Progressive Leaders Say Why They & Thousands Will Risk Arrest This Week to Restore Democracy

[Rebkeh]

Progressive Leaders Say Why They and Thousands Will Risk Arrest This Week to Restore American Democracy
Thousands of protesters converge on Washington.
Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet April 13, 2016

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The protests, rallies and civil disobedience actions will continue through Monday, where thousands are expected to block entrances to Congress and then spend hours in jail, before they are released with charges likely dropped. What’s new here is that various wings of the progressive movement are coming together, rejecting the political culture created by Supreme Court rulings that gutted voting rights and campaign finance laws, and demanding that Congress pass reforms empowering people and not private wealth.

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“This is a moment where we are at a crisis point in our democracy,” said Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of NAACP. “It is a moment when we enter the first presidential election in 50 years, a half-century, without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act. It is a moment where we have voters, rather than votes of citizens, suppressed and stolen before the election. The votes of legislators bought and sold after the election.”

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“We increasingly see that having a functioning democracy is a precondition for us to have a functioning environment,” said Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA. “I have personally been an environmental activist for over 30 years and in that time I have seen enormous progress on many fronts, but overall the scientific data tells us that the situation is getting worse. The level of change that we are accomplishing is not commensurate with the scale of the problem and the science right now.”

“The number-one obstacle is all of this work is our broken democracy,” she said, especially on climate solutions. “It has been so hijacked by big money. I am sure that everyone has seen the data. The U.S. senators who reject the fact that humans have caused climate change have received on average seven times as much campaign cash from oil and gas [interests], as those who actually acknowledge the science… The other thing is there are so many new obstacles to real people participating in our democracy.”

(bold and italic emphases are mine)

Full article:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/progressive-leaders-say-why-they-and-thousands-will-risk-arrest-week-restore-american