RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 360 Larry Cohen on No Kings and Beyond: Tactics, Strategy, and Goals
Episode 360 of RevolutionZ has Larry Cohen, former president of the 600,000 strong Communication Workers of America and current board chair of Our Revolution who has spent five decades organizing workers and pushing democratic reforms inside and outside the Democratic Party to assess No Kings and explore possible future directions for it and of resistance to Trump's fascist agenda. Larry emphasizes the need to organize across differences, to change the rules that block action, and to deliver material wins that build trust.
He reveals how the No Kings mobilization surged and what it will take to convert mass turnout into durable power. He names the real opponent—the oligarchy that spans billionaires, technocrats, and captured politicians—and shows how Senate procedures, a monarchic judiciary, and dark money in primaries stop popular policies from getting passed. Instead of living forever on defense, he talks offense: defund the oligarchs, fund the people. Cut bloated military spending, expand early childhood education, long-term care, and health coverage. Enforce bargaining rights so Starbucks and Amazon can’t stall contracts for years. Take concrete steps toward Medicare for All by lowering eligibility and slashing administrative waste.
But the discussion also addresses the prospects and methods of immediate organizing and protest. Youth, minority, and labor participation. A weekday No Kings. A trajectory from five-minute stoppages to national strikes. Campus feeder marches into No Kings outpourings. All to evidence and rebuild the muscle of collective action.
Larry explains from his own experiences at every level from precincts and union struggles to revealing conversations with Barack Obama the horrid flaws and important potentials of electoral activism. He describes how to engage without contempt union members who voted for Trump by focusing on efficacy and tangible gains. He discusses the difference between Trump getting many (horrible) things done. Action. And Democrats getting little to nothing done. Abdication. He points to Obama squandering electoral support and a supportive Senate and House with do-nothingism. And he digs into party reform: blocking dark and corporate money from primaries, enforcing endorsements of primary winners, building coalitions with unaffiliated voters where Democrats can’t win and more. Larry urges that the goal ishould be better delivery not better messaging. So this episode is about moving from protest to power.
What weekday action by No Kings would you like to join next, rally, march, civil disobedience, or what?
Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. Our guest this time is Larry Cohn. Larry served as president of the 600,000-member Communication Workers of America from 2005 to 2015, and he has spent nearly all his adult life as a member, organizer, and officer. He is now board chair of our Revolution, the successor organization of Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. He has also been a member of the Democratic National Committee since 2005 and was vice chair of the Unity Reform Commission, which drafted proposals adopted by the full DNC to democratize the party and the presidential nominating process. He frequently writes on worker rights, politics, and democracy for various publications. So, Larry, welcome to Revolution Z. Great to be with you. I feel like there are a very wide array of things I would love to ask you about. But how about if we start with the No Kings demonstrations that occurred just a few days earlier than we're recording this on October 23rd? So how do you think October 18th happened? To what extent did it mobilize and gather people who were already eager to resist Trump by making a call that indicated the time and place of events that the people then eagerly joined? And to what extent did it reach out to attract new people by addressing their prior doubts and or increasing their desire and hope? Put differently, participation is reported to have risen by two million from the earlier round. How did that happen?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I think uh in part it happened because of the autocracy, the oligarchy as we call it, uh gaining steam for the last six months since uh round one of No Kings. Uh it also happened through organizing. I think you have a broad array of organizations with a wide variety of uh of strategies that came together last Saturday and uh and and last June. So I think that's a good thing. Uh, to fight fascism, you need a broad front. At the same time, to actually win and change the country, which you know we've spent our lifetimes on. Uh, you need a strategy for change, not just for resistance.
SPEAKER_00:And I wonder about three particular constituencies, actually, in light of what you just said: young people, minorities, and working people. I'm not sure their participation, but I have a feeling, mainly anecdotal, honestly, that young people in particular are a good deal less represented than their presence in the past would predict. How do you see it? If it is true, what might be done about it?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I I was out in Western Maryland with over a thousand people showing up in a Trump county. And, you know, a good percentage were young. You can't go by that. That's one of you know 6,000 events that occurred Saturday. But uh, you know, my sense is that in terms of you know, working people and young people, I'm not as certain in terms of black Americans, uh there is a a huge pouring out. I mean, uh Zorn Man Mandani in New York is very much fueled by young people, whether they're black, brown, or white, whether they're college-educated working people or or not, um uh immigrants uh uh as well. But um, you know, I think pulling people together in America has always been the challenge. You know, my 50-some years in the resistance movement, uh, we get one group, we lose another group. Can we get everybody, you know, how are we mobilizing? What are the strategies? What are we fighting for? You know, it's a shit show in this country. So uh nothing's changed in that regard. You know, people like Bernie, AOC, Azoran, you know, are able to cut across a lot of that, not all of it. But, you know, that's a tall order in a country uh with a history like this one.
