Well, supposedly I'm subscribed and I didn't get an email from them today.
Also, I understand why Monday night and Tuesday podcast downloads were
disrupted, but what was the excuse for today? I got 2 from the Real News and 1
from Democracy Now and none of the others that usualy appear on Wednesday.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2017 3:17 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: from, the Real News: A Small City's Big Lessons
About Progressive Organizing
Miriam,
As per your suggestion, I subscribed to the Real News Network.
Carl
On 7/5/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Interesting, I just listened to this as a podcast. Where did you get
the text?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, July 05, 2017 12:36 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] from, the Real News: A Small City's Big
Lessons About Progressive Organizing
A Small City's Big Lessons About Progressive Organizing AARON MATÉ:
It's The Real News. I'm Aaron Maté. Richmond, California, is home to
one of the largest oil refineries on the West Coast and also a
working-class community that has seen many struggles. Chevron, the
city's largest employer, has been responsible for hundreds of
industrial accidents in the area, including major fires, spills,
explosions, and air contamination. At the same time, for decades, it's
maintained a controlling influence over the city's electoral politics.
However, in recent years, the community at Richmond has fought back,
organizing to raise the local minimum wage and demand fair taxation
from Big Oil.This fight is chronicled in the new book, Refinery
Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. Its
author is Steve Early, who, for the past 45 years, has been an
organizer, lawyer, and labor activist. I recently sat down with Steve
Early in our Baltimore studio. Steve, hello.STEVE
EARLY: Thanks for having me on the show. AARON MATÉ: Thanks for being here.
Tell us about Richmond.STEVE EARLY: Richmond, California, is an
industrial city, 80% non-white, largely poor and working class. It's
located in the East Bay, up the coast from the better-known Oakland and
Berkeley.
For the last
century its largest employer, its biggest taxpayer, its dominant
political influencer has been the oil company known today as Chevron.
It's long been a
city shaped by Big Oil's pollution of the air, the water, and local
politics.AARON MATÉ: The central focus of your book is the community's
fight against Chevron and their presence in the town. Can you break
that down for us?STEVE EARLY: Over the last 10 to 15 years we've seen
the emergence of a broad-based, working-class oriented, multiracial
progressive movement in Richmond that has challenged Chevron's
long-time dominance over municipal affairs. Since 2004, this group,
the Richmond progressive Alliance, has won
10 out of 16 races for city council or mayor, currently has a
progressive super majority on the city council, and for eight years
actually made Richmond the largest city in the country with a green
mayor. We've had a tremendous breakthrough for Bernie Sanders-style
progressives at the local level, implementing a far-reaching program
of municipal reform in a very unlikely place for that, given its
history of Big Oil domination. AARON
MATÉ: Well, before we get into the broad reforms, let's get into the
Chevron fight more. When you say that Chevron has dominated municipal
affairs, what do you mean by that?STEVE EARLY: Well, when you have one
big major employer, they tend to have a lot of influence on local politics.
Chevron opened the refinery in Richmond in 1905. The city grew up around it.
It had other manufacturing operations, the Kaiser Shipyard during
World War II. It has a big railroad. It has a port, but Big Oil has
long been the biggest employer, the biggest taxpayer, the biggest
manipulator of local politics.
