Daily Archives: June 15, 2017

Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a human-rights lawyer, won the mayoralty of Jackson, Mississippi, in June with 93 percent of the vote. (Illustration by Louisa Bertman)

With a clenched fist held high and the promise of amovement of the people, Chokwe Antar Lumumba asked the voters of Jackson, Mississippi, to elect him as their mayor in a race he pledged would lead to the transformation of a Deep South city in a deep-red state. Victory for his civil-rights-inspired, labor-backed campaign for economic and social justice would send shock waves around the world, said the 34-year-old human-rights lawyer as he vowed to make Jackson the most progressive city in the country.1

Too radical? Too bold? Not at all. Backed by a coalition that included veteran activists who fought segregation, along with newcomers who got their first taste of politics in Bernie Sanderss 2016 presidential campaign, Lumumba won 55 percent of the vote in a May Democratic primary that saw him oust the centrist incumbent mayor and sweep past several other senior political figures in Mississippis largest city. A month later, he secured a stunning 93 percent of the vote in a general election that drew one of the highest turnouts the city has seen in years.2

That victory renewed a radical experiment in community-guided governance and cooperative economics that his father, the veteran radical activist Chokwe Lumumba Sr., began during a brief mayoral term that ended with the senior Lumumbas untimely death just eight months after his own 2013 election as mayor. Governing magazine speculates that the younger Lumumbas tenure may offer striking evidence of a nationwide trend: strongly progressive policies being pushed in big cities, even in deep red states. Thats true. Unfortunately, Lumumbas June 6 win didnt get anything close to the media attention accorded a handful of special elections for US House seats in districts that are so solidly Republican that Donald Trump was comfortable plucking congressmen from them to fill out his cabinet.3

This is the frustrating part of Lumumbas shock waves around the world calculus: His election should have sent a shock wave. The same holds true for the election of progressives in local races from Cincinnati to St. Louis to South Fulton, Georgia, in a season of resistance that began with the Womens March on Washington and mass protests against President Trumps Muslim ban but has quickly moved to polling places across the country.4

The list of victories thus far on this years long calendar of contestsmayoral, City Council, state legislative, and even statewideis striking. Many of them are unprecedented, and most are linked by a growing recognition on the part of national progressive groups and local activists that the greatest resistance not just to Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan but to right-wing governors could well come from the cities and states where the day-to-day work of governing is done. Municipal resistance is crucial because these Republican governors often do the bidding of the Koch brothers and the corporate-sponsored American Legislative Exchange Council.5

Our nation will only change from the grassroots up. Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party

Inspired not merely by their opposition to Trump but in many cases by the experience of the Sanders campaign, these next-generation progressive candidatesoften running with the backing of Our Revolution, the national group developed by Sanders backersshare a belief that effective opposition begins with saying no but never ends there. They recognize that an alternative vision can be proposed and put into practice in communities where taxes are levied, services are delivered, commitments to fight climate change are made, resolutions to establish sanctuary cities are adopted, and questions about poverty, privatization, and policing are addressed. Our nation will only change from the grassroots up, says Dan Cantor, national director of the Working Families Party, which backed Lumumba as well as the progressive winners of a hotly contested primary for Philadelphia district attorney, a statewide race for the top education post in Wisconsin, and a New York election that saw a Trump-backing GOP district pick a resistance-preaching union activist for an open legislative seat.6

Cantor is right to suggest that these victories make a powerful case that a new resistance-and-renewal politics is sending a signal to conservative Republicans and cautious Democrats alike about the ability of bold progressive populists to win in every part of the country. Thats why it is so worrisome that these electoral shock waves have been crashing against the wall of ignorance and indifference that surrounds a Trump-obsessed Washington media.7

Even before the 2016 elections, the national media were far too focused on Beltway intrigues. When the Trump-centric punditocracy hang on the 45th presidents every tweet, election results that cannot be tied directly to whats happening in Washington barely exist in their eyes. This is a damaging phenomenon: Even in an era of rapidly evolving social media, the validation that comes from traditional media coverage should not be underestimated. In the none-too-distant past, things changed because down-ballot races were closely monitored for evidence of the zeitgeist; the tangible signs of electoral progress for civil-rights campaigners in the late 1960s came initially in the form of election results for the mayoralties in places like Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, and they inspired the next wave of campaigns in cities like Atlanta and New Orleans. City Council elections in Berkeley, Madison, and Ann Arbor in the early 1970s revealed the political potency of radical movements and lowered voting ages, just as Harvey Milks 1977 election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors told us that LGBTQ Americans were transforming urban politics. And a remarkable series of election results in 1983, beginning with Harold Washingtons election as mayor of Chicago, signaled the rise of a rainbow coalition that would inspire not just the Reverend Jesse Jackson but a young community organizer named Barack Obama.8

