The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So we’re here at the Real News Network Studio in Baltimore, and I am really grateful to be sitting here with an incredible panel of folks who are going to help us think through and respond to the Maryland gubernatorial debate that we watched yesterday, October 6th, between Democratic incumbent Governor Wes Moore and Republican candidate Dan Cox. So a lot of us watched that debate either live or afterwards. There was a lot to be furious about. There was a lot to think about in terms of like, okay, these are the candidates we have on offer, but also these are the things that our political parties think are important to us. And so I think a big way that we’re going to address tonight’s discussion is by talking about the issues and voices and perspectives that were not represented on that debate stage last night and that are just not represented in the dominant politics that is determining all of our lives.

And so I could not be more excited to be here at the Real News Studio to talk about these things with all of you and with our three panelists. Please give it up from my farthest end over to me. We’ve got the great Charly Carter, political strategist and executive director of Step Up Maryland. Give it up for Charly.

We’ve got Dayvon Love in the middle, director of public policy at Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. Give it up for Dayvon. And thank you to Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle for co-hosting this great and important event with us. And last but not least, we have to my right, Andy Ellis, Green Party candidate for Maryland governor. Give it up for Andy, everybody. Okay. So here’s how I kind of want to start things off, gang. So like we said, we all watched the debate. I want to just go to the tape for a second and remind us that the debate opened up with 60 second statements from each candidate, Cox and more. And in Cox’s statement, the message, the narrative that he’s selling is pretty clear. Property taxes, rents and electric bills are too high. We’re paying more, but getting less is a direct quote. Maryland is the second worst economy in the nation.

This is all because of dangerous spending, mismanagement and absentee governor Wes Moore. And his pitch boiled down to, we need to lower our car registration fees immediately, cut taxes, cut the fees, control spending and bring back affordable energy and housing for all. Now more on the other side was doing what I think we’re going to see Democrats do for the next two years, which is tie everything to Trump, tie it like an anvil over their neck. And that’s exactly what he did. This guy loves Trump. Dan Cox says he supports 100% Donald Trump’s agenda. While they’re focused on the wealthy elites, I’m focused on working families. And Moore touted his record saying that Maryland has had among the fastest drops in violent crime anywhere in the United States. Teacher vacancy rate in Maryland is down 60%. Math and reading scores are at a five year high, yada yada yada.

So that is how they open their statements to us to ask for our votes. That is how our political discourse shaped the whole discussion of last night. So I want to ask you three, starting with Charly and working back down here, what are we not talking about in the way that that whole framing of the debate limits us?

Charly Carter:

Well, thank you for having me here tonight. I have to say after watching that debate, I wondered whether either candidate had been in the state of Maryland for the last nine months because I’ve been here for 20 years, a little over 20 years, and I’m seeing more activism in the community now than I ever have previously at a higher rate. People who’ve never been involved before are involved, protests sprouting up all over the state. And I didn’t hear anybody really addressing those issues. None of them really addressed the real concerns that people have over data centers. Nobody really talked about the amount of money that’s been taken out of education that’s concerning people and people’s just ability to afford things. Cox touched on utility bill rates, but then he didn’t really give any information about what he would do about them. And I think the things that I’m seeing people really upset about now is about the skyrocketing utility bills, the data centers and what they’re going to do to our communities and people’s home values, and then revenues to continue to invest in education and in other programs that help our community.

Dayvon Love:

Yeah. I would say that the debate yesterday really highlights the limitations of the two party system. I think most people’s assessment of the debate is that it wasn’t quite substantive. And I think what is clear, the purpose of a debate is to provide the audience with an opportunity to see a rigorous test of people’s policy positions. And so part of the challenge with the two party system is that there are certain perspectives that are not going to be present in the conversation that will be helpful to the general public to get a sense as to what is actually at the heart of the policy agenda of each of the candidates and their respective parties. And so just as a couple of examples, and I start as a revolutionary Pan-African nationalist, I’m very clear that black folks are a captured elector of the Democratic Party. So that is the posture where I start in terms of analyzing the discourse between two parties.

And so then evidence of that that I’ll just give to start with is even the conversation about juvenile justice where what the Democrats won’t do is the Democrats will not talk about the ways that the system of the criminal justice system is weaponized against the humanity of people of African descent and that the calls for stricter juvenile justice laws is not about accountability. It’s about continuing to be complicit in an attack on the humanity of black people, particularly black youth. And it would’ve been helpful to have someone like Andy on the stage to be able to press the Democratic Party to go further than what I describe as tough on crime light, which is what the Democratic Party essentially is. And so as a result of not having that kind of perspective, a person that is fiercely defending the fact that we have a system that automatically charges youth as adults and 80% of them black, which means you have kids spend 180 days in adult prison, that is something that folks in our community care about, but in the two party system, in the duopoly, we’re not going to hear a defense of the humanity of people of African descent.

And so again, I just think the debate yesterday was an example and we can give more examples as we have had this discussion, but just as a preliminary thought, just an example of what we don’t get because of the duopoly and the limitations, particularly as black folks being this captured electorate of the Democratic Party.

Andy Ellis:

Yeah. My name is Andy Ellis. I’m the Green Party candidate for governor. I’ve spent the last four years traveling across the state and we’ve been to fairs, festivals, we’ve been to library meetings, we’ve been to church meetings, we’ve been to protests, we’ve been to hearings, we’ve been to all sorts of places and we’ve talked to a lot of people. A lot of people are really frustrated with the way that things are working right now. They don’t think that the government is working for them. They think that the politicians are serving their donors, their national narratives and their party bosses. They don’t think that they’re listening to people and they don’t think that they hear the real pain that people in Maryland are feeling across the state. And I think the debate operated in that fiction where the politicians don’t hear that type of thing. And I think both of them acted as if we existed in a world where their two party system still had hold on the imagination of most people and most people still believe that that system actually works.

I think more and more people have decided and agreed that that system doesn’t work because they’ve seen year after year after year of politicians promising them to do things in debates like that and not actually doing them. The UNBC poll came out yesterday right before the debate and it showed a couple of things. One, it showed that Wes Moore and Dan Cox are at the lowest points they’ve been at in the polls since they both won the 2022 primary. People know who both of them are. They know what the record is and they don’t like either of them. Dan Cox had 24% support in that poll. That’s the lowest that I can ever remember a major party candidate having. And if Wes Moore weren’t running against Dan Cox, he may be in trouble in this election, but because he is running against Dan Cox, who is a MAGA aligned, sort of mediocre, no charisma politician, Wes Moore is going to probably win this election and he’s probably going to win it by double digits.

But the other thing the poll showed yesterday was that 25% of people don’t want either party and like 80% of people don’t trust either party. And I think that creates a real opening for us to do something different than what we’ve been doing up until this point. We have an election where there’s a 99% chance that Wes Moore is going to get reelected and all Dan Cox is trying to do is get out of the 20s so that he doesn’t get embarrassed. Dan Cox has sort of functionally turned the Republican Party in the state of Maryland into about as ineffective as the Republican Party is in Baltimore City or in Prince George’s County or in Montgomery County. And I think that that creates an opening to take the anger that people have and the grassroots uprising that people are having that Charlie is talking about in order to build a new kind of politics that is about grassroots governing power and not about the same old two party system.

And I think the debate was a perfect proof of that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, to kind of really bring that point to light, one of the questions that was directed to Cox was literally, do you support or oppose the federal eligibility changes for programs like SNAP or food stamps and Medicaid? The bar is so damn low that the question is, do you support kicking all these millions of people off SNAP and Medicaid and everyone who’s going hungry or going homeless because of it? Are you shitting me? That’s the level of question. Are you for or against this? So I don’t care what these people say to a question like that. I don’t care about their bullshit responses to a bullshit question, but there is a very non-bullshit problem here that Marylanders and people around the country are going through. So I wanted to talk about that more. They did not address enough what the effect of these cuts and these costs of living are on Marylanders.

What would you say about that if you were on that debate stage?

Dayvon Love:

Well, something that I want to say to the point that you raised about just how cookie cutter the questions and the debate is, it’s important for the general public to be clear that there’s an emergence of a consultant class, a political consultant class that exists within both major parties that profiteer off of the fact that every two years there are major election cycles where people are making a lot of money. And if you think about the corporate core of both parties, where they have a business model that is reliant on keeping folks within the confines of the duopoly. Well, what I think what we’re seeing though is that to Andy’s point is that there is record levels of dissatisfaction with both political parties. So even the question that you identified that was posed to Dan Cox is a very typical question as it relates to your traditional Republican Democratic Party discourse, social safety net and entitlements versus trickle down economics and austerity.

So these are very traditional, the kind of traditional polls of the Democratic and Republican Party discourse. And the challenge is that we’re at a place now where I think more people, this is to Charlie’s point about the increase in activism that exists, that people are just more informed and people now are demanding more of these candidates. But unfortunately what happens, and I think this is really important for people to be clear about, is that the emergence of the political consultant class in many respects, it’s really on its last leg, that if folks in the broader community continue to push, then it’s going to force the development of an emergence of different political formations. And so I think that’s really important for us to continue to say to the general public that it’s not futile. And I think that’s part of the concern that I would have is that people would see the lack of substance in that engagement and completely disengage from the political landscape as opposed to staying on the battlefield.

Andy Ellis:

Yeah. And I would say both Wesmore and Dan Cox have a class privilege that does not make them have to experience this type of thing. And for me, I’ve experienced it very directly. Last June, I was laid off from a company that I had worked for for 15 years with no notice, just sort of one day I got a call and they sent a box from my laptop and said, “It’s been nice knowing you.” I didn’t talk about that for a long time on the campaign trail because I was embarrassed, right? I shouldn’t be embarrassed. It wasn’t my fault. It was global capital and private equity and a company that didn’t care about people, but I was embarrassed. But when I started talking about it when I was on the campaign trail, I realized how many Marylanders are going through something like this. How many Marylanders have lost a job at the federal level or corporation that they worked at for a long time, how hard it is for them to find new work, how ineffective state services are, how low unemployment is because it hasn’t been adjusted by the Maryland General Assembly since the Obama era, how bad the other services are in the state.

And as I started to talk about it, I went from shame to solidarity on this because I was starting to understand that so many people are struggling in a way that the politicians don’t understand right now. And if the politicians can’t wrap their head around the way that people are struggling and get beyond this cookie cutter consultant class conversation that Davon is talking about, they’re going to face a kind of uprising that they’ve never faced before. And we are going to see this political system change. The question is, is it going to change in favor of the people or is it going to change in favor of the Trump fascists who are trying to push their corporate rule on all of us? And I think the key question that we have to ask in our politics in this election and over the next decade is which way that change goes.

For me, I hope it goes for the people, but I’m worried that it’s not going to. I think the only hopes that we have are to use every forum we have in order to fight back against it, in order to fight for the people who have been left behind, even though Wes Moore says he doesn’t want to leave anybody behind, a lot of Marylanders have been left behind. And I think we got to fight for those folks and I think we have to create a political reality that allows them to have the power to make the changes they need to their communities and their lives so that we can get different outcomes because if we don’t, I’m pretty sure Trump and his fascists are going to do their form of that and none of us are going to like that.

Charly Carter:

I agree with both what Davon and Andy have said. I think the missed opportunity in that debate was the opportunity to talk about big ideas, new ideas, something bold. What we saw, as everybody has said, is two parties and two candidates who could stay relatively safe within the bandwidth within their two respective parties. No one had to challenge, no one was challenged. They could just say, “Here’s my position. I’m for lower taxes.” And the other person can say, “And I’m against Trump.” And yet all of the other issues just completely went undiscussed. And I think that’s the importance for having third party and minor candidates in these debates because oftentimes they are coming from a perspective where they’re offering a big idea that is why they’re not part of one of the other two parties. So I think it was a really missed opportunity for voters to hear about big ideas, which is what they are seeking.

More the people who are changing parties, and I’m hearing it regularly about the number of people. I’m shocked, honestly. I’ve been a lifelong Democrat and I’m shocked with a number of people who are saying they are shifting from being a Democrat in the state of Maryland where they can’t vote in primaries to being independent because they just don’t see what they believe. They don’t feel like it’s being heard, what they want is being heard or that it’s being represented in the party here in Maryland. And just as a funny aside, when I first met Andy, we argued about, this is going back years, we argued about whether or not there could be a successful third party in the state of Maryland. And I was adamant, although I was charged at that time with starting the Working Families Party of Maryland, I was like, “It’s just too easy to take over the Democratic Party because they have no vision and they’re not inspiring to people.” And what we saw on that debate stage was really a lack of vision and inspiration.

And that was really from what… Wes Moore is one of the most popular Democrats in the country right now, and yet he had this perfect opportunity to talk about something that inspired people that gave people hope. And he just talked about the same very vanilla policies that he’s been talking about and, “Oh, I’m better than Trump,” without really talking about what we could be doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. It’s like I hear a lot of talking, but the words don’t mean shit. It’s just like they never just address the thing that you’re begging them to address because you’re living it. It’s just such a bizarre spectacle that he just keeps being subjected to. I have a kind of follow up when it comes to the way that that comes through in their language and the responses they give. But before we move on from the question of the costs of living, straw poll. I mean, what’s hitting your pocketbook these days? The cost of gas is ridiculous. Rent keeps going up. What else? What else are people struggling with when it comes to paying for the cost of living? Everything. Everything is the main answer. Any others? Food? Yeah. We’re all working harder and our wages are staying the same while everything’s getting more expensive. What the hell?

That doesn’t feel like the American dream that we ostensibly were raised to believe in.

Dayvon Love:

And can I give an example?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Please.

Dayvon Love:

An example I think is really important is on the conversation around public safety that I alluded to in the beginning. If we’re clear about the nature of the way that the law enforcement establishment has interacted with black people, the law enforcement establishment being the Fraternal Order of Police, the Maryland State’s Attorney’s Association, the Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, these are entities that have advocated for the tough on crime policies that are responsible for mass incarceration. And in some contexts, Democrats will talk about pushing back against that kind of in a very cosmetic way. One of the things that we’re seeing is we’re seeing Sinclair Broadcasting and Executive Chairman David Smith who owns the Baltimore Sun. We are seeing those media outlets being used as a communications arm for the law enforcement establishment. And the real material impact of that, because Baltimore has experienced one of the most precipitous declines in homicides and non-fatal shootings of any city in the United States.

And I think there’s a large community consensus that has been the unprecedented investment in black-led grassroots organizations that have been the cause of that precipitous decline. It’s important if Democrats are serious about this issue, it’s important for them to talk about being in opposition to a force that wants to undermine and to diminish those black-led grassroots organizations. But I don’t hear the governor or the Democratic Party coming to the defense of those organizations that are being attacked. I suspect what that is because Democrats still want to maintain a level of proximity to the law enforcement establishment, which means that talking about the declines in violence as being based in the community being supported in doing so undermines the law enforcement establishment and the Democratic Party doesn’t want to offend the law enforcement establishment. So I just wanted to lay out… Tha’s a concrete example of something that folks have talked about in the community, in public discourse, people have talked about that, but the fact that that is not what Wes Moore is saying, that is an important part of what is happening in Baltimore says something about the limitations of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for our political interests.

Andy Ellis:

And can I add to that? So I think one of the interesting things about the way that that question got answered is Dan Cox got closer in some ways. Dan Cox said we need to invest in rec centers. We need to invest in community organizations. We need to invest in churches. Now he went on to say a bunch of other stuff that was not the right answer, but he was getting closer to making the argument about investing in the grassroots than Wes Moore was, which I thought was really interesting. It means he’s been listening, I think, to some folks who are trying to tell him some of those things, but he is not the right messenger and the Republican Party is not the right messenger for this stuff because they then turn around and talk about predator children and soft on crime laws and things like that.

So they’re getting part of this message, but they’re not getting the rest of this message. I thought it was really interesting that Cox talked about that and Moore did not. It was a really interesting juxtaposition to me that Cox was the one who was talking about investing in the grassroots community organizations as a means of addressing crime and addressing public safety. Now, the rest of his package doesn’t work, but he was the one that got there and Moore didn’t say yes. Moore could have even said, “Yes, I’ve done that. That’s why we passed this initiative that gave a little bit of money to some of these organizations.” But he didn’t say that.

Dayvon Love:

He even said that the talking point of his administration has given record investments to law enforcement, to your point.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and the law enforcement question really centered around ICE, right? It’s close to home. Of course, it’s happening in our backyards, in our neighborhoods. We just published a report I did from Frederick right in front of the house where those ICE agents drove onto private property, beat peaceful protestors, terrorized the whole family and didn’t even take anybody. All that terror for what? It’s happening all… I’ve been in front of the Hagerstown warehouse. I used to work in warehouses like that. They’re not built for human beings to work in most times, let alone house them and incarcerate them. So they talked about ICE a bit, right? But to your guys’ point, the answers were very revealing for what they said and more importantly, what they didn’t say. But the question that I thought was really well put, shout out to Tracy Wilkins from NBC Washington. I thought she and Pamela Wood from the banner asked really great questions, even if they got really crappy answers most of the time.

But Tracy Wilkins was asking Wes Moore if it was a mistake to ban ICE detention partnerships or a mistake to how he’s handled ICE and the cooperation question of local law enforcement. And his answer was, “If you’re going after the worst of the worst and violent offenders, I will work with you.

But when you’re going after people like Pastor Fuentes in the Eastern Shore who has been here for decades and leads a congregation in the Eastern Shore and ICE detains him, then no local law enforcement will and I will not allow them to be deputized to do that type of work.” So that was something, but then Tracy Wilkins pressed him about if there’s going to be detention, should detention be happening in Maryland where people can have access to family and access to their counsel, or are you going to do anything to stop these Gestapo motherfuckers disappearing our neighbors and sending them to Louisiana or some third country? And his answer was boiled down to, “So I think there has to be a reconsideration about the way that ICE is moving inside of our communities all throughout the state of Maryland.” What the fuck does that mean?

That’s my question. What does that actually mean? As a citizen of Maryland, as a Latino, as someone with family members that feel very threatened right now, what do I do with that?

Andy Ellis:

I mean, I think what it means is there was some political pressure on him this year in order to move against ICE that there wasn’t last year. Last year when the 287 bill came up, it got killed in the Maryland General Assembly at the request of Governor Moore. There was some political pressure on it this year, and so he moved and he responded to political pressure like he always does. But I don’t think that his heart is in it because he sat up on a stage with Mark Wayne Mullen when Mark Wayne Mullen took over the head of the DHS and was all chummy with him, talking about how we need to have this bipartisan cooperation in order to do this the right way. I think that it goes back to the place that Wes Moore likes the police. He likes to give police resources.

He likes to be able to talk about how he’s tough on crime and then say, “But we’re not tough on all crime.” I like the framing of tough on crime light, and I think he is tough on immigration light. I think he’s responding to political pressure and trying to do everything he can to protect his political career. I’m not sure that he’s trying to do much to protect Marylanders. Because again, last year there was a bill in front of the General Assembly that would have banned 287. It wasn’t just last year. It’s been there for years and years and years and it’s gotten killed every year. Wes Moore, Bill Ferguson have killed it.

Yeah, great. They came around this year on it, but there’s a lot of families who got broken up and there’s a lot of people who got detained and deported that didn’t need to be because they didn’t have the political courage to do the right thing without the amount of political pressure on them in order to get them to do the smallest thing they could. 287 is great. Yeah, let’s address that, but that is not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that we have a immigration policy at the national level that has been broken for decades because both parties refuse to give it up as a political cudgel to use against the other ones and refuse to figure out a way to deal with the millions of people who are already here without threatening to deport them or threatening to detain them.

