Interviews for Resistance – The Baffler: Recent Episodes
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Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We’re now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators, and educators, not only about how to resist, but how to build a better world.
Jody Calemine: My name is Jody Calemine. I am the general counsel for the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Sarah Jaffe: We are talking today about the strategy put forth by the CWA for tackling the problems with the tax bill. First off, for folks who haven’t heard, can you explain what that is? JC: We represent around 700,000 workers across the United States, and therefore, we have a keen interest in what is going on with this tax bill. The vast majority of the benefits of this tax bill are going to go to the very rich and corporations. Not to working people. But the White House has been telling everybody not to worry; those benefits will trickle down to workers. And they have been very specific about it. They have said that if the corporate tax rate is cut from 35 percent to 20 percent, every household in this country will receive a $4,000 boost in their income per year. That is a very specific promise about how trickle down is supposed to work. We are going to take that promise literally. We acted as a labor union should react by writing to our employers because what we do all the time is negotiate wage increases. We wrote to eight of our key employers, and attached to those letters to a bunch of CEOs was a contract proposal. It says, “If the corporate tax rate is cut to 20 percent, every employee in our bargaining unit will receive a $4,000 wage increase.” SJ: Have you gotten any reactions from any of those companies yet? JC: Not yet. We gave them until Friday, December 1 to get back to us, but there has been no official reaction yet. The New York Times did a story on this last week. It appear[s] to have gotten some reaction from some of the employers who are dismissing it as a stunt, but it isn’t a stunt. It is very serious. For once, we want to make sure that these promises that the White House and congressional leaders are making are put in writing and signed by the people who will actually pay this money. SJ: Just for example, some of the other stuff in the tax bill would actually be very bad for some of your workers. I imagine you have done some thinking about exactly what this could cost some of your members. JC: The bill itself, about 75 percent of the bill’s benefits are going to go to big business and the very wealthy. Those benefits are made permanent by this bill. The things that are for any individuals are temporary, and over the course of this bill, people who make less than $75,000 a year are actually going to see their taxes increase. So working people are really [going to be] harmed by the bill. And it is not just the overall tax structure that they are trying to implement; it is lots of little things. We don’t happen to represent teachers, but teachers have this deduction [of] up to $250 [they can make] when they spend money out of their pocket for classroom supplies. That deduction goes away under these bills. We do represent graduate students at a few places. They want to tax the tuition that grad students might receive in exchange for their work at the university. This is money that the graduate student never actually sees. They want to treat that as if it is wages earned, but these same organizations behind this bill also want to make sure that graduate teaching assistants cannot organize. SJ: There have been many attempts to cut taxes over the past decades. Always with this promise that, as you said, it will trickle down to workers. Is this a new strategy? Have unions tried to do anything like this before? How is this time different, if so? JC: As far as I know, we have never responded in such a direct way before. The promises made by this White House are so specific about what the outcome would be that it simply spurred us to try and hold them [and our employers] to this promise. . . . There is another specific promise that these guys made—on Paul Ryan’s website in big letters—that this tax bill is going to prevent the offshoring of jobs. That is a big issue for us. We have been fighting offshoring for a long time. It is what the Verizon strike up and down the east coast last year was all about. They are saying this is going to prevent offshoring? Then we are going to our employers [with] a second provision [in these contract proposals]. It says [that] so long as this tax bill is in effect, they will not offshore work. New jobs will be created here rather than overseas and work that is here isn’t going to move overseas. Again, just like the wage increase, this is something entirely within these corporations’ control. They get to decide what they are going to do with [the tax savings they are going to enjoy under this tax bill]. The politicians are saying, “This is what will be done with it. That is why working people should support this bill.” So we are going to those employers and saying, “Is that, in fact, true?” and we haven’t gotten a response. SJ: Just to be clear, overall, the union is opposed to the tax bill. JC: Yes. We view it as an outrageous money grab. It is not as if the $4,000 will make up for everything else that this bill does to working people, but if they are going to make these kinds of promises, we want it in writing. SJ: CWA has been involved in various fights over various Trump policies over the last year. Tell me a little bit about how the members are reacting to all of this. JC: The way our members have been reacting to things emanating from Washington in this new administration, I think they have been very energized. They worked very hard to make sure that the Affordable Care Act survived—rather than seeing millions of families lose health insurance. They rose up and participated in all the public actions to stop that repeal. It has been a very energizing moment. I think one of the interesting things about this administration is that they got themselves elected with a lot of pro-worker rhetoric. I think a lot of people are starting to see the gaps between that rhetoric and the reality. This tax bill is one of them. The attempt to repeal the ACA is another one. Where they land on offshoring will be another test over time. The things that they are prioritizing in Congress [sends] a signal to working people across the country. Infrastructure was supposed to be a priority. That has taken a back seat. No one knows exactly when they will ever get around to that kind of job creation work. The appointments to various agencies have not signaled an indication that they are looking to strengthen workers’ bargaining power, which is actually what we need to be doing right now if we want to have wages rise and the economy be more sustainable and fair for everyone. We need a lot more done on that front in terms of increasing workers’ bargaining power. On the contrary, they seem to be moving in the opposite direction. SJ: Have any other unions, after you came out with this, signaled that they are going to do something similar? Has this gotten a reaction from other unions? JC: Since we have come out, I have not had conversations about it directly with other unions. I don’t know if they are going to plan to do the same thing. I can tell you what: If this tax bill passes, I think everyone knows what their campaign is. Workers will have to organize and bargain to get their fair share of these tax cuts. SJ: Are there any thoughts about strategic places where there might be room to have a big campaign around this? Any contract fights that you have got coming up where this would be a place to focus? JC: With respect to the $4,000 wage increase, that is supposed to be an ultimate windfall after it trickles down to workers—on top of what we would be bargaining for anyway. So these contract proposals are in addition to existing contracts. They are modifications without affecting whatever raises we have already bargained for. Whatever the terms are today, we are supposed to get an additional $4,000. If this tax bill were to pass and become law, I think you will see this being inserted in all the fights going forward because everybody is supposed to get a $4,000 wage increase. That is what Donald Trump says. SJ: We will see how that goes. In terms of broader strategies and things that you are thinking about going forward, we are in this interesting moment where, as you said, Trump got elected on a lot of pro-worker rhetoric. On the other side of the aisle, your union was one of the ones that backed Bernie Sanders. Since his campaign, there has been a lot of interest and a lot of actual victories for candidates running in a sort of Bernie Sanders, left populist, even Democratic Socialist mold. It feels like it is both a moment where there is potential for tremendous steps backward but also steps forward. I wonder what you are thinking about in terms of bigger demands that it are possible right now for labor, for working people. JC: I think it is pretty incredible how quickly politics can turn and that the opportunities can arise long before you may have otherwise expected them to enact real change. Pundits talk about a blue wave. That may or may not come about, but you do see people being very motivated to get involved and to get out and vote. There were too few people who voted in the last [presidential] election. The direction of the country will depend upon voter turnout. We have headwinds against us on that front that come from those who would like to keep people from voting, with various hurdles and obstacles to [keep] people out of the booths or to keep people from getting registered. It is an uphill battle, but this year’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia and various special elections that have occurred indicate that there are people energized and voter turnout, I think, is coming. SJ: Lastly, how can people keep up with CWA, with this particular demand, and with the work that the union is doing around the country? JC: I think the best way to keep up with us is to subscribe to our Twitter feed @CWAUnion. We have a great digital media operation to try and keep people informed and let people know about actions we are undertaking and how they can participate.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We’re now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators, and educators, not only about how to resist, but how to build a better world.
David Duhalde: I am David Duhalde. I am the Deputy Director with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Sarah Jaffe: You had a pretty successful election night. Tell us what you were thinking when you started hearing the results come in? DD: It was very funny for me. I will be quite honest that a lot of us [who] were maybe deeply affected by 2016 were maybe not as optimistic as we should have been. I was speaking at a conference for the European left. It was in Belgium and I was many hours ahead. I thought, “I am just going to go to bed and I will wake up and I will see how we did.” I didn’t want to stay up and lose sleep. Then, I awake to a flurry of text messages and Facebook messages like, “Oh my god! Lee did it!” referring to Lee Carter in Virginia. And, “Oh my God! J.T. Scott won in Massachusetts!” I didn’t burst into tears, but I was fighting back tears in a hotel room alone because I had almost no one to share it with. But, I did at least have Facebook and was messaging people. It was truly one of the best experiences of my life. It was just such a pleasant surprise. It really had exceeded my expectation[s] and a lot of other people’s who wanted it badly but just weren’t sure it was going to happen. SJ: Was there a particular one that you were really surprised and excited by? DD: I am going to be uncreative and say the Lee Carter race in Virginia. . . . I work out of the Washington, D.C. office of DSA, so I was able to meet Lee for the first time at a major meeting we had after the election where about 140 people came. He came and spoke and he impressed me deeply. He had come to a couple of things, including my Labor Day barbeque, to pitch his campaign. Then, I went down to volunteer. But when you volunteer, it is hard to get a read sometimes on the crowd. So I was very hopeful, of course, but he had hired some great DSA members who were all under twenty-three, and he was taking on this huge incumbent with a war chest who then dropped this anti-Communist mailer on us. I was just very worried. Even though I knew we were doing everything right, you can do everything right and it doesn’t matter. That was just a huge surprise. But, the J.T. Scott race, too. I had actually lived in Somerville where J.T. is now an alderman. It was impressive to me because I knew the machine. I remember how difficult it was to beat them and how recalcitrant some of the residents could be towards new people and change. So even though it is a Democratic stronghold, there were definitely the new vs. old residents and to see him take on this incumbent who I know definitely had a base, had been there for [sixteen] years, but [that] he just did it through blood, sweat, and tears was just truly overwhelming. It was just truly great to see all those grassroots campaigns led by DSA but also working with Our Revolution to really sweep these elections. But lots of other allies—especially in the Carter race—such as Planned Parenthood. SJ: That is interesting you mention those two in particular because one of these was against, of course, a Republican incumbent. The other one was against the Democratic Party machine. I would love to hear you talk about that aspect of this; that in some places you were going up against these right-wing people and in other cases you are taking on centrist Democrats. DD: It was an interesting, fascinating scope of races that we took in. We ultimately endorsed [five] candidates nationally. Some of whom were running against Democrats, like Ginger Jentzen who was in Socialist Alternative. She ran against two Democrats, actually, in a ranked-choice voting race.[1] Others, like Jabari Brisport who is a Green, ran against the machine Democrats. Most of them were Democrats themselves and were running . . . in primaries like Khader El-Yateem in Brooklyn [or] Tristan Rader who won . . . in Lakewood, Ohio. It really shows a couple of things. It shows to me that what I appreciate about the new DSA, the one post-Trump election, is how committed it [still] is to being flexible and being willing to work around local conditions. I think that is what is going to make a modern DSA thrive. It is not necessarily having a one-size-fits-all model but really allowing [these autonomous] grassroots chapters to work with national to do what fits them. Sometimes, that mean[s] we are going to take on the Democratic machine, like in Somerville and in Lakewood. Both of those actually succeeded, but sometimes it is just winning the Democratic ballot line that no one wants, like the Lee Carter race. . . . What is really exciting for me, too—khalid kamau who won [and] was one of our first nationally endorsed candidates after Bernie—is that we are really focusing on lots of these local races, learning from good lessons of bad people, seeing how the right wing has built such a great pipeline of local candidates who eventually [become] part of the ruling class and part of the congressional Republicans. We feel that it is very critical for groups like DSA to be flexible but also [to have] our folks train [people] on races where they can learn because it is very hard to win a race. What I think is beautiful about Bernie Sanders is how he energized people. But what is also kind of worrisome for an old man like me is that he made it seem too easy, I think, for people. Some people didn’t appreciate how much work he had put in throughout his career to win those races and to get to that place where he could do that. We’re working with our folks and getting them to be flexible and [to] know that what works in Peoria doesn’t necessarily work in Syracuse—or vice versa. It has been a really great experience to see how DSA-ers and other Socialists that we have worked with have learned that. SJ: Take us back a little bit to the thinking and the planning around electoral strategy this year. You had the conference, but talk about how the strategy came together and how people within DSA are now thinking about electoral politics. DD: It is a very fascinating process for us and really one that evolved over the course of the year after Bernie Sanders first declared his intention for the presidential primary. DSA has come out of a movement that had really wanted to make the Democratic Party a Social Democratic party and a really genuine progressive party. With the rise and success of neoliberalism in the 1990s and Clinton—both Bill and Hillary—and [with] Barack Obama, it was very clear that the idea of changing the Democratic Party was not really in the cards. So DSA shifted away from electoral politics and its bread and butter mission and focused on social movement work and other forms of sophistication. But Bernie Sanders really energized people and especially us. So DSA put a tremendous amount of energy and support into his candidacy, doing independent expenditures. Then people started coming to us for endorsements. He really re-energized the idea of people wanting to run as Democratic Socialists. We had to step to the plate. We started pretty small. We just did a handful of endorsements without much work behind them—such as Mike Sylvester, who is now a state representative in Maine, and [Ian] Schlakman, who ran as a Green for the Baltimore City Council [and] ended up staying involved in our national electoral committee. That was pretty good. Then, khalid kamau came out of nowhere and . . . that is when we started realizing we could build a national program using khalid’s campaign as a model where we called dozens of chapters and got them to phone bank for him. People were just so excited to work for this amazing member and fellow Socialist. That made us realize we could really start building Socialist electoral power. Then we had a handful more people come to us for endorsements. By the spring of 2017, we kind of had to say, “Stop.” People were coming to us ad hoc—especially with our convention coming up—[and] we just didn’t have the bandwidth to take on people as needed. [So we]—and I think it shows to how strong DSA has gotten— created a national electoral committee, which included Schlakman . . . and nine other great DSA members who applied and were accepted, who ranged from people who were with Democratic politics to people who had done voters’ rights legal work to people running campaigns on their own. [We also] allowed candidates to apply to be endorsed. To re-jigger and make it easier for us to institute our electoral mission, we created a three-point criteria to receive a DSA endorsement. You had to be running as a Socialist. You didn’t have to be a DSA member. Ginger Jentzen is not. But you had to be a Socialist and be okay with talking about it, even if it wasn’t in the forefront of your campaign. It was very important to us that you . . . had the support of a local DSA chapter. . . . We don’t want to be that kind of D.C. or national group that kind of parachutes in and tells people who they are going to be supporting. We really want endorsements to come from the grassroots. For example, unfortunately, [we couldn’t support] Chokwe Lumumba . . . because we didn’t, at that time, have a Mississippi DSA. Hopefully, that will be different now, but we were very strict about that even if we really love Lumumba. The third thing was we really want people to show us that they had a pathway to victory. We didn’t need somebody to say, “I am 100 percent a shoo-in to win,” but we wanted people to really show us they have been thinking about . . . the steps to win their races. We wanted people who really were going to be out there hitting the pavement and talking to voters. From this, we were able to select six candidates. Then, [we] really built a national infrastructure to support them through our base. Social media is a huge asset, especially for local races [in] trying to draw national and potentially international attention and donations. But also using our network of hundreds of volunteers and thousands of members to do phone banking and to do door knocking. For example, in Seattle, [for] Jon Grant—who ran as a great housing advocate [but] unfortunately ran against a very good liberal Democrat, [making] it a hard race—the DSA knocked on 22,000 doors. We made sure to send out emails for them to reach other members in the State of Washington they might not have reached. The same thing with Carter. We worked hard to talk to the media and raise awareness—especially in the D.C. Beltway—about his race, which helped generate attention he might not have gotten. So strategically, we shifted and we are trying to look to 2018 about how we are going to expand this program because 2017 was kind of the test run. We will see what happens, but we definitely want to be more sophisticated, we want to increase the standards to get endorsed, and . . . we want to make sure we hold [those we’ve helped win] accountable. We don’t want people coming to us to get volunteers and leaving. There are a lot of questions that are going to come up that the national political committee, which is DSA’s leadership, are working on to really make sure we are still a very relevant and democratic organization that is electing Socialists who will be held accountable by their constituents. SJ: How does the broader post-Bernie spectrum of groups and organizations fit together in this moment? There were a bunch of Our Revolution-endorsed candidates, there were some DSA-endorsed candidates, there were other local people who came out of that movement all over the country. I am wondering how you think this movement, such as it is, fits together, or where are some of the tensions? DD: That is a really great question. Actually, similar to how my expectations were exceeded about how well DSA did on election night in November, I have been rather pleasantly surprised about how well the different post-Bernie formations have been doing and working together to keep this political revolution going. I want to give one great example: Our Revolution either locally or nationally endorsed all of our candidates that we endorsed nationally[2]. . . . We have a very good working relationship with Our Revolution. We often share information and talk about candidates. We also have this affiliation program where DSA chapters can be the local Our Revolution chapter, as well. That is to avoid unnecessary conflicts [and] duplication of efforts. That is a really great example of keeping this collaboration going. But also Socialist Alternative, which is one of the other major socialist groups, endorsed Bernie Sanders [and] worked with us not only on Ginger Jentzen’s campaign, but they were [also] big supporters of Jabari Brisport running on the Green Party ticket. So there was lots of good energy coming out of teaming up and keeping this work going. That was something you just didn’t know going in after 2016 if that [was] going to keep alive. We are definitely going to see what happens in 2018. I do have Brand New Congress [and Justice Democrats] looking at some of the people we are looking at for congressional races. There is definitely a lot of potential out there, and it has been really exciting to see that different groups who bring different things are able to still keep this going and also say, “You help me and I will help you.” I especially saw that with Our Revolution and Socialist Alternative. That makes me incredibly optimistic for 2018, to keep this post-Bernie energy going. I think Sanders has definitely said all the right tunes to encourage that. He posted about Lee Carter’s victory. He is clearly still promoting Democratic Socialist candidates and it gets him very excited. That is only going to keep our base energized, too. SJ: I want to wrap up by talking about 2018 and what is coming down the pike. This is going to be the congressional elections. What are you guys working on so far? DD: Well, we have not made any endorsements yet. Definitely, people have approached us on the congressional level for endorsements. We also have lots of locals who are already getting excited. I was at our general membership meeting in D.C., and three county councillors from Montgomery County— which is the county north of the District of Columbia—came to speak. Two of [them] are DSA members, including one who is running for county executive—and if he won, he would [be] the Socialist with the largest constituency in America. There are twice as many people in Montgomery County as there are in Vermont. So, we are definitely seeing people already coming right now. I think what we are looking for 2018 is to expand our network of national volunteers who can then really work with local volunteers because the key still will be the influence we are going to have will be much more locally [based]: raising profiles nationally and working to create new systems to make sure that candidates will come to us with a clearer understanding of what they want from us and what we want from them. [We will maybe be] looking at. . . . different tiers of endorsements. We are also looking at how we can support and hold candidates accountable after the election. We understand that, of course, you first have to help get people elected. Where you help them get elected . . . increases the interest they will have in you, and we want to make sure that we are going to be educating DSA chapters that to hold people accountable means we are going to have to contribute a lot to their campaigns [while] also hav[ing] clear expectations. For example . . . we have a strict policy [that] we only endorse pro-choice candidates, and helping DSA chapters think about how they set their own standards for endorsements, I think, will be really key. Just getting people to think strategically, be sophisticated but also keep politicians honest, ultimately, is a huge role DSA will play. And, of course, prioritizing electing Socialists will be our niche compared to [other] great post-Bernie groups, and definitely our focus will still be advancing the Democratic Socialist agenda more explicitly. SJ: How can people keep up with you and also with DSA’s electoral efforts? DD: You can follow DSA at @DemSocialists on Twitter. But, if people have any questions or comments or just want to get endorsements, learn how the process works, I can always be reached at info@dsausa.org and that will go straight to me. We are also going to be putting out a website pretty shortly about our electoral work. People should be on the lookout for that website at www.DSAUSA.org.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
[1] It was a four-way race. Ginger Jentzen ran against Samantha Pree-Stinson (endorsed by the Green Party), Steve Fletcher (endorsed by Our Revolution Minnesota and the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party), and Tim Bildsoe (DFL). [2] Khader El-Yateem’s campaign did not receive an endorsement from the local or national chapter of Our Revolution.