Lumumbas big win in Jackson and similar breakthrough victories across the country are powerful indications of todays emerging resistance. His overwhelming primary victory occurred on the same day that progressive Cincinnati Councilwoman Yvette Simpson shocked even herself when her power of we campaign finished first (ahead of a conservative incumbent) in that citys mayoral primary. Annie Weinberg, electoral director of Democracy for America, which has waded into dozens of down-ballot contests, said the message is clear: In 2017, voters are ready to make cities everywhere into bastions of resistance to the Trump regime by electing bold progressive leaders who run on, and are committed to fighting for, racial and economic justice.9

Weinbergs point was confirmed on May 16, when Philadelphia Democrats nominated veteran civil-rights lawyer Lawrence Krasner for district attorney. Krasner, who had defended Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter protesters, beat a crowded field of contenders with a campaign that promised to make the City of Brotherly Love a model for criminal-justice reform. Along with victories last year by Cook County States Attorney Kim Foxx in Chicago and Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala in Orlando, Florida, Krasners win reflects the political appeal of new approaches to policingones first voiced by protesters on the streets of American cities, and that the Trump administration and too many politicians in both parties continue to callously dismiss. The headline of a Philadelphia Daily News column by Will Bunch announced: This wasnt just a primary victory. This was a revolution. The columnist saw in Krasners victory nothing less than the stirrings of a whole different kind of revolution from the city that gave America the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rightsa revolution aimed at finally undoing a draconian justice regime that had turned the Cradle of Liberty into a death-penalty capital and the poster child for mass incarceration.10

Many recent progressive victors were Bernie Sanders supporters or Sanders DNC delegates last year.

A similarly revolutionary result came in St. Louis on April 4, when Natalie Vowell won a citywide school-board seat with an intersectional campaign that focused not just on education policy but addressed the housing, employment, and criminal-justice issues that often determine whether students succeed. A Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Vowell promised to empower parents across the economic spectrum and stop equating poverty with apathy.11

Developing detailed platforms that recognize the links between local, state, and national issues has characterized these recent victories. Winning candidates have made opposing Trump a local issue, with commitments to defend immigrants and fill the void created by federal budget cuts; but they have also rejected the austerity, deregulation, privatization, and intolerance of statehouse Republicans. For example, Dylan Parker is a 28-year-old diesel mechanic and member of the Quad Cities chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. In 2016, Parker was a Sanders delegate; in early April of this year, he was elected to the City Council of Rock Island, Illinois, with a campaign that updated the sewer socialist municipal politics of the 1930s by focusing on providing universal high-speed Internet access and expanding Rock Islands publicly owned hydroelectric power plant. Two weeks later, another DSA member, khalid kamau (who lowercases his name in the Yoruba tradition that emphasizes community over the individual), was elected to the City Council of South Fulton, Georgia. A Black Lives Matter and Fight for $15 organizer and also a Sanders delegate, kamau campaigned on a bold economic and social-justice vision that seeks to make the newly incorporated community of South Fulton the largest progressive city in the South.12

In Scott Walkers Wisconsin, April voting saw Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers win a statewide nonpartisan race after being targeted by conservative backers of the school choice schemes favored by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. While his challenger embraced DeVos and called her selection a positive development for education, Evers challenged the Trump appointees promotion of taxpayer-subsidized parochial or private schools that are part of the choice program and said DeVos should be paying attention to public-school students. We need her to be an advocate for those kids, explained the teachers union ally, who calls for the increased funding of public education, especially for schools serving African-American, Latino, and rural students. Evers won 70 percent of the vote in a state that narrowly backed Trump last fall.13

While DC pundits have kept a reasonably close watch on congressional special elections in the districts won by Trumpand have seen signs of political movement some of the clearest signals are coming from special elections for seats in the state legislative chambers that will redraw congressional district lines after the 2020 Census. Progressive Democrats running in historically Republican districts in New Hampshire and New York won breakthrough victories in May. Republicans should absolutely be concerned: Two Republican canaries died in the coal mine yesterday, GOP political consultant William OReilly said after the results were announced. He explained that Trump voters and other Republicans simply didnt show up, and voters from the left did.14

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

The New York special-election winner, elementary-school teacher and union activist Christine Pellegrino, described her victory as a thunderbolt of resistance. But it was also something else: Pellegrino, another 2016 Sanders delegate, wasnt the first choice of Democratic strategists and local party leaders. She gained the nomination with the help of the group Long Island Activists, which was born out of the Bernie Sanders movement, and she ran an edgy anticorruption campaign that recognized the mood among voters frustrated with both major parties. As observers hailed her victory in a district that gave Trump a 23-point edge last November, Pellegrino explained that her winning strategy wasnt all that complicated: A strong progressive agenda is the way forward.15

