Every week Grant Reeher, Director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University, leads a conversation with a notable guest. Guests include people from central New York — writers, politicians, activists, public officials, and business professionals whose work affects the public life of the community — as well as nationally-prominent figures visiting the region to talk about their work.
Wawa Gatheru on the Campbell Conversations
Jul 13, 2024
Wawa Gatheru
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Wawa Gatheru. Ms. Gatheru is the founder of Black Girl Environmentalist, a national organization dedicated to empowering black girls, women and nonbinary people across the climate sector. In 2019, she was named the first black person in history to receive the prestigious Rhodes, Truman and Udall scholarships, all three of them. Since then, she's received a number of young leadership recognitions and awards. Ms. Gatheru, welcome to the program.
Wawa Gatheru: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk with you today.
GR: Well, we're excited to have you. Let me just start with one thing, we know already that you're very smart, I think I just proved that. Where did you win all these scholarships? Where was your undergraduate experience?
WG: Yeah, so I'm a proud alum of the illustrious University of Connecticut, Storrs. That's where I did my undergrad.
GR: Excellent, okay. And you did the Rhodes Scholarship, was the one you chose, which makes perfect sense. And I think the Truman was one that you get sort of while you're an undergraduate, is that right? You were able to receive that scholarship at Connecticut, right?
WG: Yes. So the Truman Scholarship is a public service scholarship so it's awarded to undergraduate juniors that have shown exceptional promise in the space of public service and have a track record and hopefully will continue to carry that on throughout the rest of their career.
GR: All right. So the Rhodes is the one everyone's heard of. And what did you study at Oxford?
WG: So I studied major society and environmental governance. So that was a masters where we really focused on environmental governance and have the opportunity to understand what that looks like from a global perspective, it’s very insightful.
GR: Well, perfect for what you're doing, so great, okay. So, briefly tell me how and why you started this organization, Black Girl Environmentalist.
WG: Yeah. So the idea of BGE, Black Girl Environmentalist, was definitely seeded throughout my experience in the environmental space. I was 15 when I really knew in my heart that I had found my calling and I knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to climate solutions. And throughout my time as a young person navigating the climate sector, I had an incredible experience obviously, I'm still here. But there were many instances that reminded me of the leadership crisis that our space really suffers from and even though people of color make up nearly, I think, 40% of the U.S. population, we rarely see a 12 to 16% green ceiling of representation and that is definitely seen and felt when you're in environmental or climate rooms. And so I kept asking myself the question, if we know that communities of color, people of color and women of color in particular, are experiencing the brunt of environmental injustices in our country and abroad, why is it that we're not adequately represented in climate leadership? Why is it that the next generation of climate leaders don't look like a representation of the United States? And so that was a big tension point throughout my journey. And when I completed my master's at Oxford and fall of 2022, I was confronted with the possibility of spending a year turning what, at that point was an Instagram page and Instagram community, into a functioning, fully operational nonprofit that could attempt to address this very unique pipeline and pathway issue in the climate sector. And so I decided to, instead of accepting a job offer that would have provided me financial security, spend a year dedicated to spreading the word on BGE, building out our programing and fundraising. And I told myself that if I wasn't able to fundraise enough to hire myself, then at least two people full time within a year, I would essentially go back crawling to whoever would take me for a job, and I'd keep the organization as an Instagram page. And somehow we were able to do that and we're still going strong with full time staff.
GR: That's great. So, a follow up question on that, but just to underline something that you said at the beginning about the field being dominated by white people. You know, I've had a number of folks on the program in the years that I've been doing it to talk about environmental issues and you prompted me to go back really quickly and think, and they were all white. So you are the first person of color to be on this program to be talking about environmental issues. So it just kind of underlines your point there. You said that people of color bear the heavier brunt of environmental injustices and problems. Could you say a little bit more about that because when I think of some of the environmental concerns, you know, global warming and everything, I don't necessarily think of them in those terms, so help me better understand that.
WG: Yeah, so I mean, there's so many different ways that we can look at this. The origins of the climate crisis in a formal environmental course, we really look at the industrial revolution as being the starting point of the climate crisis particularly, and the rapid increase of greenhouse gases and the way that we really see our economy industrialized in this very specific way and how that launched the US in particular into an era of wealth and really solidified it as one of the most wealthy nations in the world, if not the most wealthy. But I would say, if we took from a historical perspective, the climate crisis did not begin there, right? The Industrial Revolution didn't pay for itself. We think about the abolishment of slavery and what a tectonic economic shift it was. It required the US to really launch itself into a new economic system that did not remove itself from a system of exploitation. So we went from a system of exploiting black and brown bodies to continuing to exploit black and brown bodies, not in the same way, but still doing so while also exploiting the land and our resources at a level that we have not been able to keep up with. And a lot of environmental strands can really trace the legacy of chattel slavery, colonialism, imperialism as being huge, grounding fundamental systems that have led us into this crisis. And because those systems are born out of exploitation, the climate crisis and staying true to its origins and roots, does not impact us all the same. I often say the climate crisis, even though we're all in the same storm that is a climate crisis we aren't all in the same boat, meaning that the climate crisis is a threat multiplier. It does create a lot of new problems for people, and it certainly impacts all different types of people. But depending on your social status, socio-economic status, race, gender, et cetera, your relationship with it is different. We often talk about climate change as being a threat multiplier. And, you know, when we dive into that term, it really means that the climate crisis intensifies all existing social threats. So even if the climate crisis wasn't in the picture, right, we understand that there are communities that tend to be poor. There are communities that have been targeted by systemic inequalities. There are communities that are more likely to experience poverty, and then when you bring the climate crisis on top of that, those issues grow larger. And the gaps between those with and those without continues to grow. And so people of color tend to be on the end of the have-nots when the climate crisis is brought into the mix, again that gap continues to grow larger. A really good example is heat. Right now, we're still in a heat wave. It's kind of crazy to think about, right? We're at day six, I think, to summer. And we are already seeing headlines of people losing their lives to heat. But the thing is with heat, heat does not impact us all equally, right? When we think about the very real legacy of redlining even though redlining is illegal, we still are living out the ramifications of these racist policies. There is research that shows that previously redlined communities that are still predominantly black and brown and low income are actually hotter than communities that weren't previously redlined. And that's because redlined communities were designated for a lot of concrete infrastructure. Warehouses highways, lack of green space. And then if you look at communities that weren't previously redlined and were able to access investment, there's a lot of green space. There is a lot of canopy cover, there's a lot of infrastructure that mitigates extreme heat. And because of that, we can quite literally see that a neighborhood that was previously redlined just a couple of blocks from a predominantly white community that wasn't previously redlined, people are experiencing heat very differently. And that's just like a real tangible example. But, you know, even if we bring in pregnant people into the mix, right? We already have a black maternal health crisis, we already know that black mothers and their babies are disproportionately impacted by our broken health care system. But heat really, really impacts pregnant and birthing people and their babies. And so if you add that on top of the mix, right, a black mother and a black baby in a community that was previously redlined, that is low income, that is hotter, is going to experience that heat differently than a white mother in a neighborhood that wasn't previously redlined, has canopy and tree cover to mitigate extreme heat and likely also has better access to health care in ways that the black mother doesn't have.
GR: Yeah, I could see how the threat multiplier there comes into it. And my mind went to something further back in time when you were talking about this, which was the differential impact of Hurricane Katrina.
WG: Right.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Wawa Gatheru, the founder of Black Girl Environmentalist. So, what would you regard as your organization's biggest success so far, other than building it, obviously, which was a challenge. But now, you know, now that it's built, what's the thing that you would point to with the most pride?
WG: The thing that I would point to with the most pride is, you know, building it, I would say. And the reason why is I don't think people realize how dire philanthropy is for the climate space. Climate is the least funded issue item out there, which is really scary when we think about organizations, groups that are leading on climate solutions that are simply not able to scale and don't have the capacity to do so because of funding. And youth climate organizations are in a really, really interesting predicament and which constantly, we're told, you are the future, you're going to save us from ourselves. And then simultaneously we receive .76 percent of climate philanthropy of the very little there is, we receive .76, and most of that funding is located within the United States. So, we are an organization that is primarily focused in the United States, right? And even then, there's a disparity where my fellow brothers and sisters that are leading incredible work elsewhere are really not getting any funding. So the fact that we were able to raise enough capital to have full time staff and to be able to lead programing, in and of itself is great, but it certainly has been a burden in navigating. But very specifically, I would see our Hazel and Johnson Fellowship program is something that I'm very, very proud of. It initially launched just a couple of months ago. It's a summer program where we have placed 14 current college students or recent graduates at leading environmental organizations for the summer where they are receiving financial support, mentorship and professional development at a scale that really isn't normal in our space. Unpaid internships are thankfully becoming less and less popular, but there is still an issue around college students or recent graduates being able to access these internships or summer opportunities that are really, really critical and being able to obtain your first early career job. Because, A, if they are paid, they don't always tend to be able to correlate with the high costs of living. Two, if you have to relocate, many of the places that are very popular for internships are very expensive already. And the other issue is that students may not know how to really leverage the experience if they're in there. So with our fellowship, all the partner organizations are paying our fellows at least $18 an hour, and only one fellow is actually receiving that, most of them are receiving at least $20 an hour, up to $25 an hour. On top of that, Black Girl Environmentalists, our organization has equipped the bills with a $5,000 living wage stipend to support those fees as well. We are providing them weekly professional development, 3 hours a week, where we get to introduce them to different topics that are pertinent to where they are in the early career journey, and then also expose them to other things that could help them as they develop, as well as partnering each of the fellows up with the mentor. And we're finishing up the summer with an in-person retreat in Washington State, where we'll be able to really share about the experiences that folks had over the summer. Folks will get to connect in person or be able to plan ahead for how our alumni program can continue to support these individuals. It's been a really, really incredible journey to see the program start from an idea into this pipeline that is being recognized and where folks are participating from all over the country. We have HBCU students, we have state school students, we have Ivy League students, students that are utilizing this platform to really get their foot in the door. And our partner organizations are just incredible. We have everyone from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign, Harvard's Salata Institute, The Climate Trust, WWF, Rare (Environmental), across disciplines from renewable energy to environmental justice to policy. And we really wanted for folks to be able to have a wide selection of what type of discipline they wanted to get into, as well as start off in a place that can really help bring them to the next level.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Wawa Gatheru. She’s the founder of Black Girl Environmentalist, a national organization dedicated to empowering black girls, women and nonbinary people across the climate (spectrum). I just wanted to mention before the break you were talking about your fellowship program, and I just want to give you compliments here because I run an internship program at Syracuse University, but the way you've thought this through, inserting the mentoring into it and the big meeting afterward where people can compare their experiences, that's really nicely done. I just want to say good work on that.
WG: Thank you.
GR: What's been your biggest challenge so far outside of building the organization? I wonder whether it was getting people of color more interested in this or what's been the thing that's been toughest to get around for you?
WG: Yeah, you know, it hasn't been that last point. And it's so interesting because I think there is this narrative around people of color that sometimes we believe as well, like as people of color where it's like, oh, like, black folks don't go outside or don't go camping or don't care about the environment, or people of color don't do those things, when in reality it's not true. Like, we have polling that shows that people of color overwhelmingly do care about climate action, do care about how, for example, political candidates are talking about climate change. Actually, more than our white counterparts. In fact, Latin communities are the most concerned about environmental protection than any demographic. So it's always so interesting that when we think about environmentalism, it typically isn't that communities of color that again, arguably do care the most. I find that the issue or the biggest burden that I've had to face in the past several years with BGE and then overall is combating that narrative. And then also really combating that narrative and really asserting why an organization like this is so important. I tend to get a lot of questions about why I focus on what I focus on. People ask, why women? Why black women? Why black girls? Why not stick it to the tree? That's one I get a lot. You know, like race has nothing to do with climate action or climate protection, why exactly are you being divisive? And so I find that a lot of my job is to, specifically when it comes to overcoming narratives, is to really provide a historical grounding into the ways in which people of color have always been involved in our stewardship, have always been environmentalists, and remind folks of that continuing legacy. And then also to share that history with other folks of color and other black folks, because it's always been, again, this moment of a feeling of tension that I have experienced. But as I continue to meet more and more and more black girl environmentalists, I hear the same thing back. Where so many other people also have this lived experience of being like, this is so strange, like at home, we always recycle and like we always talked about how important it was to take care of the planet, we always understood that protecting the planet always meant protecting people, too. But the prevailing narrative has left us out. And so it's been a burden, but then it's also been an opportunity to connect with other people and build community over the fact that so many of us have been exposed to this narrative and yet, in the midst of it, have continued to persevere and continue to really take up space and really show the movement at large that in order for the climate movement to be successful, we need a movement made in the image of all of us and one that speaks to everyone.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is Wawa Gatheru. She's an environmentalist and she founded the organization, Black Girl Environmentalist. Now, your constituency, as you listed on your website and elsewhere, is black girls, black women, but then also nonbinary people. So I just wanted to ask you why that was part of your focus. Do you see some sort of natural connection between the issues of bringing those first two groups into this conversation and the last one, nonbinary?
WG: Yeah, ultimately, right? Marginalized groups, folks that are made marginalized by our prevailing systems, we experience not just the climate crisis, but a lot of other issues differently than other groups, right? And it's really interesting because if you look at data or information that we have around gender, it very clearly points the fact that women of any race experience climate change with disproportionate severity because enforced gender inequality makes us more susceptible to escalating environmental stressors. At the same time, we know that women, when women are in positions of leadership in the environmental space or at large, we see better conservation outcomes when women are taking up space in national parliaments. We actually see more robust climate policies come through. So that's very, very clear in the research. But what's so interesting is that gender expansive nonbinary folks aren't even included in the research. There is a huge gap in the literature around how gender expansive and nonbinary folks and other gender minorities are experiencing the climate crisis and environmental hazards. And that in and of itself says everything that I need to know, right? If folks aren't even being included in the research, in the metrics, aren't being validated as a demographic, then of course, you know, of course, they're experiencing these things at disproportionate levels because they're not even being understood as people with lived experiences that need to be recognized. And so Black Girl Environmentalist as an organization, we are trying to make sure that black folks that have been left out, black gender minorities that have been left out of environmental leadership, out of environmental narratives, out of being understood as leaders of today and tomorrow, we are reconfiguring what that is. We're saying no, that we are leaders were leaders today we are leaders tomorrow, and we are creating opportunities for these folks to be seen, to be invested in, to build community. So for me, it's a very natural progression and it's a very natural part of our community.
GR: I get a sense of what your organization does and you mentioned the fellowship program and developing leadership and focusing on these groups. What's your long term hope or vision for this movement or organization?
WG: Well, to be honest, my long term hope / vision is that we won't have to exist (laughter). Like ultimately, right? All of us in the climate space, no matter who you are, no matter what your race is, we are trying to solve the climate crisis, right? So a long term goal is that we solve the climate crisis and that folks that have dedicated their life to climate solutions can focus on something else. My dream, if I wasn't in climate, I would have been a jazz singer, that's what I wanted to do my whole life. But, yeah, the climate crisis kind of got in the way of that dream. So maybe one day you'll find me out in some smoky bar singing Amy Winehouse, because we solved the climate crisis. As an organization, right, the goal is that we have a climate movement made in the image of all of us. I want for a black girl to be able to look at the climate space as a viable option for them and not to be deterred because they are going into workspaces or going into rooms that don't look like them and don't recognize how the climate crisis is impacting their communities most directly. And so if we get to that point, then I'd be happy to close the doors on BGE and have us focus on other things, but we're not there yet. And ultimately, our goal now really is to continue to create these pipelines to continue to cultivate communities and ecosystems of care for our members to build alongside each other, to build community, and for folks to know that the green economy space, that climate space is for them, and that there is room for them and that they are needed for the viability of our movement.
GR: I don't want to sound too pessimistic, but I'm going to guess that the climate problem and environmental issues are going to remain challenges beyond my lifetime for sure, but also probably throughout yours. So I don't know whether you're going to get to the jazz singing or not (laughter).
WG: You know, I think maybe there's some future I can do both. But for now…
GR: Okay. I have to ask you this question as a young leader. You may not like it, but I'm going to ask it anyway. President Biden, he's instituted some policies that environmentalists have applauded, and they've involved some fights. At the same time, though, among young people, his age is creating unease and lack of enthusiasm. And of course, that, you know, obviously came to a head with a debate performance. What do you, as a young leader make of the age issue in this regard?
WG: That's such an interesting question. And the way that you posed it…
GR: ...You’ve got to answer quick, I'm sorry.
WG: Ah, it's a big question, right? Because I think there is this narrative around young climate organizers or activists feeling some sort of resentment towards older generations. And I think that is a totally incorrect narrative. It does not speak to how movements work, right? Like, I am in this movement because of older people that have taken me under their wing and have quite literally paved the path for me and I'm on their shoulders. I think this question about President Biden and his age and his performance, I think it's a valid one for people to have. I personally am not focusing on his age when it comes down to me being someone that would vote for him. I'm voting off of climate and reproductive justice and so that's where my vote is. Again, I do think that while it's a valid conversation around the lack of representation of young people in our political system and the energy that we bring, oftentimes because of our youth, I do feel like are some ageist narratives that are going about that, take us away from the issues that we should be focusing on. There are things that we can critique for sure, and age can be one of them. Personally, that’s not my number one deterrent right now.
GR: Okay, we’ll have to leave it there. That was Wawa Gatheru and again, her organization is Black Girl Environmentalist. Ms. Gatheru, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, I really enjoyed the conversation.
WG: Thank you for having me.
GR: You’ve been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Rep. Marc Molinaro on the Campbell Conversations
Jul 08, 2024
Mark Molinaro
This week on the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Rep. Marc Molinaro, a Republican who represents New York's 19th Congressional District. An independent organization recently ranked Molinaro as the 2nd most bipartisan member of the House of Representatives, and the 5th most productive.
Program Transcription:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is New York Congressman Mark Molinaro. The Republican was elected in November 2022 to represent the 19th district. It's a large geographic area that spans from Ithaca and Cortland and the west to the Massachusetts border in the east, and includes the city of Binghamton and the southwest, among other political offices and experiences. The congressman was a Republican candidate for governor of New York state, and he has previously appeared on the program. Congressman Molinaro, welcome back and it's good to see you again.
Marc Molinaro: Glad to be back with you, Grant. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
GR: Oh. You bet. Thanks for making the time. So let me just start with, happenings from this week. I was curious if there was anything in the congressional primaries in New York that caught your eye or that you think are worthy of note?
MM: Well, I mean, certainly in my neck of the woods, your neck of the woods, just the, you know, obviously the selection of the Democratic candidate in the 22nd Congressional District of of significance that was a heated, primary. Of course, I support Brandon Williams. But, that that's been settled and now they're off and running. But I think most of the eyes of, of America were focused on, the heated primary, in, in Westchester County, and, into New York City, the Jamaal Bowman seat. George Latimer, you know, I, I don't I don't try to be a pundit. I just would offer that I think most voters want responsible members, of, responsible individuals representing them. And I just think that, they've had enough of, Bowman's antics. And then what was clearly, you know, frankly, anti-Semitic, commentary and even some policy in practice that just, you know, undermines, alienated and insulted, significant portion of his, his district. And it just goes, to, I think make a broader point we are in a moment as a country of choosing and let's let's take the politics out. Let's just, you know, when it comes to our fellow man or woman, the concept that we extend respect, irrespective of the religious, personal beliefs, critically important, the fact that, we in America are almost revisiting some of the, the hate and and anti-Semitism of the 1930s and 40s. It is frightening. it's frightening, obviously, to a lot of Jewish Americans. But it's frightening to, you know, moms and dads and, and everyone else who just want, to be a nation that embraces one another. And I think that that really, obviously impacted that race and that district is likely to send a more moderate, you know, Democrat to Congress.
GR: Yeah. No, I appreciate that. So, let me turn to some of the things that, you've been up to lately and, and you've been invested in. I understand that you have been pretty heavily involved in the Farm Bill. Which I believe, if I understand correctly, would be the first major sort of reworking of that law, since 2018. So, tell our listeners, first of all, about the importance of this bill for central New York and then what we should be aware of regarding it.
MM: Sure. So first, the Farm Bill is America's, agriculture policy. We actually, have to reauthorize it every five years. It's long enough to provide some stability, for farmers, but short enough to allow us to pivot and evolve to, to to address new, new challenges. I'm thrilled, you know, after having, town hall meetings, 11 town hall meetings, three listening sessions, specifically with farmers on farm bill development. As a member of the Agriculture Committee, that we we, developed and adopted a bipartisan Farm Bill that does a lot to help upstate New York farmers. And and so farming in New York is a little bit different than other parts of the country where smaller acreage, acreages, we kind of fit our farms in where we can. Although agriculture remains the largest industry in upstate New York, when you combine it with agricultural tourism, it's the largest industry in the state of New York. and then add to that weather conditions, infrastructure limitations, workforce challenges, and then regulations out of the state of New York. Upstate farmers are really pressed. Now, we obviously specialize in specialty crops and dairy, fruits, vegetables, Christmas tree farms, and of course dairy farms and so the Farm Bill, as has been adopted by the committee, again, bipartisan, includes ten separate provisions that I wrote to support upstate farmers. Everything, by the way, from expanding access to families with individuals with disabilities, to provide support, to enter and remain in that workforce in farming, to enhancing the dairy margin, coverage to ensure that we're providing more accurate and more robust support to dairy farmers, in order to make up those losses. Right. We don't set the pricing. They don't set the pricing for their product. And so there are times where they're just under water and dairy margin coverage provides assistance, to, to issues addressing climate resiliency. So, that's on the farm side. But the bill also includes, support for those who struggle accessing good quality food options. Snap Benefits of formerly food stamps, represent about 80% of the Farm Bill. And so as a former county executive that spent 12 years administering food stamps in the state of New York, the states administer the program and as a as a kid who grew up on food stamps myself, it was very important to me that the bill not only makes smart investments to support farming and farmers, but that we enhance the tools necessary to help people get from, independence, excuse me, from dependance, to a greater level of independence. And so the Farm Bill does not cut food stamps. It actually increases food stamps $6 billion over five years. and, three basic provisions. I just want to point to that, that expand access. Number one helps upstate New York. seniors, bill that I wrote allows for more delivery of food stamp related, fruits and vegetables to to rural and isolated seniors and families that, that may struggle. Secondly, provision that, expands access and support to food pantries and food banks, allowing broader capacity to assist. And then third, increasing the age of a child in home, who can remain, who can gain an income and remain on and supported by food stamps. What does that mean? Currently, when you hit 17 years old, we start to, draw you off of, those benefits. But 17-year-olds, of course, might still be in school. And if you are an individual with a special education requirement, you might be in school until you're 21. So we increase the the limit to to age 21. If you have a part-time job or you're still remaining at home that isn't credited against you, and your family, if you are supported by food stamp benefits. And so what we do here is broaden access, broaden the, the commitment and add more dollars to food stamps. Really in a way, to try to help people get, greater access to quality food product, greater food, and nutritional literacy. And then ultimately, we want to move people from where they are to a level of independence that allows them to thrive and survive, and really, really be successful as individuals.
GR: I want to come back to something that I heard as kind of a subtheme through what you were saying, and that is the concern that you have. And we've talked about for, individuals with different kinds of disabilities, physical and, and mental. And I see how you've woven that into what you write. Well, yeah. you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Congressman Mark Molinaro. He represents New York's 19th congressional district. the other thing I wanted to ask you about is the fentanyl epidemic and related opioid overdoses. They continue to plague the nation. It continues to be an increasing problem. And it seems like for whatever set of reasons it is, particularly vicious in rural areas. And it's been hitting upstate New York. So I understand you've been active on this front. Tell me a little bit about what you've been, trying to do there.
MM: Yeah, I offer in New York, the 19th Congressional District is the epicenter of the fentanyl and synthetic opioid overdose crisis, with, incidents of overdose on the on the climb. But upstate New York, facing this challenge. And by the way, every family is affected. we many times don't want to acknowledge it, but every family is affected either by, some, mental health related issue that leads to substance use or substance use disorder itself. And so, and so for us, you know, there's a couple of things we've got to do. Clearly fentanyl and synthetic opioids are coming over the border. Yes, they come from entry, but we know that they are they are flooding the border and they're being trafficked by individuals, who really manipulate the system. We've got to secure the border in a very smart way. Technology, physical and staff, and we've got to make clear that if you're coming into this country and you're seeking asylum, there's a process for that. We need that to work. So I do take issue with both the president, creating a crisis, undoing a lot of the protections we had at our border that led to, about 11 million individuals crossing into into the country. But I also take issue with some of the policies in Albany, in New York state, New York City, that that's incentivized this kind of behavior. And again, there are good people coming into our country that deserve to be, in line, go through the, the asylum-seeking process, enter under legal means, and access work and benefits and become great Americans. But then there are those who are simply flooding in without any kind of, background or coordination with, with the federal government or local governments that we're seeing that pour into our, we're seeing drugs pour into our, our country that's not made up. Law enforcement talks about it, border security talks about it. We also, though, have to focus on ensuring that we give resources, why I support, appropriations, new dollars for local law enforcement to advance drug task force. We need to intercede, in our communities and that law enforcement agencies need to be able to work together in order to respond to that. And then with that, laws in New York, like cashless bail, make it very difficult for prosecutors to intervene. So if you make it a lower-level offense, we don't want to put somebody in jail for a marijuana offense. But if we have a lower-level drug trafficker right now in New York, most of that will never find its way to court until they become a higher-level offender. We can intervene early, which will get me my last point. We intervene early. We not only break the cycle of sales and hold somebody accountable for law enforcement, but we could intervene with mental health and substance use disorder, treatment, which is why I support, a robust prevention, intervention, diversion and transitionary programming. Everything from the kind of, treatment centers that we built in Dutchess County when I was county executive, which is now the model, to recovery coaches, access to naloxone, getting the state of New York to approve opvee, which is a new, overdose-deterring drug, and using all of those tools in a coordinated way. I'll close this, this one segment by just saying, you know, there are two things that we have to do better. We've got to talk about the reality. Nobody chooses to be addicted to drugs. There are people who choose to use drugs, but they don't choose to spend their lives addicted to them. And we've got to confront, the stigma associated in our own lives, in our own families, with not wanting to be good interveners. Right. What we we need to be sure that we're willing as individuals to take steps to intervene. And we want our government to stand shoulder to shoulder with us, which is why we also need not only enforcement, but treatment. And those treatment options need to be community-based, they need to be medical and non-medical based. And they need to understand and be available to rural communities, which is why I support broadening access, to telemedicine for everything from, traditional telemedicine to behavioral health, and even, using, Medicaid support easing using, telemedicine, for Medicaid related services, which often provide assistance to those living with mental illness or substance use disorder.
GR: I want to squeeze in one last question before the break, and I know this is something you could talk for a very long time on, but, I want to try to ask you some questions about, Congress and sort of the more national picture n the second half. But the last thing I wanted to ask you about in terms of these things you've been involved in and this is a, something that is close to your heart, I know, and and certainly something I'm interested in too. And I've mentioned that, but you're thinking differently. And instead of just tell me, tell me what's going on with that, why it's important and then we'll get on to some some national.
MM: Stuff I should. So, like you, I'm personally, impacted, and and have a family member living with, with a disability. But in 2014, we launched Think Differently in my home county. Again, became a national model for how to engage the community in breaking down barriers and creating opportunities for those with intellectual, physical, and developmental disabilities. When I came to Congress, I said this was going to be a priority. This is the population, as you know, that have an 80% unemployment rate, those with disabilities, 80% unemployed. Even though they can work, we have to be sure that we provide them opportunity to do so. Access to housing, the challenges for families. And despite the billions upon billions of dollars that we provide for special education and supportive services, it is still a labyrinth and maze of very difficult, policies, and services to access and families are left struggling. And so I make I've made this a priority we’ve proposed, a dozen separate bills with the Think Differently moniker. But but everything from the Think Differently Transportation Act to ensure that we're breaking down physical and by the way, intellectual, barriers, for those who need to access public transportation, to thinking differently about emergencies, which is to arm and enhance emergency response for families and individuals living with disabilities, to agra-ability or Think Differently About Farming Bill, which which would expand the supports that exist within the agricultural industry, to welcome individuals with disabilities to the workforce. I could go on, but I will tell you that, to your point earlier, we weave it in, whether it's the National Defense Authorization Act, which, we wrote language that would broaden support for for military families, with those that are neurodivergent or living with disabilities to standard appropriations, to getting letters with Democratic colleagues, to the architect of the Capitol to to to do appropriate curb cuts where they have crosswalks and we've tried to make it a critically, a large focus of the work we do, because if we’re not, others aren't right? There are a good number of us in Congress who do pay attention to these issues but as a dad of a child now, an adult child, with a disability, I just know that families face these challenges every single day. I mean, you know, every single day from waking up in the morning to going to getting to bed and bathing at night, these are challenges that people face. And this population is often been left on the sideline. I don't want that to happen. And so we've added to all of our legislation, and into all of our initiatives because it's that important.
GR: Well, thanks for that. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Republican Congressman Mark Molinaro, who represents New York's 19th congressional district. So let me ask you this question about you. You were recently ranked the second most bipartisan member of Congress by Georgetown's Lugar Center. In listening to your discussion of food stamps, if we had just taken that little clip and then said, who is speaking? Most people probably would have said a Democrat. So how have you, how have you gone about, your job to earn that ranking?
MM: Yeah. Well, first, I think that government ought to be smaller and more effective. And using food stamps by the way, as an example, as a tool to help people get from dependence to independence is a very smart, way of ensuring people have had the experiences of, of their own rights and their own liberties and their own independence. But, I've said this from the from the day I was elected. I'll work with anyone who's honest and earnest about solving the problems that face the people that we represent. And so, I don't come into conversations prejudging another colleague. If we have a shared goal, I work together, which is why, yes, I've been acknowledged as the second most bipartisan member. And I've been delivering on everything from mental health services, to support for law enforcement. Almost every provision I've written, and we we've had about 37 provisions adopted by the House. 11 now, adopted by the House and Senate, signed into law, almost all of them bipartisan, because I think it's that important. I think most of the challenges we face as individuals aren't left or right, you know, blue or red, they're simply, pragmatic, solutions are very pragmatic, and need to confront the challenges. And, and so, in our case, we just I'll just work with anybody to get the job done. And frankly, we've been successful in doing it.
GR: Yeah, you've already I the other thing I want to ask you about, but, you just answered it was you were also ranked by the Congressional Research Service as one of the five most productive members of Congress this session. So you just explained, why that's the case.
MM: So it is, and I'll say quickly, right. 37 provisions, five standalone bills, 11, of those total adopted into law, either as part of larger bills that we've moved or stand-alone. And, I think the job here is to try to make government respect the people it serves and and try to be responsive to the challenges we face. And I'm working hard to do that.
GR: So so let me ask you this, though. You those two rankings demonstrate that you are both bipartisan and effective. So it can be done. So my question to you is why don't more members of Congress seem to take this approach?
MM: Well many do. They don't necessarily get the same. They don't get it, we don't often get attention. But I listen, I think that politics today is fueled by division. And it's not just the politicians that are divided, it's the public and the public accepting that things are are one way or the other, right? Black or white, left or right. And so I just would say that I think when you keep your head down, your eyes forward, and you just earnestly work toward a goal, it is clear that you can achieve that. We can get legislation passed, we can mold consensus around certain issues, irrespective of ideology, and we can get communities like ours the attention and respect that they deserve. And so, you know, I, I fight hard and people know that if I need to throw a punch, I'll throw a punch. But I also call balls and strikes. And if you're, on one side of the aisle and you're saying or doing the wrong thing, I might. I might say it, but I also will work again with anybody who wants to get the job done. And I think that to the to your point, it'd be good if more people, focused on that.
GR: I think I think a lot of people feel that way. So, the last thing on this topic and I want to ask you about some big national questions. This may seem like a strange question, but when I look at your rankings and I look at the issues that you're focusing on opioids, mental health, and, and put that all together, you remind me a lot of John Katko, who used to represent what is now the 22nd district of New York.
MM: I'm I'm much funnier and better looking. So, no, don't quote me, please.
GR: But I my my question is, do you guys talk? I mean, do you guys do you guys stay in touch now that he's out?
MM: First I will tell you that I take advice from a lot of people. John is among them. And by the way, I will say this out loud, the entire spectrum, I welcome good ideas from from good people. And so, yeah, John and I talked my, my former, my, my predecessors I talked to, Chris Gibson, quite, quite often John Faso, of course, and I'll let you in on a little secret there. Good number of Democrats who, we have my ear as well. And, I think it's important to learn from from others experiences.
GR: Okay. Right. If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Congressman Mark Molinaro. So let me ask you a question. You talked about immigration and the need to secure the border better in terms of fentanyl, among other reasons. Do you expect a renewed effort, on immigration and the border, regardless of the outcome of the November elections, do you think that will be on the agenda for 2025?
MM: This president hasn't shown a real desire, to confront the crisis that that he did create. And so, you know, I, I, I'll be I'll be very, you know, sort of blunt about it. There were protections in place, like them or not, if you go back, all the way to, to George H.W. Bush, this country had certain basic protections at the border that President Biden undid by executive order and then spent three and a half years saying that he had no way of of of fixing that. Well, he he did by issuing executive orders and then, of course, he issued executive orders to undo the damage, but quite frankly, doesn't go far enough. And this isn't about being cruel. In fact, I think the the policy that this president has allowed is cruel. It says to people it is okay to traffic human lives and it is okay to traffic, drugs because we know who's controlling the southern border. It is the cartels from Mexico. And I know this firsthand. When I went down to the border, it was clear from local law enforcement, Republican and Democrat leaders, Border Patrol, the border is is controlled by and we have surrendered this border to drug cartels. And so knowing the game, they know how to manipulate the system and send thousands upon thousands of people in, and sadly overburdened the system. And the president was slow to act to to give Border Patrol the kind of support they need to conduct the the background searches and the asylum-seeking process which could happen, Remain in Mexico and the partnership we had with Mexico allowed that to happen actually at the border and then did one thing that was even more offensive. And I know there are those who who get upset when I say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. I don't like when states put people in busses and planes and transport port them to other countries. So therefore I do not like that the federal government has been doing it in mass. 80% of the people being transported to other cities and states around the country without the background checks, without the asylum review process, or being done so by the federal government at the direction of the administration. That is not right. It is not healthy, it is not safe. And then it puts this burden on states like like New York, New York, sanctuary city policy, is is absurd. On one hand they say, come, on the other hand they say, yeah, we didn't actually mean it. And what that has created is this crisis, that treats human souls with disregard, the souls that are coming across the border. Clearly, if we cared about human lives, we would crack down on that trafficking. And then the the in the communities that are impacted when individuals are indiscriminately transported and settled in other communities without any coordination, communication and resources, all of that is cruel. And so we do have to confront this in a very humane and compassionate way. It starts with reestablishing that relationship with Mexico, to conduct those those kind of asylum-seeking reviews at the border. And I just would close this comment by saying, something in the neighborhood of 75% of those, once we identify them, right, we're not even we're not even screening most people. But when we finally do get to screen the small number, we do 75 to 80% of them don't qualify for asylum. They're not here for asylum, and they're not leaving an oppressed nation or violence, or extreme poverty. And we have to we have to we have to send them back. That just isn't a process that makes any sense.
GR: Oftentimes when we get to this point in an election cycle, you know, we're heading into the final lap. The Congress kind of goes into a temporary freeze on action, you know, and waits until the election sorts things out. Is that is that kind of where you think Congress is right now going into the summer?
MM: Not entirely. We have an aggressive, effort to get appropriations or budget done. As you know, I'd like to say that we I wish we were more successful last year than we were. But but we are organized this year to get appropriations bills done. That's heading into the summer. And then we've got to negotiate with the Senate. That's a pretty aggressive strategy. and thankfully, we're moving in that direction. There's also a couple larger pieces of legislation. But but to your point, yes, it, you know, the fall of, of, of a presidential election year does feel a little bit less, extreme as a fall of, of a non-presidential election year. But we've got our plate full and we're still advocating for a lot of, a lot of good things for the people we serve.
GR: Great. We got about, a couple minutes left. I wanted to squeeze two last things. And if I could. We are talking, you and I, on, Thursday, June 27, I want to just let our listeners know that. And the first presidential debate is tonight. So by the time our listeners hear this program, it will have happened. I want to, but you a little bit on the spot and say, do you have any hunches of what we might expect tonight?
MM: I think that the two people running for president are exceptionally well known to 99.9% of the American public, and what you expect is likely what you're going to get. But but what I will also offer to you, at first it's very strange, right? Early presidential debate is very unusual. I just hope that we hear two people, ultimately who understand that there are a good number of Americans who feel left out. Now, I will tell you that I, the people I represent, I feel, are being left out by a federal government that too often overlooks them. And I do want a president that takes more interest in the rural and upstate, and small communities that make of upstate New York. And so I, I won't get into punditry. I just will tell you that, I think what you expect is what you're going to get, and I hope ultimately, that this, that this nation, pays attention to the forgotten folks who live in communities that are overpriced, overburdened, and overtaxed like the ones I represent.
GR: One of the things that I wanted to bounce off of you, that that occurs to me that I have not heard a lot about, and I was hoping that that debate would pull this out, is neither the both the candidates seem to be arguing a lot about the past rather than the future. And I would like to hear both President Biden's and former President Trump's vision of what they would try to do in the next four years. Do you do you agree with me that that has been missing from the, the dialog?
MM: I agree in that and that elections are always about tomorrow. Voters are always looking forward and do need leaders who are going to be paying attention to what happens next and giving a vision for what happens next. But you, as I both know, we have two entrenched candidates. And by the way, a great deal of animosity in the country, that sometimes needs a little bit of airing. Let's just hope we get to the point where, we're talking about, the future, because I still think and I that's I'm going to sound corny, but I believe it inherently. I just think that, this still is the greatest nation with the greatest capacity to do the greatest things for humanity. And we ought to be about the business of doing that. We ought to do that, by the way, by respecting the people, that pay the bills and this government is supposed to serve.
GR: That's a good note to end on. That was Mark Molinaro. Congressman Molinaro, again, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.
MM: Really appreciate it, man. Thanks very much. I appreciate it, be well.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Ken Block on the Campbell Conversations
Jun 29, 2024
Ken Block(Mark Lavonier)
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks to Ken Block, author of the book, "Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections."
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Almost four years after the fact, we are still hearing about a supposedly stolen 2020 presidential election. My guest today is uniquely positioned to discuss this. He was the data analytics expert that the Trump campaign hired to investigate fraud in the election. Yet he found that there wasn't a case to be made. Ken Block is a political reformer and software engineer. The founder of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island, a former candidate for governor, and most importantly, again for our conversation here today, he's the author of a new book titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” Mr. Block, welcome to the program. Really interested to hear what you have to say.
Ken Block: I am so looking forward to this conversation. Let's go.
GR: All right. Great. Well, first of all, obviously this topic has become so tangled, it's going to be hard to unwrap it in the 27 minutes or so that we have. But we're going to try. I think the first thing that we ought to do briefly, if we can do this briefly, is to establish your credentials as an expert and your political background, because I'm sure that anyone listening is going to be wondering about those things right away. So tell us, tell us who you are in that regard.
KB: Sure. So, I am, a, 30-year veteran of the technology industry. I specialize in large database applications. I have an expert a knowledge expert in my field. I came to politics late in life, and I came into politics because in, 2008 or so, I became very unhappy with the choices that the two political parties were offering up to me. I became, very unhappy with what at the time, felt like a lot of hyper-partisanship. Of course, it's much worse now.
GR: Yeah. Those were the good old days.
KB: Yeah. And, in a spectacular, explosion of naivete, I said, well, the right answer is to start a new political party. And I, was the godfather of, in Rhode Island, the Moderate Party, which was a centrist political party. And, it was quite a fight to create the party. We had to sue the state in federal court, get some laws declared unconstitutional just to be given the chance to try to start the party. And, we, won the court case. We had to collect a huge number of signatures in order to qualify the party for the ballot. Then we had to stay on the ballot once we got on the ballot. And, I was essentially, because no good deed goes unpunished, my executive committee basically looked at me and said, well, now you have to run for governor so we can keep the party. So, that's how I got into politics. And, I, exceeded expectations in 2010, I got 6.5% of the vote, as running as a complete unknown and participating in about 40 debates. I realized that I was good at politics. I was really good at the debates. And I had the bug, and I realized in 2012 that, a third party just is too hard to do. I abandoned the party in 2012. I ran for governor in 2014, as a Republican, because in my state of Rhode Island, it's an incredibly blue state. And if you want to make change in Rhode Island, you can't do it from within the Democratic Party. The machine is, all-powerful. So the only option left to me was running as a Republican. I lost my statewide primary by 3000 votes. And I'm fond of saying now that, voter fraud was not to blame for my loss.
