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.
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