PICKETS AND POLLS
COMPILATION AND
COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
FEBRUARY 21,
2020
THIS ARTICLE
DIGS A LITTLE DEEPER INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE “BERNIE BROS” VERBALLY ATTACKING
THE TWO WOMEN OF COLOR FROM THE CULINARY UNION. FIRST, THEY ARE IDENTIFIED IN THE
ARTICLE AS HAVING A ROSE EMOJI IN THEIR HANDLE AND / OR SPEAKING AS THOUGH THEY
ARE IN FAVOR OF SANDERS. WE ALL KNOW ABOUT RUSSIAN BOTS BY NOW, THOUGH, SO THAT
ISN’T NECESSARILY THE TRUE SITUATION.
ALSO, “CLOSE TO
A THOUSAND” SUCH ATTACKS SOUNDS LIKE THERE WAS PROVOCATION OF A MORE SERIOUS
NATURE THAN JUST “VOICING THEIR OPINIONS.” IN FACT, THERE IS MORE. CULINARY
UNION LOCAL 226 ISSUED A SORT OF SAMPLE BALLOT OF CANDIDATES BLASTING SANDERS’
PLAN, MEDICARE FOR ALL, OVER ITS’ EFFECT ON BASIC PRIVATE INSURANCE. M4A DOES GIVE
SOME FINANCIAL ADVANTAGE TO OFFSET ANY MONETARY LOSS TO UNION MEMBERS, AND WILL
ALLOW, SANDERS SAID, INSURANCE COMPANIES TO COVER SPECIALIZED NEEDS.
I HOPE THAT MEANS MORE THAN JUST "NOSE JOBS," BECAUSE IN ORDER TO BE A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN, MCR NEEDS TO BE CHANGED. THE THING THAT LEAPS TO MY MIND IS NURSING HOME CARE AND HOSPICE. MY MOTHER HAD TO GO TO MEDICAID FOR THAT, WHICH TOOK OVER AFTER HER MAIN ASSET, THE HOUSE, WAS TURNED OVER TO HER HEIRS. SANDERS SAYS THAT M4A WOULD COVER IN-HOME CARE, WHICH TO MANY OF US IS PREFERABLE ANYWAY.
THIS STORY
TITLE REFERS IN PART TO A GENERAL CONFUSION THAT OCCURRED AT THE PICKET SITE CREATED
BY SEVERAL POLITICAL CANDIDATES WITH THEIR ENTOURAGE INEPTLY TRYING TO MARCH
WITH THE UNION MEMBERS. JOE BIDEN’S PEOPLE, IT SAYS, MARCHED IN THE WRONG
DIRECTION. THIS DESCRIPTION MAKES ME WANT TO SEE SOME VIDEO OF THE ACTION. IT
MUST HAVE BEEN A GAS.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/nevada-stop-bernie-sanders-failing-caucus-polls.html
The Stop-Bernie
Campaign Can’t Figure Out Which Way to Go
The other
contenders march in circles with the local culinary union.
By JEREMY STAHL
FEB 20,
20206:49 PM
PHOTOGRAPH --
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren walks with members of
Culinary Workers Union Local 226 on a picket line outside of Palms Casino
Resort on February 19, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mario
Tama/Getty Images
Sen. Warren in
sunglasses marching, chanting, and carrying a picket.*
Democratic
presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren walks with members of Culinary
Workers Union Local 226 on a picket line outside of Palms Casino Resort on
February 19, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Mario
Tama/Getty Images
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Before the
leading Democratic contenders showed up for Wednesday’s presidential debate in
Las Vegas, the majority of them made a point of going by the Palms Casino
Resort, where the powerful Culinary Union Local 226 was holding a picket. The
union—which boasts 60,000 members and calls itself the largest immigrant group
in the state, and which was the first union in the nation to endorse Barack
Obama in 2008—had declined to endorse a candidate, but that just meant the
would-be nominees were trying to cultivate the workers’ goodwill as Saturday’s
Nevada caucuses closed in.
With cumbersome
press entourages following each candidate, the picketing soon got physically
awkward. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the first on the scene, and her arrival led
the union members to fall out of their looped marching pattern and start
trailing after her en masse, in one single direction. Harried organizers had to
steer them back into formation: “Come on, this way!”
The others each
brought their own form of entropy. For Pete Buttigieg, the back of the line
simply stopped moving, waiting for the former South Bend mayor to make his
arrival. Former vice president Joe Biden and his large media contingent started
walking in the wrong direction, against the loop, causing a minor traffic jam.