Pellegrino proved her point by taking 58 percent of the vote in one of the 710 legislative districts nationwide that have been identified by Ballotpedia as including all or part of the so-called Pivot Countiesthose that voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then voted for Republican Donald Trump in 2016. As the website explains: 477 state house districts and 233 state senate districts intersected with these Pivot Counties. These [districts comprise] approximately 10 percent of all state legislative districts in the country.16

For progressives, figuring out where to win and how to winnot merely to resist, but to set the agendais about more than positioning. This is the essential first step in breaking the grip of a politics that imagines large parts of the country will always be red, and that says the only real fights are over an elusive middle ground where campaigns are fought with lots of money but little substance. The resistance-and-renewal politics thats now gathering momentum rejects such empty politics and embraces what Chokwe Antar Lumumba identifies as the struggle [that] does not cease: to give people the jobs and freedom they need to shape their own destinies. That makes every election in every community matter, because the point isnt merely to resist one bad president; as Lumumba reminds us, it is to change the order of the world.17

View post:

A Progressive Electoral Wave Is Sweeping the Country | The Nation - The Nation.

Lewis Goodall, Political Correspondent

One of Jeremy Corbyn's biggest acolytes, Matt Zarb Cousin, wrote convincingly in the Guardian on Wednesday that one of the keys to the success of his former boss in last week's General Election was people recognising that he was a "different kind of politician, that he genuinely wanted to take on the establishment".

He's not wrong. I've clocked up over a thousand miles over the course of the election but not once did I meet a voter who thought that Mr Corbyn was a traditional politician. Along with the occasional salty remark, whatever most voters thought of his views, they were largely united in seeing him as different, a firebrand, a renegade even - a break with the past.

But for my money, the great secret of the Corbyn leadership is just how much of a traditional Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has become, at least in the domestic policy arena.

Through the development of his own political antenna and the Labour Party's structures slowly taming him, the man we think of as the most radical leader in the party's recent past has in deed if not in diction become reliably middle-of-the-road and represents continuity with the recent past.

Gone is the doctrinaire campaigner of old, to be replaced by a man who, yes, has principle, but chooses his battles.

He accepts policies he doesn't much care for because he knows what is politic and what isn't. He might occasionally say something he doesn't believe for party unity or to serve his wider political aims. He has become, in other words, a politician and a successful one at that.

The proof of this particular political pudding is in Labour's manifesto - the first since 1983 written with the Left broadly in control of the party's levers.

But few on any side of the party, even the Blairite right, had any complaint when it was published. Yes, the nationalisations might not have been every candidate's cup of tea but their implementation was so staggered and piecemeal that few bothered to care.

The policy on austerity, despite the fanfare, was much the same as Ed Miliband's, as were many other policies. Even tuition fees, perhaps the most striking inclusion, finished a journey which Mr Miliband had begun.

Most astoundingly, the Labour leadership quietly accepted the Government's changes to welfare benefits. The Labour manifesto didn't even mention the Government's welfare benefits freeze up to 2020 and the party seemed unclear as to whether to change it.

Much of the document was redolent of microwaved Millibandism or good old-fashioned bread and butter New Labourism: policies on school meals, 10,000 new police officers, more homes, childcare - put them on a pledgecard and any self-respecting New Labour apparatchik would have happily brandished it. The word "socialism" didn't appear once.

And whatever his reservations, this former vice chair of CND stood on a manifesto with a commitment to renew Trident at its centre. He may have squirmed when asked about the promise but the Labour Party hierarchy made sure it was there and, should another election come, it would be there again.

But something has changed. Because, unlike 2015, Labour is gaining seats. Uncomfortably for a man who values substance over style, I suspect it's more the latter which boosted Labour last Thursday.

After all, for the mansion tax alone, I think the 2015 manifesto has some claim to be at least as radical than its 2017 successor. But I don't think it would have made any difference to Ed Miliband if he had stood on every word of it two years ago.

It was actually Mr Corbyn's mix of meat and potato, moderate Labour policies with his personal brand of radicalism and rhetorical style which created an electoral sweet spot for Labour. It married traditional Labour voters with a burgeoning cultural, youth-led movement which taps into the zeitgeist.

You could walk down the streets of east London or hop on the tube and see people wear Jeremy Corbyn t-shirts or badges. In saying you're part of his tribe, you're saying something about yourself - an instant cultural signifier.

You couldn't say that of Ed Miliband.

Mr Corbyn is a vinyl politician who reeks of authenticity, even if the end result isn't pitch perfect. Redolent of a different age, a slither of an imagined more authentically Labour past. He is therefore perfectly placed for a generation who crave "authenticity" above all else.

