Episode 86 – 2020 with Margaret Kimberley

Macro N Cheese – Episode 86
2020 with Margaret Kimberley

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Margaret Kimberley [intro/music] (00:04):

[Montage] Why have Democratic presidents caused wars around the world? Or why haven’t Democrats tried to raise the minimum wage, or why don’t we have free healthcare? If you ask them anything all they do is point at the Republicans. People might still be racist. They might still be sexist, but ultimately if you give them free healthcare for the rest of their lives, that would cut out a lot.

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (01:26):

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

Steve Grumbine (01:34):

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, I have been trying my best to expand our horizons and really dive into issues deeper than just that surface-level storyline that you see so often in the mainstream media. And today I’m taking that to another level. I have Margaret Kimberley joining me today.

Margaret Kimberley is Editor and Senior Columnist of Black Agenda Report. She is co-founder as well, and she is the author of the book, “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents.” She is also a contributor to the anthologies “In Defense of Julian Assange” and “Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence.”

Ms. Kimberly is an administrative committee member of the United National Antiwar Coalition and the Coordinating Committee of Black Alliance for Peace. And with that, let me just say, I am so happy to have Margaret Kimberley on today. Margaret, thank you so much for joining me.

Margaret Kimberley (02:37):

Oh, thanks for inviting me.

Grumbine (02:39):

Absolutely. So we are in a really abysmal time. I am finding myself, personally, physically ill with the current political landscape, but this isn’t something new. This has kind of been going around for some time. And I’m just curious as a member of the Green Party and someone who is deeply involved in revolutionary politics, what is your take on the current climate?

Kimberley (03:07):

Ah, the climate, literally, that’s a problem. One of the reasons we’re sick, we’re seeing these horrible wildfires. Just another indication that the planet is on the brink and that’s not hyperbole anymore. We have had the COVID pandemic and Americans, if we didn’t know before we know now: we live in a failed state. Much of the death toll, the inadequate response has been blamed on Trump personally.

And it’s so easy to do – he gives you so much material, but we don’t have the healthcare system we ought to have. Our for-profit healthcare system fails us time and again. The countries that have responded the best to COVID are either fully socialist or have robust public funding for their healthcare system and have free healthcare. And we have this presidential election with Donald Trump, and the Democrats decided to foist Joe Biden on their voters.

So we have this vile man whom half the country hates, but the Democrats decided that it was most important for them to make sure that the person most able to beat him wasn’t going to be the nominee. So their big campaign was getting rid of Bernie Sanders, but they chose Joe Biden who has obviously some kind of cognitive problems, some sort of health problem. He can barely get through sentences. I won’t be surprised if there aren’t any debates, frankly.

So of course you feel sick. And Trump has stripped the system bare. There’s no nicety, no facade, no nothing. He appeals to the lizard brain of white racists and his foreign policy – he and his secretary of state Pompeo are killing thousands of people with sanctions – and I am concerned about an October surprise, frankly, with foreign policy. We have protests being met by right wing reaction. We have people literally being killed. So yes, this is a moment for us to feel sick. We’re at a crisis.

Grumbine (05:29):

This didn’t just happen though, did it? You go back to Clintonism and you go back even further than that. This is the story of the United States, is it not? This moment in time though, is even worse than… It’s worse than anything I’ve experienced in my 51 years on this planet. What makes this time so different?

Kimberley (05:52):

As my Marxist friends would say, the contradictions are getting sharper. Capitalism is in crisis. And I think that is what we’re seeing play out. The two major parties, the two wings of the duopoly are both capitalist parties. For example, everyone talks about climate change and Barack Obama will – and I’m writing about this in Black Agenda Report this week, by the way – so Barack Obama will tweet pictures of California and fires, the orange skies, and say, you know, “vote like your life depends on it.”

Well, when he was president, he bragged about increasing oil production. He bragged about increasing fracking. The Governor of California, another Democrat, has given more fracking permits this year than he did last year. So we have these two parties who come together more often than not. They pretend that they don’t to get buy-in from the public. They both represent some different interests, but there are a lot of issues where they in fact come together. So there isn’t any pretense anymore.

You know, for a long time, the Democrats would at least go through the motions of being the working people’s party. But they’ve been living off this reputation for decades now. So all you have is one party that does nothing, you know, that stabs you in the front, pointing fingers at the other. So if you ask them, well, why have Democratic presidents increased oil production? Or why have Democratic presidents caused wars around the world? Or why haven’t Democrats try to raise the minimum wage? Or why don’t we have free healthcare?

If you ask them anything, all they do is point at the Republicans. So there’s literally no opposition anymore. And that’s why it feels so bad. It’s been a long time since things were in fact this bad, but I want to add quickly, people talk about fascism – “Trump is a fascist” – if he wins, fascism will be on the rise. But that won’t be the first time. In the twenties the Ku Klux Klan marched past the White House.

