therealnews--2020-08-27--Players kick off wildcat strike wave for Black lives

On Wednesday , Aug. 26 , professional sports players went on strike in support of growing protests demanding justice over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha , Wisconsin .
That same night , during the Republican National Convention , Vice President Mike Pence ignored the deaths of two anti-racist protestors shot and killed by 17-year-old “ Blue Lives Matter ” supporter Kyle Rittenhouse on Tuesday and misrepresented the May 29 killing of a law enforcement officer by right-wing extremists as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement .
“ We will have law and order on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Over the last few days in our home state of Wisconsin , we ’ ve seen the horrendous video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha , and the additional shooting of protestors .
Despite the overwhelming plea for change , there has been no action , so our focus today can not be on basketball , ” the NBA ’ s Milwaukee Bucks said in a statement .
News reports indicate players are meeting with team owners over when to resume the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the back seven times by Rusten Sheskey on Aug. 23 , and remains hospitalized .
His family says the shooting left him paralyzed from the waist down , and that he was trying to deescalate a domestic dispute .
Sheskey opened fire as Blake was opening his own car door .
Blake ’ s three children witnessed the shooting from inside the car .
Sheskey and the other officers involved in the incident remain on paid administrative leave .
The shooting prompted nightly Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Kenosha demanding justice for Blake @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fire on protesters , killing 26-year-old Anthony Huber and another 36-year-old protester who has yet to be identified , and injuring another protester , who is expected to survive .
After the shooting , Rittenhouse was seen on video posted on social media trying to identify himself to police , who ignored him .
Rittenhouse was arrested Wednesday in Illinois on first degree intentional homicide charges after fleeing Wisconsin .
As reported by Buzzfeed , Rittenhouse was pictured in the front row of a Trump rally back in January , and his social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ militia member and an ardent Blue Lives Matter supporter who was obsessed with law enforcement .
Ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country have demanded justice for Blake in Los Angeles , New York , Philadelphia , and Minneapolis .
Protests also took place Wednesday in Baltimore , Maryland , at Fort McHenry—where the “ Star Spangled Banner ” was written—where Vice President Mike Pence accepted the Republican nomination to be Donald Trump ’ s running mate .
“ The hard truth is you won ’ t be safe in Joe Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as he condemned the Black Lives Matter movement , promising to prosecute nonviolent protesters to “ the fullest extent of the law.
” Pence then implied Dave Patrick Underwood , a Department of Homeland Security officer who was killed by far-right violent extremists in May , was actually killed by Black Lives Matter protesters .
Underwood was “ shot and killed during the riots in Oakland , California , ” Pence said , omitting crucial details about the right-wing killings by Steven Carrillo , an Air Force sergeant and member of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the FBI used the cover of protests demanding justice for George Floyd to target law enforcement officers in an attempt to spark a civil war .
Carrillo faces murder charges over the incident and the murder of a second law enforcement officer who attempted to apprehend him .
On Tuesday , the RNC also featured speakers like St. Louis lawyers Patricia and Mark McCloskey , who face felony charges after brandishing weapons at Black Lives Matter protesters who marched near their house in May .
Their appearance was described as one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the convention by National Lawyers ’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law President Kristen Clarke , who tweeted : “ The McCloskey ’ s call to preserve single family zoning has roots in racist zoning policies and redlining efforts aimed at keeping communities racially segregated and isolated.
” Just hours before Wednesday ’ s portion of the RNC began , professional basketball , baseball , and soccer players went on strike to demand justice for Blake .
The action was started by the NBA ’ s Milwaukee Bucks , who announced they were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 5 of their playoff series against the Orlando Magic .
“ We ’ re tired of the killings and the injustice , ” Bucks player George Hill told ESPN .
Player protests on Wednesday resulted in the postponement of the other two NBA playoff games scheduled for the evening , three MLB games , and five MLS games .
Kenny Smith , a host of Inside the NBA and a former basketball player , unclipped his mic and walked off the set live on TNT in solidarity with the players .
“ As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ player , I think it ’ s best for me to support the players and just not be here tonight , ” Smith said .
On Twitter , Princeton professor and New Yorker contributing writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor called for a general strike and questioned why other major unions have not joined in the actions demanding justice for Blake .

On Wednesday, Aug. 26, professional sports players went on strike in support of growing protests demanding justice over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. That same night, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence ignored the deaths of two anti-racist protestors shot and killed by 17-year-old “Blue Lives Matter” supporter Kyle Rittenhouse on Tuesday and misrepresented the May 29 killing of a law enforcement officer by right-wing extremists as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“We will have law and order on the streets of America.” Pence said.
“Over the last few days in our home state of Wisconsin, we’ve seen the horrendous video of Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times by a police officer in Kenosha, and the additional shooting of protestors. Despite the overwhelming plea for change, there has been no action, so our focus today cannot be on basketball,” the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks said in a statement.
News reports indicate players are meeting with team owners over when to resume the season.
Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by Rusten Sheskey on Aug. 23, and remains hospitalized. His family says the shooting left him paralyzed from the waist down, and that he was trying to deescalate a domestic dispute. Sheskey opened fire as Blake was opening his own car door. Blake’s three children witnessed the shooting from inside the car. Sheskey and the other officers involved in the incident remain on paid administrative leave.
The shooting prompted nightly Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Kenosha demanding justice for Blake, where on Tuesday, Rittenhouse opened fire on protesters, killing 26-year-old Anthony Huber and another 36-year-old protester who has yet to be identified, and injuring another protester, who is expected to survive.
After the shooting, Rittenhouse was seen on video posted on social media trying to identify himself to police, who ignored him. Rittenhouse was arrested Wednesday in Illinois on first degree intentional homicide charges after fleeing Wisconsin. As reported by Buzzfeed, Rittenhouse was pictured in the front row of a Trump rally back in January, and his social media posts depict him as a self-described militia member and an ardent Blue Lives Matter supporter who was obsessed with law enforcement.
Ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country have demanded justice for Blake in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis.
Protests also took place Wednesday in Baltimore, Maryland, at Fort McHenry—where the “Star Spangled Banner” was written—where Vice President Mike Pence accepted the Republican nomination to be Donald Trump’s running mate.
“The hard truth is you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Pence said, as he condemned the Black Lives Matter movement, promising to prosecute nonviolent protesters to “the fullest extent of the law.”
Pence then implied Dave Patrick Underwood, a Department of Homeland Security officer who was killed by far-right violent extremists in May, was actually killed by Black Lives Matter protesters.
Underwood was “shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California,” Pence said, omitting crucial details about the right-wing killings by Steven Carrillo, an Air Force sergeant and member of the far-right extremist Boogaloo movement, who according to the FBI used the cover of protests demanding justice for George Floyd to target law enforcement officers in an attempt to spark a civil war. Carrillo faces murder charges over the incident and the murder of a second law enforcement officer who attempted to apprehend him.
On Tuesday, the RNC also featured speakers like St. Louis lawyers Patricia and Mark McCloskey, who face felony charges after brandishing weapons at Black Lives Matter protesters who marched near their house in May.
Their appearance was described as one of the “most racist” moments of the convention by National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law President Kristen Clarke, who tweeted: “The McCloskey’s call to preserve single family zoning has roots in racist zoning policies and redlining efforts aimed at keeping communities racially segregated and isolated.”
Just hours before Wednesday’s portion of the RNC began, professional basketball, baseball, and soccer players went on strike to demand justice for Blake. The action was started by the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, who announced they were withholding their labor instead of playing Game 5 of their playoff series against the Orlando Magic.
“We’re tired of the killings and the injustice,” Bucks player George Hill told ESPN.
Player protests on Wednesday resulted in the postponement of the other two NBA playoff games scheduled for the evening, three MLB games, and five MLS games.
Kenny Smith, a host of Inside the NBA and a former basketball player, unclipped his mic and walked off the set live on TNT in solidarity with the players. “As a Black man, as a former player, I think it’s best for me to support the players and just not be here tonight,” Smith said.
On Twitter, Princeton professor and New Yorker contributing writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor called for a general strike and questioned why other major unions have not joined in the actions demanding justice for Blake.
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


therealnews--2020-08-27--For some, homes and neighborhoods are now digital prisons

Authors Maya Schenwar and Vikki Law argue that many alternatives to incarceration follow the same model of oppression as physical @ @

Authors Maya Schenwar and Vikki Law argue that many alternatives to incarceration follow the same model of oppression as physical prisons.
