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alexandria ocasio cortez
Choosing Rahm Emanuel as DNC Chair Would Drag the Party Backwards
If Emanuel ends up in the top DNC spot, the message will be that wealthy power brokers have fully recaptured the party.
Nov 21, 2024
If the Democratic National Committee is trying to find a new leader proficient at alienating Black voters, it couldn’t do better than Rahm Emanuel.
Emanuel has indicated in recent days that he’s interested in the job. If he goes for it at the party’s upcoming meeting, much of the old Democratic guard is likely to back him, setting up an intra-party brawl.
Last week, David Axelrod served as a digital advance man for his former Obama White House colleague, posting that “Dems need a strong and strategic party leader, with broad experience in comms, fundraising, and winning elections,” while touting Emanuel as just the man for the job: “Dude knows how to fight and win!”
The Democratic National Committee should not choose for its chair a pugnacious bully who relishes fighting with the party’s most loyal constituencies and committed activists.
In terms of well-connected power-brokering, Emanuel’s ties with Democratic elites and corporate donors have been second to none. And he can boast an impressive political resume—senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, congressman from Illinois, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Democrats’ 2006 sweep, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and White House chief of staff for Barack Obama, before becoming mayor of Chicago in 2011.
But his eight-year record as mayor could trip up Emanuel if he runs for DNC chair. Long before leaving office in 2019, Emanuel had fallen into disrepute. By the end of 2015, a poll found that his approval rating among Chicago residents had sunk to 18%. No wonder he decided not to run for a third term.
Emanuel stands out at provoking bitter enmity from Black people, crucial voters in the Democratic Party base.
He earned notoriety for the cover-up of a video showing how Chicago police killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald one night in October 2014. For 13 months, during Emanuel’s campaign for reelection, his administration suppressed a ghastly dashboard-camera video showing the death of McDonald, an African American who was shot 16 times by a police officer while walking away from the officer. (A jury later convicted the officer of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery.)
Memories of Emanuel’s malfeasance have remained vivid. In 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) expressed a widely held view when she tweeted: “Rahm Emanuel helped cover up the murder of Laquan McDonald. Covering up a murder is disqualifying for public leadership.”
Last weekend, amid reports that Emanuel was weighing a bid for DNC chair, Ocasio-Cortez denounced him as a symptom of what ails the party: “There is a disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people. If you want to know the seed of the party’s political crisis, that’s it.”
Longtime Chicago journalist and activist Delmarie Cobb wrote a scathing assessment of his mayoral record in 2021. While mentioning that Emanuel “closed 50 public schools in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods,” Cobb also pointed out that “he closed six of 12 mental health clinics in these communities.” She added: “Now, who needs access to mental health care more than Chicago’s Black and brown residents who are underserved, underemployed, and under constant threat of violence?”
Emanuel’s response to the McDonald killing was emblematic of his arrogant leadership method, routinely clashing with the basic interests of racial minorities and the non-affluent. When Emanuel was nearing the end of his last term, The Nation magazine summed up his term this way: “The outgoing mayor’s legacy will be defined by austerity, privatization, displacement, gun violence, and police brutality.”
It’s fitting that Axelrod is leading the charge for Emanuel to win the top post at the DNC. Both of them were well-compensated for providing services to the giant Exelon Corporation, a public utility with the nation’s largest set of nuclear power reactors. In fact, Emanuel “helped create the company through a corporate merger in 2000 while working as an investment banker,” The New York Timesreported.
During that stint as an investment bank director—after leaving the Clinton White House and before entering Congress—Emanuel used his connections to make $18 million in just two-and-a-half years. It’s that kind of coziness with economic elites that has caused Democrats’ appeals for working-class votes to ring hollow.
A frequent refrain at Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign rallies was “We won’t go back!” But if Emanuel ends up as the DNC chair, the message will be quite the opposite—signaling that wealthy power brokers have fully recaptured the party.
As Emanuel’s days are numbered in his position as ambassador to Japan, the chance to become chair of the DNC might be too tempting to pass up. Shortly after President Joe Biden nominated him for the diplomatic role, Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke wrote that the idea was “laughably absurd.” As mayor, Huppke recalled, “Emanuel was, as he always has been in public life, a pugnacious bully.”
