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Daniel Imperato For President 2024
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Brandon Johnson greets people at a restaurant in Chicago on April 23, 2023. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
On April 4, Brandon Johnson won a stunning victory in the Chicago mayoral election. But the honeymoon period for him and his supporters will be brief. As for all pro-worker reformers and movements, a proverbial “Sword of Damocles” hangs over their heads. Stray too far from the status quo, and the interconnected institutions of the capitalist class — the banks, corporations, lobbyists, and corporate media — will descend, or at least threaten to until compliance is restored.
Already, as Kevin Young has documented in these pages, businesses and their allies are threatening the incoming Johnson administration with capital flight (moving capital out of Chicago to other locales) or a capital strike (refusing to invest in the city) if he pursues some of his more ambitious economic reforms.
Other than capitulating, Johnson’s only real choice is to strike at the heart of this reactionary resistance by asserting public control over capital. While this will be politically and technically challenging, especially for a US city like Chicago, it is not impossible. Many US cities are in the advanced stages of exploring or creating new public banks. And as several observers, including Young and Saqib Bhatti have noted, Chicago could and should join them as soon as possible. In the meantime, there are several shortcuts and temporary measures that might expedite the public-banking process and allow Chicago to deploy its own substantial financial resources to blunt the threat from private capital.
At the same time, “public” control of capital cannot just mean the city acting alone through top-down bureaucratic channels. It will require an active process of increasing accountability and fostering democratic participation from below.
Almost fifty years ago, in April 1974, a coup by left-leaning soldiers within the Portuguese armed forces overthrew the country’s fascist dictatorship and triggered a far-reaching economic, political, and social revolution. Faced with the threat of capital flight and capital strikes, unionized workers in the country’s banks seized control and demanded the replacement of governing boards hostile to this “Carnation Revolution.”
Following a failed countercoup in 1975, the government nationalized private Portuguese banks (without compensation) to break the power of the country’s small group of capitalist elites. Over the subsequent years, these public banks helped spur Portugal’s economic development and transition to a multiparty, social democratic system.
Portugal’s moves were bold, but not unprecedented. Throughout the twentieth century, radical movements in countries from Russia and Cuba to Chile and Tanzania realized that leaving capital in private hands would, at best, limit what they could achieve and, at worst, threaten their very survival. In the US Midwest, a similar dynamic — an ascendant left-wing movement grappling with private capital — led to the creation of the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the more than one-hundred-year-old public bank that serves as a model for many US public-banking campaigns.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, North Dakota was under the thumb of corporations and wealthy capitalists, particularly out-of-state railroad companies and grain monopolies backed by large private banks. These companies used their wealth and power to evade state taxes and buy off state officials. Early efforts to weaken this plutocratic stranglehold were met with warnings of capital strikes. In 1891, for instance, grain companies threatened to close their elevators rather than accept modest regulation.
Between 1916 and 1918, candidates aligned with the newly formed Nonpartisan League (NPL) won a series of elections on the promise of creating a more just economy. Upon gaining control of the North Dakota legislature and governorship, the NPL began to implement its agenda. Aware that corporate interests would use their control of capital to stymie radical policies, the NPL made public banking a cornerstone of their approach.
In July 1919, the BND opened its doors and managed to survive an early economic and legal counterattack from Wall Street banks and their local allies. It has subsequently become an engine for economic development in the state, supporting lending to farmers, providing disaster relief, making low-cost student loans, providing banking services to smaller banks and individuals, and returning tens of millions to the state general fund to support social services.
Creating a completely new public bank at the city or state level is a difficult and complex proposition. For many years, the BND was the only full-scale public bank in the United States, and only recently did a second institution join that list: the Territorial Bank of American Samoa (TBAS).
Despite mounting momentum behind public banking — especially in California, where enabling legislation was passed in 2019 — it has proven difficult to get new public banks off the ground for a variety of reasons, including opposition from private-banking interests and the requirement (in California) that new public banks receive Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance (something that neither the BND nor the TBAS needs given that deposits are guaranteed by the state or territory government).
Founding a new public bank in Chicago, and realizing its full benefits, will likely take time — time that the Johnson administration politically, and the people of Chicago economically, manifestly lack. Fortunately, there are several half steps the city could adopt to assert public control over capital and move toward a full-fledged public bank.
As a new report by the Jain Family Institute and the Berggruen Institute outlines, a potential first step would be to create or repurpose a municipal finance corporation (MFC) — similar to those already existing in several North American cities — that would make loans and investments but would not collect deposits. Such an institution, the authors contend, would be much easier to establish through traditional municipal processes and would not require FDIC approval. “The MFC structure could thus allow the city to quickly initiate lending toward its goals and social mandates in climate, housing, and financial justice,” they write.
Not only would this MFC help Chicago deliver on some of its most pressing economic, social, and environmental priorities, but it could help lessen the blow of a potential capital strike by providing funding (in the form of loans or investments) to Chicago-based businesses. Additionally, it could serve as proof that public control of capital is possible, strengthening the case for a full-scale public bank.
Another option would be to acquire an existing financial institution and convert it to a public bank. While the Jain/Berggruen plan envisions this as a second stage once an MFC is up and running, it could also be implemented separately. In the private sector, most bank expansions and new entrances occur by way of an acquisition since it is quicker and cheaper to simply purchase a bank charter than to erect an entirely new bank.
Currently, the FDIC lists thirty-one insured banks operating in Chicago (not counting branches of larger national or international banks). While not all these banks would be a viable option to buy out, one or more could be willing to sell their operations to the city at a fair market price.
The Jain/Berggruen report acknowledges some downsides to the buy-existing approach, including inheriting loans and business lines that might not be in accordance with the goals of a public bank. The report even suggests that the city might find it more difficult than a private bank to shut down these business lines.
This is a contestable presumption. Traditionally, one of public ownership’s main benefits is that it can advance whatever goals society chooses to prioritize — including ending or excluding noxious business activities. By contrast, a private bank committed to maximizing shareholder returns will likely find it exceptionally hard to mothball socially undesirable business, especially if it is lucrative.
Public banks, like all publicly owned enterprises, are not inherently good or bad. They are institutions that must be consciously designed to produce the outcomes that society desires. Over the decades many have been highly successful in their aims, from boosting employment to developing industrial policy. Others, however, have been at best overly top-down, bureaucratic, and alienating, and at worse, vehicles of clientelism, environmental degradation, and state oppression.
In recent years, an alternative known as Democratic Public Ownership (DPO) has started to emerge and proliferate around the world. At its core, DPO is about enhancing democratic decision-making structures, transparency, and accountability both within and around a publicly owned enterprise or service. This may include empowering trade unions and works councils; creating democratically elected governing assemblies; establishing multi-stakeholder boards; building autonomous community “observatories” to enhance participation and oversight; implementing participatory planning and budgeting processes; and crafting co-governance arrangements with popular membership organizations.
