The Bernie Left Is Taking on Machine Politics — and Each Other
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On a cold evening last November, a handful of activists along with a state senator and gubernatorial candidate pitched tents in front of the Rhode Island state capitol in Providence. “I shouldn’t have to do this at all,” Senator Cynthia Mendes told a local news site that night. “But when we’re sure that the homelessness crisis has been resolved and no one is going to freeze to death, the protest will end.” The encampment was organized by a new progressive insurgency in Rhode Island, which has announced plans to challenge dozens of incumbent lawmakers in the upcoming primary elections, citing the failings of the state’s Democratic establishment. For Mendes, the insurgency’s tactics were already working. She was one of over a dozen progressives who ascended to the state house in 2020 after ousting Senate Finance Committee chairman and Working Families Party ally Billy Conley by over twenty points in a primary. Mendes had challenged Conley due to his tight relationship with the establishment forces in senate leadership. One legislative session later, Mendes found herself making demands from outside the state house, railing against the state’s political leaders. She spoke harshly of her colleagues that evening: “State leadership feels entitled to ignore the fact that people in their state are going to die this winter,” she said. Camping outside the state capitol though would be much harder to ignore. Alongside her was Matt Brown, former secretary of state who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2018, and is running again this cycle. Mendes herself is running for lieutenant governor, and the duo announced their candidacies alongside a few dozen state legislative candidates as part of the progressive electoral organization, the Rhode Island Political Co-Op, which Brown runs. Layered up in blankets and sleeping bags, Mendes and Brown slept in tents in front of the state house for a total of sixteen days, and were joined by candidates and activists affiliated with the Co-Op as well as members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Sunrise Movement, and homeless advocates. On the sixteenth day, Governor Dan McKee announced about a hundred fifty new emergency shelter beds and a new quarantine and isolation facility for homeless people. When asked about the camp McKee said, “We are listening to anybody who wants to talk about the issue. But I think it’s a little presumptive to think that any one group got us here today.” In early November, McKee had announced $5 million in funding to create two hundred seventy-five new shelter beds. Brown told Jacobin, in response, “It defies plausibility that within sixteen days of the sleep-out, four hundred beds emerged by coincidence, or they were going to do it anyways.” It was an important victory won using militant tactics. But the Co-op hasn’t been without controversy, even on the Left.
Putting on the Pressure — Inside and Out While Mendes, Brown, and activists were sleeping out and holding daytime rallies and press conferences, a different set of left-wing organizers were canvassing and meeting with unions and housing organizations to put together a proposal to build green, public housing. Reclaim Rhode Island, formed by volunteers from Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, is working in concert with state lawmakers, labor unions, and issue-based organizations to build left power by training organizers and building consensus around popular policies, including public housing investments. This fall, Reclaim formulated their Homes For All campaign to direct a quarter of the state’s $1.1 billion in American Rescue Plan funds to green public housing. The state has no dedicated funding stream for affordable housing, and a shortage of homes has driven up prices in recent years. Rithika Ramamurthy, cochair of Reclaim, said engagement like this is necessary before escalating pressure on lawmakers. “At a certain point, it will come time to pressure individual legislators,” she said. “But we are hoping to build a lot of public consensus around this issue, because there are very few people who would disagree that we need more affordable, public housing in this state.” The Co-Op’s strategy, meanwhile, starts from the basis that Rhode Island voters have an appetite for a progressive agenda and an antiestablishment message, and that the biggest barrier to winning progressive governing majorities is running effective campaigns. The organization was founded by Brown and two others, Jeanine Calkin and Jennifer Rourke, all of whom lost their primaries in 2018 and blamed their losses at least partially on the establishment outspending them and using aggressive tactics. Reclaim, meanwhile, is investing time and energy in training organizers and engaging with communities to build support for progressive policies. “Organizing work is not just deciding that you’re correct,” Ramamurthy told me. “Of course the Left is right; that’s not really the question. The question is, how many people are going to stand up for the right thing?” At times, the Co-Op and other groups in its orbit — like Sunrise and the DSA — have operated in parallel with Reclaim’s organizing work, of which elections are only a small part. Reclaim has endorsed candidates running with the help of the Co-Op, and has also allied with the Working Families Party, which has achieved legislative victories in Rhode Island such as paid sick leave by working in tandem with state house leadership. But at other times, the Co-Op has alienated potential allies by making demands which its members find untenable, or by vilifying progressive lawmakers as not progressive enough. “We’re all speaking the same language, yet we’ve never been in a room together,” State Senator Tiara Mack told Jacobin. Mack was elected to the state house in 2020 as part of the Co-Op, but has