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. I’m Eddie Conway, your host, coming to you from Baltimore. Recently, there has been a new book out by two authors that has done extensive work in the prison system. The book is, Prisons By Any Other Name, and it was written by my sin Maya Schenwar and Vicky Law. They’re going to join me today to kind of explain what’s in the book. Basically they’re challenging the idea that alternative to incarceration is better and represents some kind of reform. When in fact they’re saying that’s not so that it continues the same oppressive system and it continues to uphold white supremacy. So Maya, Vicky, thanks for joining me.
Vicky Law: Thanks for having us on.
Maya Schenwar: Thanks for having us.
Eddie Conway: So could I start off just with both of you all given some personal background. Why you wrote this book and why you’re involved in prison work? You could start Maya and then Vicky, you could follow up.
Maya Schenwar: Sure. I think that this book, in particular, Vicki and I both came from both our professional work reporting and editing and writing about prisons for many years and our personal experiences and interactions with the system. And not only with prisons and jails, but also with all the extensions of the prison system. So for me personally, I’ve been writing and editing stories and books about prison and related subjects for about 15 years, and I’m also involved with prison abolitionists organizing efforts. But the main drive to focus so intensely on this particular subject was rooted in personal experience. So for the past 15 years, my sister Keeley was cycling in and out of jail and prison, and also various alternatives such as electronic monitoring and mandated drug treatment and probation, and a lot of this stemmed from her addiction to heroin.
So she would go to prison, she would become even more deeply traumatized and come out and she’d go right back to using heroin. And then when she out here she’d have an electronic monitor shackled to her ankle, or she would be on probation, or she would be locked in some kind of treatment center that was very, very restrictive. And all of these punishments involved some sort of forced confinement and control, and they also involved forced abstinence from drugs, which we know does not work for addiction. So she was trapped in this cycle of many different forms of punishment and confinement, which were said to be forms of help. And so this is how I came to be interested in these sorts of alternatives, so-called alternatives, these reforms that actually end up looking very much like incarceration, although they’re not obviously the same. So along with jail and prison, they were contributing to very much hurting my sister and harming our family along the way. So that’s where I’m coming from personally.
Eddie Conway: Vicky, what is your experience that brought you to this?
Vicky Law: So like Maya, what brought me to co-writing this book with Maya, it was both professional and personal. So as a teenager in New York city, I went to one of the schools that we would now call a school to prison pipeline school in which it was an overcrowded school. It was mostly black, brown and immigrant, people who were able to lie about their addresses or have their children test for one of the handful of specialized public high schools in New York City, avoided sending their children to this school. But if you didn’t have resources, if you didn’t have somebody whose address you could borrow to lie about your address as to where you could go to school, or if you didn’t know about specialized high schools, or if your child was not considered intelligent or talented enough to get into one of these schools, then that was the kind of school you went to.
There were metal detectors and x-ray machines at the front door. That’s what we went through every morning. There were several thousand students, grades nine to 12. The classrooms were often crowded. I didn’t realize this at the time that you weren’t supposed to have 40 children in a classroom, but this is what I learned later. And it was the perfect recruiting ground for gangs. And so when we think about what we know about the teenage brain and impulses and longterm planning, we know that when you are looking at a possible future of sitting in a classroom, being warehoused, or if somebody comes up to you and says, “How would you like to make a couple of hundred dollars every night?” A lot of my friends ended up joining gangs, dropping out of high school and then getting arrested and being incarcerated.
I had a brief stint with the law myself. I participated in an armed robbery, were arrested and because of my race, I am not super brown, my gender, my size, I’m five feet and at the time I think I was about 80 pounds. And the fact that I had no record and was considered a good student, I was ultimately sentenced to probation as a youthful offender, rather than having to go through the criminal legal system as an adult facing years in prison for one teenage action.
And the probation I went through was very different than what the probation of today was. Like people on probation today, I had a curfew. Now, if you think about most people, whether they are teenagers or grown adults, they don’t necessarily want to be told that they have to be in their house by 7:00, 8:00, or 9:00 at night. There was a raft of restrictions that accompanied by probation, but there wasn’t the technology yet to be able to force people to comply.
Nowadays, we know that there are 3.6 million people on probation and probation is a driver back to prison for many people. At the time, again, there was not the technology so I didn’t have to worry if I came home at 9:30 instead of 9:00 at night, that I would set off an alarm and end up spending years in prison for being a teenager, they wanted to stay out later. Or because I was riding the New York city subways and the subway didn’t show up or decided it was going to be stuck in the tunnel or move slower than expected, and I got home late.
So fast forward to my professional life, I’m a journalist that writes about issues of incarceration, and I was seeing that there were increasingly ways in which people were proposing alternatives to incarceration that instead of actually addressing why people were being criminalized, why people were being arrested, why people were committing violence and harm, if they were committing violence and harm, or why they were committing criminalized acts that did not actually harm anybody. So instead of addressing why so many of my friends joined gangs, instead these alternatives basically built different types of imprisonment and incarceration and expanded the net of both racial and social control into our homes and communities. And these alternatives were increasingly being embraced as ways to decrease mass incarceration in physical jails and prisons, but not actually address underlying causes of why we rely on punishment and punitive systems to address what are basically societal failings.
Eddie Conway: Maya, Vicky just brought up a good point, and you raised the point earlier about these alternatives. And I understand your book is suggesting that the alternatives is just a continuation of the prison system wit large. Explain, because so many people want their loved ones or their family members to not be inside behind a wall, behind fences, they want them to be in the neighborhood, in the house, even if they got to wear a bracelet, even if they got to stay near the house. So how is this worse or bad, or how is this making our community part of the prison system? Can you explain that?
Maya Schenwar: Yeah, absolutely. So I think one thing to clarify is that in our book, we’re not arguing that electronic monitoring or drug court or any of these alternatives are worse than prison. Although a couple of the people we interviewed did say, “Well, I wish I would have just gone to prison because I would’ve gotten it over with,” when they’re serving these very long probation sentences. But instead of thinking that way, because most people would rather be on monitoring, most people would rather be in a treatment center than prison, we’re saying these should not be the only alternatives. It shouldn’t be a bad cage and a worst cage. So I was very relieved when my sister was sentenced to electronic monitoring because it was definitely a better option than prison, but it was still a very, very punitive and harmful so-called alternative that ended up sending her back to prison, since the penalty for violating the terms of electronic monitoring is prison.
So what we’re saying is, what should be happening, if we’re really talking about forward motion, is we should be shrinking this giant carceral system. But instead, a lot of the prison reforms that we address in our book are expanding the system. Not only are some people who might’ve been in prison or jail put on monitors or in treatment centers or psychiatric hospitals, that’s happening to some extent, but also the presence of these alternatives is allowing authorities to hand them out to people who otherwise would not be under any physical control of the state. So maybe people who are charged with or convicted of very low level offenses that otherwise might be released on their own recognizance or the charges might be dropped. Instead, we see them being placed on electronic monitoring, placed on some sort of treatment oriented probation, all of these things.
So it’s actually expanding the system and it’s operating according to the idea that if we can’t put people in prison, or if we’re looking for an alternative to prison, we have to put them into some similar looking institution instead of actually addressing the root causes of why systems of policing and prison exist, which are built on white supremacy, built on capitalism. It’s not addressing any of those things. So just electronic monitoring as an example, what’s happening.
There has been a major expansion. So in 2005, there were 53,000 people on electronic monitoring. And recently, estimates have put it around 200,000 and that might’ve even increased as a result of people being released on monitors during COVID-19. And people on monitoring, it’s this very restrictive system. People have to get pre-approved permission to go anywhere. And sometimes they’re faced with an inability to do things like go to the ER or go grocery shopping for essential supplies.
One of the people we interviewed said she was not even able to take her garbage out because it was at the end of the housing complex. And so we see it still operating in this way, and it’s not just of course, “Oh well, I guess I can’t go outside. But if I really had to, I could,” it’s well, if you violate those terms, you could be headed back to prison. And in many cases, with both probation and electronic monitoring, and also drug court, people actually see longer sentences if they violate those terms, than they might if they had just been sent to prison in the first place. And when we look at these systems, these reforms, the people who are criminalized hasn’t changed, so it’s not altering the system of criminalization. People targeted by monitoring are still black and indigenous people, other people of color, sex workers, drug users, trans people, disabled people.
So it’s perpetuating the same system. And we see that, like I said earlier, it’s widening, but not of surveillance and punishment, freeing more and more people in. So when we call these reforms into question, we’re not saying, “Oh, people should just be in prison, instead.” We’re saying we want to shrink and eventually dismantle this entire unjust system.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Vicky. Because there’s a financial component to this expansion of the prison industrial complex and it seems to me that the electronic monitoring, the online thing, the ankle braces, all that stuff, the burden of finances falling on the actual person that’s used in the particular system. So not only is the prison system expanding, but it’s also charging the poorest part of the population to expand. Can you talk a little bit about that? Follow the money a little bit.
