A Future to Believe In
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Two years ago today, I was scrambling to find myself municipal election work after being abruptly pushed out of a job as the first state organizer for Texas at Our Revolution. It was an anxious and depressing turn right after the hellish general election results of 2016. Over Christmas break in 2016, I was told that I had to report back to work under the supervision of a man who had screamed at me, lied about me and written threatening emails about me to our national board and state committee members. The same committee members had sat in a meeting with me while this man berated me for attempting to do my job. Except for one person who attempted to interrupt him, they sat there one by one and looked on while this White, elderly, male screamed at me and asked who I thought I was to introduce an organizing plan. I thought I was the state organizer. And I thought they were all social justice and labor leaders from my great state.
The run-up to that meeting had included weeks of disorganization and bad faith between the national board and staff from Our Revolution and my state organizing committee (SOC). The SOC was not a board, had not been elected, but had been hand-picked by a CWA friend of Senator Bernie Sanders and national board member, Jim Hightower. The man who screamed at me and accused me of never reporting to the SOC (I had emails of reports and had met with them three times in a month) was allowed to choose over 50 people who would be exclusively allowed to “convene” and start the Our Revolution Texas Chapter. He had proposed that members could only vote on chapter and regional committees if they paid money to the organization. He wanted the entire Texas donor list from Friends of Bernie Sanders. (He and his wife emailed that list without the consent of members on at least one occasion.) All of these demands and actions were the opposite of what we had fought for and what the Senator had claimed he stood for. A poll tax? Hand picked conveners who hadn’t all been volunteers or dedicated to Bernie 2016? Ultimately, I was abused in that final meeting in front of my peers for presenting a version of the national organizers’ plan that tried to incorporate some of the state-specific work the committee wanted to achieve. After the incident, I was berated by this man in one email for also recommending that one person should not be one of the original “conveners”. A year later, the person I singled out stepped down from a Congressional primary campaign because of sexual harassment allegations from multiple women. I didn’t have magical foresight. I just happened to know what happened on the ground in Texas since I had been a staffer on the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in Texas, Louisiana and New York City.
Previous to my final meeting, when I reported the elitist and strange behavior going on in Texas, I was told by an Our Revolution staff member (who still works there today) that he had been informed, “if Texas is going to fail, let it fail”. I was alienated from the other national organizers who were working on the plan that looked a lot more like the campaign we had all worked on in 2016. It was stunning to me that Texas, a state of such international economic importance and national political influence was being treated this way. But then, I reminded myself of who was being allowed to run Our Revolution. And who had been allowed to run our 2016 campaign. It was the same kind of connected White guy with not a lot of experience. My work didn’t matter and my mistreatment weeks later at the hands of the SOC mattered even less. The people at national who were supposed to be supervising this project and supporting me had no idea what to do next and wanted it all to go away.
After a phone call where I was told I could only come back to work under my harassers’ supervision and that there would be no attempt to resolve what had happened, I saw the writing on the wall. I wrote an email with a timeline of my entire time with the organization and a statement that I understood that I was being made to leave. I addressed it to Jeff Weaver (who was still hanging around Our Revolution at the time), the organization’s executive director, some national staff and my state organizing committee. There was no response and my final paycheck came late. During that time, I also found out that my harasser had done the same thing to my former coworker who was responsible for organizing North Texas during the 2016 campaign; harassing, slandering emails and all. The man who had disrupted the state chapter process and my life was a known quantity to the people who had worked on Bernie 2016 in Austin, Texas; the same people who were allowed to form the state chapter of Our Revolution. This pattern is familiar in the two national organizations headed by Senator Sanders.
A year later, the man who mistreated me in front of the committee was chased out of the national elections for the Democratic Socialists of America for misrepresenting his organizing past and threatening and harassing members of his local chapter. By that time, I had already successfully worked on a few more local campaigns. I felt vindicated by the fact that Our Revolution was floundering in Texas (it still does to this day). I felt like I had successfully moved on but then the#metoo movement descended fully upon the Bernie Sanders Alumni Group in the form of the 2017 California congressional primaries.
By now, many of my former coworkers and plenty of reporters have told the story of Arturo Carmona and the national outreach team on Bernie Sanders 2016. During the campaign, many of us had also heard stories out of states like Iowa and Nevada that resembled the ones that were ultimately spelled out last month in the New York Times. The effect that the Carmona story had on our campaign was an important one; women and men who had been sexually harassed or mistreated across the campaign began coming forward. The need to protect, “the boss” and “his bosses” was melting away at the same moment when women across the country were reporting abuse by powerful men in politics, corporate America and the entertainment industry. An unofficial coalition of staffers who had been undermined and underpaid began to assemble. People traded stories, emails and memos and named names. Lists were kept of supervisors and staffers who abused people or looked away. People protected each other. It felt like some healing from 2016 had started but there were also big disagreements about what to do next. During the entire time, while we talked about these incidents to reporters and online in front of his staff, Senator Sanders never confronted any of it.