since left the organization. “There is no definition of what Rhode Island progressives are working toward. That has not yet been defined by the movement.” The Co-Op has defined for itself what it means to be a progressive, and its goal is clearly stated: winning progressive governing majorities in the state. The Co-Op has defined for itself what it means to be a progressive, and its goal is clearly stated: winning progressive governing majorities in the state. But the way it has delineated who is inside and who is outside its movement has created rifts among organizers and left progressive legislators struggling to meet the organization’s demands. This fall, the organization announced it was primarying two lawmakers who had been working with Reclaim Rhode Island on legislation to tax the rich and pass binding emissions targets, because both lawmakers had voted for the establishment leadership picks in 2020. Both of the challengers the Co-Op had recruited for those primaries dropped out weeks later after local media uncovered old social media posts in which the challengers expressed anti-vaccine sentiments. Once elected, many Co-Op members have disaffiliated from the organization. Senator Kendra Anderson left the Co-Op after it changed its platform to require that its members support a $19 minimum wage, a policy she thought was untenable in her conservative-leaning district. Only two current lawmakers who ran their campaigns with the Co-Op in 2020 have retained their affiliations with the organization. The Co-Op also expelled one of its own candidates after the 2020 election, Representative Brandon Potter, for voting for the establishment’s pick for house speaker. Potter published an op-ed in response, arguing that his expulsion was a symbolic gesture given that abstaining from the vote would not have impacted the outcome, and noting, “Ultimately, I answer to the people of District 16. I will continue to exercise independent judgement even when it’s uncomfortable, and I’m prepared to be held accountable by my constituents for all of the decisions I make,” he wrote. While the group has had significant momentum, both in the 2020 primaries and through actions like the sleep-out, the effectiveness of its strategy will be put to the test in this fall’s primaries. The group is currently planning to run fifty candidates in state and local elections, about half of whom have already announced. Many of the announced candidates have run, and lost, in previous election cycles, some two or three times. And Brown, who is running for governor in a crowded race, is currently polling between 6 and 9 percent. Mendes told Jacobin that the victories in 2020 prove that the Co-Op strategy is working. “It doesn’t take a lot of imagination now to know that it’s possible to win majorities, because we proved it.”
Taking on Machine Politics Rhode Island’s history of corrupt political machines and insurgent upsets lends credence to the Co-Op’s antagonistic approach. In Rhode Island, a handful of people — the state Democratic party chair, the house speaker, and the senate president — run what resembles a political machine. This machine funnels money to vulnerable allies in elections and unseats lawmakers who vote against them, gives offices to its allies in the state house, decides which legislation is perpetually held in committee, employs family members and political allies in state government, selects committee chairs, and controls a slush fund which is doled out to little league teams and community groups. Over the past decade, state treasurer-turned-governor Gina Raimondo allied with this machine to shepherd cuts to public pensions and Medicaid, and push through the charterization of urban public schools. (Raimondo is now Biden’s commerce secretary.) Over the past few years, progressives have shown that what once seemed like an impenetrable and omniscient force may be weaker than it appears. But over the past few years, progressives have shown that what once seemed like an impenetrable and omniscient force may be weaker than it appears. The Left began to challenge the machine’s omniscience in 2016, when Sanders stunned in the state’s presidential primaries. Ahead of the primary, Hillary Clinton had led Sanders in a Brown University poll by almost ten points. She visited the state four times during her campaign, and was endorsed by Raimondo, the house speaker, and the chair of the state party. But Sanders gathered a rally of more than seven thousand a few days before the primary — one of the largest political gatherings in state history — and won the primary by 12 percentage points. Contemporary observers thought his victory revealed more resentment toward the state’s political establishment than previously suspected, creating an opening for the Left. “Sanders’s victory for Rhode Island is confirmation of an anti-establishment sentiment in Rhode Island, and that’s not particularly good news for Governor Raimondo,” Professor Val Endress of Rhode Island College, told the news site GoLocalProv at the time. “Any public official who closely aligns with a candidate who loses the state in the primary creates some reason for consternation.” On the same day that Sanders upset Clinton, four Working Families Party–backed candidates for state legislative seats also unseated incumbents. In 2018, progressive state representative Aaron Regunberg — one of only a few state lawmakers to endorse Sanders in 2016 — came within 2 percentage points of unseating the lieutenant governor, and the Providence DSA sent their first candidate, Sam Bell, to the state senate. After the 2018 primaries, a few candidates who had lost their elections — Brown, who lost by over twenty points to Raimondo, Calkin, a WFP-backed senator who was unseated by a machine-backed challenger in 2018, and Rourke — decided that progressives needed their own electoral infrastructure to compete in primaries. Those three formed the Rhode Island Political Co-Op.