Vicky Law: Sure. So one of the largest corporations that supplies electronic monitoring, bracelets or shackles, is BI, which was bought by private prison corporation GEO Group, which is one of which is one of the largest private prison corporations in the world, back in the early 2000s. And what this basically does is, it not only gives an incentive to states and local jurisdictions to have people on electronic monitoring, it shifts that burden to them, so that that way the state and the local jurisdictions save money. They don’t have to pay the overhead of having somebody in the physical building, you don’t have to pay staff salaries, you don’t have to pay staff benefits, you don’t have to pay overtime, health insurance, into their pensions and to unemployment funds. You don’t have to pay for food, you don’t have to pay water bills or electricity bills.
People in jails and prisons supposedly have an eighth amendment right to medical care. States and local jurisdictions don’t have to provide even a pretense of medical care if somebody is locked in their own home. And what we’re also seeing is that in many cases, they partner with private companies, such as BI, and BI is one of a host of private electronic monitoring companies that provide electronic monitoring services. So the physical shackle, the person that monitors where you go, the person to whom you have to submit up to a week in advance, where you are going to go outside of your house and what times and wait for approval.
Yes, you can go pick your child up from school. No, you cannot attend their school play. Yes, you can go grocery shopping at the store three blocks away. No, if that store has no toilet paper, because everybody has bought all the toilet paper during the pandemic, you cannot go two blocks further and go to the next store to see if you can buy toilet paper. Yes, you can take your mother to her doctor’s appointment. No, your mother fell down in the middle of the night and if you go take her to the emergency room, you are out of bounds and we will send you to prison.
So this is what the electronic monitoring company does, because they watch you through the GPS device to make sure that you are actually in your house when you say you were going to be in your house, and you were only at the place that they have pre-approved. And people are forced to pay either by the week or by the month for this supposedly privilege of being incarcerated in their own home. One of the women we interviewed who lives in Indiana had to pay $115 a week for her electronic monitoring. She lived in a small town in Indiana. It was very hard for her to get work with an electronic monitor and suddenly a felony conviction.
She then had to rely on her husband, at least she had another adult in the house who was able to work to basically provide for all of the family’s financial needs, and they had this sudden financial burden on top of them. And she was told that her sentence would not be considered complete. She had been sentenced to X amount of time on this electronic monitor, but her sentence was extended because she had not paid her bill in full, so she was going to have to continue this sentence. And with every week that passed and every month that passed, another chunk of money was added to that bill. So basically she was going to be sentenced in perpetuity for her failure to be able to pay. And we interviewed another person in Olympia, Washington, who was told that if on the day that his sentence ended, he did not have the bill paid in full, he would just be sent back to the jail. And after he was released from the jail, he would still be responsible for this bill.
So it works in different ways, but it puts people, particularly people who are poor and marginalized and unable to scare up resources, to be able to afford a good defense or to be able to live in a neighborhood where the police aren’t stopping them or any number of things that people with more resources are able to do to navigate out of the criminal legal system altogether into a position where if they cannot afford and they don’t have family or friends that can afford to help them pay this bill, they are going to be penalized and sent back to prison. So we see that electronic monitoring has become a booming business because of the nation’s addiction to punishment. So we’re not saying, “Okay, electronic monitoring company, you have to monitor this person, but also make sure that you can help this person go get a job.” No, they are not social service agencies. They are basically prison guards and jailers by another name using technology,
Eddie Conway: Maya. Kind of walk me through, I mean the prison industrial complex is so vast, it encompassed so many people, judges, lawyers, social workers, parole agents, police officers, correctional officers, you name it, bails bondsman. How do you turn that around? How do you think in terms of shrinking a system like that when there’s so many people that make their livelihood off of incarcerating people of color and people that are poor.
Maya Schenwar: So I think that we need to start from taking a step back and thinking about the whole thing as a system of criminalization, rather than like looking at all of its different parts. Even though, obviously in our book, we’re documenting how large the system is and how many people are complicit in it. And thinking about, okay, what can we do that disrupts this entire system of criminalization, as opposed to replacing each of those things one by one. And one of the things that we talk about toward the end of our book, is that a lot of these systems that we’re looking at, such as schools and the realms of the medical system and social work, these are realms that actually also produce good, they’re not entirely a punishment system. They’ve just been drafted into the punishment system because it’s so sprawling in this country and it infiltrates practically all of our institutions.
And so we need to think about a radical shift in resources. And this is one of the things that the current movement to defund the police, that’s been organized by young black abolitionists all over the country, is pushing for, is this radical shift in resources toward life affirming priorities. So we think about, okay, yes, there may be jobs lost if prison and policing goes away, but we can’t keep these violent institutions that are actually enacting some of the largest acts of violence that our country sees, because they produced jobs. And then instead we think, okay, what are all the other many, many, many priorities that this country is not fulfilling? And so we have to look at health care, mental health care, education, dramatically expanding these systems so that we’re supporting everybody. The arts, recreational programs, programs for youth, housing.
So expanding all of these things and really fueling an economy that supports people’s survival, supports people in thriving,, those are the ways we need to be channeling our economy. So I think a lot of times, the argument around jobs as brought up when a particular prison is going to be closed. And people say, “Hey, this prison supports this town, we have to rally around this prison to save people’s jobs.” Even though people’s jobs are supporting mass violence. And so I think instead of that, we need to think, okay, why is there a town that is entirely built around a prison and that’s how people have to make their living? And so yeah, I think in addition to questioning the system of criminalization, we’re actually questioning the entire economic system that this country is structured upon and racial capitalism itself really.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Vicky, you can have the last word on this. What do you suggest that the public people that’s concerned about the conditions in prison and outside of prison? What do you suggest that they could be doing?
Vicky Law: Well, there are a number of things they could be doing. Across the country, there have been growing calls to defund the police. And not just defund the police and put the money in some pot elsewhere, but shift resources into departments and agencies and institutions that actually help people’s basic needs to survive and thrive. We just talked about this idea of job loss among prison and jail guards. But we have to think about the fact that across the country, because of COVID, we’re seeing teachers, school counselors, medical staff, people who work in food industries, all being laid off or not hired to begin with. So we see job loss happening across the country. So this idea that only prison guards or jail guard should be exempt from job loss really doesn’t help promote public safety. So people can get involved in organizations that work around prison justice and prisoner rights.
And then on a personal, they can also say, “Well, what can we do to promote safety?” One of the things about policing and prisons is that it shrinks our collective imagination as to how we can actually promote out our own safety and how do we actually prevent violence from happening or address harm. And instead, we ended up relying on calling 911 for everything. And so it means that instead of getting to know our neighbors and figuring out like, well, what are ways in which we can support each other through things like everyday life? And now everyday life is a pandemic, what are ways in which we can start to build community so that when problems come up starting small and perhaps branching out into bigger things, we can actually support each other. So how do we support each other in getting food, finding medical care, not leaving our house, if we feel sick so that we don’t spread COVID, and perhaps doing things that help people survive in this moment.
Eddie Conway: Maya, Vicky, thanks for joining me.
Vicky Law: Thanks so much for having us, it was great to speak with you.
Maya Schenwar: Thanks for having us, Eddie. Thank you.
Eddie Conway: Okay. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.
Studio: Cameron Granadino Production: Ericka Blount Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.


therealnews--2020-08-27--DeJoy strangling the Post Office for Trump

This is a rush transcript and may contain errors .
It will be updated .
Speaker 1 : Will you put the machines back ?
DeJoy : I ’ m very proud to lead the organization .
The rest of your accusations were actually outrageous .
Speaker 1 : Will you put the machines back ?
DeJoy : No , I will not .
Speaker 1 : You will not .
Speaker 1 : You will not .
Well , there you go .
DeJoy : There I go what .
These machines [ crosstalk 00:00:16 ] .
Speaker 3 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ answer the question .
Marc Steiner : What ?
I mean , how can the post office work without automatic mail sorters ?
Who can do that ?
This is ridiculous , but just how ridiculous is it ?
I ’ m Marc Steiner here with the Real News .
Good to have you with us .
Things were popping in the post office and it ’ s the center of the struggle in America right now , it seems .
In Tacoma , Washington , the post office restarted the machines on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And that clip you just saw was from yesterday ’ s hearings , which we ’ ll be talking about during the course of this conversations .