And here's the rub: neither part of this Labour 2017 jigsaw would have worked without the other.

Mr Corbyn unbound and unrestrained would have been anathema to the electorate and a traditional stack of Labour bread and butter middle-of-the-road policies presented by a traditional middle-of-the-road Labour politician like Owen Smith wouldn't have worked either without Mr Corbyn's personal zeal.

Ironically for someone who so eschews free markets, Mr Corbyn has a brand. And this, mixed with a traditional retail, not especially radical Labour offer, made a potent cocktail.

Mr Corbyn called the 2017 manifesto "radical but responsible". Not half. We didn't know it then but it beats "strong and stable" every time.

Previously on Sky Views: Sam Kiley - Cutting immigration may crash economy

Original post:

Sky Views: Rebel Corbyn has become traditional - Sky News

He wore bright colored capri pants, telling all that capri stands for capricious rather than the Italian isle. He extolled the usefulness of little black dresses to women and was described as a gifted and imaginary actor with jazz hands.

Leonard, the lead character in The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, also expressed an idiosyncratic fashion sense by gluing layers of rainbow colored flip-flops onto the soles of black Converse athletic shoes, turning them into platform booties.

He was 14 and, given the stuffy Jersey Shore where he lived, a loner.

And, one day he went missing.

The one-act, one-man play Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, written and performed by James Lecesne, is on the Laguna Playhouse stage through June 25.

The one-act, one-man play written and performed by James Lecesne and in performance this month at Laguna Playhouse is based on his young adult novel Absolute Brightness.

As a one-man performer, Lecesne is brilliant and completely believable, affecting variants of a New Jersey accent while impersonating a cop, a beauty parlor patron or a teen-age girl.

Working against an elegantly spare stage set designed by Jo Winarski, he keeps his audience on edge for roughly 80 minutes with nary a pause for breath. He nimbly pivots between Chuck DeSantis, a Shakespeare quoting, old-school detective; Ellen Hertle, the self-described aunt Leonard lived with; her introverted teen daughter, Phoebe; and the effete British owner of a local drama school.

He also becomes Gloria Salzano, a mobsters widow who finds one of Leonards signature platforms floating on the lake. Adept at fishing, she also distinguishes a variety of knots, a crucial skill, it turns out.

Humor emerges when she lectures DeSantis on the real persona of a mobsters wife, grills him on matters of faith and so gives the audience insight into the rough-edged cop who ultimately becomes as moved by Leonard as the people he queries.

The story begins when Ellen comes to the police station reporting Leonard missing for 24 hours, actually 19 hours and 47 minutes, and wants DeSantis to do something immediately.

Through his investigation, including interviews with the aforementioned characters, we find out who Leonard is or was. The missing youth meanwhile remains wordless, a shadow on a screen or represented by symbols such as a set of fairy wings.

Lecesne lets everyone describe Leonard, sometimes humorously, sometimes baffling, but always with affection and respect.

Its noteworthy that all descriptions of Leonard, save for those by Phoebe, come from adults who marvel at his persona while also cautioning against excessive flamboyance. Tone it down, honey, says Marion, the salon patron, but Leonard counters that if he stopped being himself, the terrorists would win. And, he does not own a cellphone but carries a pocket watch.

Affected by Leonards vibe as well, DeSantis nonetheless dryly describes the video-game addled bullies who lure him into a wooded area and ultimately kill him.

He also has scant words for the lawyers who defend the louts who claim gay panic, meaning that Leonard may have made a pass at one of them.

Disaffected, alienated and bullied teens, some gay, some not, have driven a plethora of story lines, with the latest being Dear Evan Hansen. The musical revolves around a teenager with social anxiety and a schoolmates suicide. Written and composed by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the production premiered in 2015 and received six Tony Awards this past Sunday, June 11. One reviewer called the storys moral ambiguity a sign of the current zeitgeist.

There is no such ambiguity in Brightness. Leonard is a good-natured, gifted kid who only transgressed by being himself. How everyone whose life he touched came to appreciate this and change their own entrenched ways will not be revealed here.

In 1994, Lecesne had created Trevor as part of the award winning show Word of Mouth, which he later adapted into a screenplay for a short film. After winning an Oscar for best live action short film, Trevor grew into a national movement initiated by Lecesne and the films producers Randy Stone and Peggy Rajski.

The project is a lifeline for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youths in crises between age 13 and 24. The Trevor Life Line at 1-866-488-7386 is available daily. TrevorSpace connects LGBTQ youths world wide.

See the rest here:

One-Man Play Shines Brightly - Laguna Beach Independent Newspaper