GR: Okay, so that explains then. I'm guessing, then, that the Trump campaign, when they came to you, you know, you were the they thought this this guy's not going to be hostile to a Republican candidate. He's got the data analytics chops to do this. So you were sort of the right combination for them. What were the initial, I'm curious to know, what were the initial stated grounds or the suspicions about the outcome that were communicated to you? I mean, the campaign comes to you and they say, we think this has a problem because of what?
KB: Well, interestingly, the lawyer who approached me to do this work, his name is Alex Cannon, did not come to me asking me for aspecific finding. He actually wanted proper due diligence. We, he asked me to provide an estimate for what it would take to look for deceased voters, to look for duplicate voters, where a voter votes in more than one jurisdiction in the same election. And as we discussed doing the work, I told him that in a decade of looking, very closely at voter data, I'd never seen anything close to what I knew the campaign needed to be found. And his response to that was, well, I appreciate your candor and, I want a straight-up assessment. You know, if you find it, you find it. I said, look, if I find it, it will survive legal scrutiny. So, yeah, you know, it'll be a foundation for, legal action if we find it. I said, if we don't find it, I'm going to tell you I didn't find it, and that's the end of it. And he said, perfect. Off we go. So there wasn't an expectation. And that's always surprising to people when I describe, what the nature of my engagement was, the lawyers I reported to were doing their professional due diligence in every, in every way. Which is a very unexpected thing for people to learn.
GR: So, briefly, what did you find?
KB: We found evidence of voter fraud in small amounts. We found some dead voters. We found some duplicate voters, nowhere near enough to have changed the election result in any of the swing states. And as I made Alex aware, as we were moving through all of this, I said, look, even imagine in Georgia that we found 20,000 fraudulent votes. Even if we find those votes, it still can't change the election result, because we have no way of determining for whom those fraudulent votes were cast. And so, without being able to do that, you can't show the harm the campaign needs to show to claim that something should be changed with the election result. And Alex, as a lawyer, got that right away. Unfortunately, it seems like almost nobody else in the country seems to have figured that out.
GR: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because when I was thinking about this, I was thinking, how would you go about investigate this? I would think that at some point you would need to have individual human testimony, right? Like this person paid me to vote twice or, you know, I admit I voted twice. I was part of a group that tried to do that. Or, you know, we got these dead people to vote. I mean, don't you have to sort of have a testimony of some sort?
KB: Well, I think if you if we had been able to identify again, I am very careful when I talk about these hypotheticals. We didn't identify, but imagine if we did identify 20,000 deceased voters in Georgia. We would only need to be able to show two things. That the person who cast the vote is legally dead, and we have the ability to do that. But what we couldn't show is that, that vote was cast, on, you know, as a vote for, Biden or as a vote for Trump. That's not possible to do in our form of democracy. Who you vote for is anonymous by design and you would never want to be able to trace back who a specific individual voted for. So, had we found 20,000 fraudulent votes in Georgia, you can make a weak argument that you should redo the election because of the number of those votes, but because you couldn't prove the harm that those votes caused. I doubt any judge would have gone to that far to have changed the outcome of the election.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is Ken Block, and we're discussing his new book. It's titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” So you come back to the Trump campaign and you say, I didn't find anything. I didn't find what you guys were looking for. Here's what I found. How did they react? You said only the lawyers seem to understand.
KB: Yeah. So Alex did a couple of things besides giving me the freedom to give him a straight-up assessment. He also provided me political cover. Nobody above him knew my identity or the identity of my company while we were doing this work. And that was done specifically to avoid a problem where political pressure from the imagine potentially the White House, for example, would be brought to bear on me or my company, to find a specific set of results. So Alex was very receptive and understanding, of the fact that we couldn't find enough voter fraud to matter. He communicated that to Mark Meadows, who was Trump's Chief of Staff at the time. Meadows accepted that finding of fact as true, and he took that information into the Oval Office. What we glossed over here is that while I was asked to look for voter fraud, data mining for voter fraud, the second day of my contract, Alex started asking me to assess the validity of claims of voter fraud that other people brought to the attention of the campaign. And we looked at about 20 different claims of voter fraud, in the one-month window in which we had done all this work. And every single one of those voter fraud claims, I was able to show Alex why they were false, back it up with evidence and as a result of that work, several lawsuits that were going to be filed based on false evidence were stopped in their tracks.
GR: Wow. Okay, that sounds like that's equally important to the original work. I don't know if you have enough contact with the different people there to get into this, but I want to ask you anyway. So did you get any sense of sort of what the culture of the campaign, Trump campaign was sort of planet Trump in regard to this issue?
KB: So, no firsthand information. I wasn't going out to lunch with folks or anything like that. I was very I was siloed on purpose. My only day-to-day communications were with Alex Cannon.
GR: Okay. And this may be a tough question, too, but I have to ask it. Based on your interactions, do you think that there were people in the campaign that actually thought this election was fraudulent?
KB: Well, I would only. I would simply be speculating, right, because I didn't have the conversations so I cannot give you a firsthand account of anything. Based on the January 6th deposition, transcripts that I read, few people who were actually employed by the campaign, seemed to indicate that voter that they believed voter fraud was prevalent. The people who believe voter fraud was a big problem were external to the campaign. They were lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, folks like that. While they were attorneys and while they were filing lawsuits on behalf of President Trump, they weren't part of the formal campaign apparatus. So, we all know that there were people who, I don't know if they honestly believe that there was voter fraud, but they certainly, spent a lot of time, energy and money, bringing forward claims of voter fraud all over the place.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with data analytics expert Ken Block, who was hired by the Trump campaign in 2020 to investigate fraud in the election. He didn't find it, and his new book is titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” Okay, so Ken, we covered in the first half sort of what you did while you, you know, you didn't find anything, how that interaction went. So if Trump didn't lose because of fraud, why did he lose? You've got the explanation.
KB: Sure. “Republicans In Name Only.” The reason that Trump lost in 2020 through a couple of different ways of proving it was done in by the RINOs that he denigrated for years leading up to the election and whose support he publicly rejected. Trump made RINOs dead to him. And what happened in 2020? On a national, on a state-by-state basis and on a county-by-county basis, almost consistently across the country, across every county is Trump did about 2.5% less well, in terms of his total percentage of the vote won in 2020 than he did in 2016. 2.5% that 2.5% is the RINOs. And in the reddest states in the country, Trump did less well in 2020 than he did in 2016. And you, it's so consistent. This is it's not an abnormality. It's everywhere. It's a national trend. Secretary of State Raffensperger in Georgia, when they were analyzing the election results, found nearly 30,000 Republican primary voters who did not vote in the presidential election in 2020. So they voted in the primary, they didn't vote in the general. Remember, Trump lost by about 12,000 votes in Georgia. 30,000 votes in the Republican primary, voters didn't vote in the general election. Another 30,000 voters in the general election voted for down-ticket Republicans across the board, but left the presidential race blank. That's really compelling. Really important. The other thing, another equally stark fact is in Georgia, the libertarian candidate took about 50,000 votes and Trump lost by 12,000 votes. So there's a number of different explanations for it. Trump's own pollster did an exit poll, which is where they interview voters leaving a polling place, and they interviewed 30,000 voters across all the swing states. And they found that one out of six of those voters were Republicans who abandoned Trump.
GR: Well, the finding on the primary voting is amazing because as a political scientist, I know primary voters are usually the most reliable voters of all. Yeah, but if you vote in the primary and don't vote in the general. Yeah, that's very telling. Okay. So that brings up a question in my mind about 2024. And again, you know, it's speculating here for you. But do you think then that four years of a Biden presidency for those RINOs might make them less likely to abandon Trump as the challenger this time?
KB: Well, Trump has done nothing to try to bring RINOs back into the fold. So, I don't think many RINOs who abandoned Trump are going to simply embrace him again. I think that more has to happen than that. And if anything, Trump has made himself even more less appealing to moderate Republican voters since 2020 then he was going into the 2020 election between January 6th and just the heat behind his rhetoric has gotten so extreme. I don't see how anyone, how any moderates who abandoned him go back. On the other hand, they look at Biden now, and they're not seeing a compelling political figure anymore. So, you know, this election to me is extraordinary because, both candidates have, substantial negative that they carry along with them. Neither candidate is really providing a lot of pull for anybody under the age of 40 anywhere. Right? You just have nothing in common with these old candidates. And they're both misfiring. Young progressives have abandoned Biden right now, just like the moderates have abandoned Trump. Honestly, and this really stinks to say. But, I believe that this whole election might very well hinge on whichever candidate falls down on live TV first is going to lose. I mean, their health is so fragile at this point. It could be something that basic that determines who's going to win this election. And that's not good for us.
GR: Do you think the fact that the third-party candidates that are in it this time around are more of the type that are likely to draw from the left than the right matters?
KB: Well, the libertarian candidates are always going to derive, they're going to derive their votes from the right, not the left. Kennedy is a is an interesting character. With his last name, you would think he's pulling votes from the left. But when you look at what his positions are, he’s very purposely pulling votes from the right. So I don't know that there will be there will be, left-leaning voters who vote for him because they think he's a classic Kennedy. But other than that, I don't see him getting a lot of support from the left. I don't know if the Greens are going to bring forward, a candidate who's going to draw a lot of votes or not at this point. I guess we'll just sort of have to see. I mean, this is this will be an election for the ages. And if ever there was a voter for voting for the lesser of two evils, this campaign is going to embody that. I think for sure.
GR: I don't know if you want to try to venture into answer this. I know I'm asking you to do a lot of speculating here, but based on your experience, with the Trump campaign in 2020, what do you think they're going to do if this November, Joe Biden wins the election on Election Day but it's close again?
KB: Well, they've, the I don't have to speculate. Trump and a lot of the higher-level people within the Trump Organization have made it very clear that they're going to contest the election results. They're going to claim voter fraud was, to blame. Roger Stone has been quoted recently as saying that they're much better prepared now than they were in 2020 to contest the election results. And honestly, they're going to have an advantage because I'm not sure that there's been a whole lot of effort, to prepare on the other side to refute all of these claims of voter fraud that are going to be coming there. You need to do a lot of expensive prep work to be able to turn back, these claims in real time and provide scientific evidence that they're false. You know, we'll see. It's helpful, I think, to democracy that there were no claims of voter fraud that were valid and would have survived legal scrutiny in 2020. So I think that that's an advantage to democracy in general as we come into this new round of claims. But it's going to it's going to be contentious. It's going to be jammed up in the court system again. And hopefully this time around, people will keep a bit of a, saner head on their shoulders as we work our way through the mess that's coming.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Ken Block. We've been discussing his new book titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” Let's get to the last part of your title there how we can improve our election. So you go through all this and you come up with some conclusions about how we can make the system better. What are they?
KB: Sure. Well, I'm going to start with a statement of fact. The statement of fact is that the two parties have really blown it in this cycle. They brought forward two candidates who really, have more negatives than positives going for them right now. And, as somebody who's tried to start, an alternative political party, the system is designed to make it almost impossible to successfully launch a political party to be able to raise money, support candidates, and do it so hard. And every state has their own obstacles for success of, alternative parties to launch. We really have an unfair, uneven system, and I think we're paying the price for that now. Gerrymandering is one of the biggest issues, I think, that are out there in terms of making our elections unfair. 80% of congressional seats are uncompetitive. We know which party is going to win, which, which of congressional seats, regardless of who the candidates are. And that's largely the result of gerrymandering. And we need to eliminate gerrymandering when the United States helps set up new democracies. I'm certain we don't introduce the idea of gerrymandering to these rising democracies because of the awful implications it has to what the election results are. So, I believe that for strong but not for strong elections with great results. And to get better cooperation in Congress, we need more competitive elections so that our representatives in Congress are more likely to compromise as opposed to collide. And, I think that's probably the biggest thing that we should be doing. Mail ballots are not going to go away, nor should they go away. But really, the way we use mail ballots, when you look at it from a systems perspective, we have the absolute weakest form of identification you can imagine. For those who are voting, in a, by mail and not in person, which is signature matching, we're using a technology that's, you know, a hundred years old. It's rife with its own problems. And, it's not a great way to to confirm identity. Not anymore, for sure. The United States is the only first-world country, certainly in Europe. And, I believe across most of the world at this point that doesn't have a national identifier. when you look at every country in Europe, they all have national identifiers that include biometrics. It makes sense. It's a strong way to prove identity. Here, we don't have any national identifier. We have Social Security numbers. But its purpose wasn't to be a national identifier, and it's no longer confidential. I mean, I could find anybody's Social Security number pretty quickly at this point due to, how many breaches there have been over the years. So, I believe we have to replace Social Security numbers. I believe we should have, voter identification number. That's federal in nature. And I believe that when you're, born in this country or you're naturalized, you should automatically be given your voter registration number. That removes all the headaches with registration, all the problems with state-based registration and people registered to vote, multiple states, all that stuff goes away with a national voter registration number. And I think it should just be automatic. And that would solve 90% of the integrity problems we have.
GR: That's interesting. So we've got about three minutes left, and I want to try to squeeze in two questions more if I can. We did have this organization No Labels this time around and trying to put forward a unity ticket, they called it. But they had done all of that hard work that you described before that, you know, discourages third parties. They had managed to get by a lot of that, despite the fact that the Democratic Party tried to knock them out of those ballot access efforts. But in the end, they didn't get a candidate. So briefly, if you could. I mean, what does that say?
KB: Yeah, it's speaking from personal experience, launching a new political party is a chicken in the egg exercise. Do you build the party around a personality, or can you create the party and then try and attract in the individual or multiple individuals who stand a chance of winning? So No Labels went, and I don't know which way to which which ones, which chicken, which one's the egg. But they just they said, well, let's create a party and then we'll go find a candidate. What I ended up doing, accidentally in Rhode Island was I ended up creating a political party for my personality. Not that that was my that wasn't my intention. But that's effectively the way it worked out, because I then had to run for governor to keep the party going. So I think it's pretty hard to do a party and then try to attract in the candidate to fill the role of carrying that flag, you know, the banner in the battle, basically. which I think is what did in the No Labels thing. And honestly, of all the election cycles to do it, this was probably the worst one because so many people believe so much rides on this particular election.
GR: Last question, and really only about 30 secons for this I apologize, but it is a personal one and I was just wondering of having the role you did for the Trump campaign, having the findings that you did, and then the fallout that may have come to you about that. Has that affected you in any kind of personal way?
KB: Well, I've been subpoenaed by Jack Smith's grand jury in D.C. I've been subpoenaed by Ruby Freeman's legal team in her defamation suit against Rudy Giuliani. And I've been subpoenaed by Fani Willis as prosecutors in the Fulton County, Georgia, matter. So have I been impacted? Yeah. If I have to testify, will that be an even bigger impact? Yeah. For sure. And I actually was compelled to write this book because of the fact that it was going to become publicly known that I had done this work, and I wanted the story told in my framing, not anyone else's. None of this would have been happening had all this just remained a quiet job that was done to no effect. Basically.
GR: Well, the good news is we have your good book that came out of it. we'll have to leave the conversation there. But that was Ken Block. And again, his new book is titled “Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.” A lot of interesting stories and interesting ideas in there. Ken, thanks so much for taking time to talk to me. I really enjoyed it.
KB: Great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Kevin Elliott on the Campbell Conversations
Jun 22, 2024
Kevin Elliott( politicalscience.yale.edu)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. It seems like we've all become busier than we were in the past, from schoolchildren up through retirees. Given that, all the information that's available on the internet, some of it unreliable, how much can we reasonably expect from our fellow citizens to engage the political system and how can we make that engagement easier, more rational and more fair? My guest today is Kevin Elliott. He's a lecturer in ethics, politics and economics at Yale University and he's the author of a new book that tries to tackle those questions. It's titled, “Democracy for Busy People”. Professor Elliott, welcome to the program.
Kevin Elliott: It’s a pleasure to be here.
GR: Well, it's great to have you, and thanks for making the time. So, first of all, before I ask you a question, I'm going to start by putting on another hat, rather than radio host and that, my hat is political scientist and not only a political scientist, but a political scientist who studies and teaches democratic theory. I just want to applaud you personally for taking on this challenge, it's a big one. So thank you for that. My first question may sound obvious, but still, I wanted to ask you anyway. Why did you decide to write this book when you did? And how did you get the idea for it?
KE: Yeah. So you know, when I was looking around, reading in democratic theory, reading in political theory and trying to kind of pick my way through the world that it depicts, the political world that it conveys. I saw an absence of one particular person and this was people like my mother. My mother was a single working parent without a college degree. And insofar as there was a place for people like her in these texts about democracy that I was reading, it was either that she was absent, that is to say that there was no place for her at all, or the place was silent and sort of out of the picture. And so one of the reasons that I wrote the book and I asked the questions that are tackled in the book is precisely to try to make sense of like, where can we locate, within a healthy flourishing democracy, people who maybe don't have a large amount of time, maybe are not particularly familiar with politics and with the kind of ins and outs of all of the, you know, what bills being heard today on the floor of the, you know, people like that. Is there a place for them? If so, what might it look like? So that was one of the big things that was sort of motivating me. This just like absence of people like my mother, of whom it turns out when we look sort of empirically, there are a lot of these people around, as it turns out, millions and millions.
GR: Absolutely, yeah, that's really interesting. So your book is broken into two main parts as far as I gathered from reading in it. And the first one is, what we can reasonably ask and expect from citizens. And the other is about changes we might make to the system to, just as you said, find a place for people like your mother, how can we make changes to the system to make active citizenship more equitable and more accessible? So let me start with the first of those, what we can and should expect from ourselves and our fellow citizens. You write about floors of expectation, and you also write about when we're asking too much. Let me start with the floor. What's the minimum? What's the minimum here for citizens?
KE: Yeah. So let me just clarify one thing about the floor. So the idea here is like, when people do a thing, you know, we typically have a sense of like, what's the minimum level? What's the minimum standard, right? What's passable, what's acceptable, right? And we commonly will mark out that there's like a difference between doing something really excellently, doing something acceptably and then doing something unacceptably like sort of like pass, fail, excel, right? Something like that. A lot of our ideas about democratic citizenship and about what we want sort of out of democracy, kind of elide that middle category it seems to me. We often will just kind of think that like, a good citizen really has this incredibly demanding set of tasks, right? That a really good citizen, being a good citizen is very, very hard and so it's very easy for us to fail. So one of the things that I've tried to do is articulate this like, a minimum, a minimally acceptable standard that will allow us to recognize when someone is being a responsible citizen without being necessarily, while leaving I should say, lots of space for someone to excel to do further, to do more than that, and then sort of demonstrate their like civic virtue or what have you. So on my account, the minimum starts with paying attention to politics, political interest. Ideally, this would be in a critical mode. So we're like observing what's happening in politics and then we're also thinking about it, we're reflecting about it, we're turning it over. Maybe we're talking about it with people that we know, again, in a critical way, in a questioning way. And then on top of that, we also want to make sure that we have the skills, the minimum set of skills that will enable us to step into politics if we recognize, step in actively into politics if we recognize that we are needed, that there's some major issue that is sort of, you know, in play. And it seems to me that when we put those two things together, we have a kind of a surveillance capacity, we're watching. And then we're also able to step in and participate actively. We put those together and you get what I call, “stand by citizenship” and that's the kind of minimum that I articulate.
GR: Okay. Now, we could probably have an hour long conversation about this next question, but briefly if you could, so that does get in to one thing that, you know, you and I know there are both long debates about, which is okay, but do people then have to participate, is it voluntary? Is it, must you at least vote? Or can you just decide to say, I'm going to watch, I'm going to pay attention, but you know what, I'm good with my life, I'm just going to let the thing go.
KE: Right. And so the book is a little bit, I don't take a very hard line on this. I tend to think that you will need to participate actively, sometimes. I do advocate mandatory voting in in the book. I do think that that is a kind of, a sort of a reasonable part of a package of the minimum, in part because voting is habitual and it's the kind of thing that we can come back to periodically. And it's a way to sort of upkeep our civic skills because I know where my polling place is, I have an incentive to touch base with the kind of what's going on in the news, what's going on in the political world. But I don't really take a very hard line on like, you must be engaged in this kind of way. I do think there is a kind of, shall we say, not being fully active that is consistent with good citizenship. One of the examples I give is like, if you sort of observe the political world and you find that people like you are very well represented, basically, like people have heard from people like you very, very thoroughly, maybe it's okay if you take a step back and don't necessarily need to be, you know, heard even more, right? Like, oh, I'm just going to echo what he said and what the seven people before him said. You know, maybe that's sort of okay.
GR: Yeah, it's like a horrible business meeting where eight people say exactly the same thing, but they're all going to say it. (laughter)
KE: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like yeah, we know, we know what this view is.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Yale Professor Kevin Elliott, and we've been discussing his new book, “Democracy for Busy People”. Well, let me delve deeper into this in terms of when things might be problematic in terms of our expectations, how much can we expect then? You said you want citizens to, you know, be analytical, be critical when they're taking in this world, this political world. But there's a, as I said at the outset, there's just gobs of information out there. Not all of it is reliable and some of it is deliberately misleading or false. How much can we expect individual citizens to be their own quality control agents in the information they consume?
KE: Yeah, the information environment, changes in the information environment are definitely an enormous challenge. And not just, of course, to the kind of picture that I'm painting here of democratic citizenship. And, you know, I don't have a sort of holistic response to these challenges. These are things that lots of colleagues, lots of people in media and in political science and in other corners of academia have been struggling with for a long time. So there's a lot to be said for sort of, cultivating a rich media diet. That is to say, you know, not relying on any one source. There's also a role to be played here, and this is one of the sort of themes I hope that comes out of my book that, there's a role to be played by basically wider political, the wider political system. So here I think about sort of media regulators, Congress, political parties, that is to say other actors than the individual citizen. So one of the most important insights, or I should say one of the most important points that I make, hopefully it's an insight for readers, is that it's a little bit of a mistake to think that it's up to the individuals themselves to correct for the sort of systematic malformations and pathologies of our information environment. A lot of the work that needs to be done is at the level of, let's say, platforms. So, for instance, it's my understanding Facebook recently changed some elements of its algorithm, which really kind of downplayed political news. And this actually led to an enormous collapse in traffic towards, in particular, very, very high profile sources of political misinformation. And so this was a change internal to the platform. They didn't do it necessarily out of a concern for the sort of integrity of the information environment, they had other interests, but it is the kind of thing where it's like, it should not properly be up entirely to the individuals. You know, it takes a village not only to raise a child, but also to cultivate a healthy information environment. So we as individuals, we should be trying to cultivate a rich information diet, absolutely. But it's also an important responsibility of those who are managing our information environment, who are adding to it through their role as journalists or as sort of the administrators of our platforms to also have in mind what kinds of sources do our algorithmic amplification processes amplify? Who is amplified? Where does this traffic go? Which is just another way of saying the information environment is a broader construction and so we as individuals can only be expected to have so much responsibility on us.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Kevin Elliott. He's a lecturer and ethics, politics and economics at Yale University and he's the author of a new book titled, “Democracy for Busy People” and we've been discussing what he has to say there. So before the break, Kevin, you laid out the responsibility then that the providers of information have to kind of, in a sense, sort out quality control, maybe to some degree pre-digest what it is that the citizen is getting. But of course, it brings up the huge question of what if those folks are deliberately trying to mislead us? And I'm not going to name names here, but we can think of sources in the media and political officials and former officials who have done that and are doing that. So how do we handle that? Is that just a question of those people falling down on their civic morals, or does the public sector have a role to play in trying to make sure that that works the way it's supposed to?
KE: Yeah. So, you know, one of the biggest sources of misinformation is social media. So let me say a word about sort of the structure of social media, probably a lot of your listeners will be familiar with this, but it's useful to have this little bit of a wonky, little bit of a jargony word, but it's very helpful for understanding the dilemma here and this is the word: disintermediation.
GR: (laughter) Wow! Let’s say it again, “disintermediation”!
KE: Yes, say it with me now - multiple syllables, multiple syllabic word, yeah, disintermediation. So, what social media does is it eliminates the traditional gatekeepers in media, right? So traditionally you had editors, you had journalists, to some extent publishers and what these figures did was that they stood between news consumers and the world, that is to say, the world of events and so forth. And so as we've seen, journalism when we see headlines about newspapers closing and journalists being laid off, what we're seeing is the collapse of those gatekeepers. And in the age of social media, the reason for this is because now we are directly getting information through, typically through social media channels and so this has just eviscerated the revenue model of traditional sources of media. So, this is a removal of these mediating these people who are in between, that's why disintermediation. Okay, so that's how it appears, right? And that is indeed what has happened, that is to say, traditional gatekeepers have gone. But with the rise of social media platforms, these platforms appear to be sort of invisible. They appear to be, as it were, neutral spaces, right?
GR: Right.
KE: But of course, they're not, right? They are carefully cultivated, carefully controlled and algorithmically governed. That is to say, the algorithms created by the platform or the company governing them governs the kind of material that's amplified that you're likely to see and so forth. So one of the things that we need to be thinking about, and here is where I do think there is a role for regulators is, what exactly is a platform, how should we understand it? I think we are still lacking a nice, clear firm publicly shared understanding of what exactly a platform is and what it ought to be, and thus how it should be regulated. Is it like, should we imagine it like the public square, right, in like, you know, ancient Athens or something, in which case we would want to make sure that it has also, you know, high, high amounts of neutrality and so forth? Or do we want to make sure that we have moderation policies in mind that are transparent and for which there are various types of appeal processes? If you think that you have been sort of moderated out of a platform in reasonable ways, rather in unreasonable ways. And indeed, like so Facebook has done an enormous, Meta I suppose, has created this like board that is supposed to be making these types of high level policy decisions regarding moderation practices. Here at Yale, there's been a number of kind of conversations between people in political science and people in democratic theory indeed, with some people from these platforms who are exactly trying to figure out like, what's the right model for this internal process? So this is a kind of self-regulation, right? So it's really not regulatory from the state, but in a way they're trying to like get ahead of that, right? They recognize that insofar as there are enormous problems of misinformation, insofar as violence is potentially being, and not potentially we know, in fact, right? Violence has been coordinated on some of these platforms, fast. Like we're talking about like hundreds of thousands of people have been subject to violence, killed through campaigns that have been coordinated on these platforms. They are not, they shouldn't necessarily be treated as these just sort of neutral like an email system or a phone system, right? They are something different than that. So all of this is to say that we should be thinking, we need to have a clear understanding, a publicly salient understanding. So this is an issue that our political parties should be thinking about. This is something that our elected officials should be thinking about. This is something that regulators should be trying to kind of formulate a theory that also allows us to talk about it, you know, sensibly in a public forum like this one and that would allow us to identify what kinds of rules do we not have, what kinds of rules would make for best practices for companies who might be trying to avoid the heavy hand, as it were, of government regulation, and if they can't, right, what should that heavy hand look like? What should they be seeking to establish? And so all of that is in some ways quite distant from the individual news consumer, right? The individual citizen. But in many ways, right. Like we as individuals can only do so much with the direction of our attention. We should try to recognize when news is a attracting us because it's making us feel angry. We should be sort of emotionally aware that that's, infuriating content is the kind that spreads virally. So before you re-tweet or repost or whatever, some piece of news, think about like, why am I doing that? Like, why am I sharing this thing? You know, is this really helpful, is it even true? Like, there's a lot of, there's a role for individual responsibility, absolutely. But it needs, we really want to be thinking also systematically here. We as individuals should be trying to be more controlled, we should be trying to be more reflective. We should approach our posting, as it were, with a degree of understanding that like, I am the gatekeeper, right? For the other people in my feed, other people are connected to me. And take up that responsibility in a way that is defensible.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Professor Kevin Elliott. And we've been discussing his new book titled, “Democracy for Busy People”. I want to give you some time here at the end to set forward, like your one or two most important changes you'd like to see made in the system. But I wanted to ask you one in particular, and this may sound quirky, but it's something that I think about a lot because I teach in different programs for people who are from other countries trying to learn about the American political process. One of the things that really flabbergasts most of them when I give them a list of this is the frequency with which, and the number of different positions, I, as a citizen am asked to vote on. And so I will do a little exercise and I'll say, okay, let's see who I voted for this year, you know, and it might be like, okay, President, they all understand that. But, you know, 10 minutes later, I get down to, and the guy who is in charge of maintaining the roads in my little town, you know, and in the meantime, we've talked about library budgets and school budgets and school boards and governors and state legislators and local legislators and the list goes on and on and on, not to mention referendums, okay? So sometimes I've admired other systems for being simpler for the average citizen to understand like the British one. Do you think that we should try to consolidate these offices or voting decisions in some way and how might we do it?
KE: Yeah. So you're pointing to what I talk about in the text is sort of regime complexity, basically.
GR: Yes.
KE: So, yeah, as a voter, right? As a citizen, not just a voter, but as a citizen, if you're trying to understand, like, why did this particular thing happen? Why did this, why was this policy made? Why is this problem persisting as the case may be? And trying to kind of sort that out is quite complicated, right?
GR: Yeah, who do you hold accountable?
KE: Who do you hold accountable? Exactly. I think one of the best examples of this is like, you know, Obamacare and the expansion of Medicaid. And so if you're somebody who's in a state that has not expanded Medicaid and you fall into that group of people who would have otherwise been covered under the expansion of the Affordable Care Act, who do you blame for that, right? Because, is it Congress who passed the ACA and did it in a way that allowed, or maybe didn't allow, but, right? They passed a law, the Supreme Court took a run at it and they sort of turned a thing that was supposed to be mandatory into a thing that was actually voluntary, right?
GR: Right.
KE: And then your state legislature chose or didn't choose to expand Medicaid as a result of that. So there's a bunch of different failure points there, right? To say, well, why didn't Congress fix this problem after the Supreme Court? So you could blame Congress, you could blame the court, you could blame your state legislature. And so in this way, responsibility kind of dissolves. And so you as a voter, like I'm not sure who to be mad at, right? This is actually very complicated. So for me, I think one of, you mentioned local government and this is also another feature of our system. We have not two levels of government, but three, right? And this, it's important for Americans to understand in some ways the option set available to us is sometimes invisible. If you were to say, boy, it's kind of weird that we don't understand who to blame for such and such thing. And people say, okay, but yeah, but like, what's the alternative, right? In lots of countries, you know, local governments are appointed by either the national government or a state level government, right? So what if you don't elect your mayor? What if you don't elect your sheriff, right? Why do we have these locally elected offices? It doesn't always make a huge amount of sense. And it's very important that one of the key reasons for being concerned about this is that as the ballot gets longer, right, as the number of offices that we're expected to talk about get longer, the electorate who actually selects it becomes smaller. So we should be looking to de-complexify our politics, I think, as much as possible. I think it's important to locate decisions at a place where we have accountability, where we can find electoral accountability. When we have small electorates, that is bad. When turnout is very low for powerful offices, that's not good. So we want to have accountability at a place that people can identify who is to blame. Federal government, national politics tends to be the right level for this for a lot of things because the most eyes can fall on that level.
GR: We've only got about a minute and a half left, but I wanted to give you a chance to, is there another big, important change that you could describe briefly that you would want our listeners to walk away with thinking about that would help this?
KE: One of the things that I think we want to have in the United States are strong political parties. Political parties tend to be very, Americans tend to be skeptical of political parties for a whole variety of ways. But parties are actually one of the most important institutions for making politics understandable for ordinary citizens. When we try to understand what the stakes are, when we try to understand what the issues are, when we try to understand also just where should we be looking for these important issues, where should we be focusing our political attention and efforts? Political parties help us to convey that. In the post Dobbs world for instance, we've seen a lot of activist energy in the states who have initiatives. So they've been trying to focus activist effort at the level that the change that people are interested in can occur. So I think we want to strengthen political parties. And also we would like, it's good for us to think about ways to diversify the parties that we have. That is to say, if we could have more parties in single party states, this would be a way to enrich our political conversation. And also hold our political parties more accountable. Single party states are terrible for political accountability because the party in power doesn't have to worry about being voted out of office.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. But I just want to add, there are all sorts of other important and interesting suggestions that you make. So I really do want to encourage our listeners to take a look at this book. That was Kevin Elliott, and again, his new book of his is titled, “Democracy for Busy People”. Professor Elliott, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.
KE: Thank you so much for having me. It was a wonderful conversation.
GR: It was my pleasure. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Sarah Klee Hood and John Mannion on the Campbell Conversations
Jun 15, 2024
Sarah Klee Hood / John Mannion
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. One of the most closely watched congressional races in the entire nation in this November’s general election will be that for New York's 22nd district right here in the Syracuse area. The district contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica and Auburn. The district is currently represented by Republican incumbent Brandon Williams, who is in his first term. My guest today are the two Democrats hoping to challenge Williams in November. State Senator John Mannion and DeWitt Town Councilor Sarah Klee Hood. The primary election is June 25th. Now, this is an informal debate or a shared conversation of sorts. We have just under a half an hour and we've got two candidates. So I've asked the candidates to be brief and extremely to the point, and I've let each of them know that I'll interrupt if necessary towards that end. I should also note that I help run a program at Syracuse University for veterans who are interested in pursuing public office and prior to serving on the DeWitt Town Board, Ms. Klee Hood was a participant in that program. Both candidates have appeared on this program previously. Counselor Klee Hood, State Senator Mannion, welcome back to the program, it’s good to have you both on.
Sarah Klee Hood: Thanks, Grant. Delighted to be here.
John Mannion: Thank you, Grant.
GR: So, thanks again for making the time. So, here's my first question and I'll start, Senator Mannion, with you. I've been reading through your previous debates, and I've looked at your websites, and it does seem to me that regarding policy positions, the two of you are very similar, first of all, and secondly, you're pretty standard for the Democratic Party I think at this point. There is support from both of you for expanding a lot of public programs to aid middle earners and lower income earners. But I don't really see anywhere either of you that you'd want to cut back significantly on spending. So in my understanding, if either of you get in and you get your way in Congress, the government's going to get bigger. You've both talked about letting the Trump era tax cuts expire, but that would involve raising some taxes, mostly on higher earners, but not cutting back on programs. So. Senator Mannion, I just want to start, are there any kinds of programs at the federal level that you'd be willing to cut back on or restructure in a way that they would significantly spend less?
JM: I think the first thing that we have to look at, Grant, and thank you for the question, is that you did reference, you know, some of our highest earners. And what we've seen over the course of a couple of generations now is that that rate is really dropped. So I think it's reasonable that folks pay their fair share and that we do make that adjustment. As far as the programs, 100% committed to the maintenance and expansion of Social Security and Medicare. You know, I do think that there are efficiencies in government that we absolutely have to look at and I think that we have to hold these federal departments accountable. You know, budgets are about priorities, so I do think we have to take a hard look at some things. You know, there was certainly a great inflation of the federal budget and therefore our debt during the Trump administration. And I do see in the Biden administration that we have a real investment in our future in manufacturing and in infrastructure. But still, I think we have to look at efficiencies in government and we really have to hold those departments and agencies accountable.
GR: Any specific programs that you can point to, though? That was a very general answer about just sort of taking a broad look, any specific programs that would be on your list?
JM: You know, I think there is support for multiple corporations. There's these grant programs or investment in those, particularly in the large fossil fuel industries that we have to look at. We have to look at minimizing that, cutting that down. And that's something that should have been done a long time ago.
GR: And then one other follow up and I'll move to Councilor Klee Hood. Can you point to something in your voting record in the state legislature where you voted to cut a program?
JM: So what we just saw and what's out there in the media is a program that was going to increase costs on individuals as far as utility costs, and that was called New York Heat Act. I voted against that because it was going to disproportionately raise dollars, you know, the costs of utility rate payers of our customers. So in that regard, I voted no on that. An adjustment was made, and then I voted affirmatively so it wouldn't disproportionately hurt the people that I currently represent. I was sent here to make sure that central New York got their fair share and I believe that I've done that. I'm proud to secure funding for programs that are really making an impact locally.
GR: And so Councilor Klee Hood, the same question, what kinds of programs at the federal level would you be willing to restructure significantly or cut back on?
SKH: Sure. So I think I'm going to fundamentally push back against a lot of the Republican talking points as of late. They are looking to find tax cuts or programmatic cuts to deliver, if you will, in quotes, “for the American people”, which is absolutely they are looking to strip away the fundamentals of the pillars of the US government. As somebody who managed a $25 million federal budget while I was an officer in the US Air Force, I believe that we can definitely scrutinize our defense spending. I recognize that in the global picture, the US has a responsibility to its allies, but I also know from my own personal investment and time managing federal budgets for multiple years there is a lot of area where we can start trimming some of that fat away. Similarly, the fossil fuel industry, whether it is through incentives or through government partnerships, we really need to look at divestment there. And at the end of the day, the 2017 trickle down Trump tax cuts, they are not helping Americans, it's set to expire. We have a real opportunity to capitalize on this in 2025. And Grant, just to put some numbers to your comment, we are starting the tax 2017 tax code that really gave folks that were making $400,000 or more significant tax breaks. I firmly believe that if we start taxing the ultra-rich we can bring back money annually year over year. For example, when our taxes such as the tax program we have now is skewed to the rich and to corporations, we're losing less than $350 billion a year starting in 2017, excuse me, 2027 if we don't modify the programs that we have on the tables now. So at the end of the day we don't need to start significantly reducing how we're funding federal programs. We need to have an equitable tax code that truly is proportionate, regardless of how much money you are making, so that we can start bringing back some of that money. And it's through taxes, but it's not through taxes at the middle class or the working class, it's for the ultra-rich and corporations. Let's close the loopholes. The carry tax interest loophole, which is the most sought after loophole in our federal tax code right now, it's allowing $41 million annually to be evaded from the US, from the US government, meaning that we are missing out on over $41 million annually in tax revenue. So I fundamentally believe that we can get there simply by readjusting how we look at our tax structure. And with that we also have to ensure that we are funding the IRS so they can do their job.
GR: Well, let me ask you then also, can you point to something in your voting record in Dewitt, where you have voted to cut a program?
SKH: Sure. I'm proud to be a local elected official because that means I get to implement federal policy with all of the baggage and none of the budget. It means we have to get very creative at the local level. I'm proud that Dewitt has been able to maintain the tax cap. Last year, we went above it by, I think 1% to maybe 2%, still at less than 5% taxes with an increase very nominal. The point being, though, we don't have a significant budget. So in order to make up that lost revenue to ensure that we have the funds for the police department, the highway department, the rec department, all of the services that folks would expect from their community government, we've been looking at public / private partnerships, which is really where there is an opportunity here. Not only does that bolster the services and programs available to the towns within that representation, but it also helps small businesses get a piece of the pie while also having some skin in the game.
GR: Okay, I want to interrupt here because we're going into sort of a different argument about public / private partnerships but Senator Mannion let me come back to you. Councilor Klee Hood did mention something pretty specific there and what she's willing to look at and pare back and that was defense spending. Do you agree with that or is that something that you think should be hands off in terms of looking for cutting?
JM: I talked about, you know, efficiencies in government and that would certainly include the Department of Defense. But I think we have to be very careful about that, I'm talking about efficiencies. As far as funding goes, we have to be flexible. We have to be in tune to what is happening in the geopolitical space. So in regards to that, I would be very careful about taking a hard stance about cutting military spending, considering what's happening in the world and where we might be moving forward.
GR: Okay, and Councilor Klee Hood, any just super quick responses to that response?
SKH: Sure. Through my six years managing a federal budget of $25 million, I can tell you there's a lot of room for efficiencies there. I feel confident that there are rooms that we can maintain our global responsibility as a global leader in the current geopolitical landscape while ensuring that there are cuts to be made.
GR: Okay, my next basic question and I'll stick with you for this Councilor. It's obviously, I think probably the biggest question for the Democrats voting in the primary and for independents and some Republicans as well. But it's, briefly, I know I know both of you could speak for hours on this, why would you be the stronger Democratic candidate in the general election against incumbent Republican Congressman Brandon Williams?
SKH: I think we're all here because we want to win in November. We are uniquely positioned to be able to bring home a win that is long overdue for central New Yorkers through a Democratic victory. But we need to think about this strategically, not emotionally. Yes, we should vote for the candidate that has the federal professional and personal experiences that meet the moment of this day. But what's more important is aligning us to a strategic win in November, and that is me. We need a nominee that is able to contrast and compete with Brandon Williams and win over some of that support. We need a veteran. Veterans give Republicans and independents an opportunity to vote for a Democrat that they normally would never have voted for. In a post-Roe era, women are mad, man, I am pissed off. We need a woman that is going to be able to support women's rights regardless of the political tides. And we need a candidate, let's be frank, that isn't burdened by ties to Albany. We can't forget that Lee Zeldin won this district by a lot last time. Republican playbooks are vetted for anti-Albany politics, if you will. And we need to have a candidate that will be able to both remove themselves from that conversation to avoid the attack ads, but to speak eloquently about the needs of today without it being tarnished by Albany. And we need someone who doesn't have, you know, multiple publicly published material that's at the ready for Republican attack ads. But at the end of the day, it's about a strategic win for the Democrats in November and we have to align ourselves strategically.