Over the weekend , over 800 demonstrations took place in all 50 states , more are happening today .
So today we ’ re looking at those hearings , talk about those demonstrations , the struggle to save the post office , looking at how the Koch Brothers for the last 50 years have been trying to put the post office out of business , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ terms of struggle to save and build a post office for this country .
We ’ re joined now by Courtney Jenkins .
CJ Jenkins just came from today ’ s demonstrations in Baltimore , and here he serves as legislative director of the American Postal Workers Union Local 181 .
He ’ s a rising young union leader and star and who was a mail carrier , and at 32 years old has been a union activist for over a decade .
And Lisa Graves is the executive director of True North @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spearheaded several major breakthrough investigations into how we ’ re distorting our American democracy .
Her research has been cited by almost every major newspaper .
She was featured in the film 14th , and prior to founding True North Research , she was a co-director of Documented Investigations , led the Center for Media and Democracy , and she just wrote the Billionaire Behind the Efforts to Kill the Post Office that appeared in the Public Interest .
And in True North it was called , Wait a Minute Mr. Koch Man @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Post Office .
And I love that title .
And welcome CJ and Lisa , it ’ s so good to have you both with us .
Marc Steiner : So let us begin .
CJ , you just came off demonstrations today , talk about that and what ’ s happening across the country , and then I ’ ll let Lisa chime in to that as well .
These demonstrations as I read about , over 800 all 50 states fighting to support the post office .
So talk a bit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : It was a great showing today downtown Baltimore at our main post office .
First , thank you for having me , Mr. Steiner and the Real News Network .
Marc Steiner : Great to have you with us .
Courtney Jenkin… : We ’ ve had actions across the country for the American Postal Workers Union , our national day of action today .
We invited all types of just the public community organizations , anyone who wanted to host a rally on a day of action today following the oversight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do so .
So there were different community organizations , labor unions , just concerned members of the public who came out to the downtown facility today between 12:00 and 1:30 .
It was a good show , and that this is happening across the state of Maryland , but across the country .
And what we ’ re seeing is again , community associations , concerned groups just popping up and saying , “ Hey , we got to protect our public postal service.
” Marc Steiner : So Lisa , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take on this .
The post office is , I think in one of the by-lines one of your recent pieces is one of the few and most beloved institutions in the federal government .
And you ’ re seeing people come out across the country .
It does feel like the post office is at the heart of the struggle for the future ’ s democracy and more .
How do you read it ?
Lisa Graves : I think that ’ s exactly right Mr. Steiner , and I want to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on , and also it ’ s an honor to be on with Mr. Jenkins .
This is the battle for our democracy .
This is the most popular agency in the government .
It ’ s actually the most popular brand in America , and it serves every American equally .
It ’ s vitally important to our democracy and to our production chains , to our distribution chains in America , and especially during this pandemic .
And so these efforts by Mr. DeJoy to really cause chaos and change the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see in the charts , the hearing yesterday , how the service has declined under his watch .
In the very short time he ’ s been here as the head of the postal service , he has basically caused chaos .
And he said in the hearing yesterday that he was not going to reverse course and get those machines , those fast mail-sorting machines that were removed , re-installed .
That ’ s just wrong .
He needs to be removed actually from that [ inaudible 00:04:29 ] .
And I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of governors needs to be reformed and changed because it ’ s been captured by Mitch McConnell and these privatizers .
Marc Steiner : I ’ m going to come right back to this privatizing question , and what you wrote about with the Koch brothers , because it ’ s really illuminating , and we have to really understand the depth of that .
I want to talk about what this… And I ’ m curious , CJ , from your perspective in terms of the postal union , what the internal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it comes to saving the post office .
In Tacoma , Washington , you have the post office actually told the DeJoy to take a leap and they restarted the machines .
Is there going to be an effort by postal workers to do any kind of job actions like this ?
What is your strategy ?
Courtney Jenkin… : Well , there have been pockets of resistance across the country .
I get a chance to talk to a lot of rank an file organizers across the nation , and there are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there ’ s the letter carrier who says , “ No , I ’ m going to complete my route that day.
” Or the maintenance employee who says , “ I ’ m going to reassemble that machine.
” There hasn ’ t been a strategy because each facility , each local post office is different in its own way .
So trying to figure out how to have a one-size-fits-all , that ’ s pretty much where we ’ re at right now , but really it ’ s a legislative @ @ @ @ @ @ @ union , as a full major postal workers union to get the support through the pandemic with this emergency appropriation , but along with conversation around postal reform , which is something that we ’ ve been pushing forward in different ways .
We have different agreements and disagreements on who is in the postal reform conversation .
But that is one of the things that is a longterm goal .
Right now , though , just the pockets of resistance you ’ ve seen , those are just workers coming together , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ do things , in their own facility or their own office , and having a conversation and putting a plan of action together .
The four major postal workers union to my knowledge have not publicly come out and even made a position on the postmaster general with a board of governors .
So it looks like , again , this is a grassroots type of resistance and pushback , which is what it always should be .
Marc Steiner : Which is really interesting because I think Lisa , when you wrote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ starting in the early ’ 70s to privatize the post office , that was also on the heels of job actions across the country , that [ inaudible 00:06:49 ] eight-day strike that also led to the… Postal workers were able to get more money .
It also led to the battle to destroy the post office .
So these things are really interrelated .
Lisa Graves : Well , that ’ s right .
And one of the things that I discovered in my research was just how long Charles Koch who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ America , and on the planet who basically controls his own private mega corporation , Koch Industries , that he ’ s been staking the people who ’ ve been trying to private the postal service since the 1970s .
It was a fringe idea back then , although it was one that was also spurred by anti-labor , anti-workers sentiment .
But it ’ s a fringe idea now .
And what he ’ s done is really pushed this fringe idea , fertilize it with his cash , to push it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Unfortunately , this shouldn ’ t be a partisan issue .
Shouldn ’ t be a political issue .
This is our service , whether you ’ re democratic , republican , independent , or any other party , this is a service that serves us all .
And so the fact that you have this intervention by this president to try to weaken it , to withhold funds , to urge these negotiators and these coronavirus talks to not give the postal service the money that the previous postmaster general said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and to put such power in the hands of Steve Mnuchin , a guy who quite frankly , made his riches in part on the foreclosure of the homes of many Americans across the country .
He ’ s exactly the wrong guy at the wrong time .
And they managed to squeeze into position this postmaster general who is deeply conflicted in terms of his own financial holdings with competitors of the postal service .
Plus , the fact is , is that he was one of three men that Mr. Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the RNC .
And he ’ s personally raised millions of dollars to help this president .
And then on top of that , you have a guy who is close to Mitch McConnell , Mike Duncan , who ’ s the president of board of governors who was recently appointed during Trump ’ s term , who also has deep financial ties to the Republican Party and has helped fund Mitch McConnell ’ s rise and capture of power .
You have the postal service being led by the most partisan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re engaged in destruction in my view , of our democracy .
And I don ’ t think anything DeJoy said should give anyone cause for a reassurance that they are not going to try to dismantle our postal service and hike the cost for everyone across the country if we let them .
And I ’ m so proud of the work of people across the country that Mr. Jenkins has pointed out , and others who are standing up and saying , “ This is our postal service , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from these predators.
” Marc Steiner : So CJ , how ’ s that playing out among the workers themselves and the and the ranking and file of postal union .
You ’ re the one whose jobs are being threatened as well as the service that you provide the country .
So what ’ s happening inside the union , especially rank and file ?
Courtney Jenkin… : Well , the rank and file , we ’ re frustrated to be quite honest with you .
Because our entire careers , no @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , whether it ’ s 30 years or three days , we ’ ve been taught to move the mail .
And now we see these decisions being made which inhibit our ability to do that .
Go against the oath we ’ ve taken .
So , the members that I represent come to me on the workflow and then voicing their frustration because they ’ re seeing the news and their neighbors , their friends , their family , they ’ re calling them now and saying , “ What ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
” And we have to remind those folks that we don ’ t make the decisions .
We are workers , there are rules in place .
If We ’ re given an instruction or told to do something , we have to do it .
We have to carry it out .
So again like the workers , we ’ re trying to respond as these issues come up as well .
So if there ’ s an issue at your local post office , the Postal Workers Union , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , properly educate the public to what ’ s going on , and what they could do to support .
Whether it ’ s calling their representatives , supporting us at an action , calling their neighbors .
I think that ’ s the way this moves .
I ’ m approached by my neighbors when I go check my mail every day .
They know I ’ m a postal worker , and they are concerned and they are listening .
