Berniecrat honchos like former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, and allied media spokespeople in The Nation, Mother Jones and elsewhere were only too glad to mine the movement credibility of Jackson Mississippi without mentioning the RNA, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, or Cooperation Jackson. They pretended, and allowed the ignorant among their followers to believe the movement in Jackson Mississippi was somehow part of a wave of organizing efforts inspired by Bernie Sanders, rather than the present phase of organizing efforts stretching back half a century.
The Berniecrats appear to have pocketed the movement cred of Jackson without giving Jackson or its principals a thing. They got to speak at the yearly event, but Jackson doesn’t have a shot callers or even a spectator’s seat on the board of Our Revolution, the Berniecrat political operation, or any other line of visible input on its policies or positions. And those positions are highly questionable.
Paul Jay of The Real News Network was the first to observe that the Berniecrat “Peoples Summit” featured speeches by Van Jones and other luminaries but offered no mention from the podium, no workshops and no presentations on foreign policy, on the military budget or the profound impact of global empire on everyday life in the US, which spends more on arms than the next eight or nine countries combined. Our Revolution president Nina Turner can talk endlessly about the human needs not being met in this country. But when Paul Jay interviewed her on her appointment to the presidency of Our Revolution he made the mistake of asking her a generic foreign policy question.
It was a real softball question, inviting Turner to link the insane amounts spent by the US government on arms and the military –$13 billion aircraft carriers and trillion dollar F-35 aircraft — to the absence of funding for schools, infrastructure, social security, student loans and more. Turner utterly fumbled the question, as though she’d never thought out loud about it, and never wrote or spoke a stump speech line on the subject. We cannot know her thoughts, but she really has NOT spoken on the subject, perhaps because her mentor Bernie Sanders is pretty much mum on it as well, and Turner is committed to aping Bernie’s act as the formula for political success.
The sketchy foreign policy section of Our Revolution’s web site reflects the same ignorant or deliberate myopia as well, eschewing the mention of drone wars, the thousand plus military US military bases, US campaigns for regime change in Iran, Venezuela, Syria and elsewhere or Israeli apartheid. Let’s give Turner and the Berniecrats some credit. These are not stupid people. They know exactly what they’re saying and what they’re leaving out and they know exactly why they want to do this. They know their constituency is antiwar and they’re not. They aspire, like good leading Democrats everywhere to get the antiwar vote by default. Bernie Sanders, Nina Turner and Our Revolution want to play it like Barack Obama, who as a candidate got credit for being antiwar when he actually said he only opposed “dumb wars,” whatever that meant.
For whatever reason, this is the crew to which Chokwe Antar Lumumba has attached himself. This is the cause to which he has delivered the credibility of half a century’s struggle in Jackson Mississippi. What does this mean?
Will the forces that elected Chokwe Antar Lumumba, including MXGM and participants in the Jackson movement be required to mute themselves on regime change in Venezuela, Iran, Syria and elsewhere? Will they have to toe the Berniecrat line and silence themselves on drone wars in Africa or the fact that the US arms and trains every military except two or three on the African continent? Is silence on these issues part of the political DNA of the junior Lumumba’s circle, as it is of Nina Turner and the Berniecrats? What IS the real price of Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s affiliation with the Berniecrats, and what if anything can the Jackson movement expect to receive in return?
Should the Jackson movement even want to be claimed by these people?
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the GA Green Party. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
Article Appeared @https://www.blackagendareport.com/berniecrats-and-the-jackson-movement