GR: Okay. Those are three reasons I heard. Senator Mannion, you obviously are going to get the same question, but I'm going to have to give it to you after the break. Right now, I'll just have to tell folks that you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Dewitt Town Councilor Sarah Klee Hood and New York State Senator John Mannion. They're the Democrats running in the primary to challenge incumbent Republican Brandon Williams in New York's 22nd congressional district in this November's general election. Okay, Senator Mannion, just before the break, Councilor Klee Hood laid out why she thought she would be the better candidate in the general election, that's obviously arguably the biggest question for voters in this primary. So she listed three reasons, why would you be the better general election candidate?
JM: So, thank you, Grant. I'll say that I have a proven electoral record and a proven legislative record. So as far as my electoral record goes, I have flipped a Republican seat that was held by them for 100 years. I currently represent a district that has more registered Republicans than Democrats. Of the 42 Democratic Senators, I'm the only one that has that distinction. There are seven Republicans that have that distinction. And also, I would say that in my last election, 7000 more Republicans have voted than Democrats and I won. I work with everyone. 33 municipalities. 29 of them are run by Republicans, so I have a proven track record. And I believe that it's not just, you know, great campaigning or whatever, it's also the deep relationships that I have in the region. I was a teacher, my wife and I have lived here our entire lives, I was a union president and all of those things are contributing factors. From a legislative standpoint, you know, I'm proud of the committee work I did as the first ever Chair of the Standing Committee on Disabilities. I have emboldened a woman's right to choose prior to the overturning of Roe v Wade with a 100% score card from Planned Parenthood. I have expanded universal pre-K into upstate New York and made sure the funding was there to support our schools. And it was a co-prime sponsor on Green CHIPS legislation to make sure that if a semiconductor chip manufacturer uses clean energy and hits their job numbers, there are incentives. And as a result, Micron is coming here with the largest private investment in the history of this country. I'm battle tested, I have broad based support as I mentioned, including multiple elected officials. So I believe that has positioned me in a great spot. The people here trust me, I know those folks and they know me.
GR: Okay, so I have a follow up question for you. And then I have a follow up question for Councilor Klee Hood. My follow up question for you is, the councilor did mention something that has been on my mind and thinking about this election. And when we look back at the previous election, it was obvious that Brandon Williams linked Francis Conole with Albany, even though he had no real ties there but nonetheless, that was his messaging and it seemed to work. You saw pictures, for example, in his ads of Francis Conole right next to Kathy Hochul. How are you going to deal with that? Because I'm sure that Congressman Williams has got four people at least combing through your voting record right now. So how are you going to deal with that Albany, for lack of a better word, the attempt to put a taint on it.
JM: So I'm proud of the record that I have, Grant, and people are appreciative of the work that I've done. I do believe that I'm a good reflection of the district and I've acted accordingly in Albany in delivering for the district and really making certain things a priority that I've heard at the doors and on the phones for years of what we need to do, accelerating middle class tax cuts, suspending the gas tax, providing property tax relief. But also we need safe communities. So a lot of the issues that we seem to have been attacked on involved bail. In my time in the New York State Senate, I have only strengthened those laws, giving judges greater discretion, making more crimes bail eligible and addressing the reoffending issue. In fact, I had the support of law enforcement all along, including in this election, as I'm endorsed by the New York State Troopers PBA. It was my legislation that helped create the Syracuse Regional Airport Authority to make sure that that location is safe and it could be staffed. It is the first police force created in New York in 50 years, and I'm proud of that accomplishment.
GR: Okay. Councilor Klee Hood, the question / follow up I wanted to ask you is, the senator mentioned unions once, but obviously he has gained a lot of support from different unions. And I wanted to ask you about this because I'm going to put my political scientist hat on now. It is my sense that this general election is going to be a lot about, for Democrats in particular, turnout.
SKH: Yes.
GR: And one of the things that unions do effectively do in general elections is turn out voters. So, how would you address this question of the, what might seem to an outsider looking in that the senator has an advantage there with the unions behind him in terms of turnout in the general election?
SKH: Sure. So I think that there's a difference between union logos and endorsements on a website and the rank and file members. Last cycle, when I ran in this race, despite being significantly underfunded, we came up about 1100 votes short. And that's because of the union support that we have within the rank and file members knocking doors for us. But we're talking about your question (that) was pointedly at the general election, and I have great relationships with all of the labor unions. They're supporting John right now because he was a former labor leader, that's what they should do. I have veteran organizations, women organizations, environmental organizations supporting me because that's where I am. It makes sense. But I can also tell you that, you know, when you get feedback, like, yes, we're supporting Senator Mannion right now, he's our guy, but, man, we're really excited for Sarah should she win the nomination. It just goes to show that the support goes both ways. But if they had to choose somebody, I'm good where I am. I appreciate the rank and file support that we have. But I have zero concerns about their support coming through in a general election.
GR: I see, okay, all right, thank you. So I did want to ask a question about abortion because it has been such a huge issue for the country in the last few years and it's obviously something that the Democrats are going to be running on all over the country. And it seems from your campaign rhetoric of both of you that that you're going to do the same in the general election. But, and I'll come back to Senator Mannion I guess to start with this. In looking through and listening to what you've had to say, both of you, it's a little uncertain to me as to what limits, if any, you would put on access to abortion. So, Senator Mannion, let's just start from scratch here and just say, what kinds of limits are you comfortable with short of on demand abortion until the day of delivery? I'm using an extreme example here, but I want to just try to understand this.
JM: So I'm proud to have been endorsed by Planned Parenthood in every one of my previous elections. And in this election, they have not endorsed and they will not until after the primary. But I have a proven legislative record in protecting a woman's right to choose and protecting their providers. I will say that these decisions should be made between a woman and their health care provider. I have a 100% voting record from that…
GR: …I'm going to interject here because there's no doubt that both of you are for choice. I mean, you're both clearly that way and you've both spoken passionately about it. What I'm asking is, are there any limits on on-demand abortion that you are comfortable with?
JM: When I ran in 2018, I supported the Reproductive Health Act. I was not elected, and then in 2019, the Reproductive Health Act was passed into law. I had supported that, as did many and in fact most Democratic majority members at that time. And I have emboldened that law. So I support that law, and that's where I stand.
GR: Well, can you just tell our listeners what those limits are just so we’re clear?
JM: Sure. That limit is what the Democratic majority voted on in that time and what I support is up to 24 weeks and then beyond that is the health, mental health, risk of life to the mother or an unviable fetus when an abortion can occur.
GR: Okay, and Councilor Klee Hood to focus it on the last thing that Senator Mannion said. Are you comfortable with those same limits or would you like to see fewer limits than that? I'm just trying to see where a difference is here.
SKH: So this is where the difference comes in. I'm a woman, this is personal for me. My rights have been removed and I had to seek abortion care while I was serving in the military. So when we ask about term limits and restrictions, it's fundamentally a flawed question because you're not asking the right question, Grant. So I'm going to say the right question might be, do we as American citizens trust women to make the best decision for themselves, their future and their family in conjunction with their doctor? Yes or no? If we trust women to have that autonomy of self, that understanding of what is best for them, with medical guidance, then these questions are moot.
GR: Okay so let me interject and get clarity here. So, the senator said 24 weeks, so, if what I'm hearing from you is correct is, let's say we get to 27 weeks and a woman has this conversation with her doctor, you're okay then with going forward.
SKH: If there needs to be, I trust the woman to make the decision that is best for her. And I would also like to kind of caveat that and go back to your point. I don't support on-demand abortions until the day of birth. So let's be clear there. That's a wedge conversation that is used by Republicans to drive an issue that simply doesn't truly exist in this space, but I support...
GR: …But If that's the legislation that one would vote for, then that's the situation we would be in, I mean…
SKH: That's not the legislation that's on the table. What is on the table is H.R. 12, the Women's Health Protection Act of 2023. And I adamantly support this, which prohibits governmental restrictions on the provision of and access to abortion services. We need to trust that our women have the cognizance, the understanding, the competence to make the best decision for themselves, their family and their future, in addition with a health care provider without the opinions of politicians in the medical room.
GR: Okay, We're almost out of time, I'm going to have to ask these last two questions as a lightning round kind of thing. So this is going to be sort of like, you know, vanilla or chocolate ice cream kind of thing. Here's the first one, and Counselor Klee Hood, I'll stick with you. John Katko preceded Brandon Williams in this position, and he was by all measures, extremely bipartisan and extremely productive. He had a rule that he would not introduce a piece of legislation unless he could get a Democratic co-sponsor. Would you consider adopting the same rule regarding a Republican co-sponsor?
SKH: Yes, with the caveat to women's rights.
GR: Got it. Okay, Senator Mannion, same question.
JM: (Bipartisan) support is very important and the work that I did in my committee involved, almost every piece of legislation had Republican co-sponsors, and I would commit to that.
GR: Okay, and I'll stick with you for my final question. Again, sort of a lightning round kind of thing. I am going to try to get Congressman Williams on the program before autumn comes around. I have tried before, I have not succeeded, but I'm going to try again. If I am successful, what question, briefly, would you most want me to ask him?
JM: Would he support a national abortion ban?
GR: Okay, and Counselor Klee Hood, what is the one question you would want me to ask Congressman Williams?
SKH: Will he remove himself from the Republican Study Committee?
GR: Okay, all right, those were both succinct. You were very cooperative on that. I want to thank both of you. That was State Senator John Mannion and Dewitt Town Councilor Sarah Klee Hood. Again, these are the two Democrats that are running to challenge Brandon Williams in this November's general election. The primary election is June 25th and early voting begins June 15th. Senator Mannion, Councilor Klee Hood, I want to thank both of you, first of all, for taking the time to talk with me. But I also seriously want to thank both of you for the way that you have made yourselves both available in these kinds of formats in this primary season. I think voters have had a lot of opportunities to learn about both of you. Not everybody does that and you have, so thank you.
JM: Thank you, Grant.
SKH: Thanks, Grant. It was a pleasure, have a great one.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Bob Keefe on the Campbell Conversations
Jun 01, 2024
Bob Keefe(Mark Lavonier / e2.org)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Bob Keefe. He's a former journalist and currently the executive director of E2, an organization of business leaders who advocate for clean energy. He's also the author of a new book titled, "Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Frontlines of an American Business Revolution". Mr. Keefe, welcome to the program.
Bob Keefe: Oh, Grant, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much.
GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So, let me just start with a real basic question about your organization. Just tell our listeners a bit about E2, you know, how it got started, what it does.
BK: Absolutely. So we are a national organization of more than 10,000 business leaders who work or do business in just about every state and just about every sector of the economy. And we advocate for policies that are good for both the economy and the environment. And we've had some great ones recently Grant, that I think we're going to talk about.
GR: That's great. Yeah, I would like to do that. Before we get into that, let me just also ask informationally, where does the organization get its funding? Is it from the member industries or of specific companies?
BK: Well, that's right. Our members are business people, not businesses. And they (leave it to) our organization to let us do our work.
GR: All right, okay, good. So, yeah, let's get into some of those examples. So, you know, your book relates a lot of really good stories that are out there about businesses and entrepreneurs doing creative things to transition to a cleaner economy. But if you had to pick like one or two of the best stories, maybe, maybe there's one in New York State to that you could talk about. But just to give us an idea of what you're excited about.
BK: Well, what I'm most excited about, Grant, is both the volume of the projects that are coming out of the ground are in the works in America now and where they're going. My organization, E2, has been tracking major clean energy projects announced since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act 21 months ago. What we know now is that there are more than 300 major projects all around the country. We're talking about electric vehicle factories, battery plants in Upstate New York, for instance. Hydrogen plants being built by companies that are based in New York, solar panel factories, wind turbine factories. When in the world have we had more than 300 major factories and other projects coming out of the ground in America? I call it an economic revolution. We've had more than $120 billion worth of private sector investment. That's not government loans or grants, that's companies investing in America. And we've had more than a hundred thousand jobs announced because of these projects already and we're just getting started. If, if if we don't go backward and these policies are at threat right now, at risk, and hopefully we won't go the wrong way.
GR: Yeah, I wanted to get into some of that a little bit later, the policies and the political aspect of this. You mentioned Upstate New York. Can you say a little bit more about one or two of the projects that are there?
BK: Sure. Well, for instance, in Massena, a company called Air Products is investing $500 million to build a, what's called a green hydrogen plant that's going to produce hydrogen. Now, hydrogen is new for us, it's not new in the world. It's used in a lot of applications, but it's new in the clean energy space. But hydrogen has been called, for instance, the Swiss army knife of clean energy because it can be used in so many places. I was just in Cleveland, literally yesterday, meeting with the head of a steel manufacturing plant there outside of Cleveland that is converting away from coal fired furnaces to electric furnaces that can someday, that are also equipped to burn natural gas, but also equipped to burn hydrogen. And they are banking a lot of their future on being able to use this clean fuel to produce steel. Hydrogen also can be used to fly airplanes we know, and used in heavy trucking and things like that. So that's an example of a company doing good things. There's another company called Viridi Parente that's building a big factory up in Buffalo that's building lithium ion batteries. Toyota is investing in lithium ion batteries there outside of Rochester, General Motors is as well. Overall, we've tracked since the IRA, Grant, we've tracked a dozen projects in New York, $785 billion worth of investments. 3,000 jobs just in the state of New York. And again, this is just in the past 21 months.
GR: Yeah, that's quite impressive. So I wanted to ask you a little bit later about these social and political challenges, but let me ask you first, what are the biggest technical and economic challenges to transitioning away from fossil fuels?
BK: Well, you know, I spent, before I do what I do now Grant, I spent about 20 years as a journalist, and a lot of that time I spent as a technology journalist. So I covered the introduction of the iPod and the iPhone and the rise and fall of the Internet and the rise again of the Internet and all of this. And frankly, I've given up on guessing where technology's going to take us. But once you have the market signals to business, which is what we now have, businesses can figure this stuff out. And we're going to hydrogen as an example. Nobody thought about using hydrogen as a fuel 10, 20 years ago, but we're on the cusp of that. Nobody thought we'd be driving electric cars by now, but we are. The good news is the technology is here now, the technology has caught up with the problem. The policy has caught up with the problem, the human will has caught up with the problem. We all know we need to do something about climate change and making there a little cleaner and the water a little cleaner. The hope is, again, that we don't go backward on this stuff just when we're getting started.
GR: I’m Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Bob Keefe, and we've been discussing his new book titled "Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Frontlines of an American Business Revolution". So, then, what I'm gathering from what I'm hearing so far is the challenge is really, are political and social. And so tell me what your take is and what your senses of that challenge and where we are.
BK: That's right. Well, first of all, the fact is there shouldn't be anything partisan or political about any of this. There shouldn't be anything that's political or partisan about creating jobs, driving economic growth, making America more competitive. And when you look at where these projects are going, Grant, as we did at my organization, of those 300 major clean energy projects that have been announced so far, 60% of them are in Republican congressional districts. 70% of all of the jobs that have been announced are in Republican congressional districts. 85% of all the money being invested by these companies is in Republican congressional districts. Not a single Republican passed or voted for the law that's making this happen. And we've already had 30 attempts in the U.S. House, including as recently as a couple of days ago or yesterday, really with the farm bill the House has tried to rollback or repeal parts of the policy driving all of this growth. Now, we all know there's a presidential election coming up, I'm not going to get into electoral politics, but we certainly know where both candidates stand on things like clean energy, on electric vehicles, on offshore wind, onshore wind, on climate change. So that uncertainty over their election is frankly already starting to cast a pall over this progress that we're just now beginning to see.
GR: Yeah, you know, you mentioned that 85% figure, 85% of the investment in Republican congressional districts. And I hope this doesn't sound too cynical, but what popped into my head when you said that was the idea of, well, maybe that suits the Republicans just fine because they can speak to their base and raising concerns about the transition and speaking in favor of fossil fuels to some degree, but then they get the benefits anyway of the transition because all this stuff is happening in their districts. I mean, that's kind of a politically sweet spot to be in, in a way.
BK: Well there's, yes. And folks start to look at this a little differently when, they view electric vehicles a little differently when they're building them in their backyards.
GR: Yeah.
BK: They view solar panels a little differently when it's creating thousands and thousands of jobs. I was recently as part of the book, I went down to Dalton, Georgia. I don't know if you ever been to Dalton but Dalton is a little town, It used to be the carpet capital of the world. If you wanted to have a job in Dalton, you had to work in carpet. Well, right now, a company called Qcells is building one of the biggest solar panel factories in the Western Hemisphere in Dalton, Georgia, creating 4000 jobs in that state. It happens to be in the district of Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most conservative, maybe not conservative, but one of the biggest flame throwers in the Republican Party right now.
GR: Yeah, I was going to say flamboyant but… (laughter) Well, you know, I wanted to ask you this bigger picture question about the role of government, taking politics out of it for a minute, but the role of government and the transition to clean energy, because you do talk a lot about that in the book. And it's not new for government to be critically involved in the emergence and the promotion and establishment of new technologies when they come along. I mean, the government subsidized the transcontinental railroads, for instance, they wouldn't have been built without them. So what's your vision of how you see government being involved in this instance with this transition?
BK: Well, Grant, my organization again, E2 got its start 25 years ago in California when California was considering what then were the first ever tailpipe emissions standards for vehicles in the world, the so-called California Clean Car standards. And our founders at the time were businesspeople, they saw what was happening in Sacramento, they saw the auto industry coming into Sacramento, the oil and gas industry coming into Sacramento and saying, oh, you crazy Californians, pass this law and it's going to kill our companies, we're not going to make cars in America anymore, California is going to go to hell and catch on fire and float in the Pacific, and it's going to be the end of the world. Well, our founders stood up and said, you know what? We don't know that much about making cars, we don't know that much about making petroleum, what we do know about is innovation. And what the right market signals from government, from government policies, we can, maybe these, again, 25 years ago, maybe those Prius thingies, these hybrid cars will be more commonplace and who knows, maybe even electric cars someday. And by the way, it's not a bad idea to clean up the air in California. So our founders saw that with the right market signal from government policy, we can drive innovation, we can change the world. And that's what's happening now. We have federal policies, finally, finally, finally, we decided to do something about climate change in this country. And it's creating what I believe is the biggest economic revolution we've seen in generations.
GR: So it's clear from what you're saying that, you know, the businesses have gotten the cues and they're able to make money at this and they see it's the future. So they're going to do the innovation. It may be tough to answer this but if you could imagine that government were not involved, it sounds like the transition would still happen, but it would take longer. Is that fair to say? And my question to you is, how much longer? I mean, do you have any idea?
BK: It would take too much longer is what I would say. And look, the proof is in the pudding. Again, 300 major projects around America, a $120 billion in private sector investment. That would not have happened, Grant, without the policies that were passed in Washington 21 months ago or 2 years ago. And that's again the Inflation Reduction Act, but it's also the bipartisan infrastructure bill and it's the CHIPS and Science Act, which invest in semiconductors that are key to a clean energy transition, generally. But here's the thing, it would take too long from a climate perspective for one thing, because remember, the reason we're doing all this stuff is to create and give us the tools we need to reduce our emissions in this country by 40% to 50% and meet our climate goal, the world's climate goals to keep to keep on track with that. But the other thing is, if we didn't do this, guess what? We would be beholden to other countries in the clean energy transition that is sweeping the world. Right now 90% of solar panels are built by China or other countries. Right now 80% of our batteries are built in one form or another by China. We couldn't even compete in this market before, but today, guess what? We have more than 40 battery factories coming out of the ground, including right there in Upstate New York. We have more than 35 solar panel factories being built in America right now because of these policies. So we're going to finally be able to compete in what is expected to be a $23 trillion global market for this stuff. That's amazing.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Bob Keefe is the executive director of an organization called E2. And we're discussing his new book titled "Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Frontlines of an American Business Revolution". So, Bob, I was glad to see this in your book, you've got a chapter on equity in clean energy. And it does often seem like, you know, when you think about solar panels, you've mentioned those a few times or electric cars, they're almost things that almost seem like luxury items for those who are better off. I mean, you don't normally see solar panels on the roofs of cheap houses, a higher end Tesla costs more than most people make in a year. So how is clean energy related to concerns about equity and socioeconomic inequality?
BK: Well, for starters, you're exactly right, Grant. Look, not only are the majority of purchasers of things like electric vehicles or solar panels affluent white folks, the majority of people who work in clean energy right now are predominantly white men. African-Americans make up something like 16% of the overall U.S. workforce, they make up about 6% of clean energy. Women make up almost 50% of the U.S. workforce, they make up less than 20% I think in in clean energy. The policies that were passed in Washington try to address this in a few ways. First of all, there's something called the Justice 40 program, which means that 40% of all of the government's investments in clean energy projects are going to go into underserved communities and communities of color, for instance. There's also something called Community Benefits programs, which means that any time one of these companies goes into a region, they've got to work really closely with the community to develop that project and address community needs. That's something that's new in government expansion. We didn't have that when the railroads were going through, we didn't have that when the Interstate Highway Program was happening, we didn't have it when the moonshot was happening for that matter. And then finally, there's something called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund which just got released, I think. It essentially sets aside billions of dollars to help bring some of these clean energy advantages to low income communities and communities of color, but also help the entrepreneurs in those communities get engaged and get up and running with clean energy companies to support those communities themselves. This is a new way of doing economic development in America, and hopefully it's going to finally address some of those issues of inequity.
GR: I wanted to ask you a couple of questions now that I hear when I hear the pushback on some of the evangelists like yourself, you know, talking about the benefits of clean energy, and one is regarding electric cars and other things that have these lithium batteries. For example, I have an electric lawnmower with a battery. I love it, by the way, it's lighter than my gas mower, it's quieter, it's my favorite gadget. But you do hear concerns about what we do with all these spent batteries because, you know, they have a lifespan and they pose certain environmental risks and they contain some pretty dangerous compounds of materials. So, you know, what's your response to that concern?
BK: Well, my first response is, yes, we need to pay absolute attention to that. And if only we would have paid that much attention to when it came to burning oil and gas and coal and the impacts of that as well. But, you know, a couple of things about lithium ion or batteries in general. First of all, as part of the book I went down to a lithium mine and processing operation that's being built in North Carolina. And one of the things that I learned is that not only are they extracting lithium from what was an abandoned mine down there, or they plan on it, you can actually reuse about 98% of what's in a typical lithium ion battery today. And so a lot of these battery manufacturing plants, including some of those in New York I think, are also setting up operations to essentially recycle all of the goods in batteries so you can use it over and over and over again. There's another way you can do this, which is reusing these batteries. So that battery in your lawnmower or the battery in my electric car, when it's spent, I might not be able to go , you know, 200 miles on it anymore, but there's still enough good stuff in that battery to maybe let it go ten miles a day. So we have an E2 member, for instance, in Michigan who takes old Prius batteries and basically reuses them. He puts them in forklifts and forklifts on a factory floor. You can imagine they go all day long, but they don't go more than ten miles. So you can reuse that battery in that way. The last step is that because of the innovation that's being spurred because of these policies, we're starting to see so many new types of batteries and energy storage that, again, from my technology reporter days, I'm not even going to guess what it looks like. But finally, the innovation is moving in this and that's going to be good stuff.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Bob Keefe. We've been discussing his new book, which is titled, “Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Front Lines of an American Business Revolution”. Another sort of pushback I wanted to put to you is, it is obvious though that even though we're in this massive transition, that fossil fuels are still going to be part of our daily lives and our economy for a fairly long time. And I do think one gets the impression sometimes listening to the advocates for green energy that they don't take that, they don't sort of acknowledge that fully. And I think that sometimes that makes them sound in a way that opens them up to criticism from the other side. I just want to get your thoughts about that.
BK: Well, look, change takes a long time. We know that in every part of society and in every part of the economy. That said, look at when the mobile phone was introduced. That wasn't that long ago, Grant., and I don't know anybody left that still has a wired phone in their house. I know there are a few people that are that do, but not a lot. Look at something like digital music, right? I remember as a technology reporter covering Steve Jobs one day when he walked out and he held up a little square thing and said, someday you're going to have a hundred songs in your pocket in this iPod, right? And then later it was, someday on this cell phone, you'll be able to take pictures and you'll store all your music on it. That wasn't that long ago, look how fast that technology moved along. That's the type of pace of technology that we're seeing now in the clean energy field. No, it's not going to make fossil fuels obsolete tomorrow, maybe not even next year or then the next decade. But it's moving at such a rate that fossil fuels look like they're headed the way of the CD and the cassette tape.
GR: Well, I hope the CDs stay around longer because I still love my CD’s.
BK: I think there's still going to be people that still love their gas powered cars, right? But just like with your lawnmower, I haven't talked to anybody I know of that has an electric car that says, man, I wish I could go back to a gas car and go fill it up at 80 bucks every week.
GR: Yeah. Well, this may seem like a dumb question to someone like you, and it's I have to just kind of warn you, this is kind of a special interest, I guess, of mine. But I can remember when natural gas used to be seen in positive terms. I'm that old by environmental, you know, natural gas is this great thing…
BK: You and me both.
GR: Now, of course, natural gas is the devil. In New York. You can't get a new house with a gas stove, there are certain carve outs, but that's basically the situation So just for someone who doesn't understand this stuff as much as you do, explain to me why natural gas is still really bad.
BK: Well, natural gas is still a fossil fuel and it produces energy by burning it up. And when you burn it up, it produces emissions and those emissions heat our planet and that heating of our planet causes bigger hurricanes and more wildfires and droughts and flooding and all of the things that are really impacting our economy to the tune of $100 billion every single year now. Natural gas was long seen as a bridge fuel, right? To get us from coal to electricity, really. That bridge is getting shorter and shorter now because the technology has finally, finally, finally caught up. You know, today's Tesla is not the EV1, which was the General Motors early attempt at an electric vehicle. The solar panels that we're seeing utilities deploy almost, and by the way, utilities are switching away from natural gas as well, not necessarily because they just want to do the right thing for the environment, but the fact is, solar and wind is the cheapest power available. It's cheaper than coal, it's cheaper than natural gas in most cases. And you can deploy a lot of solar and wind a lot quicker than you can build a new natural gas plant or a nuclear plant by far, that sort of thing. So it's speed to market with clean energy and it's the pricing.
GR: We've only got about a minute left, but I want to squeeze one last question in for you. Any time you have big changes like the ones that we've been talking about, there are tipping points along the way for society. And these are points when the resistance and the inertia sort of decisively break in favor of a new system. Where are we, do you think, in terms of those tipping points, is the tipping point behind us, or do you see sort of a moment in the near future where it's really going to accelerate?
BK: So, I think when it comes to clean energy, we are at a tipping point already. Again, when you look at all of the new power sources that have been deployed by utilities in the past year, something like 95% of that has been solar or wind or batteries. It's not gas anymore, it's certainly not coal anymore. Nuclear is way too expensive and it takes way too long. So we've already seen that tipping point. Electric vehicles, we've got a ways to go, but we're just getting started. Again, when you look at the fact that every single automaker is shifting to electric vehicles, that's a sign of where things are going. Now, do we still need more charging? Absolutely. But the good news is we've also got a bunch of companies investing and putting new charging out there. So that's coming. We're not there yet with EV’s.
GR: Well, it's an exciting time. And there are a lot of exciting stories in your book. That was Bob Keefe and again, his new book is titled, "Clean Economy Now: Stories from the Frontlines of an American Business Revolution". Bob, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.
BK: Thank you, I really appreciate it.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Victoria Newhouse and Michael Gecan discuss affordable housing on the Campbell Conversations
May 20, 2024
The supply of affordable, quality housing is at a crisis point in the United States, including in the Syracuse area. This week, Grant Reeher speaks with architectural historian Victoria Newhouse, and Michael Gecan with the Industrial Areas Foundation. They have edited and contributed to a new book on the topic, called <b><i>Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing.</i></b>
The Campbell Conversations: A discussion on the Micron project with Tod Rutherford
May 11, 2024
President Joe Biden speaks in Syracuse in April on the $6.1 billion grant that Micron will receive to build a chip megafab in the Town of Clay(Darren McGee / Office of the Governor )
Last month, a number of political dignitaries, including President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, descended upon Syracuse to tout the massive $6.1 billion grant for Micron from the CHIPS and Science Act for its massive megafab project in the Town of Clay. This week, Grant Reeher talks about the labor and economic impacts of the project with <b>Syracuse University Professor Tod Rutherford. </b>
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Last month, a host of political dignitaries, including President Biden, Governor Hochul and Senator Schumer, descended upon Syracuse to tout the federal government's $6.1 billion in grants through the Chips Act to Micron, which plans to build a microchip mega complex in Clay and has said it will invest $100 billion in the project. There was, needless to say, a lot of celebration on that day. My guest today is an economic and labor geographer who's been looking at the Micron project. Tod Rutherford is a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship. Professor Rutherford, welcome to the program.
Tod Rutherford: Thank you very much, Grant. Thanks for having me on.
GR: Well, we're glad you could make it. So, as I just mentioned, you know, there are a variety of government incentives for this Micron project and $6 billion from the Federal Chips Act most recently. But there have been other, goodies and incentives that state and local governments have been putting in as well. Could you just briefly summarize some of those?
TR: Yeah, I mean, the Chips Science Act is $280 billion in total, with $39 billion allocated to, supporting domestic manufacturing. and another $13 billion for research and development and workforce development. But this is, of course, been accompanied by a host of other, kinds of, subsidies and, tax abatements and so forth like this. So, I know that the county, Onondaga County has put in a fairly significant, level as well as New York state. I don't quite have the figures to hand, but, it's a significant amount of money on top of that. Yes.
GR: I think it was in, you know, like almost $300 million by the time it got added up..
TR: Yeah over a 20 year period. Yeah.
GR: Okay, that’s important to note, right? It's not all up front. So, thinking about that and also thinking about the promise of Micron, what people are hoping to see out of it. in one way, I guess I could say we've seen this movie before in this region, and there's even a pun in that sentence, in terms of Syracuse's history on this. But it is nonetheless the case when I talk to people around the town about Micron, a lot of them are very excited. But there are others that say, you know, they'll believe it when they see it, and, so they're a little suspicious of it. Do you think that that it's different this time around with Micron when it comes to helping the area economically?
TR: Well, I think, you know, some degree of healthy skepticism is a good thing to have with respect to this, as you say, there is a history. I don't think, though, we've ever had this kind of level of federal and state commitment, through the Chips Act, through the other kinds of, interventions that are being made. So that would, what I would call wouldn't it doesn't eliminate the possibilities that there are risks with this. Nothing will, but it would seem to me that this would, help the project meet, at least some of its at least minimal goals, if not more. Yes.
GR: Yeah. This is kind of a more political question for you, but at least one of the things that seems different to me anyway is I get the sense that that there are some pretty prominent political players that have put a lot on the line here. I mean, you know, I mentioned Governor Hochul, Schumer, President Biden. So that that to me feels a little different than maybe some of the other economic development projects, you know, if you would.
TR: Yeah. And I think that, you know, post-Covid, there's been a really strong sense in which the kind of globalization model that had been adopted from, like the late 1970s onwards was clearly, problematic in terms of the level of resiliency, dependency on complex overseas, supply chains, all of which were, you know, on, just in time systems. So there was no kind of room for error in them. And we found that, you know, in trying to recover from Covid in the economic sense that, these were really, deeply problematic. And so there has been, I think, both an economic and political argument for reshoring on top of this longer-term concern about the level of investments that's required to sustain a viable manufacturing base in the United States.
GR: Yeah. So the country itself has a stake in this project, I guess, as opposed to, say, the film hub or the mall. So, I was wondering, in addition to the confidence level in the project, actually happening, which is what you've just been speaking to a little bit from an economic standpoint and a governmental tax standpoint, are there reasons to think that that will see the government and therefore, you know, we the people of Onondaga County, I guess we'll get our money back from these upfront investments?
TR: Yeah. I mean, assume let's assume that the number of jobs direct jobs that are, said to be created over this next 20-year period are created. So there's something that we, economic geographers talk about, multiplier effects. and that is, for every direct dollar spent in a sector, how many other, indirect, spendings and jobs can be linked to it. And manufacturing tends to have a fairly high level of multipliers. like, you know, the auto industry in particular, but also, chip manufacturing. So, if we say that we're going to get 9,000 direct jobs as, as is, the forecast in this project with Micron, then we're looking up to, an additional 40,000 more jobs being created. And so, if we're anywhere near that figure, then, then it will pay back just in terms of, the multiple ways of spending, tax revenue and so forth. Yes.
GR: Yeah. Those number of those jobs is really mind-boggling when you think of the size of Syracuse.
TR: Yeah, so assuming that we get anywhere near those jobs, that's that's the big thing. Yeah.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Syracuse University geography professor Tod Rutherford, and we're discussing the Micron project in central New York. So based on your research, Tod, and the things that you've looked at and thought about, what are your biggest concerns about the economic aspects of this project as you look at it right now?
TR: Well, when we have to remember that this is a very cyclical industry. and so it's it's very difficult to forecast in any one year or even a five-year period, you know, exactly if jobs will be created or if jobs that are created don't simply result in layoffs. So we need to be prepared for thinking about the cyclical nature of the industry, even one that's getting the level of subsidy that it that it's getting. The other thing that I'm somewhat concerned about on the kind of economic front is, you know, who's going to be responsible for training, and, and doing those kinds of things, because it seems to me that the model that the United States has followed for about the last 50 years is increasingly, employers expect, either the public sector through the education or some other body to do the training and so it seems to me that there is this expectation and this is certainly happening in the local economy where, you know, Onondaga College and Syracuse University are stepping up the amount of investment and I'm not necessarily against that. But we do have to ask, you know, whose responsibility is it to make somebody's job ready? Where does the the public sectors, responsibility and the employer's responsibility, begin? And it seems like, for a long time, the kinds of training that used to be done internally, are, are now expected to be done either by the individual coming into the job or, through the public education system. And so if, if Micron and other companies are gaining this level of subsidy, is it not fair to expect that they should also pick up more of the training? And that's not clear to me that that's going.
GR: Yeah, that's an interesting point. And and I wanted to ask you about that, that what I mean, what happens if okay, OCC and SU and you know, maybe LeMoyne and other schools around here create programs, and then Micron says after they encounter these people, well, they're really not quite what we need. We're going to have to hire overseas or we're going to have to pull people over from, Idaho or something. I mean, is that what happens then is that is that just the company's decision or?
TR: Well, I mean, and again, we're not sure, exactly what the agreement says about those aspects, assuming that it's just simply the company's decision to make, then, yes, they could bring in people on visa. They can bring that is non domestic workers or they can bring people in from other locations. So that is a concern in the sense that we're not sure, about what the responsibility of Micron should be in terms of, doing that kind of training. I, you know, my other concern is that, you know, if you build this training infrastructure and the jobs don't appear, what's going to happen? There has been some, reports from Arizona recently that they're doing, they're stepping up these trainings and apprenticeships and other kinds of programs for the chip companies that are coming there. But the hiring hasn't really gone on to nearly the extent, that they expected at this point. It may yet come to fruition. But it seems to me that, you know, the risk is kind of on the public and the individual worker to invest in skills and then hope that that's exactly what the firm wants. and it seems to me that there should be some levers of intervention within any kind of agreement that says, you know, you have some responsibilities. We're not we can't train everybody down to the last, bolt to tighten and, and, and screw to, to screw in. Right. You know, you've got to do something on this, you know.
GR: Yeah. On that, on that issue of the levers, are based on, your experience and your research, are there like best practices for that, that the government or, you know, policy instruments that, that could speak to that?
TR: Yeah. Well, there does seem to be some local community benefit agreements, that that have occurred, in other communities that have, received, companies receiving chip grants. And these tend to be coalitions of local labor unions and, community groups. And they were stipulating things about, minority hires. You know, a union neutrality agreements and other kinds of things. And, you know, there's stipulations within, for example, the Federal Chips Act about not engaging in stock buybacks. whether it is, you know, using the money that you get from the Chips Act from the public to very effectively, just simply inflate your shares by buying, buying stocks. And it's not clear that this is being enforced. So, we have the letter of the law and then we have the fact of the law. And it seems to me that so far there's some discrepancy. and I'm not sure who's making that decision. And it's partly in the sense that there, there's different layers of responsibility here. So the Chips Act is passed by, by the, by executive and by the, by the US government, but it's enforced by the Commerce Department. and the Commerce Department may have other priorities. So it's not clear that that's, that's going on in the same way.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Tod Rutherford. He's a professor in the geography and the environment department at Syracuse University's Maxwell School. And we've been discussing the Micron project here in central New York. So obviously, one of the big things that I have read about this project when it comes to the jobs is, that in addition to creating a lot of jobs and you mentioned that multiplier effect in the first half of the program, which, again, is just an astonishing number when you think of the size of the area. But, many of these jobs that Micron is going to be providing are going to be very high paying relative to the Syracuse, market, the current set of jobs in the area. And I was just wondering what effects will that have? Obviously, it's going to have some huge effects on the labor market here in central New York. And I it's just kind of hard to think that through. What do you see happening in terms of ripple effects or broader impacts to the labor market here?
TR: Well, there's a there's a number of different ways to address this. First of all, we need to look at the fact that the types of jobs that are being created, there's differences in terms of pay and skill level. I mean, obviously, you have people who are, graduate engineers. but then about 60% of the workforce, I believe, will be what we call technical workers. The graduate engineers are going to be earning significantly above the average for the predicted, pay, but the technical staff will probably be earning maybe 50 to 60,000 a year, which, you know, maybe 20 to $25 an hour, give or take more with overtime and other kinds of things. So it's a kind of a skewed or bifurcated, labor market. So, you know, let's assume the number of jobs that are being created are being created at the level of wages and salaries that are predicted. Obviously, this is going to, you know, have these ripple effects. You know, they can be very beneficial in the sense that, you know, workers' wages in the United States and elsewhere have been fairly stagnant for 40 years and including in Syracuse. So they'll be probably actually good thing that wages are going to go up. but, you know, on the other hand, you can have things going on like, what they call poaching, where, a big firm like Micron can, can fulfill its skill needs by just simply taking, a worker from an, already an existing, firm that's done the training and so forth like this, but can't afford to necessarily bump up the pay to the level that Micron is offering. And so then, then you can have skill shortages that can come out of that. And so that becomes a potential issue in terms of how that affects labor market. But you know, especially if you also have more equitable and diverse hiring, we have an opportunity here for, you know, minorities and other groups in the Syracuse region that have not been included in a lot of what we would call good and good paying jobs to, to have access to these jobs. But again, it has to be, there has to be benchmarks set by the community. There either is an advisory board, but these benchmarks have to be have some teeth. And in terms of, you know, maybe holding back certain subsidies if, if, they're not being, fulfilled. So, you know, it's not simply up to Micron. It's also the community should have some levers into this particular, impact. Yes.
GR: Well, it's interesting you mentioned that because one, one lever that I was struck by and it's not doesn't really fit the categories you've mentioned so far exactly. But I watched the announcement. of, of the, of the $6 billion and where again, President Biden, Governor Hochul, Senator Schumer, among other elected officials spoke. And I was struck by how much was being made about unions during all of that. Every single speaker hit that point hard, about the value of unions, the fact that these would be they kept talking about union jobs, and they made it sound like most of the jobs at the new manufacturing plant would be unionized, except I was I was left a little confused. Were they talking about the unionization of the construction of the plant, or were they talking about both the construction of the plant and the operation of the plant? Anyway, what's your what's your sense? I mean, how many of these jobs are going to be unionized? Which ones will be unionized? Do we know?
TR: The only thing that I do know is that they have a, an agreement to only hire, union labor for the construction phase. I don't think there's any other understanding, beyond that. And that's why in other communities there are, especially ones that are getting chips money, but other kinds of infrastructure money. There have been agreements to have a union neutrality that is, if Micron and union wants to form their that they're not going to hold compulsory one-on-one, anti-union meetings, they won't engage in arbitrary firings or intimidation of the workforce. They will agree to be neutral during that process. And certainly, there have been other agreements in New York state between, for example, the Communication Workers of America and General Electric, which is also receiving some infrastructure and green infrastructure money for those kinds of things. So it's it's not clear that there will be necessarily a union at all. The point is, is that if workers wanted to have one, will they be able to make a truly free choice in order to do that.
GR: Well, let me push you a little bit on this, and I kind of pushing you into your values a bit, I suppose. But, you know, Micron is this really high-tech company. Do you think it's do you think it's important that a lot of the jobs there at the plant are unionized, in your view?
