On a day when Democrats should be voting in several states…

by Eric Jackson

The news has been repeatedly slamming the faces of Americans into the pavement. Actually, not just Americans. Among Americans, not just those in the USA. Among Democrats, perhaps a confirmation of some of our beliefs but also evidence of the breach of them in our midst. We are given pause for uncomfortable introspection, in the quaint and now sort of disreputable academic phrase of yesteryear, “values clarification.”

In Virginia, a centrist Democratic lieutenant governor, a physician from a patrician family who won a primary against a progressive and has brought in the Clintons and much of that crowd for his general election race, started by centering his campaign on improving the state’s schools and protecting and extending people’s access to health care. The Republican, Ed Gillespie, has been making his bid by talking about race and about guns.

So, you Northern Virginia voters of Afro-Panamanian roots, what do you think about THAT? Did anyone teach you enough state history to know about the “patterollers” and their relationship to the Second Amendment? These were the state militia, generally deployed in organized groups of three to six white men, whose main job was to keep blacks off of the roads to prevent runaways or the organization of slave revolts. All free white men of military age were expected to participate or to hire someone to take their place. The institution made Quakers unpopular, and in some states illegal. Patrick Henry railed against the Constitution that came out of the Philadelphia convention because it did not protect the right of white people in states like Virginia to bear arms, and this is the purpose to which he referred. So if you self-identify as a black person, what do you think about another Virginia campaign about guns?

But then, Virginia has too many African-American voters for the Republicans to want to rile them all up so that they appear at the polls today, so the folks to whom they point as reason for the fine white citizens to be armed and ready to kill somebody are immigrants from Latin America. Salvadoran gangsters are the tatted-up poster boys, but there aren’t enough of them and they haven’t caused enough trouble in the state to justify all of the many costs of a general ethnic cleansing. But there you have it: today’s Republicans aren’t talking about arresting a few lawbreakers, they’re talking about a roundup of all immigrants and a lot of them, with their talk about “anchor babies,” do not distinguish among immigrants and the US-born children of immigrants. And people like that have never been able to distinguish among Salvadorans, Mexicans, Panamanians and other Latin Americans, let alone among individuals of those descriptions. So if you identify as Hispanic, what do you think about THAT?

We get a massacre of white people at a small town Baptist church in Texas to add a somber note to this election day. In the hours when that awful story was breaking, the comments below the mainstream media reports — comments sections that generally do nothing to exclude pseudonymous Nazi trolls and Russian bots posing as such — blame was immediately cast upon black people, and on Muslims. As details emerged, the white guy who did it was cast in outright libelous reports as an anti-fascist anarchist (antifa) and the Texas attorney general called for all religious congregations to be armed. Further details muddied those stereotypes. An armed member of the congregation did give chase, and did shoot the criminal — but not before 26 innocent people were killed. The criminal? A sexist terrorist, who had beaten his ex-wife and broken the skull of her young son by a prior relationship, and whose mission that day included revenge on her family that took the life of her grandmother.

Wait a minute. “Sexist terrorist?” Isn’t that ruled out by definition of anti-terrorist laws that generally require opposition to some government or intimidation of some defined ethnic or faith group in a society? But in the USA, those laws were for the most part written by men and reflect that reality.

Do you want to know terror? Have a gun pointed at you in the context of domestic violence. I know. Statistically, forget about that stuff about a hero driving off an intruder with a gun — homicides and suicides within the household are what firearms deaths within American society are mostly about.

(And the Republican gun nuts who dismiss the suicide statistics as irrelevant? None of them are ever heard to champion the right of a patient who is suffering the pain of a terminal illness to end his or her life.)

So should Democrats feel superior? She we define THEM as the party of horrific abuse against women, and US as the enlightened people? Almost all of us adult male Democrats can take a hard look within and know that this has not been our personal history. And then there is that champion of the “donor base” — to which the DNC gives preference over the rank-and-file these days — Harvey Weinstein. He’s been in the news a lot, too. Not only for his abuse of power against women, but now for his hiring of Israeli mercenaries to terrorize those who would speak out against it.

And Americans living abroad — have we fled from all that? I see where Mexico just arrested a gringo cult leader for multiple counts of murder. I have seen American sexual predators, including convicted ones, coming to Panama in search of submissive women and children. Wild Bill was an active white supremacist up there before bringing his crime wave here. We get all sorts of wannabe armed cultists and “sovereign citizens” coming here from the USA, and Panamanian authorities, warned many times, seem oblivious. Or is it that they have been paid to be oblivious?