The Democratic National Committee should not choose for its chair a pugnacious bully who relishes fighting with the party’s most loyal constituencies and committed activists.
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How We Can Keep the Green New Deal Alive Despite Trump’s Fossil Fuel Authoritarianism
The Green New Deal is being created right now by flesh-and- blood people under real-life conditions. It is being created in communities, cities, states, and regions—from below.
Nov 21, 2024
To resist and eventually overcome the looming authoritarian national government, we need to create bastions of what the Polish activists who overthrew their country’s dictatorship called “social self-defense.” That will involve many methods, including mutual aid, on-the-ground protection of those under attack, intelligence sharing, and many other forms of solidarity. For the past five years, I have been studying initiatives that are realizing the principles and policies of the Green New Deal—what I have called “The Green New Deal from Below.” I believe these Green New Deal from Below initiatives can be a critical component of our social self-defense.
The Green New Deal is a visionary program designed to protect the Earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to unite the necessity for climate protection with the goals of full employment and social justice.
The Green New Deal erupted into public attention as a proposal for national legislation. But there has also emerged a little-noticed wave of initiatives from community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other nonfederal actors designed to contribute to the climate protection and social justice goals of the Green New Deal. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (AOC), who helped initiate the campaign for a Green New Deal, has called it “a Green New Deal from Below.”'
The Green New Deal from Below is showing that it is possible to challenge the powers that are imposing climate change, inequality, and oppression.
The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of Green New Deal from Below initiatives in many different arenas and locations. These initiatives encompass a broad range of the programs already under way and in development. The projects of Green New Dealers recounted here should provide inspiration for thousands more that can create the foundation for local, national, and even global mobilization—and reconstruction.
The Green New Deal is happening, and whatever happens is possible. The Green New Deal is not an impossible leftist fantasy, or something that could never win popular support, or a dream that couldn’t possibly be realized in practice, or something that would bring disaster if it were realized. The Green New Deal is being created right now by flesh-and- blood people under real-life conditions. It is being created in communities, cities, states, and regions—from below.
Of course, only a limited proportion of U.S. geographies and institutions have fully developed Green New Deals. But efforts to create Green New Deals are ubiquitous; an article in Popular Science magazine soon after the first Green New Deal proposal in Congress found that plans and first steps to realize Green New Deals were happening in every state in the union. Today the Green New Deal from Below, dispersed throughout the United States, is transforming the realities where it is—and creating models for broader transformation everywhere.
Green New Deals in cities like Boston and Los Angeles are reducing the greenhouse gases that are destroying our climate. They are creating jobs that protect the climate and training workers to fill them. They are mobilizing city resources to reduce poverty. They are investing in climate- protecting buildings and technologies in low-income neighborhoods. They are expanding cheap or free public transit to reconnect isolated neighborhoods, provide people who lack cars with access to jobs, and reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
In states like Illinois, California, and New York, Green New Deal-style programs are shifting major resources to climate-safe energy development. They are setting targets for greenhouse gas reduction and schedules for shutting down fossil fuel-producing and using facilities—and implementing them. They are reducing fossil fuel use by increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, transportation, agriculture, and other energy users. They are investing in infrastructure to correct historical injustices like polluting facilities concentrated in poor communities. They are creating jobs in the green economy with high labor rights and standards and providing job training, jobs, and job ladders for people who have been marginalized in the labor market.
Unions like the IBEW are promoting programs to expand renewable energy production, building coalitions to support them, training the workers needed to realize them, and monitoring the results to ensure that they produce good union jobs. Unions of educators and nurses are fighting for—and winning—green schools and hospitals.
The Green New Deal from Below is showing that it is possible to challenge the powers that are imposing climate change, inequality, and oppression. That it is possible to formulate realistic alternatives. And that those alternatives can actually be implemented.
Perhaps someone could look at the diverse projects, programs, and initiatives of the Green New Deal from Below and see them as simply scattered, unconnected, one-off phenomena. But that would be like saying, I see the students, the classrooms, and the football field, but where is the university? The Green New Deal from Below is indeed composed of many parts, but that does not prevent it from being a real entity as a whole.