TR: Well, I go back to I feel that there needs to be a real choice made by the workers. It's ultimately up to the employees themselves to make that decision. But, you know, my values would be that, there is some important, features of unionization when unions work well, of giving workers, voice in the workplace. Also, unions are positively associated with things like investment and training. They often make firms do more training than they would normally do otherwise. They also reduce, the level of employee turnover. So they build kind of the human capital that comes by through learning, by doing. So, you know, in my view, there's a lot of positives that come out of unionization. And I do believe it would be a positive benefit, to the workers there. But as I said, ultimately it's their choice to make.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Syracuse University professor Tod Rutherford. Well, let me stick with the unionization, just just a little bit longer. Do you happen to know whether Micron itself has a particular history so far? Have they been friendly to unions, unfriendly or anything else that you're aware of?
TR: I and I must confess my ignorance here. I don't I don't know what their history has been. You know, traditionally, the semiconductor industry is not particularly friendly, to unions. Okay. Like a lot of the high-tech industry, that slowly changing in some areas. There are some unions and, and associated with high-tech industry more generally. But you know, you know, the one reason that they've offshored over those years, the last 40 years is, is to avoid and in some cases, union labor or paying the levels of wages that are typically associated with not just unions, but, but U.S. standards.
GR: Right. Yeah. No, I wondered about that as well. Well, you mentioned something, at the beginning of our conversation about the investments that educational institutions like OCC, Syracuse University and I believe I read about also some things that we're going to be done at the high school level, even about this, to get the students ready to go into those programs. And so it does seem that these institutions are making some upfront investments now in their curriculums and their programs and, and particularly in the STEM areas. And I, I believe if, if my understanding of what I heard, in a, in a faculty meeting was correct, that I believe that that Syracuse University has actually reallocated some faculty lines in to to reflect this. So they're making some real decisions about this. Just your sense is that is that too risky at this point? it's just necessary at all to do this?
TR: They may be privy to more, they may be privy to more information than I have. So, it is it is something of a risk in the sense that there is no guarantee that the number of jobs that are pledged to be created will be created. And there's no guarantee that those workers will stay in the Syracuse region, whether they're skilled engineers, graduates of Syracuse University or whether they're graduating from OCC. I will say that especially for the technical level, it's very important that if any investment is made in training, that workers are receiving a recognized transferable skill, that is, you know, that it's not just simply to the demands of Micron, but are skills that can be transferred to other firms in the region, you know, hopefully that people can stay in the region, assuming that happens so that it's not just simply a skill that is either linked to Micron or is completely unrecognized elsewhere. So I do believe OCC is trying to make sure that they are and as a public institution, they should be. But it is really important that if you are going to make these investments, you can't guarantee exactly that they're going to get those jobs, but you can at least say they've got a transferable skill that could go to another, you know, firm.
GR: Yeah, that's that's an important point. Well, we've we've got about three minutes left or so, and I wanted to give you a bit of time to discuss this final question. And it it's I wanted to get, you know, you you've looked at a lot of these kinds of things in the past and other industries. And you've looked at Micron now a little bit. From your particular perspective and your perch, what do you think are the most important questions that the people who are listening to this program, you know, the citizens of the region, should have at the front of their minds as they're thinking about this, because, again, some of these numbers are just mind-blowing and I think the, I wouldn't necessarily call it a danger, but maybe it's a danger. But I think the, the, the, the inclination is just to say, oh, we have to have this, you know, this is just these are numbers I've never contemplated before. So. But what do you think people here should be have at the front of their minds as they're processing this in the next few years?
TR: Well, you know, as I said, this is an equal parts opportunity and a risk. I think, people here should be thinking about an opportunity in the sense of developing, also a supply base that is not just simply wedded to Micron, but has possibilities of, developing its own synergies with other firms supply elsewhere. And so that we are not just putting all our eggs in one basket with Micron, that we develop a kind of, a kind of a momentum that, that this kind of investment will generate, but not just simply to say we're just only going to supply to Micron, but to develop, independent capabilities in, within terms of research and development and other kind of capacities that will allow, a kind of cluster to develop here that isn't just dependent on Micron, so that we have a more diversified base. So I think that that's critical. I haven't talked about that so much, but I think that's also very critical.
GR: Just a few seconds left and maybe taking you out of your lane here. But one of the things that I've noticed just since this announcement has been made is, the value of my home has gone up considerably, and a lot of people are excited about that, particularly in my neighborhood. But there's a downside to that is that continues. And that's affordability of housing. And it's already an issue in Syracuse. So just in a just in a couple seconds, is that is that a big problem we ought to be thinking about too?
TR: Yeah. You know, in the short to medium term, you know, housing is is not something that responds very well to to market changes. So the supply isn't going to necessarily match the demand if the demand comes to fruition of course. And so we need to think about, how we're going to have affordable housing, and the public sector and private sector need to make some agreements on that too.
GR: Well, we'll have to see how it all plays out. That was Tod Rutherford. Professor Rutherford, thanks again for taking the time to talk with me. It's been very informative.
TR: Well, you're very welcome, and thanks for having me.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Jonathan Zaharek on the Campbell Conversations
May 08, 2024
Writer and photographer Jonathan Zaharek(provided photo)
New York's Adirondack Mountains are a precious resource, and within them is the High Peaks wilderness area. This week, Grant Reeher talks with writer and photographer Jonathan Zaharek, who has written a new guidebook on the High Peaks, called <b>"Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks: A Guide to the Region's High Peaks."</b>
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Well, spring has sprung in upstate New York, and a couple days have even felt like summer. On this program, we sometimes like to take breaks from politics and the dim news of the world. So today we're going to discuss the Adirondack Mountains and hiking in them. My guest is Jonathan Zaharek. He's a writer and a photographer and a deep devotee of the mountains. And he's written a new Falcon guidebook to them titled “Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks.” Jonathan, welcome to the program.
Jonathan Zaharek: All right. Thanks for having me.
GR: You bet. Well, we're glad you could be here. And we'll talk about the mountains themselves and the book first. And then we'll get into some of your experiences in the mountains, as well as some broader issues. But first, I just want to say I have, read and used a lot of hiking guides, and I thought this one was particularly well done. So, kudos to you and to the guides for that. So really nice work. So let me just start with something very basic here. What marks the 46 High Peaks as being in a certain group? How do you qualify if you're a peak? How do you get to be a high peak?
JZ: I understand okay. Yeah, right. Yeah. So the 46 High Peaks is kind of synonymous with the other high peaks scattered around the northeastern United States. So all in all, there's 111, peaks that rise 4000ft or higher in elevation and so New York state has 48, two in the Catskills and 46 in the Adirondack Mountains, which would be the 46 High Peaks the most sought after mountains there in New York state.
GR: Nice.
JZ: What classifies them as a high peak is pretty much the day elevation above sea level.
GR: I gotcha. Okay. And, and you mentioned the two that are down the Catskills they're not part of the 46. And so. So. Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. And now I understand that there is it a formal or an informal club of people who have hiked all 46?
JZ: Sure. You know, it's started out certainly more formal. Back when, you know, in the early 1900s, because it was very few people. But since then, the popularity has caused it to be a little bit more, informal. There are many people who don't even, you know, you can be a 46er. That's what it's called when you finish. And you don't have to, say, you know, you don't have to actually submit something that you did. You know, some people don't. But if you wanted to, there is a formal process which is not nearly as extensive now as it used to be.
GR: I see okay. Yeah, I've got a I've got a neighbor of mine up the street who, who's a 46er. And so he's, I see him out training in the winter and he's walking around with a backpack on his back. So, you're a photographer and you're a writer. the pictures in the book, I have to say, they're plentiful, first of all. And they're, absolutely beautiful. Are they yours?
JZ: They are, almost, I I'd say there's maybe only 2 or 3 images in there that aren't mine, that are sourced from other people. But, yeah, most of them are mine. And, I'm honestly, I was very, very excited to be able to contribute the photography more than just the writing as well.
GR: Yeah, they're really, really striking. And I have to say again, I guess I'm going to be your chief salesman today. But the book is the book is worth it for the pictures. Even setting aside the helpful guide. Do you have a separate book or a place where people can see your photography in and of itself?
JZ: Absolutely. I don't have a physical photo book yet. I'm actually working on that. Maybe to release, next year, but as of right now, I do have a full-time website that people can, can search at is, jonathanzphotography.com. And Jonathan is spelled J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N. And, and you can just find my website, my portfolio online to see Adirondack galore of all photography. That's all that's pretty much there. even though I've traveled and photographed other places, the Adirondacks are my bread and butter.
GR: So one question on those pictures, then, now that I know that they're all yours. there are quite a few, from the tops of the mountains at sunset, at sunrise. You even got some pictures at night. Some spectacular pictures of the stars in the night sky. So that means that you're doing a lot of coming down and going up these mountains in the dark, right? Is that right?
JZ: You know, I guess one way to put it, and this might make more sense. I was a photographer first, then a hiker second. And so I always brought my camera with me when I was on these hikes. And some of these hikes are extensive enough that whether you like it or not, you're either going to be on top of sunrise or at sunset, or starting your hikes in the dark or ending in the dark, you know? So it was always nice to have my camera with me and photograph as I went along.
GR: I'm glad you did. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the writer and photographer Jonathan Zaharek, and we're discussing his new guidebook on the Adirondacks titled “Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks.” So, some questions about the mountains. I have read concerns in recent years. I guess they go back a ways, but, that some of the trail's getting too much foot traffic and too many people on them. Do you have do you have observations about that in your experience on the trails or, or thoughts about that that you could share?
JZ: Sure. Yeah. So I, I'm somewhat new to the area. When you look at the whole spectrum of time that people have been hiking. I would say I've been hiking them for about the last ten years or so. And in that short time frame, I have seen the, the influx of people and how trails have certainly changed where I do remember certain areas being a single track, and then now it's like out of nowhere, it's predominantly rocks and mud in so many areas. And so I, I have and now that I live in that area, I have certainly seen the influx of people and the negative environmental impacts it has had. And I would say and from my stance, the, the influx of people isn't so much the problem as it is the infrastructure that's in place and the people in charge of the infrastructure and how fast or slow, things move when it comes to rules and regulations and limitations, because what you're doing is you're combating pretty much the constitution of the Adirondack Park, which is this forever wild, not building upon the land, which means there are certain things you are limited to when it comes to actual trail building. And then there's underfunding. and then there's just the process that it takes to, to work on things. And so we might have the foot traffic, and it looks like, I mean, it feels like a national park sometimes, but we have state funding, right? We're not a national park. And so it's it's the balance is very, it's very imbalanced. And so we're playing a lot of catch up, and you're really just trying to figure out what to do and that, has certainly come at the expense, the, the expense of some freedom, I guess, with that land.
GR: Yeah. The, I wanted to ask you more specifically about it. there's a large state park in the center of Maine, Baxter State Park. I don't know if you've ever been there or not, but I many years ago, I went there a few times, and it's the largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi. I guess the Adirondack Wilderness area is the second largest. And, what they do is they limit the number of people that can come even into the park, forgetting about a particular trail, any given day. Do you think there's any discussion or movement toward trying to do something like that in the High Peaks?
JZ: Yeah. So the High Peaks Wilderness, is the second. And, obviously there's more wilderness zones within the Adirondack Park. So when you combine all the wilderness, it's I don't even know how many more times bigger than Baxter. But most people are going there. Most people are going to the High Peaks Wilderness. And so when you compare that to Baxter, Baxter, I believe, has, kind of written in it that if you are a resident of Maine, you are given Baxter State Park pretty much to you as a right whereas if you're not, then you pretty much are at the mercy of like first come, first serve. And so I would say that how the Adirondack Constitution, I guess because it was, I believe I think it was started in 1892, when that started, they didn't necessarily have an idea of what it would be like today. And so there's a lot of things built upon that. And so we're kind of at the mercy of New York state first of all, just how they do things, because it's a huge state, the dichotomy of populations. And the way politics are is it's very diverse and it's harder because we have more people coming into our park and Baxter.
GR: Yeah, much more remote.
JZ: Much, much more, I believe I think it was in 2021, New York state, the DEC, approximately 72 million people went to the Adirondack Park or through it in some way. So whether they were driving through it or whatever, and that obviously could be repeating people but there was approximately and I don't know how they calculated it, but around 72 million people, which is actually insane, because Maine, it's way up there. So I feel like it's easier for them to kind of restrict the flow, and the basis of it and how it was formed and how it's regulated is already different. So people aren't going to complain. I respect Baxter, I love Baxter, I've hiked there many times. And, I get it. And it's like, if I can't get a spot, I can't get in. I don't I don't blame them. I, you know, I blame myself. You know, I think here, though, it's different because you're starting with something that's already there and then you're taking it away.
GR: Exactly. Yes. It would be hard. Well, another question I had to ask you about the mountains and the park area too, is I've also read that the park, and the state are both concerned to some extent that the visitors to the Adirondacks are not as diverse as the state itself. You mentioned diversity just a minute ago, and there's been some efforts to do more outreach and change on that. I think there was even an office established, a, a director of, of of basically diversity for the Adirondacks. I’m just curious from your perspective, being out on the trails in the last ten years, have the has the population gotten more diverse, or is it, you know, eight gazillion Jonathan Zaharek’s out there. What are you seeing?
JZ: You know, I think there's a lot of people, like we have a lot of Canadians. Right. And there's I mean, there's the whole northeast in general isn't that diverse of a region of the United States. And so probably like 75% of the people hiking in our area are from within a neighboring state or neighboring cities. So automatically right off the bat, when you bring more people in, you're at the mercy of how diverse the cities and states are just surrounding New York, which already at the end of the day, isn't too much but when it comes to the types of people actually out there, I will say there's been an influx of people who might have a passion for the outdoors, but they might be getting in over their heads about it. And so there's a lot more unprepared people, a lot of people who think, oh, these are just hills, you know, it's New York state. It's, you know, it's not the big deal. I'm going to get into hiking. And it's a great way to get into hiking, because you can't get in the hiking without hiking. I mean, it's a great way to learn mistakes, and it's a great way to learn how to do things right. Because I say, if you can hike in the Adirondacks, you can hike anywhere and I think there's a lot of truth to that, depending on how you actually take it. But I do think there's also a way that the people who live there and the people who are in charge of helping people and education and all these other things, it's we're also, kind of we have our own responsibility everyone has their own responsibility, but everyone's playing a different key, a different part. And it's about making sure that people are properly educated, you know, because we want people to come in. It's free. It's public land. We don't want to restrict access, but sometimes that might be necessary for the, you know, for the, for the, for the safety of it.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with the writer, photographer and hardcore hiker Jonathan Zaharek. And we've been discussing the Adirondack Mountains and his new guidebook titled “Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks.” So Jonathan, you're kind of an unusual guy. Let me just summarize some of your physical accomplishments in the Adirondacks. You've logged over 4000 miles hiking there. You've done 11 complete rounds of the entire 46 peaks, accumulating them all up 11 times. Uou've done three winter rounds of that. You've done something called the Red Line in the summer, and the winter. And you've done a solo Bob Marshall traverse in both the summer and the winter. And you've also hiked 25 peaks in 25 hours. Now, I don't know what some of those things are, but I am convinced from all that that, you're a bit of a fanatic in these mountains. And that's probably a good thing.
JZ: Yeah, it’s very passion-driven.
GR: Yeah, I can see that. So. So let me ask you some questions. Based on your experience on this land. First of all, what is the most difficult of the 46 peaks to hike and why?
JZ: This is a great question, and I wish it was a clear-cut answer, but I'm really I'm really I, I, I'm asked this question quite a bit. I think a lot of it has to do with whether, how remote it is or how technical it can be. What I tell people the final boss of a high peak is, I say Allen and I say Allen Mountain, for multiple reasons. Why? Now, Allen isn't very technical, but it does have technicalities to it. When I say technical, I mean there might be scrambling hands-on. It's not just a dirt trail. I would say Allen Mountain because it is the most remote pretty much from like the access road. Everything from as the crow flies, singular high peak in all of the northeastern United States. So it's almost 20 miles to go, car to car, round trip for this thing. So it's almost ten miles, one way out into the wilderness. And so the first thing that you have to conquer is the distance. You have to have the distance. And then half of the mountain, half of that trail isn't even marked. So you have to have good trail judgment. You have to understand where you're going. You have to be able to read your map and know what turns to take and where to go, because it's not all marked. There's plenty of mud, river crossings. And then once you actually get to the ascent of the mountain, there's slides, rock slides that you have to climb that are sometimes very slimy. And so there's a lot of things that could, you know, a lot of precarious situations if you're not careful. There have been rescues on that mountain, and there are other mountains that are more dangerous weather-wise. But I think Allen is like, you need to if you're going to go out there, go with someone who's been, and don't make that your first high peak or it's going to it might be a really, really bad time for you.
GR: Of all of the 46, what's your personal favorite?
JZ: I, I kind of have two, I think, I'll start with kind of like the better view. I personally think my favorite view of any high peak is Basin Mountain. And, I mean, I just think it has the best panoramic view of all the major peaks, both front and back. And then I would say for sentimentality purposes, it would be Algonquin, which is the second-highest peak. If I could only hike one mountain for the rest of my life, it would probably be Algonquin, because it's the second tallest. It's very short. It's like 3.7 miles. It's very steep, but it's short and sweet right from the main hiking trail hub, and it's spectacular. Any season, any time, any weather.
GR: It's funny, we have something in common because that was the one I would pick as my favorite. Although I don't have the extensive experience of all of them that you do. What is I listed all these things at the when we came in from the break of all these, some of them sort of sound crazy. 25 peaks, 25 hours. But what's the most challenging thing that you've ever done as a hiker in these mountains?
JZ: Yeah. You know, I would say the 25 peaks thing. And I know they get probably a majority of the people listening to this probably might not really grasp grasp it. and I would say, like there was a fundraiser that I was participating in a few years back, and the original goal was to do 25 high peaks in under 24 hours, which would have broken the record at that time but I got a little bit too far behind schedule. But still went over the 25-hour mark straight nonstop. And so that was like pretty much a single day, if you look at it really as a single day, continuously, nonstop. It was around 57 miles, and around 28,000ft of climbing, which is almost the height of Everest. So I Everest, you know, from sea level. but, yeah. So it's like things like that. a lot of it's just passion driven and it's like, I think a lot of people look at the things that they want to accomplish, because again, accomplishments are in, the eye of the beholder, right? Because someone doing one round of the 46, they could take several years. And once they finish it, they like I congratulate them because it's like to them, I understand how big of a deal that is for them. For me, it might be a lot easier now at this point. and that's okay because again, it's in the eye of the beholder in a way. And so I think a lot of it is passion-driven. And so, these challenges are not there are not doing them just for accolades like I do them, because it's like I want to go out there and experience this place. For example, the red line, which you mentioned is every mile of every single trail in all of High Peaks Wilderness, which is well over 300 miles. And by the time you finish that, you have done 6 or 700 miles. You have to go to and from places multiple times to go get all these miscellaneous trails that people don't hike for months at a time, in certain times of the year.
GR: Wow. So was there ever a time and all your experiences where you felt in danger of your life, or that something serious could go wrong?
JZ: Yeah, there were two. I can be brief at these. The first time was actually when I had little to no experience with winter hiking, and I thought I was. It was the classic I thought I was better than I really was, and went and put myself in a situation that probably wasn't the smartest, but, I was pretty much like it was I got first-degree frostbite. It was zero visibility. And I went up to the summit of Algonquin, on the coldest day of one winter with incredible winds. And, it was around 75 below zero with the wind chill. And, it was a very terrifying experience. I couldn't I couldn't even use my goggles. And so that was that's something that I reflect on frequently and then the other thing is I've had, I don't want to go because I could have a whole conversation about this, but I definitely have had some very, terrifying, kind of scary things to happen to me. I guess you could consider a wildlife, by myself out in wilderness areas. kind of out north near that Allen mountain that I mentioned. You know, I've had some very, very unexplained things happen to me, like, you know, rocks being thrown at me and trees getting ripped down, and actually feeling like I'm not even joking, like I was going to die. Like, I actually, like, had my S.O.S. beacon ready to go and everything. I was terrified, big things pacing you in the woods. It's, you know, even though they're probably deer or bear or, but there's just very it's it can be eerie at night in that area sometimes.
GR: Yeah. We've all seen the Blair Witch Project. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is the writer and photographer Jonathan Zaharek. So I wanted to ask you, it's obvious from your writing that you have, some kind of, special spiritual experiences when when you're hiking in the mountains and, and I've had those experiences as well. So I'm very curious to hear more about those kinds of experiences for you. What, you know, what are the special things that, that, that or the, that you're experiencing there? Where do you think they come from? What do they mean? Just tell us a little bit about that.
JZ: Sure. So I think the first thing that I know it is every single time I go out somewhere, most of that, most of the time, I've already been there. And so the more I go out into the same place over and over again, I start to compound my experiences, my memories, the way that I've seen it, just how you might enjoy the same thing with a friend over and over again. You keep doing that same thing and you start recounting memories. So from a personal perspective, just being able to take people to other places or go to the same mountain at a different time, I start compounding all these sentimental memories. Because memories aren't planned, right? Memories are things that we have to go and we do and we don't. We don't expect them. and so there's just a lot of, sentimentality for myself personally, and even that didn't exist prior to me hiking in the Adirondacks. But I would say since then, what I've kind of found even to be more profound and you did say, you know, spiritual and I think I believe in creation, and I see these mountains and I like and I kind of almost feel like I'm on a similar, a similar spectrum with them that the, the, the entity who created the mountains may have also created me. And so I almost in a way, I guess you could say you feel one with them in a way, but I would just say, like, I feel like I can actually build a relationship kind of with, with, I guess you could say God in this way and then the creation and then myself, as well as a creation, with a conscience and but the mountains are also kind of being subdued and immovable, and it's just this idea of nature and just like, I don't know, it's just such a unique if for anyone who experiences the outdoors on any spiritual level, will probably feel this in some way and just the grandeur and it's like, wow, how small am I? And like, how great is this? But it's like they stand and they are not moved by time yet. Even though I might have a conscience, I am still this like the mountains let me be here, you know, and, like I'm at the mercy of them, right? I and I like to say I don't use the word conquered when it comes to these, these mountains, because they aren't something to be conquered. The only thing to be conquered is yourself and the journey, you know? So that's my biggest takeaway and how I experience them.
GR: That's a good way to put it. For me, I was curious if you've had this there there are a couple particular moments that kind of were more powerful than others, and I don't really have a good I don't have a good reason of for myself of explaining why it was then, you know, do you have you had that where you was like like, you know, something you just something is much more powerful than the usual feeling of being in these mountains and that's magnificence?
JZ: Yeah, yeah, I think I think a lot of it comes down to my, my personal relationship, with, with God in this way, because I'll go out a lot of times solo. And what I'll do is I'll just I'll just communicate. I'll just I'll just talk. I'll just I'll just speak. I'll kind of almost be in a prayer like state and just, kind of just in the silence. And a lot of the time that comes to reflection on who, who are, what are the things that I might be going through my trials and tribulations. And a lot of people will say, I'm going to go into the woods to to leave that stuff behind me. But with my mental state going into the woods, I'm bringing the outside world, like with me. Like I can't just ignore it and go on there because I'm going to have these thoughts, I'm going to have these things and it's a great time for me to just reflect. And there are certainly been times where, I'll kind of just stop and get on my knees, like in a beautiful moment, and I'll just like, I'll just, I don't I'll just be overwhelmed, like with like, with fear, but, like, in a good way. and just kind of like this contriteness and just being like, wow, this is like, what an experience. Like, I get to be here and it's like, why am I so concerned? Why am I so worried? and all these other things. So I do think it's a great opportunity for people to, to experience those things and, on a personal level as well and it's a great time to develop those relationships with others, too, who might be like-minded.
GR: Yeah. No, I think you're making a good point there. So, more personal question. You know, I'm I'm looking at you. You're obviously a young guy. How did the, how did you and the guidebook come together? You seem very young to have written a guidebook, so congratulations on that. But. Yeah. So how did this how did this happen?
JZ: Yeah. You know, it's very providential. I, I also think it's another, another way to kind of put it, I mean, there's providence, but there's also like, what, what you put in, like, you'll kind of get that back in a way. And so my efforts in creating my photography, kind of publicly and my, my YouTube channel and putting up videography kind of becoming a, I guess you could say this kind of known entity, I guess, within the region and pretty much just trying to exercise, my passion and hope that it inspires other people had, kind of caught the attention of Falcon guides, and they were seeking an author for a guidebook of this, these mountains, which they have yet to do. And so I got an email from them one day, basically asking if there was something that I would consider. So they came to me about it, and I was 24 at the time. I'm 27 now. And, they were looking for someone who was younger, who had a good modern perspective on the mountains, who were in them all the time. And you had photography and you had a social, personal engagement. And, I mean, I fit that bill. And I thought about it, and I was like this to me, this is a way that I can utilize my love and passion for these mountains, even though I was not born and raised in them. I'm not a, you know, a legitimate local by any means, and I'm not claiming to be, but I still feel that they're giving me a voice and I felt confident enough that I would be able to do it justice because I've been able to develop relationships with these people who have been there for generations, and I've been able to get the, the, the lens and the perspective of both worlds. And, you know, I had a lot of people help me in this writing with like, hey, what do you think of this? You know, I got a lot of input from people who I respect, and I didn't just want to throw my own words out there and just, you know, you're like, I wanted to make sure that it was done well. And it being a first edition, like, I didn't write, I haven't written anything before this. And so it was certainly, a feat.
GR: Well, it first of all, your passion comes through in the book loud and clear, and it's very well done. So you should feel very good about it. We only got about 30 seconds left. I got one last question for you. So you got a sort of like the lightning round. But for the newbies listening who now have had their appetite whetted, what's the most important single piece of advice you would tell them?
JZ: Enjoy the journey. It will be harder than you probably think, but make sure you prepare, do your research, pick up one of my guidebooks and, just enjoy it, you know, enjoy it.
GR: Great. That was Jonathan Zaharek. And again, his new book, which really is splendid, is titled “Hiking the Adirondack 46 High Peaks.” Jonathan, it's been a pleasure talking to you and makes me feel good about the park and the future of it. So thanks again for taking the time to talk with me.
JZ: Yeah, no, thank you.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media conversations in the public interest.
Batya Ungar-Sargon on the Campbell Conversations
Apr 29, 2024
The American Dream is a touchstone for this nation, but is it now out of reach for many citizens we used to regard as middle class? This week, Grant Reeher speaks with Batya Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor for Newsweek. She has a new book about workers in America, titled "Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women."
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. The American Dream is a touchstone for this nation. But is it in danger of dying? My guest today is Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon. She's written a new book about workers in America titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” Miss Ungar-Sargon, welcome to the program.
Batya Ungar-Sargon: Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure and an honor to be here with you and your audience.
GR: Well, we are really glad you were able to join us. So, let me just start with the real basic question. Briefly, if you could, how did you get the idea to write this book now?
BUS: It's a great question because everybody told me not to write it, but it seems to me like the most important issue of our time, I think the 2024 election is going to be decided by the working class. The issue of class has become increasingly important in America, and yet we don't talk about it at all. And we certainly don't hear from working-class Americans. It strikes me as though they have been almost deplatformed. The voices we hear in the media are almost exclusively now the college-educated, and it has become increasingly clear to me over the last five years that the real divide in America is actually not left versus right, that most Americans are actually kind of somewhere in the middle. The real divide is the class divide that separates out the college-educated from the working class. College-educated Americans over the course of their careers on average, make $1 million more. They have much more access to home ownership. They are much healthier, they live much longer, and their lives are insulated from the kinds of precariousness that plague working-class life today and I really, really wanted to tell that story in the words of working-class Americans. So that's why I wrote “Second Class.”
GR: Well, I want to get into some of the things you just raised there, particularly as they might relate to, political issues, but, well, let me let me stick with this for now. So you gave a hint of this at the end, but what was the process that you use to go about researching and writing the book?
BUS: I wanted to interview people whose lives were interesting enough to carry the story and carry the narrative and keep reader’s interests, but also who represented larger trends in the working class. I mean, we're talking about the majority of the country, 100 million workers, right? So I went to, Joe Price, who's a professor at Brigham Young University, and he has, a team of graduate students. And what he'll do is he will rent them out to journalists who are less familiar with the data side of things, like me, you know, English majors like me. And what I asked them to do was to look at the American Census Survey. I asked them to compare 2000 to 2020 so that I could have a sense of emerging trends, and I asked them to give me a kind of bird's eye view demographic breakdown of the working class. Who is the American working class? What are the races? What are the ages? What are their homeownership rates? What, industries give higher, homeownership rates than others because homeownership is so important to the American Dream. I wanted just the pure data, and they gave me this amazingly delicious spreadsheet with all of the data that I was looking for. The breakdown by the numbers, by industry, by region, etc. and I used that to guide my search for the characters in the book so that I knew that I was looking for people who were representative of larger trends.
GR: Well, it's interesting, and the book works that way because you do, you weave in both, data and graphs along with these stories. So it's a nice combination of things. You say at the beginning of the book that you were surprised about the view toward hard work, that you heard from almost all the people that you spoke with, and that that really intrigued me. And I wanted to ask you why first of all, did that surprise you? And then secondly, what was the view toward hard work?
BUS: It surprised me because I think that we in the knowledge industry caste, as I've come to think of it, tend to think that nobody could possibly want some of these jobs. I spoke to janitors and cleaning ladies and, bellboys and, barbacks and waiters and, certified nurse's aides who spent, you know, a 12-hour night shift changing the diapers of the elderly. And I think in our caste, we think no one could possibly get any dignity from this job. Nobody wants to clean toilets for a living. And therefore, we think it's okay to, you know, outsource these jobs to illegal immigrants or offshore them, you know, manufacturing or what have you to China and Mexico, as we did for so long. And I think that's why I was so surprised by it. But what I found was to a person, people get immense self-esteem and dignity from their work, whatever their jobs are. And what makes some of these jobs undignified are the conditions and the wages. It's not the work itself. The people I interviewed, and you'll read this from them in the book, in person after person. They saw work as a spiritual inheritance that they got from their parents that they were unbelievably proud of. They remembered seeing their parents get dressed for work every day, and they felt so proud to be connected to that. And I do think there's something uniquely American about this, this kind of Protestant ethic of work, right? That's tied into a capitalistic vision that we admire enterprise. We admire effort. And the problem is, is that these people work so hard, and yet their efforts are no longer equal to securing them the most modest version of the American Dream, and a secure and stable life for themselves and their children.
GR: And I want to go back to the title of the book. How is it, then, the elites, I mean, you've given some hints about this already, but how is it that elites have betrayed the working class and probably the middle classes as well? Betrayed in what way? It's a pretty strong word.
BUS: Yeah. So we tend to think of the economy, or at least we talk about it, in the chattering classes, in the political classes, as though there's some sort of inevitability to the way everything turned out. You know, obviously globalization was going to happen. These are just the winds of progress pushing things forward. But the truth is, is that a lot of the things that happened in the economy that resulted in the downward mobility of the working class, which turned them into second-class citizens, as I argue, was the result of very intentional policy, often by Democrats, actually, in the name of progress, perhaps, you know, unintentionally, bad. But, you know, essentially what happened was we created an economy that is extremely rewarding if you are in the knowledge industry and you go to college and extremely punishing if you work in a working-class job that we actually still totally rely on to survive. And that is where the unfairness of this comes in and where I tried to keep the anger out of the book. The book is mostly in the voices of the working class, but it is an outrage that we did this because we do still rely on their work. They do work so unbelievably hard in physical labor. And yet, through a series of policy choices, whether it was President Bill Clinton signing NAFTA into law and shipping 5 million very good manufacturing jobs overseas to build up China and Mexico's middle class, or President Barack Obama, who defunded vocational training leading to this massive dearth of skilled trades in the United States, and also the closing off of a very sure avenue to the American Dream for working-class Americans or even President Biden effectively decriminalizing illegal border crossing, which has resulted in millions and millions of people entering the country, which has an effect on a of direct downward depression of the wages of the working class, because that is who these illegal migrants compete with when they find work. These were all policies that contributed to the situation in which working-class people can no longer be assured of a stable life, despite working so hard.
GR: I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Batya Ungar-Sargon. And we're discussing her new book. It's titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” I wanted to follow up with you on that, and thinking about some of the policies that might also contribute to that, and you mentioned some interesting ones there from those administrations. Three, that struck me in thinking about this were a little more simple in a way, but we've had since 1980 three sort of big rounds of tax cuts. one during the Reagan administration, another one, during George W Bush and then the last one during Donald Trump. And, while those put more money back in everyone's pockets, they certainly seemed to be more favorable toward that uber elite financially and economically, that class or would you put those and in that same sort of group of different kinds of policies that that might have exacerbated this?
BUS: You know, the high watermark for working-class wages was 1971. That's when they started to sort of stagnate and drop off. And the share of the GDP that is held by the billionaire class, you know, the Uber Uber rich has not significantly changed since the 70s. What has significantly changed is where in the 70s, the largest share of the economy was in the middle class. Today, over 50% of the GDP is held by the top 20%. So this college credentialed, you know, multiple degreed, top 20%. The professional class is actually the ones who have, secured the big shift in GDP. There's been a middle-class squeeze. So a lot of working-class people were squeezed downwards, but a lot of upper-middle-class people were squeezed upwards. And that has been where the real shift in GDP has happened. And that's why I think, you know, the tax cuts really don't, they didn't have as much of an impact. And the reason for that is that working-class Americans don't believe that what has changed for them has been an insufficiency of redistribution from the top to them. They don't actually want redistribution, which comes back to the first question you asked me about the dignity of work. They don't feel entitled to the taxes of people who make more to them, them and they don't want them. They find it kind of insulting. What they want is higher wages, better health care, affordable housing, opportunities for their children. And you can't really, tax cut your way or tax your way to any of those outcomes. Higher taxes and the redistributive model is actually very good for the poor, for the dependent poor, but it doesn't really help the working class. In fact, the opposite. They often see those taxes as their taxes. And when you look at the tax cuts, I mean the Trump tax cuts are very good example of this. It's true that the rich overall got more money, but the percentages of tax cuts, the highest were for the working class and the middle class. And so working-class people felt that those tax cuts put money back in their pockets as well, and they don't have the kind of resentment towards them that the, the, the sort of credentialed elites do.
GR: Interesting. And on that point, in a way, you have a lot of interesting graphs, in your book and this is radio, so it kind of makes it hard. I can't share them, but I did I did want to ask you about one of them that relates to what you just said, and I'll describe it. You've got a graph of the rise of three things since 1965, corporate profits and then per capita GDP, which you were just, referring to, and also the productivity of labor, in other words, for a given amount of effort, how much does that labor produce. In all those three they kind of follow the same line. They've risen pretty similarly, and they've significantly gone up since 1965. And then you have a fourth line, which is the real average wage, and that one is mostly flat. And it really is an arresting way to kind of show who's getting better off in the last 40, 50 years of this economy and who's not. And I don't know if you wanted to comment on that. You've already spoken to it. I think, but.
BUS: I, only to say it is an outrage and it is an outrage that sort of neither party really had, an answer to because, you know, like I said, the, you can't really redistribute your way to higher taxes, right? I mean, to higher wages. Right. That's not a thing that the left really has had a response to. I mean, unions are a big theme in the book. And of course, unions secure higher wages for working class Americans. And yet the vast majority of the unionization efforts today are in the kind of, white collar spaces, you see journalists unionizing and nurses and not, not, not, white collar, but, certainly, you know, on the higher end of, of the working class, you know, people who who are, you know, they're called desk unions, right? This is where a lot of that energy is. Working-class Americans are not more likely to see in unions, a great champion or a way to that higher wage. And I think a lot of that has to do with the union's reversal on immigration and the Democrat's reversal on immigration. So I'm sure your listeners remember, you know, in the 90s, it was the Democrats who believed in securing the border and massively reducing the number of immigrants entering the country because they understood that the only real way to raise wages is to limit the supply of labor. Right? It's a simple supply and demand. If you bring in 10 million people, and they are way more likely to be employed in, cleaning, in landscaping, in elder care, the wages in all of those industries are going to plummet because there are simply so many more available workers. And one of the best ways that you can actually help wages that working-class people know firsthand, right, is through limiting the supply of labor, through reshoring of manufacturing, through a lot of these policies that actually, President Trump, really made a centerpiece of his campaigns. And working-class people notice that. And the thing that I would say, I guess, to people in our class who feel a little bit suspicious of this, maybe people will say, well, maybe the working class are wrong about what's good for them. They're just xenophobic. They don't like immigrants. To that, I would ask, what is the likelihood that a person who has $50 in their bank account and, you know, four children to feed and, a car to fill up with gas to get them to school and back, that somebody like that is wrong about which economic policies put money back in their bank account. I mean, what is the likelihood that somebody living on a shoestring budget is wrong about what policies have an impact on them? To me, it just seems so unlike from times in my life where I was living on a shoestring budget. You just know. I mean, the winds, right, they impact you in such an immediate way. I think it's worth trusting these people about which policies have helped them. And by the way, I interviewed people who were Democrats and Republicans in the book. Very little distinguish them when it came to policy, because they saw both parties as effectively having abandoned them. And that's why they're not polarized. They don't hold it against people who vote for the other party. I mean, it would never occur to them to hold it against somebody because they have very little spiritual investment in the political system, because it has done so little to help them.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Batya Ungar-Sargon, the opinion editor of Newsweek, and we're discussing her new book, which is titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” You know, I wanted to ask you about this concept of the middle class and one of the things that has historically marked ideas about the middle class in America is how many Americans think they're in it. And, you know, yeah, you can get poor people who say, I'm middle class, and then you get people in this top group that you've been referring to, that think of themselves as middle class. Do you, did you get a sense that that is part of the change, that you noticed that self-identification in that wide swath is now narrowing it? More people are recognizing, hey, I'm not there anymore, or I'm looking down on this from my more elite status. Do you get a sense of that?
BUS: Yeah, I definitely did. I think, you know, it's so hard for us to remember this, but there was a time when, you know, being a janitor, being a manicurist, being, a person who, you know, sat and watched over elderly people. People who did those jobs were middle class. Like, it's so hard for us to remember that there are people still in Las Vegas, a town where you cannot employ illegal immigrants because the casinos are so tightly regulated, women who and men who clean hotel rooms in Las Vegas make a living wage. They make $26 an hour. That's definitely not the case in most of America and it's really mind-boggling when you start to realize that, you know, the kinds of jobs that we think of as poor people jobs today, there was a time in America where these jobs, you know, people had had health care, people could become homeowners. I mean, still today, 50% of people who clean homes for a living are homeowners. And that's because there are still many places in America where, you know, you could be pretty poor and still afford a home in much of Red America, by the way. And so when you think of housing as a crucial component of the American Dream, it's really Democratic cities and metro areas that are really have dropped the ball on this due to zoning laws. And there's a big chapter on that in the book. So I think, yes, there has been a shift in how working-class people see themselves. I did have the experience where I would talk to people and I could tell over the course of my interview with them, or the course of the few days or week I spoke I spent with them that they had started to see themselves as working class as a result of the conversations that we were having when before they didn't really have a language for it. That happened with a number of people, and now they will email me, you know, articles and, you know, there was this sort of thing that happened where a class consciousness started to emerge, you know, in, in the people that I was, you know, spending so much time with. I definitely think that as, as the American Dream and a middle-class life has become increasingly out of reach, people, people would use the word lower class to talk about themselves and their situation and that was also very heartbreaking.
GR: Yeah, well, on that point, I was curious of all the people that you spoke with, was there one person that you carry with you now more than anybody else that was either like the hardest for you to hear their story, or perhaps their situation made you more angry than some of the other ones that you could just briefly talk about.
BUS: You know, I was actually much more angry than any of they were, which was one of the most heartbreaking things about it was a lot of working-class people blame themselves. They don't have this concept of like, they're so patriotic and they still love this country so much and believe in this country. And, a lot of them, they didn't really have a language for the kind of like, you know, class rage that I sort of felt on their behalf many of them, felt that Trump was a champion for them. And even many of the Democrats that I interviewed admitted to me that he put money in their pockets. And there's something outrageous about that, you know, they're that somebody who has $51 in their bank account might potentially have to vote for someone who they think is more likely to take that money away from them. You know that there's this it's an outrage that the Democrats have lost the majority of working-class voters in this country, and that's increasingly working-class voters who are Hispanics and who are Black men are now turning in in a big way according to polling towards Trump. And I know it's very hard for people who are Democrats to hear that but it's such an outrage that people who used to see the Democrats as their champions now view the Democrats as the party of these over credentialed elites and the dependent poor, and they don't see themselves reflected and their interests are actually in tention with both of those groups. Right. As we spoke about earlier, if you think about it, you know, the over-credentialed college elites are the consumers of low-wage, illegal labor. And so hiring illegal immigrants actually puts money back in the pockets of people who have a college degree. While it is effectively wage theft of working class people who used to be able to have the American Dream if they were a janitor, if they were a hotel cleaning lady, if they were a line cook, and really no longer can because of policies put in place, by the Democrats. And, I, I want to stress it would be so easy for the Democrats to get these voters back. And I can talk a little bit about that, if that's of interest.