It is one of the biggest failures of the two party system at the federal level that we have allowed this to get to the point where both parties can use immigrant communities As tokens and as chips in their political campaigns in order to try to maintain their power without doing anything to the very real effects on people’s families, on people’s communities, and people’s lives that happened from them being unable to figure out a solution to the problem.

Dayvon Love:

The Democratic Party, I would say over the last 10 to 15 years, maybe even longer, has been shifting in terms of the constituencies that it sees itself as being responsive to. That there was a point in time where the Black community was a really important base of support that the Democratic Party in many respects would placate, but at least put in the effort to invest in getting Black folks to be a strong base of the Democratic Party. What has happened, and I think this has accelerated after the election of Donald Trump the first time, is a shift and a focus on suburban voters in the place of focusing on the Black community because issues that fundamentally impact our community, and I would even add other folks of color, particularly immigrant communities, that the moving away from focusing on those core constituencies has created a dynamic where they’re talking to that suburban audience, avoiding things that might inflame or might cause some consternation of that audience.

And so in the context of this conversation, particularly about ICE, and I will put it in the larger conversation about the ways that criminal justice are weaponized against those of color. What we’re seeing, Trump was not unclear and the Republicans are not unclear about the fact that the language of these are violent criminals, these are Mexican rapists, these are the very same tropes that are part of the collective American consciousness that are weaponized to criminalize black people being deployed against immigrant communities. And the limitation of the Democratic Party, and particularly in the person of Wes Moore as governor of the state, is that the unwillingness to be direct and say that, the unwillingness to say that the attack against immigrant communities is consistent with the racialized criminalization of people of African descent, that has been weaponized to undermine our humanity and undermine the humanity of immigrant communities.

The unwillingness to say that is about the fact that they’re trying to appeal to a constituency that if we’re honest, is scared of black folks. They’re scared of folks of immigrant communities. And instead of actually addressing that directly, that he’s gesturing to it. He’s giving an individual story that’s heart wrenching and wants people to be brought in, but won’t talk about the overarching structure of racism and white supremacy that animates the attacks that ICE has been tasked with on behalf of Trump and the MAGA movement. And so again, it’s just one of those things that the answer indicates to me the inability of the Democratic Party to be a vehicle for the interest of black and immigrant communities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I love the way you put that. The unwillingness to be direct is probably one of the things, it’s probably one of the most popular political complaints we all have. It’s like, just tell me straight, stop bullshitting me. Just give me a straight answer. And that’s what I really took away from the debate. And frankly, most debates I ever watch in this country is it’s a theater. It’s not a real debate. It’s a performance. And it’s a performance in not answering our most basic questions and finding a whole class of consultants, like we mentioned earlier, to help you bastardize language so that you can get around saying what people just want you to say. And there are examples that were just baffling to me. I though it was wild that even though, as you said, Andy, all signs point to more kind of winning this handedly, but he opened himself up to a few big right hooks from Dan Cox and the Republicans that it was like, “Well, if you weren’t so shitty, you wouldn’t be such a juicy target for that point.” When he wouldn’t just say, “I’m not going to run for president and leave you guys in two years.” He wouldn’t just say, “Will you commit to Maryland for four years?” And instead he said, “Yeah, he wouldn’t say it.” And the way that when Cox got him for it and it was a real deserved blow, Moore responded this way.

“Dan Cox seems to be more concerned about my future than he is about the future of the people of Maryland. “It’s like,” You piece of shit, don’t use us to shield yourself from this thing. “You know what I’m saying? So that’s an example of how it’s being done on the right. And here’s an example of how it’s being done on the left, here’s an example of how Cox was doing it. When again, Pamela Wood from the banner asked a really great question, which is,” Hey, you seem to be all in for Trump like everyone else in the Republican Party. How are Marylanders going to know that you’re actually here to serve us and not just your nut job like daddy in the White House? “And what he said is,” Well, absolutely. “Direct quote,” I am a Marylander first and last, and I’m an American first and last.

“What? That’s not how words work.That’s literally saying nothing and then just moving on as if he’s answered the question. So I want to talk about that. How do we reclaim a politics of just being real and just talking about the real shit and not violating that basic trust that we all feel has been violated so many times by so many people in the media and in the political world?

Andy Ellis:

Yeah, I’ll start with that. So part of the problem is the way the debates work right now. So in 1992, Ross Perot got on the debate stage and he was weird and he had his charts and he had all of that stuff, but he appealed to a lot of people because he was speaking truth that seemed to matter to them. And he got in that debate and he had a real impact. He went up in the polls, he probably cost George Bush that election by most accounts. He got 15% or so at the end of the day. It was real significant third party independent political work. After that, the two parties and the media corporations decided that they were never going to allow that to happen again. So they created a commission on presidential debates that locked down on the ability to hear independent voices on the debate stage.

Well, they got all the media networks to buy in with them. They pushed the League of Women Voters out who had been sponsoring debates for years. And then they went to PBS at the national level and said, PBS, if you ever want to host one of our debates, you need to start adopting these rules too. So PBS started adopting those rules and then they started pushing those rules down to their local stations like Maryland Public Television. So stations like Maryland Public Television now have a standard for who gets to be in statewide debates to say you have to have 10% in polls in order to be in… A third party candidate has to have 10% in the polls in order to be included in a debate. So they’ve had this standard for a while. No third party candidate for governor or senator has gotten more than 3% in the state of Maryland since reconstruction.

So they are setting the rules in a way they know is going to exclude people. They have another set of rules that are really arbitrary and really suspect that are things like you have to have substantial fundraising and many people need to show up when you come to an event and you need to have a lot of media coverage. And they don’t quantify those in the same way they quantify the 10% on the polling. So in this year’s debate, by the time they sent out the invitations, there was one poll that had come out and it did not include myself and Kathy White, but they said because we weren’t included in that poll and we didn’t get 10% in that poll, we wouldn’t be invited to the debate. I used the Maryland Public Information Act request in order to get some of their discussion about their other debates.

In the spring, they invited all nine Republican candidates to the debate stage, even though they didn’t have polls for them. And this included folks like Douglas Larcom, a guy who had raised no money and got less than a percent in the election. And the most notable thing that Douglas Larcom has ever been done is get charged with like 30 criminal charges a month after they put them on the stage. Things like stalking, real winner they put up on their stage during that Republican primary debate. So I asked them questions about this, why in the Republican debate they were willing to open the doors for other people, but in this debate they were not. They did not answer the question. They stonewalled, they stonewalled, they stonewalled. Well, one of the other things that came up in this Public Information Act request was a conversation that they had to a press release that I sent out and a bill that Davon and I were working on where they spent the whole day in email freaking out because I sent out a press release that said if I was the governor, I would double their budget.

They were like, if the governor finds out that this happened and thinks that we put Andy up to this, then the governor will cut our budget. So they all started scrambling to make calls to the people in the general assembly and to the governor in order to make sure that the governor didn’t think that Maryland Public Television called me and told me to put out a press release. It’s so nonsensical that when I say it out loud, it just doesn’t make sense. But they were so worried about it because a third of their budget comes from the general assembly and from the governor.

Imagine how freaked out they would think the governor was if they extended an invitation to me to be in the debate if they were that freaked out about me suggesting a doubling of their budget. And I say all of this to say that there has been a concerted effort by the two parties and the media corporations, including PBS, in order to make sure that the kind of directness that we saw in 1992 when Ross Perot was on the stage never exists again, because they know that if people hear options other than the two parties, they will listen to options other than the two parties. They will vote for options other than the two parties. So they have sanitized the discourse. They’ve excluded most of the voices that would challenge them and be direct and they have done it so that they can protect their power.

And we see where it is. We see where it is 30 years later. It is a terrible debate. Most people don’t watch debates anymore because they are consultants giving scripted ideas back and forth. They’re not engagement of ideas, they’re not engagement of arguments and they’re not reflecting of what the people want. So the reason we get a debate like this is because they made sure that we get a debate like this and not have a conversation like this.

Dayvon Love:

And what I’ll add, because so there’s the kind of front end structural dynamics that Andy is describing that impacts the political landscape. But if you go further upstream, Hupy Harry Harris in his book Negro in the Nation, he was a scholar during the New Negro movement and he was talking about the relationship that black people had to the structure of this society. And he argued that black people prior to the Civil War, our relationship to this society chattel slavery enforced by brute force. And then after the Civil War, wage slavery enforced by starvation, that our community is able to be starved into political submission. And that’s an important framing because part of the conversation about the way, particularly that black folks enter the political landscape, and you’ll hear this conversation about pragmatism or what’s practical, people who run for office, and I’m sure this is true anywhere for anybody, but black folks who run for office, they know what fundraisers to go to, they know what corporations to be in relationship with, they know what major figures to be connected to, what media companies to be affiliated with.

And so what ends up happening is that by the time many of these folks appear on our ballot, they’ve already been curated for us. We’re picking from who the corporate sector decides are viable candidates for our community. And that’s an important point because then when we see a Wes Moore on the stage and we talk about the limitations of his performance, in many respects, it’s not just about him as an individual. It’s about the political landscape that says that the only way for us to be viable in politics is to engage in politics in the way that a Wes Moore engages in politics. And unfortunately, so much of what we see around us affirms that as true when we think about those that get to elected office. So I wanted to put that framing there because some of the work is about the importance and emphasizing the importance of independent black electoral infrastructure that can actually engage in the kind of political warfare such that we can put people into office as opposed to hoping the people selected for us do what we want them to do.

And one thing I’ll add to that is because even like LBS’s political theory of change, I’m clear that all of these elected officials, even the ones I like, even the ones that I have good relationships with, I am clear that they don’t work for us because we’re not how they got there. So the best way for us to impact the political landscape is to, again, engage in the kind of political warfare necessary in order to make them do things they may not otherwise do. And a good example of that is Andy kind of ran down the policy record on immigration, where Westmore and the Democratic Party, they were made to do that. They didn’t want to do that. In fact, one of the things that the governor did was after the legislature passed the ban on the 287G program early in session, he actually issued a memo publicly to law enforcement to say to law enforcement, basically, “I don’t want you to think that we don’t want you to collaborate with federal officials.” A way of trying to have it both ways.

And again, because we’re told that that’s what it takes to be in position. And so I think we just have to be clear that we have to approach politics. We have to approach politics with the thinking of we need independent power that can engage in political warfare so that given the current landscape, we can make these folks do what we need them to do with the understanding that we need to do the parallel work of building political infrastructure outside of the two party system so that at one point and hopefully in the near future, we can produce our own candidates for office.

Charly Carter:

There’s a lot to unpack there. I think to what Davon said, yeah, there’s a lot of truth in that candidates are groomed to… Well, one thing I can say is the very first thing you learn as a candidate is how not to answer the questions that are asked of you. And that would be as someone who spent 20 years identifying training and electing candidates, the very first thing that I tell people do is you answer the question that you want to answer, you don’t answer the question that’s been asked of you. And I think we saw – As

Maximillian Alvarez:

An interviewer, can I just say damn you for being so good at your job? Because that’s one of the things that makes it so frustrating to interview politicians. But anyways –

Charly Carter:

No, no, absolutely. And it’s funny because as a voter, I look at that and I get so frustrated because I’m like, that was an easy answer. I think that people have gotten, candidates now have gotten so… It’s so ingrained in them to answer the question that they want to answer, that they miss the opportunity to really connect with voters and to really be authentic and to give actual answers that would actually get them more votes. And I think that we saw that in the debate yesterday. I think that there were a couple of times when Wes Moore really could have just given an honest answer and it would have connected more with voters than the answers that he gave. The second thing that I want to say is in direct response to what Davon says is it is very much true that when people are coming through, when candidates are moving up through the ranks, that you have to raise money.

And who has the most money are corporations and LLCs, that those are the ones who are writing the big checks. Those are the ones when it costs a million dollars to run for office, that the people, it’s a lot of $5,000 checks. Imagine if you were only talking about $50 checks, it’s all exponentially more people that you have to get in. So they are in rooms with the people who want to hear the PABLOM answers. They are in the rooms with people where they can’t be committal to issues, where they are saying, and we saw this recently in Prince George’s County, where APAC was saying jump and you had candidates who were saying how high? APAC being the American Israel Political Action Committee.

So I think that there’s a lot of truth in that, but there is a role for voters. I’m not willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. I think in this state of Maryland, we have seen where people, where voters have gotten and communities have gotten engaged and they have gotten in and elected people and it’s made a significant difference to the outcomes of their lives. And I will say in 2014, we changed 35% of the state legislature. We elected new people, people that we trained, people that were grassroots selected, people who they raised their money from the grassroots. And immediately when they came in, we got re-enfranchisement of ex-felons. We got a raising of the minimum wage. We got earned sick leave. We got automatic voter registration and same day voter registration, all happening within a four year period of being able to change that, of being able to change just 35% of the state legislature.

A lot of those people are now in leadership positions. Are their positions the same? No, they’ve kind of migrated to the middle, but I want to point out that it is possible to do that both within the two party system, but I think the Green Party and the emergence of the democratic socialists and these other progressive movements are really changing what is going to happen inside the two party system.

Dayvon Love:

And if I can add, I think that’s a really important point. One of the problems with our political culture is that we focus too much on the executive branch. If we’re clear about the science of how our government is structured, it is really the legislature that is really at the seat that produces policy and that wields power over the other two branches. And what’s important about that in terms of a strategic value to our community is that we can do more to a delegate or a state senator or a city council person than we can somebody that’s elected statewide. So I just wanted to add, I think that’s an extremely important point that we use the ability to impact those that are elected locally and have a strategy for engaging the legislature as really the greatest opportunity for black people to exercise true kind of independent black political power.

It has to happen through the legislature. Not that the other stuff isn’t important, but I think the media culture overemphasizes the executive branch.

Maximillian Alvarez:

If I could – So we’re running up on time only in the sense of halftime, right? I do want to let the community in here in a minute, so I think we will have more time to dig into this, but we are sort of rounding the final turn in this first half of the program. But I wanted to sort of build on that and hopefully give you guys a container to respond, right? But the thing that I think we should be addressing here, and I want to give everyone a chance to, is what are those core issues that it shouldn’t just be about these are the issues that a savvy politician should talk about if they want to win new election, but what are the issues that savvy regular working people should make politics about so that we win a better world and a better future?

Andy Ellis:

So the three issues that we’re focused on right now are banning the data centers, building an economy that works for the people and not the corporations, and moving past the two party system and the corruption of the two party system. And I think a bunch of people probably saw Shorty outside. He gave me his book and it’s all about how he sees corruption working in the state of Maryland. People should check it out. People should talk to him. I think that our position on this is that the system, the two party system is fundamentally corrupt because the amount of political power that goes into it determines the outcomes, determines who gets to run for office and determines whose issues get heard. So the reason that we have chosen the three issues that we have chosen is not because they’re the only three issues that matter, but they’re the three issues that we think we can use this election to most effectively put pressure on as we go into the general assembly.

The data center question is a place where a popular uprising has come around and has allowed people who never got active before to meet in a church basement, to meet in a library, to meet in their community and to tell the biggest tech corporations in the world and their corrupt politicians that they don’t want this plan, that they want something different and that they want to keep these things out of their community. The corruption is these corporations getting these county governments and city governments to sign non-disclosure agreements so that they can plan outside of the people because they know from other places if the people know what they’re doing, they’re going to shut it down. So the data center thing is the thing that gives me the most hope about the possibility of change. And one of the things that gives me the most hope about it, it is not just one part of the state.

It is not just one political party. It’s from Landover to Lusby and Southern Maryland to Frederick to places in Baltimore County to places in Baltimore City. It’s black and white, it’s Democrat, it’s Republican, it’s independent, it’s libertarian, it’s DSA. People are all rising up and understanding that they can have the grassroots governing power in order to make their local government do what they want instead of what the corrupt tech corporations want. And so I think there’s a lot that inspires me about that. And to Davon’s point, the reason we focus on that is yes, it’s a politically volatile issue right now, but we think that this election and doing well as the governor in this election sends a signal to the General Assembly that people are willing to vote outside of the two party system because they’re so angry about this issue, the corruption of government and the demand for a better political system.

And we think that energy that we build now goes into the General Assembly session where we are going to push bills in order to ban that, in order to expand the way the politics work and to control the money and power. We were in Annapolis this weekend at a rally to call for a ban on the data centers. And it included people from Landover, it included people from Southern Maryland, it included people from Frederick. It was a wide array of Marylanders who have started to understand the grassroots governing power that they can have not dictated by the two parties, not dictated by the corporations. And that is the kind of energy that I think we can build on with this election. So part of the reason that we focus on those issues is because we think it sends a very clear signal to the people in Annapolis that people are mad about this, people are willing to vote on this, and people are willing to break out of the trap and the tradition of the two party system in order to say that they want something different so that we can go into those hearing rooms in Annapolis and say, “You better vote the right way on this or we’re going to build energy to make sure that you don’t win four years from now.

And we’re going to build energy to make sure that your friends in Baltimore City lose their seats two years from now if they don’t get this right.” So I agree 100% that the strategy needs to be on the legislative session and we are using the attention and focus of a governor’s race, which is a high profile race, which gets to do things like this in order to bring an agenda forward that we think we can actually win on and change outcomes on in Annapolis in this legislative session because we think it is absolutely important that the people claim the power that they have, use it to change outcomes and get better results for their communities. Choices are great, but choices without changing outcomes doesn’t solve any of the problems that any of us are facing today. And that is why we’ve strategically focused on those issues so that we can help make those changes in the general assembly.

Dayvon Love:

I think one of the central challenges with the kind of American political system in particular, the community’s relationship to politics is the kind of unspoken and sometimes even spoken conventional wisdom that in order to be viable in politics, you have to moderate. You can’t espouse political perspectives that go beyond the political mainstream. And part of I think people’s frustration with politics is that if that’s what it takes to be viable in politics, nobody wants it. One of the things that I’m most proud of, LBS was founded in 2010, so we’re 16 years in and we’ve had some pretty substantive impact on the community. When we first started, when I was a lot younger, folks used to say to me out of love, they would say, “Davon, you’re not going to be able to talk all that black stuff and be able to get stuff done.” And what I’m most proud of is that we have maintained our worldview and perspective, but that perspective has actually made us effective at moving policy that is helpful to our community.

And so I think a part of what’s important for people, I think something that will energize people and get people to want to engage in politics is to demonstrate to people that that notion that moderating is the pragmatic approach to politics is not the only road, that there are other ways, there are other approaches and methodologies to engage in politics that can be effective, that it’s not reliant on having to be succumbed to the political institutions and the political status quo. And I’m grateful for the real news and partnering with us and hosting this conversation because I know as a person who’s very active in local and state politics, I’m sure there are going to be some people that say, “Davon, how are you speaking against this really popular Westmore Democratic governor?” And there’s some people that would perceive me even saying the things I’m saying as something that would undermine the ability for LBS to be effective in passing our policy agenda.

What I want folks that are watching this to know is that in fact, it is the independence that LBS is able to demonstrate that enhances our viability because it demonstrates that we’re not beholden to the political establishment. I was actually kicked off. I was elected to the 41st legislative district’s Democratic Party State Central Committee in 2022. I was put off of the State Central Committee because I talked about the strategy of using Andy’s candidacy for governor as a nominee for the Green Party as leverage to bring the Democratic Party further left. And so I was put off the State Central committee. But see, the beautiful thing about that is that didn’t diminish the ability to be impactful. It actually enhanced it because it demonstrates the contradiction of the Democratic Party’s stated commitment to black people. But when a Black person stands up and is independent, they try to punish them.