Only the last 10 or 15 years has a coalition of community and labor
groups and environmentalists come together and successfully contested
its influence and its use of big money in local politics and run
people for city government who tried to hold the company accountable
as opposed to doing its business for it. AARON MATÉ: Explain how that
fight played out. Were these progressive candidates running against
politicians who were backed heavily by Chevron?STEVE
EARLY: Chevron has been part of a larger ruling, conservative,
establishment group that included the Chamber of Commerce, the
Manufacturers' Association, leading developers, and, sadly,
conservative building trades' unions and the police and the
firefighters' unions. That's essentially been their coalition, and
until 10 or 15 years ago, they were were able to control the mayor's
office, the city council, the affairs of the city. The emergence of
progressives has changed the political landscape. Chevron has been
forced to pay more of its fair share of taxes. We have been able to
enact rent control in Richmond, a major progressive reform benefiting
thousands of low-income black and Latino tenants. Progressives have
been able to enact major reform at the police department, raise the
minimum wage, declare Richmond to be a sanctuary city, and take other
initiatives at the local level to address the pressing problem of
global warming. AARON MATÉ: There was a key election in 2014, and it's
said that Chevron spent more than $3 million on that race, more, I
believe, than they spent on congressional races. STEVE EARLY: It was
pretty extraordinary. Richmond has a population of about 110,000, an
active electorate of 20 to
30,000 people. In 2014, Big Oil and its allies spent over $3 million
trying to elect a slate of conservative candidates for mayor and city
council and trying to smear and defeat our progressive slate, and the
company failed. It was a very rare example of people power overcoming
big money in local politics, and it was a testament to the work that
Richmond progressives have done building a strong grassroots movement,
a volunteer army of canvassers who go door-to-door, talk to their
neighbors, get out the vote and refuse to take corporate contributions
themselves.All of our progressive candidates in Richmond are corporate-free.
They're up against Corporate Democrats who have steadily been losing
ground because they won't support rent control, they won't support an
increase in the minimum wage, they won't force Chevron to be
accountable, and they don’t want to be a part of the serious effort to
make the city cleaner and greener and healthier and more equitable for
all its citizens.AARON MATÉ: A lot of parallels there to the national
struggle right now for the soul of the Democratic Party, but before we
get into that, let's talk more about the Richmond Progressive Alliance
who you mention here, how they came together, who they are.
STEVE EARLY: Well, we all have been frustrated, I think, in various
ways by the fragmentation of the US Left, the tendency of people to go
off in different direction with a kind of single-issue focus. One of
the early triumphs of the Progressive Alliance when it came together
was getting people concerned about diverse issues, to work together
around a common agenda for municipal reform. You had people 15 years
ago in Richmond who wanted to deal with the problem of police
brutality, who even then were concerned about housing affordability,
wanted to raise the minimum wage, and improve local labor standards,
wanted to clean up the environment, wanted to get Chevron to pay more
in property taxes, but they were all kind of working in separate silos.
The genius of the
Progressive Alliance was getting them to come together, adopt a common
platform, start to run candidates, and candidates who would remain
accountable to the constituencies that elected them, candidates who
would use their position as mayor or city council member to help
mobilize the community to counter the enormous political influence of
Chevron and other special interest groups in the community. The
Richmond Progressive Alliance is an unusual hybrid organization. It
has dues-paying members. It has some labor and community
organizational partners. It doesn’t just pop up every two or four
years running candidates. It organizes year round around a wide range
of really compelling community issues.AARON MATÉ: That’s interesting,
dues-paying members, modeled on a labor union.STEVE EARLY: Very much
so or a more traditional European-style political party. Our political
parties are pretty hollow structures. They exist mainly as banners for
people to wave while they raise millions of dollars for their own
individual entrepreneurial campaigns as candidates. The RPA model is
completely different. Our candidates are not endorsed.
They're a product of the progressive movement. They are leaders in the
Progressive Alliance.
They come out of the movements they represent, and, therefore, they
tend to be much more responsive to the people that elected them. We
have seen many times people endorsed by labor or healthcare reform or
community or immigrant advocate groups get into elected office and
disappoint in various ways. One of the real challenges is, how do you
hold progressive elected officials accountable to the agenda they
campaigned on? I think the Richmond track record has been pretty good in that
regard over the last 15 years.