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We’re now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators, and educators, not only about how to resist, but how to build a better world.
Victoria Davis: My name is Victoria Davis, the sister of Delrawn Small. Victor Dempsey: I am Victor Dempsey, brother to Delrawn Small. Sarah Jaffe: We are talking on Wednesday, October 11. There is an action going on for the Right to Know Act in New York City. Tell us about the action. Victor: The Right to Know Act is a bill that we are trying to get through. We [have] a lot of support from a lot of people [for] it. Over two hundred organizations. The majority of the city council. They endorsed it . . . but it still has not been passed. Today was the rally to let them know that we need it to get done. The police organizations should be held accountable. It is common-sense legislation that will help [the New York Police Department] interact with people and hold them more accountable. That way, there [will be] more transparency and everyone [will] feel a little safer. SJ: What would the law actually do if it were passed? Victor: The first bill would require officers to identify themselves and explain the reason for official interaction. The second bill would help end deceptive and unconstitutional searches by requiring officers to explicitly convey a person’s rights to refuse a search when their consent is the only legal justification and obtain objective proof that a person gave informed and voluntary consent. SJ: Tell us your story. Why is this important to you and your family? Victoria: On July 4, 2016, NYPD Officer Wayne Isaacs shot and killed my brother Delrawn Small from his car and left him to die in the street without assistance. Wayne Isaacs was still sitting in the car when he shot Delrawn. This is important for our family . . . and not just our family [but] for us personally. My family is demanding that Isaacs be held accountable [for killing our brother]. But we also know that holding one officer accountable will not end police violence. We need strong policy changes to help to end abusive policing in New York City. Our family is demanding the Right to Know Act be passed and Wayne Isaacs be held accountable—as civilians are always held accountable. Isaacs [and] the way that he lied makes him seem like he is above the law. We just need accountability. Victor: From the first day my brother was murdered by Wayne Isaacs, it was portrayed by certain media outlets that my brother assaulted Wayne Isaacs or [that my brother] was in the wrong. It took roughly [four] days for the video to surface . . . to find out the truth. So that [lack] of transparency for us and my family shows that an officer can actually lie about an . . . incident to protect himself. If that can happen to us, any scenario could happen. Someone could be walking down the street and a cop [could] pull them over for any unjust reason or just because they feel like they can—without identifying themselves properly. People don’t know their rights to a search or if they can not give consent to a search. For us, it almost directly correlates to how the murder happened with my brother, with the officer blatantly lying about why he committed that crime. You know what I mean? SJ: Since your brother’s death, you have been working with other families of other people killed by police to do something about this. Victoria: Yes, we have. We have been doing some activist work—inadvertently, I guess, we have become activists. We have always had a strong moral compass, the three of us: me, Victor, and Delrawn. We had certain values and morals that we already lived by. This is not something foreign, advocating or fighting for people or standing up in the face of injustice. We just hadn’t done it in a public way until now. Victor: Our whole lives we have always looked at right and wrong from a point blank perspective and . . . [we] try to motivate and push people to do better for themselves. Since the murder of our brother, it just kind of kick-started us more to get more involved, to contact and connect with organizations and people and try to raise awareness because I remember before anything happened to my brother, seeing other cases—whether it was Akai Gurley or Nicholas Heyward or Kimani Gray— [and] hearing about these incidents of police brutality in the news and just being heartbroken—[even] when my family wasn’t directly hurt. Victoria: We weren’t directly impacted; however, we have always understood how those occurrences reflect how people of color are treated and how they are handled by people who are hired to serve and protect. SJ: Recently, you all did a protest where you all took a knee outside of city hall. Can you tell us a little bit about that and the significance of that action? Victor: Being a football player and an avid football fan, . . . last year when Colin Kaepernick took the original knee with Eric Reid and the gang—and recognizing why he took that knee—after my brother’s death, it was really heavy on our hearts. . . . We had watched the city council, a few days previously at noon, take a knee, [and] we decided that we need to hold them accountable as well. For one, they’re getting on board with NFL players because they have that platform, the celebrity, so to speak, to get their voices heard. Our voices get heard selectively by people who want to listen. [These football players] took the knee in these [NFL] games . . . nationwide, and they protested and raised awareness to people who didn’t really know what was going on, didn’t know that cops are unjustly murdering us. Victoria: The thing is that people were forgetting. It started to become a hashtag with some racist rhetoric. For the past few weeks, people have been forgetting the reason that Colin Kaepernick had originally taken the knee. He wasn’t against the national anthem, the flag, or any of those things. He was taking a knee in solidarity with the victims and the families of police and state murders. For the murdered. For families like us who have loved ones who were killed by a police officer who was hired to serve and protect. Victor: We wanted to align ourselves with that and stand up with him and take the knee with him to show that we see what he is doing, we appreciate what he is doing, and we are fighting as well. We are not just sitting here. We are fighting. And we are going to do whatever we can in our power to help make a change because it has to stop. Victoria: We don’t want anyone to forget why it was done in the first place. I think that sometimes people take hashtags and they [use them] for different reasons. [A hashtag] becomes almost like a fad. Taking the knee and putting faces to these victims and putting faces to the hurt. . . . We—meaning the families—cannot take a knee and then everything is right in our lives and we are just able to move on and move forward. We take the knee and that is taking a stand. We still have to go back to our lives without Delrawn, and Delrawn was a huge part of our lives. Things have been terrible since he has been gone. We just want people to remember exactly why they take the knee was taken in the first place and not to stray away from that. I think too often people forget because things move so fast in life. If [you] feel strongly about taking the knee, then please feel strongly about supporting the families in any way that you can. It can be kind words. It can be coming to a vigil, a rally. . . . I have seen people hashtag #taketheknee and they will write something and someone else will write something and I will encounter something negative. It’s changing the narrative. Because once we change the narrative and the way we see these police killings, then we will see it as not just a hashtag, but we will see that these are humans, these are people. Delrawn was a human. He was a kind person. He was a reliable person. He meant everything to us. SJ: For people who are reading in New York, what can they do to support the work you are doing here around the Right to Know Act, and what can people do around the country to support the broader struggle that you and other families are facing? Victoria: We do live in the age of social media. Social media is the biggest platform. Definitely, I encourage people to follow the Justice for Delrawn Facebook page and the @Justice4delrawn Twitter page. Sometime in the near future we should have an official webpage. Sharing the word, getting to know the facts of the case. . . . It is so important that when [you] encounter someone who questions whether or not it was okay for a person to be killed by a police officer unjustly, use all of the information that you have gained online or meeting [and speaking] with families—whether it is in person, online, or from wherever—and just help change the narrative. We as humans can’t continue to see these things happen. Everyone has the right to live. We can’t go about life asking and begging for basic human rights—especially not the right to live. Delrawn had a right to live and Wayne Isaacs took that from him. Victor: Another way that we have tried to support everything [is through] these pages for Delrawn. It is about the message behind it. The way people view what is going on. Now they understand that this is in their backyard also. We deal with a lot of organizations. We are part of Families United 4 Justice, which is an organization collectively of families who have been affected by police brutality—which is national. We encourage people to follow [them]. Support—as far as going to city council meetings, pressuring the council to let them know change has to be made—[is important]. It is not just only in New York. We are here now; we have to do what we have to do in our state to make some changes, to give people the encouragement to continue to fight. . . . We live in a social media age. Retweeting tweets, following pages, supporting it, continuously push[ing] the word out and let[ting] people know we are not going to stand around while people are getting killed. Victoria: For me, I think we want people to know that these killings don’t just affect, obviously, the person who was killed and murdered. The murder of our brother had a huge effect on us. Delrawn was a huge part of our life. He was our caretaker. Our mother died when we were children, so Delrawn has always been not just a sibling but a father as well. A person who would lead us and guide us. Our confidant. He was a person that loved and cared for us and his children. He has three children. It is extremely hard for us. We have huge shoes to fill, and trying to figure out how to do that is hard. Reliving the situation, the murder over and over again is hard. Grief and mourning is terrible in itself. Missing someone is terrible. If someone walks out of your life, that is terrible. But, to miss someone when they were taken unjustly is just . . . it is the worst because all of these questions of, “Why? How?” All of the unanswered questions and all of the things when you are expecting . . . your loved one, who is coming from a family celebration, to see them the next day, to probably continue the celebration. But this person is no longer here. July Fourth from now on will never be a day of celebration. This past July, we didn’t celebrate. We couldn’t celebrate. I was delirious a little bit because I was sleep deprived. These police killings and murders affect families in all types of ways. It is a trickledown effect. It makes you feel not safe. And we are supposed to. These people who took an oath to serve and protect, if they couldn’t do that for me, then what else? We need accountability. That way we can at least feel some type of, I don’t know, closure? I wouldn’t even know the right word. But we definitely demand accountability because if it was anyone else, they would be held accountable and they would be in handcuffs after they murdered someone. Victor: Like my sister said, we want accountability, and not just for Wayne Isaacs, but for the whole NYPD. When officers commit a crime—which it literally is committing a crime—it is not looked at as a crime when it happens. It is looked at as, “Oh, in some instances it was justified because he was in fear for his life.” That is a key phrase that officers use these days, “I was afraid for my life.” So they discharge their weapons. Now, one thing that can never change for us is we don’t get our brother back because [Isaacs] made a decision. We don’t know what he was thinking. All we know is [that] he murdered someone. So, now, regardless of what happens in this case, we still have to live our lives and raise our children, raise his children. His son was only six months [old] when it happened. Now, moving forward, there is going to be a time when we are going to have to explain to him what happened. We have to explain to him why his father cannot go to a football game with him, why his father cannot teach him what basketball is. We can’t explain any of that. Who is going to teach him how to ride a bike? His uncle, his aunt, his mother. And not just that, his daughters. We have nieces who will be going to college soon. We have nieces that just started driving. This is part of what was taken from us. Now we have to step up and do this. Now, when my niece or my nephew is going to college—as happy as it would be to send them off to college—it is also bittersweet because Delrawn is not here to see that. This is a continuous battle of emotions. It is a continuous fight within yourself to keep pushing forward. Me and my sister come out to these rallies, to these functions to support, to gain support, and it is very hard. It is emotionally draining, but we do it because we know our brother did not die in vain. The awareness aspect of this is much bigger than just saying, “Okay, we need a change.” Like Victoria said, we have to hold everyone accountable. These councilmembers who are taking knees and making these statements, they need to be held accountable. They need to be at our court dates with us fighting against the unjust things that are happening. They cannot just do it for whatever benefit it may be. They cannot just do it for whoever is looking or whoever is running for office. They cannot do it for that. They cannot use the lives of people that are suffering and not acknowledge it. That is one of our biggest things right now; everyone needs to be aware. If you are going to hashtag something, if you are going to say you stand for something, at least stand with the people that are actually suffering. Victor: Just to add one more thing, our trial actually starts October 18 at Brooklyn Supreme Court for Wayne Isaacs, the officer who murdered our brother. We ask anyone and everyone to support that. Attend the courts. We try to pack the court as much as possible just to let the system know that we are holding them accountable. Not just the families [but] as a community, as a unit, as a whole, collectively, everyone. We will do the same for any other families or any other situation that needs to be rectified. We are standing together, and we want everyone to please support everything that we are doing.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We’re now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators, and educators, not only about how to resist, but how to build a better world. This interview has been edited for length.