So I think it’s really important, again, in terms of an important issue that energizes people, people need to see that you can espouse a radical politics, have a strong base of community support and actually be able to move policies that positively impact our community. And I think that will bring more people into the political conversation in ways that I think people would feel better about the ability to impact the landscape.

Charly Carter:

I agree with what you said. I think the original question was about issues that people are concerned about. I think Andy tapped into some of them. In the years I’ve been in Maryland, I’ve never seen I have spent a lot of time in Prince George’s County trying to get people energized and to come out and mobilize on issues that were of concern to that community. And it was really pulling teeth in order to get that done. But I have seen communities come together around data centers that have never really been engaged before. And I think the interesting thing is that whether you’re talking about the Eastern shore, whether you’re talking about the DC suburbs, whether you’re talking about Western Maryland, the concern is the same. And the heat, the anger at what they perceive as politicians not listening is pretty up there. So I think that that is one issue that we definitely have to pay attention to.

I think very closely related to that are utility bills. Even before the conversation with data centers really kind of sprang to the forefront, people got clobbered last winter in January when out of the blue there was a rate hike and then temperatures plummeted to below zero. There are still people who are digging themselves out of those bills and the damage that it did to their households as we are about to embark on another winter. And they’re saying that this winter could be even colder than last winter and utility prices, both electricity and gas have skyrocketed.

I think that that is an issue. I really would have liked to see the candidates talk about that. Let’s talk about what the impact that the war in Iran has on us here domestically in the state of Maryland and what can we do about that? What can we do about BGE putting in rate hikes? And then at the same time that they are making record profits. Neither candidate is talking about that, but that is something that people really want to understand. I think housing is a big issue. We still have young people who are living in their parents’ basements and wanting to buy, wanting to move out, people who want to move up, but the cost of housing is really skyrocketing. People who are renters, we have a very old rental housing stock. What is this governor doing and what does the want to be governor?

Dan Cox, nobody talked about housing and the impact of housing in communities, particularly communities in the DC suburbs and in Baltimore City. But it is a growing problem in Howard County and in Western Maryland as well. Affordable housing tops. Over the last two years since the pandemic, the state has had to cut its funding for the blueprint that was supposed to increase the state’s investment in education at a time when we saw scores falling off and record truancy rates. Nobody talking about what are we going to do? To his credit, years ago we had a millionaire’s tax in Maryland. We had actually progressive revenue. And in that time we’ve not seen many Democrats in the legislature proposing progressive revenue. Let’s go after people. The millionaires are getting big tax cuts. They got big tax cuts in 2016. They’re getting another big tax cut that’s been proposed in this latest Trump administration.That’s money that’s going into, it’s not being taxed at the federal level.

Why is the state not there with a big catcher’s mitt to go get that money and bring it back to the state? So I think that those are issues that people are concerned about. I don’t think middle class people want to see their taxes go up, but there are a lot of people, middle class people aren’t getting a tax cut at the federal level. There are a lot of people with deep pockets who are getting that tax cut and it can go to funding. Instead of having the governor talk about the cuts that he’s making in order to balance the budget and being really proud of balancing the budget, that budget is being balanced on the backs of working people, the very working families that he said that he was fighting for. So let’s go get some money. Let’s go get some money from that top 1% and give some relief to working families.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I want to finish with a lightning, what do we do about this round? We try to end every production that we do at The Real News with information for people who are watching about what they can do to change the outcome of the story, what they can do to take this information and do something with it. And of course we have our elections and these national elections hanging over our head in just a few weeks. And so it is not my job as a journalist to tell anyone how to vote. And in fact, as the co-executive director and EIC of a nonprofit, it is something I cannot do and shouldn’t do. But that doesn’t mean that I stop being concerned for everyone in this room or everyone watching who is still maybe hearing us and saying, “That’s great, but how do I vote? What do I do?

How do I move through the world that we’re in towards the world that I want without making shit worse?” I think just on that level, what is your final pitch to folks here and folks watching before we turn it over to Q&A?

Charly Carter:

I think that it’s a shame that the MPT debate is right now going to be the only debate. And I think that that should be unacceptable to voters. I think that voters should demand that there are ample, many opportunities to hear the candidates debate each other. That is something that they can’t ignore. And so I think that showing up to the… There’s a debate being held at Coppin showing up to the one at Coppin. I think going on talk radio and raising this as an issue on Talk Radio about why are there not more debates being held in the community? I think demanding it where you get to ask questions because I didn’t get to say this earlier, but I was really just appalled at the questions that were asked. I don’t think that they were reflective of the concerns of people in the state of Maryland.

I think the questions that were asked in that debate were reflective of the literary class, like the political reporters. They had their own questions that I think they in fact are also detached from what’s going on in the state. I think that people demanding that the candidates show up and answer their questions is one way that you can have an impact in this election. I do think it’s important. Voting is important regardless of who it is that you’re voting for. It’s important that we, one, take back the Congress, that Congress changes hands, let me put it that way, that we don’t have the same people who are in office now continuing that. So I think that those are the two things I would leave people with is show up and vote, make sure you vote in congressional elections this year and demand that the gubernatorial candidates show up and demand that people expand the stage so that you can actually have a meaningful conversation that it’s not just him versus he said, she said, which is what I felt like this debate was.

Dayvon Love:

So I would say three things. The first is that our community needs to be exposed to a version of civics that isn’t like the afterschool special version. And what I mean by that is that we’re often told going out to vote, participating, that’s our civic duty. Even folks will say our ancestor staff have the right to vote, which is true, but it’s important for us to understand that if we’re going to be engaged in civics, that we need to engage it. I’m talking specifically to black folks from the perspective of engaging in political warfare against this system that wants to continue to maintain the system of white supremacy. And so we need to understand the machinery of government so that we can effectively wage that political war and LBS offers civics trainings every year. So that’s the first. The second thing that I’ll say is that it’s important that we are more granular in understanding the opportunities that Maryland has to influence the political landscape.

And I’ll give one example. It is likely that the Democrats are going to take back the House of Representatives. The person who is likely to take the gavel as the chair of the judiciary committee is Jamie Raskin. Jamie Raskin is a congressman here in the state of Maryland. Well, one of the things that’s been a longstanding project is H.R. 40, the bill that would commission a study on reparations. So Maryland actually has an opportunity to use our pressure to essentially get Congressman Raskin to commit to moving H.R. 40 out of his committee. And it is not unusual in a situation like Congressman Raskin is in where they actually are already talking about what kinds of bills are going to come out of the committee. So this is a really opportune time, just as an example, for the public to go to Congressman Raskin, because he’s going to win his election.

I don’t even know if he has a Republican opponent in November, but this is the time for us to demand to say, “Okay, are you going to make sure H.R. 40 moves out of the committee?” So those are the kinds of opportunities that I think is important. It is likely or it’s possible that maybe Chris Van Hollen becomes the Senate majority leader, particularly if the Democrats take back the Senate. And so again, using the opportunity, he is a U.S. Senator in Maryland. We have an opportunity to dictate the policy agenda as Marylanders. So that’s the second thing is use the opportunity of folks that are elected here to move our agenda. And then the last thing that I’ll say, and I know Andy is going to say this, but it’s important for me to say this, is that it is important for people that’s already going to vote for Wes Moore, you should do it.

I’m not going to discourage people that are already committed tried and true Democrats want to vote for Wes Moore. Those of you that are interested in a politics where we have more options, it is important for you to vote for Andy. And the reason that it’s important for you to vote for Andy, as a person who’s worked on political campaigns, there’s software that you get as a van where you’re able to get information about voters and demographic information. So campaign study changes in the electorate. So as Andy said, there hasn’t been a third party candidate to get more than 3% since reconstruction. So something like 4%, 5%, 6% is something that will bring attention or will come to the attention of Democratic Party establishment elites. Well, they will have to say for their own electoral viability, not just out of some altruistic, oh, these people want something more.

Out of their own electoral viability, they will have to take note of that and that will impact some of the policies that they put on that platform. As Charlie mentioned earlier, there have been some more progressive folks that have been elected to the legislature. That came simultaneously when there were green party candidates for mayor and green party candidates for delegate and for state senator. So this came in the context of that third party pressure where you had Democrats being pulled further to the left. And so this is how we get policies that repeal the law enforcement officer bill of rights, policies that created the community repair and reinvestment fund to put resources in the communities impacted by the war on drugs. So I say all to say that the practical reason, because Andy will tell you and we’ve talked, Andy’s not going to become governor, but the reason to vote for him is to send the message to the party that we want something more than what is given to us.

And what’s beautiful about the situation we’re in now is we’re not in a situation where we’re at risk of electing a Republican. Dan Cox is not going to win. So all the excuses that people make about why it’s so important to vote for Democrats is not a concern for this election. So if you’re a person that wants more choices in your political landscape, then voting for Andy, voting for the Green Party helps to send that message and create more viability politically for more options.

Andy Ellis:

All right. So the first thing I’m going to say is if you like what Davon said and you agree with him, talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, talk to your coworkers. The people are not dumb. The people are not slow, but the people in the consultant class want to frame politics that way. They want to frame it as if every single voter is stupid and is only going to listen to 30 second sound bites and has a short attention span and can’t comprehend an argument that is strategic other than an argument about who is going to win. Your friends and neighbors and coworkers are not stupid. They can understand complex arguments about strategy. And I think what Davon was laying out there is an easy actually to explain argument. I actually think most people can understand that. Dan Cox is not going to win.

Wes Moore is going to win. And a vote for us that sends a symbolic signal to people that says that people are ready for a change on these issues will be heard. The politicians and the consultants will tell you they won’t hear it, but they will tell you that because they will hear it. They will tell you that if you don’t win, it doesn’t matter, but that’s because they don’t want to have to change what they’re doing based on how people vote, if people vote outside of the two party system. But they know exactly what the threshold is. They know that at 3.2% we would have the best performance since reconstruction. They know at 4% it would send a shockwave through people in Annapolis. So the first thing is talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, have reasonable and intelligent conversations with them because we’re all reasonable and intelligent people.

The second thing is vote for us. I got to say that. Vote for me, vote for Andy Ellis and Owen Silverman Andrews, Green Party candidates for governor and lieutenant governor on November 3rd or early voting or however you vote. The number of votes we get will matter. At 1%, we keep the ability for the Green Party to stay on the ballot for the Baltimore City elections in 2028. So even if we don’t get that historic number, but if we get 1%, we still have the opportunity to be on the ballot in 2028 so that we can run candidates, maybe some folks here in this room or some folks that you know here in Baltimore City against the Democrats and Republicans, I guess, here in Baltimore City. The third thing I would say is pick one of the issues that you think is important that we are working on or that LBS is working on or that Charlie is working on and go and show up in Annapolis and exert that grassroots governing power that we all know we have in order to get the General Assembly to do something they don’t want to do right now, in order to push them to an outcome like passing the Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights, like banning the data centers, like taxing the wealthy on their wealth and making sure that it’s not having cuts that affect the working class and the middle class, making sure that they’re not cutting money out of our schools.

Let’s go get some of those wins after we set that historic number in November so that we can show that the power is transferable. It’s not just a vanity project. It’s not just for history. It’s about building the kind of community governing power that we need in order to get the outcomes that we want for our communities because if we don’t, nobody else is going to do it for us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for our panel, everybody. Charlie Carter, Andy Ellis, Davon Love. Awesome, man. Thank you guys so much. That was great. Now let’s open it up to what y’all think. Yes, please remember, we do need y’all to speak into the microphone so everyone can hear you. So we have a microphone right there. Thank you so much for carrying it over

Speaker 5:

There. First, I’m going to just say thank you. Thanks Dayvon for letting me know about this, right? So I guess my questions is this, Frederick Douglas said power concedes to nothing but power it never has and never will, right? I’m pissed off in terms of that first of all, in third grade they told me no person, no party was beyond law. So I don’t want to hear the bullshit when they say we ain’t got enough Democrats in office to stop Donald Trump from what he’s doing. Secondly, then we have a president that’s illegal. I mean, the man got 34 felonies and we allowed him to be president. So I’m saying in one sense, it’s just a game that everybody is against the people and we have to choose who we think is going to protect us when all of them are showing that they’re against us.

So I guess my point is this, is that I would like to hear people talking about find up the people and saying that when they talking about the Declaration of Independence, even if they didn’t have us in mind, they says that anytime the government does not work for the interest of the people, the people have a duty and an obligation to overthrow the government, to establish the government that’s going to work for them. So I’m saying, do we just sit back and if we can’t stop Donald Trump after the election, then what do we do?

Dayvon Love:

So I’ll say a couple things. The first is that Trump is going to not be in office in two years, and it’s important for us to think now about what our 2028 strategy is going to be. And I think too often what happens is we think about it in 2028. So I would say the first thing is that we need to think, especially in an environment where the Democrats take control of the House and if they also take control of the Senate, and I say that because Democrats, because Black folks are captured electorate, we have some leverage. We have some leverage in terms of what they do. And so I would say it’s important for us to dictate to the Democratic Party, particularly those in leadership in Congress, we need to dictate to them what an acceptable agenda is and we need to put the most radical agenda in front of them knowing that they’re not going to do it.

But what it does is that it helps mobilize the general public to recognize the ineptitudes because I think what happens sometimes is that Democrats will pick a handful of things that they’ve done good. And so they use those handful of good things to justify all the other ineptitudes. So I think we have to put a robust agenda in front of those that are going to take leadership and we need to do that in advance as opposed to when the election happens. The second thing I would say is that we need to take advantage of local opportunities to exercise that leverage. One example that I’ll give in Baltimore County. So Baltimore County has a seven member county council and currently only has one black person to serve on the county council. Now, Baltimore County did some work last year and last couple of years, ratify an expansion of their county council.

Well, now there’s going to be nine members instead of seven, which will expand the capacity for black folks to be represented on the county council. Now the challenge, because they wanted to expand it to 11, and they also wanted to ensure that there were four majority non-white districts as opposed to just three. Now what ultimately passed was a map that had three majority non-white districts as opposed to four. And the reason is because on the current seven member council, there are four Democrats and the Republicans. And in order to change the composition of the county council, you need five, you need a super majority. So in Baltimore County, they’re likely going to elect a black county executive, so that’ll be a first. But what I argue is that the most important thing is that if folks in Baltimore County can elect six Democratic council people instead of five, and many of those nominees, those Democratic nominees for county council are black folks.

They actually just did an event this past weekend where the Divine Nine did an event where they featured those Black folks that are running for… So if we get six folks in the County Council in Baltimore County, that is a level of electoral power where Black people can have leverage in Baltimore County in a way that Black folks have not had leverage in Baltimore County. And my disappointment, now I don’t even know if I would say disappointment, that the Democratic Party is focusing more on getting this ADO congressional map drawn as opposed to focusing on something like in Baltimore County where you can actually make a difference and actually shoring up Black electoral power in Baltimore County. But it seems that the Democrats are more concerned with the national fight in terms of symbolically fighting Trump because one additional congressional seat, as opposed to thinking about what are the things that the party can do to enhance Black local elected power.

And so I would say that looking for opportunities, Andy mentioned data centers this past primary election. There are a bunch of folks that were ousted from their seat because of the position on data centers. I don’t imagine that’s going to go away. So again, just looking for local opportunities to exercise some of that power that can build up and hopefully give us the leverage to be more impactful on the national scale.

Charly Carter:

Thank you, Davon, because I think that was excellent. Especially about putting the aggressive agenda on the table. We have seen when Donald Trump came in, we saw just how fast he was able to pass some really stuff we thought was crazy. I mean, when they started talking about Project 2025, most people thought they’ll never be able to get this through and look at all the things. It’s something like 70% of it has been implemented in a year and a half. So nobody can say we can’t do big things really fast, but we can’t unless we stay engaged and we need some big ideas to put up there. We’ve also been able to see Zoran Mamdani pass some really big things in New York City, things that nobody in New York, I’m from New York, nobody in New York ever thought that he’d be able to get passed.

We need those big, bold ideas on the table, but here’s the most important thing. Over the last 30 years, and this particularly happens in the Black community, is we have been trained to show up on election day, to vote and then go home and go back to our lives, that the people we elect, they’re going to take care of us. They’re going to be the ones who are… We are going to get it done for you, right? But let me ask you this question. If you had a boss that showed up once every four years, how good would you be at your job? What would you be doing for the three years and nine months before you knew they were coming back? You’d do whatever the hell you wanted to do. And that’s what we… We are the boss when we elect people to office, whether it’s to local, whether it’s to state, whether it’s the federal, we are the boss, we’re the employee.

But if we go home, if we show up on election day or a couple of months before election day and we tune in and then we show up and we cast our ballot and then we go back to our lives and watching daytime dramas and love is blind, and we don’t think about it again until the next four years. Those politicians that we elected, no matter how good they are, no matter who, where they came from, are going to do what the hell they want to do for those three years and nine months and then till they come back around again. So we have to stay on top of it. We have to check in. We have to tune in. That means when there’s a town hall, we got to show up. We got to show up and tune in to figure out how they’re voting and what they’re voting for and whether they’re representing us.

We can’t just go back to sleep. And that is going to be really hard for people who are stringing together two or three jobs. But if we want those big, bold ideas to come through, they have to know that we’re watching and they have to know that we’re keeping score. We have to show up to stuff. And I think that’s the most important thing that we can do to try to get control of politics again.

Andy Ellis:

Yeah. And so I will answer this to take it back to the 2024 election. So before the 2024 election, Davon and I were both on the Charter Commission and this is the commission that Baltimore City has where we look at the charter and every 10 years the citizens shall gather and make recommendations to the city council. City council’s not going to do any of those recommendations. But one of the things that Davon and I saw coming during that was David Smith of Sinclair Broadcasting’s question that would’ve slashed the Baltimore City Council in half. And we decided one day in Annapolis, January or something, we kind of just decided we were going to beat it. And we decided we were going to beat it because we wanted to develop the muscle of democracy in order to show that we could fight back and we weren’t dependent on the Democratic Party in order to get the wins that we wanted.

Democratic Party at that time was saying, “Well, we got to make sure that it doesn’t get on the ballot. We got to sue to get it off because we can never beat one of these things. It’s assure that our charter amendment is going to pass, that it is that a Democrat is going to get elected.” And we decided that it was important to show that that was not actually the truth and that the people could come together, put together the kind of organization that was necessary and beat the local evil billionaire. Well, he’s not really a billionaire, but a hundred millionaire, the local rich man who wants to run our government who’s a friend of Trump. And we organized with labor, we organized with faith groups, we organized with Democrats, and we organized the media in order to be able to actually beat that question.

And we beat it because we believed it was possible and we believed it was necessary. And I think what I am using that to say is that one of the things that Trump has shown us is that we don’t have the grassroots governing power in most of our communities to protect ourselves from a fascist in Washington DC. And if we rely on the Democratic Party to do it, we can see that they’re not going to be able to do it. They don’t have the capability, they don’t have the will, and they don’t have the structure. So we have to start developing the kind of power and the kind of use of democracy that allows us to get the outcomes that we need regardless of what they’re going to do. Once we start developing that power, they’ll come along in some ways. With question H, by the end, all of the Democrats wanted to jump on question H because they realized it was going to win and they wanted to be able to say that they were going to claim a win.