While relatively new as a cohesive concept, DPO has a long history anchored in left theorizing and anti-capitalist experiments. From the multi-stakeholder “Plumb Plan” promulgated by US railroad workers after World War I, to efforts to institute workers’ councils and worker self-management in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, to more direct forms of community control of public services implemented in South America in recent decades, many leftists have long identified the need to democratize publicly owned enterprises.
Fortunately, DPO principles figure prominently in the contemporary public-banking movement in the United States, and there are numerous proposals that the Johnson administration could consult: along with the recent Jain/Berggruen paper, there’s a report from the Democracy Collaborative titled “Constructing the Democratic Public Bank,” the governance proposal put forth by the East Bay Public Bank campaign, and experiments like Costa Rica’s Banco Popular, a large and highly successful public bank with an innovative democratic governance model.
Brandon Johnson will face a blizzard of challenges when he is sworn in as Chicago’s fifty-seventh mayor this month. He will need to move quickly and forcefully to attack those obstacles — including by asserting democratic, public control over capital. And even if his administration is not immediately successful, it could be responsible for creating a powerful new public bank that serves as an engine for just economic development in Chicago for generations to come.
New York City mayor Eric Adams in Manhattan on April 17, 2023. (Luiz C. Ribeiro / New York Daily News / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Last month, New York City mayor Eric Adams ordered almost all city agencies to cut their budgets by 3 to 4 percent for the coming fiscal year, which begins in July. His new proposed executive budget, subject to approval by city council next month, outlines hundreds of millions of cuts to libraries, schools, and social services. Meanwhile, the New York Police Department chose to acquire two robotic dogs for approximately $750,000 — making two new dogs worth a year of preschool for approximately fifty-eight three-year-olds.
The mayor’s choices are both devastating and antidemocratic. Adams has blamed the city’s fiscal woes on the recent influx of asylum seekers in the city, pitting refugees against long-term New Yorkers and giving the public the impression that there aren’t enough resources to be shared. He has dismissed criticism from a significant number of city councilmembers, recommendations from policy experts, fierce opposition from community groups, and contrary information from watchdog groups like the Independent Budget Office, which actually projects a $4.9 billion surplus for 2023.
Unfortunately, some of the mayor’s premises — that repeating the phrase “fiscally responsible” often enough will justify making any and all cuts to our safety net — are hardly unique. The mayor’s cuts embody poor budget judgment on a local level, as well as the need for budget justice and democracy in cities nationwide.
In his instructions to agency leaders, budget director Jacques Jiha stated that they “should avoid meaningfully impacting services where possible.” This is not possible. I should know: I am a scholar who specializes in the study of urban policy and governance, a parent of a child in our public schools and a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY).
Three or 4 percent cuts don’t sound like much, until these cuts are put into context. They are actually the third round of cuts in just a few months. Mayor Adams has proposed a 50 percent cut in job postings in all agencies, without attention to whether these vacancies were for expendable positions or for ones that are absolutely essential to keep New York running.
And these three rounds of cuts follow steep, seemingly indiscriminate budget cuts last year, more than $370 million for the Department of Education alone. As reported in the City, this means that Brooklyn’s Middle School 859 had to work with 15 percent, or $825,000, less than it did the previous year. So several teachers were “excessed” over the summer, and the school eliminated leadership positions for teacher professional development, planned to increase class sizes from twenty-five to thirty-three, and shrank arts, music, and enrichment offerings.
These cuts also come exactly when students direly need more resources to cope with learning and emotional losses they suffered during the pandemic. More than eighty-seven hundred children in NYC lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19; an investigation by a coalition of journalism organizations reports that “decades of underfunding mental health care left schools unprepared” to help these students.
These cuts are an act of self-sabotage. According to one Brookings Institution study, six of the country’s top ten four-year colleges for economic mobility are part of CUNY. We did not become the “People’s University” without resources.
These cuts also come exactly when students direly need more resources, to cope with learning and emotional losses they suffered during the pandemic.
At Brooklyn College, the political science department in which I teach has lost seven full-time faculty members in the past decade. None of those positions have been replaced. In the meantime, even as we increasingly rely on underpaid part-time, adjunct faculty to teach our classes, our adjunct budgets are also being slashed and our courses canceled, sometimes just days before the semester starts. Our building infrastructure is in such disrepair that, as but one example, two of the three sinks in my office’s bathroom are inoperable.
We are working to increase student enrollments for the coming year, but we cannot do so without offering the courses and facilities they need for their college education. Among CUNY’s community colleges, more than one hundred faculty who left since the start of the pandemic have not been replaced.
The budget cuts will also hurt services like food stamps, right after pandemic-related federal assistance ended. The result is, as one New York Times headline put it, a “catastrophe.” The Human Resources Agency is supposed to process food assistance applications within a thirty-day window. In fiscal year 2021, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Mayor’s Management Report reported an on-time rate of 92 percent. In December 2022, the on-time rate was 22.4 percent. Those eligible for housing vouchers face similarly long delays, resulting in some being evicted from their homes as they wait.
Meanwhile, Mayor Adams just announced a contract giving the city’s largest police union $5.5 billion in raises. This means that a cop with five and a half years of service could earn $131,500 a year. (By contrast, teachers with five years on the job and a master’s degree earn $72,076 a year.) Further, many cops earn as much $50,000 to $80,000 a year in overtime pay on top of their salaries; a recent recording obtained by Gothamist features police officers bragging about “milking” overtime.
The city has overspent its police overtime budget by nearly $100 million thus far this year. The new contract will make these numbers even more dramatic; the new overtime rate of $93.75 an hour is 50 percent more than the current one.
The city’s recent cuts reflect little rhyme or reason. Although New York City’s preschool programs for three-year-olds (“3-K”) were seen as a national model, the Department of Education allowed thousands of precious seats to sit empty as many families remained unaware of the programs. It could have used federal COVID-19 money on outreach but did not.
City council members must hold Mayor Adams accountable and reject any executive budget with such austerity baked in.
Early childhood education should be universal and is a bargain in the long run; it yields returns of as much as $16 for every dollar invested in the form of less crime and fewer social services needed in the future. Instead, the administration plans to significantly contract the program and pay the consulting firm Accenture $760,000 to “map out needs and future seats” in 3-K.
The city administration should roll back these wholesale budget cuts. City councilmembers must hold Mayor Adams accountable and reject any executive budget with such austerity baked in. City agencies need more time and resources to strategically plan for the medium term. New York State must pay its fair share to the city, especially for services to newly arriving asylum seekers, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the billions of school funds it still owes from the 2001 Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York decision.
And New Yorkers should demand a more democratic budget process — one in which everyday residents have a say in the city budget’s priorities. Dozens of community groups, including the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY union I am a member of, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), and the local Democratic Socialists of America are already organizing to make this demand through a coalition called the People’s Plan, which came together to forward alternative visions for the city budget and for how we could have a better budgeting process.
Public budgets are moral documents that reflect specific values and theories of government. Mayor Adams is relying on his team and allies to decide a budget for all of us, and in doing so, he’s depriving the city of so much insight from what makes New York great: New Yorkers. By opening up the process, he can get fresh ideas that help the city thrive. Everyday New Yorkers deserve a budget that gives them the resources to address their needs and the right to help shape what that means.
(Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images)
On Tuesday, April 24, graduate student workers at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, walked out on a three-day strike over an unfair labor practice charge. According to Fordham grad workers, represented by the Fordham Graduate Student Workers–Communications Workers of America (FGSW-CWA), the university is refusing to bargain in good faith. Grad students voted overwhelmingly to form the union in a National Labor Relations Board election in April 2022; they are now trying to negotiate their first contract with Fordham.
Graduate workers at the university say the administration’s bad-faith bargaining tactics are particularly egregious given that many students struggle to find housing and experience food insecurity; international workers, who aren’t legally able to work outside the university, are particularly vulnerable. Jacobin’s Sara Wexler talked to Fordham grad workers about last week’s walkout, the union’s demands, and the state of bargaining.
Sara Wexler
Why did you all walk out last week?
Marshawn Brewer
We walked out because we’re in the process of bargaining our contract and we’ve been bargaining it for around seven months now. The walkout was a response to the bad-faith bargaining of the upper management of our school.
They have a lawyer who is engaging in a tactic called “surface bargaining,” which is meant to stonewall the bargaining process by rejecting any proposals, by not moving forward at all. This is meant to wear the opposition down through attrition, so the momentum of the union will slow, people will be like, “Well, nothing’s happening,” and want to give up.
Because he was using this tactic, we weren’t getting any results; there was no momentum in bargaining. We knew that the only way we could change this was to show them that we had the power to withhold our labor, and that that in turn would energize the bargaining process and make them take our requests more seriously.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
The union just started last year actually; this is our first contract. Our demands are higher wages and better health care; job assignments are very important. And there are more specific demands, things that don’t necessarily apply to everyone, but are just as important — like access to childcare, paid family leave, those sorts of things. These are the types of demands that we’ve brought to the university, and we have received basically nothing in return.
Most of the time management doesn’t even show up with the proposals pulled up or printed. It feels like they’re there just to waste our time.
When you think of good-faith bargaining, it’s hard — because they have their interests and we have our interests, but there should still be some proactive approach to this. If you’re showing up to the table for after fifty hours of bargaining, and we’re the only ones bringing ways we can change the status quo, ways for the situation to be better for all grad students all across the board, and you’re coming in with literally nothing. . . . Most of the time management doesn’t even show up with the proposals pulled up or printed. They don’t have the information that would make negotiations easier to approach. So it feels like they’re there just to waste our time.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
One good example that we’ve been discussing in several bargaining sessions now is that we would like to have it in our contract that somebody can only be dismissed under just-cause reasoning, which is what Fordham has in other contracts with other unions in the university — but management have refused to put that in. We’ve spent hours discussing definitions of legal terms, and there hasn’t been any change to this status quo. They have completely rejected every single proposal that we’ve had for protections for international students. They haven’t even considered that.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Another aspect that we’ve found very frustrating is that the administration’s approach outside of the bargaining sessions has been to completely ignore the existence of the union. That has been the case during town halls and their general approach to communicating with undergrads and alumni — they’ve just played it off as if we’re not here.
That changed with the announcement of the walkout. The response was an interesting email that was sent out by President Tania Tetlow to the whole undergrad body. It’s made its rounds on Twitter; the language in the email was just baffling. It was baffling to see them take that approach.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Obviously the union-busting language is expected, but the tone of the email was very condescending, and it was calling us entitled. They were saying that we wanted to have more benefits than others in the Fordham community, which is completely wrong. It was an email full of just plain lies and misinformation. We actually got a lot more support from certain communities after the email was sent out because of how obviously condescending and wrong the email was.
But that was the first time management actually recognized that we are a union and that we are present and trying to bargain with them. We have asked the president to meet with us several times, especially when she first got to Fordham. We sent a couple of emails, and she never tried to have a conversation with us. She’s never been at the bargaining table. All the information that she’s getting is whatever she gets from her bargaining team. Unless she comes to the table, she won’t really know what is happening in the room.
Sara Wexler
Can you say a little bit about what it’s like to be a graduate student at Fordham? I read that the stipend is about $28,000; what is the experience for graduate students trying to survive in New York on that stipend?
Marshawn Brewer
There are a multitude of survival problems that go with the $28,000 salary. One of them is that a lot of times you need a guarantor to get an apartment, and because we aren’t able to afford that on our salary, we need a cosigner. Many students don’t have people they can rely on for that. Second, if you don’t have access to those types of funds or community support, you have to find an apartment that might not be legal or you might need to find housing with four to five other people. So you can find yourself in precarious situations.
Third, the housing, the stipend, and related conditions impact international students a lot. They often don’t get paid in a timely manner when they first get here. So, as an international student, not only do you get a small stipend, but you don’t get paid for months on end sometimes. And you have to rely on people in the Fordham community, other grad students, and sometimes families back home.
As an international student, not only do you get a small stipend, but you don’t get paid for months on end sometimes.
Many international students struggle with housing because of these precarious situations. We have proposals to try to alleviate some of these things, such as having the university provide housing over the summer so that international students can transition quicker or having the option for students to be paid with their A number as opposed to a Social Security number, which would speed up payments. And the university has rejected all those proposals.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Not only is the stipend lower than $30,000 a year, but it’s also taxed, and it only covers the nine months of the academic year. We don’t get paid over the summer, which is difficult for everybody, but especially for international students because we’re legally not allowed to work outside of the university. So a lot of us do under-the-table jobs, babysitting or any other gig, basically, that will pay cash to try to get by over the summer.
Besides the housing situation, there are also a lot of people who experience food insecurity because the money is just not enough; on top of paying taxes out of the stipend, we’re also supposed to pay some fees to the university. The university doesn’t cover the full amount of the health insurance. We usually pay a little above $2,000 out of that stipend a year.
It’s impossible to survive on that stipend. At the beginning of this year, one of us had to house an international student who was able to afford just a few days in a hotel when they first arrived, but nobody provided them with any aid to find housing, and they were going to be on the street that night if nobody would take them in.
The university administration knew about the issue, which continues to be a problem. We had another international student from Ukraine who also faced difficulty finding housing when he first arrived. He was trying to find housing, and Fordham University just didn’t do anything for him.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
I remember going to the first negotiation session that I attended, and this was a topic that came up. The response from the university’s lawyer and their negotiation team was like, “Hey, you know what you’re getting into. It’s New York City baby, that’s how it is.” And I’m paraphrasing here, but what the lawyer said was, it’s a personal problem and Fordham is not going to delve into those. So [the message from] their lawyer and the president of the university is, come to New York, but we’re not paying you enough to find proper housing and we’re not paying you in a timely way so that you can even make the first payment. Were you able to find an apartment? That’s just a problem that you have to deal with on your own.
I just remember sitting in that bargaining session and hearing them say this and thinking, they don’t want us here, or they’re at least not making any effort to make us feel like we’re welcome, appreciated, and valued at the university. For me, going to class or doing any of the tasks that I had to do for the week after that . . . I was like, “Where’s the motivation here if it feels like the value that we bring to the university is completely unappreciated?”