SPEAKER_00:Indeed. But looking forward, let's stick with use for a second. You probably remember, I remember, major demonstrations. What no kings have done is larger. So that's not the issue. But I remember campuses having feeder marches. So that, in other words, you had an outpouring from campus after campus uh that was organized. And the and the the students were, you know, on the move and would go to the big demonstration, but then they would also do their own work back on the campus. And I get the feeling that that hasn't happened yet. I have a feeling it's about to, but I think it hasn't happened yet. And I'm wondering if uh, you know, you're probably more in touch with what's going on across the country than I am, and with whether you see that or not.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, if you're alluding to late 60s, early 70s, there's no question that high school and college campuses were much more alive then. I grew up in in North Philadelphia, and you know, as a high school kid, and and right after was I was heavily involved organizing against Frank Rizzo, who was the police commissioner, a notorious racist, openly racist, and then um became the leader of the Democratic Party and elected twice as mayor uh as a Democrat, even though he was an avowed racist. And yeah, on May 8th, 1970, I was uh a key leader in a in uh shutting down every high school and college campus in Philadelphia. There were five lines of march. We went to Independence Hall at 12 noon on a Friday and had over 100,000 people there. The attendance was reported in the Philadelphia Inquiry, the big daily paper, in the high schools at 10%. And those high schools were at least half black. So, you know, in that in that moment, um uh May 8th, 1970, it was the racism of Arizzo coming together with anti-war activity and more, really. And yes, that was those movements were led much greater than now by very young people, high school, uh, college-age uh people. And, you know, I I joke around a lot because, as you mentioned, I end up end up president of a huge labor union. I've spoken to giant rallies outside for 55 years now. And uh in many ways, that one, May 8, 1970, was the largest one that I organized. I was involved in the demonstration against Iraq speaking for CWA in in 2001. That's the biggest demonstration that I ever saw outside, especially where I was speaking, well over a million in New York City. But um, no, I think your point's right that the kind of systemic organizing among high school and college-age students uh that we saw then has not been replicated. Um and I'd have to think more about you know why.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a tough question, I think. You know, I've thought it has something to do with youth culture then, being relatively absent now, social media, phones, people feeling spied on. There's a lot of variables for sure, but it is it is an area in which things could could get still better in terms of the resistance. Yeah. And in that light, I wonder, even given No King's incredible virtues and achievements, which really are substantial, a lot of longtime leftists don't don't quite acknowledge that, but it's true. What, nonetheless, do you think might be done in future efforts, or what might future efforts need to accomplish to in fact do as they intend, stop fascism, and even beyond that uh to win ongoing positive games going into the future? I know it's a big question, but uh, you know, you've been around. Um so if you were sitting in a room, and actually I don't know, you may well be sitting in a room with uh people working on the next one, when should the next one be? And how often should they be? And what, if anything, should be changed going forward?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, again, great questions. I don't want to jump into answers uh that I'm not certain about. But um so on the one hand, I think resistance to you know the oligarchy, to fascism, to uh autocracy, whatever authoritarianism, lots of words for what we face here, you know, is very, very broad and uh, you know, not that deep in the in terms of, well, what is it that we are fighting? So, you know, in our revolution um and the Bernie world, you know, we're fighting the oligarchy, not just Trump. So, you know, we try to define it as the the unity, I hate to use the word unity for them, but the unity of the the billionaires, uh the technocrats, and and a billion is not even a lot to some of these people, but along with the uh with Trump and with the entirety of the Republican Party and a big chunk of the Democratic Party, because where does the funding come from most Democrats when they run for election? That's something else we can come back to that I work on. But um, I mean, cutting off that funding, at least in the primaries, that is not regulated by Citizens United. So if you're interested, we can come back to that. But, you know, when we talk about, I mean, the shirt that I wore Saturday, the our revolution shirt, defund the oligarchs, fund the people. And so what does that mean? It means, you know, where's our health care, uh, early childhood education, uh, long-term care, those things are missing from the richest country in the world. Missing or way too expensive or out of reach for you know giant chunks of the population. So obviously, you know, cut off the oligarchs, cut off the extra$150 billion that Trump put into military spending. He now rightfully calls it the Department of War. That's what it is. That's what it's been for my lifetime. Um, the only thing I might agree with him on. But that funding, as you well know, over a trillion dollars this year just for that military budget, that doesn't even include Homeland Security and many other aspects of the militarization of this country, could fund all the things that I mentioned. Even if you cut it in half, it could fund virtually all of those things. And you think about, and in terms of health care, if we had Medicare for all, you would cut the$4 trillion in healthcare spending, you know, by five, it's twice as much as any other country spends as a percentage of gross domestic product and uh worse results. Um so, you know, lots of easy answers here. The question is, how do we organize for that vision? And and as I used to say in CWA, um, not just defense, offense. If you wanted to uh, you know, go to a sports analogy, there's virtually no sport where you can play defense and change anything. Uh, the way I put it on Saturday was we're not just fighting against oligarchs, we're fighting for the people we love. And it's that spirit of the people we love when we talk about healthcare and education, um, workers' rights, which has been my lifetime. You know, we have the worst workers' rights um support in the world in terms of organizing and bargaining rights when people want to build a worker organization, a union, and bargain with their employer. We're at the bottom of every democracy by every measurement in terms of workers' rights. So, you know, for me, that's the people I love as much as my own children and grandchildren. So um uh, you know, how we how we cobble together enough of that to uh to keep not only the resistance movement going, but the movement for real change, you know, is uh I mean I just alluded to what I'm working on, but uh, you know, I think it's it's not articulated well. The the blocks to democracy, including workers' rights, but many other things, there's seven or eight big ones that I talk about, they're not faced by anybody in any other place that pretends to be a democracy, whether it's Argentina fighting their own version of fascism right now, starts out with a lot, uh uh a lot of those things are far advanced in Argentina, particularly workers' rights. The majority of the workers in Argentina have bargaining rights, and they fight back, not only at the bargaining table, but politically with general strikes and and politically um, you know, with their own political organizations. So uh, and that's only one example. Um, and they have uh a whole different way of bargaining that most of the world has called sectoral bargaining. You're not you're not bargaining part of one workplace at a time, like in the U.S., whole sectors bargain, and and the results go to everybody in that sector. Um, so uh again, I'm probably going too deep on that one subject. But um, I could go on and on. The role of the judiciary, the federal judiciary here is like a monarchy. It's another monarchy. Um, they're there forever, meaning they're a lifetime unless they resign or retire, as they put it, but they're there forever. Uh, as my friend Jeff Merkley, the senator in Oregon, who I would call, you know, right with Bernie, one of the best, um, says we have a judiciary that thinks it's another Congress. They legislate. And uh and we don't have a Congress because of the rules in the Senate that are that are absurd, that you need 60 votes to put a measure on the floor. We don't have a Congress that does anything to any extent. And, you know, we get all excited about, well, we have a Democratic majority in the Senate again, and that's another long shot right now. But when we do, we need to have a Democratic majority that's gonna get rid of, especially the initial cloture. It's not even filibuster, but and then regulate the filibuster so that majority is gonna rule. Um, we can go on and on with these things, amending the Constitution, worst of any democracy in the world, virtually impossible. Three-quarters of the states' legislatures, two-thirds of the Congress to pass an amendment. It goes on and on, you know, what we face, and as a result, it makes it harder to mobilize people in this country. I'm still thinking about your issue of the of the uh high school and college students and why they're not leading as they have at other times and in other countries.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, uh I want to hone in for a minute on one of the things that you said. I think it's gonna surprise you. Um it it resonated with something that I don't think I dreamt it. I think I saw an ad for Bernie during the campaign back in 2016, in which he was, you know, talking to the public, as he does, and in which he said, if we can get to the point where we care about our neighbor as much as we care about the person across town, we win. And I was sort of blown away by somebody on TV saying that. I am now even just, you know. And you just said essentially the same thing. That is, you said you cared about the people in your the workforce at like you did your your kids and your grandkids.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, and and you've been in it for 50 years. So that might be, you know, we constantly have our eyes on the demands or various factors. Not on that factor. And yet that factor might be really, really important. And another one that might be really important is some sense of of confidence, of efficacy, and some understanding of collectivity. So I have two questions. One, how has Trump convinced everybody that he's so damn strong? Because, okay, he's got the government, but he's not that strong if people just understood the idea of collectively opposing him. I couldn't understand why when Musk was firing everybody, they just didn't say no. We're not going. You know, we're sitting down. Or when Trump says to the university, play the game this way, the students just didn't shut it down and say no. Um and he wouldn't have been able to deal with that. Even the law firms. He couldn't have dealt with those big law firms if everybody just said no. Uh now, I know it's hard to get to that point. But isn't the real issue that we have not figuring out what's wrong and not figuring out even what demands to make? That part's easy. But figuring out how to sort of get that dynamic going. That's better. Do you think that or yeah?