Billionaire Tom Steyer, who’d missed qualifying for the debate, marched halfway
around the loop and made his exit by simply cutting through the formation. And
by the time Sen. Amy Klobuchar was making the circuit, union leaders were
calling for the picketers to drop out of line and come take in speeches from
Local 226 officials.
The only
missing candidates were former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose
self-funded megadollar ad-blitz campaign isn’t on the ballot in Nevada, and the
national polling frontrunner, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’d received the union’s
anti-endorsement, in the form of a memo warning Local 226 members that his
Medicare for All plan would confiscate their current, collectively bargained
healthcare benefits.
But as the
picketing difficulties suggested, being against Sanders is not the same thing
as having an alternative plan. The union, like the Democratic Party
establishment, has not identified someone to get behind—a difficulty that
carried through the debate, when a handful of candidates had strong nights
beating up Bloomberg but none of them emerged as a clear No. 2 to Sanders.
In Nevada,
where Sanders’ lead has skyrocketed in recent days following a virtual tie for
the win in Iowa and a clear-cut victory in New Hampshire, the Vermont senator
seems poised to take advantage of the divided field and remain on a slow but
steady trajectory to the nomination.
That doesn’t
mean that the culinary union isn’t keeping up a blistering critique of Sanders,
or that the other candidates aren’t trying to join in. Geoconda Argüello-Kline,
secretary-treasurer for the Culinary Union, has been telling everyone who will
listen that she and the union’s director of communications, Bethany Khan, have
continued to face harassment from Sanders supporters ever since Local 226
released a scorecard of Democratic candidates that said Sanders’ plan would
“End Culinary Healthcare.”
On Tuesday
night, at a women’s event at the union hall, Argüello-Kline called on Sanders
to denounce these supporters in stronger terms, and for Sanders to specifically
address the fact that the harassment has been targeted at two women of color
instead of the president of the entire union, Ted Pappageorge.
“What has
happened has been a terrible attack from Sen. Sanders’ followers to me and to
Bethany Khan, the two women supporters, but not to the president, who is a
white man,” Argüello-Kline told her members, before Warren and Klobuchar
addressed them. Argüello-Kline says she had received more than 1,000 abusive or
threatening messages, from Twitter, to phone calls, to text messages, some of
them telling her to leave the country.
It’s unclear
how many of these are from Bernie supporters and how many might be from bad
actors entirely unconnected to Sanders, but Argüello-Kline has been adamant
that Sanders’ supporters are responsible. “You don’t think he has to say, ‘Stop
attacking women of color’?” she told reporters. “If I’m the leader of this
union and I see the women of color coming under attack, I would say that.”
Sanders
initially put out a generic statement calling for “supporters of all campaigns
not to engage in bullying or ugly personal attacks” and not acknowledging the
role his own supporters might be playing in the harassment. On Tuesday, Sanders
denied that his campaign workers were attacking the union leaders, again
refusing to address whether his supporters might be involved.
The agenda for
Wednesday’s debate, which managed to skip over any real mentions of war and
foreign policy, made room for discussing the hostilities between the union and
the Sanders camp. Asked about it onstage, Sanders said that his own backers who
are women of color face their own abuse, and he suggested that some of the
attacks on culinary union officials might be from trolls.
“If you want to
talk to some of the women on my campaign, what you will see is the most ugly,
sexist, racist attacks that are—I wouldn’t even describe them here, they’re so
disgusting,” Sanders said. “And let me say something else about this, not being
too paranoid. All of us remember 2016,
and what we remember is efforts by Russians and others to try to interfere in
our election and divide us up. I’m not
saying that’s happening, but it would not shock me.”
Again, Sanders
denied that his supporters might have attacked these union leaders: “I saw some
of those tweets regarding the Culinary Workers Union. I have a 30-year 100
percent pro-union voting record. Do you
think I would support or anybody who supports me would be attacking union
leaders? It’s not thinkable.” Slate
asked the culinary union if it was satisfied with the response. “Any woman on
Twitter who is an organizer or who works in the political space is well aware
of the consequences of being a target of ROSE Twitter*, especially women of
color,” responded Khan, referencing the emoji Democratic socialists use on
Twitter. “The fact is that two women of color have been attacked and continue
to be targets, just for voicing our opinion. We remain, to this day, under
attack by folks who wish to dismiss or gaslight us. We will not be silent.”