GR: Yeah, yeah. Let me just remind people who were who we're talking to. If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is Batya Ungar-Sargon. And we've been discussing her new book, which is titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” Yes, that's exactly where I was going to go. So I'm glad you brought that up. Which is okay, so you've painted this problem for the Democratic Party. So, so and this problem can be traced back to 1980, at least. There was a famous focus group done on Macomb County, Michigan voters, in that era where this kind of thing that you're talking about came through loud and clear. So what is what can the party do? What can they what can they do to get these folks back?
BUS: So it's actually a lot easier than I think many people realize because they don't speak to working-class people. And so working-class people are a cipher to them. They assume that they project all of this onto them, this white rural rage. Right. That was the latest book describing it. To me, this is just an alibi, right? To let themselves off the hook for having abandoned these workers. But it would be very easy to get them back. And the reason I know this is because of this, the vast majority of people I interviewed, whether they vote Democrat or Republican, they agreed on the policies that would help them. So you ask me for examples, I'm going to talk about two women that I interviewed, Linda, a big Trump supporter from West Virginia who drives an Amazon truck. And Amy, a certified nurse's aide in Florida, is married to a woman and, voted for Biden. These women agreed on almost everything. So Amy told me this is the gay nurse's aide. She told me she thinks parents who take children to, a drag show should be put in prison. She told me she thought that it should be unbelievably difficult to transition, she was very upset about funding to Ukraine. She did not understand why we were funding that war. She worried that immigrants were going to take American jobs, and she felt that they had lowered the wages for people who were working class. She was very worried about health care. Every year she spends all of her savings on these unbelievable premiums and deductibles that her terrible health care plan has. And she'll never be able to afford a home. Linda. her number one issue, she would say, is the price of groceries. She is very upset about homeless veterans and homelessness in general. This is the Trump voter, right? She's extremely pro-gay. And when a family member kicked her nephew out of her home for being gay, she welcomed him with open arms. These are women you're going to meet in the book. She loves that Trump is pro-gay. She loves that he courts unions. She loves working for Amazon. And she also is not a homeowner. She lost her home with her husband when his factory was shipped to Mexico in 2000. So these two women, you could create a policy and agenda that would both of them would vote for how? Okay, well, what are their top issues there?
GR: I got, I got I got to interject here. We're getting low on time and I want to squeeze one thing in. So if you could make that point quickly let me ask you my final follow-up.
BUS: If a candidate came out of the gate and said, we're going to significantly limit the number of immigrants coming into this country and back health care from the government's point of view, make it impossible for people to have bankruptcy-related to medical expenses. That person could get 60% of the vote tomorrow.
GR: Wow. Well, let me just what I heard and what you just said, and we'll have to end it here is that one of the things that the Democratic Party then might do is emphasize class in the way that you are talking about it, and perhaps de-emphasize some of the social identity issues that they have been pushing. Would you agree with that?
BUS: I would agree with that. But it's even easier than that. If they took a hard line on immigration, they would turn this ship around tomorrow because they have the health care piece and the Republicans don't.
GR: Gotcha. Okay. We'll have to leave it there. That was Batya Ungar-Sargon. And again, her new book is titled “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women.” I highly recommend it. It's a good read. It's substantive, but it's very interesting and readable as a story. So, Batya thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.
BUS: Thank you so much for having me. God bless you.
GR: You too. It's been, you've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Jenn Jackson on the Campbell Conversations
Apr 22, 2024
Jenn Jackson(Syracuse University)
Black feminism is usually regarded as a relatively newer dimension of racial justice movements. This week, Grant Reeher speaks with Jenn Jackson, a Syracuse University professor, and author of "Black Women Taught Us," about early Black feminists, as well as contemporary ones.
Program Transcript:
GR: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Jenn Jackson. Professor Jackson teaches political science at Syracuse University, focuses on the politics of race and gender and racial justice, and has written a new book for a general audience titled “Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism.” Professor Jackson, welcome to the program.
JJ: Thank you so much for having me.
GR: Well, it's a really it's a really wonderful book. So we're glad to have you on. So let me just start with the beginnings of this book. I understand the book has an interesting origin story. Tell me how you got the idea to put this together, what it was based on.
JJ: Yeah. So, you know, I have been writing for a long time. Actually, before I came to academia, I was already a journalist, so I had already written for, you know, Ebony Magazine and Marie Claire and Washington Post. And by the time I got through graduate school, I had an editor approach me who at the time was at Live Write. And she's like, you know, I think you have a book in you. And at the time, I was like, I, I'm still in graduate school. If I have a book in me, it's going to be a dissertation book. But we sat down and we talked actually after I got the position at Syracuse University and she said, well, what are you thinking about? And at the time, I had really been getting excited about my Black feminist politics class that I was teaching every spring at Syracuse. And I told her that it was exciting to me because I never myself had taken a Black feminist politics or Black feminist day class in my history. And when I told her that, she was shocked, she was she was amazed that I could teach this. Having never been formally trained myself. So I told her about what it was like being an engineering major in undergrad at University of Southern California, searching for a class like this, and none were offered. When I graduated, I went to go work at Disney, and I was a, what was called a workforce analyst. And I used statistics to, staff, the hotels and staff, the food and beverage locations. And I encountered a lot of racism. I encountered a lot of, misogyny. I encountered a lot of, experiences that I wasn't familiar with. And I hadn't, again, hadn't taken that class, so I didn't have the language to understand it. As an engineering major, you don't take a lot of classes, to understand culture and people. And so I called my mother on the phone back then, and I said, “Mom, I don't know what's going on here. I don't know how to navigate this.” And my mother was a voracious reader who, read everything Dean Koontz, Stephen King, James Patterson, Danielle Steele and Alice Walker and Terry McMillan and she said, “Go to Borders bookstore,” which is what it was called back then. “And find, find the section where you can pick up Alice Walker and Terry McMillan. If you find that section, you'll find whoever you need.” And she was right, I. I went to Borders and when I walked into Borders, I saw those books. But I also saw the book “Sister Citizen” by Melissa Harris-Perry, who happened to just be a political scientist. And this book just happened to be published with Yale University Press. And the book was talking about the Sapphire, the Jezebel, the mammy, the stereotype about black women that have been rooted in slavery. And this theory called The Crooked Room and The Crooked Room theory, suggests that for some people, especially for black women, we walk through the world and we feel as though we are walking at an angle that we just don't fit. But what she said is that The Crooked Room theory says, actually, it's the world. The world that is at an angle. It is the rooms we're walking into that are full of stereotypes, that are full of these ideas of who we are allowed to be, that make it hard for us to exist. And because it resonated so much with me in my job, right. I was working in this place in Orange County, one of the most conservative counties in the country. and I was experiencing anti-Blackness for the first time, having grown up in Oakland, California, around such diverse people. I had never experienced this type of vitriol. And I'm in this bookstore and I was crying into this book, because I was like, oh my gosh, I, I feel seen, you know, I feel this is reflecting my life. And I picked up that book and I began reading everything that she cited in that book. And the first thing I picked up was, bell hooks’ “Feminism is for Everybody.” The next thing I picked up was Audre Lorde’s “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.” And the third person I found was Cathy Cohen, who's a political scientist at the University of Chicago. And that was the day I decided it was time for me to leave Corporate America and do something different. I chartered a three-year plan to get out of Disney, to go back to school. and within a year or so, I was pregnant with my, second child. And I went to Cal State Fullerton, terminal master's program in political science at night, after school, after work, I finished that degree program in two years with honors, and I loved it. It was one of the most invigorating and exciting things I had ever done. and they invited me back. They said, you know what? You, you belong here. Do you want to come back and teach statistics? And I said, sure. I love math, so I taught statistics, and then the next semester I taught Black politics. And that changed everything. That changed everything. I knew that I would, I wanted to teach methods. I wanted to teach, about Black politics and gender and and political history. And I applied to graduate school. I got into Chicago and I worked with Cathy Cohen, and that's that's the the journey to academia. And it all started with, “Sister Citizen.” So that's what the book is about. The book is about that journey of kind of becoming a Black feminist and searching and having that desperation of walking into that bookstore that morning and wanting to find these stories and theories that would help me understand the world around me, and not only finding them, but then changing my entire life to move into a new career and a new way of being that would allow me to do that for a living.
GR: That's a great story, because the book does incorporate memoir and your analysis of these Black feminist, activists and authors. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Syracuse University political science professor Jenn Jackson, and we're discussing their new book, “Black Women Taught Us.” So I'd like to play a little, game of sorts with you if we can. And I'm going to list the people for the benefit of our listeners, that you discuss in each chapter of your book.
JJ: Yeah.
GR: Each chapter, although it's not only about that person, is primarily about a Black feminist. And then what I'd like to do is I want to pick one and ask you to discuss what you learned from that person. And then when you're done with that, I want you to pick one. You pick anyone you want other than obviously the one I picked. And then you tell me about that one.
JJ: Okay.
GR: You've got chapters on Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Nora Zell Hurston, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Toni Morrison, the Combahee River Collective, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and bell hooks. Well, first of all, what a lineup. I mean, that's, but picking one is obviously hard, but I'm going to pick one. I'd like to I'd like you to tell me a little bit about what you learned from Angela Davis.
JJ: Absolutely. Angela Davis was so, growing up was so critical to my life, in ways that I didn't actually know until I was about 15. Growing up in Oakland, California, I grew up in the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. So for me, those the ethics of the Black Panther Party of, self-actualization and self-defense were always incorporated into who we were. I found out later in life that my mother was actually one of the children who benefited from the free breakfast program that the Black Panthers put on. My father was a Black Panther. He changed his name in his 20s, when he became a Black Panther. And so these things were always embedded in my life. And I opened the chapter talking about, in high school when I, I cut all my hair off and I was going natural, and my mom told me, “You look like Angela Davis.” And I said, “Well, who is that?” And she told me for the first time who this woman was and what she did and that she happened to just teach down the street. And my mom said at UC Santa Cruz. And that put me on a path to learn more about who Angela Davis was. What's important about Davis's life is that, Angela Davis grew up in Birmingham in the era when it was called Bombingham. You know, she knew the four little girls who were blown up in the in the Baptist church, on the corner whose, stories we hear so often who have been re-enacted in film and for her, that experience, that experience with terror, shaped a lot of her ideas about anti-racism and what it means for us to be fearless and consistent in our struggle, against racism. So I learned I've learned a lot from Angela in that I've seen her. I'm lucky that she's actually still alive. She just turned 80. and I've had multiple opportunities to actually interact with her, over my career. And I've seen her speak about the intersections of anti-racism, gender struggle and abolition. And she's always been very clear that this is an anti-capitalist struggle. This is an anti-institution struggle. This is a global struggle. And I've been very gracious to learn from someone who not only sees this as a kind of theoretical project, but because of her experiences as a child, because of her exposure to violence and vitriol and hatred. She also understands the real-world consequences and the ways that so many Black folk, encounter violence in their lives that her, the, there's an imperative here, right? So her work is not just about the theory, it's about the imperative of keeping Black people alive. So I talk a lot in the chapter about why it's important to think about abolition, not just about, you know, ending prisons and police, but also about returning care to communities. Right? When we think about Davis's central claim that we have to stop investing ourselves in the prison industrial complex, she tells us the first place we do the disinvesting is in our own minds, right? The ways that we live in communities. And we see prisons on the side of the road, and we drive past them as if there's nothing there, because we've normalized, the incarceral state in our own communities. You know, that's where she wants us to start. What does it mean for our communities to care for themselves, to have the resources? To and I equate this a lot to college campuses. Right? College campuses have, DPS, they have Department of Public Safety, but they also have a Title Nine office. They have, therapy services. They have gyms. Right? They're microcosms of the world, but they have all these services available to make sure this community is intact and that the people who are there are safe. And I always think to myself, why can't we think about our own communities and neighborhoods in the same way? And that's really what abolition is about. And I learned that from Angela Davis.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Syracuse University professor Jenn Jackson. They're an expert on race and politics, and the author of a new book titled “Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism.” Well, so I picked my pick before the break. Yeah, I gave you the break to think about your picks. So who do you want to talk about out of out of all of these wonderful, Black feminists that we could talk about?
JJ: Yeah. I mean, I think I've been really spending a lot of time thinking about Zora Neale Hurston’s life recently. And it's been resonating with a lot of, readers because a lot of folks don't know how difficult her life was. Zora Neale Hurston died of malnutrition in 1960. She was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. But because, male writers like Richard Wright didn't think that her writing was, relevant at the time, they didn't think that her, capturing of Black people was fair. So she wrote in dialect. She would write in African-American dialect. And she was really serious about capturing the exact way that people spoke. And what they said was that she made, Black people seem foolish and that she made, them seem as though they were uneducated. And so she was shunned and, what this ended up doing was kind of making her, writings, they went out of print. She kind of had to, she returned home. She had a hard time feeding herself. And when she returned home, to the South, she withered away. She withered away. And it wasn't. We wouldn't have had, Zora Neale Hurston works like we do today if it wasn't for Alice Walker. So Alice Walker discovered Zora Neale Hurston and she fell in love with her writing. And then she realized, wait, I don't know, I can't find her works anywhere. She said, where is this woman? What happened? And she found out that, Zora Neale Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave. So she went down, down South, down to Florida and she went to the community where Zora Neale Hurston was buried, and she posed as Zora Neale Hurston's niece and told them that she was looking for her aunt. They took her all of the neighborhood, you know, all of the community, you know, it was all word of mouth. And eventually, she got to the graveyard, and the graveyard was grown over, it was, she said there was, grass that was waist high and you couldn't see anything. And she's in this field and she's near, near crying because she's like, I don't know if I'll find Zora Neale Hurston. And she was using landmarks. She's like, okay, there's a fountain there and a tree here. And she's trying to figure out where Zora is. And she calls out and says, “Zora, I'm here, are you?” And she stepped backward, and at the moment she stepped back where she stepped down into a six-foot hole that just happened to be Zora Neale Hurston's grave. And that moment is so important because and I talk about this as the reclamation of Black women's labor. Right. Because so often, and we know the statistics that help us understand that Black women are paid less for their labor. There's a disproportionate effect of unemployment, when, you know, for instance, during the Covid-19 crisis, when, jobs were removed, it was often Black women's jobs that were removed first. Right? So we know that there's the kind of quantitative side of the labor that is also, not taken seriously. But what I'm talking about here is the labor that folks like Zora Neale Hurston offer in their lives, for communities, you know, that is erased in just a generation, right? If there are no children, if there are no grandchildren, if there are no nieces and nephews to continue that story, to continue that archival work and that memory that, that can just that, that history can go away that quickly. And I, I bring that into the book because I want folks to understand that when we talk about the contributions of Black women to our theory, to canon, to thinking about mass movements, you know, this work isn't new, right? This isn't this isn't work that just started, right? Ida B. Wells was writing in 1892 to, you know, Angela Cooper was writing in 1892. We have been thinking about Black feminism for generations, right? For over a century. and unfortunately, people still have this idea that Black feminism just started in 1989. So it's really important, as we think about folks like Zora, that we understand that it's not that Black women haven't been doing the work, is that so often it's erased. It's forgotten, it's misremembered.
GR: Wow. Yeah. So, even with that lineup of people that you profiled, you must have considered some other people that didn't make it into the book. And I was just wondering, which was the hardest one for you to leave out and why.
JJ: Yeah. Yeah, I love that question. There were two, actually. There were two that I still to this day, I'm like, you know, one was Pauli Murray. Pauli Murray was an incredible, lawyer and activist whose, intellectual work was critical in the Brown v Board of Education decision. Without Pauli Murray’s vision a lot of the legal wins of the NAACP in the 20th century would not have happened. Also, Pauli Murray was a, kind of genderqueer, androgynous person who struggled over the course of their whole life with understanding how they could fit into these movements, given that they also were not sure about what their gender identity was and how they wanted to show up. And so their life, really is, you know, it's resonant for me as a gender queer person. But I also think it's so important because these movements have been primarily masculine. We always had these charismatic male leaders. And while Pauli was so central to this work, they were sidelined because they were still read as a woman and still read as someone who didn't belong in the room. The other was Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha P. Johnson was a Black trans woman who, was critical in the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. Her work to ensure that Black, queer and trans people at the height of the AIDS crisis in New York, she created the street transvestite activist revolutionaries along with Sylvia Rivera. They are kind of the folks who started this house culture of, we're going to build homes for people who are on the streets. This is the culture of house mothers and house fathers, house family. The concept of chosen family is really rooted there for, young queer and trans people. There's also data that shows that young queer people are the most likely to end up houseless in high school, and in their early adolescence because of the fact that people find out that they are queer and so she was actively working against that, by providing housing. The problem with Marsha P Johnson's story is that so much of it is undocumented. There's still questions around how she passed away. You know, it's a very sad story. and there's so much more left to be told.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Syracuse University professor Jenn Jackson. I wanted to move away from your book specifically, to a little more general question and it's about, reparations for African Americans, because I know you have some thoughts about that issue. So my first question is, and I know you could talk about this for hours. So if you could, you know, I'm going to I'm going to make it hard for you to try to be brief on this, but first of all, do we really need reparations? And if so, how would you imagine it being carried out?
JJ: Yeah, I love this question. you know, I think need is an interesting framing. I think that I think that, I frame it more through a lens of accountability. I think that we've seen examples of this around the world. You know, Germany is an interesting example. South Africa is another example. We've seen rotational reparations happen and they happen quite easily where the government says we are accountable for the harms and we should do work to ensure that this harm doesn't happen again and I think in terms of what models I've really found to be effective, I, I go straight to, the current Chicago model that is thinking about the Birge trial and the torture justice work that happened. So for folks who don't know, John Birge was a, police chief who used his position to, isolate and torture predominantly Black and brown men, for years in Chicago, they would have these blackout centers. They would have these places where they would literally and they would violate and harm, people. And there was no recourse for a very long time until activists, organizers, lawyers came together and said, we've got to do something about this. And then this happened around the 2008- 2015 moment. And what was so critical about this is they use their resources in communities, they use art, they use media they visited the UN, and they said, you know, this is a human rights violation that the government needs to answer for. And they won. They won, large sums of money to pay, folks who were harmed. There were a lot of folks who were in prison because after being tortured, they had been compelled to offer these, false, testimonies that a claim that they had committed crimes that they didn't commit. So they worked to actually free some folks from prison who weren't supposed to be there. This is the work of reparations, right? It's not just the funding side. They built the Chicago Torture Justice Center, which is just a center that's meant to offer, psychological support, educational support, community support in response to these harms. Most of what reparations is and should be is the, again, care for communities It it falls right under abolition. Right. So people think that reparations has to just be cash payouts. But it's not just cash payout it’s actually rooted in restorative justice. Which means whatever the harm is, whoever the victims are, they get to identify what the solutions will be. So if they want psychological support, if they want community justice, they whatever they need so that they can get back to a place of citizenship, of feeling whole, right? That's what reparations should look like. So this included a whole conversation about teaching about torture, justice in schools, local schools, so that young people know the history of their community. Right. That's what reparations should look like. It should be about truth-telling and being accountable for the actual history, the truth in the fact of history that has occurred, and then responding to the needs of those victims who have been harmed.
GR: So just to clarify, and this is very, helpful to me in my understanding, because so much of this conversation often gets stuck on the notion of general tax revenues being taken in and then redistributed on a broad basis to an entire race or ethnic group. You're talking about things that, in my mind, sound more specific and targeted to the problem.
JJ: Correct, I think the local model is a better, I think it's a really good model.
GR: Okay. we've got about three minutes left or so, and, I wanted to squeeze two questions in if I could. They're they're both big ones, so. I'm sorry about that, but, I want to I want to go back to your book, and then I want to ask you a big-picture question at the very end. So back to your book. The last chapter is titled “I Taught Myself Patience.” That's very intriguing. Tell me briefly about that.
JJ: I, I wrote that chapter because I want this book to, assuage folks fears that they have to have a handle on their Black feminist journey right now. I talked to a lot of young people who feel this sense of urgency around organizing, around movements, around education, and they feel that the the times require that they be experts. And what I've been telling young people is that that's absolutely not fair to yourself. give yourself time to learn. This book is meant to be a starting place, a beginning. And in that chapter, I provide a whole list of other folks whose works you can engage with who are not necessarily a chapter in the book, because I want folks to understand that they have to find their place, and it's not necessarily right now.
GR: Well, your life is kind of a demonstration of that patience in a way. So, just about a minute left my last question. Big picture, the future of the conversations that we're going to have in this country about race and race relations. Where do you think they're going long-term? I mean, if I if I brought you back on this program in 20 or 30 years, God willing, if I were still alive, what would what would we be discussing?
JJ: You know, unfortunately, I just taught my students about this yesterday. I think a lot of history repeats itself, and I think we're in a pendulum-like moment right now. We see the pendulum swinging back to a moment of conservatism. I think we're making incremental progress, but I hope that in 20 to 30 years, books like mine won't be so rare. I think it's so strange that this is the first of its kind. I hope to see many, many more of them on the shelves and many more people engaging with this work in a in a wider way. I want people to understand the facts of history, and I want those to govern society as opposed to this current moment where it's a lot of, vitriol and tropes and caricatures. It's, I'm hoping we move away from that.
GR: Yeah. Me too. Well, that was Jenn Jackson. And again, their new book, which, by the way, is a great read if you haven't already concluded that, is titled “Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism.” Jenn, thanks again for taking the time to talk with me. Very insightful. I learned a lot. Thank you.
JJ: Thank you.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta on the Campbell Conversations
Apr 06, 2024
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. In India, he's served as President of Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think-tank and as the Vice Chancellor of Ashoka University. He's the author of the book, "The Burden of Democracy."
Program Transcript:
GR: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Pratap Bhanu Mehtar. He's the Lawrence Rockefeller visiting professor for distinguished teaching at Princeton University. In India he has served as president of the Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based think tank, and as the vice-chancellor of Ashoka University. He's an expert on Indian politics and democracy. And he's with me today to discuss the state of political affairs and the state of democracy in that country, among many other works. He's the author of “The Burden of Democracy.” Professor Mehta, welcome to the program.
PBM: Great to be here.
GR: Well, we're glad to have you. So let me just start by maybe taking you back in time a little bit, and then we'll come forward. But what kinds of challenges did Indian society pose for the original achievement of democracy?
PBM: So I think there were principally two challenges. One, India was an extraordinarily poor country, one of the poorest countries in the world. And one of the most illiterate. And frankly, in the 1950s if you had asked anybody in the world, can a country this poor and this unlettered could sustain democracy? The answer would have been an unequivocal no. I mean, India did not meet any of the preconditions of democracy, as you know, from the, you know, democracy literature and in that sense, it was a gigantic leap of faith that we can actually have political democracy before we've had a minimal degree of economic development. India reverses the traditional sequence of democratization. I think the second big challenge was it's also a country of enormous diversity, linguistic diversity, religious diversity, social diversity of a kind of, almost, you know, a bewildering variety and to craft and consolidate a modern nation-state out of this building, building diversity was an extraordinary challenge. And particularly when if you look at the record of other attempts to do this, they weren't very heartening. I mean, every society has had to go through its process of incredible violence, exclusion, ethnic cleansing. So, you know, again, in the 1950s, people used to publish books with titles like “Can India Survive?” Based largely on the fact that this diversity is not meant to exist, coexist, at least by conventional yardsticks.
GR: One of the things that, occurred to me when I was thinking about that question I wanted to get your reaction to it is the degree to which the society, in addition to being incredibly diverse, as you just explained, also was hierarchical as well. And, you know, there's even a caste system or there was a legacy of that. Talk a little bit about how that challenged the achievement of democracy.
PBM: You know, so I mean, you know, the caste system is in a sense the single biggest blot in a sense, on, on India. I mean, it's a deeply oppressive, almost totalizing hierarchical social system, or at least had become one. And I think almost every modern Indian leader understood that if you want to forge a modern nation, you cannot do it when you have such a deeply oppressive social system at the heart of it. And just to I mean, you know, it's a kind of familiar fact, but caste actually governed people's lives. As Ambedkar once said, it was a division of persons. It was not just a division of labor, who you can marry, what you can eat, where you can sit, which professions, you will possess and it was an it's an extraordinary edifice of indignity. There's no other way of describing it. Right. And, the modern Indian Constitution, actually puts forth the idea of, we are free and equal citizens bound together by fraternity. So there was this incredible contradiction between the stated aspirations of this Constitution and what our social structure was. Now, one of the choices India made, and this was the interesting choice, is in many contexts, these social structures are uprooted through revolution, violent revolution. Right. India made this choice or political circumstances that it adopted a nonviolent ameliorating path to overcoming this hierarchical structure. And the hope was that the introduction of political democracy itself would, over time, weaken the hold of this hierarchical social, social system. And I think the different ways of telling that story. But some people think that glass is half empty. Some people think that glass is half full. but this is certainly a work in progress. And India has a long way to go to this, on this.
GR: And I wanted to explore with you just where it is on that path and what are the challenges. But let me ask this more general question first, and then we'll then we'll get into that. You've talked about how India is different from a lot of the other democracies in the world, and its story of democracy is different. What is do you think the importance to democracy in the world generally of India's democracy? Does it matter for democracy?
PBM: Oh, I think it matters in two ways. I mean, one, of course, it matters, because, you know, this is one-sixth of humanity, right? So them living under a democratic system is the biggest triumph, democracy. In fact, the future of democracy is going to be decided in India. But there's a second way in which it matters. Actually, I think, and particularly I think for, I think listeners across the world. Right. Which is, there’s been lots of competing models of regimes across the world, right, 1920s, 30s, you had communism, fascism and even now you have a competing model in China, which is a kind of one-party state, increasingly more authoritarian. And in the developing world and elsewhere, there was always the sense that, you know, 20, 25 years ago that democracy was not a great option for developing countries because you end up like India, kind of low growth, you know. Yeah, sure, it's it's an open society. But it's not a model of successful social or economic development. If India proves and as it had begun to in the, you know, still on the pathway to that, you can actually get decent growth, 6 to 8% growth just to use an aggregate GDP number, you can actually build out a half decent welfare state. Not perfect by any means, but certainly, you know, impactful enough. Think of what it does to the global debate about what democracy does to empower citizens and make give them a dignified life. And actually, I think sometimes I actually find colleagues in China actually understand this, that the success of India's democracy and the power of its example. I mean, you know, President Biden says the power of the US is the power of its example, or at least was historically. I mean, you know, this is like times for that.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Princeton University professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and we're discussing politics and democracy in India. So I think most of our listeners will know relatively little about India, but they may also know, of the current prime minister, Modi, Prime Minister Modi. Tell us just briefly how this gentleman rose to power, what was his path?
PBM: Okay. so, I'm actually a little surprised. I think people know more than we think they do. And particularly in this day and age, the Prime Minister Modi is an extraordinary figure in modern Indian history, there's no question about him. He is a self-made politician who rose from humble circumstances. He likes to describe himself as a [inaudible]. He's actually from one of India's backward castes. Not the lowest cast, not the ex-untouchables, but still a cast that was relatively low down. the hierarchy. He joined a Hindu nationalist organization, the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, at a very young age. And basically has dedicated his entire life to that organization. So this the RSS is a almost 100-year-old organization that was created to consolidate Hindus into a self-conscious political identity, and it's the main organization that spearheaded nationalism. He gave up his family ties very early and so there's there's a big mythology around that because, he was married at a very young age, but gave up all on this story, all attachment to family and home to dedicate himself to the cause of nation. And after years of toiling as an RSS worker, he first comes to prominence in the state of Gujarat and he comes to prominence in two ways. One in 2002, there is a major riot in the state of Gujarat. A series of events leading up to it. There was a there was a train, carrying Hindu activists, and one of the coaches was set off on fire. And there's still a lot of controversy around exactly the circumstances under which that coach caught fired. But as a response, as a retaliation, there were riots all across the state. depending on your estimates, almost 2000 people died. Mr. Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat. And many people believe that he and the BJP had active complicity in producing those riots. There were certainly, at the very least, sins of omission. I mean, whenever there is a major riot in an Indian state and the state refuses to or delay stopping those riots, you can pretty much assume at least some kind of complicity. So. So it keeps the negative sin of omission is clearly there. There is a big debate about the sin of commission, right? I mean, who was exactly orchestrating this? But, but that actually catapulted him to national prominence. And many hardline Hindu nationalists began to see him as the strongest defender of Hindu interests, precisely because he'd actually innate allowed this violence. Right. So it was that violence, rather than being a kind of black mark against his career, at least for his core constituents, became a point of attraction. But the second thing he did in Gujarat, and that's the combination he brings to the center. Gujarat is an economically very dynamic state. A large part of India's kind of business success comes from the state of Gujarat, it houses some of India's most prominent businessmen. And he managed to create the buzz around Gujarat, around his ability to be very pro-business, create the kind of modern infrastructure that business requires. Now, again, just to get the facts on the ground, Gujarat actually doesn't do very well on a couple of other indicators, like health and education or social indicators. But this image of a kind of efficient chief minister who wants to modernize India, right, through the creation of infrastructure, he had this kind of flagship project in the city of Ahmedabad creating this kind of modern riverfront where they essentially kind of channel the water [inaudible]. But, you know, but, you know, it makes for a kind of magnificent sort of infrastructural vista, at least, you know, visually. So this combination that he's a militant defender of Hindu interests and he's a pro-business modernizer that became known as the kind of Gujarat model which he then managed to sell at a kind of national stage very, very effectively.
GR: It's beginning to sound familiar. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Princeton University professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta. He's an expert on Indian politics and democracy. So you were talking about this Hindu nationalism and how Prime Minister Modi really embodied that and then erode that, in addition to other aspects of his political appeal to the top in Indian politics. He is generally, I think, seen as a force that has threatened democracy in India. In broad outline, would you go along with that, or is it more complicated story?
PBM: I think a broad outline, that's true. But I think there's there's this there's some nuances, I think, which are I think important. So first of all, when we say threatening democracy, we have to acknowledge the fact that so far at least, elections in India have been free and fair, and his appeal is genuinely popular and his political victories are genuinely politically earned. Even the opposition up till this point has not, you know, challenged the election results. And it's important to his self-image that he sees himself as a genuinely popular leader, and he's remarkably good at actually one aspect of democracy, which is electioneering. I mean, he there's no political leader in the world who takes elections as seriously as he does. Right? I think the worry about him as posing a threat to democracy, in part, is a kind of anticipatory body, which is to say that as Hindu nationalism gets more consolidated in structures of government, it is beginning to show signs of both authoritarianism and exclusion of minorities. Right. So the challenge for India is that while elections are still robust, in between elections, civil liberties are weakening considerably. So, for example, clampdowns on freedom of expression, the use of state power to target political opponents. And just recently, in the last week or last, last month or so, the chief minister of Delhi has been arrested. Now, there again, nuances to that case, but it's beginning to send a signal that this is not a government, even when it's popular, that's actually going to let the opposition now freely organize and mobilize and it also poses an anticipatory tactic, because we know that once you have been in power and have targeted your opponents, you know, through using state power, the existential stakes for you losing power potentially become all that much greater because you might fear targeting. So I think Indian democracies now entering that zone where it will be that democratic commitment to free and fair elections is going to be tested but certainly the clampdown on civil society, freedom of expression, the erosion of independent institutions, what happens between elections as it were, in the kind of non-electoral space? I think those threats are now increasingly serious.
GR: As you speak, of course, it's impossible not to think of the analogies to the United States and many of the things you've said. It's not a 1-to-1 match, but there's obviously a lot of overlap, and I wanted to get reflections on that. Do you think that there are lessons or insights for the United States situation where you have, you know, a pro-business, populist leader that is emphasizing themes of nationalism and some would say Christian nationalism, Christian white nationalism? As an outsider looking at us, you're living in the United States, but you're not originally from here, what do you think the insights or lessons are?
PBM: So, I think there's there's kind of one interesting similarity and one difference. Let me begin with the difference first, which is I think the United States, I think the worry is much more polarization. Right? Which is, two blocks roughly of similar size. Right. 45% vote on the one side, 48 or something percent to the other side, something like that. Right. I mean, whoever comes up with and that polarization actually producing a kind of gridlock, or at least preventing America from doing the kinds of things that it needs to do to solve its pressing social problems. But the distribution of social power across political parties is still relatively balanced. And that provides, at least for now, a certain kind of check and balance. I think with India, the challenge now is actually the concentration of power at one end of the spectrum. So, imagine if one of the two parties or if it was a right-wing party, kind of, let's say an authoritarian Republican Party were to, you know, kind of dominate American politics to the point that you just could not even imagine anybody challenging it. What would, in a sense, you know, your views in like, a democracy look like? So one is I think there's difference between kind of polarization and concentration. But the similarity that I see is, I think the following, which is, that both in both countries there are sections of the population that might be tempted by ethno-nationalism. Right. Again, it's sometimes hard to be precise about how widespread that attraction is, partly because nationalism now itself can speak as a coded language. You know, in some ways it re-articulates itself as something else. so there can be genuine arguments about immigration. There are arguments about immigration that I actually, frankly, just ethno-nationalist arguments. It's sometimes difficult to parse those things out and I think, you see this in both countries. But insofar as there is a kind of attraction to ethno-nationalism, and, and ethno-nationalism defines itself also against a similar set of targets. It's impatient with liberal elites who they think are not just too out of touch. It's impatient with checks and balances because they think checks and balances come in the way of creating the unity of the people, or taking the strong actions that it needs to take to make the country great. Right. I mean, we don't want all these courts we doing different things in Congress. And the natural pluralism of society becomes a kind of hindrance, not an asset. Right? That's the core. Right. And that temptation then leads to the curbing of their independent power, whether it be universities, whether it be media. I think that tendency is quite strong in the US. It's still checked a bit because there are countervailing powers. But I don't think it's something that should be in a sense, complacently, I think, taken for granted and I think the third I think element of kind of ethno-nationalism, which is we are in this moment, in world history, where, every country wants to put their interests first. Again, nothing new about it. All nationalisms do it. Historically, every country has put their interests first. But I think now we are at a vision of the world where we see the world in a zero-sum game. It's America first, India first, China first. And that optimism of the last 25, 30 years that you could see geopolitics and the nature of our economic development in non-zero-sum games in non-zero-sum terms. I think that optimism is waning and once that optimism wanes, it does make the way for a kind of politics of exclusion and closure you know, that, that might not. I think we consonant with the kind of open, free American spirit that we were used to.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Indian politics expert Pratap Bhanu Mehta. When you were talking there, I was thinking of two things that I want to ask you about at the end before we have to stop. But one of them is in the one of the things I worry about as a political scientist looking at the United States is that zero-sum mentality for domestic politics. But it's very interesting to think of it in terms of the international realm as well, and how those two things might work together. But before I wanted to ask you a question that’s related to that. Let me ask you a question about your own experience if you don't mind. And, you know, you don't have to get deeply into this if you don't want to. But my understanding is that the kind of limitations on academic freedom that you're beginning to see in India, that's that's something that that you, you personally have experienced. Is that correct?
PBM: Yes. I mean, I mean, to put it very in a sense, pointedly, there is direct pressure from government on academic institutions to rein in academics who are critical of the government. Could be on a range of issues, not just academics. I mean, there's there's a group of thinkers who have actually been targeted and put in prison. I just mentioned a couple of them just to give examples on and tell to me one of actually India's finest Dalit scholars. He was kind of the government accuse him of, fomenting in some sense, his left-wing insurgencies really kind of surcharge in this evidence now that, evidence was actually planted on his laptop to make that possible. So, yes, I mean, and lots of Indian universities increasingly cannot hold seminars on subjects of national importance. For example, you cannot hold a seminar, on Kashmir in most Indian universities. Either there'll be direct pressure from government or increasingly the government will use or at least support vigilante groups, sometimes, unfortunately, even student groups, to obstruct and block these seminars. Appointments in public universities deeply vetted ideologically. So, so, yeah, there's a whole range of, you know, ways in which are increasingly, unfortunately, becoming familiar in the US as well, in which academic freedom is under jeopardy in India.
GR: So as I listen to you, I also am thinking of, a very famous, political writer, Alexis de Tocqueville.
PBM: Yeah.
GR: Oh, you know, was, a Frenchman who had important observations to make about the American system. And you're kind of reminding me of that here in a modern context. And I wanted to draw on that. We've only got a couple of minutes left, but, I wanted to ask you. Okay, so give the United States political lessons. What should what should Americans be most what should be on the top of their mind politically as they think about their future here? And what should we be most on guard about? How should we and are there things that we need to be doing differently or thinking about differently? If you could give us this advice.
PBM: So, I mean, it's very presumptuous, but okay. But here's two quick points. One, and this I very strongly believe in that almost any tinge of ethno-nationalism in politics, that's a story that never ends well. Even though you might not see violence immediately, it does something to relations between citizens. That's, I think, deeply troubling for democracies, and particularly one that, you know, we kind of celebrate, I think the United States kind of I mean, this was this democracy, the sense of lightness of being was always one thing that we wanted to associate with the United States, not the kind of the heavy heaviness of ethno-nationalism. The second thing I will say, which is a lot of what gives ethno-nationalism links in politics, is actually the governance failures of liberal establishments. So in India, it's also, you know, the credibility of the liberal establishment imploded on its own account. Right. And, while we focus on, you know, ethno-nationalism, white supremacism, pluralism, populism, at the heart, there are serious governance challenges, housing, health, daycare costs. And if you want to preserve liberty, you have to be able to demonstrate that you are up to also meeting these governance challenges. Otherwise, the bad guys would have an opening.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. I could talk to you for hours about this topic that was Pratap Bhanu Mehta and if you'd like to learn more about India and democracy, check out his book, “The Burden of Democracy.” Pratap, thanks again for taking the time to talk to me has been extremely insightful.
PBM: Thank you, it's been a real privilege.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Brian Taylor on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 23, 2024
Brian Taylor
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with returning guest Brian Taylor, a Political Science Professor at Syracuse University. He's an expert on Russia and security, and brings us an update on Russia's war with Ukraine.
Program Transcript:
GR: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Syracuse University political science professor Brian Taylor. Professor Taylor has been on the program a couple of times previously to discuss the war in Ukraine. And he's back with me today to bring us up to date on that war. He's an expert on Russia and security and has written about both Putin and the Russian military. His most recent book is “The Code of Putinism.” Brian, it's good to see you again.
BT: Great to see you, Grant. Thanks for the invitation again.
GR: Oh, yeah, you bet. So. Well, before I start asking you questions, actually, I want to publicly give you credit for saying the very first time that we spoke and the war was just getting started and it hadn't really gotten underway, that you said then that you expected Ukrainian resistance to be fierce and lasting. Most of the other experts at the time were expecting Russia to roll over them without much resistance. So well done on that. We'll continue in that vein. So, so, as my first question, though, just briefly bring us up to speed on what's been happening in the war in the past six months or so. Just a real thumbnail sketch.
BT: I guess I would say we haven't seen a massive amount of change in the war on either side in the last six months or so. About nine months or so ago, nine, ten months. Ukraine launched, a long-planned and long-expected counter-offensive across several points of the front line. And I think it's fair to say in retrospect that this counter-offensive was largely unsuccessful, for reasons we can get into, if you want, but it was largely unsuccessful. The amount of territory that Ukraine was able to take back was pretty small. On the other hand, we should say that Russia has not made major advances either. So some people have referred to the war as a stalemate. It's not quite a stalemate because there's still lots of things happening, but the movement of the front line has been pretty small and pretty minor over the course of, I would say, even the last year. The one other thing I might add, the one part of the battle where we've seen a bit more change, perhaps, is actually in the Black Sea, where Russia had pretty much tried to blockade Ukraine from shipping grain and other goods out of the Black Sea, and Ukraine has successfully fought back against those efforts, and they have managed to sink, around a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, even though Ukraine itself doesn't have a proper navy through the use of drones and missiles and other technologies. And so they've reopened that shipping route for them, which has a big impact on global food prices and things like that, but in general, not a huge amount of change. And the final thing I would say, I guess, is that Russia is on the front foot now because Ukraine is running out of ammunition, especially artillery and this has to do with the hold up on the U.S. military assistance package in the US Congress over the last half year.
GR: Yeah, I wanted to get into that a little bit later. Briefly tell us why the Ukrainian, counter-offensive wasn't successful. Was it bad planning or something else that was going on?