SPEAKER_02:Well, I mean, first of all, you know, last Saturday was people saying no. I mean, that's that is what united the people, uh, whether they were in, you know, rural like me, rural demonstration or in a giant demonstration in, you know, Chicago or Philadelphia or or New York or Washington or Los Angeles, you know, where there were in every one of those more than 100,000 people. Um that is what unites them. It's the opposition to Trump, you know, the orange monster, and you know, there are caricatures of him everywhere. But I think, you know, uh part of the problem is that he doesn't just talk, he acts. And, you know, what I say to electeds that I talk to, uh, you know, Obama taught me at least one thing that I don't give a, I'll clean it up. I don't give a shit about your messaging. I I care about my great-grandmother. I grew up with five adults and me. I was the only kid initially, and my great-grandmother owned the house. Mary Francis was her name, and she'd say, Larry, everybody can talk here. I'll watch your feet, not your mouth. And I've repeated that, you know, for decades. Uh, you know, people more commonly say actions speak louder than your words. But, you know, we have a political system in this country where uh uh, and I'm speak about Democrats for a minute, and you know, there's many different versions of Democrats. There's 57 Democratic parties. Each state, each territory has one. There's a DNC where, as you mentioned, I've spent 20 years fighting for reform, and we're making some progress again there. But it should be about action, you know, not messaging. Not, you know, do I have the money to have the messaging that I want to have, and then I can win an election, and then if nothing changes, I'll get ready for my next election. Um, Obama had a landslide, and I think part of our problem now is his eight years. It wasn't just his landslide, it was the House and the Senate, 60 Democratic senators. That's out of reach. You know, again, we have limited time, but I could tell you, you know, as somebody who pays a lot of attention to that, in the next four decades, certainly the rest of my life, the 60 is out of reach. You know, even if we go to the broadest definition of electing, say, a John Asif in Georgia uh that next year that type, um, we're not getting back to 60. There's no path to 60. It was squandered. And Obama and his team, and I, you know, I more carefully than this, told him this the last time I met with him uh at the end of my second, whatever it was, fourth term as president of CWA, um, I said, you know, I still love you in a certain way. This is to him, but we didn't get anything done here. And now, on your way out the door, we have the Trans-Pacific Partnership that all again screw working class people. Because the reason for that meeting is why are you so agitated about that to me?
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:And um the but the point being that he and Axel Rod, who's been on, I guess, CNN ever since at more than a million dollars a year, his whole core group that came in with him, not even Aram Emanuel, who was his first chief of staff, but I'm talking about the core younger group at the time. Uh they all went off to a million dollar a year salary. And at the end of his presidency, he brought the 400 people who worked for him in the White House together and he said, We've been doing good for America, now we'll do well for ourselves. And he and his wife signed a hundred million dollar contract with Netflix to produce shows. They were good at messaging. You know, if I hear anybody else, and I've had this conversation with many of these people who, you know, center left, and even with Bernie, you know, Bernie's a great messenger. Bernie actually believes this stuff, though. He does care about his feet, not just his mouth. But he's not an organizer, and he doesn't work with the other ones who get elected. Now he works with AOC. But um, you know, to me, it's always an organizing challenge. You know, organizing at every level. And Democrats have failed miserably for the last 35 years when we elected Clinton for eight, Obama for eight, huge Democratic majorities, not now, we're in the minority in both, in all three. It should be, you know, what the F have you gotten done? And why not? And why do we have Trump now talking about cutting back pharmaceuticals and a bunch of Democrats agreeing with him? The prices, why wasn't that done at least? And and why did so-called Obamacare cave in not only to pharma, but to the insurance industry and to the hospital industry?
SPEAKER_00:What's your answer to that? That is to say, it's not as if it was impossible, right? No, it was very possible. Yeah, it was it was quite possible, and irrespective of anything larger than that one that one might want, why do you think that correct me if this is wrong? It's a slippery slope. That is to say, if the Democrats of the sort that we're talking about now do win things, it demonstrates to the public that things are possible. And the minute that you have some things, you rightly think about what's next, what more. And so the impediment isn't it's not that they're sadistic and you know they're withholding something modest that could be done, and it it's that they're afraid. They're they they put a lid on accomplishing things that they could accomplish and even enhance their own popularity and even enhance their own electoral prospects uh because they're afraid of where it leads. Is that plausible to you at all?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. But the caveat I would stick on that, the one thing I would change about that message, your message just now, is that especially in the Obama years when I was, you know, enough of a leader in America that I could see exactly what they were all doing. Right. And since then, um it's been there's been a sizable number of quote, people elected as Democrats. To me, it's you work inside and outside the party. That's the broader strategy. You can't just work inside. But but there's been a substantial number that were ready to fight for more. So if we took workers' rights or health care, we had an overwhelming majority in the House to do something real, much deeper on both. And and then you go to the Senate and we had a majority, but we didn't have a White House or a Senate leader or even 50 senators prepared to throw out Harry Reid and elect a different leader and work off of a majority. A simple majority can change by a parliamentary motion the rules, the procedure, I should say, of how the Senate operates. And again, I want to leave that go without diving into it, but but I could dive into it. The rules are what I've learned, sadly. Whether it's organizing rules, whether it's getting rid of superdelegates, which we finally did in in 2017 and 18 in the Democratic Party, my big issue now is getting the the corporate money and dark money out of the nominating process of the of the Democratic parties. We passed the resolution at the DNC to do that in 2028 for the presidential. We still have to implement it. That's a big step. But the resolution passed to do it. So too many people get elected as Democrats in the House, in the Senate, as president because of big money. And the big money that funds those Democrats, which often is Republican big money, by the way, in House districts where there's only going to be a Democrat elected, that's the majority of House districts that have a Democrat or a Republican for that matter. Corporate money, the billionaires know we got to determine, and you saw this in New York City, we've got to determine who the Democratic nominee is, or else we're likely to lose. That's what Zoran's primary