Watch: Bernie Sanders Addresses 'From Protest to Power' Convention

Bymobanmarket September 28, 2020

Capping off a session that includes future progressive candidates sharing why they’ve decided to run for office in the Age of Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) addressed the People’s Action “Rise Up” summit on Monday afternoon.

Sanders, who has been touring the country with Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez on the party’s “Unity Tour,” appeared before roughly 1,000 activists after 2:00pm EST.

Watch below:

The “Movement Politics: Protest to Power” session of the three-day People’s Action convention, which began Sunday and concludes Tuesday, will also see the official unveiling of the “Protest to Power” platform to “electoralize the resistance” as co-executive director George Goehl told the crowd on Sunday.

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“[W]e have to build a resistance that turns Defense into Offense,” he argued. “That means being exactly where they don’t want us to be, exactly when they don’t want us to be there. We have done it on healthcare, and we can do it on immigration, we can do it on policing, we can do it on the budget, and more.”

The platform specifically includes calls for racial equity; an end to mass incarceration; healthcare as a human right; environmental justice and a clean energy economy that “serves those most impacted by disinvestment, colonization, structural racism, and the impacts of climate change;” a just immigration system; and an economic system “that reverses the concentration of wealth and historic income inequality and allows workers and small businesses to thrive.”

To that end, protesters will gather outside the White House on the final day of the People’s Action summit to demand “a just budget that supports people and the planet invests in clean energy and clean water,” according to a press statement. “It’s a budget that makes debt-free education a reality; invests in the jobs of the future instead of lying about the jobs of the past. It expands access to housing and healthcare. A just budget is easily paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations.”

As Goehl declared: “Let the toppling of Goliath commence, and the radical imagination of what’s next begin.”

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