Building a Serious Left Challenge With this momentum, and the Co-Op’s ambitious goal of winning enough elections to replace house and senate leadership, the 2020 primary was a windfall for progressives. A few months before that primary, another group joined the scene. In 2020, Rhode Islanders had run a substantial volunteer base for the Sanders campaign, despite the campaign not having a paid staffer in the state. The weekend before the New Hampshire primary, an estimated hundred fifty Rhode Islanders went to the state to canvass. After the 2018 primaries, a few candidates who had lost their elections decided that progressives needed their own electoral infrastructure to compete in primaries. When Sanders dropped out of the election in March 2020, those Rhode Island Sanders volunteers decided to turn the campaign infrastructure into a new group to build working-class power at the state level. The product of their work is Reclaim Rhode Island, which launched in spring 2020 with a campaign to tax the rich and prevent cuts to the state budget. Then governor Raimondo was insisting that substantial budget cuts would be necessary to recoup lost revenue due to the pandemic, and Reclaim mobilized a campaign to raise taxes on the top 1 percent of earners. The coalition behind the “tax the rich, no cuts” campaign included the state Working Families Party and Providence DSA, anti-poverty organizations, and labor unions. Meanwhile, the Rhode Island Political Co-Op spent that spring and summer running seventeen state legislative campaigns for candidates the organization had recruited to run on an agenda of a $15 minimum wage, a Green New Deal, taxing the rich, and other agenda items mirroring national organizations like Justice Democrats. The Co-Op, teaming up with local Sunrise Movement hubs operated like something between a state party and a political consultancy, vetting candidates, giving campaigns access to voter data and campaign managers (many of whom were Sunrise Movement organizers), and helping recruit volunteers, in exchange for monthly dues from candidates. Additionally, Reclaim endorsed a handful of primary challengers, as did the Providence DSA, and the SEIU 1199, all of which ran substantial ground games. In many cases, incumbents didn’t even lift a finger against their challengers. One such incumbent failed to file a single campaign finance report (and lost), while another didn’t knock a single door. Numerous candidates in that primary season told Jacobin that people at the doors had never been canvassed before, had tried to contact their legislator during the pandemic and been unable to or simply didn’t know who represented them in the state legislature. That momentum manifested in eight progressives unseating incumbent candidates at the state house, in addition to as many as seven more winning open seats. In a seventy-five member assembly, that replacement was notable. Perhaps the most important outcome of that election, however, came as a Republican unseated the powerful house speaker Nicholas Mattiello, a conservative who had helped the state pass its first voter ID law, opposed pro-choice legislation, received an A rating from the National Rifle Association, and said in 2020, “There’s nothing Rhode Island can do to address climate change in a way that’s real or impactful.” Since that election, some progressive groups have moved into the Co-Op’s orbit. The DSA, for its part, has drawn a red line against working with the state’s leadership. Kimberly Dicupe, Providence DSA cochair, told Jacobin that the group’s membership has “overwhelmingly voted to adopt standards like refusing to vote for conservative leadership and going forward with an aggressive electoral strategy, putting our standards in a league with Sunrise and the Co-Op.” That approach puts these groups at odds with labor unions and progressive lawmakers who see voting for leadership as essential to getting their bills to the floor.
Sanders, Warren and Baldwin urge Larry Fink to intervene in strike at coal company partially owned by BlackRock
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Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin pressed BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to use his firm’s sizable financial stake in Warrior Met Coal to compel the company’s management to broker a deal with its striking coal miners.
The trio said the miners employed by the Alabama-based coal company are striking to win better pay and benefits from a job that requires them to work in “extremely dangerous” conditions.
“As we hope you understand, the mines in Alabama run 24 hours per day. Workers can face termination for missing more than four days of work,” Sanders, Warren and Baldwin wrote in a letter dated Thursday that was obtained by CNBC. “Given BlackRock’s stake in the company and your position within BlackRock, we are asking you to do the right thing.”
Some of BlackRock’s most popular products are its index funds, investment vehicles that allow clients exposure to a portfolio constructed to match the components of a specific financial market index. In other words, those funds are not actively managed.
Such products allow investors an easy and cheap way to put money in a fund that will offer performance almost identical to a popular market index, such as the S&P 500. More than a dozen BlackRock index funds owned equity in Warrior Met Coal at the end of 2021.
Separately, each fund owns a fraction of the coal company. But combined across all its many funds, BlackRock controlled about 13% of Warrior Met Coal stock at year’s end, making it the company’s largest stakeholder, according to a FactSet analysis.