victory should teach everybody. Cuomo came in with billionaire money and got and lost anyway, because it's a tight enough city that with 50,000 volunteers you can overcome that kind of messaging that flooded the airways. But you can't do it in most house districts. And so again, to go to the bigger point, the bigger point is that in the time that I've been most active, which is 2005 to the present, where I could see what's going on, you know, it's almost a privilege to be able to see what they're doing, all these people. Um there were there were a majority of Democrats in the House led by the Progressive Caucus. Progressive caucus leaders have changed from a Keith Ellison uh to Pramilla Jayapal. These are great people from my point of view, uh leading that caucus at different moments. Um Greg Cassar now, but Jayapal's still really leading a lot of it. Um they have our vision, these people, Keith and Pramilla and Greg. They have our vision in the House. Over on the Senate side, where you have Bernie and you and I would throw in uh Jeff Merkley, and they're a little bit different, but there's another 10 that are very similar. Um and then there's a majority of those Democrats. But the problem is you saw that majority vote with Bernie to cut off uh I'm gonna shortcut it, to cut off arms sales to Israel. There were two different resolutions, but that was at a critical moment. Now that was a majority of the 47. We need 50 to act. And we had 47, 48 ready to act on a key democracy bill, but we didn't have 50. This was when Biden was president, you know, just a few years ago, the democracy bill that would have done a lot of things. So you know, the the problem is that um going back to Obama, particularly in 2009, Rahm Emanuel said to corporate, not only corporate Democrats, but more importantly, corporate leaders don't worry about what Barack what the president is saying. We're not gonna change the rules, we're not gonna support changing the procedure. It's not really the rules, it's the procedure in the Senate. And so it doesn't matter what our messaging is, nothing's gonna change. And when it came to health care, I could talk about Employee Free Choice Act, workers' rights, where you know, I was right in the center of that fight. But when it came to health care, the Senate Finance Committee was led by Borcas from Montana, and it and also another member of it was Lincoln from Arkansas, and they gutted the House bill. Now, the House bill is not what I would have done, I would have done more. But that had public option in it, had a lot of price controls in it. And I'll still remember a voicemail I got from the president, Obama. I didn't pick up the phone, you never know who it is when he calls. And he doesn't, I don't think he cared if anybody picked up the phone. All he wanted to do was check the box. So I called him. Anyway, he calls, he leaves me a voicemail. Larry, it's Barack, the president. I know you don't like the Senate Finance Committee version on health care. That's all we can get. I hope you'll support it. And you know, it's it's details like that. And I could go on and on just about that one thing. What did we end up with in that bill versus what we should have had? There were more than 50 Democrats in the Senate that would have done the House bill. Is the House bill what I would have done? No, I would have done Medicare for All. You know, Bernie's core issue, one of his two or three core issues. But that House bill, we wouldn't be in the shit we're in now on healthcare. Because it had a public option in it. The public option could have mimicked Medicare uh and given people that choice state by state. So again, that's a lot of details, but out of those details comes what are the core problems that we face? Core problem that we face, obviously, Citizens United in 2010, that Supreme Court decision that in general elections money is speech and the billionaires can spend as much as they want. Billionaires, you know, you have Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, they'll spend hundreds of billions. Millions, sorry, because they get billions back.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I wonder if there's a difference between the way you're describing how various sectors of Democrats um have faced the situation and how Trump faces the situation. Yeah. You know, it's ironic, but Trump says, let's just change the procedures. Let's just change the rules. We just have to build everything all over again. We just have to do it right. Now, what he means by do it right is disgusting. But set that aside for a minute, for some reason he does have a different mindset than even somebody like you know Obama or whoever you want to talk about. I'm not even sure about Bernie has that much of a mindset. You know, that if Bernie had won the election, would he have sat in the Oval Office and said, okay, let's just start from freaking scratch. What do we need to do to deliver? And you know, I'm not sure he would have. But and I'm not sure why that is, but uh it is a fundamental difference. And right, and it's right now it's a it's a serious problem, obviously. Um that's right. And so my question, and and there's a second part to that, which is that if Trump 10 years ago, well, 20 years ago, and the people around him, right, had looked at the world, they might have said something like what you said earlier. It'll take 50 years before we can be in position to even do our policies, forget rebuilding everything. But it wasn't 50 years, right? It it w it wasn't at all. And I'm wondering why I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm wondering why you feel that on the humane side of the ledger, right, it's impossible to conceive of a project that simply doesn't abide by the expectations, and more like Trump on that one score, right, says the rules are to be remade, the procedures are to be remade. If we have to run over stuff, so be it. You know, why is that not conceivable? If it isn't.
SPEAKER_02:Well, so I I think again, it goes back to the the the the unity, um, to use a bad word to describe them, of the oligarchs.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they've got the money. Obviously, I know one big one big difference is that their fuel is money. Our side is fueling.
SPEAKER_02:It's not like it's it's not like you give somebody a hundred bucks who's running for office. You do that again, the way I put it is to the people you love.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:When they give a hundred bucks, they get four hundred dollars back. I could give you example after example. This is a lot, again, of what you know Bernie talks about at our revolution in great detail. We talk about the rate of return for Musk on his$250 million. It's enormous, it's billions, SpaceX alone. Right. Uh Larry Ellison just got, and he put over$100 million in. He just got TikTok for one and a half billion dollars control of it. He's not the only player, but basically that the market value of TikTok in that deal with China, the American part of TikTok, is$15 billion by every measurement that Wall Street uses. They get a rate of return that says to them, and you could go back to the Koch brothers, you nobody even talks about it anymore because the new billionaires have so much more than they have. But but um uh they get this rate of return on their investment, return on investment, ROI, as Wall Street would call it. So I I I I I don't think you can skip over that because No, I agree. They they will get hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars for that. But but but you can partially skip over it. So you see the image of the wrecking ball in the east wing of the White House.