Patrick Blanchfield: I am Patrick Blanchfield, a freelance journalist and writer who writes about violence and guns in American culture and politics. I am also an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Sarah Jaffe: We have talked before about how hard it is to have a discussion about guns, gun violence, and mass shootings in the framework of resistance. To start off, I thought I would ask you about the discourse that happens after these mass shootings and the lack of political demands on one side and the political demands that are assumed by the people left of center? PB: The thing that is really striking to me in the wake of all these mass shootings . . . is realizing how much of what people articulate as their immediate political desires are really: “This is how I would like the world to be otherwise. I would like to have a world in which this doesn’t happen. I would like to have a world in which there is no gun violence.” There is a temptation in that space to immediately endorse certain policy propositions. You are so wedded to that outcome that people who are otherwise very self-reflective leftists wind up sounding a lot like proceduralist law enforcement national security Democrats or even “moderate” Republicans. So, if we want to frame this in terms of resistance, the way to think about resistance and gun violence that is the most helpful is to actually resist the immediate framing of it and try to come up with a different handle on it. SJ: Yes, and that is a really tough thing. We are unfortunately, horrifically, used to these things happening now. We know the political slots we are supposed to fall into, and people tend to talk as if there is a fully fleshed out “gun control” framework that is only being held up by the Republican majority in Congress or by NRA donations. PB: There is some way in which it is immensely emotionally satisfying and [politically] necessary to see when liberal journalists share that such and such a congressman got ten thousand dollars last year from the NRA. Such and such congressman got fifteen thousand dollars. That is [indicative] of how corrupt our system is and the character of regulatory capture, but on another level, if that were all that was in play, then, it is not a lot of money. That is a couple of dinners at a D.C. steakhouse. Then, the left would just be like, “Give that same Congressman twelve thousand dollars. Give them sixteen thousand dollars. Just outbid the NRA,” but clearly something else is going on because that is not happening. . . . There are anti-gun forces out there that are fairly well moneyed [but] they are not doing that. It doesn’t seem to work. SJ: One of those people that is ostensibly in this gun control space is Michael Bloomberg who was the mayor of New York under the stop-and-frisk regime that was ostensibly about guns. The whole justification for [the] racist stop-and-frisk policy by the New York Police Department was to find guns. Michael Bloomberg is the tenth richest person in the world. He could easily buy some congressmen if it was about money. The policies that he would put forward as “gun control” are concerning—to say the least. PB: The moment guns enter the mix, people have this immediate aversive or really enthusiastic response one way or another that has actually been documented by psychologists. I hold up a photo of a gun in a cognitive psychology lab [and] people are going to have a reaction. . . . It is a super over-coded object. Even saying the word does stuff to people. There are a lot of us who have very sophisticated politics about things like policing [and] misogynistic violence. . . . [but] the trick is to understand that the phenomenon and the landscape of gun violence is an organic continuation of the broader landscape of other kinds of violence in this country, and just because guns are in the mix doesn’t mean that we should suddenly endorse carceral solutions that we wouldn’t [endorse] for other things. The trick is to not fall into the trap of that immediate desire for a knee-jerk response. SJ: We have gotten to the point where just a regular old mass shooting isn’t even spectacular enough to get national news coverage. It has to be something like Las Vegas—which is the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. We are not really having a conversation; we are having a war of statements. But, we only have any of this when there is something so horrific that people feel forced to respond. SJ: Two concepts that I want to have people feel more intellectually limber about, but also capable of thinking their own way through emotionally are gun violence . . . and mass shootings. In mainstream media, [you will oftentimes see numbers] about gun violence or mass shootings . . . that if you push [on] will reveal some really striking agenda-driven . . . omissions. To take one really good example, a lot of people [and] journalists will cite figures on gun homicide that exclude killings by police. So, the question is: What are we obscuring and what are we gaining politically by comparing ourselves to states that we don’t really resemble versus ones that we actually do? The answer is a type of erasure of the real political asymmetries of power and racial difference in the United States. SJ: The piece that you wrote at n+1 in response to this latest mass shooting was to point out that the thing about mass shootings that is horrifying to the average person—who doesn’t worry about the more everyday gun violence that happens in a lot of places—is that it’s a moment when there is nothing in our systems of inequality that can protect you; it’s a random person shooting random people on the street PB: The definition of mass shooting . . . is a moving target. [According to the] FBI what constitutes a mass shooting . . . [is when] four or more people are killed in a single setting by one shooter.[] But, if you were to ask a newscaster, a well-intentioned person, they would tell you it is a shooting [spree] in a church, a school, a college campus, or a business park. If you have seventeen people shot in fifteen minutes, non-fatally [at] a block party in New Orleans . . . that is, technically speaking, not a “mass shooting.” Certainly not a mass shooting that is reported as such in the mainstream media. The question then becomes: How do we think about this other category of gun violence in a way that accommodates [the] spectacular acts of violence in Vegas, Sandy Hook, [and] in so many other places but that also doesn’t take them as a radical exception from a norm just because [the latter] happen more often than not to involve white people or wealthy people or people who—this is the implicit logic—“shouldn’t expect to get shot.” SJ: Trump has used Chicago as an example of a horrifically violent place that has a lot of guns. His response—which is an applause line at his ongoing campaign rallies—is to threaten to send in the military.[] We see this from Trump regularly in response to the idea of gun violence but also from Democrats who run cities like St. Louis. The response to “regular” gun violence is to just arm the cops more, and the response to spectacular mass shootings is, “We need gun control.” PB: It is a weird cognitive dissonance because people who are otherwise extremely intellectually sophisticated vis-à-vis things like the war on drugs or occupation-style policing will not . . . question who is going to be going door to door collecting the guns if we want to do an Australian-style buyback—which, of course, we would never do. But, if we do want to take away all the guns, what [would be] the mechanism? I am not trying to bog us down in the policy, but do we actually think that the enforcement of that will not, in and of itself, [entail] the same horrible injustices and unnecessary violence that our other mechanisms of enforcement do? If we just say, “We are going to stop and frisk black people because they may have drugs,” a lot of liberals are like, “No, no, no.” But because it is guns, suddenly, we are like, “Okay. Do it. Go for it.” SJ: We saw John Lewis, of all congresspeople, leading this sit-in on the floor of the House for including no fly list data in gun background checks. PB: That basically means that if you are in any of several highly opaque, incredibly faulty, and constantly metastasizing government databases, you can’t fly and you can’t buy a gun. [I have profound respect for] John Lewis, but it is one of those points that I am like, “Is this the best we can hope for: ‘gun control’ that basically is just another vector for expanding the security state?” The job of leftists is to demand something other than that. SJ: I was reading interviews with the people at the gun shop in Vegas where Stephen Paddock bought his guns from and they were like, “Yes, he passed the background check. He had never had any criminal offenses.” One of the most common predictors for this kind of gun violence is domestic violence. When we are talking about a warning sign like domestic violence—which is highly likely to be not reported to police in the first place—it would not show up on a background check of a lot of people. People are talking about background checks, background checks have got to be the thing. This guy passed them all. PB: People doing shoe-leather reporting went to the local Starbucks where [Paddock and his girlfriend] got coffee, and the baristas [said], “Oh yeah, he is the guy who treated his partner like trash every morning.” This goes to that point where gun violence—whether it be mass shootings or partner murder—is an organic continuum with other kinds of violence in society. . . . In spaces that are already saturated with violence [guns] precipitate or accelerate lethal outcomes. So, whatever our politics are going to be in terms of our responses to gun violence as a category, it has to be coherent [with] our consciousness of those other, broader kinds of violence—rather than just trading one kind of violence for another. It is not like police don’t have a problem with domestic violence in their homes. SJ: One of the things you were watching on the day after the shooting in Las Vegas was, of course, the gun stocks going up. PB: Arms, as an industry, thrives on people using arms. This is another thing that a lot of specifically white liberals should not view with contempt. When people feel unsafe, when there is the possibility of physical harm—and particularly when you can’t trust the authorities to vindicate your own desire for safety [or when] the authorities may be a source of threat—people make decisions that, from the perspective of those who are more secure, may seem foolish. They may choose to arm themselves, . . . [and] I have a very hard time begrudging them for making that choice. Yes, the desire to be the person who pulls a gun on a mass shooter to save [themself] is [opposed to] reams of data that say, “That won’t work. You are more likely to get killed by cops.” But people are still in this hard spot where they have to make a choice—and so they buy guns. There is a way in which the arms industry—which exists thanks in no small part to federal government subsidies—caters to that. But there is also a way in which simply focusing on the manufacturers [that] reap an outrageous profit or focusing on the NRA occludes the fact that people are buying their product regardless of the byzantine politics of lobbying or the subliminal messaging of ads; they are doing it because they feel unsafe. Unless we have a politics that can address those material and emotional conditions of unsafety, people are still going to be buying guns. SJ: We don’t have a society that makes people feel safe and protected. Obviously, as we mentioned about domestic violence, I think it is worth noting that most of these mass shooters are men—but this points to the bigger, scarier social questions that we have to grapple with. We don’t have a bill we can pass through congress to abolish patriarchy. PB: I read a lot of gun-centric publications, industry material, and scholarly lit. It is striking how super gendered it all is. It seems crude to say, [but] for a certain sector of the populace, guns are just their big penises. You see an ad from Bushmaster just prior to the Sandy Hook shooting that was very literally like, “Get your man card back. Buy an AR-15.” If that were in a satirical novel, you couldn’t have a more on the nose “Hey men! Do you feel castrated? Here, buying this gun will remasculinize you.” SJ: My favorite was the politician who had the bacon on the gun barrel. PB: It was Ted Cruz! The image of Ted Cruz’s face eating steaming bacon off the barrel of a machine gun—the sizzling and the grease—it’s going to haunt me for the rest of my days. Also, this implicates a lot of discourse on the left [of], “Well, we just need sufficiently, militantly armed leftists.” I would happy to talk about the role of weapons in leftist organizing over the past century—and that is not a thing to be diminished—but, on another level, I have yet to see a single study that says that leftist men are less likely to shoot their partners. SJ: We have been talking a lot about what doesn’t work and which solutions are too easy to reach for in these moments. I do want to turn to questions of what can be done. In moments like this, a lot of people want to do* something. What are some of the things that you have seen that are doing something that seems positive about the broad issue of guns, violence, healthcare, and safety in America? PB: There [are] two parts. One is just [to] resist the frame. . . . Instead of even falling into the wormhole of gun control debates on the national level, think about gun deaths on the local level. Think about who in your community is the most vulnerable to winding up dead because of a bullet. When you start asking that question, you see some really surprising grassroots coalitions [across the country] coming into being [or having been in operation for some time] that are doing really substantive things [to help] lower [the] toll of violence. One: Where is the activism happening? Two: Where is the room for actual interventions that are meaningful? I won’t get too inside baseball, but the way[s] in which gun laws have taken shape—particularly over the last thirty or forty years—means that most [meaning] interventions are happening on the state or . . . municipal levels. That is legislatively but also in terms of activism. If you are in a place like Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, or numerous [other] municipalities, the major driver of gun deaths is “gang violence,” retaliatory violence between social sets that have no course of vindication through law. There is a robust panoply of activist groups that are [working on] this. One example is MASK (Mothers Against Senseless Killing) or . . . Mothers of the Movement, which is an organization of mothers of various high profile young black men and women who have been killed by vigilantes or police. There are church groups that will . . . patrol the streets at night and talk to people—which, surprisingly, has a real effect. There are a variety of church groups that will also do things like gang outreach . . . not involving the police, which is particularly helpful. [They] know who the young men are in [their] neighborhood who are likely to commit an act of violence and when [they] hear through the grapevine that there is something that has happened for which [someone is] going to retaliate, someone from the church calls them up and says, “Do you really want to do this?” and that stops it. That doesn’t necessarily involve the police, your local senator, or . . .the Democratic Party, but it actually can be meaningful. A good place to go if you are in an urban setting is to find out what the black churches are doing. If you are in a more rural space, the leading drivers of gun deaths are [likely] suicides and domestic violence. There are surprising activist groups and coalitions that are emerging. For example, in New Hampshire, Kentucky, [and elsewhere], there is something called The Gun Shop Project, which [involves] gun store owners talking to people who come into their shops. They have been trained by medical professionals to look for signs in people who are near suicide, and all they do is ask them, “Do you really want to buy this gun or do you want me to hold it a couple of days?” A lot of people are like, “Oh my god. Gun shop owners, they are icky.” Sure, you can feel that way, but at the point at which [someone] is taking a sobbing woman or man away from the counter, [saying], “You don’t need this right now. How about you come in the back and have a cup of coffee and call your doctor,” that is a real intervention. There is room for straight up voting and calling your Senators and for all of that. There is a way in which mass shootings . . . are a trap. I am not saying they are false flags. They are very, very real. I am saying that discursively [and] politically, we have this immense desire to do something in reaction to them that feels emotionally proportional to the horror that they have given us. When you see sixty people dead, it is an understandable emotional view [to say], “I want to take all those guns and I want to melt them into the biggest statue ever.” That is fine, but there is a way in which—given how the news cycle works and given the way in which parties make money, whether they [are] the parties like the Democratic Party or the Republicans or [groups] like the NRA—simply embracing that impulse actually just perpetuates the same sort of status quo. The reality [is] that there are a ton of things that can lower gun deaths that are not necessarily the same as gun control. For example, the need for trauma centers on the south side of Chicago. You need a Level 1 trauma center in order to vastly increase the likelihood that people who have been shot are not just going to bleed out, [and activists fought for one on the south side of Chicago]. That is an investment of money and infrastructure that has to come from some governmental body and that is something that people can fight for. Ditto for various national-level programs that will foster that type of gang intervention [work]. . . . If you want to create national level change on this, you need to, unfortunately, check your very understandable desire for single dramatic gestures in favor of viewing the broader phenomenon of gun violence as a disparate collection of individual at-risk groups—each of whom can be helped with different targeted interventions. SJ: To wrap up, when we point out the structural causes of this, they are the same ones that lead to us not having a universal healthcare system. They are the same structural causes that are causing all sorts of the inequalities that we live with every day. To deal with “gun violence” as an issue, we have to deal with inequality on micro and macro levels—from the fact that the Southside of Chicago didn’t have a Level 1 trauma center to the fact that we don’t have a functioning healthcare system in this country, leading Las Vegas officials to set up a GoFundMe to help the people who were shot in this moment. PB: It is understandably morally frustrating that, on this issue, you wind up finding the exact same depressing structures that we otherwise confront . . . . There are no simple easy answers, but there are answers that require work and time. One some level, why would we expect otherwise? [The system is never going to accommodate] radical change. . . . Don’t get me wrong, I will show up for the dictatorship of the proletariat that is going to eliminate gun violence through income redistribution. But, absent that, we need to have something . . . other than just a knee jerk utopianism that just gets hijacked in the favor of a really deadening status quo. SJ: On that note, how can people keep up with you? PB: I am on Twitter at @PatBlanchfield. I have got links there. I freelance, so I have got a site that is www.carteblanchfield.com. Anyone who wants to follow me on [thos] spaces [are] more than welcome.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
[] The FBI has never formally defined “mass shooting;” however, they defined “mass murder” as “a number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders. These events typically involved a single location, where the killer murdered a number of victims in an ongoing incident.” In 2013, though, federal statues began defining “mass killing” as three of more people killed, regardless of the weapon used. [*] In January, President Trump threatened on Twitter to “send in the Feds” if Chicago did not address the number of shootings in the city. Then White House press secretary Sean Spicer later claimed this could mean a great deal of things, including the dispersal of “aid.”