So Virginia and New Jersey vote today, as do a lot of other Americans in local or special elections. Who’s moral? Who’s the majority? Imperfect people need to look within, and find that sense of decency, and vote accordingly. It does matter.

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Making 2020 Transparent

When I ran to serve as chair of the DNC following the 2016 election — a cycle unlike any other in American history — I knew that repairing our party’s structural flaws and healing the deep divisions among our supporters would not be easy. While we’ve made remarkable progress since last November, we still have a long way to go.

I am more committed than ever before to restoring voters’ faith in our democratic process because even the perception of impartiality or an unfair advantage undermines our ability to win. That is unacceptable.

To that end, the new DNC under my leadership is committed to the task of making sure that our 2020 nominating process will be unquestionably fair and transparent. And all the people I’ve brought on board since taking over as chair are working according to the following principles:

• We believe that only through transparency and accountability can we rebuild the trust we need to win elections.
• We believe that it’s critical to build an infrastructure that supports all candidates and helps Democrats win.
• We believe that a party must listen if it seeks to lead.
• We believe in the principle of equal opportunity for the American people and for our candidates in our party elections.

Of course, as any leader knows, principles only matter when they inform and inspire action. After listening to Democrats from every wing of our party, I’ve developed a series of concrete reforms to put our principles into action and guarantee that under my watch, the new DNC will work to rebuild trust with the people we represent. These principles are:

1. To ensure that no candidate participating in our presidential nominating process gains any unfair advantage — real or perceived — during our primary season. We will decide the debate schedule in advance, instead of negotiating it after all our candidates have entered the race.
2. I will ensure that any and all joint fundraising agreements will be transparent, including the new Democratic GrassrootsVictory Fund agreements we’ve developed with all 50 state parties. This is the first time the DNC has signed joint fundraising agreements like this so early and before the mid-term elections.
3. At all times, I will follow the rules established in the Charter and Bylaws of the Democratic Party, not least of all as they pertain to the selection of our nominee for president of the United States. If there are opportunities for the DNC to make changes to the Charter and Bylaws to be even more transparent, I will work with the DNC body to pass those changes.
4. I will continue to support the Unity Reform Commission, whose goals are both to unify and reform the party we all love. We will work with the Unity Reform Commission to implement their collective recommendations for meaningful change in our party.
5. I will continue working to reform and revive our party by empowering diverse grassroots Democrats at the leadership table. We will build on our recent successes with small-dollar fundraising. And we will reject contributions from corporate PAC donors whose goals conflict with our platform.
6. In addition to committing to a transparent process, I will work with all members of the Democratic Party to make the 2020 process as inclusive as possible, including working to protect the right of every Democrat to make their vote and their voice heard in the primary process.
7. I will work with our DNC members and progressive partners to ensure that the 2020 process is transparent, accountable, and representative of the will of rank-and-file Democrats

We should never confuse unity with unanimity, and it is my unequivocal goal to regain the trust of voters and unify and strengthen our party to ensure we can elect Democrats from the school board to the oval office. I will not rest in the fight to restore the faith of hardworking families in the political party I love.

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Revitalizing the Democratic Party

by Bernie Sanders

Politics is not a baseball game, and it is not a soap opera.

People are hurting in this country, and our job is not to be distracted by political gossip and Donald Trump’s tweets. Our job is to revitalize American democracy and bring millions of people into the political process who today do not vote and who do not believe that government is relevant to their lives. Our job is to create an economy and government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent and wealthy campaign contributors.

Here’s the problem: the strategy the Democratic Party has been pursuing in recent years has failed. Since 2009, Democrats have lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures across the country. Republicans now control the White House, 34 out of 50 governorships as well as the US House of Representatives and the US Senate. In dozens of states, the Democratic Party is virtually non-existent. Too much is at stake for our country and our people for us not to learn from our past failures and move forward in a way that makes the Democratic Party stronger so we can take on and beat Trump and the right-wing Republican agenda.

What the recently released book excerpt from former interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile made clear is that unless we get our act together, we are not going to be effective in either taking on Donald Trump or in stopping the extremist right-wing Republican agenda. We have to re-establish faith with the American people that in fact we can make positive changes in this country through a fair and transparent political process that reflects the will of voters across this country.

