pollution, which will force more children to suffer from asthma and other chronic illnesses, and stalled funding for a badly-needed new hospital center in Prince George’s County until after his hand-picked commission had cut the size of the project.

He passed new mandatory minimum sentences and vetoed a bill that would restore voting rights to citizens returning from incarceration. These were only restored after the state legislature overrode his veto.

He vetoed a bill to regulate prescription drug price gouging, was also overridden by the Assembly – and Hogan then furnished a letter questioning the law’s constitutionality, which Big Pharma lawyers used in a successful appeal of the law before the 4th Circuit Court.

He opposed a bill to expand family leave, and then once it became apparent that it would pass over his veto, he took credit for it.

Bottom line, it’s clear from Larry Hogan’s record what he is not: Hogan is not a leader of vision for the people of Maryland. He’ll do favors here and cut a deal there, and take credit wherever he can – but for all of the Marylanders who need jobs, health care, a cleaner environment and criminal justice reform, he’s not your man.

Who is the leader of vision Maryland needs now? Ben Jealous.

[takebackthedream]

There’s Nothing More Powerful Than People Taking Back Democracy by Adrienne Evans

Something good is happening in the Gem State. Real good. You might not read it yet in headlines, but it’s happening – and real – everywhere from Boise to Idaho Falls.

“We’re winning the war of ideas, and that’s why they’re worried,” says Paulette Jordan. “They might outspend us, but there’s nothing more powerful than people deciding it’s time to take back democracy – and they know it.”  

You probably know Paulette, but let me introduce you: she’s the thirty-eight year old rancher and farmer who’s running as a Democrat to be Idaho’s next governor. She’s a fearless and outspoken advocate for the expansion of health care and fully funded K-12 education in our state.  She was elected in 2014 to Idaho’s House of Representatives, where she served on the Business, Energy and State Affairs Committees.

Paulette’s also an enrolled citizen of the Coeur D’Alene tribe – she grew up on the reservation and served on her Tribal Council before holding statewide office, and is the descendant of chiefs from both the Sinkiuse and Yakama nations. If elected, Paulette will be the first Native American woman to serve as a state governor. Ever.

At United Action for Idaho, we’ve gotten to know Paulette really well, because she was one of the first to answer every question on the thirteen-page questionnaire we sent last April to  candidates standing in this year’s election – all 41 Republicans and Democrats.

“Why is it so long?” some complained. “I just don’t have the time,” said others. But not Paulette. She answered every one of the forty-five questions, and we’ve been proud to stand with her, and the sixteen others who endorse our RiseUp Idaho platform, ever since.

She stands with us because she knows, as we know, that the RiseUp Idaho platform reflects what Idahoans really want – it’s a people’s platform, not a political party statement. Our candidates agree to be held accountable to voters in complete transparency, which is what the people want.

How do we know this? Because over the past eighteen months, we’ve traveled around the state and held hundreds of town halls and forums, asking ordinary people, ‘What are the most important issues for you, your family and your community?’

We never – not once – asked how people voted, if they had voted in the past, or what party they belonged to.

What Idahoans said matters most to them is what we put in the RiseUp Platform – nothing more, nothing less. It’s that simple. We wanted to make sure that all of the issues on our agenda reflect where people are – not what we think their issues are, but what their issues actually are.

Like other People’s Action member groups around the country, we pledge to put people and planet first, with access to health care and a fair economy for all. But our RiseUp Idaho platform also includes what people around our state say matters to them: gun sense, preservation of public lands, and restoring the authority of local governments.

Everywhere we go – and we’ve held hundreds of these meetings across the state – these are the populist values that a majority of Idahoans tell us they share. These are the values that bring us together.

But something strange happens sometimes when you say the right things: those who don’t share your values get nervous. Very nervous. And that’s what’s been happening in Idaho.

Paulette and her running mate for Lieutenant Governor, Kristin Collum, have come under attack from the local GOP – none of whose candidates could find the time, by the way, to answer our questionnaire – with allegations that they and the RiseUp platform are propped up by outside donors.

First of all, this is a lie. Flat out. United Action for Idaho and the RiseUp platform are entirely funded by small donations of Idaho dollars. Period. Second, the Idaho GOP should know better than criticize others, when they accept millions in dark-money dollars to support their candidates.

They even posted pictures of Paulette and Kristin listening to and talking with voters in Stanley – as if that were a bad thing – while their candidates were hanging out in the media booth at an ISU football game.

The bottom line is they’re running scared. This is what you do when you won’t – or can’t – compete with real solutions for the real people our state.