So the rank and filers , the local unions themselves , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with issue happening in Baltimore , it may not be happening at Tampa Bay .
So what we ’ re trying to do is just have a communication network and support one another in these endeavors , as we go out into the streets , and socially distant , of course , and try to bring attention and awareness to this .
But let ’ s not be mistaken .
We are still in the middle of a pandemic , and our folks are , the morale , as you can imagine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of low as they turn on the news and they ’ re being attacked from leadership , I guess we can call it .
So it ’ s just , now they ’ re getting rounded up , they ’ re seeing the community come out .
So these conversations on the work floor are happening more frequently .
I was actually at a rally today and it ’ s interesting , a sister of mine in the local union , she ’ s a member .
She was coming out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a customer as well .
And I recognized her even with her mask on , and she picked up a sign and she joined in the rally .
So it ’ s that type of thing .
We are customers , we are a public service , and we ’ re just trying to , I guess the saying , get in where we can fit in at this point .
Marc Steiner : The statement , that theme here , I want to talk a bit about Ayanna Pressley in her testimony @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the hearing .
Ayanna Pressley : The postal service is one of the largest employers of veterans and has one of the most diverse workforces in our country .
40 % of postal workers are people of color .
And for generations , working for the USPS was one of the only living wage jobs accessible to Black and Brown Americans .
No doubt , many of these families have a personal story of how the USPS job made it possible for them to buy their first home , or to send @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is well documented that many of these same families have been disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic , and will bear the brunt of any efforts to dismantle the USPS .
Marc Steiner : I don ’ t think people always get the understanding of how racial justice is part of this battle .
Whether you ’ re talking about black community , whether you ’ re talking about the Latino community , or if you go out to the Rez , the post office workers are all native .
I don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this means to racial justice .
And CJ , why don ’ t you start with that ?
And then please , Lisa , I want you to jump in on this .
Courtney Jenkin… : So Congressman Ayanna Pressley made several great points at the hearing .
Not just about the impact to the service , to the general American public , but how communities of color deeply rely on the postal service .
Those that aren ’ t connected to the internet still rely on that unemployment check or that stimulus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come through the mail .
But I mean , even myself , I ’ m an employee of the postal service as well .
I ’ m a young African-American male from Baltimore , Maryland .
There aren ’ t too many options out there of living wage , decent wage jobs with benefits .
I ’ ve been able to build a solid foundation in my own life , then I look at my peers and they don ’ t have those type of things .
They ’ re working at those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are so anti-union , and they ’ re coming to me and they ’ re saying , “ Hey , what can we do ?
I ’ m frustrated with my employer.
” But my family , my grandfather started at the postal service when it was still part of the cabinet .
And he moved onto the department of labor , and then he became one of the first African-American families to move to a town called Columbia , which was just being developed in Maryland .
The middle class life was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and again , build a solid foundation through employment at the postal service .
I had family , friends that worked for the postal service right now that I represent as members , and they ’ re buying homes , putting kids through college , going back to school themselves , and being able to do it in a community of color we are a part of , and improve that community .
They ’ re going out and they ’ re organizing their communities now becoming public service , purchasing , again @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because of the unionized workplace that the postal service provided where 40 % of the employees are people of color , almost a quarter are Black people .
You know what I mean ?
So this is something throughout the nation where if you attack the postal service from any angle , whether it ’ s privatization or anything like that , it ’ s really an attack on communities of color , minorities , women .
That type of folk .
Marc Steiner : So Lisa , picking up on what CJ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about that chart you put up about the Koch brothers in your article and the public interest , showing the timeline from 1970 to now .
This is partially the issue of racial justice is deep here , and as well as the anti-union fervor of some of these folks on the right , these billionaires who want to just kill unions .
And that ’ s very much part of the struggle , which is why this is so essential , I think Lisa Graves : I think that ’ s right @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things that you mentioned , and Mr. Jenkins mentioned is how the postal service reflects the beautiful diversity of our communities .
The postal service is perhaps the most diverse workforce in America , and it ’ s not the type of workforce like Walmart , where Walmart is the largest civilian employer in the United States , but the postal service is second largest civilian work workforce in the country .
But the Walmart workers are paid so low that the taxpayers have to subsidize them with additional benefits because Walmart has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its leaders have become some of the richest billionaires also in the world .
The postal service works for us all , and so there isn ’ t that effort to take money , to take cream off the top to line someone ’ s pockets , to make some billionaire or stockholders richer .
What it does is provide great jobs for the American people , including more than 100,000 veterans .
And our veterans also represent a substantially diverse part of America due to the GI Bill and opportunities that military @ @ @ @ @ @ @ really have a disproportionate impact on people of color in America , as well as on women .
Women in the workforce , in the postal service have tremendous opportunities that they might not have in some of the private sector places , or these chain stores or big box stores where there ’ s so many people paid such low wages .
And the postal service has been sustained by the stamps that people buy , and buy the packages people get at a fair and reasonable price .
But that ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sector .
You know how much more it costs to get something delivered by FedEx or by UPS ?
It costs a lot more than it does for the mail .
But at the same time , we know that that bill in 2006 , which was pushed forward by one of Koch ’ s right hand man , a guy named James Miller , who was on the postal board , that 2006 bill basically stifled the postal service from raising rates for first class stamps , but by about more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which doesn ’ t allow it to have the type of funds it needs , even a modest increase in that to really make sure that it has the most modern fleet , that its fleet of trucks is in excellent condition and is modernized even perhaps green .
It really makes it so that people like DeJoy come in and are trying cut the amount of workers or try to cut over-time , that ’ s absolutely necessary during this pandemic .
And the fact is , is that DeJoy , whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to know how disruptive his actions were going to be to the postal service .
He was micromanaging the time trucks leave , and where they can park on a street .
He is fundamentally responsible for the crisis that the postal service is facing .
And he in my personal view needs to be removed , and the people who chose him need to be held accountable and removed as well .
This is unacceptable for a public service that serves America .
And this racial impact is substantial , and it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Steiner : And let ’ s pick up on another point here as we conclude .
I think that you both hit on some really critical points here .
I was thinking about , this is republican , Clay Higgins of Louisiana and what he had to say .
Clay Higgins : This [ inaudible 00:18:47 ] is exactly why America does not trust Congress .
Our cities are on fire , violent mobs roam our streets at night .
The Chinese have crushed the American economy with a virus , and democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Marc Steiner : So to me , and Lisa , I ’ ll start with you here , and CJ , please jump in .
But this goes to the heart of the struggle that America ’ s facing right now , it ’ s built around the post office and what he said was emblematic of the divide .
Some people , someone wrote about these hearings were like a clown show .
On some levels , that may be true .
But what does this portend for us , at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s ahead of us ?
Lisa Graves : Well , it ’ s astonishing to see the lies perpetuated by some of these republican members .
And Senator John Johnson to be saying that this is all some sort of conspiracy to have people call… People are not getting their medicines on time .
They ’ re not getting their check to themselves on time or their rent delivered on time .
And that ’ s because of the policies of this administration .
The fact that they want to tell the American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re seeing with your own eyes , don ’ t believe what the postal workers are sharing with you with their own eyes , what they ’ re seeing with the machines cut , with rats in the facilities because of food and stuff that ’ s been delayed .
It is the ethic of the postal service as Mr. Jenkins pointed out , to get that mail in and out on the same day , because otherwise it accumulates like dirty dishes in your sink , and we can not allow @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can not , we must reject the misleading claims by these partisans who want to put their party ahead of our country .
Marc Steiner : So let ’ s talk about what the future may hold here and where their struggle may come next .
This clearly could have an effect on the election , and that ’ s part of what this whole struggle began .
And in the press , we ’ re also seeing the battle to what the future of the post office should be .
I had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other day who writes for [ Jackbin 00:20:47 ] and is an AFT activist and a union activist saying that we should be talking about the post office in terms of its ability to deliver the internet , its ability to be a public bank , to do things that other countries have them do , [ inaudible 00:21:03 ] this could be a different place .
Let ’ s talk a bit about what these fruits of struggle over the next few months , or this next year might be when it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ CJ , you ’ re in the middle of it every day , we ’ ll start with you and concluded with Lisa .
Courtney Jenkin… : Thank you , Sir .
The future of the postal service , in fact , looks bright if we could just get the right decision makers , policy makers and supporters to do the things that they should be doing .
You mentioned postal banking .
We actually have a petition going on in Baltimore to try to bring that to cities like Baltimore , Cleveland @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As Ms .
Grave said , she spoke to that pre-funding mandate from 2006 has tied our hands to be able to innovate , to reinvigorate our fleet of letter carrier vehicles , things like that , to introduce things like postal banking , even to have electronic fueling stations at post offices .