As Gaby was saying, international students are forced to find other ways of financing their summers. It’s just crazy finding funding for three to four months out of the year when you can’t work outside of the university, and jobs within the university are very limited. Even once you can teach — I can’t teach yet, I’m a first year — that’s an avenue that, because of Fordham’s rising tuition, which they just raised 6 percent, becomes more and more unavailable. Students are unable to pay for a summer course.
International students are forced to find other ways of financing their summers. It’s crazy finding funding for three to four months out of the year when you can’t work outside of the university.
So yeah, you can just see the avenues, the ways to find funding, closing around you. The alternatives are you have savings, a rich family member, or you have another type of funding — or you have to find something under the table. And at that point, because you’re an international student, you’re under a lot of scrutiny for your visa status. You’re forced to make the wager: Am I willing to take this under-the-table job, knowing that if anything were ever to come up, then my visa’s out the window? And any prospects of getting approved to stay here afterward on a job visa are also out the window? It’s a very precarious situation.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
And of course this is always happening while we’re trying to do our best teaching our students, doing our research, and working for the university — because Fordham works because we do, right? The president says that she wants to see diverse backgrounds and diverse voices and faces in the university. But when it comes to protecting the people who bring that to the university, we don’t hear anything from them.
Sara Wexler
What’s the next step after the walkout? Do you foresee a longer strike?
Marshawn Brewer
It’s hard to make a determination on that now. Upward of 90 percent of first contracts end without a strike. So if we go by the data that we have on hand, a strike shouldn’t be what occurs. But we are going to need the capacity to strike. We’re definitely going to have to be strike-ready regardless of whether a strike is on the horizon or not. The idea is to be building momentum for the capacity to strike and to be willing to execute that. That is what we’re trying to do currently.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
We’ve opened a strike fund because there were already people during the walkout who were hourly workers who were not going to get paid for the hours that they joined the walkout. And that’s already a few thousand dollars. That’s why we started the strike fund right now — to be able to cover their wages.
Marshawn Brewer
We’re going to see whether the walkout is going to have impact on bargaining. While we were bargaining during the walkout and the protest outside, the university definitely had a change of tone. They were definitely more demure in their responses, and our arguments started to make a lot more sense to them. It’s funny how your arguments make a lot more sense when people are outside chanting and the windows are shaking and you hear the signs and everything like that — your logic becomes much more precise.
We’re going to see what their response on just cause is. Because just cause is a staple of some of their past agreements, and the only reason they wouldn’t want to put it in our contract is because they’re bargaining in bad faith. If we offer a counter to them on just cause and they say they’ll consider it, if we get a positive indicator on that, if they agree to just cause during the next bargaining session — that might be a sign that we are moving toward good faith and that a contract could be on the horizon.
Sara Wexler
Have you faced any challenges in organizing?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
There are certain departments of students who have been hard to reach out to. There’s definitely a lot of fear. I can speak to that as an international student: there’s a lot that’s so ambiguous in terms of how are we protected, especially in terms of fears of getting your visa removed or something like that. We know in general that the United States is not a very welcoming place for immigrants.
So that fear is looming a little bit behind trying to organize in the workplace — and not only for internationals. For a lot of people, I think, there’s kind of a stigma that unions might not be the greatest. People have reservations. But, again, after the letter that the president sent out that was blatantly condescending and horrible in so many ways, a lot of people who were afraid or who had reservations were like, “Ok, I’m ready to walk out after seeing the way we’re being treated and disrespected all the time.”
Marshawn Brewer
I think there are pockets of the graduate student body who have some ideological reservations. Then there’s, like Gaby said, the fear of some international students about what could transpire if they lean in too hard into the process.
And then there’s just a sense of apathy among a few people. Once the union isn’t front and center — it was last year — there is a point at which a lot of people drop off and aren’t paying attention. So you have to reactivate them, tell them why this is important and why they have to get involved.
You also have the problem of third partying, where people who are not as involved in the union see the union as something separate from themselves. You have to get them to understand that we are all in this together, and that it’s not “us versus them” — it’s all of us together in relation to the upper administration.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Also, on a more practical level, there’s the challenge that there are students who are here for a shorter amount of time by virtue of the type of program that they’re doing. They might still be student employees, they might still be workers and part of the unit; but because some people are here only for three semesters, unless you’re a PhD student that has an investment in the institution for five, six, seven years, it’s harder to say, “This fight is worth it. This is something that I want to involve myself in.” So planting the seeds of this feeling of solidarity, of “maybe I’m not going to reap the benefits of this contract, but people after me might be able to” — it’s challenging.
We heard during our walkout, at the closing rally, from a master’s student, and you do see master’s students that are very involved. So I’m not going to say that it’s impossible to activate those sorts of parts of the unit, but it’s certainly a little more challenging. The rough part is that these are people that are still very much affected by the conditions under which we work, by the problems that affect us all. It’s just harder for them to see how “this fight is worth it for me.”
Sara Wexler
Have you been in touch with any other unions? Are there other communities that have expressed solidarity with your contract fight?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Individually, some of us have been in touch with certain people at other unions that have recently gone on strike, for example at Temple University and the University of California, to discuss how their negotiations are going or how they go about certain things.
On our social media, the solidarity between unions is really strong. Other unions have been retweeting our strike fund. They’ve been offering their support every time that we post about a big thing that we have. For the walkout, a lot of them were supporting from afar. We got some people from other CWA units and locals come to our walkout, and they brought food to help us out and just cheer us on. They came to the closing rally at the university.
Sara Wexler
How do you think a good contract will transform graduate student life at Fordham?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
It’ll transform the lives of all of us a lot. It’s terrifying and difficult to go into class thinking, “I can only eat ramen noodles for the rest of the week, and have our brains function the way we need them to function in order to be able to teach and research and all these things.
It’s terrifying and difficult to go into class thinking, ‘I can only eat ramen noodles for the rest of the week.’
Even in terms of morale, it’ll transform the spirit of the university because graduate students teach about 30 percent of the classes at Fordham University. We’re in touch with the majority of first-year students who come into college, and we’re excited for our research and to teach them. But in our current conditions, sometimes we just can’t. We can’t be excited, or we can’t perform. We know that the Fordham community in general will be better with a good contract — not only will our personal living conditions improve, but the entirety of the ecosystem.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Aside from changing the conditions under which workers are able to teach and research and be a part of the university, the proposals that we’re making are also about the ecosystem and the university at large — demands like banning NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] in cases of harassment and discrimination. Those are about making the university a safer place. The ultimate objective of the contract is to create a safer learning environment that makes everyone involved in it better off.