But they jumped on board because we believed it could happen and did the organizing with the community in order to make sure that it was going to get defeated. Yeah, we needed them. It was useful to have their resources. It was useful to have their money. It was useful to have their door knocking, but they didn’t do it because they wanted to do it. They did it because we believed that the impossible was possible. We made sure that it happened. We did the organizing and we flexed and built those muscles of democracy to get one win that was useful in 2024. I think those victories are hints of the future. I think if we can look and see how that works, we can think about How to apply that model in other places.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and if I could hop in here as well, this is what we talk about so much at The Real News and in the reporting that I do with working people when it comes to unionizing your workplace. It’s like a union at a Starbucks isn’t going to change the world, but you are going to be much more capable of changing the world after you unionize your Starbucks with your coworkers. The struggle changes you and makes you more capable of making change thereafter. I think there is something to be said about building that muscle wherever we can, however we can. But I really want to bring that back to your question because we got some muscles that need building for whatever is coming. And we don’t know full well what’s coming, but what we know is something is coming. You think the guy who’s using our taxpayer dollars to pay for political campaign ads that I have to fucking watch on football is going to just accept the results if he loses in a month?

Absolutely. Of course he’s not. Did you think he was just going to go away when he got the conviction in court? Of course he wasn’t.

That’s the one thing you know about him. He’s not going to just say, “Ah, shucks. I lost. You beat me. You bested old Trump. I’m going to go away off stage, you’re never going to hear from me again.” That’s the one thing you know is not going to happen. So what muscles are you building to prepare for whatever does? And so that’s in the spirit that I wanted to offer just some of my thoughts. Again, it’s not my job to tell anyone how to vote, but I can tell you go vote because it’s your right, it’s your duty. It’s part of the muscle of civic engagement that needs to be built, but it’s not the only one. And when it comes to what exactly we’re fighting for, I think that’s the one thing I wanted to say is I used to love being a pundit and going down to DC and being on these news shows where they would just put me with some Democratic talking head or a Republican candidate for this office.

And I was like, “Oh, I’m going to eat this full alive.” It was so easy to just destroy them on camera with arguments that weren’t tied to everything you guys have been saying. It’s just like, well, it’s easy to beat you in a debate because I’m not trying to please some party. I’m just talking about the real shit that we’re all dealing with. There’s actual real power in just saying the truth plainly. And Mother Jones, the famous labor organizer, said that I will tell the truth wherever I please. And I keep thinking about that line and keep repeating it to folks because I think we need some of that moxie and we need some of that. We need to take it further, not just to tell the truth wherever we please, but to go say the truth wherever we can and create a sort of indomitable light that can’t be denied, that we leave these fools no more darkness to keep hiding in.

And we do it by speaking the truth plainly and loudly, meeting each other on shared planes of reality and humanity and stop letting the goddamn pundits and the internet and everything else divide us and move us away from each other. I think we got to get back to the basics. That’s why I brough up the breaking points thing is I don’t give a shit about any party at this point. I’m concerned about our species. I’m concerned about life on this planet.

So if you’re asking if we’re on the left or the right, it’s like we don’t think in those terms anymore, but if you ask all of us in this room, are you on the side over here that’s for life and a future worth living in and not war? I’m sure we’d all be standing on that side, whether or not we call ourselves left. So that doesn’t need to matter right now. What matters is do you want to let these sociopaths win? Are we going to give them our children’s future? Are we going to give up all those things that our ancestors fought for, like democracy, like the right to vote, like the belief that this country could be something better? Are we just going to give it over to these fucking nut jobs? Of course not. And I think we just got to really dig in deep and say, you’re not taking that from us.

Those lessons that we learned in elementary school you were talking about, they were good lessons. We were taught to despise and fight against what we’re seeing right now. So we should despise it and we should fight against it. All right, I’ll shut up. So get out of the soapbox.

Speaker 6:

Sorry, just had a quick question for Andy. And this is not meant to be a loaded question in any capacity, but what is your opinion of Jill Stein and what she brings to the Green Party in America?

Andy Ellis:

Sure. This is the question I get all the time. So I appreciate the work that Jill Stein has done to help build the Green Party. She has secured Green Party ballot lines and ballot access across the country over the last 12 years or so, and she has done so a great sacrifice to herself. Jill Stein could have been happily retired doctor who sat in her home in Massachusetts, did local activism, played in her band and tended her garden. And everybody would love her because she was the kind of local politics that we like. She chose a different path and she chose that path because she thought that it was necessary. She thought that what Ralph Nader had started to do with the Green Party was important and she realized that somebody else needed to pick up the baton and keep going on it. And I hope that Jill Stein is not our next presidential nominee.

And I don’t say that with any disrespect toward Jill, but I would like to see somebody new come up and represent a new era of the Green Party that is focused on building black and brown and working power in deep blue cities and deep blue states. Because I think that if we start to do that, we can start to see real change. I think if we focus more on Baltimore than we focus on Pennsylvania or we focus more on Prince George’s County than we do on Michigan or something like that, I think we can start to build the kind of alternative that those places need. And the last thing I’ll say about this is that alternative that is the People’s Party on the left does not have to be the Green Party, but the Green Party is the one that has the ballot line in Maryland right now and it is the one that has the structural capacity to nominate candidates and to allow people to get on there.

If it is the Ujima People’s Progress Party, if it’s a worker’s party, if it’s an amalgamation that we haven’t seen or a formation that we haven’t seen yet, excellent. We need something that is willing to fight against the capitalist system in the two party system. And I think Jill Stein has helped the Green Party to stay alive in order to do that. I know a lot of people dislike Jill Stein and I know a lot of people disagree with her choice to run for president in the way that she’s run her campaign over the years. I don’t think there’s a ton of people who disagree with the platform that she advanced. There’s some, but they’re not the ones who are making that argument, but they disagree with the strategy and they don’t like her as a person. I hear those concerns. I appreciate the work that she’s done.

I appreciate the sacrifice that she’s made. And like I say, I hope somebody else is the next nominee.

Speaker 7:

My name is Al. He made a point when he starts talking about the unions. And the reason why I believe he made the point, because I think that’s the hidden weapon that a lot of people are not paying attention to. I mean, even across the country itself, because at the end of the day, all these data centers are mostly being built by who? And there is a strong stance for a lot of people within unions that you do not cross picket lines or protest. So the fact that Baltimore’s already dealing with the issue with the fact that too many people in Baltimore City do not know about privatized organized building trades, they know about ASCME, they know about CEU, all the other ones, but are not familiar with JTC or any other trades unions altogether, IBW, whatever, that’s a disadvantage. And then there’s also a further disadvantage because that weapon itself is unclear.

And I think that if people would just execute on that when they’re being prompted to do so, then they would see exactly what that is for. What was happening in Baltimore County, like Davon was talking about, I went to the D9 thing, literally talking about what I’m talking about now, not in any real detail because I don’t trust them either. But at the same time, mentioned the fact that even if it comes to job creation, you know what I mean? A lot of us don’t know about it. And the thing about it is that even across the country right now for unions, the interest in unions is spiking literally because they get paid more.

So you have something that’s not going to be too hard to convince people to want to get into once you just only just tell them about it. And then in doing so, also talk about the fact that there’s a far disproportionate gap as it pertains to non-white or black, very specifically black, that now when we talking about Baltimore County and Baltimore City and we talking about the fact that they legislated for east of 40 and Woodlawn, right of town, Milford Mill, Lockroom, that now you also have the encroachment of Baltimore City that along with you wanting to get a job into the unions and now discover how unions work while at the same time also work on the same data centers that you’re not really with because I’m not with putting that in Woodlawn. There are a lot of people who are not working in data centers, mainly us, literally because they’re not with the whole Woodlawn thing.

They have maintained it and dealt with the whole contradiction of it and the fact that they’ve been in Federic working and they need the money. So utility itself, it is what it is, but they’re very stern about the fact that they’re not going to take the job in Woodlawn, but it’s not only Woodlawn. So I think that we’re missing a point that you have literally an organized element, no matter how disruptive and not as functional as it could be, that already within itself in existence, that if you would just listen and actually get involved in it, that you’ll literally reveal a very serious weapon that already exists.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I thought that was a great comment. I was going to say, can we get another one as well so then the panel will respond to a couple of these points, but thank you. No, that was great.

Speaker 8:

Hi. My thing goes to existential questions. I haven’t heard anything about genocide, haven’t heard anything about the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, but the little pieces of history that I’ve learned coming across my decades of life are little things like the birthday of Fannie Lou Hamer, which was just a day or two ago. And as you guys were talking, I could hear somebody saying in my ear, “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.” I could hear somebody else saying to me, “The secret of life is to have no fear. And if we don’t have clean water, soil and air, we will cease to exist. And if we don’t prosecute people who are guilty of murder, Nuremberg will have taught us nothing.” So I just wanted to just hit a couple dots and as we’re going through our day, we think about these things, but it just passes.

And that’s all I have to say.

Andy Ellis:

Yeah. So I want to take both of these a little bit and then let the other panel do it. So I was at the Towson Planning Commission meeting about the data centers back in August or early September and many of the white IBEW folks walked through the protest and my speech that day was like, “We got to work with the IBEW folks. We have to make sure that we’re not treating them as enemies and that we’re treating them as comrades in this struggle.” Now – What? You were on a work site that day? Yeah, sure. But so we got in and we get inside and the planning commission is going down and I’m standing in the back with most of the IBEW folks. Planning commission is going down their recommendations and they’re going down their recommendations and they’re like, “Okay, project labor agreements.” They’re like, “We do not want project labor agreements for these data centers because we don’t have them for other stuff and we don’t think we need to have them for the data centers.” And I noticed at the point that a lot of the IBEW folks that were in the back of the room kind of gasped at that because they were like, “Well, we have politically aligned ourselves with the county in this regard in order to hopefully get union jobs out of this.” And the county was quick to dismiss that.

And I think that when we’re talking about data centers and when we’re talking about labor, we have to talk about something beyond just saying no to the data centers and talk about what we do want to build. What do we want to build that electrical workers and trade unionists can build and feel comfortable building? What does it look like to build the green infrastructure that we need and to train people in Baltimore City schools and Baltimore County schools in order to build that infrastructure? Because once we start building that, we can address the clean water, the clean air and the clean land. And we don’t have to allow the only construction to be something that is destructive to people, that is surveilling people and that is supporting genocide. And I think we need to have that positive future focus on this about what is what we want.

And we need to have these conversations with people who are building this stuff to say, what is it you would like to build and how do we get the resources for that and how do we change the political climate so that is possible to build with the ease with which we build surveillance and data centers? So I think that’s the one thing I’ll say there and I’d love to talk with you more about this because I know you’ve been at some of the hearings and things like that talking on some of this stuff too. Second thing I want to say is in relation to genocide. I think one of the most foundational points in the last couple of years that has caused people to break away from the two party system who previously believed in it was watching how quickly everybody accepted supportive genocide in Gaza and how quickly both parties fell over themselves in order to crush the student movements, in order to crush everybody who was standing up and rising up.

Our platform is very clear on this and we wish we had gotten a chance to be on the debate stage last night to talk about it because we think it’s an important question, but when it’s just Democrats and Republicans on the stage, they’re not going to ask about it. The state of Maryland is currently invested in genocide in Israel in a couple of ways. They are supporting the Maryland Israel Development Corporation. They have an executive order that prevents people from being able to boycott the state of Israel if they want to be a state worker. And there’s a whole bunch of weapons going through the port of Baltimore that don’t need to go through the port of Baltimore. Now the governor can’t actually stop those weapons going through the port of Baltimore, but they can sure as hell make it a lot harder. And the fact that our governor hasn’t even thought about doing that because a couple days after October 7th, he stood in front of some sort of mesh together Israel American flag and said Israel has a right to exist and Israel has a right to defend itself shows us exactly where he’s aligned on these questions.

The tides have turned a little bit on it politically, and so he’s turned a little bit on it politically, but we have seen him being willing to extend a commitment to genocide because of it’s in his political interest. And that is the dominant narrative of both parties. The last thing I will say about Fannie Lou Hamer is that Fannie Lou Hamer was… Everybody talks about how Fannie Lou Hamer, she went to the convention, she did this and that. What they never talk about is when they got home from the convention, they went and they ran as independence against the Democrats at the time because they realized that the power that they had was to play the game of in and out. And that is where the power for folks have had. There’s a guy named Haynes Walton Jr. who writes a book called Black Political Parties, and he’s tracing the way that Black political parties throughout the South use the power of being in or out of the dominant party at the time in order to get concessions for Black folks, in order to get voting rights, in order to get programs that address housing, in order to get programs that addressed education, in order to get programs that address poverty.

And he talks even about James Clyburn, who we all know currently is a Democratic leader who started in the United Citizens Party organizing black folks in order to challenge the Democratic Party of South Carolina in order to start nominating and electing Black folks. And so they ran outside of the two party system in 1970 and they elected the first three Black folks to the South Carolina legislature since Reconstruction because they knew the power of playing that game of in or out of the dominant party at the time. And they knew the power of using the threat to take electoral seats away from the dominant political power in order to get their demands met. So those two questions, I think I’m trying to weave them together in that answer there, but I think they’re both really good questions and I think they both speak to the urgency of the moment and the way that we need to think about the strategy that we use going forward.

We have one last question back

Speaker 9:

Here. Hey Pishaw, thank you for the session today. A question I have, so listening to the debate last night, what was your perspective on Westmore’s response to the reparations question and what wasn’t addressed in that response and in the discussion?

Dayvon Love:

So that’s part of the problem with the two party system is that we didn’t actually get a substantive conversation about both the reparations bill itself that was a controversy in Maryland and the issue of reparations in general. And what’s disappointing about that is that there have been polls that have been done that say that amongst the black community in Maryland, about 80% of black folks in Maryland support reparations. Now, conversely, it says about 20% of white folks support reparations. And so to me, the way the Democratic Party, again has, and particularly the governor himself, dealt with the issue of reparations, I think dealt with it from the vantage point of prioritizing the views, the perspectives, the interests of white folks and the white population in this state over black people. And a part of what is a challenge with that is that again, Maryland is 30% black.

So Maryland has sufficient black electoral representation to advocate for a strong reparations package. But unfortunately the governor and in my assessment, assessing the national political landscape, especially given the undertones and not so much undertones in terms of the national aspirations is using as a frame of reference in terms of how to deal with it. I think the danger with the way he answered the question when he talked about his culture of repairing, he talked about investing in HBCUs and home ownership, that those things are good policy. Those things are not reparations. Reparations is about investing in black people’s capacity to practice sovereignty and self-determination. The reparations emerges from a revolutionary Pan-African nationalist worldview. So whether we’re talking about Queen Mother Moore, Universal Negro Improvement Association, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Republican New Africa, Organization Afro-American Unity, these are the progenitors of the worldview of which reparations emerges.

And so Westmore’s answer, it conflates mainstream liberal democratic party policy with revolutionary demands on the state, which is what reparations is in its proper context. And so the two party system in that debate did a disservice to the issue of reparations in a substantive conversation about it.

Andy Ellis:

And I will say, so reparations is an issue that the Green Party has had at the core of our platform for 25 years. And so when the bill came up in Maryland last year about reparations, we were excited. We were excited to see a commission that was willing to study it. We also knew that we had a pretty good idea that Governor Moore was going to veto it. I think Davon and I probably had a decent idea that he was going to veto it before many of the people who were sponsoring the bill did. And we had put together a policy that I think is really good on this and I encourage people to check it out, gogreen2026.com/reparations. It is built with people who have been fighting for different forms of reparation in the state of Maryland for years. And it talks about cash payments, but it talks about community investment.

It talks about land. It talks about burial places. It talks about a lot of the different things that people have been fighting for who have been in the struggle. And if we had had the opportunity to be in that debate last night when the two of them were not talking about it, we would have talked about it. And I think that is what is lost by allowing only two parties to be on the stage because the Republicans are only going to say that’s a bad idea and tell bad jokes. And the Democrats are going to do whatever they can to avoid the conversation of reparations and to conflate it with unionization, procurement and poverty alleviation. And those are separate things and having a third perspective on the debate that was very much pro-reparations and based in a party platform that has developed it over 25 years and based in Maryland policy that is developed from people who have been working on it for years and years would have fundamentally changed the nature of the debate and fundamentally changed the nature of the answers that people got as they were watching it.

It would have been more educational. It would have simply given people a better perspective that they didn’t have otherwise. But what we saw last night was the sort of same thing you could see on CNN or any of those other sort of talking head type of shows where they have two people squaring off and their sides are clear, their sides are ossified, but they’re not actually speaking to what people want or what the question is. And not being there last night, that was a huge opportunity lost, I think, for the people of Maryland to hear a real perspective about the way that reparations could work here and the way that both parties avoid that question.

Charly Carter:

I agree with Andy. I was really disappointed in both answers. I wasn’t surprised by Dan Cox’s response to the question of reparations, but I was surprised by Wes Moore’s response and really disappointed in, as Davon said, his conflation of just policies that have already been out there with this bold idea of reparations that he just wasn’t willing to touch it. And I agree with Andy that having another person on the stage to do that, to bring that up would be important. But the thing that I want to really talk about though is that this issue, why it’s important to have sort of independent political power on the outside.

When there is a Democrat in office, Maryland considers itself a blue state and the legislature has veto proof majorities in both the House and the Senate, but when there is a Democrat in office, the legislature never quite steps up to being as bold as it can be. It doesn’t want to leave the executive, it doesn’t want to lead the executive. And so I would say that having independent political power outside of the two parties, because Democrats themselves are not going to kind of overshadow the governor on this issue, but we need the independent power in order to push the party to do more and to push the executive to do more. And we’ve seen that happen, but it really is about, it’s going to happen from the grassroots. It has to be people who think that these are important issues, standing up, showing up, taking a trip to Annapolis, showing up when the governor or any other leader, because I don’t want to, although we have been focused on the governor because of the debate, here in Baltimore, we should not forget that we have the Senate president, is a senator from Baltimore City, that we should also be putting pressure on Senator Ferguson as well to make sure that we can push some of the bold ideas forward.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So this has been really, really great, gang, and we do need to wrap up in a minute, but I did want to, before asking you to join me in thanking our great panelists, I did want to offer one quick response to both of y’all’s really important questions, which to me are very much connected about the unions, about Gaza and all the awful things happening, because as editor-in-chief, it’s my job to be looking at all these things at once and be trying to make sure that we report on them. And that’s what we’ve done. I mean, today’s October 7th. It’s been three years since this full on genocide that we’ve all been watching has happened and we’ve never stopped reporting on it. We keep publishing documentary reports from Gaza. We keep publishing interviews with doctors returning from Gaza. We keep talking with members of the Jewish world speaking out against Zionism and all this awful stuff.

And I’m thinking about that today of all days, of course, because as a kid growing up, I didn’t envision that my adult job would be staring at images of children being slaughtered with support from my country and my tax dollars. And not only that, but that my job would be to make sure that the cameras stay on it, that we still never stop filming the carnage and the truth until it stops. That is all of our goals in some way, right? You keep your eyes open, you keep the camera rolling, you keep the light lit. If our comrades and brothers and sisters in Gaza, all the journalists that we have lost, all the truth tellers who told us what was happening with their phones, if they could keep their eyes open until the very end, so can we. We owe them that much, but we owe it to much more than them.

We owe it to all of each other, to our children. And that’s where the labor question always comes into it for me is there’s so much important stuff there, but unions aren’t perfect either. A lot of people don’t know about the unions because we have less than 10% union density in this country. Most people have never worked in a union job. And if they have, a lot of people’s unions suck and we got to be able to deal with that. We got to have a cleaning house mentality about everything. Enough is enough. Charlie, you made the great point is we have been letting too many people off the hook by just giving over the stewardship of our society to these technocrats or these elites or these con men who sell us on fancy promises. And that has led us to corrupt unions, corrupt political parties, exploding inequality.