SPEAKER_00:Incredible, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Trump had loves the wrecking ball. He even said it. I love the sound of the wrecking ball. That's a lot of his life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But but his wrecking ball, again, in in more positive terms, as you put it, it's action. And some of the action that he's done in a certain way is good for working class people. Not the majority of it. But but when you say that um that Social Security recipients under a certain amount uh will pay nothing in income tax on the Social Security that Democrats and Republicans put those taxes in on Social Security, those benefits were not taxed initially. When you say that tipped income under$125,000 won't be taxed, I'm sorry, for people who make under$125,000, their tip income won't be taxed. When you say that we're going to focus, even if he doesn't do it, on bringing back American manufacturing jobs, a place like Hagerstown, where I was on Saturday, been devastated by American trade policy, the manufacturing there. There are a list of those kind of things. Tariffs on steel, bring back the steel industry. Will it really come back in terms of employment? Probably not. But it looks like, and so a lot of the rest of what he does is a disaster, right? Uh the big bullshit bill, you know, is a disaster for working class people, gives all the money to the billionaires and crumbs to working class people. You know, he's gutted, as you alluded before, he's destroyed with Elon Musk, the federal unions. Uh they're basically destroyed. And I have been in rooms, and and you could listen to this publicly, where the federal unionists will talk about, well, we have this lawsuit and that one. They took over the federal judiciary. You know, Roberts is the symbol of that 20 years ago when he became Chief Justice. And they find reasons in almost every case. They don't do every case because then it looks like, oh, the Supreme Court is still has justice in mind. They don't have justice in mind, and they certainly don't have us in mind, you know. And so uh you know, it's a bunch of these things coming together with an autocrat uh president who, as you said, doesn't care. And and in contrast, when we got the Senate to change one thing, that's all we got. We started a group, I was a leader of it, called Fix the Senate Now, to get rid of the bullshit initial closure that you need 60 senators to put a bill on the floor. They don't debate anything. They don't do anything. They hold hearings, they do virtually nothing because they don't have 60 votes to put anything on the floor, except for what they can do under reconciliation, which again, you don't want to use our minutes up on that. That's the one loophole that they can use a majority on reconciliation to pass a budget bill like the big bullshit bill with fit with just a simple majority. But but just to change the Senate process on nominations, none of his nominations Obama's were going through. And in 2013, we finally got the Senate to agree by a majority, not by a supermajority, that nominations could go to the floor with a simple majority. And then, as on everything else, you could uh you could confirm them with the majority. But before that, you needed 60 votes to put any nomination on the floor in order for a majority to confirm. That's all we got. We didn't get rid of initial cloture. There was no initial cloture with 60, even in the 1960s when civil rights bills passed. Now, they used to have cots that had to stay all night, and Lyndon Johnson made them stay. He couldn't make them, but the majority leader at the time and the president said you'll stay all night. And eventually they passed, you know, a whole slew of civil rights legislation before they put in initial closure in the 1970s. So these rules matter on our side. Trump has not gotten rid of initial closure. They did get rid of on the nominations, now we'll put in 200 at one time. They did that two weeks ago. And and they don't care about getting rid of it overall, uh, or not enough. They don't care that the government is shut down. They'll blame Democrats for that. But but you know, why can't you use 50 senators, because they have 53, to uh to pass a continuing resolution, etc. They they have not been willing to challenge that. They could they could do that in two minutes and say, too bad, we don't have 60 senators to pass a continuing resolution. We're gonna change the procedure and now we'll do it with 50. That literally is a simple parliamentary motion. They haven't done it because they don't care that much, number one. And number two, they'd rather blame Democrats for the fact that it's shut down. And again, that gets into the weeds too much for our time. But but um Trump is a master at when he wants action, doing it first. And if he doesn't get away with all of it, he'll get away with enough of it. We've never had a Democratic president, at least that I know of, at least in the last 75 years, that's been willing to do any of that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, I hate to to press the issue, but uh imagine Bernie in 2016, right? Yeah, was and suppose he was somewhat younger, doesn't matter, and suppose that he had a uh a support that went deeper than the support that he had, which was very strong, went. So that he had something like MAGA, except for justice and equity and fairness and participation, and you know, really strongly felt could he not he, but that whole project have substantially, even fundamentally, changed the operations of the government and then hopefully moving on to the economy. Could that have happened?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so two things. So one, in 20 uh 15-16, in that nominating process, 16 was the caucuses and primaries, um there were 800 superdelegates who counted the same as the elected delegates. And so uh by the time of the Iowa caucus, the first event, Clinton shows up on you know your favorite TV show with 500 delegates, and Bernie has me and about three others. Right. You know, that are quote superdelegates. And that dampened enthusiasm. It did it's not just that she had, you know, by the end, you know, over 700 superdelegates, but it dampened enthusiasm. She won the majority of the elected delegates as well. But coming out of that, we made a deal with her. I mean, Bernie made the deal, but I was involved. I found this on the web. Um we made a deal to uh eliminate the superdelegates. That had that was the Uni Reform Commission where I was the vice chair. And that took two years in pulling out people's teeth. But we got it done. It's still done. They're out. We we don't have a say, you know, I'm one of them, we have no say in the nominating process. So so now you get to 2020. So what happens in 2020? The strength of the Bernie movement was just as strong, I would tell you. When he was gonna win the nomination, Obama comes in, you know, and Obama pulls out three, four of those people fighting for the nomination. After Bernie wins, basically uh, you know, wins her ties in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada. Now we go to South Carolina, which is a story in and of itself. I don't want to minimize South Carolina, except it's a state that no Democrat wins anything in statewide, including the Electoral College votes. And the Electoral College is another huge rule that's in the way. It's not just the rulers we have, it's the rules. But but anyway, uh Biden wins in South Carolina, and and Obama gets uh, you know, uh Buddha judge, uh Klobishar, Harris had already dropped out. Basically gets everybody out except Warren and Bernie, and that's another story why they didn't unite better, which they didn't. Then Biden starts to win. The same Biden that Obama had told in 2016, this is Hillary's, to win or lose. Now Obama's behind Biden, specifically, just like with Zoran in New York City, specifically to stop Bernie, just like they want to stop Zoran. Well, Zoran's not going to get stopped. He's going to win it easily. Uh, you know, in my opinion, everybody needs to keep working at it, but he's going to win by at least 10 points over Cuomo and Sleewo and get, you know, 10 or 15%. But, you know, a presidential situation is much more complicated, you know, with 57 uh literally 57 different nominating contests. So that's what stopped Obama more than anybody getting people dropped out. We've got to stop Bernie, is what happened in 2020. But I would say to you that Bernie, if we had, you know, uh anything near the Senate that we had in 2009, and you had Bernie as president, Bernie would have slammed through a lot of these rules. Would he have been the wrecking ball that Trump is? No. But but we would have gotten rid of initial closure and we would, and assuming that we had, I mean, Manchin and Cinema were a lost cause. So you would have had to have 50 without them. Because they're nothing but Republican or right-wing Democrats, doesn't matter what you label them. So that's an issue. But um but to your core point, yeah, my opinion is Bernie and the people around him and the forces that would have elected him uh would have said, you know, uh, you know, damn the torpedoes, basically. We're gonna do everything we know how to do. And, you know, Obama once said to me and others, when I win the election, I'll have my my uh my sneakers on, whatever he called them, running shoes. I'll be right out there on the picket lines. He never came out to a single picket line or protest. Even Biden came out to the UAW strike. Not enough, but and not nearly enough. But um, yeah, I think the Bernie movement would have led to massive change in America. And by the way, you know, yeah, I'm on the DNC, but I believe that you need coalitions of independent, unaffiliated voters. They're not really independent, they're unaffiliated, and Democrats, and a party within the party, the progressive caucus in the House is as close as you'll come to it, the core of that caucus, uh, in order to see change in America with the rules we have. Uh and I used to say in CWA, it's hard but not hopeless. Now I would say it's nearly hopeless. It's very, very hard, but it's not hopeless.