Right before that, the summer of 1919, it was called the “Red Summer.” There were riots, there were mass attacks on black people all over the country. Hundreds of people were killed. We had Jim Crow, which was the US fascism, which lasted for nearly a hundred years. So we should remember that these things have happened before. This is not something new. We have a fascistic police state. The police kill three people every day on average, more than 2 million people in prison, the largest prison complex in the world.

So we have to remember that we have had a fascistic society for a long time, as bad as this seems, but I think it’s important… Someone asked me yesterday, am I hopeful or do I despair? And this is my hope: my hope is that people realize we have to do things that are revolutionary. And the word is scary to people. But that is where I find calm: in sticking with my political beliefs. I am not going to be intimidated into voting for Joe Biden. I’m a Green Party member. I’m still going to vote Green. I’m going to vote for somebody who really wants to seriously curtail fossil fuel production and create jobs in the process, who really wants people to have healthcare, who is in favor of peace, in favor of cutting the military spending that eats up almost 60% of the budget.

And what did Biden say? He got that sentence out. He wants to increase military spending even more if he becomes president. So I believe the hopefulness is in telling the truth about our situation and making clear that the ‘same old, same old’ just won’t do. We’ve got to be revolutionary.

Grumbine (10:00):

You bring up the idea of revolutionary things and you also brought up some good points about currently police are killing three people a day and so forth. And the militarization of the police force in the United States didn’t just happen. This has been building up for some time now, and you could point back to the ’94 crime bill, probably point back even before that. But the ’94 crime bill definitely played a heavy part in pushing us down the road here. And Joe Biden was the author of that crime bill. What do you think is Joe Biden’s quote unquote part in where we are today? Where would you assess that?

Kimberley (10:44):

Well, he represents the right wing of the Democratic Party. He was against busing. He was the go-to guy for Democrats against busing to bring about school integration. And he would say things like… you know, he has a long history of being racist himself… at one point, “I don’t want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle” among other things.

But that’s why Barack Obama, the first black president, actually chose him, because he represented that right wing. Because it was an effort to get those conservative Democrats on board with him. And he bragged about the crime bill. “I wrote the damn bill,” he said. He does play a huge part in this. So we have to talk about Obama and the smoke and mirrors of “hope and change,” and the fact that in order to become president, he is as much onboard with neoliberalism, with US imperialism as any other president.

So we have this pretense of progress, a pretense of change, followed by somebody with no pretense. So that’s what we’re getting in Joe Biden. So he does bear a lot of responsibility for where we are now. His state Delaware – Delaware is the, I don’t know what to call it, the most capitalist state. It’s the state with the loosest banking laws, where it’s easy to set up a corporation to do all kinds of skullduggery.

That’s what he represents. And we’re told that this is the counterweight for Trump. So he is a person who for many decades, I mean, he was in the Senate for over 30 years. He was in the Senate a long time, then twice as vice president. So he is as much responsible for the conditions that we just talked about as Donald Trump.

Grumbine (12:44):

We talked about this offline – Malcolm X went on record (and I read a great piece in the New York times, op ed) about basically saying he’d rather face Goldwater than the alternative because the alternative might give him a hug and a kiss, but stick that knife up his back. And I think he said, don’t tell me, putting a knife in my back nine inches, and then pulling it out six, is progress.

And then on the flip side of that, yet MLK basically saying that Goldwater represented everything that we couldn’t handle in this world, that it was outright boldface fascism, and that we needed to stop him at any and all costs.

So we had two very prominent leaders pushing for change, who are revered by millions today, and yet both of them had very decidedly different approaches to how they saw that election. This election can’t be that much different than that election, in a sense. Can you give me kind of an assessment of King and Malcolm X on this?

Kimberley (13:45):

Well, you know, it’s interesting. They came together as the years went by. King started to sound more like Malcolm X. King’s greatest speech, to me… I mean, over and over again, we’re told about the “I have a dream” speech because it’s more platitudes than anything. I think that’s why it’s shoved down our throat so much.

But on April 4th, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated, King openly and publicly opposed the Vietnam war and broke with Lyndon Johnson, who was seen as an ally of the civil rights movement. He started to talk about economic inequality. So they became closer and closer together – this is after Malcolm X was assassinated. So I think it’s important to talk about that. Talk about their commonalities more than anything.

And that is why King was finally assassinated: because he was talking about organizing in places like Chicago, because he was talking about the economy, because he came out against war. By the way, against the advice of most of his allies. Most people were afraid. Even his own father questioned him, “Johnson’s our friend. You can’t make him mad. What are you thinking about?” But he made the principled decision in doing that. So I think we should talk about what they had in common.

Grumbine (15:13):

Let’s do that. I love this. I am watching this election unfold and I am being told by many people of color that my resistance to voting for Biden is a privileged position for me to take. And when I talk to other people of color who are of like-mind with me, they tell me absolutely I’m in the right frame of mind, that my approach here – personally anyway – is in line with theirs. And I say to myself, well, you know what, I’m going to do what I’m going to do anyway.