BT: I would say it was a series of things. Probably the most basic thing is it is extremely difficult in modern conditions, with the amount of visibility of the battlefield to the combatants on both sides to make a major breakthrough. And it's especially difficult to do that without air superiority. And, Ukraine actually was able to successfully prevent Russia from established, establishing air superiority in the early phase of the war. But certainly, Russia still has the more powerful air force than Ukraine. And so that meant that advancing Ukrainian units when they tried to break through, didn't have any air cover. And normally the U.S. military, for example, in a similar type of conflict, would have established air supremacy by that point. The second thing I would say is that Russia pretty successfully established defensive lines in depth with fortifications, mines, trenches, those sorts of obstacles that made it very hard for Ukrainian armored units to make much progress going forward. So it turned much more into an artillery and infantry fight. And the movement was just very slow. And eventually, Ukraine exhausted itself in its attempt to push forward in several different directions.
GR: So has the level of Ukrainian resolve to resist Russia changed at all, in your view, or is it still as strong as it was at the beginning?
BT: If you look at, public opinion polls, Ukrainian public opinion still remains very much committed to victory. People say that they believe in victory and victory to the Ukrainians means expelling Russia entirely from Ukrainian territory. Currently, Russia is occupying about 17 to 18% of Ukrainian territory. So based on the survey data, Ukrainian resolve seems to be roughly the same. Anecdotally, people say the mood in Ukraine is less optimistic than it was a year ago, that people had high hopes for, the offensive of summer of 2023. And there is, of course, some disappointment that they were not able to reconquer more territory. There's also a major debate taking place in Ukrainian domestic politics now about mobilizing additional troops because they, like the Russians, have taken heavy casualties. And the question is, how are they going to, put into the field an army that is capable of conquering back the territory they've lost and holding the territory they currently have?
GR: Now, what about on the Russian side in terms of the public? The last time you and I spoke, you talked about the kind of information that Russians were getting, how they might view the war. Have there been any major changes there about the factual information that they're getting, or do you have any, any evidence or even hunches, as a Russia expert, that their views might be changing in any significant way?
BT: In terms of, excuse me, in terms of the information available? Not much has really changed. Anyone who consumes state media or even legally available private military or private media in Russia today will be getting a very slanted view of the picture. If they go on social media or go look for independent media externally, then they can get a different picture. But, many people are pretty passive media consumers, and that's not true just of Russians, but of many people around the world, obviously. So I think the picture people are getting hasn't changed that much. But on the other hand, it won't be lost on the average Russian that a war that was supposed to be over in weeks is now already in its third year. And based on the independent survey data we have, the picture seems to be, a slow, a very slow but somewhat steady decline in commitment to the war. More people talking about the need for a settlement, talking about how if Putin went for a settlement, that they would support him in that, while at the same time, the majority seems to think they can have that settlement without getting, without having to give back any of the territory they've illegally annexed from Ukraine. So it's kind of a mixed picture. I think when we talked a couple of years ago, I may have said this, but the picture seems to be about 20% of the population are hardcore war supporters willing to do everything for victory. About 20% are hardcore war opponents, and the majority in the middle tends to go along with what the regime, is saying and at least offer kind of passive support, but not enthusiastic support. And they seem to be willing to end the war if that's what Putin says that Russia should do.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Syracuse University professor Brian Taylor, and we're discussing the war in Ukraine. Well, let's talk about Putin for a minute. You've written on him. He was recently reelected. I guess I guess that's the term we'll use. There was an election of some sort to another term as president of Russia. First, just for someone that grew up in the Cold War, are there any important sort of functional differences between Putin's level of control over the country and, say, the older general secretaries of the Communist Party? Help me understand how, what this guy is as an authoritarian leader.
BT: The main difference, I would say, is that in the Soviet Union, it was a single-party state in which the institutions of the Communist Party, with the support of the KGB and other associated institutions, had control from the top down to the bottom. But there was a set of regularized, institutionalized structures that knew what their roles were and carried out those roles. Putin's Russia is not a single-party dictatorship. It's a personalist dictatorship where power flows from one man who sits in the Kremlin, and that means the institutional constraints on him as a ruler are actually weaker than the institutional constraints that the post-Stalin rulers would have faced. In that sense, he's somewhat more like Stalin, not in the level of repression, which is very high, but not Stalin levels high. But Stalin also, in some sense elevated himself above the party. whereas under Khrushchev and Brezhnev's this system became more regularized, with routines that people followed and sort of informal rules about how the system worked. And now it's much more about Putin, his staff in the Kremlin, what's called the presidential administration, his cronies who have informal influence over him, which means the constraints are weaker. But it also means in some ways, the execution side is weaker than it would have been under the Soviet Communist Party. If you weaken institutions, they don't constrain you, but you also can't necessarily rely on them when you're trying to get things done. So that's how I would describe the difference. The one final point I would add is there was a recent study by an independent Russian media organization that said the level of repression in terms of people being either arrested or sentenced or fined for quote-unquote anti-state activities is as high now as it was under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and by some measures even higher. So it is quite a repressive, authoritarian regime, and it has become much more so over the last two years.
GR: So you were making some comparisons with Stalin there. Stalin essentially died in office. Do you think that's going to be the case with Putin? Will he have this position and this authority until he passes on?
BT: So Putin is now 71. He's been in power in one form or another for more than 24 years now. And personalist dictatorships in which the ruler is that old and has been in power that long, the typical outcome is that they die in office. That is the most likely outcome if we just base it on comparing this type of ruler to other types of rulers around the world of a similar profile, of similar age and similar time in power. In the post-Cold War era, the second most common way those people, leave power is through some sort of popular uprising. And then third would be some kind of elite conspiracy or coup. So those are the three most common scenarios in order. I think if we had to bet, we should probably bet with, you know, the majority odds, which says he'll be in power until he dies. But we also know that personalist regimes like this are pretty unpredictable and can collapse quite quickly, even though they look very formidable at the time, you know, and the stress that the war is putting on the economy and the political system means I wouldn't put a whole lot of money on that bet, even though that's the way I would bet if I was forced to.
GR: I gotcha, and you could probably dispatch this question pretty quickly, but I'm assuming, then, that this recent reelection doesn't really affect Putin's calculations in the way that we might think it would happen in a Western context of, okay, “I've been reelected, I have a mandate,” or I think that's just is that just completely irrelevant to his thinking?
BT: I actually don't think it's completely irrelevant to his thinking. I think in some ways it is more or less irrelevant. It wasn't a real election, you know, when you call it a special election operation or something like that. But it wasn't a real election, obviously. And the data is clear on that. There was massive falsification and fraud taking place and massive coercion to get people to vote the right way. But Putin has interpreted it as far as people have reported, as if showing that the country is united around him. So I think it gives him an extra boost of confidence going forward. That's maybe the one change.
GR: You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Brian Taylor. He's a political science professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and an expert on Russia and security. And we've been discussing the war in Ukraine. Before the break, we were talking a bit about Putin. Let me ask you this other question about what's inside his head, as far as you can tell. How much do you think he, in thinking about the conduct of the war and his decisions about it, how much do you think he is concerned with what the United States will do in reaction to the actions that he takes, or the Western world more generally? How does that factor into it for him?
BT: I think it's a huge part of the calculation for him. I think it's important for people to understand that for Putin, he is at war, not only with Ukraine, but in some sense with the United States and the West. And he sees this as a more global conflict because the U.S., NATO, other allies are supporting Ukraine, he sees it as very much kind of Russia against the Western world. And so one of his key objectives has been to try and divide the West, try and slow down the supply of Western military assistance to Ukraine. He has said quite openly that he thinks Ukraine would be unable to continue to fight without Western assistance. And I think his calculation now is that after the initial setbacks of the invasion two years ago, he and Russia sort of regrouped and went into full mobilization mode, mobilizing manpower, mobilizing military power, putting everything towards the war where they're spending upwards of 7%. Some people have estimated as much as 10% of GDP on the war effort. In contrast, the response from the U.S. and its European allies has been relatively small in terms of restarting military production lines and those sorts of things, supplying Ukraine with armaments and equipment and economic assistance. Obviously, a lot has been done, but in comparison with the way Russia has mobilized, for, one might say, total war, the U.S. and Europe has barely sort of started moving forward, in that. And so I think Putin believes, and maybe there's some evidence for this, that the U.S. and the West in general will eventually lose interest, and then he will have a free hand in Ukraine.
GR: This is, really, almost a perverse question on my part, but I want to ask it because as you were talking, it occurred to me, if we in the United States were to put like a Cold War lens on this conflict and remember back to the way that the United States kind of effectively outspent the Soviet Union and really caused them to hurt their own economy by staying up with us in terms of spending on a military that they could not afford as easily as we could, would it not be, at least from a strategic point of view, somewhat in the Western interests, to keep this war going and keep spending Russia down and keep making him, in a sense, more and more, contingent in his in his position? Or is that I mean, that has enormous ethical implications for what we're doing to the Ukrainian people and nation. But it just struck me if from that lens, I don't know if that question's making sense or not to you know, but.
BT: I guess I wouldn't describe the situation in that way, because the Cold War was a Cold War, and it went on for decades. And now we're talking about an extremely hot war. The hottest wars in Europe since World War II, in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or wounded, and it goes on day by day. Just last night, Russia sent a massive missile and drone attack against Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. So the scenario is different. The Cold War scenario was, over time, the collective economic and technological might of the U.S. in Western Europe was going to outstrip that of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Now we're talking about a full-blown massive conventional war in which if the West doesn't step up to help Ukraine, defend itself, then Russia will try and grind down Ukrainian resistance, and that will radically change the security situation in Europe and will lead to increasing demands for more U.S. military assistance to the rest of Europe, more U.S. troops in Europe, and that sort of thing. So I would frame the conflict quite differently than the Cold War.
GR: Right. No, I see what you're saying. Well, so you've mentioned this a couple times. I did want to come back to it. In fact, you said it right at the outset, the need, for, U.S. support and Western support for the Ukraine militarily and that you cited as Ukraine's biggest challenge right now is that artillery, ammunition and other things are beginning to to dry up. So what would happen then if, if the United States government didn't provide this aid that Ukraine needs?
BT: I think it would make it much more difficult for Ukraine to continue to resist Russian offensives. I think Europe would try and do what it can, and Europe actually is providing more assistance than the U.S.. I think there's a bit of a misconception about that. So Europe would do what it could, but there are certain things that the U.S., as the world's largest economy, with the world's most powerful military and the world's largest military industrial base can provide that Europe can't provide right away. Things like just the number of artillery shell shells, air defense missiles to protect Ukrainians, cities, those sorts of things. So the fight would get much more difficult for Ukraine. But if the West, not only the U.S. but, Europe sort of withdrew from the conflict, I don't think that'll happen. But if it did, this does not mean Ukraine will stop fighting. It'll just mean the nature of the war will become more like an insurgency, rather than, sort of old World War I, World War II style conflict if Ukraine simply runs out of, you know, artillery and systems like that.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Russia expert Brian Taylor. Well, I wanted to ask you how the Israeli-Hamas war has affected the situation in the United States in particular. Has it changed the way that the war in Ukraine is perceived? I mean, obviously, it's taken some of the attention away from Ukraine, but beyond that, has it, has it reframed it for this country in any important way?
BT: It's an interesting question. I mean, I think the Biden administration initially wanted to go with a message that helping Ukraine and helping Israel are part of the same fight against sort of authoritarian, you know, political actors, whether it's the Russian state or Hamas in Gaza. But, the, the course of the, you know, Israel-Hamas war has almost sort of flipped that argument. And now, I'm getting a bit outside of my lane here. But the way Israel is fighting in Gaza, bears some resemblance to the way that Russia is fighting in Ukraine. And there's a political argument in the U.S. political discourse more globally that actually, you know, we should think of the side that needs protecting as the Palestinians and Ukrainians rather than the Israelis and the Ukrainians. So it's muddled the debate in a way that I don't think the Biden administration anticipated after October 7 when clearly everyone's sympathy was with Israel after the horrible Hamas terrorist attack. But given the course of that war, it looks a lot more complicated than it did back in October. And so the politics of it have become difficult. Specifically, on the issue of the Ukrainian assistance bill that's been stuck in the House. There's a faction of the Democratic House that doesn't want to vote for that bill because it includes not only assistance for Ukraine, but assistance for Israel. And so, the left part of the Democratic caucus in the House is also opposed to this military assistance bill for very different reasons.
GR: We've got about, three minutes left or so. I want to try to squeeze in 2 or 3 more questions if I can. This is a big one, but, I wanted to get your take on it. One of the things that you sometimes hear coming from the Right in the United States, regarding this war, is this notion that historically, Ukraine isn't really a nation. And you know what? What are we helping to defend in this kind of thing? Just how true is that historically, I mean, outside of the carving up of the region that occurred after World War I and World War II and is Ukraine a nation? That seems like a dumb question, but.
BT: Ukraine is 100% a nation. Ukrainian is a separate language from Russia, from Russian. Ukraine has a separate culture and identity, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then again in 2022, has made that even stronger and more clear to Ukrainians. I know we're running out of time, but I do want to make one fundamental point that the history, although Putin likes to talk about it a lot, is in some sense irrelevant. Many borders came about accidentally over the courses of centuries, but the current international order is based on the notion of acceptance of the territorial integrity of states in their given borders. Russia recognized these borders multiple times. The UN recognizes these borders, so there's no legal argument about Ukraine's separate status.
GR: I think that's a good point. We could have lots of conversations about the rest of Europe if we were to apply that logic to it. So, I know that the predictions are dicey in this realm. You've kind of, I think, suggested where you think this might be going, but it seems like the war can't go on forever. Maybe it could, but you know, it can't. What's the ultimate arrangement that you think comes out of it in a minute or less?
BT: It's really hard to predict. At the moment actually, I don't see any scenario for a settlement because the two sides positions are completely separate. Russia wants to destroy Ukraine and control Ukraine, and Ukraine wants to keep its independence. So I don't think we should think about this so much as a question of this or that piece of territory. It's a question about political control. Putin wants to dominate Ukraine. He thinks it's an artificial state. I've just said why it isn't. Ukraine thinks they are a real state, which it is. And so in some sense, it either ends with Russia establishing that control that it's seeking, or Ukraine being given the tools to defend its sovereignty.
GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. That was Brian Taylor. And if you'd like to learn more about Russia and Putin, check out his book, “The Code of Putinism.” Brian, thanks again for taking time to talk with me. I always learn so much when I speak with you.
BT: Thanks so much, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media conversations in the public interest.
Robert Mann on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 09, 2024
Robert Mann(Mark Lavonier / lsu.edu)
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Robert Mann, a professor who holds the Manship Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Prior to joining the Manship School in 2006, he served as communications director to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. He's also the author of, "Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon".
Program Transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reheer. Super Tuesday has come and gone. And some things are clear. And others maybe not so much. To help me sort this out. My guest today is Robert Mann. He's a professor at the Manship School of Communications at Louisiana State University, and prior to that, he was press secretary or communication director for a number of notable Louisiana elected officials, including Governor Kathleen Blanco, Senator John Breaux, and Senator Russell Long. He's also the author of “Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon.” Professor Mann, welcome to the program.
RM: Thank you. Grant, it's wonderful to be with you this morning.
GR: Well, it's great to have you. So let me just start with a very basic question. Our listeners are certainly aware of the big news items that have come out of Super Tuesday. But what were your main takeaways from these presidential nominating contests?
RM: Well, I guess that the that those who said and I had a lot of friends you probably did too, or you knew people who really doubted that all evidence to the contrary, that it would be a rematch between Trump and Biden. I think, you know, I had friends like you probably do who just didn't think it would end up that way. That's something would intervene that, that Trump wouldn't actually go through with it or that Biden would, would drop out and that just didn't happen. And it, I, I kind of expected that that's what would would occur. But I think that what's interesting to me is going to be to see in the coming weeks when those people and I think there were a lot of them, on both sides, but particularly among independents who just didn't believe that it would be a Trump/Biden rematch, began to absorb the, the reality and how that shakes up the polls if it does.
GR: Yeah, yeah. And there are some interesting polls that suggest that substantial majorities of the country, not only don't want to see either of them be president, but don't even want to see either of them run again. But now they are running again. So, as you point out, the reality is that.
RM: Yeah, it's, you know, it's this weird thing because you see in the press a lot of the, the national press, The Post in the, in the New York, Washington Post, New York Times, you see these stories about how people are so dissatisfied with their choices. And yet, you know, Biden wins almost every primary with 85, or 90% of the vote. And Trump romps to victory with, with a, with a little bit smaller percentage because he had actually had some serious challengers this time around. But the vast majority of of activists in both parties seem to do want these two candidates to, to be their nominee.
GR: Well, I, I've read that there were also some notable, results that emerged down ballot. Obviously got less attention. Well, I just was curious if anything in that regard caught your eye.
RM: Well, I think what's happening in North Carolina with the with the Republican nominee, Mark Robinson, lieutenant governor, who, is now the Republican nominee for governor, who I think the Democrats wisely sat on a lot of his I think to say there were controversial statements is is a vast understatement. Appalling, disturbing statements about the Holocaust and particularly about, that he would prefer women weren't allowed to vote. This probably ensures that North Carolina will have another Democratic governor. But I think in a state that Biden only lost by about half a point in 2020, that this puts this potentially puts North Carolina, really in play. And, and, you know, maybe complicates, you know, Trump's, calculus a little bit because, I think they were counting on North Carolina being in their column. And, that could allow Biden to, you know, that could give Biden a little more breathing room in a place like Arizona or Nevada.
GR: Yeah. That's interesting. So, so now that we're at the stage we're at and you had the observation that you started with, but I wanted to see if there was anything else you'd want to add to that when I asked this question. And that's for our listeners and mostly we're in upstate New York, although we do get folks listening in from other places. But what do you think is the most important thing our listeners should have at the front of their minds at this point in the election cycle? Is there something you think they should be remembering or keeping their eye out for when they're watching these candidates or the parties?
RM: Well, I you know, I tell people that that you really need to you really need to tune out the polls. If, you know, for people on both sides, there's a lot of freaking out going on right now and particularly among, I guess, Biden supporters. But, but but maybe Trump supporters are a little overconfident. And I think maybe some Biden people are a little underconfident, and they're reading a lot into polls that will that will change a lot. And I think based on Super Tuesday, I think we're going to see some realignment. And, I just feel like that the polls at this, at this stage of the game are not really, especially the national polls, if you're looking at a you're looking at a national poll, I think you're just kind of wasting your time. You're just inviting, yourself to to contemplate scenarios that are unlikely to happen. And they probably aren't even, realistic. And so I would say people on both sides, if you're if you're a Trump supporter or you're a Biden supporter, focus on ways you can help your candidate, not ways you can freak out about your candidate's chances. And, you know, I think also that one thing that I've been thinking about the last few days is that we've we've got to have a more serious conversation in this country among political reporters and among political professionals about polling and, and how we cover it, how we use it, how the media uses it to create news, which I think is not the best use of their time. But I think we really need to reassess what we do with polling in this election and going forward.
GR: I think it's it's been a problem for a long time. But it's a good point. So given that your experience was mostly on the Democratic side of the aisle, nonetheless, I wanted to see if you're getting a feeling in Louisiana, of any kind of like, sense on the ground among Republicans. You know, you talked before about how people really were discounting the possibility that this would be a rematch of 2016. But it is, and so or it looks like it's almost certain to be. So are you getting any kind of feelings in Louisiana among Republicans that Republicans up here might not be getting the same sense of?
RM: Well, you know, so Republicans in Louisiana. So first of all, I think your listeners need to understand that, Louisiana had its statewide elections last year. We're one of three states that have governor and legislative races in off years. And so, a lot of the political activity that would be happening in other states and a lot of the influence that a presidential campaign would be having on a statewide election just doesn't happen in Louisiana. We elected a Republican governor last year, and a supermajority in both houses of Republicans. So Republicans are feeling really ascendant. The presidential campaign doesn't touch us, really, in ways that it might in a swing state. And so, you know, Republicans are really feeling the roads right now. I mean, the governor just convened two special sessions and passed some pretty bold legislation, and is going to continue to do that. They're on a romp, they're feeling their oats. And, there is just, you know, I think that the presidential election is something that people care about. But I think in Louisiana, it's something they feel like they can't do anything about, because their votes are in the bank for doing it. Our electoral votes are in the bank for Republicans in every election.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Bob Mann, a professor at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Communications. So, Bob, I moderated a panel up here in New York of, academics last week. It was before Super Tuesday, and my last question to them, it was a bottom-line type of question was at this point in the election cycle, I didn't want to ask them to make a prediction because political scientists and social scientists don't like doing that. But at this point in the election cycle, who should be more worried, Joe Biden or Donald Trump? And to a person, they all said Donald Trump. Do you concur with that? And why?
RM: I do, I do, and I think if you look at from a standpoint, the standpoint of resources, of money, from the standpoint of, you know, the issues, particularly how abortion and reproductive rights is cutting against Republicans and every special, almost every special election, since the Dobbs decision. And if you look at the, the sort of the legal peril of the two candidates, one and Biden, who is, you know, the Republicans keep stepping on rocks trying to impeach him and to some extent, the, you know, the prosecutions against Trump are a little bit in trouble and delayed and all that. But there's still, I think, a bigger problem for Trump, there's a story that I saw yesterday that the Democrats are about to dump, the Democrats, the Biden campaign and its super PACs that are helping the Biden campaign, are about to dump early $700 million in television buys across the 7 or 8 battleground states. That's an enormous amount of money, especially this early. This is not to say that it will work. This is not to say that money is the magic potion that just wins campaigns. It doesn't always translate into a winning campaign. But, the the question you ask is, who would I rather be? And I would rather be sitting in the Biden chair than the Trump chair at this point in the campaign.
GR: There's something I've been mulling for a while now, and I wanted to get your take on it. it's the first time in our modern history that we've had, two presidents, each with two four-year records to compare. And an election hasn't happened for a very long time. Now, granted, one is the sitting incumbent and one is the challenger, but they both have full presidential records. Do you think that will affect things? And if so, how would it affect the dynamic?
RM: Yeah, that's a good question. They are sort of running as these two incumbents in a way, and, they're so well known. I think the Trump people think there was a I saw that, that, a Washington Post columnist, tweeted the other day that the Trump people believe that there is no new information that voters need to have about Trump, that it's all baked in and that the negative spots that Biden is going to dump on Trump rain down on Trump will have no, effect. I don't believe that. I think that I think you and I both know that voters have very short memories when it comes to politics, and that there's a lot about Trump, that they don't remember a lot about Trump's agenda. If he's elected, that they don't know about. I think there's still a lot of room for the Biden campaign to educate about Trump. And so where I'm going with this is that, you know, Trump wants it to be a referendum on the incumbent, which is what every challenger wants it to be. Biden wants it to be a choice between these two, these two presidents and that. So if you want to know who's going to win the race, I think you just need to one way to look at it is in late October, are people going to be looking at this, this election as a choice or a referendum? And I think that'll it'll tell you how it's likely to go.
GR: And, are you following the vice presidential sweepstakes on the Republican side of this at all?
RM: Well, a little bit. As much as you as it can be followed, which I think is kind of I think it's kind of funny, funny in a macabre sense to be watching these. A lot of these Republican, former challengers and other people sort of swirling around Trump, you know, doing the bootlicking, trying to, you know, put themselves in contention for this, for this job. It's you know, I think Trump clearly wants someone who will be totally subservient to him and would I mean, he's looking for more subservience than he got from Mike Pence, if that can be believed. He's looking for someone who'll be much more loyal to him. Who will be willing to, if need be, to violate the Constitution in a way that Mike Pence wasn't willing to do. So, you know, I think it's going to be just a race to the bottom in that sense. It's not going to be a this is not going to be a pretty sight. And also, you know, you got to realize that and, you know, in both campaigns, the running mate is really supposed to be the hatchet person. And so you're also I think Trump is also looking for the sort of the dirtiest fighter that he can find. It's kind of hard to believe that Trump is looking for someone who's more of a gutter politician than he is, but I think that's what he wants.
GR: There's some, extra interest in it, I guess, up here in this area of the country, because Elise Stefanik seems to be on that list, and she's a member of Congress from a little bit further north of here. But nonetheless, she looks like she would fit the role of the attack person pretty well. I mean, that's what she did during the first impeachment, for sure. Any thoughts about her?
RM: Well, you know, yeah, I think she's, you know, she's clearly angling for the job. And, one observation I have about her is that, you know, it could be that Trump is looking for someone from a state that, that would, you know, that's in play. I mean, you know, New York is not going to vote for, it's not going to give its electoral votes. Elise Stefanik on the ballot is not going to make any difference in how New York votes. So that is you know, I think presidential candidates have gotten away from that because I think they realize that except maybe for Lyndon Johnson, you can't find an example of a running mate who brought his home state along, but that still may be a consideration for Trump in a very close race.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Bob Mann. He's a professor at Louisiana State University's Manship School of Communication, and he's the author of “Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon.” We've been discussing different things coming out of Super Tuesday's primary elections and looking beyond. So, I mentioned this panel that I had moderated up here in Syracuse. Another thing, that we got into a discussion with was, was whether Democrats, are essentially stuck at this point with Kamala Harris as the vice presidential nominee. It seems to me they are. But my panelists had some disagreement about that. It does seem like the White House is trying to feature her more in recent weeks and expand her portfolio in different ways. What's your sense of this issue?
RM: Well, I would not use the word stuck because I think she's she's more of a of an asset than, than a lot of people realize. You know, there are some, polls if we are just told, people just disregard polls, but there are some polls. It suggests that there maybe there's a little there's a little, you know, the support among African Americans and other minorities is a little bit soft this year. And I think to, you know, I think to, to, to throw, you know, a woman minority overboard a few months before the election would be a, a really bad move on Biden's part. And I think all the people around him understand that even if he wanted to cast her aside, which I don't think he wants to do, but even if he did, that would be I think it'd be a really bad political move for him. But I think she could help. And I think she, she's a she is she is a very, I think a very effective communicator. She's, I don't I just don't see the downsides that a lot of people see in her. I think the people who, who cast a lot of aspersions on her and who denigrate her are people who have trouble with, and I'm not saying everybody, I'm not trying to. I'm not. But I think a lot of people just don't like a I hate to use the word, but an uppity black woman. And I think there's a lot of that. And I see it around in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, among, not very tolerant white people who are just offended by the, the idea of a, of a black woman being in a position of power. And I think that sort of bleeds over. So, you know, I like her, I think she's a, she's an effective, a messenger, for, for Biden, for the campaign. I think she's been a good vice president. It's the fate of every vice president to be denigrated in some way and to be dismissed even by some of the president's own people.
GR: Yeah. No, I, I had used the word stuck because you're the, you're the, fullest throated endorsement of her potential help in the election that I've heard so far. Even among Democrats, they seem to view her as a liability in that may be because they are looking at those polls that you referenced. I wonder, do you think, let's say that President Biden should have some significant health issue that is, you know, patently obvious and can't be spun in any way health-wise, age-wise between now and the convention, do you what do you see happening in that instance?
RM: Well, first of all, let's say I think is I think I think if two people if either of the two candidates are likely to have, health issues, it's going to be the guy that eats Big Macs for lunch every day.
GR: Fair enough.
RM: So I just find it frustrating that there's an inordinate amount of focus on Biden's health when we've got this obese pre-dementia patient running for president on the other side who you know I just find it I just find the maddening that we're focusing on one one candidate's age more than the other. But if something happened to, I think if something happened to Biden, I mean, I think Kamala Harris would be the nominee. I mean, it's just there's just no way this late in the game that the Democratic Party is going to change two horses. Yeah, it's going to be Joe Biden and Kamala Harris through October and into November, no matter what anybody wants, because that's just it's just inconceivable that the Democrats would go in another direction this late in the game. If you wanted another candidate, if you wanted another vice president, if you wanted another presidential candidate on the Democratic side, last year was your time to get that this year, it ain't going to happen.
GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Louisiana State University professor Bob Mann. So, with about a third of the program we've got left, I wanted to, take some time and explore your thoughts about Ronald Reagan since you since you wrote, a very, very interesting book on him just a few years ago. And, obviously, he's been brought up a lot in the Republican debates, so far. And, and it's even the case that Democrats, mentioned him sometimes, often when they're criticizing the current state of the Republican Party. So let me just ask you, just a flat-out question to start with, is, is Ronald Reagan still relevant in the Republican Party right now?
RM: No, no, Ronald Reagan is, Ronald Reagan is in that sort of Mitt Romney, John McCain, category where, you know, he, a traditional conservative, who bases his, his appeal on his optimism and his patriotism, quote-unquote, patriotism, whatever. You how are you to define define that. That is just Ronald Reagan was not an angry person. Ronald Reagan was not a person who trafficked in personal invective. Ronald Reagan was not a was not a candidate who demonized immigrants. In fact, quite the opposite. Ronald Reagan celebrated America, you know, Trump denigrates this country, calls it a sick country, calls it a bad place to be. You know, he runs down this country in a way that Ronald Reagan would couldn't imagine. So, you know, if Ronald Reagan showed up on the scene today, he would meet the same fate that people like, you know, Mitt Romney, and then Nikki Haley and, and John McCain have met in that party. They're just no longer welcome. It is no longer a party that that they would be that they would even recognize. And I think they would be among the Never Trumpers who have left the party, at least for the time that Trump has control of it.
GR: Yeah. And you put your finger on something with that answer that I wanted to explore a little bit more deeply. Which is, is this a stylistic issue? Most of the things that you just listed as differences seem to me to be style and personality and for lack of a better word, character, with the exception of the immigrant position. Is there a policy difference here, or is this a type of politician in a way, of being a Republican?
RM: Well, I think to some extent I think to well, I think to some or maybe even a large extent, it is about it is about style and approach. But I think that's also very important. I don't, I don't think that it's, it's a, it's necessarily a superficial thing. And here I'll give you an example. when, when Trump won most, most almost all the Super Tuesday states and Haley Nikki Haley decides to suspend her campaign to essentially drop out. Trump attacks her, starts, you know, calling her names and sort of exalts in this victory in a, in a, I think, a very, ugly, counterproductive way, you know, beating his chest. Biden, by contrast, welcomes the Haley voters into his fold. That is what Ronald Reagan would have done. That's what Ronald Reagan did do. He saw politics as, he saw politics as addition, not subtraction. And so, yes, it is stylistic in a, in a large degree, but it is the essence of politics, I think, to know that if you're gonna win elections, you got to add people to your coalition. You can't throw people away. You've got to find room and make room for them and appeal to them. And, I have a million disagreements with Reagan when it comes to his policies. I didn't, don't admire what he did, but I do think that he understood politics, in a way that Trump doesn't. I mean, I don't mean Trump doesn't understand politics. What I mean is he sees politics in a completely different way. And I think that that way of seeing politics is not ultimately going to serve Trump well. It hasn't gotten, you know, a majority of the, you know, he didn't get the he didn't win the popular vote. And the Republicans have lost every major election since then because of those politics, I think.
GR: Yeah. So, you mentioned that Reagan wouldn't do too well today if he was trying to get the Republican nomination. He'd go the way of other folks. But I wonder how what you think, having written a book about him, what Reagan would be saying about Trump, would he break his 11th amendment if he was confronted with “The Donald?”
RM: Well, I don't think he would understand Trump. I think he would, it would just be inconceivable that a politician would or a Republican would, would do that. I mean, I just so a lot of my book was, was about, you know, Reagan's growing awareness of, you know, growing political awareness and his evolution from a, from a liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican. And one thing that I noticed in the book that, you know, Reagan, Reagan had sharp criticisms of the policies of the, you know, of John Kennedy and, and others, other Democrats, but he never made it personal. He, he made he really focused on, on policy or when he or when he did make it personal, it was it was usually about a, you know, sort of a, an anonymous person. He never picked people out and attacked them personally. And so I think that I think that he would just not understand and think that that was just really counterproductive politics to attack people, attack people personally. He didn't want to be seen as that kind of person. He thought it wasn't a he thought it wasn't an effective way to win elections. But I think he was, you know, I think he was largely, he was largely correct. And so I think he would not he would not admire and, and recognize the really, really ugly, mean-spirited Republican Party that Donald Trump has, has brought into being and helped come into being. You know, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan has beared some of the blame for this in some ways. But I don't think he would recognize his party today. I just don't think he would recognize it at all and a lot. And the reason I say that is a lot of the people who I think are Reagan Republicans don't recognize their party and they've left it.
GR: Well, we've only got a few seconds left and I've got to end just an absolutely silly question for you, but I can't resist it. So I'm going to ask it. You are Bob Mann, and you actually hold the Manship chair at the Manship School of Communication. So Mann holds the Manship chair at the Manship School. Is that ever weird?
RM: It is weird. And, you know, what's weird about it is, that I don't, I just have an endowed chair. I'm not the chair of the department. I'm not the dean of the school. But because of that, so many people think that I run the place around here like, I get a lot of emails that I shouldn't be getting.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Bob Mann. And again, his recent book is titled “Becoming Ronald Reagan: The Rise of a Conservative Icon.” And if you're interested in learning more about Ronald Reagan and understanding how he developed the ideas that he did, it's a really great read to help you understand that better. Bob, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciated this.
RM: Thanks, Grant. It was a pleasure.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Tim Palmer on the Campbell Conversations
Mar 02, 2024
Tim Palmer
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Tim Palmer. A prolific nature writer and photographer, Palmer has won awards from the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club and American Rivers. They discuss his new book, "Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis."
Program Transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Tim Palmer. He's a prolific nature writer and photographer and has won awards from, among other places, the National Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club and American Rivers. He's here with me today because he's authored a new book titled “Seek Higher Ground: A Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis.” Mr. Palmer, welcome to the program.
Tim Palmer: Thank you. Grant, it's great to be here with you today.
GR: Well, that's good to have you. So let me just start with a real basic question. How did you get the idea to write this book? Now, on on flooding. What, what's the story behind it?
TP: Well, it goes way back. I was a victim of flooding in, get this, 1972, and some people in your area may remember the Hurricane Agnes flood. It was the most damaging flood in American history up to that time. And I happened to live at ground zero in north central Pennsylvania near Williamsport.
GR: Okay.
TP: And, my home was almost flooded. Not quite. It went up to the, the next step would have got us in. It's a front entrance. But my neighbors were flooded and, you know, seriously damage. And I helped them and became engaged in emergency services. I was also working as the county planner at the time on the planning staff. I was the environmental planner. So as soon as I got back to work, I had the job of not just questioning how we could help flood victims, but how we could prevent this kind of disaster from occurring again. And that was the seed.
GR: Okay.
TP: I worked as a planner and then I started writing full-time. And this has been a long time ago. I've written many books about rivers and river conservation since. But the flood issue has always been very close to my heart and in my mind. And then we came to global warming and the floods are getting way worse. So I think you can see that's unfolding now.
GR: Right. And it's interesting that you mentioned, Hurricane Agnes. I remember that as, as a kid, I grew up in the Washington, DC area, and I can remember that came through. We weren't flooded in our neighborhood, but the main, artery, road was. And that had never happened before. And, my dad and I went down there to just to see it and look at them, watch them trying to clean that up. So I remember that hurricane very well. So, so. Well, give me a, a recent, brief history, if you could, of flooding in the United States, let's say, since 1972, since Hurricane Agnes, you mentioned global warming and the fact that these have gotten worse. But, you know, are there any general trends a little a little more specific than that, that that you think are important for our listeners to know?
TP: Yeah, yeah, quite a few of them actually. But the, you know, for years and years, we basically tried to deal with the flooding problem by attempting to stop the floods from occurring and doing that by building dams. So we spent billions of dollars. The Army Corps of Engineers alone built 400 flood control dams across the country. In spite of all that effort, flood damages continued to grow worse and worse and worse. The fundamental reason is people kept building more and more and more in the flood plains. So even though the Corps was working as hard as they could to stop floods, we still had floods. More and more people were subject to damage. And now we have the dangers to have dams failing and that kind of thing. The other essential approach was to build levees, not to stop floods from occurring, but to keep them away from us. And, you know, levees fail and levees overtop. And Wilkes-Barre again, the Hurricane Agnes flood, 100,000 people, dam flooded because the levee failed. so these two essential approaches were not working in terms of limiting flood damage. And so, yeah, as a planner, you know, I was immersed in this issue, no pun intended, but it was evident to me that we had to simply quit developing more and more on the floodplains and instead protect them as open space. It's the most dangerous, most expensive place to develop with all kinds of not just private cost, but public costs. And secondly, we had to help people relocate out of the danger zone wherever they were willing to go. So this dual approach to me made way more sense. You get rid of the problem that way. And, so I kind of worked on those lines as a planner. We got zoning accepted in all 52 of our local municipalities. We launched a buyout program. I left the planning career, began writing full-time. This is 32 books ago, but the flooding issue has also been one that has interested me greatly. And as the data has come in on global warming and its effects on floods, this to me just augmented the importance and the urgency of understanding this subject better and understanding the path that we must follow if we're trying to get out of the jam that we're in today with this.
GR: Yeah. You just you just gave us a glimpse of sort of the, the central, positive argument of your book of what, what we ought to do instead. And I want to explore that with you a little bit later. But let me just stick with this other thing first, and I'll come back to that. Now, you talked about this. There are two things going on in creating this problem. And your focus is mostly on the United States. I was just wondering, have you have you looked around the world, similar patterns, anything there that, that strikes you?
TP: Yeah, I have a little bit Grant. But, you know, the flooding issue in the United States is so enormous. And I had a limited number of words for my book with the University of California Press. So I didn't really get into that very deeply. But I did look at in a few sections, I addressed that worldwide, the problems are even more serious, because there's even less activity in trying to regulate development or help people move. Take Bangladesh okay, exhibit A, millions of people, many millions of people subject to flood hazards, and they live at sea level, you know, so they not only have river flooding, but they have the rising sea level issue to deal with and the projections for the numbers, the increasing numbers of people subjected to flood damage worldwide are truly mind-boggling. And I have I cover that in the book. My main purpose in doing that is, is not so much to inform about the world situation or figure out what other countries need to do, but to point out how important it is that we try to lead the way. We have ability, we have the knowledge, we have the talent, we have the staff, we have the history to come to grips with this problem. If we just get over the political hurdles involved, we have the ability and all of what's needed to show the world a better way. But you know, we're not doing it. And so pointing to the direction we must follow, you know, in the United States was my primary goal, even in terms of addressing the problems of the rest of the world.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Tim Palmer. He's a nature writer and photographer and the author of the new book, “Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis.” So you mentioned that global warming has obviously made this problem worse, but also where housing is being located, and decisions about that have made the problem worse. This may not be terribly important to try to figure out which which one of those two things has been more of a driver, but I am sort of curious. Did you come to any consensus, that is, which one is the worse culprit? Global warming and the change in climate or where we're putting these houses in the first place?
TP: Well, where we're developing is the fundamental problem here. Since the beginning of time, there've been floods. It's part of the hydrologic cycle. It's the way nature works. We wouldn't even have valleys to build in if it weren't for floods swarming that landform in time. And so, you know, we've always had floods, we've never been effective in, in helping people to build in the proper places and making it harder to build in the improper places. And so it's it's a matter the global warming issue is a matter of more urgency now and a matter of degree. It's simply telling us that, hey, this has always been a problem, and now this problem is getting way worse. Unless we do some really effective reforms right away.
GR: One of the things that you do spend some time talking about in the book is our system of, flood insurance in this country. And, it hasn't it hasn't worked. Well, you argue so. But first, if you can do this briefly, I know it's a very complicated subject, but briefly, how does the system work for those who have never considered having to get it or, you know, dealt with this?
TP: So flood damages are more severe and serious than fire damages to a home. They're more of them. They're more costly. It's more widespread. Yet we all have fire insurance, you know, but we don't have flood insurance. One reason is it's too expensive. The insurance industry is well-informed. They know that selling flood insurance is not a money-making job for them. So it costs way too much for people to afford. So nobody bought it. The floods keep coming, the federal agencies and very enlightened people involved in them back in the 50s and the 60s recognized this. And so they came up with a brilliant formula here, and that was that we can, we should offer subsidized federal flood insurance so that all these victims of floods were already living on flood plains through really, perhaps no fault of their own, so that they can afford insurance. But the deal is to do that, the local municipality needs to zone the flood plain so that the damages don't continue to become worse and worse. Okay, so it was a two-part bargain that was that was developed here. And then after the Agnes flood, it was realized that almost nobody had flood insurance and that Wilkes-Barre mentioned Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where the levee failed in 1972, 100,000 people were evacuated and flooded. Two of them had flood insurance, two, even with the federal program. So the people in charge at that point had the additional brilliant idea that we should tie this to the federal insured mortgage system so that if people wanted a federally backed mortgage, which virtually all of them are, the community had to be enrolled in the flood insurance program and thereby zone the land that is subject to hazard. So that was passed, and I was a county planner at the time, and I think I speak for many in saying that, that we thought we had come across the bridge here and that we were going to solve this problem in the long term because, number one, we won't have much more development in the flood plain. Number two, what development is there will eventually phase out because of the flood issues, but it didn't work out that way. What happened instead was largely owing to the influence of the development industries, banking, real estate, home building, the federal process became somewhat, I think, active. And when the actual regulations came down and when the money was appropriated and all those kinds of things, the program ended up being watered down way too much to be as effective as it should have been. The restrictions on development were not tight enough. The mapping of floodplains was not effective enough. The target of a 100-year floodplain is not big enough. Now. The floods are way bigger than that. And, you know, and the money that that made available for this just just didn't do the job. So what we need to do now is, and what we've needed to do from day one, is reform that program to be more effective. And there are good practical, real ways of doing that.