AARON
MATÉ: Speaking of challenges, I want to talk a bit more about this
coalition, this progressive coalition that was assembled. One of the
critiques of the Bernie Sanders campaign, especially in the early
stages of the primaries, was that it didn’t do enough to attract
African-American voters. Is Richmond a case where that divide between
progressive groups and African-American voters, to the extent that
that divide exists, was overcome?STEVE EARLY: It has been, but it's
been very difficult. This is a majority minority community, 80%
non-white, 40% Latino, 30% black, 10% Asian, but Big Oil has often had
a lock on the African-American opinion-shapers and leaders, black
churches. The NAACP is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chevron. The
company in its role as a major philanthropist supports everything from
children's breakfast programs to Black History Month.
Chevron forged a strong alliance between conservative,
corporate-oriented African-American Democrats. The Progressive
Alliance only became successful in challenging that connection to the
black community when it was able to develop younger black and Latino
leaders who refused to take corporate money and were willing to take
Big Oil on. Last fall, one of the Progressive Alliance candidates who
won was a 26-year-old tenant organizer, Melvin Willis, Bernie
Sanders-inspired, first-time candidate for city council. He came first
in a field of nine up against seven Corporate Democrats, none of whom
supported rent control. Melvin was the leading proponent of rent
control in Richmond. Rent control was on the ballot. It was adopted by
a two-to-one margin. He came in 2000 votes ahead of a 40-year
African-American Chevron-backed council incumbent. The times are
changing in Richmond, but it's only because a younger generation of
black, Latino, and Asian activists from working-class backgrounds have
come to the fore and are willing to challenge the relationships
between elders in their communities and the major corporate power in
the community. AARON MATÉ: Since you mentioned rent control, let's
talk about housing. It's been a big issue in Richmond, and activists there
have used a variety of tools to advance a more progressive agenda, including
eminent domain.STEVE EARLY:
Well, during the foreclosure crisis of 2007, 2008, Richmond, like many
cities, had lots of struggling low-income homeowners losing their
homes. The city council at the time, when there was not a progressive
majority, came up with the idea of using the threat of eminent domain
to block foreclosures, which, of course, spread blight in communities
as people were forced to abandon their homes. This was a brave
initiative. It was cutting-edge, but the big banks, the real estate industry
counter-attacked very aggressively.
No other community would join the effort. We had enough votes on the
city council then to adopt the idea in principle, but you needed more
votes to actually implement it. In the course of the canvassing and
the campaigning that was done, people discovered that rent control was
really what was needed. You have thousands of tenants in Richmond
facing huge rent increases as people are displaced from San Francisco
and Berkeley and Oakland. They move into Richmond. The landlords raise
the rent and kick tenants out. Last fall, this measure that was passed
by a two-to-one vote rolled rents back to the level of a year before,
holds landlords to future rent increases tied to the overall increase
in the Consumer Price Index. They now cannot evict tenants unless
there is just cause, and we have a rent board that’s going to
adjudicate landlord-tenant disputes. First city in California to be
able to do this in 30 years. It only covers 40% of the tenants because
of restrictions imposed by the state legislature, but it's a
tremendous breakthrough, a real economic gain, and, again, a model for what
people can do in states where it is possible at the municipal level to
regulate rents.
AARON MATÉ: Okay, keeping this thread going in terms of the city
providing a model for what people can do, let's talk about
undocumented immigration, a big issue, and the city took steps to
protect its undocumented residents.STEVE EARLY: When Gayle McLaughlin, a
leader-AARON MATÉ:
That was the mayor-STEVE
EARLY: ... of the Progressive Alliance ... yeah ... was first elected
mayor in 2006, she declared Richmond to be a sanctuary city. Many
other cities are doing that now. Richmond was among those leading the
pack, and this was very much tied into the effort launched around the
same time to reform the police department.A new police chief was
brought in, a fellow named Chris Magnus, one of the leading police
reformers in the country. He understood right away in a community like
this with thousands of undocumented immigrant residents that you could
not rebuild relationships within the police department and the
community if the police were seen as acting as an arm of any kind of
federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants. The city, sanctuary
city, has been recently reiterated by our current mayor and the model
of sanctuary city activity really has spread quite widely in the Trump
era, but Richmond took the stand back in the George Bush era.AARON
MATÉ: Let me read to you from your book, "If urban political
insurgencies are going to succeed in more places, they will need
models for civil engagement like Richmond provides. Our city's
emergency response lesson is this. When we take shelter in place
together, we can change our communities for the better. If we remain
frozen in a state of individual fear, apathy, alienation, or
powerlessness, the world around us remains the same until the next
warning siren sounds and all the ones after that, until there are too
many fires to put out and not enough time left to reverse the damage
they’ve done." STEVE
EARLY: Well, I should probably explain what shelter in place is.
