For a Bernie 2020 Win, Equitable Conditions for Staffers Are Essential

By Angela Watters, Reader Supported News

05 January 19

n explosive New York Times piece alleges widespread sexism and gender pay disparity in Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign for president. Progressives should welcome the revelations about sexism within the organization. The timing of them is auspicious. I don’t think this is an accident.

With the Iowa Caucuses thirteen months away, a letter published by Politico from former staffers to Bernie and his top aides shows a keen understanding not only that sexism proliferates in the dark, but also that closer to the primaries, these allegations could do more damage to a fully operational organization than a nascent one. The authors of the letter “request a meeting with Senator Sanders and his leadership team to discuss the issue of sexual harassment on the 2016 campaign, for the purpose of planning to mitigate the issue in the upcoming presidential cycle – in both the primary and the potential general election campaigns for 2019 and 2020.” In short, the staffers want to ensure any future campaign avoids the problems discussed by named sources in detail in the New York Times article.

If you believe women, and that the reporting by Ember and Benner is factual, the following occurred during the Bernie for President campaign:

• A Bernie surrogate touched Giulianna Di Lauro inappropriately over the course of the day and when she complained to her supervisor he told her “I bet you would have liked it if he were younger” and then laughed. The supervisor’s response was corroborated by another woman in the room.


• Samantha Davis experienced sexual harassment in both New York and Texas offices. According to the New York Times article, Davis said “her supervisor marginalized her after she declined an invitation to his hotel room.”


• Sarah Slamen worked for the 2016 campaign in Texas and for Our Revolution subsequently. She quit the organization after she reported issues of sexist behavior and “received no reassurance that anything would change.”

Overt sexism and sexual harassment were not the only revelations brought to light in Ember and Benner’s New York Times piece. Gender pay disparity was a frequent complaint by nearly a dozen staffers interviewed by The New York Times. One can either view this news story and the subsequent coverage as a thinly veiled attempt to weaponize gender politics to further an establishment agenda or, one can see this as an attempt to hold a powerful man and movement accountable to the values they profess. I prefer to view it as the latter.

It’s clear that the Sanders organization grew too quickly for proper oversight and that women suffered as a result, which was acknowledged by Mr. Sanders in his interview with Anderson Cooper:

When our campaign grew from, I think we started with three or four paid employees, and over a period of a few months, as the campaign exploded we went up to, I think, twelve hundred employees, and I am not going to sit here and tell you that we did everything right in terms of human resources, in terms of addressing the needs that I’m hearing from now that women felt disrespected that there was sexual harassment which was not dealt with as effectively as possible.

The 2020 Sanders campaign, if there ends up being one, has been given a unique opportunity to make their presidential run an equitable and harassment-free zone for staffers. By Sanders’s own account on CNN, this is exactly what he directed his organization to do in his Senate campaign last year:

What I will tell you is that when I ran for reelection in 2018 in Vermont, we put forward the strongest set of principles in terms of mandatory training in terms of women if they felt harassed having an independent firm that they can go to and I think that is kind of the gold standard for what we should be doing. So, I certainly apologize to any woman who felt that she was not being treated appropriately and, of course, if I run we’ll do better our next time.

People make mistakes, even Bernie. Imagine what could happen if the sexism within his last campaign were swept under the rug? Sanders will be relying on personnel in Texas and in New York where some of the harassment was alleged to have taken place, not just his Vermont crew. Would an opponent leak a story the week before Super Tuesday?

Making the workplace safe for women is not simply a moral imperative, it’s crucial to Bernie’s success as a candidate. It’s a good thing.

Angela Watters is the managing editor of Reader Supported News. Follow her on Twitter @ajwatter.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Where's the Line on State-Sponsored Censorship?

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

04 January 19

mericans have a Constitutional right to freedom of speech. Right? That’s what we’re taught in school, at least. That’s what a lot of us believe. But we don’t really have a completely uninhibited right to freedom of speech. The conventional wisdom is that Americans are free to say anything they want (short of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater) except with very specific exceptions. For example, the Supreme Court has ruled that one exception is “advocacy of the use of force when it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action.” You can thus advocate violence, just not violence to begin right now. Other exceptions include obscenity, child pornography, encouraging suicide, and (commercial) speech owned by others.

What happens, then, when a person vents on Facebook or in the comment section of a newspaper’s website? There’s no threat of immediate violence, so it’s legal, right? It’s not legal, according to two of America’s police departments.

Look at example number one. James Ross, 20, is a gun control supporter and is active on Facebook. One day a friend of his posted a meme on Facebook entitled, “Why I Need a Gun.” Below the title were photos of various firearms and an explanation of what each could be used for. The shotgun, for example, was for “burglars and home invasions;” the rifle and scope were for “putting food on the table;” and the assault rifle was for “self-defense against enemies foreign and domestic, for preservation of freedom and liberty, and to prevent government atrocities.” Ross didn’t like the meme, so he wrote in the comment section, “Which one do I need to shoot up a kindergarten?” He then went to bed.

The original poster deleted Ross’s comment and the post, but not before a Facebook friend forwarded it to another friend who happened to be a cop. That cop in turn forwarded it to two more cops who, without conducting any investigation whatsoever, showed up at Ross’s place of employment the next day and arrested him for “disturbing the peace,” a misdemeanor. Ross attempted to explain himself, but the police were having none of it. They read him his Miranda rights and locked him up for four days.

The county prosecutor quickly dropped the charges, but Ross sued the police, saying that his civil rights had been violated. He hadn’t posed any threat to anybody and the police knew it. A federal district court judge, however, threw the suit out, writing that the police had “qualified immunity” that prohibited private citizens from suing them while they were in the process of carrying out their duties. An appeals court, however, recently reversed the district court, saying that the officers could not have qualified immunity because Ross’s post was not a “true threat” and the police had not carried out even “minimal investigation.” It was a close call for Ross – and for the rest of us.

The basis of the judgment was the First Amendment. Ross had not met any of the criteria for controlling his freedom of speech. It was as simple as that. The cops knew it, but charged him anyway. The judge did the right thing.

Similarly, Robert Frese, 62, of Exeter, New Hampshire, had an ongoing problem with one local police officer after being arrested and convicted of purposely running over a highway construction flagger. He allegedly shouted at the man, “If you don’t move out of my way, I’m going to run over you,” before doing just that. He was convicted of felony assault and sentenced to two-to-four years in prison, with all but 67 days suspended. He was later accused of stalking the officer who arrested him and, later still, of rummaging through a private garbage dumpster, apparently looking for information on the cop.

When the officer retired, a story that was carried in the local paper, Frese took to the online comment section and wrote, “Chief (William) Shupe covered up for a dirty cop.” Frese was arrested the next day and charged with “criminal defamation of character,” a class B misdemeanor. Frese maintained that the police just wanted to silence him because even a misdemeanor conviction would send him to prison for the remainder of the two-to-four years on the assault charge.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) saw the case in a completely different way. Two weeks ago, the ACLU filed a federal suit against the Exeter Police Department arguing that the criminal defamation law violates the First Amendment. The suit says that the Supreme Court recognized in a landmark 1964 decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, “the profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” Indeed, the Court added, the complaints didn’t even have to be true to still be legal.

So there it is. We Americans can pretty much say whatever we want, within very clearly defined (yet few) limits. It may not stop the cops from harassing us. It may not stop the FBI from surveilling us. But tough luck for them. We’re going to keep on fighting.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.