These people don’t deserve the keys to society. So we got to take them back and we got to have that mentality that we’re not waiting on anyone to fix them. We got to start rolling up our sleeves and doing it together. So thank you guys for rolling up your sleeves and joining us and doing that today. Please join me in thanking our incredible panelists for sharing their amazing thoughts with us tonight. And thank you so much to Andy Ellis, thank you to Charlie Carter, thank you to Dave on Love, thank you to our incredible crew that made all of this possible. Thank you to Cam, thank you to Dave, thank you to Kayla. Can you guys give them a round of applause for making the production happen?

MANSA MUSA:  Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.

Joining me today is Andrea James, activist in every sense of the word. I want to say abolitionist, but she’s an activist in every sense of the word, organizing, and is currently running for the governor of Massachusetts.

Thank you for joining me, Andrea.

ANDREA JAMES:  Thank you for having me. It’s really great to be back in your studio, and just to have the privilege of being a part of how you disseminate information. It’s really an honor to be here, and I thank you for this opportunity.

MANSA MUSA:  And we want to go on record right now saying that here at Rattling the Bars, we recognize that it’s a so-called two-party system. And we recognize that, when you’re dealing with electoral politics, that if you’re not a traditional Democrat or Republican or so-called Independent, according to their definition, you’re not going to get the recognition. So we are here primarily to level the playing field. It’s not our endorsement of it, it’s more opportunity for her to talk about her candidacy, why she’s in this position, why she’s running, and what she expect. 

And with that being said, introduce yourself to our audience, Andrea.

ANDREA JAMES:  Well, I want to say thank you for introducing me as an abolitionist. I mean, I am an abolitionist. I have had a direct experience that causes me to understand that this country has had more than 250, but 250 recognizable years of incarceration of prison and prison building and incarcerating people in cages. And actually, I believe in direct experience and that that’s what leaders should have, some level of direct experience so that there’s an urgency around the issues that need to be worked on. And so I’ve had the experience of incarceration myself personally, and I happen to know, having lived in a women’s prison, that they only cause further harm and that they are antithetical to getting us to a place of having whole, healed, and healthy communities and people. So I am a prison abolitionist, absolutely. And thank you for referring to me in that manner.

Why I’m running has a lot to do with that experience in 15-plus years specifically. Decades prior to that in my lifetime came from a family, African American family of Civil Rights folk breaking color barriers and so forth in law, in the field of medicine. My grandmother was the first Black nurse in the city of Boston. I’m from a community that is the most incarcerated community in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. We’ve been in Massachusetts for seven generations, in the same old house in Roxbury for five generations. 

And so why I’m running is this alchemy of these life experiences that have brought me to where I am in my life today with my understanding of these issues and also who I am today. And that includes all of my life experiences, not just the highs that I’ve reached and the accomplishments that I’ve had and the academic achievements that I’ve had the privilege to be exposed to, but also my incarceration, which has been one of the most important experiences of my life that propelled me.

This was 20-plus years ago. I made a mistake in my law practice. I wound up on a prison bunk in federal prison for wire fraud. And what I received and learned from that experience after having been a criminal defense attorney, after having worked my entire adult life on ending mass incarceration and bringing attention to that issue and then having the direct experience of myself of living in a prison, I knew immediately after being surrounded by all these women, I had to survive 24 months of incarceration. I was laying next to, head to toe, head to toe, head to toe on a prison bunk next to sisters who had been in there for 24 years. I mean, I knew. 

My parents were researchers of people of African diaspora. When I was a kid, they were traveling all over the world with us, showing us different cultures of our people. And one of them was a trip to Gorée Island, where we saw where they enslaved African people, put them into caves, waited for ships to come, load them on like cargo, and take them to every single place on the planet to work as labor. And when I was in that prison, I wrote a book, a memoir called Upper Bunkies Unite. And because I was on a top bunk and I remember looking up over this sea of Black women and being like, damn, the first thing that came to mind all those years later was Gorée Island, was how they stacked us.

And so I’m running for all of that, and I’m running for more of the immediacy of creating change right now. I’ve been going to the Massachusetts state House for 15 years writing policy, writing legislation, giving of my voice, my experience, to panels and state legislative hearings and congressional hearings, and being trotted out for all of the things on the federal level policy. And enough is enough. Enough is enough. 

And I have done every piece. I’m older. I’m older. I believe in pouring into our young because they’re brilliant. They have a language now that like, what y’all talking about, but I like how it sounds. But we need to break the ceiling of the caste system that they expect us to continue to live under. And I refuse to do it any longer. I refuse to be made a chump in an electoral process that is not addressing the needs of the people that are millions, that, actually, in Massachusetts, have become the majority of people who are dissatisfied with either of the establishment parties, meaning the Democrats or the Republicans, that 67% of voters in the commonwealth of Massachusetts have become unenrolled. 

Now, does it mean that they’re all the way over here, prison abolitionists and to the left and progressives like I am? I don’t even call myself a progressive because that’s been co-opted in so many ways to help democratic socialists get into office and so forth that do not go far enough for me. However, we need to be a part of this in more ways than just being on the table. 

We need to shake up. I mean, you talk about rattling the bars, the electoral process needs to, those bars need to be rattled. We get people into office and they think the job, the hard work, was getting elected — Which is an arduous process even when you have their millions of dollars, which we don’t — But still too many of our electeds have gotten into office and they thought getting into office was the job. And then term after term after term, they’re just comfortable. It’s like, they have a job. They have a nine-to-five that they go to.

MANSA MUSA:  Let me ask you this here.

ANDREA JAMES:  Yeah.

MANSA MUSA:  OK. So, you already clarified the so-called progressive. We agree that the term in and of itself says one thing, but the behavior says something else. But you are running as an Independent. Now juxtapose that against Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders has ran as the longest Independent, but how do you see yourself when you say you’re Independent? Is your Independency similar to Bernie Sanders, same, or are you saying Independent in fact and not in theory?

ANDREA JAMES:  I’m Independent in fact. I mean, I’m running on issues.

MANSA MUSA:  Come on.

ANDREA JAMES:  I am not running on any party platform, and I refuse to be constricted by a party platform. I unenrolled because I was a member of the Democratic Party, I was raised by strong Black Democratic women over the generations in my family. I unenrolled because I thought it was unconscionable what the Democratic Party has become. And I believe that it is a duopoly between the Republican parties and the Democratic parties.

That being said, I wasn’t running on any party because I’ve seen the party that I expected to do, carry the water and make the noise on behalf of the issues that are affecting so many people. When they weren’t doing that term after term, elected position after elected position, I decided the party platforms are not going to carry the work that needs to be done. So I said, I’m going to work on these four issues.

Now I care about a lot of other issues, trust me. But right now in the compounded crises that people are going through, everyday people are going through in the communities like mine across the country, but specifically across the commonwealth of Massachusetts, we’re a commonwealth. It’s different when you’re a commonwealth, that means of the people. We become a corporate wealth. And our campaign is it’s the commonwealth, not the corporate wealth. We are under the oppression and control of a corporate agenda right now in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. So wealthy donors and corporations are getting the focus and the attention that working families, underemployed, unemployed, formerly incarcerated people, people who have gone through a state of struggle, the focus should be on. We’re a commonwealth. But I’m running on four issues.

MANSA MUSA:  Come on, talk about it.

ANDREA JAMES:  So that it is very clear because they’ve co-opted the term “affordability.” They’ve listened to our language and taken our language, both the Republican and the Democratic candidate, and morphed our abolitionist language into their establishment party agenda. 

So I said, I’m not dealing with none of that. I’m an Independent, meaning I am running on issues, not any sort of party platform or party identity. We don’t have an Independent party in Massachusetts. We’re just called unenrolled/Independents. So it’s not even that I’m running on a platform called Independent. I’m running on four issues: housing, universal healthcare, childcare, and equitably funded education. 

Why those issues? Because I am the voice of the people who have been just tamped down into a caste system that is only growing and widening. So before it used to be all of us, Black, Brown. We have a wealth gap in the commonwealth of Massachusetts that is astounding that nobody even wants to talk about. It’s always like, why has it got to be about race? Because everything is about race, baby [Musa laughs]. And so we’ve got to discuss that. But we’ve got an unemployment rate that is double for Black people in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

And so, these are things that we have to talk about, but the issues that I’m running on are issues that would create an immediate lift. I call it lifting from the bottom and closing the gaps. When you talk about unaffordability, it is at a crisis level in this state and around the country, but housing, universal healthcare, childcare, and equitably funded education immediately gives economic empowerment to the people, the millions of people just in the commonwealth of Massachusetts alone, the wealthiest state in the country, that has been completely left out of that.

So, we have nurses and firemen right now who can’t afford places to live. And so it has expanded. It’s no longer just formerly incarcerated people who got no chance in hell — That’s got no chance in finding support, I should say. We still make it, but in finding support in climbing out of that hole they tried to bury us in and get back on our feet and raise our children and bring our families back together and restitch the fabric that they’ve shredded economically, family-wise. But it’s expanded to a lot of the middle class, so to speak, who are now feeling the same level of pain, even as they still are intact and have their jobs and may have a house or may be able to figure out how to pay their rent, but really are not making a living wage themselves.

And so housing, universal health care, why universal health care that’s single payer health care. I’ve traveled the world in the work that I’ve done as an expert on women and incarceration. I’ve talked to parliaments in different countries about the issue. I’ve visited women’s prisons all over the world. And while doing that, I have had the experience of those countries and their major cities and how they address policy. Well, housing is a number one thing in many of these places, but also they have universal healthcare. They’re not beholden to what we’re stuck with, which is the CEOs who make $200 million, with a M, a year who run health care companies in the United States. And we have no benefit of it. We pay high premiums, we have deductibles, and most of the time we have to ask if they’ll fix something for us and it’s denied.

And so universal healthcare is one way to immediately infuse some economic stability in the families and in the everyday people in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. If we have single-payer health care, which means the state takes over completely — Which we are uniquely poised to do here because Massachusetts already controls its own health care market — And so the only reason we don’t have it is that because the governor and the other leadership in the commonwealth of legislature are beholden to the wealthy donors who are the CEOs and their rank and file who donate money to these campaigns. Because there is no other way to explain in the commonwealth of Massachusetts where we already control our own health care marketplace, where it does not make fiscal sense or it’s not fiscally responsible to not have single-payer health care, that we still have it, except that we will hold in place because of the lobbyists, the health care industry, and the CEOs that make us have to pay all of this money for health care that does not produce the level of health and wellness that we deserve.

MANSA MUSA:  OK. Let me ask you this here then. OK, so you already acknowledged that you got this wealth gap, and you got in terms of the political structure. So how are you managing being competitive in the sense of being able to get out and get your message out unless are you getting PAC money? Are you getting corporate money? So how are you funding your campaign? How do you see it? Because like you say, you up against, just to your own point, it ain’t commonwealth, it’s corporate wealth. If it’s corporate wealth, right?

ANDREA JAMES:  Millions and millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. The Republican candidate in this race, there’s three of us. First of all, mainstream media is beholden to the Democratic Party and they only refer to her. And in reference to the Republican candidate running against us, they only refer to one opponent running this race against our current Democratic governor. There’s three of us. There’s not just two. So mainstream media plays a huge role in completely blocking. 

Took 10,000 signatures, they didn’t think we could get it as an independent candidate. We got 13,311 certified signatures from the secretary of state — Certified at the secretary of state’s office, which means I am on the general election ballot on Nov. 3. 

Mainstream media has refused to include me in anything. We did our first mainstream media interview that aired Sunday morning, the very first one, but yet that same network is hosting one of the few debates that the current governor, Mara Healy, has agreed [to do]. They left it up to her. They let her do all the deciding. There’s three candidates, but she’s the one that got to decide where she was going to show up. Fine. They’re excluding me from the debates, the mainstream networks. I’m a candidate. I am on the ballot, and I am being excluded from being in the debate. 

When I asked the other network that I just did the interview with, why had they not invited me into the debate between the gubernatorial candidates? And they said, because the people have expressed that they only want to hear from the establishment parties. Well, that’s interesting in Massachusetts where 67% of the voter roll are currently unenrolled Independents. So who are you talking to?

And so, it doesn’t matter. What Donald Trump is doing right now with mainstream media on the national level, CNN and all them, he just kicked them out of the press [inaudible] their credentials, and they’re on the sidewalk outside of the White House trying to do an interview, being fed information from inside the press room. That’s exactly what these networks are doing to me by inviting us into the debate and allowing the voters to hear the messages, to be informed voters, and not just mainstream media being able to determine who gets to be heard and who doesn’t get to be heard. That’s violation of constitutional rights, of [the] First Amendment, there’s a plethora of wrongness with it, and that shouldn’t happen.

And so then we got to talk about the money, right? So the current governor’s a millionaire, but she also has millions of dollars that have flowed into her campaign by corporations, the CEO. And then all you got to do, it’s all public knowledge. Anybody can look at ours, they can look at theirs, and you can see where the money’s coming from. And it’s all the wealth and power in the commonwealth and people of wealth and power who want to make sure that the Democratic platform stays intact.

Now look at the Republican candidate that’s running against us. He’s got a $31 million mansion in Montana somewhere, a summer home in Montana. But he, at the start of his race, said, I’m putting $10 million into this race. So they’ve got commercials running, they’ve got all kinds of stuff that we don’t have. So the only thing that we have is an opportunity to be blessed, to be invited into opportunities like this, like what you have always provided for us at Rattling the Bars, but it’s about boots on the ground. And that’s one thing that our style of organizing didn’t change because it shifted to electoral politics.

So we know how to do this. It’s still hard because you have to pay for signs. You have to pay for, even though — Here’s an example. I don’t know if you can see it because my screen —

MANSA MUSA:  Yeah, I can see it.

ANDREA JAMES:  But throughout this entire campaign, our money has been spent on toner and paper. You know what I mean? Because we’ve been talking to Independent candidates, Kshama out in Washington State, and just talking to their campaign managers about how y’all getting this done against multi, multimillions of dollars that are just, they’re not even talking about us yet because they don’t want to give any rise to the awareness of people that there is a person like myself running. So they’re just suppressing everything else by covering everything with signs, with commercials, things that we just don’t have. 

So we’re doing our best. We’re boots on the ground. It took them two days to get 10,000 signatures to get back on the ballot. It took us months because we were grassroots. I stood outside in the rain, the heat, the snow, whatever for months, personally asking people if they would sign my ballot sheet. But also it gave me an opportunity to have conversations with people about what’s their pain points, what do they need in their lives to create joy? It’s not just about the struggle we’re going through, but where are the investments to create joy in the lives of the people of the commonwealth, all of us.

So it has been a really — And then again, Massachusetts is a blue, blue state. We got a blue governor, which is another reason why I ran because I’m like, hold up. The line in the sand for me was we went — So, Massachusetts was one of three states up until 2000 that allowed incarcerated people to vote, full access to the ballot. They took that right away from incarcerated people in 2000 because the brothers inside of a men’s prison here called Norfolk State Prison started to organize themselves. And they started to organize themselves because of the hard draconian sentences that more of these young brothers were starting to come into the prison with these real heavy sentences hanging over them, young. 

And so the Legislature was predominantly white and male was like, oh wait, you going to organize yourselves and your families on the outside? We make 7% of the population, Black folks in Massachusetts. We make up 51% of the carceral population. First of all, make that make sense. Math ain’t mathing, OK?

So they said, we’re going to strip you of the right to vote. And they did. They had to move heaven and earth. They had to change the Massachusetts Constitution to strip us of the right to vote inside.

Now, we have been fighting to reinstate that ever since. And so, they got a congressional hearing in one of the sessions, and we went and poured our hearts out. And with my testimony, I lined up the fact that this is voter suppression. This goes back to denying Black people the right to vote whenever you have a disproportionality in the numbers of Black folks in the state and the levels of incarceration, on and on. Well, they didn’t even reconvene after the hearing to discuss it. It never made it out of committee. It was what every other piece of our legislation that we have worked on over decades went to what they call “went to study.” 

That was it for me. Y’all ain’t even going to huddle and discuss this after we came in and poured our hearts out about why it’s important as people who have had direct experience with incarceration for people inside to vote. I was a mother. I had a 5-month-old little baby boy when they made me go into the prison, a 12-year-old daughter, and young adult, a son and two daughters. I had good reason to still have my right to vote.

MANSA MUSA:  Right. Answer this here, Andrea. And I want you to put yourself in this space, your candidacy in this space. So when we was at the Free Her March, I asked you about that, and this is what you said. You said when we first started this, the first time we came down here, we had a hundred people. The day that we was down there, we had blocks and blocks and blocks of people. We had Freedom Plaza flooded. So that’s one. I want you to put your candidacy in these two spaces. How do you see your candidacy in this light?

I was in Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts, I think year before last, where they was doing a showing of the movie called “The Strike,” where they shut down Pelican Bay, where the men shut down. How do you see your candidacy in terms of you was in a prison where they was treating y’all like animals, y’all made y’all minds up when y’all got out, when y’all got in a position to change the narrative, you was going to change it systematically and continuously, you changed it. Her movement. 

When I was down there where the buses was at, I ran into a lot of sisters I had dealt with and interviewed. Everybody was energized. Strike. They organized this strike throughout California under a situation where they ain’t even had the ability to communicate. So put your candidacy under that type of light.

ANDREA JAMES:  Well, we did. We started our work as incarcerated women inside of a federal prison and we were like, You know what? We don’t hear nothing about us, the separation of us from our children, whatever. So we organized ourselves in that prison, and we didn’t have no way of… We were writing letters and sending kites outside, whatever we could do to raise awareness of the issue of the incarceration of women and our separation from us from our children. But if you look at the life of a woman on a prison bunk, every issue that we are fighting for has been a factor that led them to that prison bunk. The lack of housing, the lack of health care, the lack of education, the lack of childcare, the lack of resources for the most vulnerable among us. And so that’s the first thing.

The second thing is I’m older. I’m older, and they want to create a narrative, and have created a narrative, that we have no more value and we don’t count. And the issues that we’re talking about, nobody should listen to because we have incarcerated or formerly incarcerated as part of who we are. And because of that, we just valueless now. We have no more authority. We cannot be accountable. We cannot be relied upon to run these institutions, to run these states. 

And they have these positions like Qiana Johnson, county clerk. What? Come on now. We got the first formerly incarcerated Black woman who is now the clerk in Prince George’s County. This is what we talking about. We’ve got a new Black woman mayor in Washington, D.C. because of the rallying and the intense work that Black women did, formerly incarcerated Black women did, to change that and put new leadership into that seat. 

So I want to be that. Let me break the mold. You know what I mean? It’s a win-win for us as far as I’m concerned because I’m challenging that. Yeah, they’re like, oh, now they started out only writing stories. There’d be one page of a story when I announced my candidacy a year ago and the whole page was filled up linking my case and talking about my transgression of wire fraud and went to federal prison as a lawyer and one little line that said, oh, and by the way, she’s running for governor.

So I’m like, OK, somebody has to step out and kind of be like, OK, I’m the whipping post. You know what I mean? Because I’m going to push back on that. And what? I don’t have time to talk about that. I have time to talk about why it’s important to have people with direct experience who actually know and have the urgency, the transparency, the accountability that it requires that we don’t currently have from our current legislature, from our current governor, particularly in Massachusetts. Massachusetts just received the Black Hole Award in the country. That means the least transparency in any state in the United States. The least. We have the least effective legislature in the entire country. So we have to do something different. 

And they’ve made it impossible pretty much if you have a felony conviction to run for things. You can’t be a state legislator for the felony conviction in Massachusetts, but guess what they didn’t think anybody would have the nerve to do as a formerly incarcerated person? Run for governor. But also I’m not a politician. I’m a community organizer, and I have no interest in making a career out of starting from school committee and working my way up and sitting around in the state legislature. I’m going straight to the top.