The Green New Deal transformed America’s political imagination. It transgressed the neoliberal, market-only assumptions that dominated public discourse for four decades. It proposed the long-disparaged notion of using government to solve problems. It refused to accept the growing inequality that had reshaped American society. It advocated tackling rather than ignoring the climate emergency. To paraphrase Green New Deal mayor Michelle Wu of Boston, it shifted “the sense of what was possible.” It thereby expanded the limits of what was possible.
This transformation flows from the core concepts of the Green New Deal. These core concepts integrate multiple concerns rather than addressing them in separate “silos” or adding them together in “laundry lists.” They unite the urgent and universal need for climate protection with the economic and social needs of disadvantaged groups and of working people. They do so by articulating a strategy for rapid greenhouse gas reduction that prioritizes programs that create jobs and reduce injustice. This strategy provides a new way of integrating the interests of previously disconnected or antagonistic constituencies.
The Green New Deal is not just a slogan, a list of demands, or a menu of policies. The Green New Deal provides a framework for moving beyond piecemeal policies to a set of integrated strategies. Like the original New Deal, it makes seemingly antagonistic policies and constituencies complementary by transcending the limitations of established assumptions. It pro-poses a set of changes in the social framework that meet both the common and the distinct needs of those affected. It thereby constructs a common interest that incorporates the particular interests of different groups. This allows needs and interests that may currently appear incompatible—for example, between jobs and environment—to become compatible or even synergistic.
The Green New Deal integrates such distinct elements in two ways. First, it integrates different kinds of needs and their solutions. Front and center is its integration of the need for climate protection, the need for good jobs, and the need for greater equality. But it integrates other needs as well. For example, it combines policies that attack entrenched forms of discrimination and injustice with ones that increase the power of workers on the job by strengthening their right to organize and engage in concerted action. Legislation in Connecticut and other states exemplifies this by requiring that offshore wind clean energy projects provide both project labor agreements ensuring union wage standards and conditions and community benefit agreements providing access to jobs for communities and demographics often deprived of that access.
Second, the Green New Deal integrates the needs of different constituencies. For example, two separate coalitions backing different bills developed in Illinois to shape climate legislation. One, the Illinois Clean Jobs coalition, was rooted in the environmental movement and local social justice organizations. The other, the Climate Jobs Illinois coalition, was based in the state’s labor unions. After considerable tension and extended negotiations, the two united on a common program that included the demands of each—laying the basis for the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, described by one journalist as a “Green New Deal” for Illinois.
Integrating programs and integrating people go hand in hand. For example, the Green New Deal tames the purported conflict between employment and climate protection. It challenges the “jobs vs. environment” frame. At a local and state level, the Green New Deal from Below has therefore been able to unite often-divided labor, environmental, and climate justice advocates.
The Green New Deal is driven by a sense of urgency. There is the urgency of the climate emergency. There is also the urgency of people who are suffering and even dying as a result of injustice. The original Green New Deal proposal responded to this urgency by calling for a 10-year mobilization that would reconstruct American society and economy as dramatically as the New Deal and mobilization for World War II.
The Green New Deal arose in a sea of hopelessness and despair. It pointed the way toward viable alternatives to realities that evoked that hopelessness and despair. The Green New Deal from Below provides people a way to start building those alternatives day by day where they live and work.
The world historian Arnold Toynbee once delineated how great civilizational changes occur. Existing leaders of existing institutions face new challenges—but fail to change to meet them. Their civilizations thereby become vulnerable to collapse. In such a setting, however, a creative minority may arise that proposes—and begins to implement—new solutions. Surely climate change represents such a civilizational challenge, and just as surely our existing institutions and their leaders are failing to make the changes it requires. But at the grassroots a creative minority is at work establishing new solutions that are reconstructing society on new principles. Their work is manifested in the Green New Deal from Below.
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Johnson Attempts Damage Control After Saying GOP, Trump Would Repeal Job-Creating CHIPS Act
"The Republican Speaker of the House just told the tens of thousands of construction workers building New York and America's future they want to send them pink slips ASAP," said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Nov 02, 2024
On MSNBC Friday night, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued an unexpected "thank you" to House Speaker Mike Johnson—expressing appreciation for his admission that the GOP will try to repeal the CHIPS and Science Act, which has created more than 115,000 manufacturing jobs, if the party wins control of Congress and the White House.