Very practical things that draw traffic into a post office and keep it relevant .
So the future looks bright if folks will get on board and instead of getting in the way like the congressmen who thinks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , has he been supporting postal reform legislation ?
Or is this just a topic that he brought up as a rebuttal to what we ’ re trying to get done right now in the immediate sense .
Over the next two months , and again , it ’ ll be policy , legislation , making sure our members turn out to vote .
Things like that .
Draw more attention to the folks who have been hiding in the background .
[ inaudible 00:22:27 ] the board of governance , the postmaster @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lot of media attention a lot .
And as we could see from the hearings and everything over this past weekend , this postmaster was not prepared for what he was about to take one in this endeavor .
So over the next few months , it ’ ll just be keeping that pressure up , especially as we move after the election into the busiest season for postal workers every year , which is Christmas .
So as you can imagine everyone at home now , we had about a billion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last Christmas .
It ’ ll probably double or triple now that people really can not go into malls and retail spaces .
So it ’ ll be encouraging folks to have faith in the postal service , pushing back in a longterm of postal reform legislation , and fight back against any attempts to privatize , which has been an ongoing battle that we [ inaudible 00:23:15 ] .
Marc Steiner : So Lisa , you ’ ve covered this battle against our democracy for a long time in your articles and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this all fits in and what do you see happening ?
Lisa Graves : Well , I do want to say in terms of the volume that the postal service is experiencing and is going to experience , there are a lot of Americans out of work , in fact , what should be happening right now is the postal service should be expanded .
It should have more people , more workers on board .
And there ’ s so many great ideas from the civil service about what they can do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in his book , he ’ s a conservative .
And he wrote about this vital public institution and how during Katrina , the postal workers were bringing water and food to people during the crisis .
There in that hurricane .
And there ’ s so many things that the postal service could do , like provide internet , make sure there ’ s internet .
It could be a locust point with these assets in each city and community for distributing goods and services during pandemics and crises .
There are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ broadly versus this narrow privatization view of Mr. DeJoy .
But that view to respond to your question , Mr. Steiner , is exactly what ’ s taken hold particularly on one side of the aisle .
This idea that the private sector can do it better and cheaper .
That ’ s not true .
They ’ re not doing it better .
Amazon can ’ t hold a candle to the amount of volume that the postal service handles efficiently every single day .
And quite frankly , the cost is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
These are our assets and we , as a people have to defend them , and there are going to be plenty of opportunities in these coming weeks and months , and in the next year to reimagine how these public services can better serve us from the standpoint of public health , from the standpoint of our democracy , and from the standpoint of making our community better .
And so we are in battle with these , privatizers , this cult of greed and fear that has taken over , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to have a brighter tomorrow .
And so I hope that people really are going to be calling , calling , calling as much as they can , as long as they can , over and over until we get this situation righted and turn the course and repeal these laws that have harmed the postal service and get it the funding that the postal service needs , but that we need to have this service flourish and thrive .
Marc Steiner : This has been a great conversation .
I think that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of really wrestle with what we ’ ve just talked about here , in terms of this being a struggle for the future of unions , for racial equity , for giving services we all need as a public , and to stand by the post office .
And so Lisa Graves and CJ Jenkins , thank you both so much for your work and for joining us here on the Real News today , it has been a great conversation , and look forward to talking to you both down the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Thank you , Mr. Steiner .
Thank you .
Marc Steiner : Good to have you all .
Thank you both .
And I ’ m Marc Steiner here for the Real News Network .
Please let us know what you think .
Let us know what ’ s happening in your community with the post office as well .
I want to know , and we want to push this on the air because this is key to the future of our democracy .
Take care .

It’s all part of a push to privatize, which threatens the living wages of hundreds of thousands of employees.
Story Transcript
This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Speaker 1: Will you put the machines back?
DeJoy: I’m very proud to lead the organization. The rest of your accusations were actually outrageous.
Speaker 1: Will you put the machines back?
DeJoy: No, I will not.
Speaker 1: You will not.
DeJoy: I Will not.
Speaker 1: You will not. Well, there you go.
DeJoy: There I go what. These machines [crosstalk 00:00:16].
Speaker 3: Madam Chair, let the witness answer the question.
Marc Steiner: What? I mean, how can the post office work without automatic mail sorters? Who can do that? This is ridiculous, but just how ridiculous is it? I’m Marc Steiner here with the Real News. Good to have you with us. Things were popping in the post office and it’s the center of the struggle in America right now, it seems.
In Tacoma, Washington, the post office restarted the machines on their own defying DeJoy’s orders. And that clip you just saw was from yesterday’s hearings, which we’ll be talking about during the course of this conversations.
Over the weekend, over 800 demonstrations took place in all 50 states, more are happening today. So today we’re looking at those hearings, talk about those demonstrations, the struggle to save the post office, looking at how the Koch Brothers for the last 50 years have been trying to put the post office out of business, and what the future may hold in terms of struggle to save and build a post office for this country.
We’re joined now by Courtney Jenkins. CJ Jenkins just came from today’s demonstrations in Baltimore, and here he serves as legislative director of the American Postal Workers Union Local 181. He’s a rising young union leader and star and who was a mail carrier, and at 32 years old has been a union activist for over a decade.
And Lisa Graves is the executive director of True North Research, is its editor-in-chief, she spearheaded several major breakthrough investigations into how we’re distorting our American democracy. Her research has been cited by almost every major newspaper.
She was featured in the film 14th, and prior to founding True North Research, she was a co-director of Documented Investigations, led the Center for Media and Democracy, and she just wrote the Billionaire Behind the Efforts to Kill the Post Office that appeared in the Public Interest. And in True North it was called, Wait a Minute Mr. Koch Man: The Plot to Kill the US Post Office. And I love that title. And welcome CJ and Lisa, it’s so good to have you both with us.
Lisa Graves: Thank you.
Marc Steiner: So let us begin. CJ, you just came off demonstrations today, talk about that and what’s happening across the country, and then I’ll let Lisa chime in to that as well. These demonstrations as I read about, over 800 all 50 states fighting to support the post office. So talk a bit about what just occurred.
Courtney Jenkin…: It was a great showing today downtown Baltimore at our main post office. First, thank you for having me, Mr. Steiner and the Real News Network.
Marc Steiner: Great to have you with us.
Courtney Jenkin…: We’ve had actions across the country for the American Postal Workers Union, our national day of action today. We invited all types of just the public community organizations, anyone who wanted to host a rally on a day of action today following the oversight hearing yesterday, they were welcome to do so.
So there were different community organizations, labor unions, just concerned members of the public who came out to the downtown facility today between 12:00 and 1:30. It was a good show, and that this is happening across the state of Maryland, but across the country.
And what we’re seeing is again, community associations, concerned groups just popping up and saying, “Hey, we got to protect our public postal service.”
Marc Steiner: So Lisa, I’m just really interested in your take on this. The post office is, I think in one of the by-lines one of your recent pieces is one of the few and most beloved institutions in the federal government. And you’re seeing people come out across the country. It does feel like the post office is at the heart of the struggle for the future’s democracy and more. How do you read it?
Lisa Graves: I think that’s exactly right Mr. Steiner, and I want to thank you so much for having me on, and also it’s an honor to be on with Mr. Jenkins. This is the battle for our democracy. This is the most popular agency in the government. It’s actually the most popular brand in America, and it serves every American equally.
It’s vitally important to our democracy and to our production chains, to our distribution chains in America, and especially during this pandemic. And so these efforts by Mr. DeJoy to really cause chaos and change the work in the postal service you could see in the charts, the hearing yesterday, how the service has declined under his watch.
In the very short time he’s been here as the head of the postal service, he has basically caused chaos. And he said in the hearing yesterday that he was not going to reverse course and get those machines, those fast mail-sorting machines that were removed, re-installed. That’s just wrong. He needs to be removed actually from that [inaudible 00:04:29].
And I think that actually the postal service board of governors needs to be reformed and changed because it’s been captured by Mitch McConnell and these privatizers.
Marc Steiner: I’m going to come right back to this privatizing question, and what you wrote about with the Koch brothers, because it’s really illuminating, and we have to really understand the depth of that.
I want to talk about what this… And I’m curious, CJ, from your perspective in terms of the postal union, what the internal struggle is going to look like when it comes to saving the post office.
In Tacoma, Washington, you have the post office actually told the DeJoy to take a leap and they restarted the machines. Is there going to be an effort by postal workers to do any kind of job actions like this? What is your strategy?