GR: Well, we'll get into some of those in the second half. It's interesting when you started telling me that story, first thing, I'm a political scientist, first thing that popped into my head is the politics of the zoning must have been out the wazoo. And of course, that is exactly the story you told me. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Tim Palmer. He's a nature writer and photographer, and he's with me because he's recently written a new book titled “Seek Higher Ground: A Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis.” And we've been discussing this book. So I can see what you said before the break there, that as we have also done more of this development as floods have gotten worse, and at the same time you have that political and economic dynamic. It's basically, if you'll excuse the pun, I'm sure there's a lot of these in this topic, but a perfect storm for a problem. So how would you change just the flood insurance plan? I know you've got a larger argument to make, but just in terms of this flood insurance plan, how would you tighten that up? I mean, how can you push back against that kind of influence?
TP: Yeah, just another footnote on the issues of the program. It's worse than I described. It's so bad that insurance, in many cases has become an incentive to build on the floodplains, because now taxpayers are shouldering the burden of the damage, you know, rather than just the individual. So, you know, this whole story is a great illustration of the law of unintended consequences. So how would you fix it? Well, there's this is a big subject of course. There's an organization called the Association of State Floodplain Managers that has a whole agenda on how FEMA, the Federal Energy, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Congress should reform the program. But let me just highlight a couple of things. It should be really easy to do. Okay. One is that people can get payouts from the insurance program after damage without limit. There are limits on the amounts, but number of floods are unlimited. There are actually homes that have been flooded and paid by taxpayers for flood damage 18 and 20 different times. There are many places that have been paid more than the entire value of the house, and these are called repeatedly flooded properties. And, they make up 1% of the policies in the federal flight insurance program, but they account for 30% of the payout costs. So this is an outrage to have for someone to own a property and frequently these are not the people living on floodplains because they have no other place to go. Many of these are like trophy homes along the coastal areas, they're used as rental properties. And, you know, they just keep getting hammered and rebuilt, taxpayer hammer, get taxpayer payouts, rebuilt. And we're all paying for that. So limiting the repeated damage payouts should be a no-brainer. Same problem, development industries come in there and say, well, you know, as long as somebody is willing to pay us to rebuild these houses, we're going to rebuild them, you know? And so that's number one. It should be easy to change. Number two should be a disclosure requirement on flood damage. When you want to sell a house, you have to do a deed search to assure the buyer that you're actually, you actually own the house you're selling to them. This is to protect the buyer. There is no disclosure of flood damage, so the people buying the home have no idea that it floods.
GR: That's interesting because there's disclosures for lead paint. There's disclosure for all sorts of expenses and repairs that that home has had. I didn't know that.
TP: Yeah, absolutely. So the poor people buying the place aren't required to be told. They of course can look themselves. But let me tell you about my own experience on this. I was going to buy a cabin along the Rogue River in Oregon. The place cabin of my dreams. Okay, so I met with a realtor there and, kind of looked things over and asked, you know, is this exposed to flood hazards? It didn't quite pass my eyeball test as a guy who's worked with rivers all my life, and she said, oh, yes, they built a dam upstream. It will never flood again. And that didn't quite pass my sniff test of the negotiation. So I went straight to the county planning office. I was able to do this, fortunately, looked up the maps and sure enough, I was right in the floodway waiting for another atmospheric river with my name on it. So I of course declined to buy that property, but somebody else did, and they probably had no idea it was going to flood. So disclosure should be a requirement. We pay for these flood maps for FEMA to do, it should be public knowledge. The, you know, the arguments to not let people know what they're buying or, you know, just don’t fly. So that's the second big thing, a third kind of reform that's needed is in the schedule for how much is paid for flood insurance. And to their credit, FEMA is moving on this issue and reforming the cost schedule so that those properties that account for the biggest payouts when they flood are actually paying more for the insurance than the poor people who just, you know, through no fault of their own, live in the floodplain and get hammered repeatedly. So those are three reforms that should be easy to do. There are many others we need to more effectively map floodplains. We need to have the 500-year, rather than a 100-year flood be the principle guiding metric in this. We need to include the effects of global warming because they are going to make floods way, way bigger. But those are just a few of the really practical things that can be done that should be done, that must be done to reform the program.
GR: So I want to get to some of the big picture things here in the last part of our conversation. But let me just check one impression that I've gotten from something you said earlier, and make sure I've got that fact right. And that's, you were talking about dams and levees originally. So I just want to make sure I understand this. One of the trends, I assume, that we've seen, along with the flooding, is that more dams have been failing than before. Is that correct? Okay. And the same thing with the levees that they've been I mean, I obviously everyone thinks that Katrina, but. Yeah. Okay.
TP: Excuse me to clarify.
GR: Go ahead.
TP: With all credit to the Army Corps, most of the dam failures are not corps dams were built for flood control. But some are in the Bureau Reclamation, built, for example, Teton Dam in Idaho, which failed while it was being filled. It caused more flood damage than an entire network of Snake River dams had prevented in flood damage over the course of history. Most of the dam failures, however, are private dams that have been poorly regulated, poorly monitored, many of them without even owners anymore. So, but nonetheless…
GR: Like the story of the Johnstown flood, you know that that.
TP: Exactly.
GR: Okay. Got it. Okay. If you just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is the nature writer Tim Palmer. So, I want to get to some of the bigger questions that your book gets at. And I want to first ask you, before we get to your the argument that's kind of embedded in the title of your book, but flooding itself, how will more regular and less constrained flooding help us help the planet? Why is it good?
TP: Yes, yes, yes. There's a whole other side to the flooding coin here that we have not talked about that almost nobody talks about, and that is that floods are not only inevitable in the workings of nature, but they're essential to the workings of nature. We actually need to have floods. It's the way landforms are formed. Floods account for the very best of our wildlife habitat. They're needed by fish for their habitat. Floods are what deliver sand to the beaches, we wouldn’t have beaches. If you like beach sand at the ocean, you got to like floods. If you like fish, you got to like floods. And so they are part of the natural process of the way the earth works, that we have failed to really recognize and give credit for.
GR: And so your title is, you know, “Seek Higher Ground.” So if that's really okay. So, so ultimately your bottom line solution to this is we need to locate in different places. First of all, if you could briefly because I want to have a follow up to this. What do you mean by that? Is that just like where we should be doing new construction, where people should be thinking about buying homes? All the above?
TP: Yeah, yeah. So we need to, number one, effectively zone our floodplains so that they are not developed more than they already are. Two very interesting statistics on this. 90% of our floodplain acreage is not heavily developed. So the problem could get about nine times worse than it now is if we're all developed. So we need to protect what still is open space. Second number here is 7%. And that is the total floodplain area of the United States. There are a lot of other places to go, to build, and not that that will be easy, but 97% of America is not floodplain. So much of that is more suitable for development than the high-hazard areas of floodplains that we have. So that's number one. We need to protect what is still open space. Number two, a lot of people are already there. And of course, we're not going to move Saint Louis, you know, or Memphis or Portland, Oregon and so forth. We need to protect them effectively with levees. But most of the area that is in a flood hazard area is not heavily developed. And in those areas, we should look at every possibility we can to help people relocate and get up out of the safety zone. I interviewed some very interesting people in my book who did this. And you know, and their stories are inspiring, really on how you know, people can come to grips with this problem and actually solve it, rather than just staying to worry and, and stress about the next flood to come.
GR: You know, I would think that first of all, the trauma of being flooded would be huge. And second of all, worrying about, as you just said, would be huge. There is one question though. We've got about a minute and a half left, so I want to give you a little bit of time to think about this, but what you just said, though, will be easier for some people than others. Right. And, and, and I'm thinking primarily because of economics. So that dislocation that might be involved and moving could be disastrous for some folks. So I would think that you'd have to build into this some kind of additional help for the people who need it. And very briefly, in about a minute or so, how would you do that?
TP: That's absolutely right. And, and a lot of agencies are doing precisely that. The number one, very few, if any public agencies are requiring people to move. This is the programs to help people relocate are all are essentially all voluntary government agencies. There's federal money, there's state money. There are local districts that all work toward helping people move if they want to. There's a lot of grant money available to do that, but it's not nearly enough. And here is another great pair of numbers. These are the two I'll leave you with. For every $1.70. Are federal government spends helping people to move away from flood danger and be done with the problem, the federal government spends $100 helping people to stay by helping pay for, quote, floodproofing, it doesn't work very well. To do, to help with public facilities that get damaged. So we need to reverse that ratio so that we're really helping people to move rather than to stay.
GR: That was Tim Palmer. And again, his new book is titled “Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis.” It's an important book. It's evidence-based. It's got a lot of good material in there, but it's also very, very readable, so I highly recommend it. Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. Really appreciate it.
TP: Thank you, Grand it’s been wonderful to be with you today.
GR: Great. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media conversations in the public interest.
Mary Jumbelic on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 24, 2024
Mary Jumbelic(Marc Safran)
On this week's episode of the Campbell Conversations, Grant Reeher speaks with Mary Jumbelic. She is a forensic pathologist, serving as Onondaga County's Chief Medical Examiner from 1998 - 2009. She's recently published the memoir, "Here, Where Death Delights: A Literary Memoir".
Program Transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Mary Jumbelic. She's a forensic pathologist, and she served as Onondaga County's Chief Medical Examiner from 1998 to 2009. She's recently published a memoir titled “Here, Where Death Delights.” Doctor Jumbelic, welcome to the program.
Mary Jumbelic: Thank you so much, Grant.
GR: Well, thank you for making the time to be with us. Let me just start very basic question. How did you come to write this book?
MJ: Well, I've always been a writer, Grant, starting back when I was 13 and I received a diary for Christmas. My father died six weeks later, and I think I found solace in writing down my feelings and thoughts after that experience. And I just kept doing it ever since. I liked English in high school and all through college, I took creative writing, but I found a passion with medicine and going to become a physician. Some of my writing took a little different flavor. I wrote academic articles and publications, but I also kept journals for all my times through those hard years. So if I did a mass disaster response, I kept a journal about it. So I have notes from the World Trade Center and the tsunami and things of that nature. When I retired, I just decided that I would follow up on some of my interests, and writing was a very strong one of those.
GR: All right. Well, so, briefly explain the title to me. “Here, Where Death Delights.” How does death delight?
MJ: Well, it actually comes from a Latin quote that I won't boggle by trying to say it in modern English, but, basically it's found on plaques in, in many morgues, dating back to the 1450s. And it's, as the quote is, “Let conversation cease, let laughter flee. Here is the place where death delights to help the living.” And so I drew my title from that quote. I think the dead have a lot to teach us, and perhaps delight is a strong word. but they do have a lot to tell us, a lot to guide us by. And two former forensic pathologists have written memoirs, one back in the 1960s, Milton Halpern and Bernard Knight in the 1980s from the UK. And their memoirs were called “Where Death Delights.” So I feel I'm in good company with them.
GR: Yeah. So, at the beginning of your book, you thank the Syracuse Downtown Writers Center of the YMCA. And, I've had, instructors and other participants from that program on the show in the past here on the Campbell Conversations. So just tell us a little bit about your involvement in that group.
MJ: Yes. I found that the Downtown Writers Center was a resource available to me where I could take classes. Oftentimes it was convenient in the evening, and I began dabbling with writing and memoir classes and having readers read my stories and I had no formal other than a few classes in college. I don't have an MFA, and, I haven't gone to, you know, fancy writing programs in Iowa or wherever. However, I felt that the Downtown Writer's Center had very knowledgeable instructors that helped me really hone my craft, and that the process of having my work reviewed every week. Readers comment on it and pick it apart and have no connection to me personally to my story. So they have an objectivity that I can't get from friends and family. It was brilliant and it really forced me to look at my writing with a harsh light and an editorial eye, and I think improved it remarkably.
GR: Yeah, that's my that's been my impression, too, talking to other, writers who have participated in this. Now, the style of this book, is called, I believe, literary nonfiction. You have literary memoir as the subtitle of your book. Explain what that genre is.
MJ: Yes. Well, the general overall genre clearly is nonfiction, and but it's also creative nonfiction. and literary memoir is a more defining term so that I feel that the stories are told in a narrative way. So there's an arc to the book, but it doesn't simply encompass my life in a memoir. It is storytelling, but truthful storytelling, it captures more fictional elements of style than a classic nonfiction would.
GR: Yeah, what I liked about it, and I know this is part of it too. But each of your chapters, stand alone. I mean, there's an end to each of them, but then they all accumulate to something as well. And so I think it's, it's a great book, for, like, reading in the evening or even reading before you go to bed, because you can get to the end of something, but then it's still there for you the next day to continue on. So, I really liked the style. So,
MJ: Thank you.
GR: Let me, let me now shift down to the sort of the meat of the book and, and, your experience as a forensic pathologist. Forensic pathology, obviously is not going to be for everyone, even though death may delight. is there a typical path that you're aware of to becoming a forensic pathologist among the medical profession? And in any way, what was your path if there's not a typical one?
MJ: Well, I don't think it's a popular, choice for a profession. for many reasons. Not simply because death might not delight everyone. it is a subset of pathology. So those doctors that work in the hospital, and they do laboratory work and they take specimens and they're analyzing the urine, and they're also taking sections from surgery and seeing whether it's cancer or not. You know, that's a whole branch of medicine, pathology. And then forensics is a sub-branch of that. And it's small. There are only about 500 board-certified forensic pathologists in the United States.
GR: Wow.
MJ: Now, so there aren't enough to go around, in the country and in the past, because it's often government-affiliated, the reimbursement, the, the salaries haven't really been up to par with other branches of medicine. So that's been difficult to work with. The dead don't vote, as my old boss used to say. So the taxes, go to the living. and, you know, the dead are left trying to scramble for like a little bit of money that might be left over. you know, that being said, I think people have recognized, in government in the past decade that you do need to support that branch of medicine. So I went into it for the interest, for the puzzle solving, for delving into what happened to the person, for being able to explain it to the grieving family members, for helping with recognizing hazards for the living and, for doing, you know, larger scale community work, public health work. So I felt I was drawn to it from that perspective.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with former Chief Medical Examiner for Onondaga County, Mary Jumbelic, who's recently published a memoir titled “Here, Where Death Delights.” So in the book, you write a lot about how your work intersects with your family life and the effects it has on your family. And, you know, I would just think that it would create a lot of, unique challenges. tell us a little bit about the work-family interactions that you had in your line of work.
MJ: Yes. I think, it does create a big challenge, I guess, like anyone who might be in a, you know, first responder type of field, law enforcement, ER work, EMTs, but, you know, so there's, you know, calling out at night for a homicide, you know, having to drop everything and, you know, being late for, you know, maybe family events and that type of thing. That being said, I think what has kept my sanity and kept me grounded has been my family and they've all been incredibly supportive. And I was lucky to have my mother help raise my kids when they were younger. And when I lost her, I had a nanny who became like a second mother to me. I even learned Russian, because she didn't speak any English. So it was very profound. And so my kids always had, like, the village to help, help them. They weren't just relying on some busy parents. It was a very cooperative, environment.
GR: And even setting the family issue aside, it just seems to me I would think that for you as an individual, even though you have a passion for this work and you mentioned the different reasons why you went into it, I would think that the work would wear you down after a while. did you have any special techniques of coping with that phenomenon?
MJ: I think the work does wear you down. And I think, I think part of the motivation of writing the book was to exorcize some of the ghosts that still dwell, in my mind, even years after finishing the work, if you will. so I guess the technique that most people use and that came in handy was, you know, compartmentalization where you have to divide yourself. Here's my role as medical examiner. Here's my role as mother. I'm going home now, you know. but it can't be a really firm barrier. It has to be permeable, because if it's too firm a barrier, you lose your empathetic human nature in the work. So you become distant. You become scientific. You can't respond to the family members. And so you have to have it permeable and yet still be able to put it aside, and enjoy the time you're not dealing with death and sorrow. So, I think my family helped ground me with that and remind me of that, when I came home and, and were very important elements in my being able to cope.
GR: And the essence of your work entails drawing on the body, of the deceased body to reconstruct the deceased final hours or less minutes. Can you just give me an example of how that works?
MJ: Well, oftentimes, we'll come upon a scene. I'll be called to a scene and there's but dead person, and they may be laying in bed. They may be laying on the floor. They may be out in the forest. It may be in a car crash. It's quite, quite the panoply of, scenes. And the very first thing is to absorb and take note of the situation, how the person's lying, where they're what the environment is, what's around him, where they reaching for something, you know, what were they doing right before they… was a phone nearby? Did they write something down? All of these things that you're processing at the scene. And the next time that I will see the deceased is at the morgue, and it's a little bit of a more austere environment. So they are now on the gurney, and I am now observing them. But when I say the dead speak and they and they talk to me, they are talking to me through their disease, through their wounds, through what they did, did they shampoo their hair recently? Have they eaten a meal? I can see that inside their body. I can tell what it is. Have they applied deodorant? Did they paint their nails? what was their state of dress? All of this is giving me so much information. They are really talking to me like this is what I did in the last few hours of my life, and they're. And they're they're showing me and telling me that.
GR: That's interesting. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Mary Jumbelic. Doctor Jumbelic is a forensic pathologist who has served as the Chief Medical Examiner for Onondaga County. She recently published a memoir titled “Here, Where Death Delights,” and we've been discussing her book. So you gave me an example before the break of sort of how this process works, what you're trying to do. Is there one case over and above all the others that sticks with you in your head, maybe even haunts you?
MJ: Well, there are there are many, believe it or not. I guess the prologue to my book was one of the first stories I ever wrote. And it's about a boy who was murdered by his father after the mother was murdered in the same house. And that prologue sets up my book, really because I can envision that so clearly in my mind, going into the house and the situation and seeing the poor child and the mother and then coming home after that to my family and having my boys hug me so strongly and the symbol that stuck in my mind and it's in the story is bloody handprints that were on the wall from the boy after he had been, cut by a knife. And I have on my wall my boy's handprints in finger paint and that contrast of, you know, terror from a child and the love and joy from another child sits with me and is the tension that I feel in many cases, but is emblematic of it.
GR: Yeah, that's very powerful. So how did you know in doing this work, how did you know when it was time to retire?
MJ: Well, I have rheumatoid arthritis. when I developed it, you know, 17 years ago or some something like that. And, it has affected my joints primarily and really got into my ability to bend down, go to scenes, you know, do all this, do all this stuff – manual labor. People don't think of a forensic pathologist as being a manual labor. But we really are in many ways. And, it really took its toll on me. And I had really bad flare-ups of that. So it kind of was time when I felt I couldn't do it to the extent of that I wanted to professionally. Yeah.
GR: So in going through your book, I have to say I was surprised not to find a discussion of the Newlander case. And just to remind our listeners of that case, Robert Neulander was a prominent DeWitt ObGyn physician who was convicted of murdering his wife, Lesley, in their home. He had claimed that she fell in the shower. You were friends with this couple and as I understand it, you were retired by the time this incident happened and the original medical examiner's report, not yours, concurred with Doctor Neulander that it was indeed an accident. But then you develop suspicions about that. Take the story from there.
MJ: Sure. You're correct. It's not in this book. That's because I'm writing a second book and halfway through it now, and it will be included in that one, which, is going to feature stories, of violence against women as part of the lens that I will be using. Yes, I was approached by friends of Leslie about the case, and I had had a devastating medical situation myself, so I was in a wheelchair. I had been in a coma. I was recovering, from a complication related to my rheumatoid, and, I didn't. And when she died, I was shocked and she had visited me just a couple days before, and I couldn't wrap my mind around it. I wasn't well myself, but the friends never let it drop. They never let it drop. And it just kept saying, you know, please look into this. Please tell me what to do. And it went from there. And then, you know, once I did get involved, it was clear to me that this was a murder. And then the rest is kind of, history, if you will. It, there was an investigation already ongoing, unbeknownst to me. Other people weren't settled with this either. was it as if, I was Chicken Little, calling out. So, it went from there and everyone, the prosecution did what they needed to. The police did what they needed to do. They had many other experts look at it, not just a little old Mary Jumbelic and come to the conclusion that, you know, she was killed, and, and didn’t fall in the shower and, and a trial and then an appeal and another trial, and there'll be more appeals. But in my mind, it's settled, yeah.
GR: Well, given all that was going on with you and your relationship to the couple, this whole thing must have affected, you know, very deeply.
MJ: It did, and it was very hard within the community for a couple of years because people didn't know what was going on. You know, nothing was made public. So the evidence was private. And all the investigation was somewhat private, and there are just rumors floating around. And so there was the pro-Bob side and the pro-Leslie side. And I was just persona non grata in the middle of everything. So it was not just because of my relationship with them, but because of the community, very, very difficult couple of years.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is former Onondaga County Chief Medical Examiner Mary Jumbelic. So I did want to ask you a couple of other questions about this and hopefully, I'm not, you know, opening up a wound too much for you here, but I am very curious to get your take on these things. Doctor Neulander's children, I believe, stuck by him during this trial. but in one of the appeals that you mentioned, the evidence was described by the court as overwhelming, in terms of his guilt. Why do you think the children have stuck by him and not kind of, in a sense, taking the side of the dead here?
MJ: Well, I guess, it philosophically gets to, what did the original information that was provided to them do to them? So that's why it's so, so very important that the medical examiner forensic pathologist that's listening to the dead person takes that information and provides it, whether it's pleasant or whether it's not pleasant or whether it confirms or whether it denies what the family thinks, it's important to get it right. It's important to get it right at that at that point, because what happened is, it was called an accident. Everyone thought it was an accident for months. So that has a chance for that settles in. That's the story. That's the oral history. And then how do you change that? Especially when the family doesn't see the evidence, doesn't see everything until court and that's like what, two years later? And so now there's just been too much time for that to jell and set, hard to reverse that.
GR: Yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of a cognitive dissonance kind of kind of thing. Well, you mentioned there were a lot of appeals in this case. My understanding is Doctor Neulander just recently filed another one several weeks ago, and it revolves around the instructions that the judge gave the jurors regarding his daughter not testifying on his behalf, I guess in one of the subsequent hearings. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a legal expert. But my understanding would be if at this point, if he wanted not to end his life in prison, he'd probably be better off admitting guilt and trying to show good behavior in prison. And, you know, do all the things you need to do to get parole. But he's persisting in these appeals, insisting on his on his innocence. Why do you think he's doing that? Do you have any insight into that?
MJ: You know, I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist or, sociologist. so I don't I don't know what is propelling him forward, but at some point, you're so deep in the lie, I think you can't get out of it. How do you save face and get out of it? “Oh. I've put my family through all this. I've put the community through all this. I still have some support. And now I'm just going to say, oh, well, sorry, guys. you know, I did it.” But, you know, and I'm not sure it's weighing on his conscience. Like, it doesn't strike me as the kind of person who needs to clear his mind before he goes to the grave, so I don't know that, though. But, I don't. What would compel him? What would compel him at this point?
GR: Yeah. Well, we've got about, three minutes or so left, and I want to try to squeeze in, two questions if I can. Okay. I want to change this to a happier note and then the first one is, you know, you've done a lot of, very interesting, philanthropic work helping in different things. You mentioned, going to New York on 9/11. Just tell us about some of the work you've done in various places.
MJ: Well, it started with the crash, off of, Mauritius in Long Island, the TWA crash, where the state, the governor called the response team to help out the local medical examiner. And while I was there, I met the man in charge of the federal team Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. He said, why don't you join our federal team? So I joined the federal team and the next year responded to Guam on a Korean airline crash there. And then one thing led to another, and I started responding to mass disasters, with the biggest, probably the most personal impact being the World Trade Center. But all of them have had, tremendous impact. And I represented the United States, for the Andaman Sea tsunami that occurred back in 2004. I went over to Thailand and there was a big international committee, and I represented the United States as a medical examiner. So my husband has always said, oh, you couldn't take death just on a like a local single basis. You had to really swallow the whole thing. Like really large format. I never saw it that way. I just kind of got drawn into it. But, I guess he's right. It was very impactful because you get to see how different cultures handle death. You get to see what happens to a society in a country when a major event occurs, and you still try to focus on the individual that's on your table.
GR: Yeah. That's interesting. So, we got about a minute left or so. I want to leave you time to talk about the new book you've got in the works. So it will involve the Neulander case. Tell, are you using the same approach or the same kind of literary memoir or something different? Tell us. Tell us what you're up to there.
MJ: Yes, I think that my voice in the stories has been very positively received, and I've gotten a lot of feedback from readers and reviews of the format. And so I feel, emboldened by that. So I'm, I'm continuing in that vein and it will have different stories again woven in with my experiences as a girl and as a woman. So, yes, Leslie will be one large piece of it, but so will Carol Ryan, and so will others that are close to my heart and that I don't that I remember in great detail. And I will interweave that with my own experiences.
GR: Oh. Okay. Well, that sounds great. Just a few seconds left, squeeze something else and go back to what we were just talking about. You going into different areas of the world, working with death. Is there a culture out there or a country out there that you think handles death particularly well in a healthy way?
MJ: Oh, that's loaded. That is a heavy question. I think that every culture has its pluses and minuses when it deals with death, but I think we don't do it well. So I guess I'm answering the opposite…
GR: That's ok.
MJ: …you're saying. But I don't think we do it well. I think we're afraid of it in America. I think we cover it up, we sanitize it, we put deodorant on it, and we kind of ignore the impact of it. If we could just look it in the face, I think it would have a much stronger impact on us.
GR: That was Doctor Mary Jumbelic. And again, her new memoir is titled “Here, Where Death Delights.” It's a very interesting read, and it's very well done. Doctor Jumbelic, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.
MJ: You're welcome. Thank you so much for the opportunity, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Melissa DeRosa on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 17, 2024
(Mark Lavonier)
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Melissa DeRosa. Ms. DeRosa served as secretary to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo during the COVID pandemic. That office is the highest non-elected position in state government. She left the office when the governor resigned and has now published a memoir titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. Ms. DeRosa, welcome to the program.
Melissa DeRosa: Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So, let me just start with a really basic question about the book. What were you trying to accomplish in the writing of it and the publication of it?
MD: You know, I decided I was going to write the book within 24 hours of me being out of office. And it was because I wasn't going to allow the first draft of history to stand. And the first draft of history is written by reporters in real time based on non-primary sources, people who aren't in the room when it comes to politics and government, the people feeding them information have a whole host of different motivations. And I lived it, I was there, I was on the phone with Jared Kushner, I was on the phone with Donald Trump, I was in the Oval Office, I was in the room with Bill de Blasio, I was in the room with the health professionals, I was there when we shut down the state of New York. And so I felt a responsibility both to the public, because this was a once in a lifetime pandemic to really understand what was going on when the cameras weren't rolling during those famous briefings, to my administration, who I felt was really unfairly treated in that last year of the administration and to myself and my family to tell the truth as I lived it and sort of lift the veil and let everybody else in.
GR: And I wanted to ask you, you kind of segued into that at the end of your answer, but I wanted to ask you also a more personal question about the writing of it. Was it therapeutic to write this? Was it reliving a trauma, was it a mix of both? What was that like?
MD: You know, when I started the writing process after we resigned, I was almost, it was almost like journaling, which for your listeners, you know, who I don't know if they know what that means, but it's almost like a form of you’re writing to process a trauma or get through something, relive it for yourself to understand it. And so it was incredibly therapeutic. It was also incredibly re-traumatizing at some points. You know, I would literally sit there and close my eyes and bring myself back to the moment of calling the families of the health care workers who passed away and remembering those moments and what that emotion was. And I would cry while I was writing. And so it was, you know, it was therapeutic, it was cathartic, it was also traumatizing in a lot of ways.
GR: Well, I did want to ask you some questions about your experiences during the pandemic that are in your book. But I wanted to ask you a broader question about Governor Andrew Cuomo and his sort of his overall political slant. And I was thinking of this as I was reading the book, when Andrew Cuomo first ran for governor, I remember it, he ran more as a centrist. It was someone who recognized the state's spending issues, the outmigration problem, unfriendly business climate, spoke about all those things. But when he was in office, I think it's fair to say he tacked more to the left. And at one point in the later time of his administration, I think he had some famous phrase about like, I am progressivism in New York, or, but he was very, very strongly saying he was a progressive. I wanted to know how you would characterize the overall policy direction, the overall policy goals of Cuomo's governorship.
MD: I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, when he ran for office in 2010 originally, and disclaimer, I was working for President Obama at that time, but obviously I have a unique perspective into all of this. When he was running for office in 2010, the state was in a massive deficit, he inherited I believe it was a $14 billion deficit that he then turned around. And so, you know I remember when he was running and he would say I'm a progressive who's broke. And he was all about trying to retain and attract businesses. You know, he came in and he brought in a bunch of a bipartisan coalition on a tax committee that included people like George Pataki, who was his predecessor and some other big name Republicans. And, you know, he took a whack at the tax code. We did things like, we lowered the estate tax, which traditionally Democrats don't really go near, we lowered corporate taxes, we lowered small business taxes. And then I think as the administration went on and the party shifted left, he did, you know, wrap his arms around and sort of lead the way on a number of really big progressive issues, like the $15 minimum wage, paid family leave. But, you know, I think his progressive bonafides were always there, he's Mario Cuomo’s son. You know, he did marriage equality in his first year in office and famously, you know, was able to wrangle the entire Democratic conference, as well as four Republicans to vote for that bill and was really ahead of its time. So socially, I think it's fair to say he was always progressive. I think fiscally he was always very moderate. And then as time went on, I think that he did tack more to the left on certain fiscal issues.
GR: Okay. And you alluded to this when you talked about first draft of history that you wanted to counter. But obviously, Andrew Cuomo and his administration, you know, and you have been subject to a lot of criticisms since he stepped down and resigned. Very briefly, because I know you could speak for a very long time on it, but very briefly, why do you think those criticisms are misguided?
MD: Well, it depends on the criticism, right? But I do think that particularly in politics of today, where everything has become so weaponized and the selective outrage is so real, you know, where you can see on what you can, and I write this in the book, you can almost draw a straight line from someone's call for resignation, not to their principles, but to their political interests. And Andrew Cuomo had been in power for so long, by the time he resigned, he had been there for nearly 11 years. He had been attorney general for four years, before that, he had served as HUD secretary in the Clinton administration. He ran his father's first campaign when he was 20 years old. And there were a lot of people with pitchforks that wanted him out. And I think that when there's an opening, you know, sometimes people take it. And in that instance, people took it.
GR: And so to flip that around, though, what do you think are the legitimate criticisms of his tenure in your view? What were the biggest mistakes that the administration made along the way?
MD: You know, and I write about this in the book too sort of at the end where I look back and reflect on everything that happened. You know, when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. And I think that one of the biggest things that, you know, in looking back, we really became so accustomed to fighting all the time, fighting the legislature, fighting the left, fighting Trump, fighting, you know, this one, fighting that one, that we almost lost calibration. And sometimes you catch more flies with honey. And I think that, you know, we had really thrown our weight around. And the governor would say, Governor Cuomo would say it's because the goals that we were after were so worthy and so important and it was about the people and that was first and foremost. Which I do agree in some instances, but it doesn't have to be that way in all instances. And so I think at the end of the day, we had alienated a base of political support that would have been necessary to get through that period. And had we not always looked at everything as a fight, I don't think that necessarily would have been the case in the spring of 2021.
GR: As an outside observer, that sounds like a good insight to me. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and we're speaking with former secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa. She's the recent author of, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. So let's talk about the COVID pandemic a little bit. And if you, again, it's similar to the question I just asked you, but if you could do the state's response to COVID again, would you make a different decision along the way? I mean, one big one that comes to my mind is a different decision about putting COVID patients into nursing homes, for example.
MD: You know, I got asked this question on Bill Maher and I said, you know, people ask me, would you do anything differently? I would do everything differently, I would do everything differently. I mean, this was the definition of building the plane while you're flying it. And I get into this in the book and really try to bring people behind the scenes because even though COVID wasn't that long ago, I think almost as sort of a trauma response, we all have collectively really put it away from our minds and it feels much longer ago than it was. And I think it's really easy to forget what it was that we were going through. But, you know, why was it that they closed travel down from Asia but not from Europe? You know, they closed the back door to the country because COVID existed in China, we knew it existed in China. They didn't close the airports to Asia, and that was why New York and New Jersey in the tristate area got hit so hard out of the gate. But in hindsight, how stupid is that? And I mean, these are the smartest people in the world in government, right? Dr. Fauci was helping to make these calls, they had this whole COVID task force at the federal level. Some of this stuff I blame President Trump for, but some of it I don't. You know, they didn't advise him to shut down travel to Europe. But how is it, given that we live in such a global economy, that we didn't think that, of course, a pandemic somewhere is a pandemic everywhere? And those critical weeks between when we knew that COVID existed in China and leaving the door open to Europe and not thinking that it wasn't already in New York and with a subway system like New York’s subway system and the interconnected way in which the tristate area works and lives, that it wasn't everywhere. You know, we wasted so much time that in hindsight, if we had taken steps to shut down earlier and we could have gotten, you know, brought the curve down and, you know, so many decisions were made around trying to keep the hospitals from collapsing which segues into your question on the nursing homes. I mean, people sort of fundamentally misunderstand what happened there, but that was a call that was made at a time when every major, you know, consultant, academic institution was projecting that New York State’s hospital system was going to collapse, that we were getting 120, 130, 140,000 beds, even though the entire system collectively only has 40,000 beds. And that decision was made by health professionals based on health guidance given from Washington to try to say if people are in hospitals that no longer need to be there because they're medically stable and believed not to be contagious, as long as certain steps are taken, they can go back to where they were living. And so, you know, when I look back on all of that there's the scientific and medical hindsight of 2020 of the things I would do differently. And then there are the political things that I would have done differently, looking back in 2020. And whether or not that March 25th health guidance, you know, impacted is still a cause for debate. Some people say yes other reports say no. But if I had known it was going to cause that political firestorm and that it was going to create an opportunity to weaponize real pain of nursing home families to get caught up in the middle of those politics, I would have said do anything but that, you know, whatever we have to do to do anything but that, avoid that of course, because you want to avoid controversy. But, you know, again, and that was part of the reason I wrote the book, because so much of this has gotten lost in the politics and so much of it got lost in the moment that I thought it was important to sort of bring people back into the room as we were living it to understand how and why decisions were being made. You know, both chronologically and also the thought that was going into it.
GR: And one quick follow up on that. You know, you alluded to this, but one of the big political storms that came out of all this had to do with the reporting of COVID deaths in the nursing homes.
MD: Yep.
GR: And I think the general impression is that, you know, those were underreported in some way. Explain that, I know that's a complicated one, but if you could explain it briefly.
MD: I’ll try to do it quickly, and I write about it in the book. When we originally started reporting deaths in March of 2020 it was done for one reason, for simplicity. Anyone, you know, every day, at the end of the day, every hospital in the state reported into state government the number of number of COVID deaths and every nursing home reported in the number of nursing home deaths. And they did it based on their patient population where they were. So the nursing home said, three people in my nursing home died today. The hospital said we had five people in the hospital that died today. And then in the middle of April, end of April of 2020, the press started asking a different question, which was, what if you were a nursing home patient who left the nursing home, went to the hospital and died in the hospital? That person like, how many of those people died? And so then I write in the book, we went back and did this retrospective, we issued up to a dozen surveys to the nursing homes who, by the way, at the time were dealing with COVID and were completely overwhelmed and asked them all these retrospective questions. And then they start reporting in all of these numbers that were clearly wrong. Some nursing homes were reporting deaths going back to December of 2019 before COVID was even here. Some nursing homes were reporting anticipated death dates in the future. Some nursing homes said every single patient that left here, we believe died of COVID, whether we know it or not. And so it was a forensic nightmare, which then and fast forward to August of 2020 we underwent this audit and then ended up releasing the numbers in January. But that was where the controversy came from. And that's another thing we're looking back on it, had we known that that number was going to become a political football, in March of 2020 when we were standing in the war room we would have just said, have nursing homes report the people that leave there and confirm with the hospitals that they died and we can report that subset earlier. But that was another one of those, it almost felt like manufactured controversies, but it took real life pain and sort of weaponized it and it turned into the scandal that spiraled out of control.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Melissa DeRosa, former Secretary to Governor Andrew Cuomo. She recently published a memoir titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis” and we've been discussing her book. So I've got a kind of a retrospective hypothetical political question for you about your boss. In 2020, Andrew Cuomo was arguably at his political peak, and certainly the Biden people didn't want him to be running for president, you talked about that in your book. He ultimately cooperated with them, stayed out of the race. Do you think, looking back on it now, he should have run for president then, that was the moment he should have run for president, 2020?
MD: You know, if he had run for president in 2020, I have no doubt in my mind he would have been the Democratic nominee and beaten Biden. But the problem is, Andrew Cuomo was exactly where he needed to be for the state of New York in 2020 and if he were running for president back then in the midst of that pandemic, every decision he made would have been viewed from the onset as a political one. And we only successfully brought down the curve, crushed the curve in New York, beat back COVID because the people of the state of New York I think honestly, watched those press conferences every day he gave them the facts as he knew them, he made an emotional appeal to stay home and everyone sort of fell in line. And not just in New York, but nationwide he stepped into that leadership role. And so I think on the one hand, was that his moment? Yeah, I think politically that was his moment, he would have been the nominee. On the other hand, I think that it was a much higher calling that he be governor of the state of New York during that once in a lifetime pandemic and not be viewed through a political lens, because I think if that had been the case, COVID would have spiraled further out of control here and it would have resulted in many more deaths.
GR: So I asked you earlier about things you might, you wish the administration might have done differently. And if I were making a list of those things, this would be on top of mine, so I wanted to get your sense of it. Did the governor make a mistake putting out that book about COVID?
MD: Yes. Yes, and you know, it was one of those things that, again, I think had we had the foresight to know that it was going to spiral out of control the way that it did, I wish I would have thrown my body in front of it. And there are some things that as staff, you know, you look back and say, oh, I should have done that differently because I had the ear of the principal. And that was one of those things where I should have thrown my body in front of it because it just turned out to be such a political headache, and to what end?
GR: And on that point, I don't mean to be too harsh with you here, but I mean, you're obviously (an) extremely politically intelligent person and you've got a team of people around you that were that way. How did you get that one wrong? Because it seems like the optics to me were just begging...
MD: Obvious? Yeah. (laughter)
GR: (laughter)
MD: No, I mean, and I write about this in the book, it was the end of June of 2020, and we just finished the briefings, the daily briefings which obviously we picked up late. But the 111 day briefings had just finished and we had brought the positivity down below 1% in New York sort of consistently, and it stayed there for three months. And it was like the way Andrew Cuomo's brain works is always like, what's next, what's next, what's next? And it was like the minute we ended those briefings, he sort of was like, we should do this and I'm going to write this book and I'm going to tell the story of what happened and we're going to get it published immediately so that the rest of the country can learn from what we lived through in the first wave, because they're all going to get it in the second wave. And it was really a crash project. You know, it was done over the summer in like a six week time period, and it was published in October. And so, you know, it's interesting to me because some people have tried to, the assembly in their impeachment report said, you know, oh, they were doing this during this critical time, and it was like, well, it was actually during the summer of 2020 when the positivity was below 1% and we were taking sort of a collective breather. And there was no point during that process where his attention was being taken away from COVID. It was like he wrote that book so quickly, a lot of it was done based on voice notes he took in real time. And the, I understood the goal of let's tell the story as it happens to the rest of the country can learn from it. But the, you know, making the money from it in the middle of all of that, you know, obviously was a huge political headache that he, you know, we never should have gone near. And just the timing of it, because I think it would have been different if COVID hadn't come back in the fall and then we were in the middle of a second wave. I think if we just beaten back COVID and that was that, I think it would have been a different proposition. But no, you're right. And I don't know if that was like, COVID brain, I was too tired, I wasn’t seeing straight, but no, I mean, I definitely hold myself responsible for not speaking up more on that one.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Melissa DeRosa. So here's my, I guess my $64,000 question and it may seem like a dumb one, but I am still mystified a little bit by this. Why did the governor decide to resign, given the circumstances? I mean, there are other political figures who have weathered arguably much worse, #MeToo types of accusations. No criminal charges have come from any of these and the criticism that the attorney general's report had some political motivation behind it does seem to have some plausibility to it. Why not just stick it out and force the legislatures’ hand? Make them vote?
