This past weekend, a few thousand activists gathered in Chicago for the People’s Summit, a three-day event designed to "bring together activists committed to a different kind of agenda: a People's Agenda that can enhance and expand issue campaigns and hold all elected officials accountable to popular demands for justice, equality, and freedom."
Co-sponsored by People for Bernie, 350.org, Physicians for a National Health Program, the National Nurses Union (NNU) and Hedge Clippers, the summit featured a roster of progressives such as climate activists and author Naomi Klein, political scientist Frances Fox Piven, Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, National Domestic Workers Alliance director Ai-jen Poo, and socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant.
Here are some brief excerpts from four journalists and activists who were there.
Nika Knight at Common Dreams writes—People's Summit Offers Hope for a Movement Bigger Than Bernie:
Klein said that many conversations at the gathering revolved around how to support and organize new progressive candidates in electoral politics as well as how to keep up the energy in the social movements that are currently pushing for many of Sanders' suggested reforms.
"We can't forget that it was social movements that produced the conditions that made governing thinkable," Klein said. "It was winning enough victories, enough local battles —increases in minimum wage, bans on fracking—that made people feel like, 'Wow, well, maybe we could govern.' If we swing all the way in the direction of, 'Okay, now it's all about electoral politics,' then we lose that force and all of that momentum, and that is going to be absolutely necessary to hold neoliberal politicians accountable."
"I heard no sectarian discussion," Klein continued, "no 'My way or the highway.' I heard, 'We need it all. We need people to go into politics, but we also need people in social movements.'"
D.D. Guttenplan at The Nation writes— There Was No Clear Agenda at the People’s Summit—and That’s a Good Thing:
If the summit had any common theme, it may have been “Don’t count us out.” Though there were more than a handful of Bernie-or-busters in attendance—the estimates I heard ranged from 10 to 35 percent of a gathering that itself drew heavily from the left wing of the Sanders political revolution—Becky Bond, a former senior adviser to the campaign, spoke for a much greater proportion when she said, “Bernie didn’t create this movement. He recognized the movement moment we are in.”
Bond also gave the most concise explanation of why the kind of manifesto drafting so beloved of past revolutions—from Philadelphia in 1776 to Port Huron two centuries later—is neither possible nor relevant this time. “We can’t pick an order,” said Bond, or decide whose priorities are more important—whether racial justice takes a back seat to economic justice, or ending the use of fossil fuels has to wait for universal health care. Especially when, as Representative Tulsi Gabbard reminded us, the foreign-policy establishment is gearing up for another war for regime change in Syria which needs to be opposed and resisted right now.
Dave Weigel at The Washington Post writes— In Chicago, Sanders supporters commiserate — and plot their next moves:
...there was little talk of bolting from the Democratic Party to a third party. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s likely presidential nominee, fired off a few Twitter complaints about the organizers keeping her out of the summit. Nina Turner, a Democratic former state senator from Ohio, said in an interview that it would be healthy for a “young, new, burgeoning party” to become an option for progressives. At a Saturday breakout session, where trained facilitators asked fellow activists what to do next, many conversations turned into debates over whether to vote for Clinton or Stein.
That debate ended on the summit’s main stage. Juan Gonzalez, a popular co-host of the left-wing show “Democracy Now,” a TV, radio and Internet news program, asked activists not to repeat the lessons of 1968 when people like him refused to back the Democratic ticket.
“The tactic was wrong,” he said.
Klein told activists about a 2005 workers’ movement in Argentina, where even as they voted, some organizers said that their values were not truly on the ballot.
“It didn’t mean ‘don’t vote,’ ” [Naomi] Klein said. “It meant some people voted and some people didn’t vote. But nobody was under any illusion that what was written on that ballot represented the world that they wanted.”
Isaiah Poole of the Campaign for America’s Future writes—People’s Summit Attendees Leave Determined To Keep “The Bern” Alive:
One of the most electric moments of the summit came when Sanders supporter Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, stepped off the plenary stage and walked through the crowd of an estimated 2,000 attendees, invoking a demand for elected officials to be “doers of the deed,” as she walked through a list of progressive agenda items in a rousing, sermon-like tone. “We need to elect people into office who actually give a shit about the people they represent,” she said.
Many of the breakout sessions captured the agenda items that summit attendees were expected to take back to their communities. The topics included ending voter suppression, stopping mass incarceration, ending racial and gender inequity, health care for all, the Fight for $15, climate justice, and fair taxation.
Heather McGhee, president of Demos, used her Sunday plenary address to encourage progressives to change how they talk about racism and racial disparities in the economy by recognizing that “in our interconnected society, racism is bad for white people, too.” She challenged progressives to “work harder to fight this zero-sum mentality” that the work of reversing institutional racism only benefits people of color.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—On presidential leadership:
With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.
—Abraham Lincoln
Barack Obama made very clear in his statements before, during and after the campaign that he did not think any one president could accomplish major changes all alone. He has said on multiple occasions that he doesn't have all the answers. He has said that no party or person has a monopoly on good ideas. He has said that change will not come from himself, but from the unity of millions of people demanding it. He has said change is slow, difficult and, at times, frustrating. At many opportunities, he has made an effort to make sure the people understand their role in his presidency, which is to act as agents of change where he cannot.
It's a persuasive argument. I'm convinced the nature of our times demands much of what the President says. What I am not convinced of is that this state of affairs means our President has to accept unnecessary limits on the breadth and depth of the changes he advocates. […]
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