That’s a refinery town emergency protocol that I wasn’t too familiar
with until moving to Richmond five years ago and becoming a neighbor
of Chevron. When there's a major refinery fire or explosion, like we
had five years ago this August that sent 15,000 refinery neighbors
scrambling for medical assistance at local hospital emergency rooms
and clinics, we are told to shelter in place, which means you go into
your house, you tape the windows and doors shut, you turn off the air
conditioner, you kind of hope for the best. That really is, I think, a
symbol of a fearful, isolated individual kind of situation. Richmond
provides a good example of people leaving their homes, coming
together, organizing in public spaces, and taking on the causes of
problems like the ones created by Big Oil in our community and
throughout the country and the world. I know it's counterintuitive when you
have global problems. Why is going local the best way to address them?
Well, actually,
you can have more of an impact in your own community, your own
neighborhood, working in a city of human scale of 100,000 like
Richmond.AARON MATÉ: Right, but in terms of that scale being
applicable to bigger cities, there are limitations, especially the
bigger a city gets, to redoing the local model, say, in a place like
Baltimore or New York. Right?STEVE EARLY: Very definitely, but some of
the programs that Richmond has been able to pioneer as an aspiring
laboratory for municipal public policy innovation are actually now
being copied in cities like Baltimore and Oakland. One of our programs
is the Office of Neighborhood Safety, an adjunct to the reformed police
department.
Richmond still has a very big problem with gun activity and gang
conflict and drug trafficking. It leads to 20 or 30 homicides a year,
mainly involving young people of color between the ages of 15 and
30.The Office of Neighborhood Safety in Richmond hires formerly
incarcerated, former gang members to go out, work as peacemakers, try to
de-escalate gang disputes.
They have a peacemaker fellowship program. They’ve recruited scores of
young gang members to be part of it. They get a stipend. They get job
training and counseling. They get support for taking a different path
in life. It's a program that’s now being reproduced in many other
larger cities that have seen the failures of a military-style model of
policing.Aggressive police tactics have not led to reductions in
homicides and gang activity and street crime, and so the Richmond
model of the police relating differently to the community and
civilians playing an increased role in public safety, very key element
of civilian oversight of the police department, civilian activity in
neighborhoods, and this Office of Neighborhood Safety. It's a pretty powerful
package for real change in the area of public safety. AARON MATÉ:
For those, though, who might look at Richmond and say, "Okay, well
look, it's easy for this California town to enact all these
progressive measures, but it's just not possible for us to do here in our,
say, Midwestern town.
Not every town has a police chief like the one in Richmond who held up
a Black Lives Matter sign at a rally." What do you say to them?
STEVE EARLY: Well, we would never have had Chris Magnus as our police
chief in Richmond if we hadn’t started to make some progress done 12
years ago in electing more progressives to the city council, electing
a green mayor. They were the folks who hired a new city manager, hired
a new police chief. Chris Magnus is one of the few gay police chiefs
in the country. He came from Fargo, North Dakota, one of the whitest
and safest communities in the country. A lot of people didn’t want to
hire him because they didn’t think, you know, he would fit in in a
diverse urban environment like Richmond, but sometimes you need an
outsider, a change-maker, someone willing to really upend an
institution to bring about real change in a city department as
difficult to reform as the police department. I think there's elements
of the Richmond model that are reproducible in other parts of the country and
in cities both larger and smaller.
