Rossana Rodriguez
Template:TOCnestleft Rossana Rodriguez
Solidarity Midwest Day School
The Solidarity Midwest Day School was held at People’s Church in Chicago on Saturday 28 July 2018. The event brought together about 50 people from Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee.
Ryne Poelker opened the meeting by observing that People’s Church had been targeted by developers and their political allies several years ago, but saved by a successful social justice campaign. T
Our Midwest Socialist Day School panel on taking power at the ballot box, with aldermanic candidates Ugochukwu Okere (40th Ward), Byron Sigcho Lopez (25th), Maria Hadden (49th), Bob Quellos representing Rossana Rodriguez (33rd) and Angela Clay (46th).
The final session, “Taking Power: Activists and the Ballot Box”, featured a panel of community activists who are running for office on the Chicago City Council: Angela Clay, candidate for 46th ward alderman and community activist; Maria Hadden, candidate for 49th ward alderman and community activist; Ugochukwu Okere, candidate for 40th ward alderman and DSA member; and Byron Sigcho Lopez, candidate for 25th ward alderman and DSA member. Also on the panel was Bob Quellos (DSA, 33rd ward Working Families), representing the aldermanic campaign of Rossana Rodriguez.[1]
DSA endorsed
City Council successes
If their success on Tuesday carries over to the April 2019 runoff election, as many as five members of the Democratic Socialists of America could be on the Chicago City Council.
Two won aldermanic seats outright. Three others made the runoffs.
“The oligarchs are shaking in their boots tonight,” Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th) told supporters. “Our continued organizing and movement-building over the last four years is paying dividends. And it appears to be a total transformation of political power at City Hall from the bottom up.”
Rosa is one of the two members of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America who got the majority vote needed to win without a runoff. The other, Daniel La Spata, upset Ald. Joe Moreno in the Near Northwest Side’s 1st Ward.
Socialist Rosanna Rodriguez-Sanchez will be in April’s runoff against incumbent Ald. Deb Mell (33rd). Rodríguez-Sánchez broke into tears at her election-night party at Chief O’Neils in Avondale after hearing she’d gotten the most votes in a three-way race.
“Chicago had a way of doing politics, and I feel like that died tonight,” Rodríguez-Sánchez said. “I’m very very confident that I’m going to win” in April.
Byron Sigcho Lopez, who heads the Pilsen Alliance, credited the socialist organization — which says it’s not a party but instead a “political and activist organization” — with helping him in the race for the seat vacated by retiring Ald. Danny Solis (25th). Sigcho-Lopez will face Alex Acevedo in the runoff.
“DSA members were instrumental, and I’m thankful to the volunteers who spent hundreds — thousands — of hours campaigning,” Sigcho-Lopez said. “We’ve had a rubber-stamp City Council beholden to corporate interests, and that’s why the DSA candidates resonated with people.”
Andre Vazquez, who joined the socialists in June, will be in the runoff against 35-year incumbent Ald. Pat O’Connor (40th).
Rosa, who turned 30 in February, had been DSA’s only elected official in Chicago.
“For the third-biggest city in the country to have a DSA caucus is amazing, and having members around Carlos will only amplify the causes that working-class Chicago — not the rich — wants,” local DSA co-chair Lucie Macias.
Macias said the group supports rent control and having an Chicago school board and opposes plans to build a new police academy in Garfield Park. Nationally, the group backs “Medicare for all.”
The successes of the socialist group’s council candidates set off a raucous celebration at a Chicago watch party at the Logan Square offices of the magazine In These Times, where updates on Tuesday’s vote prompted whoops and swigs from bottles of Malort that were being passed around.
“This progressive insurgency is absolutely historic,” Rodriguez-Sanchez campaign volunteer Rachel Johnson said. “We are poised to have three or four new socialists on the City Council and will be positioned to have a socialist [caucus] on the City Council. I’m absolutely elated.”
After claiming roughly 5,000 members in 2015, the group says there are now about 60,000 card-carrying DSA members nationwide and about 1,300 among three Chicago chapters.[2]
Trotskyist support
Rossana Rodriguez’s, campaihn was also supported by the International Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative. [3]
References
- ↑ on our Midwest Day School Ian Cornelius August 15, 2018
- ↑ [https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/socialist-democrats-city-council-election-dsa/?fbclid=IwAR24XRtKUPfd1dcDhko22g_SxJAR-SFa_IQ-Ibg2knucbQipyB2PNoeeg0w Chicago Sun-Times, 02/27/2019, 01:52pm As many as 5 socialists could join City Council after election successes Tuesday By Ryan Smith]
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