I am running for president because with you, I think the time is now to transform our country and create the kind of nation we know we can become. ---Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders has been on the move on a southern journey—for environmental, educational, and health justice.
Follow us and the campaign as it explored environmental, educational, health care, and other types of justice in the southern states of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama.
Environmental Justice
Road to Green New Deal Stop Tour, Howard University, DC
On May 13, the environmental activist group, Sunrise Movement held a “Road to the Green New Deal” (GND) rally. There were a number of speakers, featuring:
- Judith Howell, SEIU 3BJ
- Payton Wilkins, Historically Black College and Universities Climate Consortium
- Rhiana Gunn-Wright, policy lead for the GND, New Consensus
- Jeremiah Lowery, DC environmental justice organizer and former city council candidate
- Sen. Ed Markey
- Sen. Bernie Sanders
- Naomi Klein, author and activist
- Alexandra Rojas, Executive Director of Justice Democrats
- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
All of the speakers were amazing, including Rep Markey who had a great soundbite:
Referring to wind and solar power and other renewable energy sources, Markey said, “Give us some of that socialism that the oil industry has been enjoying for 100 years.”
In his speech, Sanders pushed for legislation to cut subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel companies, investing instead in sustainable resources. But in moving towards a GND, Sanders made note that GND was not out to punish petroleum or fracking workers; it was to end the greed of the CEOs and corporations exploiting workers and the planet. Further, Sanders suggested:
If you missed the event, you can watch this recording.
Environmental Justice Townhall, Denmark Technical College, SC
The Sanders Campaign held a townhall in Denmark, SC, to highlight public water problems. As we know, Flint, MI’s water was contaminated 5 years ago due to the Michigan governor switching water systems from the lake, using the Flint River instead, which has been polluted with lead for decades. Residents are still fighting for replacing their pipes which were corroded by the switch. Even GM could not use the water for their manufacturing facility.
Before the townhall, Bernie visited some residents to talk about clean water.
Denmark, SC has been experiencing tainted water for over a decade but they didn’t know it until last year. From The State:
Halosan was supposed to kill slime in a distribution well, but Clemson University regulators ordered Denmark to stop using the chemical because it had not been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for drinking water systems. The Halosan injections and other troubles in Denmark have sparked two lawsuits against the city, which distributes water to more than 5,000 people in rural Bamberg County.
Like the home Sanders visited, many Denmark residents complain of dark-colored and foul-smelling water flowing from their kitchen sinks. At Brown and Smith’s home, they use a rooftop water collector to avoid using the city water system entirely.
“When I was drinking my coffee, I didn’t know I was drinking Halosan at the same time,” Smith said.
Recently, the S.C. Department of Heath and Environmental Control issued a violation notice against Denmark after inspectors found poorly maintained water tanks and vultures roosting on the tanks. Inspectors say the city has also failed to test parts of the water system for pollution, including services to Voorhees College and a middle school.
The problem, according to Josh Fox, environmental activist and filmmaker, said that Halosan is commonly used as a quick fix for old pipes that need to be replaced. Halosan is a chemical not approved by the EPA, and it can cause problems. One man said one of his grandchildren was born with only one kidney due to his daughter drinking the water from the tap.
Visit to Lowndes County, AL, Pamela Rush’s Home near Tyler, May 20, 2019
When Pamela Rush flushes her toilet, the waste flows out the back of her sky blue mobile home through a yellowing plastic pipe and empties just a few yards away in a soggy pit of mud, weeds, and dead grass. On a hot day in mid-May, Rush walked around her yard in rural Lowndes County. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed her as she tiptoed near the pit. The smell of sewage was overwhelming.
Rush, a soft-spoken 48-year-old with striking brown eyes, has straight-piped her family’s waste into her yard for almost two decades. Her home is on the edge of clay dirt road in the dense Alabama forest, miles from a municipal sewer system. Since Rush struggles with her health and is unable to work, she can’t afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to install an on-site septic system. This is her only option.
Mold grows throughout her house because of the damp, dark conditions, causing multiple respiratory problems for Rush and her two children. “I go to sleep in fear every night,” Rush said as she stared at the pit in her backyard, wiping sweat from her brow. “It don’t ever leave my mind.”
The Montgomery Advertiser published this investigative article last summer on the Deep South’s public health crisis for those impoverished, isolated rural areas.
