Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Moving Forward With and Beyond Sanders


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Hello Berners!

As you all know we had a tough night yesterday. To tell you the truth I’m not as broken hearted as I expected to be. I left that aside in that NY night. The path for the nomination has never been further from happening.

Does it end here? Hell no!

Before I begin let me congratulate you all for all of what you have achieved. Beyond amazing. The donations, the phone bank, the facebank, canvasing, organizing, all of it unprecedented. Losing and getting back up and gaining momentum and then winning 8 states in a row. You guys are the future. We have the momentum. And by that I don’t mean the campaign. Because it’s not about Bernie Sanders, never was. It was about creating a revolutionary movement, that we can achieve anything if we all work together. This is bigger the Clinton and the Democratic Party which doesn’t represent us. Bernie is just a man like any of us, but he did what nobody had the courage to do. As much as I love and respect Elizabeth Warren she didn’t had it on her to challenge the Clinton machine. That 74 year old man rallied 3 times a day every single day for his beliefs, fought against the media, against the political establishment and big donors. Yet we made it this far. That proves that we can dream big and win. This is a win. We might not get the nomination, but that shouldn’t be our goal. Our goal is to make what Bernie strengthen and push it even further. It’s on us now! The youth voted overwhelmingly for him. The Democratic Party has been warned, they are out of touch, they are way off to the right and we are not taking it anymore.

Before how I say my suggestions of how we move forward I’d like to make something clear. We take this to the convention. We keep phone banking, we keep fighting just like we had till now. At the same time don’t be unrealistic and realize what our chances are. Think ahead. Give this last push with Bernie not for the nomination but for our nomination as a movement. Use the platform that he gave us to push it and make it stronger. We are not going to have that platform in maybe 8 years, so the time is right and the time is now! Take everything that you all have learned from this campaign and use that apparatus to break the system and renew it. How do we do that?

Start what we already have. You know all those Bernie groups? Right after the convention convert them to grassroots groups. Join other grassroots movements like Wolf Pack and others and organize.

Promote our media. This is the most important part right now in my opinion. The establishment media crushed us. We need to take that power away if we want to make any progress. We need to make them irrelevant. The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Washington Post, Vox, Slate, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Wall Street Journal and so on have proven that they are bought and that they are doing a disservice to truth. And we should boycott them in masses. Watching Democracy Now! Every single day without missing an episode is mandatory to all of you, the same with The Benjamin Dixon Show, promote, donate to those shows, also support The Real News Network, TYT, Thom Hartman, Ring of Fire. If you are smart enough and have good resources, network and start your show like Secular Talk, David Packman and Humanist Report did.

Donate just like you did with Bernie, to all these shows and to grassroots movements. Environmental movements, veteran movements, Black Lives Matter, worker movements and so on. Democracy Now! Is crucial and you will learn about each movement in every single episode. Democracy Now! Should be like going to church for a progressive.

We need to be aware of anything that goes on so that the day that Hillary Clinton decides to bomb a Doctors without Borders hospital like the Obama administration did, or hide the torture report like Obama did, that we are going to bring them hell. Clinton years are going to be the nail in the coffin for neo liberalism. I believe she will be one of the most disliked presidents in modern America, and I’ve been saying that for years long before I knew who Bernie Sanders was. We need to be ready and strong or they will wipe us out like they did with Occupy Wall Street. We need to get our politicians in power, we have a list now, they endorsed Bernie or remained neutral, and those are our guys. We know which journalists are BS, like you know all of them in mainstream that includes Maddow and Chris Hayes.

Bernie or Bust is a super weak response in my opinion, I’m not even going to get into that. Our response should be we are going to create a movement bigger and stronger beyond anything you have all ever seen before. We are going to create the most organized and focused political machine ever seen in this country. Bernie or Bust is a reaction for the moment, and we need something that is reactionary for the ages. Nothing in the I have a dream speech is not about reacting to 1963, that speech has no age, no time, it is a speech that speaks for every age. Bernie or Bust gets us nowhere. A political revolution. A revolution of ideas and policies is what Bernie pushed. Let’s create something that lasts, not something that dies on an election year.

We need to keep Bernie on board, keep Bernie on the movement and protect him from destructiom, because after Clinton wins they will try to bury him to make sure that something like this wont ever happen again. Protect the Record is a warm up guys, it will expand with the Trump race, and it can grow from there. And that is some 1984 scary shit. We need to be ready. We can’t have another Occupy without leaders, we need Bernie to stay at the head pulling other heroes to lead the movement, especially when he is no longer available for us, he is not eternal. Nina and Tulsi are promising to the future, let’s strengthen them, there are many others that we don’t know about. Organize try to get them to speak at your colleges.

It can’t be all protests, it has to go beyond that and it has to be organized. We can’t put all eggs in one basket. That is why if we put all of them in this campaign we are done for. We need to stretch out. We need to inform, we need to support our media, we need to do what Wolf Pack is doing and beyond. Watch the Benjamin Dixon Show and visit the Progressive Army site, support them. They really know how to pull this off. We created amazing tools for Bernie, let’s build into them. People are talking about third parties, the green party, this and that. No. We need to do it ourselves. From what we built is what a third party could come out from. But it needs to start with us getting bigger not the other way around. We can be stronger than a party. Martin Luther King shaked the system without one. If he created a party he would have been crushed. We can do that. But we can’t let Democracy Spring to be as small as it was, we have to be even bigger than that. Hillary Clinton asked for a nightmare and we are going to bring it to her. We do not forgive, we do not forget. When she gets into power we will have her accountable and we are going to hit hard, even harder than the GOP. Because she should be on our side. The GOP attacks the Dems for the wrong reasons. We have to force Clinton to the left so when she doesn’t do it, because she won’t, she loses more and more followers and Dem party will get weaker and weaker. We can’t let her be Obama 2.0 where everything takes a free pass. If she wants to get in more wars, deport more people, force feed prisoners, spy on citizens, she will have to deal with us first.

Aspire to be bigger than life, if your young, aspire to have the spirit of Aaron Swartz. If you are in Washington aspire to have the spirit of Daniel Ellsberg. If you’re an academic aspire to have the spirit of Noam Chomsky. If you are an aspiring journalist become the next Amy Goodman or Glenn Greenwald. If you are an aspiring religious figure aspire to have the spirit of Oscar Romero. If you are a worker aspire to have the spirit of Cezar Chaves. If you work within the system, aspire to have the courage of Ed Snowden. If you want to be a politician aspire to have the tenacity, morality and ambition of Bernie Sanders.

Don’t get discouraged. In all this fights there are always lost battles. The war has plenty of room for our victories.

I’ll leave you all with this Howard Zinn quote:
“The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.
Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back.” 


This will make you tear up today like it did to me when I saw it when writing blog post. This is what WE all should aspire to.



With this I end my thoughts and I send to you all a big thank you. What you all have achieved is exceptional.  Obama lies when he says that the US is exceptional. It is far from it. It is YOU, who really fight, who truly are.

Now wipe out the tears. Keep phone banking, canvasing for Bernie and beyond. The future is in our hands, and I know that we will win. For the sake of the future of our world.

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