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. We’re now several months into the Trump administration, and activists have scored some important victories in those months. Yet there is always more to be done, and for many people, the question of where to focus and how to help remains. In this series, we talk with organizers, agitators, and educators, not only about how to resist, but how to build a better world. Javier Morillo: My name is Javier Morillo and I live in Minnesota. I am the president of [Service Employees International Union (SEIU)] Local 26, and I am originally from Puerto Rico; that is where I grew up. Sarah Jaffe: Things were not great in Puerto Rico before the hurricane flattened it. Give us a little background on the so-called “debt crisis,” the PROMESA bill, and U.S.-imposed austerity in Puerto Rico. JM: What is terrifying about what is [happening] on the island now is that the situation was so precarious before the hurricane hit, and it was precarious for completely human-made reasons. Puerto Rico is in a debt crisis. When [Donald Trump] finally started tweeting about Puerto Rico, he mentioned the debt twice. Your readers would be familiar with the foreclosure crisis and how that was caused by Wall Street’s predatory loans. It was a very similar situation in Puerto Rico—municipal bonds in Puerto Rico are triple tax free, meaning there are no local, state, or federal taxes on them. So they are very attractive to a lot of investors. Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, and the investment firms had been pushing investors to buy these up because they know that, because of Puerto Rico’s colonial status, Puerto Rico [and its] municipalities cannot declare bankruptcy.[1] They were betting on the island’s inability to pay, and that is, indeed, sort of what happened. What made things worse was that in in 2016, Congress passed the PROMESA bill. It is the Puerto Rico Oversight Management, [and] Economic Stability Act. In the grand tradition of Congress giving acronyms that mean the opposite of what they do, promesa means promise in [English]. . . . One of my congressmen here in Minnesota is Keith Ellison [is] a progressive stalwart [and a wonderful ally] . . . on the Financial Services Committee. I spoke with him quite a bit about this. The way the Obama administration pitched the need for PROMESA was that this was the only thing that could be done to rescue the island. It sets up the Financial Oversight Board, which has been imposing austerity. One of the things I heard as a pitch for PROMESA was one of the Puerto Rican members of Congress saying [something like], “Oh, well, the island is being bought up by rich people, and it will be essentially an island without Puerto Ricans.” What I said to Congressman Ellison at the time [was], “Well, that is going to happen either way the way things are going right now.” The thing to do at that moment, rather than pass PROMESA, was to call the question and then [for Puerto Rico to] default, really call the colonial questions of this issue that Puerto Rico [and its] municipalities cannot declare bankruptcy. Instead, they have been imposing austerity. There is an unelected junta. It is called an oversight board in English, but people on the island refer to it as the junta—which I think is more appropriate. We should all call it that because it sounds like the military dictatorships of Latin America, and that is essentially what it is. The governor has to submit to the junta and they are imposing austerity. The center of the debt crisis is the electric power company. The hurricane has knocked out power over the whole island—and, on top of that, this is a utility company that last year was literally cutting off the electricity [to] hospitals and endangering the lives of people because the hospitals were in debt to them and they are in debt to Wall Street creditors. People can look up a lot of the amazing research that Refund America and the Action Center on Race and the Economy have done on Puerto Rico, the financial research behind what I am talking about now, because a lot of that debt is actually most likely illegally incurred. The constitution of the island forbids debt that requires payment beyond 30 years and they very clearly surpassed that.[2] So, there is precedent for a judge to decide that the debt was incurred illegally. It is not the responsibility of taxpayers. So, if we actually got the island to be repaying the principal of the debt rather than all of this interest . . . [many] of the billions of dollars the island owes [are just interest and fees] that they owe to Wall Street for the very products they should not have been selling the island. SJ: Before we dig into what can be done, what are you hearing from people on the ground in Puerto Rico right now? The reports we are seeing is that it could be months and months without power. Trump seems like he is in no hurry to do anything. And a lot of people in the United States don’t even seem to realize that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. JM: My parents are on the island. For the first few days after the hurricane, it was near impossible to get in touch with anyone. I had sporadic texts and contact. I was just able to speak to my parents in the last couple of days on the phone. They were prepared for the worst, and I would say from what everything I am hearing, it feels worse than anything anyone could have imagined. There is no power anywhere. My sister, we communicate through either WhatsApp or text when she has a signal. She is asking us to send her news stories because they have such little access to the media. They have no power. I am just frankly terrified. [On September 24], the governor of Puerto Rico had a press conference where [he gave] a pretty positive face to everything that was happening, but [he] also mentioned that there were [nine] municipalities that they had not had any contact with, at least as of [September 24]. The island is one hundred by thirty-five miles. It is a very small island. To me, when I hear that [nine] municipalities have no contact with the central government, that sounds very suspicious to me—and terrifying. I know some of them are underwater. I don’t know what the casualties are or anything. There are very few flights coming in and out of the island. Honestly, I am just frankly very afraid that we are going to have to find a way to get my family off the island and not have a way to do that. I know that many, many other people are feeling the same way. SJ: I was reading this morning about how the Trump administration has to lift a regulation on ships coming in to Puerto Rico, and they are not doing that.[3] There does not seem to be any sense of emergency—perhaps not surprisingly—from this administration on this front. JM: The historical root of this is in Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States [and] the Jones Act of 1917.[4] The Jones Act made Puerto Ricans American citizens. We are born American citizens; although, when we live on the island, we cannot vote for the President of the United States who sends us to war or for the Congress that can do things like create a junta to run the island. [Then there’s] the Jones Act [or the Merchant Marine Act of 1920], which is a maritime act. It prohibits any foreign vessels [traveling from a U.S. port] from entering the ports in Puerto Rico. This also applies in Hawaii.[5] Puerto Rico cannot [independently] make any trade deals with any other countries, any other bilateral trade deals with anyone else. . . . What foreign products do come onto the island, they must first arrive in cargo containers to Florida [or elsewhere], and then they are moved from the foreign cargo ship onto an American cargo ship and then brought over. Then, they are taxed in that move. So, products arrive on the island already more expensive than they would be [otherwise]. One of the things that they have apparently done in the past with similar disasters is to waive the ban on foreign vessels arriving in the ports. That is [a] temporary solution. The more fundamental problem is the Jones Act [of 1920] itself. It contributes to the debt crisis. When you do the math on how much more Puerto Ricans [have paid] in taxes for goods that [have] come onto the island over the years, it dwarfs the debt. That is the historical root of the problem. Then, the situation today of: What are the many things that need to be done in the short-term to fix what is going on there? SJ: There was already organizing going on around PROMESA and the debt crisis that you were a part of. Looking at this now, people are organizing to call Congress just to say, “Get Puerto Rico some aid,” but what are the short, medium, and long-term goals for applying pressure on this administration? JM: I have been thinking about this a lot. . . . We don’t have a progressive or a left “shock doctrine,” as Naomi Klein calls it. The right has a program in place for how to take advantage of moments like this. What I am terrified about on the island right now is that . . . when you look at what junta has done and everything else, this is an opportunity for the wealthy one percent of the United States and the global one percent to make Puerto Rico into a playground the way Cuba was in the 1940s and 1950s for the U.S. rich, and we will have an island of Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans. To me, the question is: What do we do in the short and medium-term that is some semblance of a shock doctrine for our side? If we are going to rebuild Puerto Rico, how do we do it in a way that is right for the people of Puerto Rico? Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good answer for how we do the short-term in a way that sets up the long-term. There are organizers on the ground. One affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy in the United States has set up a fund. It is MariaFund.org. They have been doing base-building work on the island for some time, especially in the poorer areas and the coastal areas that have been devastated twice with Irma and now with Maria. That is who I have been encouraging people to donate money to because I trust the work that they do; it is directed at the most vulnerable and [at] actual social transformation on the island, with a focus on . . . the communities of African descent on the island. Right now, what I am frantically trying to figure out with other Puerto Ricans on the mainland, other Left and progressive Puerto Ricans, is: How [can] we direct resources and how [can] we direct help with that medium and long-term vision in place? Thankfully, because of the work that has been happening before, which you have mentioned, and the Refund America work on the debt crisis, there is a lot more awareness in the United States of what is happening on the island. Nowhere near enough, but it is time to call the question. My hope had been that the financial crisis would be a moment on the island where we would transcend the politics of status. Everything on the island . . . [is] defined by the political status of the island. You are either a statehood [person], or you are a commonwealth person, or you are pro-independence. That is the dialogue that has been happening for decades. My father is much more conservative politically than I am. But he has a very keen anti-Wall Street analysis of what has been [happening] on the island. I think we have an opportunity to unite people across the political spectrum . . . on a message of how Wall Street has screwed the island up til now, and now we have to fight back. That is what I am hoping that we can use this opportunity for, but I have to say this is a really, really difficult time. SJ: Short-term, people can demand that this administration speed up aid, but is there anything else that people should be thinking about right now? JM: The way FEMA normally works just will not work on the island. FEMA, when there is a disaster in Texas or Florida, frees up local municipalities, local governments, counties, or cities to put out contracts for private contractors to come in and do debris removal, for example. Then, FEMA reimburses the municipalities.[6] In Puerto Rico, that is not going to work for multiple reasons. One, in Texas and in Florida, you had people driving from all over the country with trucks. Anybody had this kind of a business could go down and do that. People can’t get to Puerto Rico to do that. Then, two, the municipalities are bankrupt. They are literally bankrupt. There is going to have to be an actual complete rethinking of how FEMA works in Puerto Rico for this crisis. I think the immediate calls of action for members of Congress is . . . for very rigorous oversight for how FEMA is working in Puerto Rico so that it is working for Puerto Ricans. I saw a FEMA website where they encourage Puerto Ricans to “follow this link to sign up for disaster relief aid.” People don’t have internet in Puerto Rico. It was like, “if you don’t have internet, call this number.” They also don’t have phones. I read things like that, and I just get increasingly panicked that they have no idea what they are doing on the island. SJ: Because Puerto Rico doesn’t have the same kind of representation in the United States that other U.S. citizens have, are there any members of Congress who have taken interest in this and could be looked at to be pushing for some sort of solution here? JM: The members of congress who are Puerto Rican by descent have obviously led on all kinds of issues. Nydia Velazquez in New York. Congressman Luis Gutiérrez has been particularly good from a progressive perspective. He opposed PROMESA. We are looking to his leadership. Really, what I would say is, regardless of who you are represented by, hearing from U.S. citizens on the mainland that they are concerned that U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico are not getting proper assistance is just good in terms of raising the level of alarm in D.C. about this. I would just say, “[Talk] to your elected representatives about it.” SJ: I want to switch gears a little bit because there is also some good news this week. You are organizing workers in Target’s backyard. Target announced that it is going to raise its minimum wage across the company to $15 an hour by 2020. Give us a little background about how that happened and what the workers you represented are feeling right now. JM: SEIU 26 and our community partners here in Minnesota have been a part of the Target story for some years now. For years we were battling Target. A workers’ center called CTUL here, the Center for Workers United in Struggle, for years had a campaign with the retail janitors who clean inside Target stores. The people who clean Target’s corporate offices have been members of SEIU Local 26, my union, for many years and, today, they make over $15 an hour. The janitors who work retail, at the stores, were, when the campaign began, making minimum wage. We had a very hostile relationship with Target for many years that eventually just changed. It switched, and they decided to take a different approach to us and to organizing. They eventually adopted a responsible contractor policy that resulted in SEIU Local 26 organizing the first retail janitorial market in the country. Across the country, SEIU represents commercial office janitors, [and for] the janitors who clean inside stores, the standards are very, very low. Beginning with Target and then moving to Macy’s and other retailers, we have the first master contract that represents hundreds of workers that clean inside retail stores. Since then, our relationship with Target has been one that on local policy issues, they have taken a different approach than the rest of the business community. When it came to us passing our sick and safe time legislation, their vice president for labor relations was a co-chair of the city committee in Minneapolis that made the recommendation for earned sick and safe time. They told us, “We are not just going to say ‘no.’ We are going to try to work with the community and figure out what the best thing is for us and the community.” I know from my conversations [with folks I know at Target] that happened since their announcement that this decision actually came pretty quickly. Just this past summer in Minneapolis, we passed a fifteen dollar minimum wage. After that, there was a conversation within Target about what they needed to do to be competitive in the job market, and they took a serious look at a lot of their lowest paid employees who have to have second or third jobs [but that might be unnecessary] if they paid a higher wage. So they made this announcement. The ironic thing is that Target workers in Minneapolis will be reaching the fifteen dollar mark before the city ordinance requires Target to do so. But the fact that they are doing it nationwide [when] the vast majority of places are nowhere near that minimum wage is actually astounding. I hope it is a harbinger for other big companies to say that they have to make investments in their workforce so that we can expand this conversation. I always like to remind people [that] there is a debate between politicians now about who gets to take the most credit over fifteen dollars. The answer is, “None of you.” Fifteen dollars began as a demand of fast food workers on their private sector employer. It later became, in Seattle and elsewhere, a minimum wage demand. Now, we have [one of] the first major Fortune 500 corporation instituting a fifteen dollar minimum wage. The fact that they use that number—we don’t get a lot of opportunities to celebrate victories, and this is a victory people should celebrate. Workers who struck, fast food workers, when they went on strike at first and demanded a fifteen dollar wage, people scoffed at them—publicly and in the press. Other labor unions would say, “That is a crazy demand.” Now, that has become the standard by which we judge wages in this country. It is just a phenomenal thing, and people should think of that when we talk about how the trials and tribulations of the labor movement—and there are many. Workers organizing and fighting on the streets, they dared to dream big and are now changing the world. That is an amazing thing. SJ: On that note, how can people keep up with you and your union and also with the work that is being done around Puerto Rico? JM: The easiest way to follow me is on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @JaviMorillo and our SEIU 26 handle is @SEIU26. For the work on Puerto Rico, www.MariaFund.org is a good place to put resources into base-building work in Puerto Rico in some of our poorest communities there. . . . To really understand the financial crisis to go to www.acrecampaigns.org. ACRE is the Action Center on Race and the Economy. They have a series of white papers, really well researched work on Wall Street and Puerto Rico. You will learn scary, scary things by going there but really understand how multifaceted the crisis there is.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
[1] While Puerto Rico remains legally barred from formally declaring bankruptcy under Chapter 9, in May the government of Puerto Rico did petition for relief under Title III of the PROMESA law, which contains certain Chapter 9 bankruptcy provisions but also recognizes that, unlike the other entities that can use Chapter 9, Puerto Rico is not part of any state and must be treated as a sovereign in some ways. Title III is an in-court restructuring based on U.S. bankruptcy code, but it has never been used before. [2] The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico forbids the issuance of municipal bonds that mature after more than thirty years—unless the bond is issued for housing facilities, in which case bonds can mature up to forty years after the date of issuance. [3] On September 28, President Trump authorized the temporary exemption of Puerto Rico from the Jones Act, allowing for the expedition of shipping much-needed aid supplies into Puerto Rico. [4] There are two different laws regarding Puerto Rico that are commonly referred to as the Jones Act. There is the Jones-Shaforth Act of 1917 that granted U.S. citizenship to anyone born in Puerto Rico on or after April 25, 1898, and then there is the Jones Act of 1920 (or the Merchant Marine Act of 1920), which dictates that only American ships can carry goods and passengers from one United States port to another. In addition, every ship must be built, crewed, and owned by American citizens. It is the latter act that’s been temporarily waived by the United States. [5] The requirements of the Jones Act of 1920 apply to all trade between ports in the U.S. mainland and noncontiguous territories, including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. [6] FEMA provides disaster relief through multiple channels, including through direct grants to individuals affected by natural disasters; however, they are often inconsistent in the dispersion of funds.
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. Since election night 2016, the streets of the United States have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this series, we’ll be talking with experienced organizers, troublemakers, and thinkers who have been doing the hard work of fighting for a long time. They’ll be sharing their insights on what works, what doesn’t, and what has changed, and what is still the same.