In order to do that, we need to rethink and rebuild the Democratic Party. We need a Democratic Party that opens its doors to new people, new energy and new ideas. We need a Democratic Party that is truly a grassroots party, where decisions are made from the bottom up, not from the top down. We need a Democratic Party which becomes the political home of the working people and young people of this country, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American … all Americans.

And we need to make it abundantly clear that the Democratic Party is prepared to take on the ideology of the Koch brothers and the billionaire class — a small group of people who are undermining American democracy and moving this country into an oligarchic form of society. YES. We will take on the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street, corporate America, the insurance industry, the drug companies, and the fossil fuel industry.

Now, what the Establishment (political, economic and media) wants us to believe is that real and fundamental changes in our society are impossible.

No. We cannot guarantee health care to all as a right. No. We cannot revitalize the trade union movement, raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour and provide pay equity for women. No. We cannot effectively compete in the global economy by making public colleges and universities tuition-free. No. We cannot lead the world in combatting climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels. No. We cannot reform our broken criminal justice system or finally achieve comprehensive immigration reform.

They want us to think that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, a nation which has more income and wealth inequality than almost any nation on earth, the best that we can do is to accept tiny, incremental change.

I could not disagree more.

Right now, a Democratic National Committee Unity Reform Commission, comprised of people who supported our campaign, people who supported Secretary Clinton’s campaign, and people appointed by DNC Chair Tom Perez are working on a set of policies that will determine the future direction of the Democratic Party. In many ways, this Unity Commission will determine whether the Party goes forward in a dynamic and inclusive way, or whether it retains the failed status quo approach of recent years. It will determine whether the Party will have the grassroots energy to effectively take on Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their reactionary agenda or whether we remain in the minority.

In my view, this Commission must:

I look forward to following the progress of the Unity Reform Commission, and I urge Chairman Tom Perez and the entire Democratic National Committee to develop policies which move the Democratic Party forward in a very different direction — a direction that will lead us to national and statewide victories. It’s important that you do the same:

Please sign the petition calling on the Democratic National Committee and Chairman Tom Perez to accept, support and implement policies which make the Democratic Party more inclusive, more democratic and more transparent.

Right now, our job is to come together, and not be distracted by the political gossip and drama of the moment. We must fight President Trump’s destructive efforts to divide us up by the color of our skin, our gender, our religion, our sexual orientation or our country of origin. We must rally the American people to oppose Trump’s proposal to provide massive tax giveaways to billionaires while taking away the health care that millions now have.

But we must also make it clear — if we are going to elect Democrats who will move us forward as a country — that we must institute long-needed reforms in the Democratic Party. When we do that, we will not only create a dynamic and progressive party, we will be able to transform our nation and create a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top.

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We will free Panama

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

Day by day Panama ever more needs a civic commitment — one with both an attitude and an aptitude — to give the citizenry what we need to free ourselves from the structural bonds of corruption.

With the case of the criminal mega-corporation Odebrecht, we have come to a fork in the road: we are either capable of rising to the occasion as a society, or we will continue a descent that ends in Panama just being a place where people live — but just people, local or foreign, for whom our country is just a business or a place to conduct business.

Panama, as a nation, as a country and as a republic, has been turned away from the values, the principles and the objects that belong to each of these concepts. The gravity of the facts does not seem to have been taken into account by those who run the government, notwithstanding that these stubborn facts daily assert themselves and await a civic reaction that does not occur.

And that’s why it’s imperative to have a citizens’ action movement to achieve freedom, to break the chains of consequences that daily corruption with impunity brings to us.

Education, the quality of life, the rule of law, all of the economic, social and procedural guarantees — none of these will improve if we do not manage to free ourselves from outdated, outdated and degenerated structures that dominate our society.

Only we can accomplish the task of freeing ourselves, in a joint effort among all of us who love Panama and who are willing to rescue our nation, our country and our republic from all of the cheap political tricks and those who promote and are favored by them.

The obstacles will multiply to the extent that we do not act decisively and patriotically. Only by freeing ourselves from the current power structures will we recover our dignity and our identity in order to be the private and public persons whom our times demand.

Let’s not allow the voices that discourage our protests to deaden our will to free Panama.

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