The Sanders
campaign also insists that his plan would not hurt the unions. “We have great
respect for culinary. Bernie has great respect for culinary,” Sanders campaign
senior advisor Jeff Weaver told me after the debate. “Bernie Sanders will not
sign a bill that does not provide better benefits than folks already have and
culinary workers like workers at every union in this country will see an
increase in their paycheck because Medicare For All will mandate that employers
who save money under a collective bargaining agreement when we move to Medicare
for All has to pass those savings on to workers in the form of extra
compensation.”
That promise is
clearly not good enough for Argüello-Kline and many of her members. “I will
always tell the facts to the members, it’s their health care,” she told
reporters. “Our health care has not been a gift.”
At the Tuesday
union hall event, I spoke with two women of color who said they were supporting
Biden and that their top issue was health care.
“I love Sen.
Warren. I love that she’s family oriented, pro-woman,” said Sheena Reid, a
Biden supporter who is black. “I’m not so much for her universal health care
because [I want to keep] my union health care.”
Wendy Almada, a
naturalized citizen who came to the United States from Mexico when she was
11-years-old, also said that she was voting for Biden because she wanted to
“keep my insurance” and “not be on Medicare.”
Sanders’ debate
opponents tried to take further advantage of the union rift on Wednesday night.
Buttigieg accused Sanders of being “at war with the Culinary Union right here
in Las Vegas,” while Warren repeated a previous line that “We are all
responsible for our supporters and we need to step up.”
The campaign
for Bloomberg, who has been no friend of unions, put out a series of talking
points criticizing Sanders supporters for “’divisive ‘energy’” and even put out
an ad “taking on ‘Bernie Bros.’”
But none of the
negativity against Sanders seemed to be helping anyone else produce positive
results. In the most recent RealClearPolitics Nevada* polling average—mostly
taken before the debate—he was in a commanding 14-point lead with 30 percent of
the vote and with five other candidates sharing between 10 and 16 percent of
the vote each and nobody pulling away. And with more than 70,000 early caucus
votes having already been cast in Nevada prior to Wednesday’s debate, it may be
too late for anyone to catch up to Sanders, however the debate performances
ultimately land.
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“CARRYING A PICKET”*
WHILE THE WORD
PICKET DOES MEAN A POINTED STAKE OR PALE, AS IN “PICKET FENCE,” AND COULD
ORIGINALLY HAVE REFERRED TO A POINTED STICK CARRIED AS A WEAPON I WOULD THINK,
IT MORE APPROPRIATELY IN THIS CASE REFERS TO A MEMBER OF A GROUP WHO ARE STANDING
GUARD AT A SITE, SO THE GROUP IN THIS STORY WEREN’T “CARRYING” PICKETS, BUT
WERE PICKETS. IN THE OLD DAYS, MEMBERS OF THAT PICKET LINE MAY HAVE CONFRONTED
ANY “SCABS” WHO TRIED TO ENTER THE WORK SITE.
“Synonyms of
picket
a person or
group that watches over someone or something
set out a
picket to watch the camp”
Definition of
picket (Entry 1 of 2)
1: a pointed or
sharpened stake, post, or pale
2a: a detached
body of soldiers serving to guard an army from surprise
b: a detachment
kept ready in camp for such duty
c: SENTRY
3a: a person
posted by a labor organization at a place of work affected by a strike
ROSE TWITTER*
EMOJI
A Rose. Media
Source. The use of the emoji in the handle is a way to more easily find
like-minded individuals. For example, if you see someone with a rose in their
handle, they are denoting themselves as a Democratic Socialist.
https://guff.com/this-is-what-all-those-emojis-in-peoples-twitter-handles-mean
FROM RealClearPolitics
Nevada* COMES AN AVERAGE OF EXISTING POLLS, ONE OF WHICH IS DFP (DATA FOR
PROGRESS). SEE BELOW.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/nv/nevada_democratic_presidential_caucus-6866.html
THEN, AT THE
DFP (DATA FOR PROGRESS) SITE, THIS BREAKDOWN TELLS MUCH MORE ABOUT CURRENT
SANDERS SUPPORTERS, GIVING LEVELS OF APPROVAL ACROSS 18 SEPARATE CATEGORIES.
HIS HIGHEST RANKINGS ARE COMING FROM MEN UNDER 45, NO COLLEGE, ESPECIALLY
HISPANIC, VERY LIBERAL AND SOMEWHAT LIBERAL, “EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC,” AND
WHOSE MINDS “ARE MADE UP.” THE WOMEN WHO ARE COMMITTED AREN’T FAR BEHIND,
THOUGH.
http://filesforprogress.org/datasets/2020/2/nv/nv_2_17_2020.pdf
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