I’m not waiting for someone to give me a permission, so to speak, but I am interested in knowing what do you say to something like that? How does someone flip through that maze of opinions and be able to take a profound, rebellious, revolutionary stance that, “Hey, I hear what you’re saying, but I’m still doing this.” How do you marry that up? It’s just such a quagmire out there with the way opinions and so forth are flying.

Kimberley (16:10):

Well, people say that to intimidate us. That’s just propaganda and that’s why they say it: to shut you up. And it assumes that there is some big difference between Trump and Biden. And it’s easier for them to try to convince people of that nonsense because Trump is so horrible. He has basically given cops permission to kill people. He has defended the young white teenager who killed two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Among other things.

So it’s easy to point to him and say “orange man, bad” than it is actually for any other president we’ve had, but we can’t be fooled by that. We have to remember who actually… I mean, Trump made his famous comment about the wall with Mexico and we’ll make Mexico pay for it, but Obama actually deported more people. Obama has killed more people around the world. Trump is close behind at this point with sanctions killing as many people as bullets and bombs, frankly. But I would just, if you’re up to it, to challenge people and just to ask them, okay, well, what’s so wonderful about Biden being president?

Just quote Biden. He says there’s no Medicare for All. He said he’s going to increase the military budget. The DNC, there was a platform proposal to end subsidies for fossil fuel production and they tried to sneak it out and hope nobody would notice. So is he going to do anything different about the economy? He hasn’t talked about ending the mass incarceration that he is responsible for having ramped up.

I mean the most they can come up with is, you know, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg finally dies, you’ll have a Democrat who’s her replacement and not a Republican. That’s pretty much it. And the truth is in the lack of enthusiasm for Biden. So there are people who will tell you, “well, that’s your privileged position and, you know, you don’t understand what black people go through,” but half of black America isn’t bothering to vote.

So that proves to me that you are on the right track. How can people go on and on and defend…? How did we get Trump? People didn’t vote. Well, I’m going to take that back slightly. There’s a lot of voter suppression. That’s how Republicans get into office. Although the Democrats don’t talk about it, do they?

Grumbine (18:38):

Nope.

Kimberley (18:39):

So Wisconsin, for example, the Republican legislature passed a voter ID bill, and that took thousands of people off the rolls. They made it hard for college students to vote as state residents. So thousands of people who would have been able to vote for Hillary Clinton were not able to. So they do things like that.

But there was also a lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton. There were people who came out for Obama, who could have voted in 2016, who chose not to. There was a record number of people – I can’t remember what it’s called – they are people who vote, but will leave a line blank. There was a record number of people who actually voted, but didn’t vote for president. They voted for their, you know, local legislator and Congress and whatever else, but left that line blank.

And that is the fault of the Democratic Party. Trump’s presence in the White House is completely the fault of the Democratic Party. Absolutely. A hundred percent. And so, you know, you might want to ask those people, “why are people so unenthusiastic about Biden? Why did people who came out for Obama stay home for Hillary?”

Biden has not had a rally. Now, partly they’re hiding him because they don’t know what he’s going to say. Trump has these rallies at airport hangers, flies in on Air Force One. It’s very good theater by the way. But Biden has not had any rallies. How do you run for president and it’s September and you haven’t had any rallies. I think they fear he couldn’t get that many people in one place.

Grumbine (20:21):

It’s terrible, but it’s true. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Going back to 2016, we saw the rise of Bernie Sanders and we watched as the Democratic Party fell all over itself to rig the primary and they went into court and they fought in court, tooth and nail, to defend their right to do whatever they want in their primary. There’s no requirement for a fair election. And truth comes out: they’re a private corporation. They don’t have to do anything. They don’t even need a primary. They could literally hand-select whoever they want and put them up there.

And we went through it again with hope because Bernie’s platform was a beautiful platform and it had people excited. You had people in the streets – young, old, intersectional – people all over the place, all walks of life. It was an amazing thing to experience, but then they did it again. And this time they did it differently by having everyone collapse around Clyburn down there in South Carolina during Super Tuesday. And it was so blatant. I mean, Bernie had won Iowa.

They say he didn’t, but he won Iowa. He won New Hampshire and he won Nevada. And all of a sudden you had Chris Matthews freaking out on camera. So unprofessional. You had all of these pundits losing their mind that a socialist might be winning this thing, running away with it, in fact. You had Nate Silver even saying that he could run the table. And then all of a sudden Obama weighs in, and the gang weighs in, and Clyburn and Clinton and the whole gang.

And one by one, even Buttigieg, who had actually won. He was one of the only ones that actually had a real shot. And all of a sudden, he just drops out miraculously at the same time too. The collusion was so severe, so blatant. How anyone could have any kind of faith in our elections at this time. It’s a democracy killer. But yet here we are, once again. You watch Obama weigh in on the NBA strike. It’s like, there’s nothing that they’re doing that in any way feels like they even give a crap about humanity at all.