Molly Gott: My name is Molly Gott. I am a researcher with the Public Accountability initiative which is oftentimes called the LittleSis because that is the name of the power research database that we oversee. Sarah Jaffe: You are one of the people developing the new Map the Power project. Tell us a little bit about what this project is and what you aim to do with it. MG: It is called LittleSis because we are the opposite of Big Brother. So, instead of the state or governments looking down on you, we are activists, organizers, journalists looking up at the power structure. We specialize in doing what we call our power structure research. That is, really identifying and understanding the corporations, the super ultra-wealthy people, the elite class that wields a lot of power in our society and in our economy, and really digging in, understanding the relationships that they have and doing research that can help grow and support social movements. Map the Power is a project that trains folks to do that research and to support activists, organizers, and people who are newly politicized and looking to engage in social movements. [We focus on] power research that supports local organizing across a variety of issues. SJ: Tell us a little bit more about what you do in these trainings. Explain what power mapping is, for people who don’t know. MG: The key part of power mapping is going up the food chain and really understanding who wields power in our society. Thinking beyond traditional organizing targets, like elected officials. So, looking above those folks to identify the corporations that are donating to them? Which corporations are massive employers in our society and therefore wield a lot of influence? How are they connected to one another? We have a database called LittleSis.org that is like a Wikipedia-style database. Anyone can sign up for it, add information to it, and search for information on the one percent of America. Part of the idea of Map the Power grew out of that work we had done on training people to use that database, and its concepts. So much information is available on the Internet—anyone can do this kind of power structure research. Trump ran on this quasi-populist agenda, criticizing Wall Street and hedge fund managers and all that. But after the election we saw that he was surrounding himself with the very people that he was criticizing. At times even the more supposedly “moderate” members of the corporate class, who hadn’t supported him during the election, were kind of lining up behind him. They were excited about things like tax reform and the massive rollbacks of regulations and all these things that were going to really intensify income inequality. So as we were realizing that, we thought one key part of the resistance work is going to be understanding who those people—who those corporate players—really are, and how we can understand their network and organize to diminish their power. That was part of where the idea for it came from. At the same time, there were all these people who were looking to engage in organizing and in resistance in a deeper way. So, we also thought there needs to be lots of different kinds of structures to absorb those people and give them roles in our movement; which, for me, is one of the cooler parts of our project, like having archival librarians coming to our trainings, and people that are public health researchers or stay at home parents, who are like, “I can’t go to a march, but I can do research for two hours while my kid is napping in the afternoon.” So, we’re pairing people’s skillsets with power research which most groups don’t really have a lot of capacity to do. SJ: That is a really good point, that [resistance] isn’t necessarily just in the streets. Can you tell us about a couple of examples of campaigns that have used LittleSis and this kind of power mapping, so people can get a better idea of what it is? MG: I live in Philly. We have a crew of folks, the Map the Power Philly crew, that have been doing research about both the local power structure in Philly, and local ties to Trump. The first project that we did was on Trump’s corporate collaborators in Philadelphia. We went through and searched—“Who are the key donors to Trump in Philly? Who are people that he had created business relationships for? Who are people that were leading business councils or members of business councils that he was appointing?”—so as to really put those folks on display. We released that set of information ahead of May Day, when there were some actions happening in Philly. We wanted to bring the focus not just Pat Toomey, who is our Republican Senator, but also these local corporate villains that don’t really want to be publicly associated with Trump. That was one thing. Then, the other example of a particular person we have done a lot of work around, and worked with other groups around organizing— it is happening and is starting to happen at a bigger scale—is billionaire Stephen Schwartzman of Blackstone. We’ve been mapping out all the ways that Blackstone and Schwartzman touches down [‘interacts with’? ‘affects’?] in the economy, whether as a landlord or as an employer or as a financer of fossil fuel infrastructure. We want to show that it all leads back to this one guy. Part of understanding who rules our economy and who is responsible for the inequality that we see right now is pointing that out and really thinking about how we organize to diminish that power. SJ: You sent me the zine that you guys made to go along with this project. In there, you have a couple of examples of past movements and organizations that understood and valued the role of this kind of research. I wonder if you could talk about the role that research like this has played in different movements. I think a lot of people don’t really know that history. MG: I think some of the history that we were really inspired by when putting together this project was the SNCC’s—The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the role that their research department played in their strategy, which I didn’t really know a lot about at the time. Since then we started putting out some archival research about their department. There are some really interesting materials in there about the way that the SNCC field team and the SNCC research department worked together. A good example is this document called ‘the Mississippi structure’ that the research department put out. It was this really in-depth look at the question of who has power in Mississippi, and it tied things back from local struggles that are happening there to the Queen of England and massive banks. It looked at particular political figures that were on many power boards, which is what we call them sometimes. They had a really clear understanding of what they were up against in Mississippi—beyond just everyday racist folks that they were encountering on the streets. SJ: I think that is a really interesting point right now when we are looking at this resurgence of open white supremacy. You see these reactions—I forget who it was the other day who was like “I feel bad picking on these white supremacists because they are the poorest in society.” Research like this can actually show that that is not really true. MG: Yes, I think particularly in the last week it has been interesting because Trump’s business council shut down, and some CEOs publically distanced themselves from him a little bit after Charlottesville. JPMorgan Chase just gave a million dollars to groups saying that they are donating to fight white supremacy,[] but at the same time, the Business Roundtable which CEO Jamie Dimon chairs, just launched a massive advertising campaign for tax reform that is supported by the White House and by all the Republican leadership. I think [there] is also research showing that these [corporate] folks, [unlike the people] that were in the streets in Charlottesville, play both sides, and it is a little bit more obscured the way their white supremacy manifests. I think that is an important role of research right now. SJ: That is a good point, too. When we think about what organizing is and what movements are, we don’t tend to think about people behind computer screens or in libraries. We think of people in the streets. It is really useful to think about other ways that you can contribute and ways for people to target different types of power. MG: Yes. Some of my thinking around “What is the role of research in our movements?” came about because I was involved in building some of the jail support apparatus in Ferguson, and seeing the ways that actually attracted and gave roles in that movement to folks who maybe couldn’t do other things. It gave them a home to do political work. So, I was thinking about the way that research can do that, as well. We have been pushing folks, which has been really fun, to do more research into their community. In Philly, we have research pizza nights where we all just bring our computers and do a bunch of tasks really quickly. It is way more fun than just being by yourself behind a computer screen, for sure. SJ: You mentioned the tax reform issue. We have got plenty of things coming up. There is never any shortage of things coming up here. But are there any particular items on Trump’s agenda that you are keeping an eye on and that people should be watching to see who is pulling the strings? MG: The one project we are doing right now related to that is looking at the corporate beneficiaries and funders and backers of Islamophobia. We have been working with a set of volunteers and a couple other partner groups to look at [‘develop’?] a list of the most active Islamophobia-promoting groups right now. They are shooting through the roof in terms of activity now that Trump is in office. Really chasing back to “Who are their funders? Who are the key corporate people that really don’t want to be publicly associated with Islamophobia but are working behind the scenes to promote it?” I think that is one thing that is on our mind. And, of course, the tax reform stuff. Like you said, just because it has so many far reaching and catastrophic effects in terms of income inequality and the material conditions of folks’ lives. SJ: We know, from unfortunate experience, that just exposing people as being supporters of Trump or something like that wasn’t enough. There have to be other things that make them respond. Talk a little bit about the value of knowing who these people are and different ways that people have used that information to put pressure on these people? MG: I think one thing is understanding points of pressure to really hit them where it hurts, and understanding what they really care about, and where they are making their money. So, thinking about all of the tax loopholes, like the carried-interest loophole that Wilbur Ross and other private equity billionaires that Trump has surrounded himself with care about, and putting more energy into those things. That is what some of the groups are working on. Also, just thinking about the way that research like this can help inform direct action, and doing particularly more disruptive direct actions on these folks in a way that helps tell the story of how they are disrupting our lives. We have to disrupt them in the same way. Then, also, going into more escalated spaces, like their social clubs like with some of the stuff that the Government Sachs folks were doing around Steve Mnuchin’s art gallery on the Upper East Side.[*] I think there is an element of power research that goes into that, of understanding where their social networks are, as well. SJ: How can people take one of these trainings or get involved in doing this work? MG: We have online trainings and we do in-person trainings for folks, too, and have a variety of ways that people who are doing this research across the country can connect with and support one another. If you go to LittleSis.org/toolkit that is the best place to go. We have an Intro toolkit, postings of past training events, and a sign up form so you can get more information. SJ: How can people keep up with you? MG: You can follow LittleSis on Twitter. We are @twittlesis. That is mostly where my work is.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
[] JPMorgan Chase will give up to two million to “fight hate”—which is 0.7 percent of the $26.4 billion in revenue they earned for FY 2017—with $1 million to be split equally by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. [*] Steve Mnuchin owns a financial stake Fourcade LLC, whose address is 45 East 78th Street in Manhattan, home of the Mnuchin Gallery, which is run by his father Robert Mnuchin, a former partner at Goldman Sachs.
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. Since election night 2016, the streets of the United States have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this series, we’ll be talking with experienced organizers, troublemakers, and thinkers who have been doing the hard work of fighting for a long time. They’ll be sharing their insights on what works, what doesn’t, and what has changed, and what is still the same. Sarah Jaffe with Nina Turner:
Nina Turner: I am Nina Turner. I am a former state senator in the great state of Ohio and President of Our Revolution. Sarah Jaffe: We are talking on a Friday, nearly a week ago a whole bunch of white supremacist groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. What are your thoughts about what is going on, the national conversation on what has been happening since Charlottesville? NT: It is heavy. Lots of people are still very raw, and rightfully so. We saw white supremacist neo-Nazis descend on Charlottesville, Virginia; at night was the first display, Friday night with the tiki torches. It just brought back all the ugliness in terms of the history of this country of what the KKK-inspired groups did in the late 1800s. 1865, I believe, was when the KKK was founded—right after the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which set black folks free from slavery.These types of terrorist groups terrorized African Americans throughout the south. So, to come face to face with that kind of legacy in the twenty-first century is haunting, disturbing. . . . It just raises so many emotions. This is a heavy time for our country. SJ: I want to talk a little bit about the questions of building a really strong anti-racist left movement now, because it is obviously more important than ever when the president can’t bring himself to denounce neo-Nazis.[] I would like to hear your thoughts about the work that Our Revolution is doing, the work that other folks are doing, to actually build an anti-racist left. NT: Yes, that is so important. In Our Revolution, we have always had a social, political, economic, environmental justice screen through all of our work. In all of the work that we do, we are looking towards forming that more perfect union, but it is even more necessary now in the face of such overt racism. And other groups, too, Democracy for America, Democratic Socialists of America, National Nurses United, you name it. There are so many formal groups out there doing this work. Black Lives Matter. The Brennan [Center]. The institutes that write [about] and study this kind of stuff. But, there are everyday people out there, too, who are dismayed, disappointed, and just as horrified that we would come face to face with this. So, our work and our push, we are going to continue to do the things that we have always done; whether it is Medicare for All, whether it is standing up to increase the minimum wage in this country to $15 an hour, whether it is talking about the private prison industrial complex that makes a profit off of keeping folks in prison. And we know that disproportionately those people are black and they are brown and they are poor. But we are also going to have a deeper conversation about institutional racism in this country, probably in ways that we might not have touched upon so deeply. We have to talk about that, because [alongside] neo-Nazis marching and KKK-inspired white supremacist groups marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, we still have systemic racism in this country. [And this] is very much a part of Our Revolution’s work, to work on changing systems that promote discrimination and bigotry in ways that hurt communities of color, particularly African American communities. When you look at wages, for example, people might not see the $15 minimum wage as a racial justice issue, but when you look at wages in this country and the fact that African American women make about sixty-three cents on every dollar that a white man makes, when you look at the fact that most African American households are led by women, then there is an economic and racial and social justice component to wanting to raise the wage. Now, as we talk about those issues, we are going to talk about those through that lens. It is bringing people together, too. We need some healing, too, because as bad as this is, we have always been a nation of progress. We have got to take the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of our history. We are not going to let a neo-Nazi-KKK-remix of the worst kind stop us from knowing and doing what we know it is we can do when we come together. We can’t allow ourselves to go backwards. SJ: That brings us to the People’s Platform. Looking at different countries, different places, things like the Vision for Black Lives platform—these kinds of policy platforms are becoming more and more common, progressives and leftists are them putting out. I wanted to talk a little bit about just the idea of putting together a platform, a list of policies that we are going to push for. NT: It is important because people need to see it. They need to be able to hold it in their hands if they want to, whether it is on a tablet or a piece of paper. It is the affirmation that we stand for this, that our value propositions will be expressed through public policy and that is really what the People’s Platform is. We decided to take legislation because we did want it to be tangible. Sometimes we talk about these issues in ways where people can’t see that they can be realized. The beautiful thing about the People’s Platform, and the coalition that we have of supporting organizations of the People’s Platform, is that it is tangible, it is real. The Education for All bill has been introduced.[] We know how important that is to make sure that we have a workforce that is highly educated and highly skilled. That is what this is about. It is about making that kind of investment. Medicare for All, which was the signature of Senator Sanders campaign. It is the foundation of what we do, which is affirming that we as a country can have Medicare for All, we can create an environment that doesn’t leave anybody behind, that is not attached to a job. To me, that kind of thing can spark an entrepreneurial spirit. If somebody knows that their healthcare is not tied to a job, they can dream bigger and they can do things that probably ordinarily they would not do. And what we are saying to the Congress, but particularly to the Democratic Party, particularly to the Democrats that serve in the Congress is “Here it is. Your members introduced these pieces of legislation. Sign onto them and let us show the people of this country, the folks of this country that this is what we stand for, this is what we are fighting for.” It is important to have all of these options, because for some people the environment might be the most important thing, to other people economic justice might be the thing, for other people racial justice. So we have something in the People’s Platform for everybody. SJ: You mentioned healthcare and Education for All bill. I think the Raise the Wage Act speaks for itself. Let’s talk about a couple of the other things on this platform, like the EACH Woman Act, because this has kind of been an issue of tension for a while, that Democrats are saying that abortion is not a litmus test for the party. I would love for you to talk about that particular one and the importance of saying, this is in fact a foundational issue. NT: It is important. People want to call it a litmus test. It is really just a value proposition that women in this country should have equal access to abortion coverage within their health insurance. To me, this goes within Medicare for All, but we have a separate bill. It is a medical procedure. It is something that we settled in this country and this should not be up for debate. It is a medical procedure. We want people to see it through that lens, that women should have the right to have an abortion and it should be safe, it should be legal, they should be rare. I don’t know many people jumping up and down saying, “Abortions for all!” Somehow we have lost ground on this debate because I think we talk about it in ways that don’t allow people, necessarily, on the other side who might bend a little, to fully understand this. It is a medical procedure. It is in that universe and the decision has to be made between the woman, her doctor, her family, whatever decision she makes, but it is a medical procedure and we have to protect women’s access to that. Now, in terms of litmus tests, there are some Democrats that are pro-life. I get it. But they shouldn’t legislate that. I grew up in a very religious family. My mother was an evangelist. I was taught as a very young girl that abortion is murder. Some people have been socialized that way through their religion. I get it. I respect their view. But I don’t want to have people who run for office legislate that way, they are going to take women back. There have been people like Vice President Biden, who is Catholic, and who has, at times, talked about this issue from a personal space. But he also understood that someone who holds the people’s power should not be doing things that hinder people’s abilities, that what we do with that power matters. Women have this right and it cannot be taken away. We have to affirm it. I see it through two different lenses. It doesn’t mean that a pro-lifer can’t run, but what it does mean is that I would want to see them commit to not legislating [against] abortion, the right to have one or not have one. Women make lots of decisions, it should be up to the women. Yes, that is firmly in the People’s Platform. SJ: The next thing on this list brings us back to an issue around Charlottesville. Let’s talk about voting rights and the decimation of the Voting Rights Act Attacks on the right to vote on all sorts of levels over the last several years have, among other things, helped put Donald Trump in the White House. NT: Oh my god, if people only knew. We should really use this moment as a teachable moment to go back through history—and not revisionist history. Let’s tell the truth that African Americans were terrorized just because they wanted to vote, just because they were fighting for liberation and equal rights in this country. It is just as simple as that. That is the stain on America. It is not the “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” The founders were brilliant, but they didn’t mean “all” when they wrote those words. But the fact that they wrote those words gives us leverage and gives us the opportunity in the twenty-first century to leverage those words. That is what we do. Voting is the greatest equalizer. It is one of the greatest equalizers that we have, because it is really truly the only space in this country, other than educational spaces—but that is a whole other thing—the only space where you can walk in, it doesn’t matter who you are, how much money you have, where you live, you are equal. You are on an equal platform. You have elected officials who are systematically, since President Obama was elected, chipping away. As a state senator, I served in the legislature in Ohio where my Republican colleagues introduced this piece of legislation, that piece of legislation, not to expand the franchise, but just chip-chipping away and “by coincidence” these bills had a voter suppression impact on guess who? People of color, poor people, students, even people who have disabilities. Imagine that. It just happened to be the people who tend to lean, you never know if somebody is going to decide if they get the chance to get there, but they happen to lean Democrat. It is a travesty for anyone who is elected to office, who serves in an elective office, to engage in voter suppression. We need to expand the franchise. That is what the Automatic Voter Registration Act is, just a simple, eloquent piece of legislation that requires every state to enroll every voter when they go get their driver’s license.