Marianne Williamson, speaking during an interview in Washington, DC, on August 21, 2019. (Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Marianne Williamson, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, is the first candidate to announce that she will be challenging President Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary. In this interview with Jacobin editor at large David Sirota, Williamson discusses the undemocratic nature of the Democratic Party establishment, her criticisms of the Biden administration, and the need for institutions to regain ordinary Americans’ trust. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
David Sirota
You’re running in the Democratic primary in 2024. You ran in 2020, in the primary. What did you learn from the 2020 Democratic primary? What are the two, three, four big takeaways that you learned from that experience that most inform your campaign in 2024?
Marianne Williamson
I learned that the political media–industrial complex is even more corrupt and in a way more vicious than I would have feared. And I learned that the voters are even more wonderful than I would have hoped. What I have experienced is the dignity, the decency, the open mindedness, and the basic goodwill that people want to at least aspire to among the voters and a political system that does more to obstruct the expression of that high-mindedness than to inspire it.
David Sirota
The Democratic Party seems incredibly hostile to the idea of primaries in general, and in particular primaries against incumbents. I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: the hardest thing to do in all of American politics, really at any level, all the way from city council up to the presidency, is to successfully challenge an incumbent in a Democratic primary. That almost never, ever happens.
It is so incredibly rare, and I’ve worked on a bunch of Democratic primaries. I worked for Ned Lamont against Joe Lieberman. I worked for my wife’s Democratic primary against an incumbent that was actually successful, one of the very rare ones. I’ve worked for, obviously, Bernie Sanders in 2020. Now, that wasn’t against a sitting incumbent, but a kind of quasi-incumbent in a former vice president.
Knowing that, I would ask why you think that, not only does the Democratic Party leadership seem to be so hostile to the idea of a primary, but clearly there’s a voting base that looks skeptically upon primary candidates against incumbents. I wonder if you agree with that and why you think that is.
Marianne Williamson
I do agree with it, although I make a distinction, as you just did, between the Democratic Party and the Democratic establishment leadership — that the latter is clearly hostile in all the ways that you said. The Democratic electorate has become deeply codependent in its relationship to the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and the Democratic leadership in a way that, number one, you don’t see on the Republican side, and number two, wasn’t true when I was growing up.
When Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy said they were going to primary Lyndon Johnson, nobody said they shouldn’t or couldn’t or even thought it was odd.
When Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy said they were going to primary Lyndon Johnson, nobody said they shouldn’t or couldn’t or even thought it was odd. Even when Teddy Kennedy said he was going to primary Jimmy Carter. Nobody thought, “Oh, how dare he?” That narrative hadn’t been created yet. It’s really a reversion to a time one hundred years ago when a bunch of men sat around a table smoking their cigars, thinking that they had the right — that they were entitled — to determine who the candidate should be, which to me is particularly outrageous because the presumption there is, “They got this.” And if anything has been proven over the last few decades, it’s that they don’t got this. The idea that they know better, the idea that we should go, “Oh, they know better,” is particularly absurd in today’s world.
David Sirota
Right after Bernie won New Hampshire in 2020, Jeff Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, published a piece with the headline, “It’s time to give the elites a bigger say in choosing the president.” I picked that out because I think it does illustrate that it has been normalized — this idea that primaries are bad; challenges to incumbents are bad; the party bosses — if you will, the elites, the political class — should choose party nominees.
Last week we had Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [AOC] on our show, and I asked her about this hostility to primaries — her as somebody who is one of the rare few who has won a Democratic primary against the Democratic incumbent. She said, as somebody who had won a primary, that she would never speak ill of primaries and essentially thinks the primary process is a healthy one.
But I would ask you to address the trope that you hear so often that says primaries are bad for potential nominees. Primaries weaken a party; the more the party fights with each other in primaries, the more it imperils the party’s ability to win a general election. I’m sure that has been thrown at you; I’m sure it will be thrown at you. What do you say to that argument when a voter or somebody in the media brings that up?
Marianne Williamson
It’s not an argument. It’s a narrative created by the DNC and the Biden administration in order to gaslight people. In 2016, there was certainly a big fight among the Republicans. But Donald Trump won. This idea that if a lot of people are arguing in the primary, that somehow that’s going to make us less capable of winning the general election, is ridiculous.
As a matter of fact, I would argue that if the DNC had kept their hands off the scale in 2016, let it just be Hillary or Bernie, whichever one the voters chose, then Trump would never have become president. If anything, the evidence would imply that a primary is a good thing. Among other things, it’s democracy.
The traditional role of the party is to stay out of this until the voters have spoken. Then once the nominee is chosen, the DNC is supposed to come in there and do everything they can to support the nominee in the general election. So this is a recently formulated power grab on the part of the Democratic establishment elite and the DNC.
It’s so interesting, because these people would have us believe that they’re the great protectors of democracy. And yet in this particular situation, they are so worried about the actual democratic process. They would have us clear the field so that Biden is just the one we all go with because they say so, as though we’re not even supposed to have an intelligent conversation among ourselves about whether or not he’s the best person to win in 2024. We’re not even supposed to have the conversation. So as much as someone like AOC might say, “I would never put down a primary,” they’re passive. All those people are passively putting down a primary by keeping their mouths shut.
David Sirota
The argument that primaries weaken general election nominees . . . you mentioned some past examples: on the Republican side, Donald Trump. But the 2008 primary was one of the most vicious Democratic primaries in the party’s modern history, between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And Obama emerged, in my view, as a stronger nominee because he was battle-tested.
Marianne Williamson
He said that himself. That’s exactly right. Number one, he admitted that. And number two, the whole country got to see who he was because of that experience. So the narrative is nothing but PR. It’s not a good-faith argument.
David Sirota
I agree. I am somebody who thinks that primaries make candidates stronger. I’m not surprised by the party establishment’s and the party elites’ hostility to primaries. They are invested in the current power structure as it stands right now, a power structure that doesn’t want to be challenged in intraparty primaries.
I’m more dismayed — maybe not surprised, but dismayed — by how that thinking has become more pervasive among rank-and-file Democratic activists and Democratic voters. It’s troubling because, in my view, it’s the voters and the activists’ job in part to demand more of these parties — both of the major parties, all the parties that exist. I think there’s kind of a subservient role now, or at least a subservient psychology, among a lot of liberals that says, our job is to serve the party; it’s not the party’s job to serve us.
Now, I do want to turn to Joe Biden specifically. There’s a new poll out, and we’re going to go through a couple of pieces of polling data. There’s a new poll out this week that says just a third of American voters say that President Biden deserves to be reelected and a majority in his own party say they would like to see somebody else as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024. Why do you think that is?
Marianne Williamson
For obvious reasons. I think a lot of people — and that poll also shows us this — are grateful to the president for many things. He defeated Trump in 2020. He’s done some things better than some people would have thought. But many people feel, “Thank you for your service and what you’ve done. But in moving forward, we can do better and we must do better, because the 2024 election is going to be very different than the 2020 election.”
They’re going to be coming at us with some very big lies. And the only way we’re going to defeat those big lies is with some very big truths. Those big truths have to do with a deeper analysis of what’s going on in this country, where we are as a country, than the Democratic establishment wants to do, because it has to do with the undue influence of corporate money on our system.