Courtney Jenkin…: Well, there have been pockets of resistance across the country. I get a chance to talk to a lot of rank an file organizers across the nation, and there are pockets of resistance pushing back. Where there’s the letter carrier who says, “No, I’m going to complete my route that day.” Or the maintenance employee who says, “I’m going to reassemble that machine.”
There hasn’t been a strategy because each facility, each local post office is different in its own way. So trying to figure out how to have a one-size-fits-all, that’s pretty much where we’re at right now, but really it’s a legislative battle that we are fighting as a union, as a full major postal workers union to get the support through the pandemic with this emergency appropriation, but along with conversation around postal reform, which is something that we’ve been pushing forward in different ways.
We have different agreements and disagreements on who is in the postal reform conversation. But that is one of the things that is a longterm goal. Right now, though, just the pockets of resistance you’ve seen, those are just workers coming together, which is sometimes the best way to do things, in their own facility or their own office, and having a conversation and putting a plan of action together.
The four major postal workers union to my knowledge have not publicly come out and even made a position on the postmaster general with a board of governors. So it looks like, again, this is a grassroots type of resistance and pushback, which is what it always should be.
Marc Steiner: Which is really interesting because I think Lisa, when you wrote about the Koch brothers and their efforts starting in the early ’70s to privatize the post office, that was also on the heels of job actions across the country, that [inaudible 00:06:49] eight-day strike that also led to the… Postal workers were able to get more money. It also led to the battle to destroy the post office. So these things are really interrelated.
Lisa Graves: Well, that’s right. And one of the things that I discovered in my research was just how long Charles Koch who is one of the richest billionaires in America, and on the planet who basically controls his own private mega corporation, Koch Industries, that he’s been staking the people who’ve been trying to private the postal service since the 1970s.
It was a fringe idea back then, although it was one that was also spurred by anti-labor, anti-workers sentiment. But it’s a fringe idea now. And what he’s done is really pushed this fringe idea, fertilize it with his cash, to push it into the mainstream of the Republican Party.
Unfortunately, this shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Shouldn’t be a political issue. This is our service, whether you’re democratic, republican, independent, or any other party, this is a service that serves us all.
And so the fact that you have this intervention by this president to try to weaken it, to withhold funds, to urge these negotiators and these coronavirus talks to not give the postal service the money that the previous postmaster general said quite clearly the postal service needs, and to put such power in the hands of Steve Mnuchin, a guy who quite frankly, made his riches in part on the foreclosure of the homes of many Americans across the country. He’s exactly the wrong guy at the wrong time.
And they managed to squeeze into position this postmaster general who is deeply conflicted in terms of his own financial holdings with competitors of the postal service. Plus, the fact is, is that he was one of three men that Mr.
Trump chose to be the deputy finance chair at the RNC. And he’s personally raised millions of dollars to help this president.
And then on top of that, you have a guy who is close to Mitch McConnell, Mike Duncan, who’s the president of board of governors who was recently appointed during Trump’s term, who also has deep financial ties to the Republican Party and has helped fund Mitch McConnell’s rise and capture of power.
You have the postal service being led by the most partisan men in modern history, and they’re engaged in destruction in my view, of our democracy. And I don’t think anything DeJoy said should give anyone cause for a reassurance that they are not going to try to dismantle our postal service and hike the cost for everyone across the country if we let them.
And I’m so proud of the work of people across the country that Mr. Jenkins has pointed out, and others who are standing up and saying, “This is our postal service, and we’re going to save it from these predators.”
Marc Steiner: So CJ, how’s that playing out among the workers themselves and the and the ranking and file of postal union. You’re the one whose jobs are being threatened as well as the service that you provide the country. So what’s happening inside the union, especially rank and file?
Courtney Jenkin…: Well, the rank and file, we’re frustrated to be quite honest with you. Because our entire careers, no matter how long that’s been, whether it’s 30 years or three days, we’ve been taught to move the mail. And now we see these decisions being made which inhibit our ability to do that. Go against the oath we’ve taken.
So, the members that I represent come to me on the workflow and then voicing their frustration because they’re seeing the news and their neighbors, their friends, their family, they’re calling them now and saying, “What’s going on with the postal service?”
And we have to remind those folks that we don’t make the decisions. We are workers, there are rules in place. If We’re given an instruction or told to do something, we have to do it. We have to carry it out.
So again like the workers, we’re trying to respond as these issues come up as well. So if there’s an issue at your local post office, the Postal Workers Union, we want to be able to get there, properly educate the public to what’s going on, and what they could do to support. Whether it’s calling their representatives, supporting us at an action, calling their neighbors.
I think that’s the way this moves. I’m approached by my neighbors when I go check my mail every day. They know I’m a postal worker, and they are concerned and they are listening. So the rank and filers, the local unions themselves, again, because things are so isolated, with issue happening in Baltimore, it may not be happening at Tampa Bay.
So what we’re trying to do is just have a communication network and support one another in these endeavors, as we go out into the streets, and socially distant, of course, and try to bring attention and awareness to this.
But let’s not be mistaken. We are still in the middle of a pandemic, and our folks are, the morale, as you can imagine right now, especially it’s kind of low as they turn on the news and they’re being attacked from leadership, I guess we can call it.
So it’s just, now they’re getting rounded up, they’re seeing the community come out. So these conversations on the work floor are happening more frequently. I was actually at a rally today and it’s interesting, a sister of mine in the local union, she’s a member. She was coming out of the post office because she’s a customer as well.
And I recognized her even with her mask on, and she picked up a sign and she joined in the rally. So it’s that type of thing. We are customers, we are a public service, and we’re just trying to, I guess the saying, get in where we can fit in at this point.
Marc Steiner: The statement, that theme here, I want to talk a bit about Ayanna Pressley in her testimony the other day, what she did at the hearing.
Ayanna Pressley: The postal service is one of the largest employers of veterans and has one of the most diverse workforces in our country. 40% of postal workers are people of color. And for generations, working for the USPS was one of the only living wage jobs accessible to Black and Brown Americans.
No doubt, many of these families have a personal story of how the USPS job made it possible for them to buy their first home, or to send their child to college. Now it is well documented that many of these same families have been disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and will bear the brunt of any efforts to dismantle the USPS.
Marc Steiner: I don’t think people always get the understanding of how racial justice is part of this battle. Whether you’re talking about black community, whether you’re talking about the Latino community, or if you go out to the Rez, the post office workers are all native. I don’t think we get to understand what this means to racial justice. And CJ, why don’t you start with that? And then please, Lisa, I want you to jump in on this.
Courtney Jenkin…: So Congressman Ayanna Pressley made several great points at the hearing. Not just about the impact to the service, to the general American public, but how communities of color deeply rely on the postal service. Those that aren’t connected to the internet still rely on that unemployment check or that stimulus check, or that financial document that come through the mail.
But I mean, even myself, I’m an employee of the postal service as well. I’m a young African-American male from Baltimore, Maryland. There aren’t too many options out there of living wage, decent wage jobs with benefits.
I’ve been able to build a solid foundation in my own life, then I look at my peers and they don’t have those type of things. They’re working at those big private companies, box retailers that are so anti-union, and they’re coming to me and they’re saying, “Hey, what can we do? I’m frustrated with my employer.”
But my family, my grandfather started at the postal service when it was still part of the cabinet. And he moved onto the department of labor, and then he became one of the first African-American families to move to a town called Columbia, which was just being developed in Maryland.
The middle class life was able to put my dad through college and again, build a solid foundation through employment at the postal service. I had family, friends that worked for the postal service right now that I represent as members, and they’re buying homes, putting kids through college, going back to school themselves, and being able to do it in a community of color we are a part of, and improve that community.
They’re going out and they’re organizing their communities now becoming public service, purchasing, again, homes, small businesses, all because of the unionized workplace that the postal service provided where 40% of the employees are people of color, almost a quarter are Black people. You know what I mean?
So this is something throughout the nation where if you attack the postal service from any angle, whether it’s privatization or anything like that, it’s really an attack on communities of color, minorities, women. That type of folk.
Marc Steiner: So Lisa, picking up on what CJ was saying. And I was thinking about that chart you put up about the Koch brothers in your article and the public interest, showing the timeline from 1970 to now.
This is partially the issue of racial justice is deep here, and as well as the anti-union fervor of some of these folks on the right, these billionaires who want to just kill unions. And that’s very much part of the struggle, which is why this is so essential, I think
Lisa Graves: I think that’s right, and I think one of the things that you mentioned, and Mr. Jenkins mentioned is how the postal service reflects the beautiful diversity of our communities. The postal service is perhaps the most diverse workforce in America, and it’s not the type of workforce like Walmart, where Walmart is the largest civilian employer in the United States, but the postal service is second largest civilian work workforce in the country.