[**] However, I would like to take that further—when people are born, let’s go and register them! Let’s get them registered there and then. How beautiful could that be? Democracy is stronger, is better, is more robust when people participate. We should want to encourage that. In 2016, during the presidential election, too many people opted out. They decided that they weren’t going to do it, for whatever reason. I think the voter suppression bill has something to do with it, gerrymandering has something to do with it. People do not believe that the system works on their behalf, they don’t trust politicians, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. They feel as though they have gotten a bad deal. And they are right. They are absolutely right. The work that we [have to] do in the political class, those of us I call the elected ministry, what are we going to do is motivate people, to not just mobilize them, but motivate them and remind them that this power is their power and that their voice does matter. There has been an erosion of that. I get why people are frustrated on all sides. There is a power class here within the Democratic Party and also the Republican Party that says, “We know better than you, Mrs. Jones and you, Mr. Gonzalez. We know better. We are going to tell you what to do and what to think. We are going to lock out black, working class men and women across the spectrum,” and people are tired of it. So they opted out during the presidential election year. If that doesn’t cause shockwaves for anybody that truly cares about this democracy— people are just saying, “I am over it and I don’t believe anymore”— then we are really in trouble. Saying to folks that their vote does matter, that their voice matters, and making it easier for them to access that ballot box, that is the way we should be going in the 21st century, not backwards. SJ: The one piece of the platform that is not actually an existing bill that has been introduced in congress is the climate change bill. I would love for you to talk a little bit about some of the things you would like to see in such a bill. NT: My climate experts have said environmental justice is a bigger umbrella, but I know that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is working on introducing that bill. Hopefully, it will be introduced this week. Global warming is a real threat to our communities, to everybody, to everything. What is our obligation to make sure that we secure Mother Earth for ourselves ad future generations? Within that bill that we will address the issues of reducing emissions and making sure that we have renewable energy. That is just one start to that bill, but overall, I want to see Our Revolution continue to push for the reduction of global warming, which I believe that the congresswoman’s bill will tackle, that we should get there by 2034. That we should work to get there, that we should encourage our fellow neighbors and the world to do the same thing, because we certainly cannot take on something like this by ourselves. The president, when he pulled out of the Paris Accord, what does that say to the world? Many of our Republican colleagues are just flat out ignoring the science. When the scientists get together and tell you that this is real, we ought to believe them. Just to flat out ignore that science puts us all in danger. Water is a part of that, too. We know that wouldn’t necessarily be in this bill, but just making sure that everybody in the United States of America has clean water. Hello, Flint, Michigan, which has been the canary in the coal mine for us, excuse the pun, in terms of us not having the types of infrastructure in this country that ensures that from every village, every township, every city, that everywhere in this country folks have access to clean water. We are going to keep pushing. We are going to do a whole umbrella, more than what this bill is going to do, but environmental justice is vitally important to the mission of Our Revolution. SJ: You famously took this platform to the Democratic Party and they didn’t treat you very well. I want to ask you about that. NT: No, they didn’t. I don’t know why. We had communicated with them three weeks earlier that we were coming. We let them know, “We are going to deliver the platform.” We had a press conference earlier that day near the Senate. We had Congressman Ellison speak, Congresswoman Jayapal spoke, Congressman Grijalva spoke, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard spoke. It was a beautiful thing and we just kind of went on a progressive stroll, so to speak. It was very calm, just kind of a walk over to the DNC—and to be greeted with barricades, to have security guards out there . . . It was just stunning. It didn’t have to go that way. The People’s Platform is really about the people and many of those bills were talked about in the progressive [DNC] platform that was passed last summer. It very much encapsulates what the Democratic Party said that it stands for. What happened there was truly unfortunate, but I hope beyond that moment, that day, that the Democratic Party will partner with the organizations who have signed on to the People’s Platform to both push and lobby all Democratic congressmembers who sign onto those bills so that we can make that progressive platform real and not just some pretty words that we got all excited about last summer at the convention. We can take those words and turn them into actions. This is really what people are looking for. It is bigger than what happened. It was unfortunate what happened at the DNC, but I want to take that and invite the DNC to join us on the People’s Platform. We had a little over 115,000 signatures on those petitions. People from all walks of life all over this country saying, “We want a People’s Platform and here it is. This is our will. Here it is. Join us in this effort.” SJ: I hate to say it, but it seems sometimes like the resistance to signing onto this stuff is not because people are opposed to the policies, but that they don’t like being pushed. NT: Well, my God. How do we get change if not by pushing? Women would have never gotten the right to vote without a fight, a push. My ancestors would not have been freed without a push. Let’s just think about what status quo has meant generation to generation to generation. All the great changes that we have ever had in this nation, for the most part, 99.9 percent of them came because people were pushed. People with the power were pushed. The status quo was pushed to change the environment by which people have to navigate. So, they might not like the push, but that is what they signed up for. They also signed up to listen to the voices of the people and hear what the people have to say. That power is temporary. It belongs to the folks in Ohio, it belongs to the folks in California or Michigan or Mississippi. The power does not belong to the person that holds the seat, whether it is local or federal. It belongs to the people. What we are saying is that we want the Democratic Party to reflect that, to be willing to put something on the line for the citizens of this country. They might want to call it a push. We want to call it a policy agenda. It is the People’s Platform. They should embrace it and fight for it. SJ: What are the plans going forward to organize people around this? Are there lobby days planned? Are there actions or anything like that? NT: We have had some lobby days. The members are on recess right now. So we have had lobby days across the country. Folks going and making phone calls. We are going to continue making calls. We are going to continue to visit offices and we are preparing for when the members are back. But we do have our membership all over the country making those calls, visiting the local offices. If their members are having any type of town halls, visiting their members there and expressing why the People’s Platform is important to pushing our nation forward in a very progressive way. This platform, even though it is being pushed by Democrats, it is not just for Democrats. It is for everybody. The overwhelming majority of Americans, if you take the label off and you just talk about the issue, they agree with these things, they want to see these things. I really very much want the Democratic Party to be the party that will have the bold agenda, and that is also willing to push this agenda forward, because if the Democrats won’t do it, then who will do it? We must continue this fight. That is what Our Revolution is about. We are about pushing issues, pushing progressive candidates, and transforming the Democratic Party, holding the Democratic Party accountable to the value proposition. Progress is not always pretty. Sometimes it is a little messy, but at the end of the day, if life is made better, if we can lift anybody a little higher, it is well worth the fight. That is what we do every single day. I hate to call it a slogan, but one of the things that really motivates us with Our Revolution is [how] Senator Sanders had the vision to call upon Americans to stand up and create a revolution across this country, to take back their voice. Campaigns end, but revolutions endure. This is a generational proposition. All of us have an obligation to make this space better for the next generation coming after us. This cycle repeats again. [The] next generation also has a moral obligation to push and make this country and this world better for the next. That cycle should be continued and continued, it should never end. The People’s Platform is our way of doing our part to push not only the Democratic Party, but to push the conversation in the political sphere about what it means to make this country better for everybody. SJ: How can people find the People’s Platform and get involved with this? NT: They can go to www.OurRevolution.com. When they go there, the People’s Platform landing page pops right up. There is also summerforprogress.com. They can find it there, as well. Please, I want everybody to get involved. Take whatever part of the People’s Platform that matters most to them and push for that. Collectively, if we are working towards this end, we are going to see things change in this country. I really do believe it. We can’t do it without the people. Join us. We want them to join us.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
[] Trump—who initially decried violence on “many sides” at the Charlottesville protest—did denounce racism as “evil” at a hastily assembled press conference the Monday after the protest, noting, “those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” The following day, he reversed course again, telling reporters at Trump Tower that there is “blame on both sides.” [] The College for All Act of 2017 was introduced in April by Senator Sanders and Representative Pramila Jayapal and would eliminate tuition and fees at four-year public colleges and universities for families making up to $125,000 and make community college tuition- and fee-free for all. [**] Under the Automatic Voter Registration Act of 2017, any citizen who interacts with a participating government agency— to get a driver’s license, apply for public services, register for classes at a public university, or become a naturalized citizen, etc.—would be automatically registered to vote unless they decline.
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. Since election night 2016, the streets of the United States have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this series, we’ll be talking with experienced organizers, troublemakers, and thinkers who have been doing the hard work of fighting for a long time. They’ll be sharing their insights on what works, what doesn’t, and what has changed, and what is still the same. In the wake of the white supremacist attacks on Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend, protests sprang up around the country. In North Carolina, a place laden with its own history of white supremacist violence, protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier outside of the Durham County Courthouse. Arrests and raids on activists’ homes followed and so have further protests in solidarity with those who took down the statue, including, on Thursday morning, an attempt by hundreds to march on the jail and turn themselves in to protest the arrests and to call for the charges to be dropped. Angaza Laughinghouse is a long-time organizer in the area, and he talks about the protests, the long fight against white supremacy in the South, and workers’ role in that struggle. Angaza Laughinghouse: My name is Angaza Laughinghouse. I am a long-time community activist and labor union leader. I’m the former president of the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union. I was a founding member of Black Workers for Justice. My parents are from Greenville, North Carolina. I grew up around the demarcation line for apartheid right there in Greenville, North Carolina. Line Street and Boundary Street. Boundary and Line Streets in Greenville, North Carolina were the demarcation lines for blacks and whites.
We had no public libraries in Greenville for the black community. We couldn’t cross over the line on Boundary Street to get to any of the facilities. No equal access to public facilities at all when I was growing up. Part of my life in Greenville, North Carolina. Sarah Jaffe: I think that is one of the things that is striking right now is how many people forget how close this history is. That it is not even history for lots of people. AL: Me, it is my life experience. SJ: In North Carolina, following the events in Charlottesville this weekend, people took it upon themselves to remove the Confederate statue in Durham. Tell us a little bit about what happened and the aftermath of that. AL: Well, obviously, people were angered Friday night when they saw those people marching around with those torches, those racist, white supremacist chants. We knew right then and there that that couldn’t happen without more people being engaged in this discussion and this fight to challenge this growing right wing popular movement, this white supremacist movement. Discussion started that weekend. By the time Saturday rolled around, everybody was on the phone—all the activists were—emails, texts communicating that this cannot stand without us responding to the death of our comrade there who was murdered, people who were injured. Then, later on, people were communicating about the young black man that was beaten [when] he went to the parking deck to retrieve his car. In that moment, people began talking about Sunday, that we’d have to mobilize across the State of North Carolina to tell them, to tell the world, that we weren’t going to let these fascist Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists just murder and injure and rally their forces to push this historic white supremacist outlook. That Sunday, we began planning the activity in Durham. We began planning, also, another activity in Raleigh. In Raleigh, we had a candlelight vigil in front of the Martin Luther King Jr. statue in the heart of the black community. [Hundreds of] people gathered to mourn the death of our comrade who was murdered and [the nineteen people who were injured]. Durham, as you know, had the other activity. Initially, we rallied to show some solidarity in action in terms of the freedom fighters that were attacked. It had a great impact on the community here. We talked about it. I know for a fact that on December 3 of last year the Ku Klux Klan tried to march in Raleigh to celebrate Trump. Some of them heard about the thousands of people who were gathering in Raleigh and decided to do a quick drive through a small rural town called Roxboro, North Carolina.[] So, we are accustomed here in North Carolina to them raising their ugly heads, ugly hate. There has been a long history of it here in North Carolina. SJ: After the rally in Durham and the statue being pulled down, I understand there have been arrests, that the police have been raiding people’s homes. Can you tell us a little bit about what has been happening? AL: Well, [after] the press conference which was held the day after the statue was pulled down, two [police officers] approached Takiyah Thompson of North Carolina Central University, a black student and also a long-time activist with several of the leading organizations that are a part of building a broader people’s assembly. They just came and they asked her, “Are you Takiyah Thompson?” And she said, “Yes.” They arrested her for the incident that had occurred. There was a group of people who surrounded her immediately after the press conference and they walked [with] her and told her, “We love you, and we have got your back,” as she approached the car that they put her in after they handcuffed her. The following day, they continued to round up individuals. One is a lawyer, Peter Gilbert, and one is a union organizer, Dante Strobino, and others. They are continuing to round up as we speak, picking them up. We are fortunate that we have a long history of working together in this community. We were able to acquire the legal services of a well-known social justice and criminal lawyer by the name of Scott Holmes. He is helping us get them out and process them as we try to pull together a team of lawyers to represent these freedom fighters that took down the statue. SJ: The governor, who is a Democrat, said that these statues should come down in the wake of this, right? AL: Yes. Yesterday, Governor Roy Cooper came out with an actual press statement outlining steps for the removal of all Confederate statues from state property. Under the leadership of Republican Governor Pat McCrory, whom Cooper defeated, they passed a law that states that they cannot move, replace, or relocate any of these historical confederate statues from any state property.[*] The governor wants to repeal this law that was passed by the majority Republican state legislature. The state legislature pushed a bill through the North Carolina House of Representatives that states they will not hold liable any driver driving a vehicle through any [unpermitted] protests. The governor is urging the senate not to pass this bill. He said that we need to make sure people don’t drive through demonstrations, that they can find some other route, and that they will be held liable because, otherwise, the [Republican] bill . . . [could] be used to [allow drivers to] injure other demonstrators and murder people, [turning] their vehicles into actual weapons. SJ: You were telling me that you have experienced that when you are organizing, that people try to run you down with a car. AL: One of the things that we do as a union is we oftentimes go to the workplaces, whether it is street maintenance or it is the sanitation yard—and usually they are in areas where people have to drive down a road to get into their workplace, to pick up their sewer trucks or equipment. While we are handing out the flyers, oftentimes some of the anti-union people, some of the people that have old white supremacist ideas are union haters, [will say,] “You goddamned union communist organizer . . .” They try to hit you. So, it is very important that the governor stops this and makes sure people are held liable as criminals when they hit or try to run over people as they hand out flyers in front of workplaces. It is not just a question of protests and rallies. In the “right-to-work” South, where less than three percent of all workers in North Carolina are unionized, there is a lot of anti-union feeling. This white supremacist thinking is institutionalized. It is everywhere. In the history, in the workplace. It is part of the anti-union, right to work climate. These supremacists who are now calling the county government telling them to prosecute these folks who pulled down the statue to the fullest extent of the law. It is fully institutionalized; it is systematic, this white supremacy thing. It is not just a few crazies as some people want to write it off. SJ: Could you tell us a little bit more about your history in North Carolina? You have been confronting this stuff for a long time. AL: Well, I haven’t been confronting it for a long time, but black people certainly have been confronting this for hundreds and hundreds of years. Whether it was lynchings or whether it was the Wilmington riots of 1898 where there was a populist moment down in Wilmington, North Carolina. That’s in the history books, where the white supremacists came, and they burned down a black newspaper, black businesses, and murdered and slaughtered black people in Wilmington, North Carolina. There has been a lot history of white supremacists and their violence since that is what they have always done. As I think back to those stories my grandmother told me while my dad was missing a portion of his chest, about how they robbed my great-grandfather’s store—way back around 1920s/30s down in Greenville, North Carolina—and threw the safe on my father’s chest. My dad had a big scar on his chest. He was missing a whole pectoral muscle. As I reflect upon that, peace and blessings be on my dad who passed in 2007. A long history of white supremacist violence.