But then take it the next step – and I think this is probably the more vicious part of this as Glen Ford often calls it “the misleadership class” – we have all these gatekeepers basically blocking people and propagandizing people. And you saw at John Lewis’s funeral, Clinton came out and said that they colluded. They did it. They were able to stop Sanders. What does that say about our country? Just in general? What is that?

Kimberley (23:01):

It’s the oligarchy. It’s the oligarchy doing what the oligarchs do. We don’t have a democracy. We have not had one for a very long time. There are all these studies conducted by universities, which show that Americans never get what they want after an election. Even if the party you wanted wins, you still don’t get what you want. It’s very open that you have to get buy-in from the richest people in the country.

Look what happened after Biden announced he was choosing Kamala Harris as his running mate. What were the headlines? “Wall street breathes a sigh of relief.” “Silicon Valley is happy.” As if it mattered what rank-and-file Democrats might actually want. So that’s the way the system works. And I think as the crisis continues, they will operate more and more openly.

Obama is the worst thing to ever happen in politics in modern history, because he gives this – and still gives this – well-crafted veneer of being a progressive when he’s not. He’s described himself – he said, “well, you know, I would be like a moderate Republican in years past,” so… and loving Ronald Reagan, he’s always praising Ronald Reagan. So that’s who the real Obama is, but that’s why they needed him back in 2008.

The Republicans were unpopular. They had to get someone who could get voter buy-in who really wasn’t that much different. And he still plays that role. He’ll be playing that role as long as he’s alive. And he’s a young person. It could be a long time. And that’s why we have to – as I was saying earlier – we’ve got to throw out the whole thing. The rigging against Bernie Sanders was criminal, but his capitulation was criminal too. I hate to hear him say anything now.

You know, when he says, we’ve got to stick with Joe. Recently, he made a comment about, he was concerned about Biden campaign’s outreach to progressives. My reaction is “just shut up.” You went along, you went along, you acted like a chump. You capitulated completely, just so he wouldn’t be treated badly. The way, you know, Ralph Nader was blamed or Jill Stein was blamed. I mean, they blamed him – my God – in 2016.

How does him running against Hillary Clinton earlier in the year keep her from winning in November? That’s just one of many lies to excuse their betrayal of the public. But I don’t want to hear from Bernie Sanders. I don’t care what he says. He deserves some of the blame for what they did. He chose to go along. He could have played a revolutionary role by staying in the race, but he decided to cave. And you’re absolutely right, you know, all the Democratic candidates… It was such a put up job.

I read recently that almost all of them use the same law firm. How are you opposing somebody if you have – oh I can’t think of their name, but, um, anyways, it’s the DNC’s law firm, by the way. Perkins Coie – they’re the DNC’s law firm, the ones who paid Christopher Steele for his dodgy dossier, lest we forget. That’s when I first heard the name, but Buttigieg and Klobuchar, and I think Warren also, they all had the same law firm.

And I said, well, this is pretty obvious to me. So they were in to see what was going to shake out, to see who the public would prefer. And when it was clear that if they stayed out of it, it was going to be Bernie Sanders, that’s when they took action. You mentioned representative Clyburn in South Carolina. And as you point out, as we say in Black Agenda Report, one of the black misleadership class. Clyburn by the way, gets more money from big pharma than any other member of Congress.

Grumbine (27:14):

Wow.

Kimberley (27:14):

Now that tells you where his politics lie. And so he gave the word in South Carolina, South Carolina being important because in the South, most Democrats are black and whoever wins that primary is said to have buy-in from black voters who play such a big role. And that’s when they dropped the hammer. And black voters – I have to say this too – it’s very sad. Black politics. Since the days of King and Malcolm X, black politics has devolved more and more and more.

So many people have been co-opted that for most people, I’m sad to say, black politics amounts to nothing more than keeping Republicans out of office. So one of the things they used against Bernie Sanders was to make sure that he did not appeal to black voters who politically agree with everything he talked about. Who needs Medicare for All more? Who needs forgiveness for student loan debt more? Who needs an increase in the minimum wage more than black people?

But instead, what were we told? Well, you might like Bernie but white people aren’t going to vote for him. So if you cast doubt, all you have to do is cast doubt on electability and you get buy-in from most black voters. That was it. That was all. And so that was it. That was the end game for Bernie Sanders. But I think the lesson is that progressives cannot run as Democrats. We can’t be afraid of the third party thing. That is in fact, our only hope to get anybody decent in office. So yeah, that’s my response. .

Intermission (29:09):

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Grumbine (29:34):

You know, it’s interesting because my view on Bernie is a mixed bag because he gave so much to us, regardless of what he did, the people themselves believed. And yes, there are vote-blue-no-matter-who’s that kind of fell in line with this appeal to Biden, but there was a movement that he built. Period. And that movement is still there for the taking, if you will.

That movement is out there and it just needs to be directed, if you will. It needs to be given some hope and it needs to be given a couple of breaths of life back into it because all the organizing that took place – that wasn’t fake. I guarantee you people gave their lives to this. And I’ve often looked at Bernie and I said, I’m glad that he said a few things.