But the Walmart workers are paid so low that the taxpayers have to subsidize them with additional benefits because Walmart has been so harsh on its workers while its leaders have become some of the richest billionaires also in the world.
The postal service works for us all, and so there isn’t that effort to take money, to take cream off the top to line someone’s pockets, to make some billionaire or stockholders richer. What it does is provide great jobs for the American people, including more than 100,000 veterans. And our veterans also represent a substantially diverse part of America due to the GI Bill and opportunities that military service provides.
And so these attacks really have a disproportionate impact on people of color in America, as well as on women. Women in the workforce, in the postal service have tremendous opportunities that they might not have in some of the private sector places, or these chain stores or big box stores where there’s so many people paid such low wages.
And the postal service has been sustained by the stamps that people buy, and buy the packages people get at a fair and reasonable price. But that’s not the case with the private sector. You know how much more it costs to get something delivered by FedEx or by UPS? It costs a lot more than it does for the mail.
But at the same time, we know that that bill in 2006, which was pushed forward by one of Koch’s right hand man, a guy named James Miller, who was on the postal board, that 2006 bill basically stifled the postal service from raising rates for first class stamps, but by about more than a penny a year on average, which doesn’t allow it to have the type of funds it needs, even a modest increase in that to really make sure that it has the most modern fleet, that its fleet of trucks is in excellent condition and is modernized even perhaps green. It really makes it so that people like DeJoy come in and are trying cut the amount of workers or try to cut over-time, that’s absolutely necessary during this pandemic.
And the fact is, is that DeJoy, whose expertise is in logistics, he had to know how disruptive his actions were going to be to the postal service. He was micromanaging the time trucks leave, and where they can park on a street. He is fundamentally responsible for the crisis that the postal service is facing. And he in my personal view needs to be removed, and the people who chose him need to be held accountable and removed as well. This is unacceptable for a public service that serves America. And this racial impact is substantial, and it also needs to be redressed.
Marc Steiner: And let’s pick up on another point here as we conclude. I think that you both hit on some really critical points here. I was thinking about, this is republican, Clay Higgins of Louisiana and what he had to say.
Clay Higgins: This [inaudible 00:18:47] is exactly why America does not trust Congress. Our cities are on fire, violent mobs roam our streets at night. The Chinese have crushed the American economy with a virus, and democrats are talking about a mailbox conspiracy.
Marc Steiner: So to me, and Lisa, I’ll start with you here, and CJ, please jump in. But this goes to the heart of the struggle that America’s facing right now, it’s built around the post office and what he said was emblematic of the divide. Some people, someone wrote about these hearings were like a clown show. On some levels, that may be true. But what does this portend for us, at least in terms of the struggle that’s ahead of us?
Lisa Graves: Well, it’s astonishing to see the lies perpetuated by some of these republican members. And Senator John Johnson to be saying that this is all some sort of conspiracy to have people call… People are not getting their medicines on time. They’re not getting their check to themselves on time or their rent delivered on time. And that’s because of the policies of this administration.
The fact that they want to tell the American people don’t believe what you’re seeing with your own eyes, don’t believe what the postal workers are sharing with you with their own eyes, what they’re seeing with the machines cut, with rats in the facilities because of food and stuff that’s been delayed.
It is the ethic of the postal service as Mr. Jenkins pointed out, to get that mail in and out on the same day, because otherwise it accumulates like dirty dishes in your sink, and we cannot allow this crisis to persist, and we cannot, we must reject the misleading claims by these partisans who want to put their party ahead of our country.
Marc Steiner: So let’s talk about what the future may hold here and where their struggle may come next. This clearly could have an effect on the election, and that’s part of what this whole struggle began. And in the press, we’re also seeing the battle to what the future of the post office should be.
I had a guest on, Paul Prescott the other day who writes for [Jackbin 00:20:47] and is an AFT activist and a union activist saying that we should be talking about the post office in terms of its ability to deliver the internet, its ability to be a public bank, to do things that other countries have them do, [inaudible 00:21:03] this could be a different place.
Let’s talk a bit about what these fruits of struggle over the next few months, or this next year might be when it comes to the post office. And CJ, you’re in the middle of it every day, we’ll start with you and concluded with Lisa.
Courtney Jenkin…: Thank you, Sir. The future of the postal service, in fact, looks bright if we could just get the right decision makers, policy makers and supporters to do the things that they should be doing. You mentioned postal banking. We actually have a petition going on in Baltimore to try to bring that to cities like Baltimore, Cleveland and the Bronx,
Being more innovative. As Ms. Grave said, she spoke to that pre-funding mandate from 2006 has tied our hands to be able to innovate, to reinvigorate our fleet of letter carrier vehicles, things like that, to introduce things like postal banking, even to have electronic fueling stations at post offices.
Very practical things that draw traffic into a post office and keep it relevant. So the future looks bright if folks will get on board and instead of getting in the way like the congressmen who thinks that things are made up. Well, has he been supporting postal reform legislation? Or is this just a topic that he brought up as a rebuttal to what we’re trying to get done right now in the immediate sense.
Over the next two months, and again, it’ll be policy, legislation, making sure our members turn out to vote. Things like that. Draw more attention to the folks who have been hiding in the background. [inaudible 00:22:27] the board of governance, the postmaster general, these are positions that get a lot of media attention a lot.
And as we could see from the hearings and everything over this past weekend, this postmaster was not prepared for what he was about to take one in this endeavor. So over the next few months, it’ll just be keeping that pressure up, especially as we move after the election into the busiest season for postal workers every year, which is Christmas.
So as you can imagine everyone at home now, we had about a billion or so packages come through the system last Christmas. It’ll probably double or triple now that people really can not go into malls and retail spaces. So it’ll be encouraging folks to have faith in the postal service, pushing back in a longterm of postal reform legislation, and fight back against any attempts to privatize, which has been an ongoing battle that we [inaudible 00:23:15].
Marc Steiner: So Lisa, you’ve covered this battle against our democracy for a long time in your articles and your work. So talk about where this all fits in and what do you see happening?
Lisa Graves: Well, I do want to say in terms of the volume that the postal service is experiencing and is going to experience, there are a lot of Americans out of work, in fact, what should be happening right now is the postal service should be expanded. It should have more people, more workers on board. And there’s so many great ideas from the civil service about what they can do during Katrina, as Christopher Shaw documented in his book, he’s a conservative.
And he wrote about this vital public institution and how during Katrina, the postal workers were bringing water and food to people during the crisis. There in that hurricane. And there’s so many things that the postal service could do, like provide internet, make sure there’s internet. It could be a locust point with these assets in each city and community for distributing goods and services during pandemics and crises.
There are so many ways we could be thinking broadly versus this narrow privatization view of Mr. DeJoy. But that view to respond to your question, Mr. Steiner, is exactly what’s taken hold particularly on one side of the aisle. This idea that the private sector can do it better and cheaper. That’s not true. They’re not doing it better. Amazon can’t hold a candle to the amount of volume that the postal service handles efficiently every single day.
And quite frankly, the cost is so much more in the private sector. These are our assets and we, as a people have to defend them, and there are going to be plenty of opportunities in these coming weeks and months, and in the next year to reimagine how these public services can better serve us from the standpoint of public health, from the standpoint of our democracy, and from the standpoint of making our community better.
And so we are in battle with these, privatizers, this cult of greed and fear that has taken over, and we have to win in order to have a brighter tomorrow. And so I hope that people really are going to be calling, calling, calling as much as they can, as long as they can, over and over until we get this situation righted and turn the course and repeal these laws that have harmed the postal service and get it the funding that the postal service needs, but that we need to have this service flourish and thrive.
Marc Steiner: This has been a great conversation. I think that it’s important for people to kind of really wrestle with what we’ve just talked about here, in terms of this being a struggle for the future of unions, for racial equity, for giving services we all need as a public, and to stand by the post office.
And so Lisa Graves and CJ Jenkins, thank you both so much for your work and for joining us here on the Real News today, it has been a great conversation, and look forward to talking to you both down the road a lot more.
Lisa Graves: Thank you, Mr. Steiner. Thank you.
Courtney Jenkin…: Thank you.
Marc Steiner: Good to have you all. Thank you both. And I’m Marc Steiner here for the Real News Network. Please let us know what you think. Let us know what’s happening in your community with the post office as well. I want to know, and we want to push this on the air because this is key to the future of our democracy. Take care.
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.