The Black Belt — named for its rich, dark soil that makes for fertile agricultural land —brought white farmers, their plantations, and, forcibly, their slaves, to Alabama. In the 1960s, that same land became the foundation for the civil rights movement. Most of the 54-mile highway between Selma and Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of supporters marched for voting rights in 1965, is in Lowndes County. It is home to Tent City, where black sharecroppers lived after being kicked off their land by white farmers, and to the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which later became the Black Panther Party.
Today, Lowndes County has a population of about 10,000 people, 73 percent of whom are black. Nearly 32 percent of people live in poverty. The once-coveted soil is now the reason many people like Rush live in dangerous conditions: the ground isn’t very permeable to water. Typical septic systems don't work efficiently, a problem exacerbated by excessive rainfall.
The woman in the pant suit is Catherine Flowers, who founded the ACRE: Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise Development Corporation. She is a Senior Fellow for Environmental Justice and Civic Engagement at the Center for Earth Ethics, combining environmental justice with caring for the earth. She is Practitioner in Residence at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute. She has worked with the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations to form the Renew Alabama Coalition, addressing Issues of Clean Air and Water, Clean Energy, Economic Development, government Transparency, Sustainable Agriculture,and Sustainable Infrastructure.
Flowers helped organize the first climate conference in Alabama for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, which has named her one of its Women Climate Champions. She is nationally and internationally known for her work, and considers herself “a teacher by profession but an activist at heart.” Flowers is also featured in a recent documentary, The Accidental Environmentalist: Catherine Flowers, which will debut at the Mountain Film Festival this Saturday in Telluride, CO.
As an aside, I had seen Ms. Flowers speak at the People’s Summit on a panel about water, jobs, and justice at the People’s Summit in 2017.
Educational Justice
North Carolina was the first on the southern stop on May 16th, the anniversary of Brown vs the Board of Education. The campaign held rallies in Asheville and Charlotte, where Sanders announced he would be releasing his public education plan the next day.
Education Justice Town Hall, Orangeburg, SC
Team Sanders traveled to Orangeburg, SC and held a townhall on K-12 education on Saturday, May 18th. From The Nation:
On Saturday, Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled his platform to reshape the American public-education system. The setting of his speech was Orangeburg, South Carolina, not far from Summerton, where the first of five desegregation cases that were combined into Brown v. Board of Education was filed. Sixty-five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. But in an age where school segregation is getting worse and an increasing number of schoolchildren are living in poverty, the onus will be on Congress and the next president to usher in integrated, equitable, and child-centered public schools. American children, educators, and parents need a champion in the White House.
Dubbed “A Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public School Education,” Sanders’s plan is the most progressive and equitable public-education agenda of any presidential candidate in the modern history of the United States. Sanders is making a clean break with a bipartisan consensus that has led to the dismantling of public education under successive Republican and Democratic administrations. It is an unapologetic repudiation of the Betsy DeVos–Arne Duncan era of market-based school reform. It is also an implicit jab at his Democratic rivals—namely former vice president Joe Biden, who supported anti-segregation busing programs in the 1970s, and Senator Cory Booker, who as mayor of Newark wanted to make the city the “charter school capital of the nation.”
At the core of the sweeping platform is the premise that we should treat public education as a public good, not a commodity.
At a town hall, educators testified about dwindling resources for schools, as well as issues of bureaucracy and lack of reliable broadband that is affordable for low income households. To address these issues, Sanders laid out his inclusive Thurgood Marshall Education Justice Plan:
- Build on the Strength in Diversity Act to increase, not cut, federal funding for community-driven strategies to desegregate schools.
- Triple Title I funding to ensure at-risk schools get the funding they need and end funding penalties for schools that attempt to desegregate.
- Execute desegregation orders and appoint federal judges who will enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act in school systems.
- Address disciplinary practices in schools that disproportionately affect Black children.
- Establish a dedicated fund to create and expand teacher-training programs at HBCUs, minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and tribal colleges and universities to increase educator diversity.
- Fully fund the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and remove current protocols that allow for arbitrary dismissal of complaints.
- Fund school transportation to help integration, ending the absurd prohibitions in place.
- Increase access to English as a Second Language instruction.
- End the Unaccountable Profit-Motive of Charter Schools
- Rethink the link between property taxes and education funding.
- Establish a national per-pupil spending floor.
- Eliminate barriers to college-readiness exams by ensuring states cover fees for the ACT, SAT and other college preparatory exams for all students.