MANSA MUSA:  To the top. Yeah, that’s right.

ANDREA JAMES:  Where we can get the things moving that we need to have moving. And so if this just tills the soil, I have had so many sisters in our network across the country say, hey sis, I’m going to run for office now. You’ve inspired me. That’s what I’m talking about.

MANSA MUSA:  One thing for sure and two things for certain, you got a broad network in terms, I seen the response that you got from men and women coming out that’s in this space. So what kind of feedback, because you told me earlier that you’ve been traveling across the state. And I want to say this, because Massachusetts got the misnomer of being a progressive state, the Kennedy and whatnot, but talk about what kind of response you getting from the people that you’re talking to across the state. And I know you going everywhere, every crevice. Talk about the response you’re getting from the people that’s going to be responsible for you getting elected, because I believe you can get elected and you will get elected.

ANDREA JAMES:  Well, those are the communities that I’m in where no other politicians seem to go. The people who represent those communities go there when it’s election time and then they become the untouchables. Nobody sees them or hears from them. I’ve been in the western part of the state, which is closer to New York than it is to Massachusetts. They wear Yankees caps as opposed to Red Sox hats because they are completely disconnected. I’m talking about what’s the Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, these towns that… I was in Holyoke last year and this sister said to me, you came all the way out here. And I was like, of course I came out here it’s a part of Massachusetts, isn’t it? She was like, nobody comes out here. They can’t even tell you who the governor is in those parts of the state. And it’s mostly Black and Brown. Black, Brown and poor. And they’re feeling like they don’t even vote. 

And so we have this tiny, tiny base of predominantly Democrats who are holding a party platform in place. There’s not enough Republicans in Massachusetts to make that matter. And they are predominantly white. They do not have the direct experience of struggle economically, and they have co-opted the term “progressive,” and they go to things like No Kings and hold signs because that’s the only kind of way that they’re feeling like they could make a difference. They will never vote for me. And so I’m like, if you vote for me, I would love, great, you have a choice. We just want you to know that. I [inaudible] communities that are in the housing developments, you know what I mean? Up in the projects. I’m knocking doors there. I’m talking to people in towns where people are like, Don’t nobody vote out here. And I’ve never voted. But we’ve been simultaneously doing a voter registration drive along with this campaign from day one.

We have a false belief amongst the majority of formerly incarcerated Black men that I’ve found out running this race over the past year that do not even know that they can vote because they’ve been told when they leave the prison. Massachusetts, if you’re felony conviction in a state prison, they took the right to vote. But the minute you walk out of that door, if you were registered before, all you got to do is go and vote again. If you aren’t registered, you can register and vote in the next election. We can vote as formerly incarcerated people in Massachusetts as long as we are not currently serving a state prison sentence for a felony conviction.

If you’re in jail in Massachusetts, you can vote. You can vote while you are serving a misdemeanor sentence in a county jail, access to the ballot. Do they have it? No. So those are the people that we’re talking to.

And again, we live. I get it. So many people have said to me, Black people have said to me, sis, I don’t vote. I would vote for you, but I can’t vote. I’m formerly incarcerated. We correct that and say, You can. We get them registered. We tell them, you don’t have to go into the voting place. You can get a mail-in ballot. You can do all these things. The other piece of that is no matter what, too many Black and Brown folks have said to me, I don’t even believe in the process, sis. I don’t vote. 

And now my response to that is one in six Black children in the commonwealth of Massachusetts go to bed hungry. 30,000 children, predominantly Black and Brown and poor kids, sleep in a car or under some makeshift shelter every single night in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. If they still go to school, they go to schools that are woefully, unequally funded, underfunded, and they just had more teacher layoffs.

If you say to me, I’m asking you, I’m an elder Black woman running for office. We’ve never had a candidate like me. I’m asking you to get engaged just to vote. Just vote. Vote for us. Vote for our issues. If I’m wrong, I’m willing to step out of the electoral process and to do. What are you doing? When I tell you that, do you have children? Most of them tell me yes. Do you care about the Black child over here who’s going to bed hungry every night, that’s sleeping on the street? If you have a better way to approach that, I’d like to know. If you have an alternative to getting somebody like myself in the governor’s seat to create immediate significant radical change that is going to start not from a budget that they’ve created that has no transparency, that nobody knows if it’s true, if it’s not true, that we voted for an audit that we can’t get.

We don’t know how much money’s there. We don’t know who’s deciding where money should be allocated. If you don’t understand the power to not start from a budget that we don’t even know if it’s true or not, but instead start from the issues and the people that need the support the most and make that the priority for the work and where the money is being spent. Then tell me what you have as an alternative for me to make sure as a mother who raised Black children, as a grandmother who now has grand babies and is from a community that the fabric has been shredded by all of these systems, you tell me what your proposal to me is so that I’m not wasting my time any longer so I can make sure that these Black babies and these poor families, white, Black, Brown, whatever, we don’t have any more children who are hungry and sleeping on the street.

MANSA MUSA:  Andrea, tell our audience as we close out how they can get involved with your campaign or how they can get more information rather about your campaign.

ANDREA JAMES:  We don’t have millions of dollars. We barely have any dollars. Our money comes from mostly poor, formerly incarcerated Black, white, Brown women who just are urgent to create change in their own families and communities who are struggling just to feed their kids, find a place to live and the whole bit. AJFOR — That shows my age. My kids were like, Ma, why didn’t you just put the number four? Because I didn’t know — So ajforma.com, that’s our website. You go there, there’s a volunteer form, there’s a donate button. No amount is too small. We get $5, $10, $15, $20 donations, and that has carried us for whatever we’ve been able to get the signs, whatever we’ve been able to do. We’re doing lit drops right now. Lit drops are where you carve out turf and you literally drop in literature like this so that people know we’re running and knocking on doors, door knocking.

Anybody who’s run campaigns like we have to stop prison builds and so forth, you’ve door knocked with me. Come and stand with me and door knock for this campaign now. It is change. And so that’s how they can. Ajforma.com, hit us up, send us an email, whatever you want to do, ajames@ajforma.com. All the information’s on our website. And we’ve got 45 [days]maybe, I don’t know, Nov. 3 is the election day. We are in the 11th hour, and still too many people in the commonwealth of Massachusetts who want or are looking for change don’t know about this campaign because mainstream media has intentionally left us out. And so we need help. We need boots on the ground who can go do a standout for us, disseminate our lit for us, put a yard sign if you have a yard or a window sign if you have a window. We need to raise awareness and we need to do it right now.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to Rattling the Bars. I’m your host Mansa Musa. Today I’m joined by Lance Grandpre, political commentator with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, to discuss his recent article for Baltimore Times, “The Dangers of ‘Law and Order’ Leftism—Toward a Black Power Public Safety.” Thank you for joining me, Lance.

Lawrence Grandpre:

Thank you for having me.

Mansa Musa:

Alright, so let’s start like this here. At one point we had in 2020 where you had a push for the abolishment of prisons and to dismantle the police system as we see it during that period. But immediately you had a pushback and the pushback came in the form of saying that this was woke. Now we look at the United States and mass incarceration, armed policing, and you juxtapose that with the lack of funds for healthcare, lack of funds for education and lack of funds for housing and the fact that the criminal injustice system is in itself painful when it comes to poor and oppressed people, mainly people of color. Let’s start with your article.

Lawrence Grandpre:

So this article stems out of a protest I went to because sometimes people say if you talk about police reform or defunding police, you don’t care about victims. And this protest was the opposite. This was a Black elder, a former member of the Baltimore Black Panther Party who was assaulted by many teenagers and it was caught on film. So of course Fox News, our local Fox News is showing this over and over again saying, “Lock them up, what’s wrong with these kids?” And these were community advocates, many of them women, Queen Mother Victorious who lost her son to gun violence, Mama Gwen, who was formerly incarcerated, coming together with community and saying these young people, what they did was a problem, not because it just violated the law, because it violated our community respect for elders. And we don’t want to just throw the cops at these kids and throw away the book, but if people know who these young people are, turn them into us, the Black community, so we can make sure that they are held accountable but not railroaded by the criminal legal system.

And I though the sophistication and intelligence of that response and even Baba Ade, the elder who was hurt, saying the Black Panther’s argument was that capitalism and racism breed criminality in the community.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lawrence Grandpre:

And it’s not for us as the vanguard to educate ourselves and use political consciousness to eliminate criminality, not just from a material standpoint, but from a psycho-spiritual standpoint. And it was really interesting because this was a few days after AOC went on the news and said, “Nobody’s talking about defund anymore. Woke 1.0 was crazy.” So it was really interesting that the people who were supposed to be talking about social justice, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, some of these other so-called leftists,

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lawrence Grandpre:

Even they were saying, “Defund—that was just people on Twitter trying to look woke. Nobody really talks about defund in real life.” And these Black elders, Black people in West Baltimore, were saying things like, “We have a $700 million police budget in Baltimore. How are we going to have that and schools and investments in the Black youth?” So these Black people who the left is telling us are conservative are actually more progressive than the DSA.

And I thought that was very telling that, in this moment, going into the midterms, there are these leftist democratic socialists who are trying to get elected, and because they want to get elected, they want to push away from radical rhetoric because they think it’s turning off voters. And I think that that goes to show you that when it comes to Black people, we need to have our own vision of public safety, because what’s being offered by even the left, the Democratic Socialists, is willing to push our issues aside, because they have a misunderstanding of our issues. They think it’s just a bunch of radicals on Twitter as opposed to Black folks been talking about Defund since the ’50s. And our visions of Defund are very different than what you saw on Twitter in 2020, but these folks wouldn’t know that.

Mansa Musa:

So how do you see the DSA in terms of how they look at the budget, just police budget and the fact that it’s undercutting the services of the very people they supposed to be representing?

Lawrence Grandpre:

It’s interesting because I think if you are a democratic socialist, it’s obvious you believe police are a tool to protect capitalism. So a world where if you’re a socialist, the idea that you wouldn’t talk about [how] protecting capitalism getting more money is a problem for you—it’s weird.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lawrence Grandpre:

But these folks are a particular brand of socialist. Many of them were very much pro-Bernie Sanders. So when Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris used conversations about identity to attack Bernie, now a lot of these folks see all conversations about race as just distraction from class issues.

So, even when Black people talk about police, they say, “Well, it’s not serious. No one really talks about Defund. So you’re really just trying to attack the socialist candidates.” And it’s like, no, Black folks have been the community control of the police platform.

It wasn’t just invented by the Black Panther Party. It was talked about by Black activists in the ’40s and ’50s, in part because the understanding that if the police were seen as a solution to all social problems… it’s not just police, it’s police-ism: the idea that policing is the only solution to the problems facing all poor people, but especially Black poor people, that’s going to push money away from all the other programs we need in the Black community. So Black folks have been saying that, really, since the Northern migration.

So when we talk about community control of the police, part of that is having community control boards control the police themselves, hold them accountable. And we’ve worked on that as LBS, but it’s also community control of the institutions that produce public safety beyond police. So, housing, addiction, education. I mean, I love to point out that Bobby Seal, he was in AmeriCorps before he was a Panther. So he would be shooting dice with the Black kids trying to school them on AmeriCorps’ time. And part of his frustration is these nonprofits don’t let us actually do the training we need to do with these youth, but we got to get the money from the nonprofit because that’s the only job we got. So even the Black Panthers program was a push for Black control of resources to socialize our youth, specifically around things like violence prevention. And again, the idea that all of that is just under this large framework of “woke”… And again, the right wing hates woke, we know that, but even some of the Bernie folks—they really hate “woke,” because they associate it with the attacks on Bernie and they see all conversations about police as woke.

Mansa Musa:

Let’s unpack some more about DSA because we see upheaval of DSA type activity and we see in terms of midterm elections, some of the candidates that ran on DSA platform have made it through the primary. And so at the same token, what is their appeal? Because they vacillating when it come to social issues.

Lawrence Grandpre:

The federal government, in theory, can print money. So there’s this belief that if we just spent more money, things will get better, and the Democrats have been afraid to spend money. I think that in the DSA, it’s like, “Let’s really focus on, in theory, cut the military budget, invest in community through things like Medicare for Al”l. Now, if you don’t have the integrity to stand up for “Defund the Police,” why do you think we would believe that you have the integrity to stand up to “Cut the Military Budget? If you don’t see the connections between the violence of policing and the violence of militarism, why would we expect you to be able to push the military budget to community?” 

Lawrence Grandpre:

These are intelligent, college-educated voters who feel like the government needs to spend more money, in part, because it’s a job program for people like them. So they have an interest in fighting the austerity of the Democratic Party, in part, because they want to see conditions improve for the community, but also in part because it’s a business model for the voters of DSA. And that’s a big concern for us, because even with Medicare for All, there’s no world in which healthcare should be a for-profit enterprise. But it’s not just that doctors are racist. When you look at things like Black women get more cesarean sections than other women, So, literally, they’re getting cut open in these dangerous surgeries. Black women, if you have a child in the hospital, you are going to get a drug test. And even if you pop for that drug test from the epidural, the drugs they give you for the pain, they might take your kid away. So engagements with the medical system are not just imperfect for Black people; they are places of surveillance and violence.

So we, as Black people, need systems like a birthing center, like nutrition, upstream investments that are different than what the DSA crowd cares about. So the idea that we should just accept not talking about Defund to get Medicare for All ignores the fact that Black people—we don’t just need healthcare to not give us a bill. We need to change the vision of healthcare so we control it. And the DSA is not interested in that. They don’t really think that way. And they honestly believe the only way anything will get passed if it goes to everybody. Universal programs prevent racial backlash. Because we know any spending in America is seen as giving money to welfare queens. So we just got to give the same thing to everybody and that’ll deal with racial backlash.

And what we know is anything you do that gives out any tax money will deal with racial backlash, but also do things that don’t give Black people the power we need to build for ourselves. It will just put us in systems that really are built by other people that, even if it’s good for them, can often be violent for us.

Lawrence Grandpre:

But I think that, again, when you have a class-based vision of the world, that has become in some ways hostile to thinking about race because you had negative experiences with people weaponizing race against people like Bernie Sanders. You’re not thinking about what a political agenda would look like when you actually invest in… because we should do both. We should have a class-based redistribution of wealth, but that restribution should also be invested in community institutions that reflect the culture and history of specific communities, not just Medicare for All, but clinics that use the history and culture of the community to provide that healthcare. Nutrition that reflects the culture and the way communities like to be fed so that they can have upstream nutrition so they don’t need to go to the doctor in the first place.

These things should go hand in hand. And I think it’s concerning that it feels like, because DSA is becoming electorally viable in some spaces, that [they] only talk about affordability issues, only talk about Medicare for all, only talk about ending the war in Iran, without really thinking intelligently about a platform that would meet people’s needs for community control of public safety, broadly defined. So not just policing, but again, youth programming, schooling, getting nutrition. Our kids are literally hungry.

Mansa Musa:

Yeah.

Lawrence Grandpre:

They’re fed junk food, but they’re undernourished. So we actually do have serious nutritional needs as we have obesity in the inner city. So what does it look like to build a food sovereignty ecosystem, whether it’s Black Yield, Black Church Food Security Network that can actually feed ourselves as opposed to just the DSA, it’s like, well just make sure they get food stamps. And food stamps are cool, but food stamps are not the vision of liberation for us.

Mansa Musa:

But talk about, because when we look at DSA, and it’s misnomer even to use the name socialist because when you look at. We got examples in Cuba and when they first took over, the literacy rate in the countryside was 90%. 90% of the people could not read or write. They organized, it’s a book out called Vincent Ramos. We were trying, that’s the name of it. And they organized all the college kids, all the intelligence and made them go in the countryside and stay to educate the people, to get them to read and write.

They didn’t say, “Oh, we’re going to create a system where they can come out the country, live in a project style housing dwelling and get them public schools that’s not going to teach them nothing.” They actually educated the people and a lot of that education led to what we see today in Cuba, got best medical, despite all the things going on. So when we talk about DSA, and I think this is a danger, and maybe you want to weigh in on it. I think it’s a danger that confronts that notion that this is a socialist party and because the right wing is going to put them right in the category like communists and they can resurrect that notion.

Lawrence Grandpre:

Socialism, to me, the key word is social. You either have the market making decisions about planning for the world or you have people doing it socially. It’s clearly better to do it socially, but there are divisions within that larger social body. And my concern is that even amongst some of the people in the DSA crowd, the leftists, some of the visions of what they would socially plan may like and lean on policing partially because they are afraid of being looked at as communist. So they might, for example, even in very, very progressive Bernie Crat, DSA San Francisco, there’s this push to, well, we got people homeless, they have mental illness. So they as individuals may not be rational, so we are going to use policing to bring them into drug treatment.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lawrence Grandpre:

And again, this is like even Bernie people sometimes say this. So there are elements of even the less progressive mindset that are like, we as a society can’t let you be out here damn bad. We have to help you lift yourself up. And if that means we have to involuntarily commit you to treatment, and if we have to use police to do that, then we’ll do that. While one thing that we talk about here in Baltimore is, and Baltimore’s been a heroin town since the 60s and 70s. And it’s been really hard for us, but we’ve also had systems of informal community care that have been designed to address some of the worst exigencies of drug abuse. Nika Namdi from a program called Fight Light said that grandma’s basement was the first halfway house. We had systems where elders, you would be able to stay with family and you would be able to get certain stabilizing influences through your social network so you wouldn’t be out on the streets.

So in that worldview, we would look at something like making sure these abandoned homes get rehabbed and given to Black people in community. That’s partially an anti-homelessness effort.

That’s an anti-addiction effort. That’s a crime fighting effort. So it’s not just social housing, it’s not just public housing. It’s also making sure that Black people in communities can pass down their family homes

And they have a way to make sure that they’re affordable so they can stay housed because that produces capacities for people who do suffer from addiction to not be on the streets committing crime. And again, the DSA vision is so limited to what they see and what they know, they sometimes end up using police where it’s like, if we just had networks of people in community that could care for each other, we wouldn’t need police for that. But I also do think folks are afraid. I know academics are very afraid and some folks are afraid of looking too radical, looking like the rhetoric of 2020 was burn down the police station.

Mansa Musa:

And

Lawrence Grandpre:

I think that’s also part of what they want to distance from when they talk about we not doing defund no

Mansa Musa:

More. Part

Lawrence Grandpre:

Of it is the direct antagonism with the state, the cost of that has increased for them. What we know is that the cost is high for us, whether we’re openly antagonistic or not, we are politically antagonistic by making demands upon the state to recognize our humanity. So we’ve always had to deal with that potential backlash. And I think now for some folks they’re saying, oh, I can’t use that. We’re not trying to do that radical rhetoric no more

Mansa Musa:

Because

Lawrence Grandpre:

People are losing jobs, people are potentially getting deported. So it’s like the ’70s, marginally away from the rhetoric of the ’60s and leaving the Black radicals out to dry after the draft ended. I think the white radicals moved away from radicalism and that we’re seeing a similar

Mansa Musa:

Dynamic. Okay, but we know that this is the 60th year of the anniversary of the Black Panther Party. And I was talking to somebody about just like we’re not anti-police. The party wasn’t anti-police. One of the things they did, one initiative they took was, and this is a revolutionary suicide by Huey Newton, where they had this particular intersection that didn’t have no stoplight and it was in the Black community and kids was getting hit. So somebody came and said, “Man, they not doing nothing about this. We’ve been complaining.” So they went down there and became traffic guards, the members of the Black Panther Party. They held up the traffic, let the kids walk by, you know what I’m saying? And this is what they did. And they had guns with them because they had one part of their program was policing the police. The police in turn came and told them they stop.