There was a few things that he said, point blank. He said, if I ever tell you who to vote for, don’t listen to me. He also said point blank that it’s “not me, us.” It’s never been about me. Don’t worry about me. It’s about you all. It’s about us. It’s the us part of this. And that mindset can live on way beyond any capitulation he may or may not have done. It broke my heart to watch this. There was no primary. It lasted what, maybe five primaries. And then it was over.

And then it was like the COVID-19 excuse weighed in and voila, you’ve got no momentum, no campaigning. And to your point, no actual campaigning by Biden whatsoever. No events, no nothing. And they probably are hiding him because you can see every time he gets in front of a camera, he stumbles and bumbles. He said, Breonna Taylor needed to be arrested or taken care of or whatever, I mean, just ridiculous statements.

A lot of the stuff that comes out of his mouth sounds like he’s drunk. And it’s just overwhelming the sadness I feel to think that it’s possible that we’ll either A, get a second term of Trump or B, get a Biden presidency where they’ll re-install the Clinton family into every hall of government and have another succession plan with Kamala Harris, who has been the queen of civil forfeiture and allowed Mnuchin off the hook. And it’s just despair, despair, despair.

And I think to myself, where’s the next Fred Hampton, do we have Fred Hampton in our midst? Do we have folks that are really prepared for revolutionary thought? And is there an appetite for it or have they made it so challenging and difficult that a revolutionary spirit doesn’t exist?

And let me tap onto that with the Black Lives Matter movement and seeing people in the streets and hearing, recently, different things about people describing Black Lives Matter as maybe not the revolutionary force, but maybe something different altogether. And I’d just like to get your take on that. Where do you see this? Do we have revolutionaries? Do we have an appetite for doing what must be done or are we trapped in propaganda?

Kimberley (32:58):

Well, there’s plenty of propaganda, but you are correct. I think one of the reasons that the protests that began after George Floyd was murdered by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota – I think one of the reasons those protests were so large and that there were so many white people involved – I think those were Bernie people who, after he capitulated, were left all dressed up with no place to go. They still wanted to change things.

And I know you’re right. People took time off from work to go to Iowa and canvas for Bernie Sanders. People sacrificed a lot in order to promote him only to have the rug pulled out from under them. So yes, those people, they have not changed. They haven’t changed their views. They still want to see what he was talking about: that government can be a force that improves people’s lives. But the system won’t allow it. And I think people have to understand what happened, what he was talking about.

Now I have to hasten to add on foreign policy he was as much an imperialist as the rest of them. But it’s just reformism; he’s not a socialist. The idea that the government should do what it used to do and make sure the minimum wage keeps going up is anathema to the ruling class. To in any way impinge on the profits of big pharma and the health insurance companies is a threat to the way the political system works. It’s a threat to the oligarchy that we have.

That’s why Michael Bloomberg came in for his crazy campaign. That was to try to make sure it wasn’t him. That’s why he’s given so much money to the DNC, who’ve been completely captured by that wing of the Democratic Party. And so people need to learn what happened, why he caved, why his nomination was something that they could not abide.

But I am hoping that that spirit… I think it does live on, but these presidential elections, they suck the political life out of the country. And so many people cave in, especially with Trump, and think that they have to go long and think they have to vote for Biden. But half the population doesn’t bother to show up also. So yeah, that fervor, I think is still there, but people have to show some courage. They have to be brave and they have to be smart and look at what do you really get if you get Biden? What do you get?

I mean, it’s really pathetic. He has not uttered anything. If Biden picked just one issue – one – one issue that Bernie Sanders talked about, he’d win. If he said, I’m going to raise the minimum wage, or I am going to forgive student loan debt. What is Kamala Harris saying? If you went to a historically black college, and if you make less than this amount, we’ll forgive your… Just forgive everybody’s student loan debt. Do it.

And I think the oligarchs could live with something like that probably, but that’s not what we’re going to get. But at the same time, I don’t want to ignore the dangers of Trump. These right wingers, who… The rumors that Antifa, which doesn’t even exist really. I mean, it’s more a theory about fighting fascism. People think that, you know, there’s a group with the word Antifa on their letterhead and…

Grumbine (36:28):

You mean to tell me you’re not like General Kimberley of the Antifa Squad of the Northeast? (laughter)

Kimberley (36:36):

Now there is no such thing. They think Antifas set fires, you know, and you have the Trumpers coming out with guns and… And so that does cause concern. But I think people need to be encouraged, need to be told, how do we oppose that? Instead of being told that your only option is to vote for this horrible man and support this horrible party. That can’t be it.

But this is why they have the propaganda. That’s why they tell you that you’re just being a privileged white person if you dare suggest people not vote for Biden. Or they tell you that – oh my God, what else is it – that Trump will refuse to leave office? Which cracks me up because it presumes that Trump is going to lose, which isn’t clear to me. That he’ll refuse to leave office, or he’s gonna have martial law because Roger Stone said he should have martial law.