The only way we’re going to beat the Republicans in 2024 is with a genuine economic alternative, a genuine fundamental course correction.
It has to do with the kind of corporate tyranny that not only holds our government in its grip, but the people of the United States in its grip. The only way we’re going to beat the Republicans in 2024 is with a genuine economic alternative, a genuine fundamental course correction and a U-turn that actually admits the citizens of the political system across the board and commits to a season of change and repair.
David Sirota
You mentioned corporate influence over the government writ large. I presume that includes, in your analysis, the Biden administration. I want to ask you to be specific about that, and I want to offer some context for why I’m asking that. When I was working for Bernie Sanders in 2020, Zephyr Teachout, one of Bernie’s supporters, published an op-ed in the middle of the campaign. She was a supporter of Bernie, saying that Biden has a corruption problem, and she listed a number of places in which he had served. His donors, including one of the most prominent ones, were the credit card industry and the financial industry — pushing, for instance, the horrible bankruptcy bill that crushed a lot of working-class people.
I bring this up because when she published this and said he has a corruption problem, it became an enormous controversy in a “How dare you?” sort of way. The allegation was portrayed as so outrageous and out of bounds, and ultimately Bernie Sanders apologized for it.
I was horrified and dismayed at the entire apology. I thought this is the kind of discussion that should be had in a Democratic primary: money went into Joe Biden, and policy came out. I don’t even understand why that’s controversial to say. So I want to ask you to be specific about where you think corporate influence has been most pervasive and intense in the policies of the Biden administration, and what you might say to folks who would say that making such allegations is out of line.
Marianne Williamson
“Out of line.” I love that. I’m an American. The Democratic Party should not be telling a Democratic voter what’s “out of line.” There’s that codependent relationship right there. First of all, the most obvious one is the Willow Project. The president had said that there would be no further drilling on public lands. The president had said that he recognizes that climate change is the existential threat to the human race, and yet he has provided more permits for oil drilling than even Trump did. And of course, the Willow Project gives $8 billion to ConocoPhillips so that they can extract fossil fuels on the North Slope of Alaska.
When it came time for “Ol’ Labor Joe” to show that he really meant it when it came to the railroad workers and their struggle with their bosses, when really at that time all they were asking was for sick pay, he came down on the side of the bosses. He had said that there would be a $15-an-hour minimum wage, which should be the minimum that we’re even considering . . . once the parliamentarian said that it couldn’t make it into the bill, he certainly found it convenient to hide behind her skirts. And even though they cut the child poverty rate in half with their child tax credit, when that expired six months later, they didn’t get around to permanently raising it.
In other words, in the final analysis, more often than not, they come down on the side of business. Now, this is how I see Biden. The way I see Biden related to these things is how I see all the corporate Democrats. They try their best to have it both ways. They do see the pain, and they are interested in and will make efforts to ameliorate the stress that people are experiencing, as long as it doesn’t challenge that underlying corporate profit.
Bottom line: that always inevitably makes the return of that pain inevitable. They’ll alleviate stress, but they will not stand for genuine, fundamental economic reform. And I do.
David Sirota
Let’s go a little bit deeper on that, because it’s a topic that I have been reporting on for a very long time, and I think you articulated it there quite explicitly and quite articulately. There is an underlying theory in the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. You could look at it and say their ideology is just corruption; everything is just a patina for corruption. But taking them at their at their word on some of the policies — for instance, as you mentioned, there does seem to be a theory that we can solve major problems and also preserve the economic status quo, that we can help millions and millions of people and the rising tide can lift all boats, and there can be yachts as well.
I don’t believe that that’s true. I believe there is a “Which side are you on?” question, that in order for millions of people to, for instance, have decent health care, you cannot have health care billionaires. Those two things cannot exist together. I wonder if you agree. And I would also ask you whether you think that really is their theory — whether that really is their principled ideology, or whether you do think it is just essentially a cover for corruption.
Marianne Williamson
I think that many of those people are so buffered emotionally from the ravages of human suffering that is on the other side of the gates that they live behind that they don’t honestly recognize what it means that eighteen million Americans cannot afford to fulfill the prescriptions their doctors give them. They clearly don’t recognize what it means that sixty-eight thousand people die in this country every year from lack of health care. They don’t understand what it means, really, on an emotional, visceral level, that 85 percent of Americans are underinsured or uninsured. That one in four Americans live with medical debt; that Americans are out there rationing their insulin — because they’re not hungry and they have decent health care.
David Sirota
There are some folks who say, look, compared to the past two Democratic presidents, Biden represents a significant policy step forward. They look at Bill Clinton deregulating Wall Street and his cuts to welfare — by the way, things that Biden himself supported. They look at Obama essentially using the health care reform debate to prop up the health insurance industry, using the Wall Street crisis to bail out and prop up Wall Street. They look at all of that and then see Biden, and they see somebody who has appointed people who are more affiliated with organized labor. They look at, for instance, the American Rescue Plan as something so much better than the bank bailouts.
I think the American Rescue Plan was a terrific thing. I think it was the best thing that’s happened as a piece of legislation that I can remember in my entire lifetime. And they look at that and they say, “Well, Joe Biden is the best president that we’ve had in a long time, and so we should reelect him.” What do you say to that?
Marianne Williamson
The American Rescue Plan was good, but its effects are no longer here. Build Back Better would have been good. But basically what you’re saying is that they have given cookies as opposed to crumbs. And what I’m saying is that you can’t live on cookies either.
We shouldn’t be comparing this to what a Democratic president did ten or twenty years ago. We should be comparing it to every other advanced democracy in the world. Every other advanced democracy in the world has universal health care. Every other advanced democracy in the world has tuition-free college, which we had until the 1960s. And when I was growing up, Blue Cross Blue Shield was a nonprofit. Every other advanced democracy in the world has free childcare, paid family leave, sick pay, and a guaranteed living wage.
That inside-the-Beltway conversation you’re having doesn’t mean anything to the average American voter. Staying within the confines of that conversation is staying within this bubble with which Democrats lose. And they are always so shocked when they lose, because they don’t realize that none of it has anything to do with the visceral experience of the majority of Americans.
We shouldn’t be comparing this to what a Democratic president did ten or twenty years ago. We should be comparing it to every other advanced democracy in the world.
If you’re among the 20 percent of Americans for whom the economy is doing fine, then a lot of those things that you just said matter. The point is 20 percent is like an enchanted economic island surrounded by a vast sea of economic despair. That is what Bernie spoke to. That is what Trump spoke to — although in Bernie’s case, he actually meant it.
But this other stuff, the conversation that you’re mentioning that the corporate Democrats are having, it’s losing. It doesn’t mean anything. In fact, it infuriates — for good reason, on some level — the average American who is struggling and who is resentful that those kind of effete arguments are made to keep them from being able to simply survive, feed their children, have a decent wage, and get health care.