SPEAKER_00:Let me ask you to switch over for a second. How do you explain the Republican Party, not Trump, not uh you know the various billionaires? But the Republican Party, are they hypocrites and liars? Or have they actually shifted that far to the right? If Trump disappeared tomorrow, they would still be what they are today. You know, in other words, what the hell happened?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, I'm no I'm no expert on that. I know it's not fair, but yeah. You know what? My own opinion is that the that the ability of the Trumpers and the right wing to dominate Republican primaries, often well funded. So when we go to elect a Corey Bush or uh Sashila Jayapal, which is one we should have won last year, except for the money, we would have definitely won it in the last three weeks. That's Premilla Jayapal's amazing sister in Portland, Oregon, in an open house seat. Uh or Bowman. I mean, there's a whole slew of them. Um the big money comes into those primaries. It can be Republican money, right-wing money, to get a Democrat like Wesley Bell elected in St. Louis instead of Corey Bush is a great example. Crypto money, I left them out. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars last year. Corporate money. There's no bar on corporate money in those primaries. Uh, as long as it's an independent expenditure, the same as the general election. Can't come in through the campaign, parallel campaign. So Republican primaries are dominated by those people, more so even than Democratic primaries. But so the result is that the whole Republican Party goes to the extreme right. Now, in both parties, the elected say things that they're not going to follow through on. So a nicer way to say that is, I don't know if it's nicer, they lie. Uh, and and they're they're all lying right now about why is the government shut down. So, you know, I I think that, yeah, the Republican Party is a total lost cause uh in terms of being controlled by the confluence of that, of that right-wing money and and right-wing uh candidates who can win primaries in the across the country in the Republican almost everywhere. Look at the the perpetual nominee for Republican governor in New Jersey or in Virginia. You're gonna see that they're gonna lose probably, but barely. Um, so I I think they're in total control of the oligarchs. And and the problem is that if we don't, which every state party can do, even county parties, DNC for the president only, we got to block that money in our nominating process. We've got to say clearly voters of the side. And then the second part, because I say inside and outside, in big parts of this country, we need independent candidates who Democrats will back who can get elected. We're not gonna elect Democrats in a lot of rural America. And in an earlier period, you had the Farmer Labor Party that then merged with the Democrats in Minnesota. Uh, you had, I forget the name of it in North Dakota, um, and they still have a different name. So does the Minnesota Party is called the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party. Um, you're gonna need you know an upsurge because, again, the rules, two senators from states that have uh, you know, half a million people. And, you know, Vermont has to be, happens to be one of those states, but there's a lot more of them that are gonna send two Democratic senators. Uh, and and we've got to be able to win with the rules we have, or we're not even gonna have 50 Democrats uh to fight for the things and the people we love.
SPEAKER_00:I want to move away for a second, if we can, from one Rome where you have a whole lot of experience, the electoral dynamics, to another where I suspect you have even more experience, which is labor. And I'm wondering, you know, Sean Fain was talking about a national strike. And there's certainly participation in No Kings, but as yet, maybe I'm just not seeing it, I haven't seen an inclination to do that. Not even to move No Kings from weekend to, I don't know, Wednesday, which would be a much stronger statement, and to to have unions basically not just support it, but support it in the way that only they can, which is with a strike. And I'm wondering what you think, A, why does it or doesn't it happen? And do you think it it can happen before they have entrenched fascism, basically? Because it may be the main impediment to doing that.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, you asked exactly the right question. And again, May 8th of 1970, this was student-led. Very few unions in Philadelphia, and it was around the country on different days that week, not necessarily. But that was 12 noon on a Friday, deliberately.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:For the student strike in particular. You're exactly right. The next No Kings, if it's going to go to another level, needs to be on a weekday at 12 o'clock. And at least for, you know, call it an hour. There's an hour of uh an hour of action, an hour of resistance, an hour of something, whatever you want to call it. And frankly, at some workplaces, because we did this in CWA, I helped start a thing uh before I was president called CWA mobilization. And we we had a whole thing in workplaces where we would stop for five minutes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Now, in some workplaces, nobody would know the difference, but in a lot of them, believe me, they know. So uh, and you know, we would have we would have stickers that would have like 12 o'clock and it would have the date, and that's all that would be on the sticker. And so uh I I couldn't agree more. So, in again, I used Argentina before. I'll go back to that. They've had one-day, you know, walkouts across Argentina against Malay, the fascist who's running Argentina right now. And and um uh they have a whole different way of organizing there. I alluded to it, sectoral bargaining, where the whole metal workers' sector bargains. So that in and of itself leads to a different level of consciousness. In terms of Sean Fain uh and talking about May Day 2028, um, which is when their contracts are up. Uh, next, you know, there's a lot of things between now and then, right? But but I think the the the broader point that you're making, put aside May Day 2028, is exactly right. We've got to be teaching people union by union, even in a local union, we can stop, we can march in to work together. We were doing that in CWA 35 years ago.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Even if we weren't on strike, we're gonna meet in the parking lot, we're all gonna march in together. I don't care if we're an office worker or a garage or a manufacturing plant. We're gonna the biggest thing we did back then in CWA mobilization is wear red on Thursday. And to this day, in CWA, the majority of the members, not all, it's supposed to be all, majority of the members on Thursday wear red to work. And the more militant locals, they'll give you a red shirt if you don't have one, or they'll spray paint your shirt red.