Why are people listening to Roger Stone? I mean, this is ridiculous. If Trump loses, he’s out – he’s gone – because there’s a wing of the ruling class who wants him gone. He is an inconvenience to them in some ways, and he’ll be out if he loses. Now, what he can do is ask for a recount, like the Democrats always refuse to do. It’s the Green Party who asked for votes to be counted in 2016. And in one of the three states that flipped, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, where the three – and I’m sorry, I’m forgetting which one – but they actually got the court.

And the judge said the Green Party did not have standing to bring the suit. And the Clinton people were there and didn’t say anything. So the judge turned to them and said “do you want a recount?” And they didn’t. So Trump could do that. It is going to be close. I think I’m going to predict this: with all of the voting by mail that’s going to happen this year, here in New York, where I live, everybody can vote absentee because of the concerns about COVID.

And we had a primary a few months ago – they did not finish counting all the votes until August. There were some close races that were not decided for two months, and that was just the primary. So one of the problems – I don’t think you’ll be able to call the race on election night. I don’t think so. So it could come down to the wire as to who is declared the president, and that’s not comforting.

But what I want people to do is to stand up to this corruption which put Trump in office in the first place and to show some courage. But first you have to realize in order to do that, you have to realize that one wing of the duopoly is not much different from another. And as long as you’re under this impression that Trump is this unique threat to humanity, it’s less likely that you’ll do it. And that’s why their campaign, such as it is, focuses on Trump so much.

Grumbine (39:32):

Let me ask you a little bit of a stretch of a question here. And I imagine there’s no real good way of answering this other than looking backwards and gauging whether or not it plays forward. But it seems like when George W. Bush was bombing Iraq and Afghanistan and Yemen and other places, that we had mass protests in the streets.

One of my favorite bands, System of a Down, had a great song called “Boom,” and they had shown every single one of the protests around the world, decrying the wars. Then as soon as Obama took office, the antiwar movement dried up to basically one guy standing on the corner with the John 3:16 sign and just being passed up and ignored.

It reminded me, sadly, of that nice gentleman who you see all the time in front of the White House with the anti-nuke stuff that people have just gotten so used to seeing there that they just kind of pass on by. And without having that number of people, it’s easy to just blow off people, making a fuss, so to speak, raising their hands with placards and so forth.

And it just seems like whenever Democrats win the White House, the Emily’s listers and the vast majority of that middle class bourgeoisie type, just go back to sleep, they start checking their 401k plans again, and they’re back to brunch, so to speak. Joe Biden himself, at a meeting with Wall Street friends, said nothing will fundamentally change.

And so my question to you is this: as someone who is a revolutionary, when I hear people talk about the concept of electoral politics, which I feel very powerless to impact, by the way, where do you see the most chance for revolution? Do you see it with Biden in office, or do you see it with Trump at all?

Kimberley (41:28):

I think it’s about even. The anti Iraq war movement was more anti-Bush and anti-Republican than it really was anti-war. That’s why it disappeared. And Obama said enough to give people the impression that he wouldn’t have done it. Although when he was asked by a New York Times reporter, “had you been in the Senate in 2002, how would you have voted?” And he said, “I don’t know.” But that was disappeared because how inconvenient is that?

And not only will they go back to brunch, so to speak, people say it at some protests, people have signs, “If Trump wasn’t president I could be at brunch now.” And people actually say this and write this. But I think when we talk about change, everybody wants to fetishize the civil rights movement, but nobody talks about what people actually did. During those years, people made concrete demands and they stuck with them. And they knew that they had an adversarial relationship with politicians and they didn’t care.

They knew that when they demanded the right to vote, or an end to segregation, or an end to housing discrimination, they knew that politicians didn’t want to do what they were demanding. But they demanded it anyway. And they worked cohesively en masse for years. And that is how those changes came about. I think the problem with electoral politics is that that should be what comes last. It’s the movement that has to come first to create the political crisis, to move politicians, because that is the only way they move.

That’s true not only of civil rights legislation, it’s true of the environment. Nixon gave us the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Why he gave it is because people were in the streets, there were millions of people. I was a kid, but I remember that there were people who had a campaign to defeat – they were called the dirty dozen. There were 12 Republicans that were targeted for defeat, and most of them lost. And then we got an EPA because of that.

So I think that’s what we have to remember. We can’t just fetishize the 60s and early 70s, we have to look at it and ask, well, what did people do that worked? And they ignored politicians. They made demands for what they needed. They weren’t shy about it. They did it year after year. People suffered personally. You mentioned Fred Hampton; people like him were murdered.

Someone reminded me the other day that after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which desegregated the schools, there were southern states that closed public schools, closed them to make sure there was no integration. So white kids got to go to these private academies and there were places where black kids literally could not go to school. But people persisted and they made these demands for years. And I think that’s what we have to remember about how things change in this country.

