Bernie warming up for his fact-finding mission to Venezuela.
Via The Guardian:
Bernie Sanders has criticised the Democratic party’s current direction as “an absolute failure” in a speech at the People’s Summit in Chicago.
Speaking to a crowd of 4,000 activists, Sanders hailed the “enormous progress in advancing the progressive agenda”, saying the increasing House and Senate support for a $15 minimum wage and the opposition to the Trans-Pacific partnership showed the success of the movement.
But the Vermont senator said that establishment Democrats were standing in the way of further progress.
“The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic party is an absolute failure,” Sanders said.
“The Democratic party needs fundamental change. What it needs is to open up its doors to working people, and young people, and older people who are prepared to fight for social and economic justice.
“The Democratic party must understand what side it is on. And that cannot be the side of Wall Street, or the fossil fuel industry, or the drug companies.”
Sanders’s speech was rapturously received at the People’s Summit, a gathering of some of the most influential progressive activists and organizations in the country.
There had been an urgency to the event on Friday and Saturday around building on the momentum of Sanders’s presidential campaign, with a focus on encouraging people from different backgrounds to run for office around the country.
Against that backdrop, Sanders’s criticism of the Democratic party as out-of-touch and elitist appeared to ring true for activists at the summit, including those who are planning to run for office for the first time in the coming months.
Brandy Brooks, who is running in the Democratic primary for the Montgomery county council in Maryland, told the Guardian that until recently she “didn’t think politics was for someone like me”.
“I am a short, black, slightly overweight-ish woman,” Brooks said, in a rather harsh self-assessment.