Taking On Starbucks, Inspired by Bernie Sanders
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Starbucks allows employees who work at least 20 hours a week to obtain health coverage, more generous than most competitors, and has said it will increase average pay for hourly employees to nearly $17 an hour by this summer, well above the industry norm. The company also offers to pay the tuition of employees admitted to pursue an online bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University, helping it attract workers with college aspirations.
Such people, in turn, tend to be sympathetic to unions and a variety of social activism. A recent Gallup poll found that people under 35 or who are liberal are substantially more likely than others to support unions.
Several Starbucks workers seeking to organize unions in Buffalo; Boston; Chicago; Seattle; Knoxville, Tenn.; Tallahassee, Fla.; and the Denver area appeared to fit this profile, saying they were either strong supporters of Mr. Sanders and other progressive politicians, had attended college or both. Most were under 30.
“I’ve been involved in political organizing, the Bernie Sanders campaign,” said Brick Zurek, a leader of a union campaign at a Starbucks in Chicago. “That gave me a lot of skill.” Mx. Zurek, who uses gender-neutral courtesy titles and pronouns, also said they had a bachelor’s degree.
Len Harris, who has helped lead a campaign at a Starbucks near Denver, said that “I admire the progressivism, the sense of community” of politicians like Mr. Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. She said that she had graduated from college and that she was awaiting admissions decisions for graduate school.
And most union supporters have drawn inspiration from their colleagues in Buffalo. Sydney Durkin and Rachel Ybarra, who are helping to organize a Starbucks in Seattle, said workers at their store discussed the Buffalo campaign almost daily as it unfolded and that one reached out to the union after the National Labor Relations Board announced the initial results of the Buffalo elections in December. (The union’s second victory was announced Monday, after the labor board resolved ballot challenges.)
Ms. Ybarra said the victory showed workers it was possible to unionize despite company opposition. “The Buffalo folks became superheroes,” she said. “A lot of us spent so much time being afraid of retaliation — none of us could afford to lose our jobs, have our hours cut.”
Bernie Sanders’ 2020 co-chair tells Biden to ‘gas up the jet’ on Sinema and Manchin
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Nina Turner does not hold back on her feelings about Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) after they voted against President Biden’s plan to change filibuster rules.
Olivia Munn Shares Sweet Photo of Baby Malcolm Hiệp in ‘Bernie Sanders Mittens’
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Olivia Munn said her mom knit her baby son a pair of mitten inspired by Senator Bernie Sanders famous winter accessory
Olivia Munn is sharing the sweet gift her mom made to keep her son warm this winter.
Munn, 41, posted a new photo to her Instagram Story Thursday of her baby, Malcolm Hiệp, whom she welcomed with boyfriend John Mulaney in November. In the snap, baby Malcolm is held in a baby carrier while wearing a gray hat and a pair of familiar-looking knit mittens.
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“My mom made Malcolm Bernie Sanders’ mittens,” Munn captioned the photo. In the next slide on her Story, she included the now-famous photo of Sanders sitting with his mittens in his lap at the 2020 inauguration for reference.
Just like the Vermont senator’s pair, Malcolm’s mittens feature brown, white and black yarn stitched into a striped pattern with geometric details.
Before welcoming her baby, Munn said in a September interview with PEOPLE that her mom “crochets and knits a lot of stuff,” adding, “She makes little rattles or stuffed animal toys already.”
Olivia Munn Marks New Year with Newborn Son Credit: Olivia Munn/Instagram
After Sanders was photographed in his mittens at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, he was turned into a meme, and the winter accessory has since inspired a pair designed for dogs and a “sexy” Halloween costume. Munn’s post is just the latest example of Sander’s mitten mania.
The Love, Wedding, Repeat actress has been sharing adorable moments with her son since she became a mom. The mitten photo comes after Munn posted a photo of Mulaney, 39, holding Malcolm and kissing his son on the neck.
Munn shared the sweet image on Instagram Tuesday, where she wrote in the caption, “The smooshiest smoosh 💋,” adding, “(And yep, our Christmas tree is still up 🙈).”
Munn and Mulaney introduced Malcolm in December, sharing the first photos of their baby in separate Instagram posts. A source previously told PEOPLE the couple welcomed their baby Nov. 24.
Posting a photo of her son asleep and cuddled up in a blanket, Munn wrote, “My Golden Ox baby. Malcolm Hiệp Mulaney. Happy Holidays.”
Mulaney shared a similar photo, captioning his post, “Meet Malcolm Hiệp Mulaney. He has his whole life ahead of him. He hasn’t even tried seltzer yet. I’m very in love with him and his whole deal. Happy Holidays.”
Mulaney first announced that he and Munn were expecting on a September episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers.
“I got into this relationship that’s been really beautiful with someone incredible,” he said at the time. “And we’re having a baby together. I was nervous when I was about to say the news!”