Grumbine (44:40):

I had a lady named Professor Camille Walsh, who wrote a book called “Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869 – 1973.” And she was just on, I guess, a couple of weeks back. And one of the things that we discussed was there is no legal right to an education in this country. There is no federal law that says you have a right.

And to your point, these types of tactics, by tying it to taxpayer dollars in the local communities that naturally… What do people think of as a taxpayer, right? They normally think of that as that white guy or the person that always does good. It’s a way of isolating and self-selecting the quote unquote good people versus the ne’er-do-goods over there.

And it’s that dynamic that has been going on since probably Bacon’s Rebellion. And, quite frankly, Reconstruction really laid this out. I’m just interested, from your perspective: every step along the way, every time there’s been an intersectional movement where – a class-based movement, as opposed to a race-based movement or any kind of grouping together of common interests – the oligarchs have managed to provide a wedge issue to splinter it and destroy it before it even gets started.

What do you think it would take to be able to overcome those wedge issues, to be able to get a class-based movement, to bring about the socialist change? Or do you think that’s completely not possible in this country? I look at black liberation and I wonder, as people are trying to decolonize their minds and trying to take back their power and trying to own things, how does a class-based movement work with black liberation and all that as we move forward, how do we pull all those disparate things together into a class struggle?

Kimberley (46:30):

Simple. Help everybody. That’s what the Democrats are still living off what FDR did in the 30s. But the Social Security system helped everybody. Just help everybody. I think most people who oppose Medicare for All, as an example, don’t really oppose it. That’s another piece of propaganda. Well, you may want Medicare for All, but other people won’t and they’ll vote against it. If you had a party that just said, that’s it, that’s what we’re going to do. That’s what we’re having.

Who doesn’t like Medicare? Everybody loves Medicare. Nobody likes having their money taken out of their paycheck. And then what do you get? My doctor told me last week, all of a sudden these insurance companies, there are things they don’t pay for anymore. They don’t pay for this medication or they won’t pay for this procedure. He told me – sounded very frustrated – he spends half his time on the phone with insurance companies, trying to get them to pay for things that people need.

People don’t want that. But if you just gave it to everybody, what would be the wedge issue? If everybody knew they had healthcare, just as an example, if public college was free, who wouldn’t like that? But we get the propaganda against it. So somebody will come on Twitter and say, “well, I paid back my student loans, why shouldn’t other people?”

And I always respond “I paid mine back, but I hope everybody’s are forgiven.” But that would be hugely popular. Just help everybody. Just establish that these are human rights that everyone’s entitled to and help everyone. That would cut out a lot of this. People might still be racist. They might still be sexist. But ultimately when you give them free healthcare for the rest of their lives, that would cut out a lot.

Grumbine (48:17):

So I want to ask you – kind of go into the final glide into the airport here – when you think of the Green Party, obviously the Green Party has been around for some time and they get a lot of flack. We’ve got the attacks because of Nader, “Oh Nader cost us the election,” which is crazy. But then there are some legitimate complaints in terms of, they say basically that the Green Party has no chance of winning, kind of thing.

And then I know the comeback to that is, well, if everybody voted Green, we’d win. But the flip side to that is I know Howie’s looking at, you know, hey, if we can get 5% of it, this elusive 5% of the vote. What is a strategy for a third party to take a meaningful bite out of the electoral process and really be a player? Does it really have to start local or is national politics where it’s at? How does the Green Party build, how does other…

You see Movement for a People’s Party? You had a nice grand celebrity kind of thing, shiny and so forth, but they aren’t a party. They don’t have candidates. They don’t have any of that stuff yet. The Green Party is the only non-duopoly-based progressive party that has any kind of power, but they’re struggling too. Help us understand how to make a third party matter to take on this duopoly that is really a single party, the capitalist party?

Kimberley (49:39):

Well, I think building locally, I think that’s important. That’s something we have to improve at the Green Party. We’ve got to get people elected; people have to see that yes, you can get people elected who are not Democrats or Republicans. I think that’s very important. But I think, again, having a movement will do that also.

And the Greens, I think we need to just identify ourselves with certain issues: the eviction crisis, what COVID-19 has done, or rather the response or lack of response, people out of work and some places can’t even collect the unemployment that they earned, about to lose their home or be kicked out of their apartment. I think those issues that are most essential to people’s lives – it’s the hierarchy of needs.

So if people are being evicted and you show up and you’re the party that’s going to fight evictions, well, then you become the most popular party or you can become that. So I think that’s something we have to do. This 5% that you refer to? Yes, if a party gets 5% of the vote, then they automatically qualify for matching federal funds. And that is a worthwhile goal.

But I think it’s more likely we will get that if people see us in action. But I also think – and I’m not trying to wish hard times on people – that as things deteriorate, we will have more support when it’s clear that neither party is going to help us. If Biden should win, I think it’s going to be clear very quickly that we’re not going to see a lot of change aside from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement being chosen by him instead.