MD: You know, I write about this in the book extensively. It was such an emotional time and this is the other thing that people sort of forget, I mean, there were a couple of factors. Number one, the legislature said they were going to impeach, they had the votes. Say what you will about Andrew Cuomo, he can count votes better than literally anyone I've ever seen in my life. And there's no due process guaranteed in the New York State Constitution. There's no, you know, high crimes and misdemeanors like there is at a federal level. It is purely in New York, a political process, the impeachment process. And I believed, he believed they were going to do it and they had the votes to do it. So it would have just been a kangaroo court. But secondly, you know, when that report came out and Joe Biden came out and called for the governor's resignation based on pure politics, by the way, and I write this in the book and you know, it was Biden who I, it hurt me so much because I respected the president so much. We had a long relationship with him. I worked for him and Obama, the governor went back with his son, the governor went back with him, Mario Cuomo went back with him. He had been accused of sexual assault far worse than any accusation ever leveled at Andrew Cuomo. And he came out and said, I didn't read the report, but I saw the attorney general's press conference and he has to go. And when that firestorm kicked off and when the President of the United States of your own party goes out and says that, it created this avalanche that it was just impossible to stop, and every single member of Congress came out and the governors in the surrounding states came out. And, you know, the legislature and then on top of it, the press storm was so vicious. And you have to remember, this is after two years of dealing with COVID where essentially nobody slept, we were all processing in real time emotional trauma that I think we didn't even realize we were living through at the time of making life and death decisions and the weight of all of that, and the sleepless nights and the stress and, you know, the isolation of being away from our family, the pressures of being in the national spotlight, all of that sort of combined. And then the press was not just going after him, the press was going after me, the press was going after his brother, the press was going after some of our longtime advisers, every day, relentlessly. And I write in the book about one moment, Maureen Dowd wrote a column where she essentially compared me to Hitler's enabler, and she compared a number of our top advisers to Hitler's enabler. Now, when you look back on it, it's like everyone had lost their collective minds. Andrew Cuomo was accused of, you know, everyone throws a number 11 around. What people don't realize in that number 11 is that, it's a kiss on the cheek, a hand on the waist for a photograph. You know, calling someone sweetheart, saying, “ciao bella” when you walk out of the room, you know, these are not allegations of assault. This is not Harvey Weinstein type behavior. But the media frenzy and the political insanity of sort of #MeToo and the politics of the moment met, and I couldn't take it anymore. And I write about in the book when I went to the governor's mansion to tell him like, I couldn't put my family through it anymore. You know, they were watching me be pilloried in the press, it was killing them. It was killing me. It was hurting his children, it was hurting his brother. And so there was this very human moment where I think he understood the only way it was going to stop for the people around him even more than himself, was to step down. And, you know, looking back on that hindsight 20-20, could he have stayed and fought? I mean, I still go back to the answer of the legislature was going to impeach him. And, you know, you look at recent things the legislature has done, and this is a little weedsy for your listenership, but there was a Justice LaSalle that they put up for the Court of Appeals last year and this is a totally different type of scenario, but completely tarred and feathered the guy, completely distorted his judicial record. This was a public servant for years and years, made him out to be anti-woman, anti-labor, because he was basically making legal calls as a judge. They then gave him the hearing, they all announced their votes before they went into the hearing and it was a kangaroo court. And that's what it would have been, but Andrew Cuomo on steroids, and in the midst of it, we were fighting COVID, we were trying to get vaccines in arms were trying to get the economy back up and running and the emotional toll was too great. So that's a long answer, but it's a hard question.
GR: But it's an important issue and it's an interesting answer. We got about a minute and a half left. I want to try to squeeze two questions in, if I can. So we're going to go into sort of semi-lightning round here. But at the end of your book, you reflect on the value of government and the good things that government can do for people, especially during a crisis like COVID. I just wanted to hear you say a few words about that, about your view about the proper role of government.
MD: You know, look, government, I write that in the book, during COVID, you saw the best and the worst of government. And in that moment in New York State, the government came together. We built field hospitals, we stood up drive through testing sites. We hardened our hospital system, we brought in PPE, we came together and we saved lives. And very rarely can you point to a time in history other than war where you can say we saved lives. And in COVID, I think you saw that great moment.
GR: Yeah. And the final question is, I read an account of a public discussion of this book that you did recently in Albany. And according to that report, you indicated, I'll say, in very strong fashion, that you were interested in planning on going back into politics. Just a couple of seconds left. What form might that new activity take?
MD: You know, we'll see. But what I've learned in the last, you know, year since everything happened is I'm not done yet. I have more left to give and I shoot from the sidelines. And I'm a big believer that if you're going to do that, you better be prepared to get in the ring. So, we'll see, but stay tuned.
GR: Okay, we will. That was Melissa DeRosa. And again, her new book is titled, “What's Left Unsaid: My Life at the Center of Power, Politics and Crisis”. Whether you love Andrew Cuomo or you hate Andrew Cuomo, this book is a very interesting read. Ms. DeRosa, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.
MD: Thanks so much for having me.
GR: You’ve been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
Svetlana Slapšak on the Campbell Conversations
Feb 10, 2024
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Every once in a while on the program, we do something completely different, and that's what we're doing today. My guest is Svetlana Slapšak. She lives in Slovenia and is a specialist in Balkan studies and a historian and a writer. In 1993, she won the American Pen Freedom of Expression Award and in 2005 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She's here with me today to discuss a new book that she coauthored with Noah Charney, titled, “The Slavic Myths”. Charney was a previous guest on the program discussing his book on women in art. But today, it's, “The Slavic Myths” and Ms. Slapšak, welcome to the program.
Svetlana Slapšak: Thank you.
GR: It's great to have you. Well, let me just start with a real basic question for our listeners. Who are the Slavs? How would you define the Slavic people?
SS: Very shortly, I would define Slavs as a huge, very mixed ethnic group. The biggest group in all Europe and in a part of Asia. And at the same time defined by one family of languages, which is Slavic languages. And that would be the shortest definition.
GR: Okay. And some, just to, maybe this is obvious to you, but just so we have a handle on Slavic languages, give us some examples of those languages, what are we talking about?
SS: Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, recently, Macedonian and so on and so on. So there are many, of course, Baltic groups and Mediterranean groups and Balkan groups and so on and so on. It's a very complicated linguistic image, but it's extremely differentiated and very extremely funny to learn about.
GR: Okay, well, that gives us a much better idea, thanks. So you've written this book about the myths that are part of the tradition of these peoples. Why are their myths important for us to know beyond simply being stories that are passed down over the generations? And that's important, too, but is there a larger importance of these myths, do you think?
SS: Oh, definitely it is. Basically, the Slavic epic tradition and the traditional narratives in the Slavic countries was connected to ancient technique of telling stories in Homer and some others. And in fact, it's in the Balkans where the technique of this epic telling the story was analyzed and in a way discovered. And it was started by two Americans, Milton Parry and Albert Lord. So we have the notion of Singer of Tales, a person who has a treasury of motives and stories, already made stories in his head, and he can produce basically a story on any topic you give him, extempore, immediately. So that's one of the importance of the Slavic epic and oral tradition, basically. And the other thing is that the, let's say, the Slavic myths, some of them are overbearing the rest and this is Russian myths, of course. But the minor Slavic traditions and the narratives and epic traditions are also important. And Balkans among these especially important because it links the Mediterranean myths, the ancient myths, and also the midst of Central Europe and the Nordic myths. And to be different from both of them, it's completely chaotic without real structure and without real hierarchy. And that's what makes it so interesting.
GR: Oh, okay. So, well, you may have just given me a hint of the answer to this next question on what you just said. But if we think of the Slavic myths, and I'll ask you to talk about some of the specific ones in a little bit, but right now, if we think about these Slavic myths as a whole, group, are there any general characteristics of these myths? Are there any sort of ways that they are? You said they’re chaotic, but are they structured in any way, is there a certain type of moral or story they all point to?
SS: Oh, definitely they do. They also mean the tradition between the ancient myths of Europe and the Christianity. And in some ways, this translation or transition, if you want, is so interesting that it really gives new narratives and new meanings to some aspects of Christianity in Europe.
GR: Interesting. And so do they have these myths? Do they have any social or political purposes or messages that you could identify?
SS: They were built on that in the 19th century by intellectuals of all Slavic countries. So, let's say when you start with Slavic myths, you know that they are a lie, a gross lie (laughter) by intellectuals to promote their own nation. But when you clear up a bit, a lot of dust and a lot of state, let's say marmalade that they were dipped in, you'll find in fact many social nuances. Many ideas about slavery, about injustice, about justice winning at the end and so on and so on. They're deeply social, most of these myths. But of course, this estate, if you want, crust, had to be broken, had to be deconstructed to see what is beneath.
GR: And what about any kind of spiritual messages? You mentioned these connect sort of older stories of Christianity and maybe some of the, I heard Nordic in here as well, so, you know, are there any sort of spiritual messages that the Slavic myths are about?
SS: Oh, definitely. They went through Christianity, but they didn't accept the whole. And if we want to see the spiritual line that really unites Slavic mythology, it's shamanism. It's the practices of metempsychosis, of living through the lives of other creatures, not only humans, but also animals. So that's a spiritual line that goes even today that is recognizable in some rituals, even today.
GR: Okay, and when you said one of the social or political messages you mentioned just as winning out in the end and I, you know, I happened to be reading a second book in addition to yours about Poland right now. And I'm just struck by the tragedies over the centuries that that country and those people have been through. I mean, the one that I was obviously most familiar with was World War Two and then the aftermath of World War Two with the Soviet domination. But, my lord, it just goes back and back and back. And I guess my question is, justice winning out in the end, I think that's going to be a hard sell for some of the people in this area of the world, given all of the tragedy that they have lived through over the centuries. Tell me a little bit more about that.
SS: Definitely. There is something that links, if you want, the notion of ancient tragedy and the Slavic myths and in fact, the whole spiritual tradition. And that is the only genre that we certainly know is transferred for antiquity and never stopped. There's no seizure, it's always there. That's a women's lament over dead. From ancient Greece to today in the Balkans and in Greece, it's the same thing. So when you think about this, then you realize, yes, there's a tragedy in history of all these peoples. And when you think about Poland, well, that's a very special case because understanding Poland will make you understand the war between Russia and Ukraine today.
GR: Yes, I'm getting some insight into that. You're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Svetlana Slapšak. She's the author of, “The Slavic Myths”. Okay, so what are some of the myths, specific myths that our listeners are going to be most likely to be familiar with? If they were opening your book they'd say, oh, okay, I know this story. What are some of the big ones there?
SS: Well, the big ones are certainly the vampire and werewolf. In America, the shortened version of vampire gave them, which all Americans know at least from film history. And it's something that really passed immediately into the popular literature in the West. And the American, Bram Stoker make it made it so, so known, so glorious in the whole world. You find it in comics, you find it in videogames. Everywhere there's a vampire, there's somewhere there's a vampire there, a series of them about vampires. And of course, it's an interesting phenomenon with werewolf because they exchange their roles and their names also because of the taboo of the name they are too powerful. And they're both related to one of the oldest and the strongest, the Balkan myths which is the myth of wolf. Wolf might be in some occasions, also the primary deity of the Balkans. So it's an interesting phenomenon which, well, vampire changes color, too. In the Balkans, he's red when they buried him and in the West, he's white (laughter), he sucked all the blood, he is white. So it's an interesting phenomenon which we follow in popular culture, also in some serious poetry. So that's a person that they would recognize immediately.
GR: And you say that the wolf then, a primary deity for the origin of some of these myths.
SS: Yeah.
GR: I'd like to hear a little bit more about that. As a deity, what is the wolf embodying? Is it about love? Is it about justice? Vengeance? What are the things that the wolf does a deity?
SS: Well, in my view, he's sacred because of the extreme structure of the wolf society. That's the thing that really impressed people. The wolf society is a complicated one with hierarchies, with relations, interrelations and so on and so on, so that impressed people. But also his strength, his power and being dangerous. He is revered because he might be good also. He is also a symbol of wisdom, practical wisdom. So he, like, he is something close to the Greek Metis, the practical intelligence, the Odysseus way of thinking, finding tricks to how to get out of trouble and so on and so on. So wolf is extremely multilateral creature and also he is a symbol of masculinity, but a well arranged masculinity which belongs to a certain society which behaves according to the rules and so on.
GR: Interesting, interesting. So those are some of the two big ones people are going to obviously be aware of, werewolves and vampires. What are some of the myths that would be unknown or less known to our listeners that you think are especially interesting?
SS: Well, there's my favorite who was totally unknown, and that's the Saint Friday if I translate her name. She's Saint Paraskevi in Greek because she's the day before Sabbath, the day of preparation, so that's this saint. But also her earlier roots go directly to Demeter (the) Greek goddess and also to Aphrodite. So she is a wise woman who protects women. Basically, women in activities like cleaning, weaving, finding medical plants, medicinal plants and so on and so on. And she was translated from the pagan myths to the Christian myths. And she functions in a very specific way in the Christian world, in the Balkans. She is the saint who sits right next to Saint Elias, who is also elected as a leading saint of the Olympic space of Christian saints in the Balkans. She's extremely powerful and she, exactly like Demeter, has a daughter. The father is not known and is not important at all, but the daughter is. So the story is about daughter and in Balkan and tradition, her daughter is called Sunday. It's Friday and Sunday, and between them is Saturday, which is the day of dead. So you see the whole link, which comes from very early times, goes through Christianity and comes back into the new world as a kind of pagan belief. And she is one of the saints that you will meet in churches in the Balkans, in Greece, in Bosnia, in Serbia, everywhere, Macedonia, everywhere. She has a special altar and special duties around women. She heals women, but not only that. For instance, there's one rule that might be remembered and useful, and that is if you wash your husband's shirt on Thursday evening, he will be sick on Friday (laughter).
GR: (laughter)
SS: So she's protecting women from aggressive, from male violence also, she's extremely important. So when you see the walls covered with votive gifts to Petka as she is named in the Slavic Balkan languages you will be surprised, and also Roma and Muslim women have Saint Petka as protectors. So there's one creature that we didn't know about, and it is extremely important.
GR: You know those connections are just fascinating. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Balkan studies specialist Svetlana Slapšak about her new book, “The Slavic Myths”. Ms. Slapšak was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Well, tell me how you went about collecting and selecting the myths that go into this book. How did you go about writing this up?
SS: Well, I was very scared of the Russian scientists and the Russian achievements in the domain of Slavic myths. They're certainly the most productive group that ever wrote about Slavic myths and some of the most famous names, we're writing, trying to construct the trials and the hierarchy in Slavic myths. That's exactly what I didn't want to do. I wanted to show their lack of hierarchy and their structures which are completely different. So yes, it is a kind of answer to many ruling ideas about Slavic mythology, but it's also about putting into the first plan, smaller Slavic groups of narratives and oral traditions, that was our ideas. And also to think about myths that we could interpret as cultural myths, founding / foundation myths. And that's why we include, for instance, the famous and legendary Czechish ruler Libuše. And some other ideas we brought in showing how much connections there are between the state ideologies and the interpretation of mythology. And also the main idea of the book was to be a popular book. Not a real scientific achievement, but a popular book which would tell the story and give some basic philological, contextual historical background to better understand these things. And we also put a lot of other myths which would not be included into these notes. So it's worth reading the whole book and not only the good stories. And the other thing is also that the idea was to include some aspects of Slavic myths, which are not usually discussed or researched. And there's a huge area which I absolutely adore, and that could not enter into this book. And this is about plants and the use of plants and magic with plants.
GR: So when you were doing the research in the writing for this book, you're obviously an expert in the field and you're very aware of it. Did you come across anything, though, that completely surprised you that you just had no idea about and it really struck you?
SS: But of course, the thing that struck me was going into detail about the myths which are common to different ethnic groups, not only Slavs at all, like Albanians and Greeks. That I knew about it, but when I gathered the real data and a lot of facts which would not enter the book, of course, that really surprised me. So that's a field of investigation for the Balkan researchers, basically for the Balkan researchers. And it's also a great initiative to make work together people from the West, especially from the West, with the native knowledge bearers from other parts to make these areas more known, more popular, more interesting. Well, also for for cartoons and video games, basically (laughter). They all did it there with, “The Witcher” on Netflix to make this world more known and more amicable and also more bearable.
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to The Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Svetlana Slapšak. She's the author of, “The Slavic Myths”. So, when you were finding some of these myths that you weren't aware of previously or even the ones that you were aware of and you looked more deeply into them, is there one particular myth that has stayed with you more than the others, got inside your head, maybe even haunted you?
SS: (laughter) Well, I am haunted by one person from the myths, which also was a profession in everyday life. And this is (unintelligible), the name is unpronounceable, but it comes from the Greek word stoicheion, element, and also element of weather. And these guys, which were Albanians, Montenegrins, Serbians and Bosnians, and also some Italians were able to control the winds and the tempests and so on and so on. And they were walking around through their rituals with the human nerves around their feet and stuff like that. This is really a magic creature, but it's also created from life because we know their names and we know their deeds and what they were doing to do their able to fly. One of them would deal with a tempest in Montenegro and then fly to Budapest, stuff like that (laughter). So, it's a creature that really works in your subconscious and appears in your dreams, I can tell you.
GR: And that's why it's haunting you, because it's shown up in your dreams?
SS: Yeah, absolutely (laughter).
GR: So I have to ask you, as I was looking through the book, one of the things that I thought was most memorable about it, in addition to the stories that you are telling, are the visuals in here. The woodblock prints are really splendid. Where did they come from, how did you how did you arrange those?
SS: Well, we did not that's Thames & Hudson editor’s job. They did it absolutely wonderfully. I was absolutely hypnotized when I was looking at these drawings. They're really, really wonderful. They have this character of wood cutting and at the same time, of course they are not, but they give a hint of primitive traditional, somewhere in time and at the same time, so, so, so impressive. Yeah, that's one of the best solutions for the book I could even dream of.
GR: Yeah. They really, really struck me. Well, so, we've got about five minutes left, and I wanted to switch gears unless there is something important about this book that I have not covered with you and then you can tell me what that is. But I wanted to switch gears and I wanted to ask you to tell me a little bit about the work that led to you being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, because that's obviously a big deal. And I wanted to hear more about the activities that you were doing that led people to want to recognize you that way.
SS: Oh, thank you for this question. I wanted to intervene, but I didn't dare not to steal time. I was, in effect, in a group of a thousand women proposed for a Nobel Prize. And it was an internet action and women from all over the world voted for women who they thought were fighters for peace. And we came up with a thousand names. That was a Swiss MP who decided to do this action. And she gathered these thousand names and went with them to the Nobel Committee, that's all. So, yes, I'm one of the thousand, that's all (laughter), let's put it into the real frame. But the other thing is, yes, I was activist for peace all of my life and I'm still is, so, I don't think I should be rewarded for that.
GR: So tell us a little bit about your peace activism then. We've only got about 3 minutes left or so. But what things have you been involved with over your life that that have had that…
SS: I was involved with since the ‘68, Let's face it, that's a crucial year in Europe, the university year of around Europe. But then, of course, the real thing happened by the end of (the) 80’s, the second half of (the) 80’s when the nationalisms started to tear down Yugoslavia. And I was in a party which was exclusively for the conservation of Yugoslavia and for peace. We didn't like it of course, that's obvious. But then I went to Slovenia to live with my husband and I was doing many peace activities there. And then, let's say since the beginning of the 90’s, there were so many occasions to breed for peace that I don't even remember how many wars and how many atrocities happened in that time, not only the Balkans, starting with Rwanda and Asia and so on and so on. So yes, today is especially tragic time when we think about wars and genocide.
GR: Absolutely. So you must have some feelings about the war in Ukraine, I'm guessing. It's not terribly far away from where you are. How have you experienced that?
SS: Well, Ukraine is, was very important for me because it's a country, it's a culture that was transferring some of the Western cultural modes to Russia, like the polyphonic music and stuff like that. And Ukraine is really very special in that sense. And when you think about how many artists, literates, actors, musicians came from Ukraine, your heart really hurts, so that's one thing. And the other thing is that when you think about Ukraine as a mixture of very, very many different ethnic groups and its links with Russia, it's really tragic that this culture, which is so important in the heart of the Slavic cultures at all, is something that has been destructed in front of our eyes. And the other thing is that we learn so much being a family and so much about violence against women, the first thing I think when there's war, there's violence, I think about women and children. So it's really something that makes me very sensitive to any kind of violence, animals too.
GR: Yeah. Well, you've lived through so much of it, and you have seen so many different violent conflicts as I think about the region of the world that you occupy. Do you have any optimism about how this war in Ukraine will ultimately end up?
SS: No, no. There's a disturbing tradition of long term wars in Europe in the past. So I hate to say it, but I'm not optimist at all. Revealing the possibilities of peace and reasonable behaving between the states is something that does not appear as a solution at this moment. So any appealing to rationalities, useless, I'm afraid.
GR: Well, we only have a few seconds left. This may be too much of a bit of a stretch, but thinking about those Slavic myths, thinking about the war in Ukraine, is there any sort of connection if the myths could be talking to the people in the conflict now, is there anything you think they would say?
SS: That would be great. Yeah, what they would say first of all, it would be, the myths would have a sense of humor. These myths are really the most useful and the most pedagogically applicable today. So the myths with humor, the animals, the wise animal could trick the others, the tricksters generally, are the figures that could help at this moment.
GR: Well, I'll keep hoping in that regard.
SS: Me too (laughter).
GR: I'm glad we were able to end that. That was Svetlana Slapšak and again, her new book is titled, “The Slavic Myths”. It's a really beautiful book, I think it's informative and entertaining and I think our listeners would enjoy it. Ms. Slapšak, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. It was really wonderful to meet you.
SS: Thank you for inviting me, bye bye.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations and the public interest.
Edward Segal on the Campbell Conversations
Jan 29, 2024
Theodore Roosevelt campaigns from the back of a train in 1905.( Library of Congress, Prints and Photos Division)
Using trains in political campaigns may seem antiquated, but the process is still alive. This week, Grant Reeher talks with Edward Segal, a highly experienced campaign manager and press secretary, and is a student of the political use of trains. Segal is the author of "Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them."
Will Barclay and Rachel May on the Campbell Conversations
Jan 20, 2024
Will Barclay / Rachel May
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Governor Hochul recently delivered her State of the State speech and then subsequently presented her budget. Now the legislature will consider that budget. As we've done in past years, we're going to hear some reactions from both sides of the aisle in the state legislature. But today, we're doing it a bit differently in that we'll hear first from one representative and then the other. And this was done just for scheduling reasons. My guest for the first half of the program is State Senator Rachel May. Senator May, a Democrat, represents the 48th Senate District and is the chair of the Senate Committee on Small and Medium Cities. She's been on the program many times before. Senator May, welcome back and it's good to see you again.
State Senator Rachel May: Thank you, Grant. Always glad to be here.
GR: All right. Well, let me just start with the state of the state. The governor seemed in this speech to pull in her wings a little bit in terms of larger proposed initiatives concerning affordable housing, for instance. Was that your sense, too in listening to it? And what is your view of that?
RM: Yeah, I felt like she tried to put on an optimistic face, but generally, she was pretty small bore in the state of the state. I think that was true. She did lean into the AI issue and some other things that I think are important. But in general, yeah, it was I was sad. I have been sad in general because I'm working very hard on housing. We hear every day from people who are struggling to find affordable housing in our district, and I hope she will be a partner in that as we move forward.
GR: And also, it seemed to my ear that she tacked a bit right on crime and criminal justice. And that's been a big issue in the state in recent years. Was there anything there that you had concerns about or that you liked hearing from her in that regard?
RM: Well, I think that was true in her campaign as well. I think she has been seeing herself as presenting kind of a opposition to the legislature on criminal justice, even though I don't think, in fact, the analysis of what we have done is really true. But yeah, she did some of that as well. I guess I’d agree with that.
GR: And so you mentioned hearing some of those rhetoric in the campaign. Do you think what we saw then in the State of the State and we'll get into the budget a bit but you know, on housing, criminal justice, was this kind of a reaction to the relatively close shave she got in her election campaign do you think?
RM: That could be That could be. I have been a little sad and we've been, I think, pretty good allies of the governor, certainly in the campaign, but also in a lot of our legislation. But she kind of came out swinging at the legislature a little bit, which is, I think, strategically a mistake. We need to work together and I hope we will work together. I certainly want to work together with the governor on a lot of initiatives that I think could really help central New York.
GR: Well, I guess in that sense, thinking back a couple decades and maybe even more, it seems like beating up on the legislature is kind of a standard thing that governors in New York state do right?
RM: Yeah, I guess I had hoped with Hochul that she was a little more. I mean, she has been collaborative with the legislature on a number of things, but rhetorically, she was a little bit more willing to own that because we can do so much if we work together.
GR: So let's let's think about the budget, which is where obviously the big ideas and whatever ideas are being put out there have to manifest themselves in terms of money. She said in her budget address that the state can't keep spending like there's no tomorrow. I think that was her words. And nonetheless, the budget that she proposed does set a new record, I believe. Are we in this budget, do you think, seeing some effort on her part to turn a ship or make a course correction, or are we slowing the acceleration? What's the right metaphor for seeing the big picture here?
RM: Well, I think the big picture actually is that all year long we have been hearing that this budget was going to involve major cuts, that we were going to have an $8 billion deficit and then a $4 billion deficit. And all of a sudden there is no deficit when push comes to shove in this budget, which is a good thing because we don't want to have to be cutting back some of the things that we have worked so hard to put in place. So honestly, it's I think, yes, there will be some slowing down because we're not getting the kind of funding that we were getting from the federal government as pandemic relief in particular. But in general, this budget is essentially holding the line. There are a few things where I know that we will be fighting as a legislature to restore some things that she has cut. For my part, the clean water infrastructure cut in half. I mean, it has been it has been generous in the past, and I don't think anybody thought that would go on forever. But from $500 million down to $250 million, when every single municipality I talked to has issues with their water and sewer infrastructure. And this is expensive. And the more we have global warming and flooding and a lot of the pressures that municipalities are seeing on their water systems, we can't retrench, I don't think, in that area. That's one, for example, where I think we're going to be fighting.
GR: Do you expect problems with the education funding? Because that, I understand, was something that was at least cut back a lot from the previous couple budgets.
RM: So it's not an absolute cut. It’s a, my understanding and I haven't had time to really look through the details of it, is trying to shift the way foundation aid is funded. For a very long time, there was a hold harmless provision in foundation aid where school districts that were already overfunded still got increases year after year because I think it was the politically expedient thing to do, but it wasn't the right thing to do because there were other districts that were severely underfunded and the funding should have gone to those districts. And, you know, there are some Long Island districts that are very wealthy, some of the wealthiest in the country, and were continuing to get large increases under foundation aid for a long time. I'm I don't have a problem with trying to redistribute that. The place where I'm most concerned is with our rural districts and we do as Chair of the Commission on Rural Resources, but also as someone who represents a lot of small rural school districts, many of them are seeing cuts as well. And we've been hearing from them. And some of those cuts are because their enrollments are down, but their costs aren't down. They still have to have classroom teachers, even if there are fewer kids in the class, they still have to have all the services that they have. And so I think we will be looking hard at how she has the rethought foundation aid in some of those situations.
GR: With that belt-tightening, I guess, is one way to put it, when in the or at least, as you say, sort of strategically rethinking how the aid is distributed. When you say wealthier school districts, is that going to percolate down to some of the wealthier suburbs of Syracuse, do you think, in terms of changing what they were getting?
RM: It could, it could. But, you know, as the chair of the committee on our smaller cities, our upstate cities along the thruway corridor perennially rate among the cities in the country with the highest child poverty. Syracuse came in number two in the country this year. And the schools that have to deal with very concentrated poverty, that is extremely costly. They need a lot of staff who are helping kids, who have got learning disabilities, kids who don't speak English, kids who have trauma in their family and neighborhood lives, and or who just aren't getting, you know, dental care or vision care, all of those things. And the costs are very high. And I think it makes sense to invest in making sure that kids everywhere can succeed. So, yes, I think, you know, I will be pushing to make sure that our that those places where poverty has been concentrated get the kind of investments that they deserve.
GR: We've only got about 3 minutes left. I want to try to squeeze another question about the budget and then ask you something about the legislative session more generally. There was another piece of the proposed budget that the media really picked up on, which was the proposal to spend two and a half billion dollars to house and feed new migrants here that have been arriving here, including 500 million from the state reserve allocation. So what what are your reactions to that?
RM: Well, what are our alternatives? Honestly? I mean, these are people who come to New York who, you know, are going through the asylum process right or, you know, they've followed the rules so far they need a place to live. They need to be able to get to the point where they can get a job, make money, support their families. We also need more people in New York state, we've been complaining about the decline in our population for a long time. So what we find with refugees who come to this region, who have been coming for decades to this region, it takes them a little while to get settled. And then they become entrepreneurs, they become community leaders, They become very hardworking citizens or or, you know, permanent residents. And they contribute a lot to our communities. So I think that upfront investment is necessary.
GR: That's interesting, seeing that as an investment. Certainly, I can see what you're talking about in the city of Syracuse, thinking about all the different groups of different kinds of refugees that have been resettled here. Well, let's think about the legislative session. Are there things that you anticipate the legislature pushing, taking the lead on that are contained in the governor's State of the State?
RM: I was disappointed that she completely left out our waste reduction efforts, whether it's the bottle bill that I carry that would expand the bottle bill, increase the deposit, include a lot more beverages in the bottle bill, the extended producer responsibility. We're seeing a moment when Seneca Meadows Landfill is trying to expand in spite of a lot of opposition from people who live in the Finger Lakes, but also people who have trucks just plowing through their communities with trash from New York City. We've got to put a lot of effort, more effort than we are putting into reducing waste. And I'm sad that she didn't put that in. On the housing front. I have a lot. She had some proposals, but they all had to do with New York City. And I have a lot of legislation that I am working on and and really hoping to pass that would make it easier to build affordable housing here in central New York and upstate in general. So those are some areas where we're going to be working really hard.
GR: Well, we'll have to check back in with you as the session winds down to see how you fared and those things, they sound like important initiatives. That was State Senator Rachel May. Senator May, thanks so much again for taking the time to talk with me.
RM: Thank you, Grant.
GR: We're continuing our consideration of Governor Hochul’s State of the State address, and then her subsequently proposed budget, also looking toward the upcoming legislative session. We’ll now hear from Republican Assemblyman and Minority Leader Will Barclay. He represents the 120th Assembly District. Leader Barclay, welcome back to the program. Always good to see you again.
Assemblyman Will Barclay: Well, it’s good to be on the program. As always, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to be interviewed by you.
GR: Oh great. Well, thanks for making the time. So let me just sort of follow what I did with Senator May in the top half of the program and we'll work our way through the State of the State and the budget. And let me start with the State of the State. The Governor, it seemed to most folks who heard this seemed to pull in her wings a bit in terms of proposed initiatives and the ambition of them, and particularly concerning affordable housing, for instance. Was that your sense of where the governor was going this time? And what's your view of that?
WB: Yeah, I would agree. It was a very staid speech. I don't think there are any kind of revolutionary proposals by the governor. Actually, her State of the State and her budget address were relatively similar. And you may be surprised to hear the script, but I actually was pleased with the message that the governor gave. I think finally a Democrat in Albany has recognized that we had some serious problems, that all New Yorkers were worried about, problems like crime, problems like affordability, problems like outmigration, things that I had been, I've been talking about my conference has been talking about for years. I was pleased the governor has recognized that these are serious problems. I think the question is ultimately, you know, what her solutions are and a recognition of why we got into those problems in the first place.
GR: Yeah, I want to come back to a couple of those things. Well, you mentioned crime. One of the things that I noticed others noticed is she did, seemed to tack a bit to the right on crime and criminal justice. Was there anything in particular there that you liked or that you still have concerns about?
WB: Well, yes. Again, I like the recognition that crime is a problem. Certainly, the shoplifting, smash and grab, as I guess is called now, has been a problem. She mentioned how crime rates are down, and that's true, and I'm happy that crime rates are down. But overall crime is still up, I think something like 33% since 2019. I don't think it's a mystery of why this is happening. We don't hold criminals accountable, unfortunately, anymore. And that's serious crimes that are down, which, again, is great. And I don’t want to deny that that's not good news. Those weren't cashless bail-eligible crimes in the first place. So when I point to the problems that we have with raising age with the bail reform or cashless bail clean slate, you know, these are all the policies we put in place over the last several years. As a result of these policies, we see crime rates have increased. So again, I'm pleased that there's recognition and I'm pleased that she wants to do something about it. And I'll be a willing partner. And I know our conference be a willing partner as long as we're serious about what we're trying to do. And ultimately, I happen to believe that you got to hold criminals accountable. You can't just have a rotating system where people get arrested and put right back on the street. And unfortunately, that's what these, you know, the past policies have caused. And in order to fix that, we're going to pull back on those policies.
GR: Now, let's think about the budget. You mentioned they were very similar, State of the State address and the budget. One of the things the governor said is “The state can't keep spending like there's no tomorrow.” But at the same time, correct me if I'm wrong, the budget did set another record. So is this, what are we seeing here? I'm trying to find the right metaphor for thinking of how to place this. One is – this is the beginning of a course correction. Another one is– we're just letting up on the accelerator pedal, but we're still giving gas to the car. How would we consider this?
WB: I think the cliche that I've been using is ‘spending like drunken sailors,’ but she didn’t go that far. But yeah, again, I'm pleased she’s recognized that we can't continue. Over the last five years, we've increased spending in New York state by $60 billion. And I had some staff in Albany look at this. And I think that's numbers. Something like bigger than two-thirds of all the other states' total budget. So clearly that was not a sustainable course. She did lower spending. I think it's now at 4.4%, which is a step in the right direction. With inflation, I think, you know, we're getting to the right numbers. We just can't continue to spend like we have over the last few years. So I'm glad that there's a recognition of that.
GR: And as part of her budget proposal, she included two and a half billion dollars to house and feed new migrants and added as part of that a $500 million from the state's fiscal reserves. What are your thoughts about that?
WB: Well, it's unfortunate. I don't know, what we have this right to shelter, what we're dealing with, the influx of migrants. You know, she mentioned the numbers that I think they're moving something like 10,000 migrants out of shelters a month. But they're increasing by 13,000 are coming in. So it's clearly a losing battle. And I think it just illustrates that unfortunate New Yorkers have to pay for, you know, the Democrats in Washington, particularly the Biden Administration's failure to secure our borders. I was happy that she said she was going to go to Washington and advocate for federal money, which I do think the federal government should be responsible for these costs. But I also advocate for a more secure border, and I would join her in doing that. And she did try to put some of the blame on the Republicans in Congress and maybe there's some to go there. I do think immigration reform needs a bipartisan solution. But that being said, the administration has control over the southern border and clearly it's not secure because people are coming in by droves.
GR: Senator May had a somewhat different take on this and looked at this in terms of something that you mentioned earlier, which is concerns about the state losing population and sort of saw the migrants as well, this is one way we can do something about this and noted how refugees in the city of Syracuse, for example, have added to both the culture and the economy there. And so she views all this money as kind of an investment in the future. Is that is is that a fair way to live?
WB: I mean, I find that as I would use tongue in cheek, sometimes I think that Governor Abbott's done more to increase New York's population or fix New York's outmigration population than any Democrat in Albany. So that's funny that she's spinning the idea that somehow this is a positive. I'm a pro-immigration Republican. I do believe in immigration, but I feel very strongly it ought to be legal immigration and not illegal immigration. This is a failure, again, by the federal government. If we need more people, let's have an honest policy debate about letting more people into the country through legal means, not through illegal migration.
GR: Well, now part of the budget also has to do with, as it always does, with school funding. And if I understand this correctly, she's proposing a change in school funding to allow the state to not always keep all towns at the same or more level of aid. And so the school districts that were particularly well funded may see less aid, and that's in order to sustain the funding for other schools that are needier. What is your view of the change and the school aid that's in her budget?
WB: I have to look at this closer and see, you know, everything in politics is local. So I want to understand how that's going to affect the school districts in my area. Unfortunately, many of them are low-wealth school districts. So they're the ones that are in desperate need of the aid. So I can't speak directly on how that's going to do it, although I again, here I am. I could be complimentary of a Democrat in the governor. I do think she recognizes that we can't continue school aid spending at the rate we've been spending. Something like we increased a six or $7 billion over the last couple of years. We simply just don't have the means to do that. So the idea that she's looking at ways to make our spending more efficient, that is driving the money where it's most needed, I'm open to that. And I do think, unfortunately, we just can't continue to increase spending the way we've been doing.
GR: So what is the legislature going to do with all of this and what might it also do on its own? Are there things that you would anticipate this year in the upcoming session that the legislature would be pushing and taking the lead on where the governor didn't really say anything or did not push for things?
WB: Well, first of all, I think let's just go back to criminal justice and crime and what she's proposed. I think she's going to have trouble getting any of that through the legislature. Unfortunately, my colleagues don't want to recognize that this is an issue and they don't want to recognize that the fact that some of the proposals, the ones I've mentioned before that they passed are contributing factors to this. So to pull back on any of those or just increase penalties. You know something that we haven’t looked at, say for people that have shoplift multiple times, you can aggregate those crimes so they can be charged with more serious penalties. They haven't shown any willingness to even address that. So I think that's going to be very challenging. In order to get that done, she's going to have to spend a lot of political capital. As seen unfortunately in Albany, what happens sometimes money is used as that political capital, so if we can get some sort of reform on crime, maybe she's going to have to spend more at schools. And that's really where we got into some of these predicaments. We never had any kind of real, you know, slowing down on our spending. And this, again, a little bit off on the spending, too, Grant as you kind of indicated, we're still spending a lot of money. We are. It's 200, I think her proposal is $233 billion, which is massive. But I've always said people often ask me, well, where would you cut? And we don't have to necessarily cut anything. Really, we have to slow the rate of growth of our spending. And we just got to get back down to more realistic terms. I mean, the last two years we're at 10% or 8%, and that's well beyond inflation, well beyond our means to be able to spend. So anyways, who knows? That always happens. A governor usually comes in a bit lower than what the legislature and then through negotiations you'll see increase in spending. Maybe there'll be some trade-off on policy. One thing the Assembly Senate majority has been against is putting any policy in the budget, which I can normally agree with, but generally the policy the Governor wants to put in the budget is something that I can support and she can't get it through otherwise stand alone because of the Democratic majorities in both houses.
GR: Yeah, the budget does act as kind of Christmas tree or however whatever metaphor we want for a lot of different things. We've we've only got about a couple of minutes left. I want to squeeze in a couple more questions if I can, but is your caucus in particular? I get a sense of the kinds of things that your caucus is going to be pushing back against and wants to make sure that are taken seriously regarding budget crime and so on. But is there anything kind of new initiative that your caucus will be trying to push as an idea to get the legislature to take up?
WB: We'll think about it. We'll talk about any new ideas. But usually, you know, I think going back to the three biggest issues that are concerning to New Yorkers is outmigration, affordability and crime. And I think there's things that we can do on affordability that we'll continue to push. You know, some are relatively obvious, like lowering taxes. Well, we've implemented let's take climate change policy in New York that is costing us billions of dollars and the cost benefit of that spending has not been demonstrated by anybody. So we're going to just keep raising those types of issues to show, you know, why are we doing this? Is this a good way to spend our money? And try to point out where we think it's been wasteful and leading to the unaffordability that we have, unfortunately, in New York state.
GR: Well, you've left me with just enough time to squeeze in one question about national politics, so I'm going to do that. You and I are talking before the New Hampshire primaries, after the Iowa caucuses for the Republican Party, at least. Where do you see this at this point? Is the Trump tide unstoppable? Does Nikki Haley have a chance? What's your sense of the terrain right now?
WB: Well, it certainly looks like Trump's going to win it, although I see the numbers in New Hampshire. He's ahead by, you know, a much smaller margin than he was in Iowa. I think whoever it's going to be the Republican nominee, I think there's rich, fertile ground for victories for, whether it's Nikki Haley or whether it's Trump or anyone else, because the President unfortunately for him this so deeply unpopular, so, you know, I'll support whoever the Republican nominee is and looks like it's going to be Trump at this time. I think probably, you know, I don't think long short of it, it looks like Trump's going to win. You know, maybe if Iowa turned out a little differently, someone could say that maybe another candidate has a chance. But, you know, all the polling you know, whatever showed ultimately that victory margin, I suspect, is going to be the same in New Hampshire.
GR: We'll have to leave it there. That was Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay. Leader Barclay, as always, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I really appreciate it.
WB: Yeah, thank you.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.