SPEAKER_00:You know, uh yeah, it communicates the idea. We can act together. And now let's think about the next step also, and the next step also. But if that collectivity, well, but yes, but it's the whole idea of collectivity. I mean, among young people now, yeah, among young people now, there's a there seems to be in people's heads, and I think it's connected, you know. Yes, we can have a um a little group, a little team, but the idea of a massive militant action is beyond comprehension somehow.
SPEAKER_02:And so that means what are the lessons of mobilization, which again I learned 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago. You start with, where did we come with the red shirt? Because you start with something everybody can do. Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And so they look around and say immediately, hey, we're all we're all doing this. And then you work up to, you know, a momentary work stoppage. Uh exactly. You don't even have to call it that. Stand up. You remember stand up for your rights. Play Bob Marley in the workplace, you know, stand up for your rights. And and you remember this?
SPEAKER_00:What's that? You know, the the peace sign? You remember the peace sign? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It had a same idea, right? People flashing it, people flashing it from car to car. Okay, you're part of something bigger. Now, what can this bigger thing additionally do? That's right. I that's what No Kings has to somehow begin to to communicate and to sort of embody for people. I'm not sure it is yet. Um the the ones I've been at, they're getting there.
SPEAKER_02:But no, it's not there. It's it's it's still positive. You know, six or seven million people at thousands of locations, that's a big positive. But your point is right. Both your points, key points. One is can it move to a weekday? Two is, you know, what's the organizing that we need um in workplaces? We'll call it unions, can help promote in workplaces that can link to this, not just legal action. Uh, you know, my opinion, that's fine, but it's not, it's maybe it's even necessary. It's certainly not sufficient. So, so what can we do in workplaces so that we can begin to see the solidarity there? And you know, on Saturday, to a certain extent, yellow was their color. They picked it up from other resistance movements at other times. I don't really care if it's yellow or red. I would always go with red, but I don't care. But can we get everybody on that weekday, you know, the same 7 million and then some to wear yellow, even if it's a yellow armband, a yellow, you know, sticker, something.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, those MAGA hats, which you know, our side sort of laughs at, those were not nothing. You know, they they were part of the process. Because you look around and you see, oh shit, I'm not alone. You know?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the whole thing, not just the hat, but the whole the whole way he uses MAGA uh, you know, obviously makes me vomit. But um uh Make America Great Again, the days of segregation, the Frank Rizzos, really, okay. But um, but yes, symbolism is key, and but but people taking action with those symbols is key. And and and uh and the the question you know that'll remain when we when we disconnect here is gonna be A, can we move to a weak day? B can unions en masse, you know, lead more? And and again, I'm a big uh supporter of the transformation of UAW. I worked very closely with UAW uh and and other unions, um postal workers, others, uh, you know, when I was president. But I would say that, you know, celebrating the tariffs for me, you know, is not going to lead to mobilizing workers across the UAW uh to take action against Trump. Now, I'm I hope I'm wrong about that. But I think that step one for unions, including my own union today, is you know, how do we talk to the people in our union, and CWA it's probably 25%, who voted for Trump and probably, you know, still think he's doing a great job. That's an example of the experience by and large, especially politically.
SPEAKER_00:Um That was actually gonna be my next question. That is, you know, you've got a lot of experience with organized labor, with workers, uh on and on. And the fact is that uh, you know, there's no point in making believe it isn't the case. A substantial percentage of working people voted for Trump. A substantial percentage of people in unions voted for Trump. And the let's say the left or the progressive community's ability to speak to that is nearly zero, or has been nearly zero. It hasn't been very effective. And it's uh more times than not, in my part of the left, it's Disparaging. You know, it's basically well. They're unreachable, they're pathetic, they're this, they're that. Um, with no real comprehension, I don't think, of the circumstances that cause somebody to feel the way they feel. And to look at Trump and say, okay, maybe he's a schmuck in some ways, but you know, he's giving me a sense of efficacy. He's uh I'm on a team all of a sudden. And uh, you know, I'm gonna be loyal to that team. And that team is team Trump. And, you know, the w we have to be able to speak to that. Uh certainly not by calling them deplorable.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's right. But I think we can speak to that if we start out with uh, you know, so in CWA and the certain pocket, so huge chunk of CWA is in, you know, the South and in so-called right-to-work states. It's not the majority, but it's a huge chunk. And you know, support for Trump would be even higher there. But there's also support for Trump among, you know, Verizon technicians in New York City. Not the majority, but you know, and but those are people who have been on strike over and over again. And you have to start with he's destroyed the National Labor Relations Board. Now, do we care about the bureaucracy? Not a little bit, I do, but we mostly care about our rights to fight the boss. And, you know, it can't just be, well, he, you know, uh, you're not gonna pay taxes on Social Security. Wait a minute. If we have no right as working class people to fight our employer and we're union members, we better understand that that is fundamental for us. And and that kind of education in depth, you know, union by union, but with a lot of resources put into that, which unions have the ability to do, um needs to be, you know, probably 10 times more than what exists right now. And, you know, you see it in in American Federation of Government employees, they've been decimated and they've done a great job in litigation. But the fear that exists about for federal workers, if I stick my head off, they'll chop it off, has offset the mobilization of those workers. Postal workers union, I remain very close to, they have a new Postmaster General from Federal Express. They we have a president saying privatize the post office. Their slogan is U.S. mail not for sale. You know, how they have a new president coming in. The current president is an amazing, wonderful leader, Mark Demenstein. But the question is, how do they rise up before they come to the post office? And we could go union by union in in that way. And can we get, you know, an initial step of several million? It doesn't have to be, you know, 14 million union members, it won't be that. Several million union members, even without the rest of No Kings, acting out on a weekday in some way. And I think the answer is yes, but you know, too much defense, not enough offense. It's not about being offensive, it's about offense.