We are going to get more war. I mean the military budget, that’s 60% of the budget. It’s why we can’t have nice things. And those of us who are not lulled to sleep and just want to go back to brunch so we don’t have to worry about the president sending tweets. That is the moment for us to speak up. We have to fight against this inertia that inevitably will cause people to want to go back to sleep if Biden is…

Grumbine (51:48):

I have a friend who works in the airline attendants union and he works with Sara Nelson. And you saw folks like Stephanie Kelton, and Darrick Hamilton, and even AOC on this unity commission, trying to pull the Sanders plan into the Biden plan and so forth. As you look at the outcomes of that, you had zero support for a federal job guarantee. You had zero support for Medicare for All. You had zero support for a Green Dream or whatever Pelosi called it in a Green New Deal.

You had zero support for any of the things that any of us push for. And yet you’ve got Howie and Angela who basically are putting that stuff out there without any kind of publicity other than people passing it around on social media. There’s no meaningful media coverage of that. It seems to me like we have got to find a way to create media outside of the mainstream that can meaningfully give representation as well, because the propaganda of the media is so intense that people don’t have five seconds of time.

Most people aren’t digging deep. Most people are still trapped in the Red Scare. So when someone says I’m an ecosocialist to the average person that has not been radicalized or has not experienced a lot of the stuff, who doesn’t have the deep political analysis… I mean, let’s be fair, I hang out in Green circles. We are not talking the language that everyday people talk. A lot of it is in a different realm that the average person doesn’t invest the time to learn. And so with that in mind, how do you message these things to people that are marginally awake?

Kimberley (53:39):

Well, that’s why it’s so important to have organizing. And that’s something that’s been lost over the years. And that should be easy for those of us who want to see it. This is our moment. People are hurting. People were hurting before. Half the workers in this country are low wage – if you have a wage. This gig economy nonsense.

I read something – it just broke my heart – where people who deliver for Amazon, they hang cell phones in a tree to confuse Amazon so that they all have a shot at making money. It was the craziest thing. And I said, well, this is where we are in a so-called advanced country. But people’s needs aren’t being addressed.

People were in bad shape before COVID-19. You don’t have to tell people that things are rough if they are out of unemployment and they can be evicted. You don’t have to explain politics to them. So this is the time for those of us who want to do these things to educate ourselves and help to organize it. And there are people out there organizing.

I don’t mean to say that that isn’t happening. It is happening, but we’ve all got to work together and amplify one another and have these local successes. And I believe we can break through. We can’t break through the New York Times MSNBC wall, but we may not need to. When people see that they have an alternative that there’s someone who’s got their back and is fighting.

Grumbine (55:08):

Yes. And with that, I’d be remiss not to pay a tribute to Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers’ longtime partner, and just a revolutionary guy who I’ve had the pleasure to work with a few times and have known for a number of years. I’m just curious, you know, if you would like to say a few words about Kevin’s passing,

Kimberley (55:28):

Sure. It was such a shock to me. It was Labor Day weekend, that Sunday, when I started to get word that he’d died suddenly the night before. It’s such a terrible loss. What he and Margaret and other people did in keeping the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC, out of the hands of the coup government. I mean, that’s the kind of thing he had been doing for decades.

Margaret had been a Green Party candidate, a physician, who obviously has fought for free healthcare for the people. They were involved in so many things. They were involved in – I didn’t even realize it. You can see it in Black Agenda Report last week. One of our writers, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo has this campaign to save an African American cemetery in Maryland. And Kevin was involved there also.

I have to say that the Defense Committee for the Venezuelan Embassy Protectors played a huge role in getting them good representation, and they had to only plead guilty to a minor charge, a misdemeanor, I believe. And that’s an example of organizing indeed. But he was active in the Green Party. He was always there. They were always there for every struggle. And I’m going to miss him as a person.

Not only is it huge loss for the movement, it’s obviously a huge loss for Margaret Flowers and everyone who loved him. But when people pass away, it’s a reminder that we need to get stuff done. This is not a dress rehearsal, and this is the time to put up or shut up for those of us who want change. But “Kevin Zeese – Presente!” and we should all try to live up to his example.

Grumbine (57:10):

I really appreciate that. Margaret, let us know – what are you up to? I know you’ve been writing. What do we have to look forward to with you here and in the future?

Kimberley (57:17):

Sure. Well, everybody should read Black Agenda Report every week. BlackAgendaReport.com every Wednesday. People should read my book. I wrote a book earlier this year, “Prejudential: Black America, and the Presidents” that you can get at a local bookstore. You can get it online. If you’ve got issues with Amazon, you can also get it directly from publisher Steerforth Press – steerforh.com. I’m on Patreon. Isn’t everybody? Patreon.com/margaretkimberley. And I’m on Twitter. My handle is @freedomrideblog.

Grumbine (57:51):

Awesome. With that, look, I want to thank you so much for joining me. It’s always a pleasure. I hope we can talk again real real soon.

Kimberley (57:59):

Thank you so much.

Grumbine (58:01):

All right. This is Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese, Margaret Kimberley, we’re out of here.

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