David Sirota
The other argument that you hear all the time is, ok, Marianne, you’re right. Biden hasn’t done X, hasn’t done Y, hasn’t done Z, and has done ABCDEFG, all this bad stuff over here. But he really wants to do all of this good stuff. The problem is that they only have fifty, fifty-one senators, and there’s always Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and whoever the rotating villain is. Biden’s really trying to do the right thing, and people who say that he hasn’t done what needs to be done are unsophisticated in their understanding of what the politically possible is. How do you respond to that?
Marianne Williamson
I respond as a woman. When a man is cheating on you and keeps cheating on you and keeps cheating on you, but then every two or four years comes back and says, “Aw baby, come on, give me one more chance.” At a certain point, the woman says, “No, no, no.” There’s always an excuse with those people.
Can you imagine the Republicans hiding behind the skirts of the parliamentarian when they really wanted to get something done? It’s true that they will abuse their power, but the Democrats won’t even use it. They’re mealymouthed, and they’ll always come up with an excuse. There are plenty of executive orders that the president could have effectuated. More than anything, the president could have used the bully pulpit in ways that he has refused to.
You’re right, Biden has made some appointments, like with the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board]. But still, when it comes to that bottom line, he stays on this side of fundamental economic reform. That’s all we need to know, and that’s what we should be discussing.
David Sirota
Do you think that he has recently tacked to the right? There have been a series of things that he’s done: breaking the rail strike, the Willow Project, and the immigration issue. There are some folks out there saying that this represents a deliberate decision to move to the right in advance of the election.
To go back to our AOC interview, she said, this is extremely dangerous. It’s not only bad on policy, it’s politically dangerous. But there are other folks who have said this isn’t a tack to the right, that this is who Biden always has been, and this is not any kind of change. Do you think he’s trying to move to the right deliberately, or is this just an expression of what the administration is?
Marianne Williamson
I don’t care. It appears that since Ron Klain left, there has been this move to the right. Some of them have actually said — not as an interpretation, but as an actual statement of the will of the campaign — they’re going to move toward this mythical center where they think they’re going to get more independents.
It seems that the establishment Democrats are intent on shrinking their base. They treat progressives like we’re unruly children who should sit down and just let the adults — who clearly know what they’re doing — run this thing.
It seems that the establishment Democrats are intent on shrinking their base. They treat progressives like we’re unruly children.
The psychology is, “He’s a nice man.” George Bush was a nice man. Talk to the people in Iraq: lost generations, murdered souls. Ask them how nice he is. This conversation of, “Who’s nice and really has the best of intentions?” The Democrats do this all the time. If a Republican does it, we scream bloody murder. If an Obama or Biden does it . . . “Oh, poor baby. He really wanted to get it done.” Even in situations where there’s no evidence whatsoever that he even tried. We have got to stop making excuses for these guys.
David Sirota
There have been some polls about the 2024 race, but a lot of these polls don’t even mention you. So let’s turn to the media for a second, because that’s not necessarily a Joe Biden thing. That’s how the media treats different kinds of candidates. And in these polls, it’s Bernie Sanders, Michelle Obama, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren — but you are, in a lot of these polls, noticeably absent. Why do you think that is?
Marianne Williamson
Oh, gee, I can’t figure it out. Come on, let’s be real. There’s a FiveThirtyEight A-rated poll that came out last week that put me at 10 percent. In some of these polls, you’re right, I’m not even mentioned. What do you think that says?
One of the things I mentioned earlier is a political media–industrial complex. I saw how it worked in 2020. These guys are married; there’s an unholy alliance there. There’s one side of the mainstream media that takes its directions from the RNC [Republican National Committee], and there’s another side of the mainstream media that clearly takes its directions from the DNC. This should not be a surprise to anyone at this point. What does surprise me sometimes is some of the people who fall for that.
David Sirota
Just to go back to the poll that you mentioned, 10 percent overall of likely Democratic voters said they’d probably or definitely back you. This is a poll by Echelon Insights, and I believe this poll showed a stronger contingent of support among people below the age of thirty. I want to hear you explain why you think younger people may be more interested in a candidacy like yours than older people.
Marianne Williamson
Because they’re not even twentieth-century creatures. A Gen Z person wasn’t even born in the twentieth century, or if they were born then, they just hung out for a few years while they were babies. They see no reason why they should live with the effect of bad ideas left over from the twentieth century.
They also have no nostalgia for a time — as I do and as I think you do — when the Democratic Party really did show up. In their experience, the Democratic Party hasn’t really shown up for them any more than the Republicans have. So they’re open. I’ve noticed this. Part of my making the decision of whether or not to run entailed a college tour. I went to eight colleges and universities. I wanted to check it out; I wanted to hear from these people.
I saw they’re not tied to any of that neoliberal bias. They’re not tied to any of that manipulated narrative of how we really should support the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party has supported them. But they’re not stupid. When you talk about FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt], when you talk about the New Deal, when you talk about the very idea that the party has been at times and still could be a real advocate for the working people of the United States, they’re not stupid. They hear that.
People tell me every day, “You’re blowing up on TikTok.” It’s pretty funny. And on that poll, it says 21 percent — that’s what my numbers are with people under thirty. I do understand why, because in many ways they represent a similar mentality to what I and my generation had when I was there. Some generations are like a perfect third on the piano. I always say, “Old people hear me, young people hear me.” The people in the middle — a lot of guys just wish I’d go away. But the young ones and the old ones, they hear me. They get it.
David Sirota
Let’s talk about experience here for a second. Trump was the first person to become the president after not holding elected office, I think, in modern history. I want to take seriously the notion that there’s a lot of evidence that Democratic voters, even more than Republican voters, like to or are more willing to support candidates for higher office who have held office before now. Maybe some of that is credentialism. Maybe some of that is Democratic voters want to elect people to higher office who they feel have experience in government.
With all of that as context, you have not held an elected office. What is your response to those who would say, “Listen, we should be interested in people who have experience in running pieces of the government if we’re electing a president.” How do you respond to that?
Marianne Williamson
First of all, it displays a great naivete about what you think those people do all day, including how much time they spend on the phone raising money. That’s number one. Number two, I think it’s very interesting what the Constitution says related to this. The Constitution says that in order to be president, you have to have lived here for fourteen years. You have to be thirty-five years or older, and you have to have been born here.
If the founders had wanted to say you had to have held elected office, then they would have. But they didn’t, and I think they didn’t for a reason. They were leaving it to every generation to determine for itself, what do you think are the skill sets required to lead us through the challenges of a particular moment?
I don’t think the problem with Trump was his lack of governmental experience. It was his lack of ethics and his lack of character. He was a very effective president in all the terrible — and some very, very terrible — ways. But if he had been a different person, and instead of someone like a Stephen Miller or Sebastian Gorka or whatever, he had brought a different kind of person around him, then it would have been a completely different story.
The idea that you’re repeating here is the idea that only people whose careers have been entrenched for years within the system — that is, the car that drove us into the ditch — should possibly be considered qualified to lead us out of the ditch. I don’t think that we need somebody qualified to perpetuate that system. We need somebody qualified to disrupt that system.
We’re six inches from the cliff in terms of the state of our democracy, the state of our economy, and the state of our environment.