- Provide $5 billion annually for career and technical education to give our students the skills they need to thrive once they graduate.
- Ensure schools in rural communities, indigenous communities, Puerto Rico and other U.S. Territories receive equitable funding.
- Give schools the funding needed to support arts, foreign language and music education to provide all students with important learning opportunities. (this carries over from the GND plan)
- Strengthen the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
- Significantly increase teacher pay by working with states to set a starting salary for teachers at no less than $60,000 tied to cost of living, years of service, and other qualifications; and allowing states to go beyond that floor based on geographic cost of living.
- End racial and gender disparities in teacher pay.
- Ensure professional development for all teachers, including continuing education and mentorship programs.
- Protect and expand collective bargaining rights and teacher tenure.
- Provide year-round, free universal school meals; breakfast, lunch and snacks through our school meals programs, and offer incentives for sourcing food from local sources.
- Expand Summer EBT across the country to ensure no student goes hungry during the summer.
- Fully close the gap in school infrastructure funding to renovate, modernize, and green the nation’s schools.
- Make Schools a Safe and Inclusive Place for All
CNN reported that “Sanders will concede that the initial goal of charter schools — to help kids with unique learning needs — was admirable. But he will argue the system has been corrupted by wealthy activists who spent millions to privatize these schools, leaving them unaccountable and draining funds from the public school system.”
Sanders weaved his education plan into other speeches in Augusta, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Montgomery events on May 18th through May 20th. One attendee in Augusta was pleased that Sanders was doing more outreach to the South through these campaign stops and plans:
Without them, Sanders doesn’t likely have a chance of winning any of the Southern states, where black voters make up the largest bloc of the Democratic electorate.
“He’s done his homework this time,” said Kenneth Sullivan, a 25-year-old African-American.
Video of the brief speech on Justice at the Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta:
Bernie did another stop at a church the next day. Why churches? Montgomery Advertiser explains:
“Rural communities are very individualist in that they know they need to work on taking care of themselves and not solely rely on the government to do things for them,” Gutierrez said. “Where types of meetings will take place, like churches or schools, getting people to come and enjoy conversation and community — that’s very important in rural regions and in the South.”
-— Dr. Krisitie Guiterrez, professor, Old Dominion University
Health Justice
Although this tour was planned weeks ago, the timing coincided with last week’s bans or highly restrictive laws on women’s reproductive freedom rights in GA and AL. In Augusta, he did not hesitate to call out the GA legislature for the heartbeat bill. In Birmingham, his rally on May 19th was timed to coincide with the March for Reproductive Freedom in that city, although the state of Alabama saw sister marches all afternoon, staggered at different times.
Kelly Ingram Park Rally, Birmingham, AL
The campaign held an event at a park across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church, the site of the Birmingham Bombings in 1963. Sanders slammed the recent legislation signed about the disgraceful abortion law. It will kill women, Bernie says, unless the draconian laws are stopped. We are not going backwards, we are going forward. He will have a litmus test for SCOTUS picks, they must defend Roe v Wade.
Sanders participated in the march as well.
Speech at Mt. Zion AME Church, Montgomery
The next day, Sanders spoke at Mt Zion AME Church in Montgomery. As Kim Chandler from the AP noted, “Mt. Zion's old location played a key role in the 1950s' Montgomery bus boycott, and Sanders criticized what he called new threats to the right to vote -- "the bedrock of American democracy," he said.” ACRE’s Catherine Flowers opened the event with the following remarks:
Good afternoon. It is a new day, Alabama. When we can have a major candidate for president go to the Lowndes County AL, go and visit people who are poor that can’t give him anything but their stories, it’s time for us to realize it’s a new day in Alabama.
I welcome you all here today. But you didn’t come to listen to me, you came to listen to the messenger whose going to bring us a great message today. And on behalf of all of the people who I work for in rural America who are very very interested in making sure we aren’t left out this tme, I am happy to be here with Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been a friend of ours for a very long time. From the very first time we met.. he’d invited me to be on a panel in Washington with big shots such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Michael Moore...he thought this little girl from Lowndes County, Alabama, was significant to be heard, and I thank him for that. I’m glad to be with him today.
And today, I think you will get a chance to hear to hear what you want to hear, that this is a not only new day in Alabama but also in America.
Flowers was referring to the tour she led to Lowndes County and to Pamela Rush’s house, as mentioned earlier.