Now you guys stop this. They said, “Well, we’ll stop this when y’all put a traffic light up there or y’all stop directing traffic. We don’t care which one you’re going to do, but you do or we going to continue to do.” They wind up putting the traffic light up there. So in terms of that particular example, what are the core aspects of the Black Power Public Safety?

Lawrence Grandpre:

I like your example because the party was a little bit different in different cities, but I think one thing that stands out to me is that they had questions about police, but the Black Panthers in some ways were law and order. It was law and order within the party. You cannot show up high, very much about discipline, law and order in the community. If you’re selling drugs, if you’re a parasite in our community, we’re going to deal with you. And I think that’s a perception, because this is something that happened in 2020, that there were white leftists being like, “Let’s just run wild and be anarchist and burn stuff down.” It’s always been Black people that’s been like, “We’re not doing that.” So the idea that somehow that is tied to Black issues, no, we’ve always been extremely serious about our liberation.

So when the Black Panther Party talks about doing a plebiscite in order to get Black sovereignty, I think that’s an example of why we need to think about community control of the police in terms of we have in Maryland, substantial police reform is nowhere near enough, but we need to have the ability for the community to have investigative power to be able to investigate police. We need to have community resources to be able to flow to community institutions so the community decides who’s doing public safety in that community. So when we talk about who’s funded to do violence prevention work, it shouldn’t just be the people who are tied into the police or the people that are tied into the nonprofit world. We got tons of people in community that have been doing work that have not

Mansa Musa:

Been funded.

Lawrence Grandpre:

And the fact that they are getting a little bit of money now, I think is part of why we’re seeing these unprecedented declines in violent crime. So Black power public safety isn’t just people getting grants. It is the community having the power to determine what the grant making criteria are. It’s the community being able to tax institutions in their community that they see as producing crime. And by that I mean Johns Hopkins. That’s

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Lawrence Grandpre:

Because Johns Hopkins gentrified the whole area of the

Mansa Musa:

City. The big colonial king in Baltimore.

Lawrence Grandpre:

And when you gentrify a whole part of the city, you’re moving people to different hoods and that creates a lot of possibility for conflict. My father was a cop for 20 years, so he talked about East Baltimore used to be called the country club because it was so quiet up there. But when Hopkins gentrified all those people out of the Middle East Baltimore, a lot of them moved to Northeast, which creates a ton of conflict, pretty much increased the murder rate in that part of the city. Hopkins should have to pay for that. They got a $13 billion endowment. So Black Power Public Safety is about us not tying in our future to gentrification, which is what the police really are a tool for. They’re a tool to produce gentrification. That’s good for that business model because gentrification needs policing.

Mansa Musa:

We

Lawrence Grandpre:

Should be able to put tax on the gentrifier so we can secure our communities so they can’t gentrify them, own our own property, stabilize our communities, but then invest in the capacity to take care of our youth, to do violence prevention, to take care of our health. All the things they stripped from us, they should have to pay us to be able to do for ourselves. In that world, I think we would have Black Power

Mansa Musa:

Public Safety. Right. And that’s basically what the Black Panther Party was doing because they had the survival program. Exactly. And the concept was Survival Pending Revolution. The Survival Program wasn’t like us being in a basement, taking guns apart in the dark with blindfolds, then putting them back together, making bombs, reading Ann Archer’s cookbook. No, survival program was the free breakfast program, free medical, sickle cell anemia, taking prison families to prison to visit them, alternative education. This was a survival program, survival pending revolution. And what the goal was, going back to your point, the goal was to stabilize the community for self to be able to be self-determined. So if I’m self-determined, I got self-determination. A great example for Baltimore would be the Clean Block because when they had Clean. And I remember I was locked up and I used to read the Afro. Afro had a big thing about Clean.

The sense of community that came out of that, the Clean Block, when they was able to say, “We recognizing this neighborhood for Clean Block.” But more importantly, that neighborhood not only had a clean block, but that neighborhood had policing. That neighborhood had a sense of identity that if I seen you, I know you Meryl’s son or Meryl’s daughter. I know you Tommy’s son or Tommy’s daughter. You know me and you know that if I see you doing something that you ain’t supposed to be doing, then I’m going to tell your parents the minute you see me, you’re going to alter your behavior because that became the sense of community. But like you say, once Hopkins got in the equation, and not only Hopkins, I remember when Shafer started when he did the Inner Harbor and they started pushing people out of certain areas in order to get to Inner Harbor and they pushed people into.

Either they pushed them out into the county or they pushed them into the interior of Baltimore in neighborhoods they wasn’t familiar with or neighborhoods they was familiar with and had issues with and would automatically create a conflict. But talk about how do you see, because what you just outlined is in fact a model that is one, inexpensive because it becomes self-contained. So the monies that you’re putting towards astronomical police budget can go towards stabilizing some of the projects that deal with housing, deal with substance, the people that’s actually doing the work.Like you say, you got people that actually going around taking people and putting them in a place and letting them drown. So we talk about how you see DSA and the gains that they’re getting and the models they’re using. How do they fit into this narrative? Are they rewriting the script and say they’re going to invest in this type of thinking or their model is, like you said earlier, we creating a cadre of intelligent people that can grant write and that’s going to become our funding source and not only our funding source, but create an infrastructure for doing case studies and then marketing these case studies, the new Jim Crow.

Lawrence Grandpre:

Yeah. I think it’s to be determined. We’re going to see a huge increase in DSA affiliated leftist people in Congress. Now, whether they’re going to be able to write bills, whether they’re just going to vote on stuff that comes from the Republicans, we’re going to see. I think the real test is going to be 2028 when it’s possible the Democrats will take the White House, Senate and the Congress. So it’s really going to be important for us these next two years for people that believe in the possibility of these folks doing good to push them. What is your actual proposal on how you can use the power of the federal government to enhance the ability of people On the ground locally to have more ownership and power and control over the institutions that impact their lives. Because policing is a state and local issue. Feds actually have relatively little control

Mansa Musa:

Over it,

Lawrence Grandpre:

Except given a few grants here or there. So really it is, do you have a vision for whether it’s through food sovereignty policy, whether it’s through manufacturing policy? The metric for us at least is again, local self-determination and the ability for local people on the ground to own the institutions that are doing this work. I think part of even going back to the New Deal, the frustration with these progressives is that sometimes they do these top down technocratic re-imaginings of what solutions look like that don’t involve community. Mamdani, people have called him a technocratic socialist.

Mansa Musa:

And

Lawrence Grandpre:

I think that’s not on some right wing stuff, but that’s scary from a Black power

Mansa Musa:

Perspective

Lawrence Grandpre:

Because technocracy oftentimes views Black peoples as widgets and inputs in someone else’s equation for progress and liberation. And I think part of the value of the Black Panther Party is they called themselves socialist, but in many places, in many ways they were also Pan-Africanist and Black nationalists. And they were combining them all to say that, yes, we will fight capitalism, but we will not just make the people this abstract proletariat to fit within a Eurocentric version

Mansa Musa:

Of

Lawrence Grandpre:

What a class centric revolution will look like. We are going to lead our people on our vision of what we think fighting capitalism looks like. And again, I think it’s going to be our job to force the DSA to not see that as woke, to actually recognize that that is just what black people demand. And that’s the cost of us being in political coalition is you respecting our self-determination.

Mansa Musa:

And I agree it’s to be determined because one, you gain electoral office through coalition building. That’s really where it come out of. And you’re able to get a common identity out of the coalition, common identity being what we want change, the change that we want to see. Harold Washington in Chicago, he was successful at building a coalition. And to his credit, he tried to maintain the standard, but they fought him tooth and nail at the state government. So he wasn’t able to get a lot of things done. But the fact of the matter, what we’re asking or we’re talking about is not really hypothetical because we see this in Europe and we see examples where police don’t have guns. They call in, if it’s a violent situation where a gun, they got a unit that comes in to deal with that. But outright, the police walk around with no weapons because the lack of fear towards the society.

Lawrence Grandpre:

You mentioned New Zealand, I think in that as

Mansa Musa:

Well.

Lawrence Grandpre:

But in New Zealand as well, the Aboriginal communities actually have really pushed a model for youth justice that places tribal elders and tribal institutions at the heart of restorative justice programming

Mansa Musa:

For

Lawrence Grandpre:

Youth who are engaged in acts of criminality. And so that’s been a big fight for Aboriginals in New Zealand and Australia to really demand tribal sovereignty over their youth as opposed to putting them into the juvenile justice system.

Mansa Musa:

But

Lawrence Grandpre:

Again, given the legacy of the private schools where they beat the Indian out of you and stuff like that. And again, I think it’s jarring for white people to think that we as black people are asking for something similar here in America because the joke is white people are so settled in America, they don’t even see themselves settler colonists no

Mansa Musa:

More.

Lawrence Grandpre:

And I think unfortunately that’s part of what’ happened with the DSA. It’s like the idea of black sovereignty is just jarring to them in a way that you’re an Australian, you know you took over Australia and there are people here that are really dark skinned, you’re not.

Mansa Musa:

But

Lawrence Grandpre:

I think in America, that basic concept of having to negotiate with people who have their own sovereign agendas is not something that they’re used to conceiving as anything other than a tool for the centrist to undermine the Bernie’s of the world.

Mansa Musa:

And

Lawrence Grandpre:

I just think the reality is if DSA is going to get Black support, it’s going to really have to reckon with the visions of the world that come from Black people, including our visions of public safety.

Mansa Musa:

Right. And before we close, you got any closing remarks?

Lawrence Grandpre:

I really appreciate this. Please check out our podcasts and search of Black Power and Political Commentary Corner. So those are on YouTube. Check us out at lbsbaltimore.com. We have all of our email updates about the work we’re doing in Annapolis to push criminal justice policy, reparations policy, which

Mansa Musa:

I’ve

Lawrence Grandpre:

Never seen DSA has been skeptical on, but we’re very adamant about its practical utility as a framework to invest in Black sovereignty here in Maryland. And you can find me on any social media at Neil Nubian, N-E, the number zero, Nubian, N-U-B-I-A-N. Right.

Mansa Musa:

And we ask our audience to really take deep thought on this particular subject matter. It’s not like say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud. It’s not when Stokley Carmichael in the ’60s, they called Black Power, James Brown, Song and Song. We’re not in that state. We’re not trying to go back into that state of mind, that conditions created that state of mind. We’re talking about an analysis of having Black political power as it relates to our safety. We’re talking about because we’re the ones that’s unsafe, we’re the ones that this astronomical budget is being doled out to, to make us feel unsafe, to lock us up. Then we believe, as the brother was talking about Lawrence, that we believe that we have a right to define what is safe for us and what is not safe for us. And making that definition or defining that, we see the necessity to make an analysis and implement it.

And in this case, this is an analysis that we want to, I think the Gullah Geechee in South Carolina got a thing where they do restorative justice. And so the fact that you infringe on the community, that they might not put you out the community, but they’re going to put you in such a shameful state of mind and the fear of what you’re getting ready to lose or make you get the person to come back or people come back and lie in accordance with the social system that they set up. We ask that you continue to support the real news and rattling bars because guess what? We’re actually the real news. Thank you.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch Report, a show that examines government policy and action through the lens of extreme economic inequality, the existential issue of our time. Today, we’re going to discuss a topic that defines who holds power in America and how they keep it despite growing voter dissatisfaction amid a historic wealth imbalance. It’s a story of money, access, and self-enrichment that is at the root of the bad policies and broken institutions we all struggle with daily. And it’s an issue that transcends the nominal state of play in this country to ensure entrenched power never loses its grip on our wavering democracy. I am talking about, of course, the hoards of cash that have turned our political system into a pay-for-play utopia since the infamous Citizens United decision in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could make unlimited independent expenditures to influence elections, super PACs, and other vehicles have transformed our elections into a veritable auction to the highest bidder.

But there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes where all this money is going, how it’s warping our electoral system, and ultimately who is cashing the checks. To help us uncover the dark details of how the system constrains us, we will be speaking with journalist and filmmaker David Sirota. But first, I want to check in with my reporting partner and co-host, Steven Janis, to set the stage for our conversation. Steven, how are you?

Stephen Janis:

Very beleaguered. Very beleaguered by the cash system you were just talking about, the ATM and politics.

Taya Graham:

Have I already depressed you?

Stephen Janis:

Yes, quite a bit.

Taya Graham:

Stephen, there was a question I had for you. There was a weird mystery in democratic circles that was sort of a one-day story, but it speaks to a less talked about aspect of today’s topic. It’s a missing chapter from the so-called Democratic autopsy of the 2024 election. What was it about and why do you think it’s important to our discussion today?

Stephen Janis:

Well, the basic story was that the Democratic Party didn’t want to release an autopsy in their 2024 loss to Trump. So there was a lot of controversy about that. Eventually they released it, but then the New York Times broke a story about a missing chapter from that report. And the missing chapter was really interesting. The fact that they left this out was talked about the consultant class that works elections that literally had somehow through this entire process of running elections obtained generational wealth. Generational wealth. That’s a direct quote from the New York Times story. And so that just really got my attention. I know money in politics is ridiculous at this point in our historic run towards authoritarianism, but I had no idea that you could get generational wealth. And I do recall a tweet from our guest, David Sirota, talking about people after 2024, all these consultants going to beaches and living the luxurious life thanks to their consultant fees for these elections.

So that really, I think was something that just stunned me that you could become that wealthy losing.

Taya Graham:

I think I chose the wrong line of work apparently. Generational wealth. Exactly. Incredible. I think this explains why working people’s issues are always on the back burner. I mean, we both cover Capitol Hill and despite a recent poll showing that 91 million Americans say they could not afford quality healthcare if they needed it, we can go months without hearing even a peep about it. It’s just silence. But I’m sure our guest will have plenty to say about it. David Sarota is the founder of the investigative news organization, The Lever. He is a former speechwriter for senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and was nominated for an Oscar for his work creating the story for the Netflix film Don’t Look Up. He’s also the producer of the podcast series, The Master Plan. I could go on, but we wouldn’t have time for the interview. So David, let me just say thank you so much for joining us.

David Sirota:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Taya Graham:

So first question, just to get a sense of this consultant class and how their role in politics and how much money they’re pocketing and the report, it actually cited generational wealth for these people. How on earth are political consultants soaking up this much money just working for a campaign?

David Sirota:

Well, it has to do with in many cases how their fee structure works. A lot of the way the consultant fee structure works is related to how many television ads are purchased. So they get in a lot of these deals a cut of the buy. So the larger a TV ad buy is, the more the consultant stands to make. Now obviously that creates, there’s sort of a conflict of interest problem there, which is if your main campaign strategist stands to benefit from a certain form of spending and will not benefit from other forms of spending, then the consultant is more likely and is really financially incentivized to suggest that the campaign spend in the way that it benefits the consultant rather than spending in different ways. So in practice, it’s not that TV ads aren’t important in elections. They certainly are, but a disproportionate amount of campaign budgets go into TV on campaigns where the consultant is paid as a percentage of the cut of the buy.

And in many cases, less money goes into mail, goes into organizing, goes into a field and ground game. It’s like there’s a baked in financial incentive. And we’re talking about in these major races, we’re talking about millions and millions of dollars that are at stake here. If you’re a consultant who’s getting a cut of a hundred million dollar ad buy, I mean you are making a ton of money.

Stephen Janis:

And David, what do you say to the idea this is generational wealth being generated for these consultants? Do you think the New York Times or the reporting from the autopsy was accurate in that, that these people are making that amount of money doing this?

David Sirota:

Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. I guess it surprises me that this is mentioned in this conversation because this is a really taboo topic, but yes, we’re talking about just enormous sums of money. And to be clear, look, I’ve worked on a lot of campaigns before I was a journalist. I understand people on campaigns need to get paid. I mean, it’s real work, it’s hard work. But when we’re talking about the levels of money that we’re talking about here, I mean this is something that’s way beyond that.

Taya Graham:

You know what? I was curious, how much are these people, and they’re vested in what we would call the great moderation fallacy, which is that voters actually want a moderate or a centrist path. So basically how much are these folks responsible for sowing doubt in the party when a progressive candidate wins? The pundits are on the same page with the same talking points about how the Democrat socialists are somehow bad for the party. How are these people responsible for making progressives look to be the lesser choice even when voters seem to be supporting them?

David Sirota:

I think a lot of it has to do, as we’ve been discussing, it has to do with the money and the financial incentives. There’s huge money to be made, not just on campaigns, but there’s actually even bigger money to be made if you’re working for advising a consultant for super PACs. Super PACs are these supposedly outside entities that are spending huge money in elections. And obviously those PACs, the biggest of them are funded by billionaire donors, oligarch donors, corporate donors, donors who have a vested interest in the status quo, in the economic status quo. So if you’re a consultant who’s working at the nexus of campaigns and super PACs and you know your next job is going to be at a corporate or oligarch funded super PAC and you’re also working, you know that those Super PACs pick consultants from specific kinds of campaigns and candidates, well guess what?

There is a kind of nexus between what that consultant is going to advise and who their next client is. I mean that is really where this is at. The consultant class appropriates the agenda of the donor class and the consultant class is advising the candidates. And you mentioned the media. I mean look, billionaire and oligarch and corporate owned media has a viewpoint. It has a political agenda. It’s not to say that good journalism can’t be done inside of corporate media and the like, it certainly can, but there is a filter there.

Stephen Janis:

So I mean is this why we keep hearing this question come up again and again on CNN and other punditry saying, well, is win of democratic socialists bad for the party rather than inquiring or trying to understand why people would vote for democratic socialists? It’s like a mantra. They say it every time. All they talk about is why it’s bad. Is this coming kind of from that consultant industrial complex that you’re talking about, like the intersection of this wealth they’re making versus actually listening to the voters?

David Sirota:

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the conversation about electability, I put that in quotes, this idea that candidates can’t be too populist, too far left, the Democrats shouldn’t nominate them because they can’t win general elections. I mean, I’m old enough to remember when Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the media said that Barack Obama could not win a general election. I’m old enough to remember when the Democratic Party elites and the media sort of celebrated Donald Trump being nominated as the Republican presidential candidate because they

Stephen Janis:

Though

David Sirota:

He couldn’t win a general election. Electability is sort of this manufactured idea that anything that strays too far from the norm inside of where politics and democratic politics specifically is can’t actually end up winning a general election. And I think that that’s how this sort of frame is laundered into the conversation. So then it becomes that DSA candidates or economic populist candidates, they supposedly have an electability problem. Oh, it’s not necessarily that they may be wrong on specific issues. It’s that even if they are right, if democratic voters vote for them, those candidates can’t win general elections. And what I see happening is that the corporate democratic faction is sort of weaponizing this argument and also playing a role in sort of wish casting that idea into reality that you see in various races where when populist candidates win the nomination for a general election, that the corporate faction is still attacking and criticizing them in the general election, even though they are now the candidate going up against the MAGA Republicans.

And I think what that speaks to is that the corporate faction of the Democratic Party in specific here is willing to potentially lose general elections to MAGA and Republicans

If that is the cost of maintaining the corporate faction’s power inside the Democratic Party.

Taya Graham:

Incredible. Now just to touch on your podcast, which is the Master Plan for those who haven’t heard it yet, I know it gives a history of something we’re dealing with at the moment, which is the Unitary Executive Theory of Power and of course our current president, Donald Trump, but it also focuses on systemic corruption that you say affects all of our lives. So this isn’t just about one man, right?