"What I would like to thank Speaker Johnson for is his honesty and his forthrightness about what they plan to do with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives," said Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). "You heard it straight from the horse's mouth and we'll see exactly what happens if we allow a Republican majority in the House and a Donald Trump presidency."
The congresswoman was referring to an interview by Luke Radel, a student journalist at Syracuse University, who asked Johnson (R-La.) about Trump's recent comments that the CHIPS and Science Act is "so bad."
"You voted against it," said Radel. "If you have a Republican majority in Congress and Trump in the White House, will you guys try to repeal that law?"
"I expect that we probably will, but we haven't developed that part of the agenda yet," said Johnson before attempting to pivot to talking about Rep. Brandon Williams, a Republican who represents New York's 22nd District, where a $100 billion Micron Technology chipmaking facility has benefited from the CHIPS and Science Act.
"The Republican Speaker of the House just told the tens of thousands of construction workers building New York and America's future they want to send them pink slips ASAP," said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
The exchange grew increasingly awkward as Radel asked Williams whether he would vote to repeal the legislation, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022, that Micron has said will create 50,000 semiconductor manufacturing jobs in the Syracuse area.
"No, obviously, the CHIPS Act is hugely impactful here, and my job is to keep lobbying on my side," said Williams. "I will remind [Johnson] night and day how important the CHIPS Act is and that we… break ground on Micron."
Speaking with anchor Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Ocasio-Cortez said the CHIPS Act "is not a remote and faraway thing for workers" in Upstate New York, Michigan, Arizona, and other states where jobs have been created by the legislation.
For thousands of workers, the law represents "the jobs and especially the union jobs that result and are created, that people can actually take and will help them put food on the table without having to work triple or double overtime in order to accomplish that," said Ocasio-Cortez. "People in Buffalo, people in Upstate New York, people in Michigan, they hear about the plant that they work at."
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) echoed the congresswoman's sentiment, saying Johnson's plan to repeal the CHIPS Act would impact "tens of thousands of IBEW jobs created by this administration."
"We are NOT going back," said the union.
Johnson's remark got the attention of other politicians whose states have benefited from the law, including Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Less than two weeks ago, Whitmer announced that through the CHIPS Act, the Biden administration had provided $325 million in direct funding to Michigan manufacturer Hemlock Semiconductor, allowing it to create over 1,000 good-paying construction jobs to build a new facility as well as 180 permanent manufacturing jobs.
"Mike Johnson's asinine admission that he would repeal the CHIPS Act if Republicans and Trump win the election is a complete disaster for thousands of Michigan workers relying on the jobs that this legislation provides," said the Democratic governor. "Make no mistake, a repeal of the CHIPS Act would kill thousands of good-paying manufacturing jobs right here in Michigan."
Johnson attempted to do damage control, saying he had "misheard the question," but Radel noted that he was standing close to the House speaker when he asked about the CHIPS Act and others commented that the word "repeal" was said clearly. Williams and Johnson also tried to backtrack during their exchange with the student journalist, saying they aimed only to reform the law—but as Radel noted, the former president has made clear he opposes the CHIPS Act.
Vice President Kamala Harris' Democratic presidential campaign said Johnson's threat to repeal the CHIPS Act is the latest of several recent questionable "promises" made by Trump and his surrogates in the last days before the election.
"Mike Johnson wants to lose Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and North Carolina jobs," said James Singer, a rapid response adviser to Harris, posting an image showing where the CHIPS Act has created semiconductor manufacturing jobs.
Johnson's comments came as Ocasio-Cortez, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and others were rallying Michigan UAW members at a labor-focused get-out-the-vote event in Detroit.
"I do not see elections as an endpoint," Ocasio-Cortez told UAW members at the rally. "They are a waypoint... Because the larger task that we have today is organizing a mass movement of labor in the United States of America. We have a generational task ahead of us, and electing Kamala Harris is an opening silo to the movement that we are about to embark upon."
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