What brought me back to North Carolina—although I have been here in North Carolina every summer of my life since I was born in 1952—was the murder of those five union organizers, political activists in Greensboro. This was the historic Greensboro Massacre of November 3, 1979, when the Klan came into a black community known as Morningside Heights and gunned down five community and union organizers who were having a rally there. There is a long history. Down [in] rural areas, particularly Newton Grove, Johnson County—more what we call the Black Belt region, where the African Americans [and farmworkers] live—it was very apparent the role that these white supremacists played in intimidating the workers. They would cheat them out of their wages, they would work them overtime without paying them, spray the fields with pesticides [while] knowing the workers were still working in the fields. It shows just how this white supremacist ideology devalues black lives. SJ: How can people support the folks that were arrested? How can people support your work in North Carolina and the organizing that is still going on in North Carolina? AL: One of the things we are asking people to do is call the district attorney in Durham County, dial 919-808-3010. We are asking them to tell whoever answers the phone to drop the charges on the freedom fighters that took down the statue. The other thing we are doing is we are asking people to please donate. If they go online to the Durham Solidarity Center Freedom Fighters Fund, they can donate toward the legal representation of the people who took the statues down. Certainly, we are organizing during community town hall meetings on a host of other issues. . . . We should take time out to discuss the importance of us all participating in efforts to get these statues down, all these racist monuments to white supremacy. That is a very important role they can play. I think workers, too, have a unique role to play. In light of what is happening in our workplaces, I think we have to take up this discussion of why all workers have to make every effort to defeat white supremacy, this white nationalism and neo-fascist popular moment that is developing. The reason why is that it keeps workers divided in our workplaces so we can’t unionize and win basic rights and better conditions and wages in our workplace. Many of us have heard about the recent loss down in Mississippi with the United Auto Workers Union organizing of the Nissan plant down there in Mississippi. It is just very important to take time out to see how this impacts our workplace.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
[] The Klu Klux Klan was expected to gather for a parade on December 3 not in Raleigh but in Pelham, North Carolina—where The Loyal White Knights of the KKK is based. However, they ended up organizing a caravan of about 20 vehicles that drove through Roxboro, North Carolina. Meanwhile, hundreds of protestors gathered for a “Justice and Unity Rally” in Raleigh. [*] Senate Bill 22 (or the “Historic Artifact Management and Patriotism Act”), signed into law in July 2015, only allows for the removal of artifacts with approval from the North Carolina Historical Commission.
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. Since election night 2016, the streets of the United States have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this series, we’ll be talking with experienced organizers, troublemakers, and thinkers who have been doing the hard work of fighting for a long time. They’ll be sharing their insights on what works, what doesn’t, and what has changed, and what is still the same. The eyes of the country turned to Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend when a so-called “Unite the Right” rally turned deadly after a white nationalist plowed his car into a crowd of people, injuring nineteen and killing Heather Heyer, 32, an activist and counter-protester. But organizers in Charlottesville have been fighting white nationalism for a while. Lisa Woolfork of Charlottesville Black Lives Matter shares some background on the community’s response to its “summer of hate,” connects the dots between the fights over Confederate monuments to violent white supremacy, and tells us about what she saw on the ground.
Lisa Woolfork: I’m Lisa Woolfork of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville. Sarah Jaffe: How are you holding up? LW: No black woman, like myself, would have been wandering around anywhere down here by herself yesterday. So, that is a big shift. SJ: So the last time there was a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was not that long ago. LW: You know, there has been one [nearly] every single month since May. I think that is important. To me it is a type of escalation on the part of the “alt-right.” We had that torch rally around the Lee statue. I think in May they had an event. . . . In July, of course, the Klan. Then, August, it is this one. We have started calling this the Summer of Hate. We are trying to say, “What was the last white supremacist rally we had here? Was that the May one? With the handful of Klansmen?” Yes, it has been quite a bit. SJ: This one was obviously a bit of an escalation for them, but tell me how your day went yesterday? What was going on where you were? LW: I began the day at the First Baptist Church on Main Street. It is an historic African American church that did a service to galvanize people to come out and stand up for their community. There were wonderful messages given there. Reverend Traci Blackmon from the United Church of Christ, she spoke. Cornel West, who is a well-known activist, he spoke. There were song selections. The service was called a sunrise service and that began at 6 a.m. Then, we walked over to the Jefferson School and a group of us proceeded from there to McGuffey Park. At McGuffey Park, there was programming. There was a gigantic live theatre puppet show with a gigantic puppet of Sally Hemings that was like fifteen feet tall and other props to tell the story about Charlottesville and the march. That was by a wonderful team of very creative activist artists. It is a community called Charis Community. Grace Aheron put that together. That is just an example of basically togetherness. The “alt-right” had come here to threaten the largest gathering of hate that they had ever put together at least since the 1960s. That is what some of the people had been saying, that this was a very powerful gathering. I was very gratified and encouraged to see that so many in the community, as well as visitors and people from other allied organizations and unaffiliated individuals, people who had no connection to Charlottesville and weren’t members of any kind of organization. They just wanted to come out and stand on the side of justice. I find that very encouraging. I helped this one woman, she must have been in her 80s, walk down a very steep slope. She was kind of struggling by herself. I just walked over and put my hand out so she could have balance. To me, that seemed like a great metaphor for the day. How do we help one another? How do neighbors, people who come together by common cause in the face of hatred and intolerance and promised abuse and vitriol? This was a very powerful and encouraging part of the day. As well as seeing the Nazis and the “alt-right” retreat from Emancipation Park after their event was declared an unlawful assembly. That was quite a parade of hate. As they were leaving the area, they threw flares, they spit on people. There were several altercations of shouting matches and shoving matches. But still, it was a very powerful display of how love conquers hate. To stand there shoulder to shoulder to shoulder with neighbors, with colleagues from my department in English, with other faculty from around the university that I have seen a few of, from people in my own organization representing Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, which is a very small and new group, has since developed allied connections. These were all examples of how the community wants to stand together against the threat and the promise of racist violence. Something that I thought was, again, very heartening was that too often people want to believe that symbolic hatred and symbolic racism has no real world consequence, that if we are to maintain symbols of white supremacy, those are completely devoid from the practices of white supremacy. That is false. SJ: That is a really good point. Obviously, these people were drawn to Charlottesville and are having this massive rally in Charlottesville not because Charlottesville is uniquely welcoming to white supremacists. You all clearly proved you are not, but because the symbols there are meaningful to them. LW: Yes, absolutely. One thing that I like to impress upon is that I think it is very important to retain attention on the Confederate monument. Of course, many people are turning to Louisiana and New Orleans as an example of a mayor who decided to step up and say, “No more. These are relics of a racist past and I want us to build a better future as a city. We do not need these any longer. They have outlived their usefulness.” Charlottesville has not done that. They have not done a complete process of reckoning. There was a commission that worked hard to uncover lots of very interesting information about Charlottesville’s unique southern history, but the recommendation that they made—there were two recommendations. One was to remove the statue and the other was to re-contextualize them in place.[] I have always been against the re-contextualization argument, because I don’t believe that you can make a huge monument to the Confederacy mean anything other than a monument to the Confederacy. What I find really compelling is that when the Monument Fund sued the city in court when the city council voted to remove the statues. Now, mind you, they voted to move them from one place to another. Then, they had a later amendment where they would move the statues outside of the city. They didn’t want them anymore.[*] The Monument Fund said that one of their arguments in court was that if the statues were to be moved, it would do them irreparable harm. I really think that we need to concentrate on that claim. What does it mean that someone’s personal identity is bound up in a racist confederate monument, a monument to white supremacy? For me, the argument about re-contextualization has already been made. I think the best and most honest context for these monuments is white supremacy. Nothing says what these monuments really mean like a thousand white supremacists coming to defend them. SJ: Speaking of the symbols, there was the controversy about them wanting to have their rally in this particular park that had just been recently renamed, having been named for Robert E. Lee, right? LW: Yes, that is right. One of the recommendations that the blue ribbon commission made was that the two parks that have Confederate monuments in them be renamed. We have a Robert E. Lee statue and that is in Lee Park. Then, there is a Stonewall Jackson statue and that was always called Jackson Park. So, they changed Jackson Park to Justice Park and they changed Lee Park to Emancipation Park. To the city, that was a name change that they approved. They agreed to do that recommendation. That has already taken effect. So, now local media and places throughout the city documentation refer to these parks now as Emancipation and Justice [parks] rather than Lee and Jackson [parks]. SJ: So, the white supremacists had complained and sued over wanting to be able to have their rally in this particular park, even though the city had ruled that they could not. LW: Yes. They did. They were helped by the Rutherford Institute, which I believe concentrates on free speech issues and constitutional issues here in Virginia. And, they were also aided by the ACLU Virginia chapter. Both of which turned out to be representing them in a legal capacity. The judge, not the city, the judge ultimately ruled that they could hold their rally in Emancipation Park. Some of the legal issues . . . I don’t want to get too much into them, but it was around heckler’s veto and not wanting a heckler’s veto to change anybody’s unpopular views. The judge just ruled and sided with the “alt-right,” with the white supremacists, with the Nazis, with the white nationalists. SJ: At whatever point that their gathering was ruled unlawful and they were pushed out of the park, tell us what happened because that seemed to be when the real violence broke loose. LW: I would say that the real violence was allowing these confederate monuments to remain in the center of our city as a paean or a testament or an endorsement of not just nineteenth century white supremacy, but twenty-first century endorsement or tolerance of white supremacy. I think that is something that I would certainly emphasize. There are so many ways to think about and define violence. But, yes, from what I was able to see from where I was standing was when they had their walk of shame from Emancipation Park to McIntire Park, which is a park that is [about] a mile or a mile and a half aways from their original location. There were a lot of scuffles. There was a lot of pushing. Again, they would throw smoke flares at the counter protestors or counter demonstrators and the counter demonstrators would kick them back. There was yelling. There was a lot that was certainly at work in that moment. It was quite chaotic and yet heartening because my personal feeling at the time was that Charlottesville had come out and had drawn other likeminded people of good conscience to aid in combatting white supremacy and fascism and white nationalism. That we had worked to reclaim in some small part that promise that America makes to all of us and that is the promise of equity, the promise that the Constitution shouldn’t be used as a battering ram, it shouldn’t be used as a weapon to deprive other people of rights. That was pretty heartening. SJ: Let’s go back a little bit and talk about the organizing leading up to this. Like you said, there have been all of these rallies. There have been new groups forming and organizing going on on the ground for a while now to counter this. Tell people about what has been happening. LW: The way that we have been working is in a coalition basis. We believe that we are stronger together than separate. There has been an umbrella of groups working as an organizing network to best utilize a variety of resources. That is something that has been very powerful. Groups like Congregate, which is a collection of different faith organizations and pastors, ministers, rabbis from a variety of different faith traditions. You have the group SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice. You have Black Lives Matter Charlottesville as another example and just one of a constellation of groups that are trying to mobilize our community for the greater good. SJ: Particularly coming into this rally, what was the plan that folks had for dealing with this day? You talked about the sunrise service, the clergy, and the day of programming, but tell us a little bit more about how you planned to respond to this? LW: One of the strengths of coalition-based activism is that it allows for a variety of approaches. Unlike the Klan rally, which was much more focused on a particular single place and time—I was involved in different seminars and symposia surrounding that, as well as some activism on the ground—this was much more dispersed. We understood that this was not meant to be a one and done type gathering for the “alt-right.” It was meant to be basically a weekend party where they would come in on Friday and then they leave on Sunday. They would need much more infrastructure in order to work. Our goal was to help pull the community to respond to the larger, more capacious threat of the “alt-right” and the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, nationalists were representing and threatening to bring forward. I think we were able to do that. We were able to bring together a variety of people, and several groups issued individual calls. The clergy, for example, had a really wonderful one calling on, in particular, white people of faith, white ministers, white clergy to come and join in taking a stand against not just explicit violent racism but also the subtle institutional racism that their own institutions had created and cultivated over time. It was I think a really powerful soul searching on the part of the clergy, for example. Charlottesville BLM also issued a call where we invited people who wanted to come and stand with us and to challenge white supremacy, as well as some of the other issues that we are dealing with in our cities, which include things like the disproportionate nature of stop and frisk in Charlottesville where African Americans constitute about eighty percent of the stops and frisks even though we comprise less than nineteen percent of the community. It is not just the statues, but we can see a very clear connection between symbolic racism and institutional racism. SJ: Going forward . . . you said you were on your way to a vigil. Tell me, what is next? What are people planning going forward from this weekend? LW: One of the things about the coalition is not everybody knows what everyone is doing. But, as a coalition, our goal is to continue in the vein in which we have started. That is helping to pull people to come forward and to join and stand in community against these types of aggressive, dangerous, menacing, racist practices, and symbols. I know, particularly, that Charlottesville Black Lives Matter is interested in talking more about the Confederate statues and how these monuments should be removed and how the city council should work hard to fight in court against the legal challenges that we might face as the court case to remove the monuments continues to go through the system. We want the city council to basically care as much about the lives of citizens as they did about preserving the rights of the “alt-right” when they allowed their permit to go through. We want the city to be committed to questions of racial justice and to appreciate that in the age in which we are living racist rhetoric is not just talk. Racist rhetoric produces racist actions. Racist statues are not just art. Symbolic racism is rooted in actual racist actions. SJ: How can people keep up with you and with Charlottesville BLM? LW: Please check Charlottesville BLM’s Facebook page. We do a lot of updates through there. We also have a Twitter feed. They can follow us there, as well.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
[] The Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials, and Public Spaces issued a report to the Charlottesville City Council in December 2016, recommending the statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson either be relocated and recontextualized in McIntire Park or that they be recontextualized in their current place. [*] On February 6, 2017, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from the park. In March, the Monument Fund, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and about a dozen private citizens filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging the city violated a state law that protects war memorials. In April, the City Council voted to sell the statue; however, the city remains embroiled in the lawsuit, and the statue remains in place.