David Sirota:

Absolutely. So the first season of Master Plan was about the 50 year plot to legalize corruption. And that story basically starts, and both seasons do, excuse me, in the early 1970s in the aftermath of Watergate. Watergate was the first real dark money scandal of the modern era. And what we trace is how conservatives, and they wrote this down in documents and we have all the evidence there, they really made a blueprint to deregulate the campaign finance system, equate corporations with people under the law and narrow the definition, the legal definition of bribery. And they did that because they understood that they became nervous that elections were causing the government to react to what the people wanted. And the Powell memo that we talk about in the, it was a memo written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, talks about how at that time conservatives, oligarchs, corporations need to invest in politics because the government had become too responsive to what the people wanted.

So one way you deal with that if you’re an oligarch and you think that’s a problem, the one way you deal with that is to turn elections into auctions, is to turn your one person, one vote democracy into a $1, one vote oligarchy. So that was season one. This relates to season two in this way. So that’s the first pillar of how you, if you think democracy is a problem, you legalize corruption, you turn elections into auctions. The other thing you do is what we trace in season two. You try to concentrate as much power as possible in the hands of one person and strip it away from more small democratic institutions and all the ways power is dispersed across the country. You concentrate that power in the hands of one person and then make sure your person is that person. And that is what we are tracing in season two called the Kingmakers, which is about essentially the unitary executive theory, where this idea came from.

Because again, it started after Watergate where Watergate was seen as a crisis of an imperial presidency. Congress passes a bunch of laws to strip power from the executive branch and it catalyzes a conservative backlash that carries through the Reagan administration, obviously into the George W. Bush administration with the war on terror and into the Obama administration, I should say, with its use of drone warfare to say that the executive branch gets to make all of the decisions. And so the point is, you asked is what’s going on today, Donald Trump, the situation, is that all just one person? No, Donald Trump is in an office with a control panel of tools that were handed to him and a system of legalized bribery that was handed to him by 50 years of plots.

Taya Graham:

To your point about how these oligarchs are essentially controlling our conversation and controlling our national narrative, and Stephen and I are actually on Capitol Hill quite a bit, rarely do we ever hear anyone talk about healthcare despite what could be described as a literal crisis in the country. I looked at a recent report from Yale University and it estimated 27 million Americans don’t have healthcare. It’s top of the list in the polls in regard to priority concerns from Americans, and yet we’re hearing silence on Capitol Hill. Would you be willing to connect the dots with some of the reporting on your podcast about systemic corruption and our current healthcare crisis?

David Sirota:

Absolutely. I mean, I think this has a lot to do with how money doesn’t just buy legislative favors, money also buys silence. And sometimes not even a transaction has to occur in order for silence to nonetheless be purchased. And it works in a lot of ways in this way, that if you’re a senator, if you’re a congressperson, you know implicitly now that if you propose a bill to deal with the healthcare crisis that let’s say challenges the power of or threatens the profits of the private health insurance industry, you know that what you’re doing is potentially provoking that very powerful money interest to spend a lot of money to get you thrown out of Congress. So many legislators basically choose to not do anything or not say anything for fear of sticking their neck out and seeing their political career ended. Money doesn’t necessarily have to even be transacted for that situation to exist.

And so what I’m describing really is the norm, that there is an implicit threat that if anybody tries in a serious way to deal with the healthcare crisis, they will be targeted. We know this, by the way, from the Obama era where the first thing that the Obama administration said when it got into office and started pushing for some kind of healthcare reform was we are ruling single payer healthcare off the table. It was immediately the administration made an announcement that this is not part of the conversation. And this is only at that point, four years after Barack Obama, when he campaigned for the Senate, said he’s a supporter of Medicare for All. We just need to get a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president. And four years later they had that and they immediately said, “We’re not even going to talk about this.” And I think that was because they saw the collective power of the healthcare industry and said, “If we do this, there will be a ton of spending to try to get every member of our party thrown out of office.” And they also ruled out the public option.

So my point in just mentioning this is that even though money doesn’t get transacted, money is overlaying and creating the political conditions at all times.

Stephen Janis:

One thing I really appreciate about the podcast is it goes back 50 years, which a lot of times reporters, we get caught up in the contemporary moment and don’t understand the roots of this. But I was thinking when I was listening to it that all of the sort of trends we’ve seen in economic inequality, and this show is about economic inequality, started about the time your podcast starts digging into this sort of systemic corruption. I mean, is inequality intertwined in this story in terms of how the process that you kind of illuminate sort of set the seeds for this almost traumatic wealth inequality and wealth imbalance now? Are they intertwined in that sense?

David Sirota:

So there’s an amazing website. People can Google it. I think if they put just the year 1971 into Google, you’ll find it where it traces how so many trends started in the year 1971. It’s kind of amazing, like de-unionization, inequality, et cetera, et cetera. I do not think it is an accident that so many of the trends started at roughly that time. This is the lead up to the Watergate era. This is a moment where the consumer movement and the broader left has sort of culminates a lot of its agenda, right? Medicare, Medicaid, the great society, all this is culminating. Ralph Nader is having huge success, regulatory success in Congress, but there is this backlash. A well oiled, moneyed, conservative machine is starting in earnest to build what ultimately ends up culminating in MAGA. And I think that that machine was based on preserving and expanding the wealth of the people who were funding that machine.

We’re talking about people like Joseph Kors to name somebody, like the Kochs. That machine started to be built then and it was a machine designed ultimately for wealth protection for that small group of people. And this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s not a theory. It was a conspiracy. And look, they used the tools of the government, they used the laws of the land and the lobbying system and the campaign finance system to get what they wanted. And we are now here living through that reality. So when I think people look at the affordability crisis, when they look at gilded age levels of inequality, we have to understand that goes along with the corruption that we’re talking about. The original gilded age was also one of the most infamously corrupt ages in American history. These two things go together. The wealthy and the powerful are buying politicians, buying elections, buying policy outcomes that preserve and expand the wealth of the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

This is the oldest story in America.

Taya Graham:

You broke a story about a really troubling phenomenon inside the Democrat political machine, and it basically uses dark money to push or bolster so-called moderate candidates. The organizations you identified were called the Bench and Majority Democrats. Could you explain how these organizations work and what’s really behind them in terms of pushing this moderation fallacy we keep on coming upon?

David Sirota:

Right. So listen, we’ve seen iterations of this for most of the post New Deal era of politics. And I would pinpoint that to probably in the modern era starting in the 1980s. You had a movement among, they were called at one point so-called Atari Democrats. Then they became the Democratic Leadership Council. Now they exist as groups like Third Way. So this is not something new. And you’re right, they exist like a group like the Bench and Majority Democrat. They have different names and different faces, but it’s the same idea. And the idea is that the Democrats need to abandon their new deal roots in order to compete with Republicans and to do that, to compete with Republicans for business support, corporate support, oligarch support, and all of those entities’ money. This has been going on now for 40 plus years. And so I think this is the latest iteration of that.

You have shadowy billionaires funding this network of groups and think tanks, which are designed to support candidates who are, and I’m putting it in quotes here, like moderate. But what that really means is much more corporate and oligarch friendly. And again, they don’t come out and say that. They are cast as we are pushing this because these are the most electable candidates. They’re not acknowledging the actual mission of what’s going on. They’re shrouding it in the veneer of what seems like a rational and logical political argument. But what’s really underneath here, it’s not a coincidence that there is billionaire money and there’s big money that wants specific things from these politicians.

Stephen Janis:

Citizens United obviously is the core of this story in terms of things getting worse in the past decade, but there is a recent decision, NRSC versus Federal Election Commission, which also I guess loosens some of the restrictions on spending and coordinating. Can you talk a little bit about your concerns about that decision and how you think it’ll make this political campaign finance system even worse?

David Sirota:

So Citizens United mostly dealt with so-called outside Super PAC spending. The idea was that these Super PACs, which are backing specific candidates, because they are supposedly independent from the candidates, they can’t be regulated because they have free speech rights, they have First Amendment rights. That ruling, now I say all this understanding and implying that those Super PACs aren’t in practice really very independent from those candidates, right? It’s almost like a fallacy, but the Supreme Court’s argument was they’re independent, so they can’t be corrupting, and so their First Amendment rights suspend must be protected. What Citizens United left in place though was the government’s interest in preventing straight up quid pro quo corruption means that campaign contribution limits directly to candidates can still be maintained because you can’t argue that a donation directly to a candidate cannot be corrosive from a corruption standpoint, cannot be a vehicle of quid pro quo corruption.

So even in the post Citizens United era, campaign contribution limits directly to candidates have been maintained. Well, along comes this case and what this case sought to do, a case spearheaded by JD Vance, we call it Citizens United 2.0. It

Was designed to say that there was a law in place to preserve those campaigns contribution limits to say, listen, you can’t route your campaign contributions through a party to get around the campaign contribution limits to a candidate, right? You need to make sure that if a donor wants to give a candidate six figures worth of money way above the campaign contribution limit, they can’t just be able to give it to their party and know that their party’s going to coordinate as if they were the candidate with the candidate to spend the money. So the Republicans led by JD Vance went into court to say that law should be taken away. And so the Supreme Court agrees. And so now what we have, we have a much larger conduit through which big donors can now give much larger amounts of money to political parties and the political parties can spend in coordination with those candidates.

So what that does in practice, it means that the original campaign contribution limits that were designed to prevent corruption, they were just circumvented. They were just significantly weakened and widened. A much larger amount of money can now be funneled directly to candidates.

Taya Graham:

I was just wondering if you could make the public understand just one thing about corruption that normally our legal systems obscure or political systems obscure or the oligarchs are actively working to obscure, what would it be? What would you want voters to understand and know?

David Sirota:

I’d want voters to understand and know that there’s a direct connection between the policies that are harming them and the corruption that’s taking place. That when they’re paying a higher prices for a medicine, a medicine developed already at US taxpayer expense, most major medicines are originally developed, we’ve already paid for them as taxpayers. The average person should know that the reason that they are now, when they need that medicine for some illness or the like, the reason they’re paying the world’s highest prices for that medicine is because the pharmaceutical industry gave a lot of money to politicians to rescind the rule that said if a drug is developed at taxpayer expense, it has to be sold to taxpayers on the market at a fair price. That rule was removed because the pharmaceutical industry gave a lot of money to politicians to get them to remove it.

I could go on and on and on, but I guess what I’m getting at is that every policy that is responsible for the affordability crisis in the United States can be traced back to a policy written and bought by big money. That corruption is not some esoteric abstract issue. Corruption is why the working class and middle class of this country is being immiserated.

Stephen Janis:

David, before we let you go, I’ve been wanting to ask you this question. If Bernie Sanders wins in 2016 or in 2020, would we even be talking about Donald Trump? I mean, if the Democrats let Bernie Sanders win rightfully those primaries, do you think we’d ever even be having. Would he have beaten Donald Trump either way?

Taya Graham:

Ooh, that’s

David Sirota:

Interesting. It’s hard to run that counterfactual. I mean, I know one of Donald Trump’s pollsters said after 2016 they though Bernie Sanders might’ve beaten Donald Trump, would’ve been a stronger candidate against Donald Trump. It’s hard to know, but I take it back a little farther. I think the more interesting. The question that haunts me, and I think should haunt us all,

Is whether there would’ve been a Donald Trump phenomenon had Obama and the Democrats when they had a super majority or a near super majority, had they really genuinely delivered a new, new deal as was rhetorically promised in 2008. I think a lot about in 1938, FDR gave this speech, it was about democracy and he had said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Democracy did not go away in other countries.” He’s looking out at Europe and the like. He said it did not go away in other countries because people there didn’t like freedom, didn’t like democracy. Democracy went away because people saw a dysfunctional government and they ultimately decided to vote to get something to eat. The idea being that the New Deal actually significantly delivering in a real way for the working class, FDR understood it to be an anti-fascist program, a way to prevent the rise of fascism in the United States.

The idea that if you raise people’s hopes and you don’t deliver for them, you will sow a level of disillusionment that will be channeled by the right. So I think a lot about those two years, certainly those first two years in the Obama administration, that

Had the administration used its political capital to serious Deliver for the working class rather than bailing out bankers who were foreclosing on 10 million people, rather than ruling out single payer healthcare and getting rid of the public option and instead passing a kind of heritage foundation version of healthcare reform. Granted, better than the healthcare system before it, but not a full delivery on the promise. Had the Obama administration used that political capital and the Democratic Party used its political capital to really deliver, would there have been a Donald Trump? Now that is a question I don’t know the answer to. Maybe there still would’ve been, but I do know this. 200 plus counties voted twice for Barack Obama and then voted for Donald Trump. So I think when you look at that, it’s hard to say, “Well, Trump only got elected because of racism.” I think you have to be honest and look deeper and say people were extremely disillusioned.

The Democrats, yes, they chose to put up in 2016 a nominee who seemed like an avatar of the kind of problems that people were disillusioned with. And people voted for the political version of the Joker. They voted for Donald Trump to just blow up the system. I’m not saying I think that was a good thing at all, obviously, but I think that is what happens. And what I worry about is looking ahead to the next set of elections. If a Democratic president is elected in 2028, making big, bold promises and does not deliver, do we relive that cycle again? And is the next Joker who gets elected at the end of that disillusioning cycle, is that somebody who’s smarter, shrewder, and even more dangerous than Donald

Stephen Janis:

Trump?

David Sirota:

That’s what haunts me.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, even now it doesn’t seem like the Democrats are making a great case for a new new deal that we can see on Capitol Hill.

David Sirota:

Not yet. I mean, listen, listen, I’m not apologizing for the Democrats.

Stephen Janis:

Understood.

David Sirota:

I think their argument in this election is put us into power so we can at least be a check on the last two years of Donald Trump. I think that’s actually a fair argument. I think what everyone should be watching for is in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, who is proposing what? Who looks like and who can we detect is really serious about delivering in a real way? Because if whoever gets the nomination and if they win the election, if they do not deliver, we are going to live through this cycle again and it will be even worse.

Taya Graham:

David, what you said was absolutely amazing and that’s what should be keeping the consultant class awake at night despite their generational wealth stuffed in their pillows and mattresses.

David Sirota:

Absolutely amazing. I mean, you’d hope. And look, to be clear, I’m heartened by some of the elections happening right now. We are finally at a point where it seems like Democratic voters are not only angry at what’s going on in the country, but disillusioned with their own party’s leadership. And I think that’s actually a moment of opportunity to actually fundamentally change that party, to fundamentally make it into a vehicle that actually is serious about delivering. But to be clear, the corporate faction of that party is not going to give up power without a big fight. So I don’t think there’s been some encouraging elections, but I don’t think it’s an inevitability that this all goes in a sort of positive constructive direction. There is a lot of power and money that is trying to stop that from happening.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. David, we don’t want to keep you too long. We promise to respect your time, but I have to say this has been an incredible conversation. We are so lucky to have an investigative journalist like you watching the machinations of power and the threat that it poses to our democracy. We have to thank you so much for your time and we really hope that we’ll speak to you again in the future.

David Sirota:

Anytime. Thank you so much for having me.

Taya Graham:

We really appreciate you so much. Thank you. Okay, Steven, before I do my final rant or analysis, do you have any thoughts about ourdiscusion you

Stephen Janis:

Want

Taya Graham:

To share? Absolutely. I bet.

Stephen Janis:

Okay. Tell you, I was really struck by the idea that democracy has to deliver to survive. I mean, that’s a really important concept. We talked about this with Dr. Richard Wolf, who told us in terms of the Cold War, there was a concerted effort to make people’s lives better because otherwise democracy would not survive. And I think that is a critical takeaway from what we see covering Capitol Hill where there’s just no attention to the immediate needs. We watched while the Democrats were Republicans, and I don’t blame the Democrats for this, where the Republicans couldn’t even pass ACA subsidies so that people could keep their healthcare. If democracy is going to survive, then this political system has to freaking deliver like now, and people have to make promises and keep them. And it just really struck me that democracy in this age of inequality is not delivering for the people it’s supposed to serve.

And if it doesn’t, that’s why it’s going to collapse. Not because Donald Trump is an idiot or we hate him or whatever, not because of those things and not even because of MAGA, because overall the system doesn’t deliver. And I hope that who’s ever going to try to get elected in 2028 is listening to that important point. You got to deliver real benefits to the people who live in this country.

Taya Graham:

You know what’s crazy, Steven? What you just said actually almost sounds like a foreign concept that a politician makes a promise and is supposed to deliver on said promise. Right. I agree. That sounds groundbreaking for some reason.

Stephen Janis:

It really does. Sounds revolutionary.

Taya Graham:

So if there is one takeaway from David’s insight to how our political system works and doesn’t, it has to be the role of fear and making us believe change is simply impossible. I mean, the whole moderation fallacy he discussed with us is based upon the idea that fear is more important than any idea or change or simply transforming a system that does not serve us the people. Taking risks, believing something is possible and embracing change is just foolish, that new ideas, new candidates and new voters should be avoided all because a party establishment fears it will lose power. And that’s where I think the establishment Democrats and Trump intersect because in a sense, President Trump is the perfect foil for a party seeking to maintain the status quo. He’s the perfect instrument of fear. We are told the only way to rid ourselves of him is to stick with the establishment that lost to him twice.

Yes, that’s right. Remember, they actually already lost twice. That’s why when you turn on the mainstream media, you hear a chorus of highly paid anchors and apparently very rich pundits having the same circular conversation. It goes something like this. Will the success of democratic socialists hurt the party’s chances in November? Will the historic wins of popular candidates with new ideas keep the establishment dems from taking their rightful place in the chronicles of power come the midterms? But here is what you don’t hear. And Steven, please correct me if I’m wrong.

Stephen Janis:

I will.

Taya Graham:

What you don’t hear is a question and it’s a simple one. It’s actually just a one word question. Why? Why do you think voters want change? Why did so many young people show up at the polls when socialists are on the ballot? Why were their candidates funded by APAC and other Super PACs unpopular? And in many cases, they just outright lost. And what? I know this is really crazy. What do the voters actually want? Why have they rejected the status quo? Why have they set aside fear for something different? And why aren’t they buying the consultant class talking points that have been shoved down their throats for decades while wealth inequality flourishes and they just can’t get ahead? Why? It’s a much better question than trying to characterize every socialist Democrat as a burden. Maybe, just maybe legacy media. That’s the question you should be asking in your multimillion dollar studios with ultra rich consultants trading barbs as if there’s some sort of substantive difference between a high price democratic operative and an overpaid Republican pundit.

Perhaps you should try to understand what motivates people to support candidates your infrastructure of manufactured consent has rejected. You should ask, be curious, be interested in the people who’ve expressed dissatisfaction with the state of America today. They’re actually important. They’re just as important as the Trump voters you fetishized and chased down. Really, they’re not as irrational as you often characterize them. They’re not monolithic or unreasonable or even unreachable. Stephen and I spoke to them during Mondami’s campaign and they were more than happy to share their thoughts. Legacy media, please try listening, try understanding, try empathy. You might learn something. You might learn that while our concerns for our hyper expensive healthcare system tops poll after poll, you never talk about it. You might learn that while the earth is consumed by a historic rise in heat, you talk about wildfires, but not the policies and oil subsidies that fuel them.

Well, for those of you out there watching, I want you to know that here on our show, we’re going to try to do the opposite. We are going to listen and we’re going to learn and we promise to keep doing so in order to bring you the truth, not the truth of the pundits, not the truth of corporate media, but the only truth that matters. And that is the truth that belongs to and is spoken by we, the people. My name is Taya Graham, along with my reporting partner, Stephen Janis. Thank you so much for joining us on the Inequality Watch. And as always, we are reporting for you.