Sanders outlined his general themes of raising the minimum wage to $15, tuition free college, parts of his new Thurgood Marshall plan, Medicare for All (and paying for the programs by making corporations and Fortune 500 executives pay more taxes), and opening up opportunities for unions in Right to Work States, as well as better resources for the elderly and veterans. He praised a recent grad of Moorehouse University’s generous offer to pay off the class of 2019’s student debt; however, he noted that charity is not enough and can’t be depended on. He would work to lower student debt for everyone.
As strengthening democracy is a key component of Sanders’ democratic socialism agenda, he remarked, "What an outrage it is today. I'm not talking about 60 years ago, I'm talking about today, that you have Republican governors all over this country trying to suppress the vote.” (Voter suppression was mentioned in the Augusta rally as well, referring to the 2018 gubernatorial election.)
The Mt Zion AME Church gathering wrapped up his four-state swing of 6 stops in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Senator Senator is working to strengthen his support among black voters who comprise most of the Democratic primary electorate in many Southern states. The polls in the South, particularly in South Carolina, currently are tough for Sanders (a recent SC poll of 595 likely Dem voters has Biden leading at 46% and Sanders in second at 15% [Change Research, 538-rating C+]), but the primaries are a long way off, and Bernie has a history of being a long-distance runner. He doesn't give up on a challenge - he doubles his efforts. And then he triples his efforts. No one knows now what will happen in the primaries, but one thing is certain: if he doesn't finish first, it won't be for lack of putting in the effort to win the race.
What this all shows is that justice is intersectional: it is about racial disparities in housing, salaries, health, reproductive rights, and environmental rights. Clean water is important for health; when you can’t see a doctor when your child is sick, you should be able to, via Medicare for All. Water affects sewer systems too. But to transform these systems, we need our people to be educated for the next energy and environmental changes to be done; thus, a comprehensive investment in public school education is necessary. This is all part and parcel for the road to the Green New Deal.
However, the racism in our country is systemic and it must be dealt with. As he said in Montgomery, “We cannot move forward if history is swept under the rug. “
I’m glad Sanders took the time to reach out and reach forward in the South in the past few as he was not very well known in 2016. On this trip, he was met with some skepticism. However, Sanders is working hard to listen, ask questions, and sincerely wanting to earn Southern citizens’ trust. Because he’s been consistent over the decades of his political career, I believe he can be trusted to follow through.
As an example of following through (mentioned in Igualdad’s earlier diary today), Senator Sanders will return to the South next month, this time in Bentonville, AR at the annual Walmart shareholders meeting on June 5th. Walmart workers also attend shareholders meetings, and Sanders was invited by employee Kat Davis to introduce the following proposal to be voted on at the event, which is to give Walmart hourly employees a seat on the company’s executive board of directors. “These workers need and deserve a seat at the table,” Sanders (I-Vt.) told The Washington Post. “If hourly workers at Walmart were well represented on its board, I doubt you would see the CEO of Walmart making over a thousand times more than its average worker."
“We really want Walmart to think about us — the lowly associates who, behind the scenes, are the ones bringing in the money,” said Kat Davis, who works as certified pharmacy technician in New Bern, N.C. [She represents the leadership for workers’ rights organization United for Respect.]
Davis said she invited Sanders to speak at the shareholders meeting because he has supported workers in their fight for better pay and paid sick leave with introducing the Stop WALMART Act last November .
CNBC’s Jacob Pramuk in filing his report, observed:
Organized labor traditionally backs Democratic candidates. But Trump performed better with union members in 2016 than Republicans have in recent elections and hopes to keep that support in 2020. Last month, he argued union members “love Trump” even if what he called “Dues Crazy union leadership” does not.
Walmart and McDonald’s workers are not unionized, despite some efforts to organize. Walmart says it employs about 1.5 million hourly associates in the U.S.
Just like in his track days at James Madison High School where he was the team’s co-captain, Bernie Sanders will run the long distance by criss-crossing the country as he did on this last swing through the south.
Want to help the Sanders campaign go further for the distance? If you have a couple of bucks, click on the thermometer below and you can chip in.
Guidelines for this particular diary thread: this is an election diary and it is about Bernie Sanders and campaign’s recent activities. What’s not welcomed is threadjacking with negativity towards Senator Sanders or his advocates here, nor invoking negative comments about his 2020 Dem competitors but fine to ask constructive questions about his campaign stops, policies, etc if you have any.