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. And and too much negative, not enough positive. This is what we don't like. That's fine, but you know they know that. Um, everybody knows that poverty hurts. Uh sickness kills, racism, you know, rips you apart. Everybody knows the bad things are bad. It's it's whether or not you have something to replace it with and a means to win that. That's what's doubted. And absent that, you know, you you I can imagine somebody saying, well, look, Trump's gonna turn everything upside down, and maybe when he turns everything upside down, I'll get something a little better. Um because certainly it's not gonna get better via you know a Biden's right. And and for working class people. It's not crazy. I don't think it's crazy either. You know, there it it's reason, you know, it's reasoned. In the absence of any kind of vision, in the absence of any kind of strategy, um, this maniac with the hammer sort of looks like something, maybe it'll be positive. It won't be. It's horrendous, but you can see why somebody would want to grasp at it. You know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, again, I I would take a page from Zoran, and uh, you know, he talks about affordability, but he he does it in for New Yorkers in very concrete ways. You know, the million, the million households that have rent control, we're gonna freeze the rent. It's not the long-term solution. Um, and and and then, you know, he goes through five or six other very concrete things. And the people voting for him believe he's gonna do those things. I think, you know, in terms of national issues, you know, what if what if we had uh Democrats? And I I say Democrats because, you know, going for some other party now is only gonna splinter things worse. Uh again, even though I'm on the DNC, it's not my football or baseball team, right? It's a way to fight for the people I love. And again, as I said earlier, I would do independent politics in much of this country where Democrats rate below unaffiliated or independents, much of rural America. But but we can have Democrats running on things like bargaining for all. When I'm elected, I am gonna fight and work for every worker that's trying to get a contract. I'm gonna punish the companies that are stopping them. I don't how does Starbucks get away with 5,000 people organizing and there's no contracts three years later? They get away with it in part because the government works for the management of Starbucks and works for the shareholders of Starbucks. It's not just Starbucks, Amazon is a more serious example. So I'm not because they're much bigger. You know, and bargaining for all, I'm gonna run and fight for those things. I'm not gonna talk about it. This is what we can do, whether it's at a city level, a federal level, Medicare for all. This is how we can begin to get Medicare for all. It's not pie in the sky. All we need to do is bring the age down. We can bring it down all at once, or we can bring it down in tiers, but we have a system that's far more efficient, and you show why. The administrative costs are three or four percent versus twenty with private insurance. But we need to have two or three things like that and and a sense that we're running on something that we're actually gonna do, not a message about what we're gonna say. All right.
SPEAKER_00:Well we're over our uh our hour. But um, but is there is there anything that we you know haven't uh brushed on or dealt with you just want to bring up.
SPEAKER_02:I want to stress one more time for political activists who listen to this. In in and and I'm not saying that you know you only work inside the Democratic Party. You work inside and outside. You work on issues, you form other organizations. But the part of you that ends up liking a Zoran or a Bernie, you know, they ran as Democrats. To get more people like that elected as Democrats, we've got to force Democratic parties, whether it's in New York City or the New York State Party is one of the worst in the country in terms of big money party. That's what Cuomo comes out of. You got Democratic leaders who don't even endorse primary winners. That should be out. But we we can pass resolutions and effective action in Democratic parties to block independent expenditures in the primaries, to block corporate money in the primaries, to block dark money in the primaries, to block big money in the primaries, to restrict primary elections only to campaign contributions, not outside separate campaigns run by billionaires. The party can say our nominees must get elected without independent expenditures. That's the term of art. Uh, without corporate money, without dark money, without big money. Those fights are necessary fights if we're gonna elect people as Democrats that are not a one-off thing like Zoran, but an everyday thing. We're not gonna win with that kind of money thrown in, particularly in cities and in House of Representative districts or even Senate states where only a Democrat's gonna win. That's that money's gonna drive out our candidates, and then we can't fight for the things we love. So I just want to stress that more because it tends to be down in the weeds. But just like getting rid of superdelegates, which we got done, we will have to get rid of this money that's gotten worse and worse geometrically in our primary elections, or we're not gonna elect Democrats that'll fight for the people we love.
SPEAKER_00:I hate to uh expend when I spend, but I wonder something. Why is it impossible to have elections simply federally funded with a cap? So you run for office, you you know, you can't spend$400 million, there's a cap, and the money all comes from from essentially taxes, and it goes the same amount to each party, and there's rules on that, and there's rules on uh, you know, media visibility, et cetera, et cetera. Is all of that, they're all just reforms. They don't seem very extreme to me. Is that not a, in some ways, an easier way to accomplish that same end?
SPEAKER_02:No, because number one, you'd have to be able to put that bill, and there was a version of that uh that had uh 48 senators who were prepared, uh, it could have been 47, but anyway, not 50, that were prepared to change the rules, to put that bill on the floor and do a portion of what you're saying, not necessarily the whole thing. It would have been more about federal matches and uh it would have overturned Citizens United. Um it would have reined in the federal judiciary, so there wouldn't be a Congress. Um, and there was a fight to pass that bill in the in 2021 or 2022. Uh, I think it was January of 2022. There was two or three votes short of a parliamentary motion that was made to change the procedure so that bill would have gone to the floor. It doesn't guarantee that it would have passed. Yeah, I mean, the the problem that is one of the elements, but we've got to get back to uh, first of all, to 50 senators and to a House majority that's gonna pass that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I see.
SPEAKER_02:And all I'm saying is that along the way, a much easier thing is to is for an upsurge to say to Democrats, state by state, and even county-based, like uh or or municipally based, we're not gonna nominate people who are taking that money. That's a simple motion of the Democratic Party. Now, Arizona is close to doing that, it's the first one. North Carolina passed the resolution, New Mexico is close, but um uh, and then candidates can do it. So we're very close to having candidates and the DNC resolution, which you know, if it gets implemented, it's a big F, would block that money in the 2028 primary cycle. Uh, also said that candidates should take the pledge, like Elizabeth Warren did in 2012. Uh, she conditioned it on her opponent, Scott Brown, and he took the pledge, the Republican, saying, saying uh a candidate in a primary saying, I'll take that pledge. There'll be no dark money. My campaign will have to replace any independent expenditure with a donation to charity if it's made on my behalf, if my opponents in this primary take the same pledge. There's lots of things that can be done on it. Yes, what you're saying is great, and we could get rid of Citizens United if Congress would pass that bill, but we can't wait for that. Part of the element of getting a majority that'll do that is getting that money out of the Democratic nomination process. And also saying no Democratic leader, Jeffrey Schumer, can continue as a Democratic Party leader if they don't endorse the Democratic candidates who win elections. And Schumer and Jeffries have still not endorsed the Zoran who won the primary.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Still not done it. So party reform, party reform is part of this process. Your your action plan is a bigger step that I totally support as well.
SPEAKER_00:Step two. Okay. Um I want to thank you for being on. It's been a pleasure. And uh that said, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time. It's for Revolution Z.