People want real leaders who stand up for them, not the same divisive party politics. As a candidate who’s traveled all over eastern Idaho and talked to voters, I know they’re tired of the scare tactics and half-truths that are used by some politicians and political operatives as a substitute for meaningful policy.

That’s Aaron Swisher, who’s running as a Democrat in Idaho’s Second Congressional District. He also stands with us, and we’re proud to stand with him.

And here’s Karen Ortiz-Evans, one of our longtime members:

I am widow, mother, grandmother, senior citizen,  previously owned a small Idaho agricultural business for 27 years, I am not a Democrat, nor am I left-wing radical. I am simply an ordinary person like many others Idaho citizens concerned about the division in our country, tired of elected officials who don’t represent all Idahoans, feeling like my voice is not being heard.

Please tell me where in this dialogue did local control, public lands, health care, social security, basic human rights for all people, regardless of  color, gender, sexual preference, disability, sensible gun laws, school safety, pay equity, fair immigration laws become radical ideas?

I am left to believe that if you cannot win on issues you must resort to smear campaigns and scare tactics.  Stop labeling people and start talking and listening.

Karen knows, as do Paulette, Kristin and Aaron, that in Idaho, we’re winning the war of ideas. Ours is a campaign by the people, for the people.

The only chance they have to get support for their platform – or lack of one – is to lead from fear. We choose to lead from hope.

In Idaho, we’re restoring faith in democracy – one heart, one voice and one vote at a time.

[takebackthedream]

Students Across the Nation Fight for #FreeCollege4All by Anna Attie

44 million people in the US owe nearly $1.5 trillion in student debt, a total that grows larger every day.  Students often choose between eating three meals a day, paying rent, and buying textbooks. For many of us, the excitement of graduating is tempered by the fear of never being able to pay off student loans.

My peers and I belong to a generation that faces unprecedented barriers to quality higher education. The cost of college has risen four times faster than inflation, but our universities continuously fail to meet the needs of marginalized students.  

This is a national economic crisis, and one that disproportionately affects women and students of color.

That’s why on October 15th, college students across the country held a National Day of Action, demanding free public higher education as part of the #FreeCollege4All campaign.

“Working class, first-generation students like myself grew up envisioning college as an out-of-reach luxury,” said Nicole Reyes, a student at University of Illinois-Chicago. “Now I face mounting student debt, which I am forced to prioritize over my already difficult living expenses.”

Nicole and I were two of the students who filled Chicago’s downtown streets on Monday to protest the rising costs of higher education. Chanting over the blaring sounds of rush-hour traffic, protesters marched down South Wacker Drive from Bank of America to Wells Fargo and Fannie Mae, three of the top issuers of student debt.

Nicole is also the lead organizer on her campus for Student Action, a network of student groups at 35 schools in 9 states that is part of the People’s Action family of grassroots groups, that fights for justice on issues that affect students on their campuses and in their communities.

Student Action organizers believe that quality education for all is a key step towards solving the global problems facing our generation: catastrophic climate change and staggering racial, gender, and economic inequality.

Student Action joined the Young Democratic Socialists of America in organizing Monday’s student protests, which took place simultaneously in states across the country, and drew participation from over 15 campuses.  Students held direct actions, rallies, and teach-ins to send a clear message that education is a right, not a privilege.

“This is just the beginning of a national student movement that centers on poor students and students of color,” said Brooke Adams, Student Action’s organizing director. “We’re putting candidates on notice that if they want students’ support, they have to get behind a progressive platform that includes free college for all.”

For us, free public higher education means that all college students will be guaranteed access to a quality education, regardless of citizenship status, economic standing, race, geographic location, or former or present incarceration status.

Today, women hold two thirds of all national debt, and students of color face a higher risk of defaulting on loans. Undocumented students and students with criminal records are often unable to even apply for aid. A truly accessible free college policy must address these disparities.

In Ames, Iowa, students from throughout the state blocked the street in front of what will soon be Iowa State University’s new Student Innovation Center. This $84 million dollar development project was approved by the school’s board of regents last year at the exact same time that they announced a seven percent tuition hike.

Forgiving student loans and passing free public higher education would free 44 million people in the United States from the growing total of $1.5 trillion in debt. This can be achieved with progressive tax measures such as estate taxes or financial transaction fees.

While the protests in Chicago and elsewhere were the culmination of months of work, we are only at the beginning of our #FreeCollege4All campaign. Student Action will continue this fight until we win a world where college need never be considered a luxury. There is more to come.