As 2018 began, I was thriving in a new city and running a really successful primary campaign in North Texas. Our Revolution was going through lots of changes at the top, experiencing a staff exodus and executing poorly timed public stunts while employing anti-Latino xenophobes as consultants. I felt good about the disconnect from Bernieland and threw myself into my work and a new relationship. I stayed in the Bernie Staff Alumni group online to trade vendor and campaign advice. A new union for political staffers emerged from our group. It was an awesome development given the pay inequality and harassment that our campaign was born from. As the months went by, it became more and more apparent that the Senator would run again. Behind the scenes, a lot of people wondered who would be in charge. Would it be as disorganized as last time? Would any of the senior staff who had been responsible for the missteps in Nevada, Iowa and other places be held responsible? By that time, the first executive director from Our Revolution had been promoted as Senator Sanders’ 2018 campaign manager (where we are now told that a “gold standard” of anti-harassment was implemented. I have to wonder why that campaign manager didn’t have this program for me in 2017.) In December of 2018, a staffer posted a picture in the staff group. It was Jane Sanders beaming with Arturo Carmona at the Sanders Institute where an informal gathering of people who were organizing for the Senators’ 2020 presidential run had gathered to rub elbows and talk about how progressive they all were. Another man who has been named as a harasser from our campaign reached out to me that same week about working for the campaign. I replied and said only if the entire national leadership had somehow changed. I was met with the familiar Bernieland silence. The man who had supervised Arturo Carmona as our 2016 national field director and been informed of multiple incidents was in charge of 2020’s Organizing for Bernie Sanders. Jeff Weaver was acting as de facto campaign manager again. Shock and anger rippled through Facebook, emails, texts and phone calls. Nothing was changing. Nothing had been learned. The same men were being rewarded.
The leaks began. Some people were talking on background, hoping to reform the Senator and just get rid of a few bad apples. I decided to speak on record to the New York Times. The same men who had mismanaged my time and my home state at Our Revolution were still near and dear to the Senator. I was beyond disappointed and I said as much to our staff group and the public. We were all attacked online and over the internet by strangers and celebrity surrogates alike. The Senator honestly and truthfully responded that he had been too “busy” to know about what had happened to any of us and that he was sorry if we “felt” like we had been discriminated against or harassed. That was okay. We had organized behind the scenes before speaking to the Times because we felt like the people who had donated an average of $27 deserved to know how disorganized and disappointing 2016 to 2018 had been. There was nothing and no ideal left to protect.
It’s 2019. There has been some rearranging of chairs on the Titanic that is Bernie 2020 but a lot remains the same. I’m writing this a little before midnight in Texas. Thirteen hours ago, I got an email from a former scheduler on the 2016 campaign asking for my information to arrange travel for a meeting in two days that many of us have known about for awhile. A lot of people like me who reported to the press after being ignored for years had been excluded from the initial planning of this meeting but after some demands from others, I guess we got added to a list. I responded early this morning with my information, curious about what would happen next, curious to see if the boss had become less “busy”.
Nothing changes in Bernieland. Myself and another reporter of harassment and wage disparity got no information about our flights or follow up information by late this evening. There was no agenda or participant information about the meeting made available to me. I wrote to the senior staff who had ostensibly asked that I be contacted and said the following:
“As a followup, 11 hours ago I responded to [scheduler’s] morning email asking for my phone number to arrange travel for a meeting. Since then, I have received no information or calls and I know other people are experiencing the same. The attempt to bully and exclude here is as insulting and transparent as the Senator’s original response to Anderson Cooper. I know that the Senator’s office has given confirmation about the meeting to Buzzfeed but no actual confirmation if he will attend and what role he would play. I said my piece to the NYT about my awful and degrading experience with Our Revolution and wanted to [be] done but I’ll have to publicly detail how disorganized, unprofessional and purposefully awful this process has been.
To be clear, I got an email from [scheduler] requesting my phone number this morning to attend a meeting with no other information (like who would attend, the purpose, etc.). I never asked to attend a meeting because I expected this kind of treatment.
To the staff behind this halfhearted effort: y’all have no business running meetings, a campaign or the country.”
For a future to believe in, learn from the past and present. Senator Sanders and his friends do not have you in mind. Demand more than easy platitudes about economic inequality. Demand a candidate who will treat the women and men who sacrifice months and years of their lives with some respect. Demand a candidate who has time to appoint leaders with substantial grassroots experience and the know-how to plan a wage grid or schedule flights. Senator Sanders is not that candidate.
At this very moment, I am choosing to ignore the late night harried calls and emails being funneled to my phone in an attempt to drag me to D.C. for this national paint job to benefit the Sanders campaign. As I told a member of his campaign this evening, your crises aren’t mine anymore. I’m finally done with Bernieland. I have multiple campaigns and a district office to run. I am six and half months pregnant with a little girl who deserves better. We all deserve better starting right now.