Welcome to Interviews for Resistance. Since election night 2016, the streets of the U.S. have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this series, we’ll be talking with experienced organizers, troublemakers, and thinkers who have been doing the hard work of fighting for a long time. They’ll be sharing their insights on what works, what doesn’t, and what has changed, and what is still the same. Sarah Jaffe with Mari Cordes:
Mari Cordes: My name is Mari Cordes. I am a registered nurse of thirty years, all in Vermont. I am a founding board member of Rights and Democracy. Sarah Jaffe: You were in Washington, D.C. in the early hours of Friday morning when the vote went down for health care reform, right? MC: I have been here since Thursday as a candidate. I am running for Vermont House of Representatives again in 2018, and I am here for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s national candidate training. I was one of 300 candidates selected to attend this amazing training, which coincided with more actions by the amazing Center for Popular Democracy and Housing Works in the Senate offices, in the Capitol, and at senators’ offices. I was part of the protest and the rally outside of the Capitol building the night the vote came down. SJ: Tell us a little bit about what that was like, while you were waiting to hear about the vote. MC: It was an amazing experience to hear, once again, many stories of how everyone not only would have been impacted by the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but [also how] everyone is impacted by the reality that our elected leaders intentionally were doing something that equated to attacking the American people. As my friend Sampson and I were heading toward the rally that night at the Capitol, we passed near an outdoor movie theatre and it turns out they were playing Star Wars. It was the perfect setting to hear the bombastic, symphonic music that is in Star Wars, because all of this still feels so unreal, so surreal, that it’s actually happening in the United States. We heard so many incredible and painful and heartbreaking stories about how friends, people that we know, and people that we don’t know, would have died, and/or about families that would have lost their homes, and/or gone bankrupt—all in the name of an obsession with an ideology, an obsessive hatred that a black man was President of the United States, and was successful in creating policy that was definitely not perfect, but did help millions of people. It was very powerful to be in that circle, that communion of sorts, and hold a vigil for our country whatever the outcome [was] going to be. In that moment there was the moment of “We are going to lose,” and that feeling of hopelessness and despair. Then, a pause and a quiet moment, and Ben Wikler delivered it beautifully. He became really somber. I thought it meant that we had lost, but it created this silent space for us to hear the statement that the vote was “No.” I don’t think I have ever experienced anything so powerful in my life. It was incredible. SJ: That vote was “No,” but you are not stopping. We are talking on Saturday evening and you are about to head to another rally for health care. Tell us about that and tell us about why the fight is still going. MC: We got to bed at 4:30 that morning. We did rest a little bit, but with the awareness that the American people are still under attack on many fronts, not just health care. The freedom and liberation of many individuals in this country is at risk. So we can’t stop. In fact, there is no better time to increase the pressure and increase our activism than after a win like this. Especially because those who were at risk of losing so much and those who have been working so hard in this fight—we have that lived experience of collective power of movement building, the organizing work. We cannot stop. We have to take this momentum and move forward. SJ: You went to D.C. a few times. You were involved in a lot of organizing, even though Vermont, obviously, didn’t have a senator that was going to vote “Yes” on this thing. But, what are some of the important lessons that you learned from the seven months of fighting to try to stave off cuts to health care? MC: I think the most important lesson is to never give up. In a fight like this, never give up. I have been very actively working in Vermont towards a universal publicly funded health care system that gets rid of the highly profitable insurance companies and creates a real system. We have had our successes, like when Act 48 in Vermont passed, and we have lost in Vermont when Governor Shumlin pulled the plug on that. We are still working hard in Vermont to move towards a universal publicly funded system. I would say that is the most important thing. We have to keep going. It is okay to rest for a little bit and take care of each other and ourselves, but we have to keep moving forward. SJ: I want to go back to the situation in Vermont in a minute, but was there a particular moment or a particular tactic around Trumpcare that you thought was particularly successful? Some moment that maybe you saw somebody’s mind change? MC: I think there were many moments that were successful, but they were most powerful because each action, each arrest—I was in the first group of people of 150 or more and forty of us were arrested, I was in the second group, I don’t remember how many were in there, but eighty of us were arrested. Then, the third time, I was a legal support for ADAPT. Hundreds were arrested, I believe, in that action.[*] I think it was a cumulative effect, in addition to all of the actions and emails and calls from people across the country that created enough pressure on senators. All of these actions, and the media that they generated, including all of the social media. I could see on my own personal social media sites people getting engaged that might not have gotten engaged before, and taking actions. It is a cumulative thing. That is the thing about collective power and movement building, it is generative. It is obvious now that people are rising up and that more people realize that organizing does work. SJ: As you said, you are a nurse, you have been a union leader, and you have been working on health care for your entire adult life. Why is this such a powerful issue to get people organized around? MC: Health care is a very powerful issue to get people organized around because it impacts every single person personally, often in potentially devastating ways. Many people that I have met though doing these actions, and then all the patients that I work with every day: I hear, I see how critically important having access to health care is for them and their families. I work in a busy cardiology unit at the University of Vermont Medical Center, and every day I am at work, when I have three or four patients, I look at each one of them and wonder “What if they didn’t have access to health care, if they didn’t have insurance? If they couldn’t get health care when they needed it, would they be alive right now?” The huge majority of the time, the answer is “No.” Then, it is personal for me, too. I have health issues, like most of us do. I would say, more than anything, it is such a huge area of injustice in our country, and the fact that in 2017 we are having to fight to stay alive is ludicrous—beyond ludicrous. SJ: You were involved in a fight to end insurance discrimination against transgender people. Of course, this week while the health care fight was going on, Trump came out and said he was going to ban trans people from the military because their health care was too expensive. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that particular fight that you were in and what we can learn from that. MC: My friends and I were just at the rally at the White House around Trump tweeting military policy changes. I was involved in some major change work in Vermont, in co-leading a coalition of organizations and people, including physicians that provide medical care for transgender individuals. The organizations we worked with have been working on transgender justice issues for a long time. Vermont did have a law that said it was illegal for health insurance companies not to provide insurance for transgender individuals, but that was a pretty broad statement and, of course, what the health insurance companies did was refuse to cover medically necessary care for transgender people. I became aware of that when an amazing nurse friend who is also transgender came to me and told me that he needed to have surgery and it was not covered by our hospital insurance. The University of Vermont Medical Center self-insures, so they get to decide what their policy looks like. This person and I and the other leaders of these organizations worked together on a campaign that eventually led the commissioner of the Department of Financial Regulation, which oversees insured companies in Vermont, to issue a clarifying bulletin [in 2013] that made Vermont the fourth state in the nation to have such clear language that denying medically necessary care for transgender individuals was against the law. SJ: I am wondering if there is something about this happening in the midst of health care fight, your experience on both these issues, that you think we can learn from going forward, as Trump is clearly going to keep doubling down on attacking marginalized groups, especially as he is losing? MC: More than anything, because of all the attacks against marginalized groups, more than ever we need to be unified. I do see that happening. I do see people in organizations working towards being as unified as possible. I believe it is the only way that we are not only going to survive, but thrive. SJ: Let’s go back to the single payer struggle in Vermont. Vermont was the first state to vote for a universal publicly funded health care system, but had trouble getting it implemented. I wonder if you could tell people a little bit about that process, the organizing that got the bill passed, and then the struggles you have been in in trying to continue to move forward with it. MC: We began around 2008—“we” meaning the Vermont Workers’ Center—by starting the Health Care is a Human Right campaign, which was an amazing grassroots mobilization and education project all across the State of Vermont that got thousands of people involved, in the education of people in the community about how our health care system, or lack of it, is broken and what we can do to fix it. We did things like holding peoples’ forums across the state where the people led the forums with legislators present. It was a chance for people to ask legislators questions, but also ask them the main question: Do you and will you actively work to support universal health care, publicly funded? The Workers Center organized annual rallies, [including Health Care is a Human Right rallies on May Day]. Eventually, working with other organizations like Vermont Health Care For All, that is Dr. [Deborah Richter’s] organization from [Physicians for a National Health Program], working with other organizations across the state led to us winning by putting pressure on legislators and supporting those who were doing the policy and taking the political risks. We did win Act 48, which has embedded in it, the five universal human rights principles. I was appointed as a commissioner to two, at the time, of Governor Shumlin’s workgroups: the Health Care Reform Consumer Advisory Council to try to move towards this new system and [the Green Mountain Care Advisory Board Council]. We did a fair amount of good work there, but in retrospect it seemed like a farce. What was really being planned was not happening in those groups with members of the public and health care professionals. It was happening at the governor’s office. Eventually Governor Shumlin and some of the legislators decided that they didn’t have the political capital to pull this off, so they pulled the plug on it. SJ: Where are things now? You have a different governor now. So what are things like on the ground in Vermont, working on health care on the state level? MC: We are organizing. Always organizing. Actively. Many of us have been involved in beginning to pull again, the main organizations that are working towards a universal publicly funded health care system are now working together to figure out what that looks like going forward. We are back on the ground organizing in communities, setting up town halls, talking with legislators. The one possible step that actually was in the state house as a bill [earlier this] year is universal primary care which would do just what it says: provide access to health care for everyone in Vermont as primary care. Primary care is often one of the obstacles that people face when they are sick or have something going on and they can’t afford it. They can’t access it. So, they don’t go and then, they get sicker and end up in the ED with a worse condition. A patient that I remember, a young man who had a simple infection that waited too long and it turned into a devastating full system infection that killed him. It was something pretty simple that could have been fixed had he been able to access primary care. That is what we are working on now. SJ: You mentioned at the beginning that you are running for office. Tell us what your platform is. I presume that universal health care will be part of it. MC: Yes, it is and it was. I ran in 2016. My main platform items are working towards an economy that works for us all. That includes having a health care system, working towards progressive tax reform that ensures corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share, and further developing and safeguarding the public services that are the foundation of strong communities. Also, that Vermont must lead on climate change. I am also a board member of 350Vermont. And quality education—we have had some major changes in how school governance is run in Vermont with the passage of Act 46, which is very controversial and in many ways took the local direct engagement away from small towns. The intent, or the stated intent of Act 46, one of them, is to help reduce property tax burdens. I am not sure how effective that is going to be. There are some one-time savings that we will see, but the real issue is that the biggest line item in a school district’s budget is health insurance for educators and staff. So until we get control over that, it is still going to be a major issue. Then, I will continue to work very hard in organizing. As a representative, [I will help] my district to develop a health care system that is financed and administered publicly with strong and transparent government regulations and ample public engagement. SJ: How can people keep up with you and your campaign and your health care organizing? MC: A couple of different ways. They can go to www.maricordes.org. There are Facebook and Twitter links on my website. You can also find me on my personal Facebook page: Mari Cordes. I am working with Rights and Democracy a lot, so I would encourage people to follow Rights and Democracy Vermont and New Hampshire.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.
[*] There were many protests staged in and around the Capitol during the month of July. During a July 10 protest in the office buildings of Congress, 80 people were arrested. On July 19, 155 people were arrested during a protest organized by the Center for Popular Democracy, Housing Works, and other organizations. On July 25, protestors visited the homes of Senator John Boozman (R-AR) and Senator Rob Portman, but no one was arrested. Later that day, however, police arrested 91 individuals protesting in the Senate visitor galleries and the Hart Senate Office Building.
WELCOME TO INTERVIEWS FOR RESISTANCE. Since election night 2016, the streets of the United States have rung with resistance. People all over the country have woken up with the conviction that they must do something to fight inequality in all its forms. But many are wondering what it is they can do. In this series, we’ll be talking with experienced organizers, troublemakers, and thinkers who have been doing the hard work of fighting for a long time. They’ll be sharing their insights on what works, what doesn’t, what has changed, and what is still the same. Sarah Jaffe with Sister Simone Campbell:
Sister Simone Campbell: I’m Sister Simone Campbell, I’m the executive director of NETWORK, Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, and I got some notoriety as leader of Nuns on the Bus. Sarah Jaffe: Everybody remembers Nuns on the Bus. Tell us what you’re doing, it’s Monday morning (July 24) as we’re talking, tell us what you’re doing today. SC: We’re really excited around here because in about fifteen minutes we’re headed up to the offices on the Senate side of Capitol Hill to deliver our letter signed by more than 7,000 Catholic sisters in the United States urging the members of the Senate to vote no on the procedural motion to proceed on this awful proposal to cut Medicaid for the most vulnerable in our nation, and also to vote no on the substance of any bill that comes up. SJ: Take us back a little bit to the history of Nuns on the Bus and this organizing that you’ve been doing for quite a few years. SC: Quite a few years! I’m getting old in the process [laughs]. Our organization was founded in 1971, and we opened our doors in ’72, and we worked on health care all these years. In 2009–10 we worked really hard on getting health care for people who were left out of [access to] health care in our nation. In that process, when it was coming up for a final vote in the House of Representatives, I wrote what’s called the Nuns’ Letter that was signed by fifty-nine leaders of Catholic sisters’ communities saying that the vote for the Affordable Care Act was a life-affirming vote. I actually wrote the letter in support of the Catholic Health Association, who had come out in support of the bill. But between the time I wrote [the letter] and the time we got signatures back, our Bishops had come out opposing the bill, so then we released our letter in support of the bill, kind of bookending the Bishops, and I’ve been told by many that they were able, with their Catholic faith, that they were able to vote for the bill because of our letter. I know twenty-nine votes that we got. So this is serious for us. This time we’re taking a letter not signed just by the leaders, though we have signatures from the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Catholic Health Association, our organization, and other organizations. This is a letter signed by the sisters themselves, and all calling on the Senate to care for the most vulnerable. It’s outrageous for us as Catholic sisters who work with the most vulnerable in our nation to see that 22, 23 million people could lose health care because of this foolishness. That’s wrong. And so that’s the message that we’re carrying today: Stop it. Stop it now and get serious about fixing the problems that do exist. SJ: This fight has now been going on, up and down, for the entire summer. SC: Oh my gosh, it is. Actually it started in January, with the first effort in the House. So we’ve been working flat out for the last seven months to get some sense into this conversation. This is wrong! SJ: Talk a little bit about the work that you do—I think a lot of people who aren’t Catholic, who don’t regularly come into contact with Catholic sisters, don’t know why this is so important to you, to your organization, to the people who signed this letter. SC: Let me just give you an example. Two weeks ago I was in Arizona, in Tucson, at St. Elizabeth’s Community Health Center. And it is run by the hospital there that is sponsored by Catholic sisters.[] Sisters work on the staff and told me that their people got care for the first time when Arizona expanded Medicaid to cover the vulnerable. Now, one of the sisters does mental health work, and she was saying so many people are terrified that they’re going to lose coverage and lose access to their life-saving care. That they’re seeing so many more stressed and traumatized people, and it’s that daily hands-on work that Catholic sisters do all over the country, and it’s because we know the people, we know the worry, we know their families. We know, that as a nation that says we work for the general welfare, this is the wrong way forward. It’s wrong in faith and it’s wrong in the Constitution, so stop it. SJ: And of course in addition to this particular health care bill they’re trying to cut Medicaid through the budget so it seems like this is still going to be an ongoing fight even if the latest version of the bill that no one has seen doesn’t pass. SC: That’s absolutely right. SJ: What can people do to support your work, to be part of this fight if they aren’t already? SC: They should look at our website, NETWORKlobby.org, you can see there there’s a section that says [Act Now], or there’s the Issues, under health care you can see what can be done. Or you can do the simple thing and call your Senate offices and say, “vote no.” Some people say, “I’m sure my senator is okay on this.” I’m telling you that all the senators need to be called in the next two days, because they need to know that there is a groundswell of We the People saying no! We will take care of the vulnerable people in our nation. It’s shocking to me, just shocking to me, that the richest nation on Earth, which prides itself on being a problem-solver, can’t care for vulnerable people. And the vast majority of the folks covered by Medicaid are . . . seniors, disabled, children, and the working poor. A very small percentage of able-bodied folks are not working. Some Republicans have the idea that this is just a cash giveaway, something people don’t need, it’s wrong. From my perspective this is about pro-life! People need access to health care. So call your senators, talk to your neighbors, lift up a voice, where we say we the people want to care for the most vulnerable. Postscript: Sarah checked back in with Sister Simone Campbell after the Senate’s July 25 vote to advance to floor debate on the GOP efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. SC: Advancing this anti-health, anti-life legislation is the wrong way forward. Catholic sisters stand with our nation’s most vulnerable people. However, the Senate Republicans plan to rip away health care from millions in order to give tax breaks to corporations and wealthy donors. This is shameful. Senator McCain said that advancing this bill is the way to begin a conversation. He is wrong. The proper way to debate and discuss proposed legislation is through hearings, markups, and debate in committee first and then on the floor. Last-minute time-crunched negotiations and cliff hanger votes are not what is needed for our nation. I pray that the Senate will stop this foolishness and instead, focus on bipartisan fixes to the problems with the ACA rather than attempting to weaken the parts of the ACA that are working, like Medicaid expansion. NETWORK suggests they start with our Ten Commandments of Health Care if they are looking for inspiration. I am so grateful for Senators Collins and Murkowski for their recognition that advancing this bill is bad for our people. I am also grateful to the forty-eight Democratic Senators who continue to speak out for the health of our nation. Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.*
[*] St. Elizabeth’s Health Center became an independent non-profit organization in October 2014. It is no longer an agency of Catholic Community Services.
Sarah Jaffe interviews Laura Goldblatt, a post-doctoral fellow at University of Virginia, and Mimi Arbeit, an organizer with Showing Up for Racial Justice, Charlottesville.
Sarah Jaffe interviews Jesse Myerson, an organizer with Hoosier Action and host of the podcast "From the Heartland."
Welfare rights activists never stopped fighting for their rights, and many are backing a bill called the RISE Out of Poverty Act.
Sarah Jaffe interviews Randy Bryce, ironworker, veteran, dad, cancer survivor—and Paul Ryan’s opponent in the 1st Congressional district.