That is one of the things that I feel that I do bring. Washington, DC, as you well know, David, is filled with political car mechanics. There are some very good political car mechanics in Washington, DC, and I would bring them into my administration.
But the problem is not that we don’t have good political car mechanics. The problem is we’re on the wrong road. We’re six inches from the cliff in terms of the state of our democracy, the state of our economy, and the state of our environment. What are those people so self-satisfied over? What are they so self-congratulatory about? On what basis do they say “It has to be one of us”? Have we not given them enough experience and enough of our nation’s history that, at some point, we say, “We need to intervene. You are the status quo. The status quo is not going to disrupt itself. You have us on a self-defeating, self-destructive trajectory to the point where we could destroy the habitability of this planet within one hundred years. We, the people, will take it from here.” That’s what needs to be said now.
David Sirota
But I would ask you this question about the system itself. Are you arguing that everybody in the system, by virtue of being in it, is part of the problem?
Marianne Williamson
No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that about Bernie. I don’t believe that about quite a few of the progressives. Rashida Tlaib was talking the other day about Julian Assange. It took a long time for one of them to mention him, but she did. I know there are progressives. And sometimes I agree with something that a corporate Democrat might do.
It’s not black and white, but what is black and white is where we find ourselves as a democracy, where we find ourselves in terms of the habitability of the planet. Everywhere I go — this was true in 2020, and it’s even more startling now — I will go into a room full of voters and I will say we’re going to do something. I’m going to ask you to raise your hand if something applies to you, and if you raise your hand, keep it up, because I want everybody to be able to look around the room.
I have done this all around the country, and this is my question. Have you heard a young person say, or are you a young person who has ever said, these words, “Under normal circumstances, I would be considering having children, but given the state of the world, particularly the environment, today, I’m thinking that’s not a responsible thing to do.” I am shocked everywhere I go by the number of hands that are raised. And I ask everybody to just look around the room, and I point out what we all know. This is not normal. We’re like frogs in the boiling water at this point.
So let historians a hundred years from now do all this deep diving, into-the-weeds analysis about who got it kind of right and how it really happened. Did it just start with Ronald Reagan, or maybe it started with some of the austerity of Carter? I don’t care. I don’t know. All I know is the house is burning, and it is not negative to yell “Fire!” if in fact the house is burning down. Who did the arson? How the fire started is not as important as saving the house of our democracy, because right now it is on fire.
David Sirota
You’ve mentioned the climate a bunch. I feel like the discourse over science, especially during the COVID pandemic, has become extremely scrambled and at times very, very toxic. You’ve talked in the past about vaccines. I think there’s some skepticism in various quarters of the country — across the political spectrum, by the way — skepticism of Big Pharma.
But I also worry that healthy skepticism — whether it’s of a government agency or the pharmaceutical industry, as an example — can tip over into science denialism. Where do you come down on the entire debate over vaccines and their efficacy specifically? And how do you think about the balance between “trust, but verify,” that kind of skepticism, and science denialism?
Marianne Williamson
First of all, healthy skepticism, as you said, is a part of right citizenship. But you’re right, it can’t just be blanket skepticism. It should be healthy skepticism. Contrary to popular belief, I have not said a word about vaccines. Before COVID, I said something about mandates and having a problem with mandates.
I have said at various times, and I think it’s naive not to suggest, that there are some places when it comes to Big Pharma where clearly there is predatory behavior. I haven’t spoken about that specifically in terms of vaccines; I have spoken about it in general. After the opioid crisis, Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family, five hundred thousand opioid overdoses . . . what are we talking about? Pretending that there’s not something to look at there?
So I think that it is very dangerous. We are at that point where people are not trusting the institutions that we should be able to rely upon. I heard a doctor, my own doctor, who said at one point, “Normally, I would just look to see what the CDC [Center for Disease Control and Prevention] has to say, but at this point, I don’t even bother.” That’s dangerous.
But that’s not just people’s fault. There are too many situations, from our government to our health organizations to Big Pharma — which is the problem, of course, with a profit-based health care system — where you can’t blame people who ask legitimate questions. And the government and some of these institutions have cried wolf so many times, have suppressed legitimate questioning, that when the time came when we really needed to listen to some of these people, people didn’t even want to hear them.
Everybody has something to look at there, including the guardians of these huge institutions who, at this point, are going to have to get the trust of the people back. That’s something I’m talking about in this campaign. It’s very, very dangerous when you have the guardians of the public trust — they come year after year, decade after decade, to gain power in order to keep money in order to gain power — become so untrustworthy. And so much of the chaos that we’re experiencing in our society today is because of that.
David Sirota
The vaccine discussion drives me crazy in this way: I don’t presume good faith in most instances, especially not with Big Pharma. But when it comes to agencies like the CDC, rank-and-file people working there, I feel like there must be a thought process that says, “Listen, if we acknowledge any questions, if we acknowledge that a vaccine isn’t 100-percent perfect with zero side effects, if we acknowledged any of those truths, it will be seized upon by dishonest opportunists to sow doubt, which is bad for mass public health.”
There are almost no medicines that have no side effects or no risks. My point is that I do think that rank-and-file folks who are trying to do the right thing in an agency like the CDC are probably calibrating: “If we acknowledge any of the truths at the margins or the truths of the risks, we will open it up to a kind of a wave of confusing information that will harm. . . .” And I think that infantilizes the public.
Marianne Williamson
That’s exactly what I was going to say. It does infantilize the public, and it does more to create skepticism and to sow doubt. When you were talking about the rank-and-file people working at such institutions, I think across the board that’s true. The rank-and-file person working in any of those institutions goes to work wanting to do the right thing and wanting in their own way to serve the public good.
There’s no doubt for me about that. But my father used to always say, “Talk to the smartest person on the jury.” And this dumbing down of the American public, acting like we’re dumb and talking to us like we’re seventh-graders, is what has created a lot of this infantile behavior on the part of people.
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Is the Likud minister in collaboration talks with Mansour Abbas? Both deny it.
By World Israel News Staff
Justice Minister Yariv Levin has been involved in talks with Mansour Abbas, head of the Ra’am party, with the aim of recruiting him to support the judicial reforms, Hebrew-language Channel 12 reported Thursday.
As a gesture, this week the Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a Ra’am bill to establish a hospital in the northern Arab-Israeli city of Sakhnin, the report said.
However, according to the report, Abbas told Levin that in no uncertain terms that he refuses to continue “under-the-table’ negotiations and will demand budgets for dealing with violence in the Arab communities as well as an end to what he described as the delegitimization of Arab society – aside from significant influence on the reforms.
Levin’s office and the Ra’am party have both denied the allegations.
Ahead of the 2021 national election, Ra’am joined then-prime minister Naftali Bennett’s diverse government that ranged from his right-wing Yamina to the ultra-left Meretz and Abbas’s party. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied reports that he, too, had tried luring the Islamist party leader into joining a Likud-led coaltion.
The post Levin negotiating with Arab party leader for support over judicial reform – report appeared first on World Israel News.