AARON MATÉ: Finally, Steve, you’ve been involved in the labor movement
for many years, and you saw how this movement in Richmond materialized
and stayed together, but, of course, organizing is tough and it's hard
to maintain coalitions. I'm wondering if you could reflect on your
observations about the challenges of keeping coalitions together and
organizing in general in the society that we live in. STEVE EARLY:
Well, I think the reason the Progressive Alliance has been distinctive
to the extent that it has tried to rely on membership dues, membership
contributions, small donor fundraising for its candidates rather than
being part of what people call the non-profit industrial complex. It
does not take social change foundation money. It's not looking for big
sugar daddies. It's not top heavy with paid staff. That’s a hard path
to take, a largely volunteer, member-driven organization, and it's a
real testament to people's staying power in Richmond that they’ve been
able to sustain it.One thing that’s helped in the last couple of
years, conscious effort by the founding fathers and mothers to step
back and create space for a younger generation of black and Latino activists,
Asian, young people, to take leadership roles.
The Steering Committee of the RPA elected every year by the members is
now predominantly people of color, predominantly female, and much
younger than in the past. We have too many institutions on the Left,
from unions to community organizations, to churches, where older
people don’t want to get out of the way and let younger people take
leadership roles. I think that’s an inspiring part of the story as
well.That’s why we have now viable candidates running for city council
in their 20s or 30s with a strong movement behind them.
You know, as recently
as 10, 15, 20 years ago, they would have been dismissed as marginal,
and their chances of success would have been very minimal. AARON MATÉ:
Since this
is a progressive town with progressive elected officials, can we talk
a bit about the internal struggle right now in the Democratic Party?
Bernie Sanders
has an interesting history with your town. He came there during the
Chevron fight and said that it was actually ground zero against Citizens
United.
STEVE
EARLY: Yeah, in 2014, when our green mayor was up for reelection as a
member of the council and she was running on a slate with two other
progressives and Chevron spent more than $3 million trying to defeat
them, unsuccessfully, it really was an example of how the Supreme
Court decision in Citizens United has unleashed these independent
expenditures committee.
You or I in Richmond are limited to giving any single candidate $2500.00.
Chevron set up a committee that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
on its favorite candidates, supposedly without any coordination with
their campaigns and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to smear
and defeat progressive candidates who were critical of its corporate
behavior. So I think the only way we can counter that kind of big
money in politics, as Bernie has argued, is to build stronger
grassroots movements. In Richmond, we also have a modest system of
public matching funds. So if you have the ability, as the Progressive
Alliance does, to raise money from small donors Bernie Sanders style, you get
city matching funds.
Other cities have adopted that, New York, Portland, Oregon. I think
that’s a necessary election reform to kind of level the playing field
when you're up against big corporate spenders on behalf of your
opposition. The lesson of
2014 was that if you build a strong base, if you have a volunteer
army, if you have candidates who are corporate-free and known for that
and respected for that, they can overcome the smears and the negative
ads and the glossy mailers and the billboards and win, even though
they're outspent 30 to 1.AARON
MATÉ: Lessons that will be important as we head into 2018 and
2020.STEVE
EARLY:
Very definitely. You know, the other thing that we've tried to do in
connection with Bernie, the Progressive Alliance is now part of the
Our Revolution network that grew out of Bernie's campaign. There's
other good groups doing this kind of work or supporting it, the
Working Families Party, People's Action.
Democratic Socialists of America is now encouraging its members to run
for municipal office. Socialist Alternative, of course, in Seattle, a
great city council member, Kshama Sawant. There's lots of networks to
be part of to get started down this path, lots of good models in
cities of all sizes and, of course, the inspiration of the Sanders
campaign.AARON MATÉ: And Richmond.
STEVE EARLY: And Richmond.AARON MATÉ: I want to thank my guest, Steve
Early, author of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking
of an American City. Steve, thank you.STEVE EARLY: Thank you.AARON
MATÉ: And thank you for joining us on The Real News.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------