 Today we are joined by Nijmi Zakia Zarinco. She's an organizer from Pennsylvania, the co-founder of Put People First Pennsylvania, a working class based building human rights organization. She's also the chair of the Pennsylvania Poor People's Campaign and National Call for Moral Revival. Nijmi, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for being, thanks for having me, I appreciate it. Okay, great. So as we speak, protests are erupting in cities and towns across the US to demand justice for George Floyd and for other victims of police brutality and also calling for an end to racist police violence. There's also been a lot of discussion about how these protests and this rebellion is not just about these latest kind of atrocious acts of police violence, but these protests are a result of, you know, 400 years of institutionalized oppression against black people in this country. And one of the ways this is very evident, and I think it's an area that Put People First works tirelessly on is about access to healthcare. So wondering if you can kind of talk about this moment, this moment of uprising and how we see the systemic racism in the healthcare system. Yeah, so thank you. What I would say about that is that here at Put People First, PA, we really see the crisis of state violence, that is happening right now and is happening continuously as connected to the healthcare crisis because honestly, state violence has many fronts. There's violence against our communities in the form of police abuse and murder. There's violence against our communities in the form of denial of healthcare. There's violence against our communities in the form of denial of the right housing. So we actually see it as really connected to the question of state violence and, you know, the state murders of black and indigenous people and other people of color are the most visible form of state violence, one of the most visible forms of state violence, but there's also many, many, many forms of state violence that we are dealing with as the working class in the US. Yesterday I was at a protest here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania about George Floyd and I talked about my own experience with state violence having been profiled by the police, having been harassed by the police, having guns pulled on me by the police, having guns pulled on me by off-duty, under, you know, off-duty police out of uniform, having dealt with militias, having dealt with police and military and occupied Palestine and settlers. So there's a lot of direct experience that I personally have had with this type of state violence. And what I wanted to do when my remarks yesterday is to make the connection between state violence in all its forms, the state violence that separates families at the border here in the US, but also through the child welfare system, as I said, that denies us access to healthcare and housing and water and food as human rights and facilitates private profiteering at the expense of meeting human needs. You know, that's really structural state violence is that our state is set up to facilitate the private profit making of the ruling class. And we can see that in this pandemic very clearly that the ruling class has been bailed out and the working class has been given a death sentence and that is state violence. And so what is the participation looked like of put people first and other working class movements in response to the murder of George Floyd in these protests that are erupting? So you mentioned that you participated yesterday, but are there any concrete demands from these movements? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we actually developed a whole set of demands around COVID when the pandemic hit that are sort of incorporate all of our healthcare demands and also kind of look at the broader situation. There's been a lot of organizing pre-pandemic that we're connected to through the PA Poor People's Campaign that particularly relates to prison and mass incarceration. And so it's been an ongoing demand to free vulnerable people from prison before this most recent set of rebellions. And so we're continuing to push for that as well as we face a crisis in budgets across the US due to the fact that we have a completely consumer based economy that relies on everyday people purchasing commodities. And that's 90% of our gross domestic product. So every state and the, you know, at every level is facing a very severe budget shortfall. And what we're demanding is that that budget not be balanced on the back of the working class, but that police, for example, right, the institution of policing, that money be taken from that budget and transferred into budgets for education, healthcare, housing and other things. Great, and as you mentioned, kind of this latest uprising is taking place in the context of a global pandemic, in the context of kind of the rapid spread of COVID-19 during which the US has been one of the most impacted countries. And this pandemic has also revealed a lot of the structural problems in the US healthcare system, which again is an issue that Poor People First works a lot on. And so I was wondering if you could kind of talk about some of these bigger structural issues that we see at play right now. Sure. Well, I mean, for example, in Pennsylvania, the state where I live, which has 13 million people in it, we've experienced the closure of eight hospitals just since the beginning of 2019. In, you know, and they continue to close even during the pandemic. This has to do very much with hospital takeovers by private equity and global corporations that are interested in making a profit. And when they buy a hospital, just like they would buy any other asset and it isn't profitable to them, they close it down. And this is one of the things that's impacting us during this pandemic, a structural problem of having healthcare as a commodity, as a private good, as opposed to a public good, which is the essential problem with healthcare in the United States. And so we've been really working around these hospital closings we've been calling for universal testing. Once again, we're also dealing with the fact that testing kits are being just, you know, purchased on the market. And so there's price gouging happening with actually getting access to testing. So we've called on our governor to direct production of testing kits and to direct production of personal protective equipment for all healthcare workers and all frontline workers, all quote unquote essential workers. So directing production of those things. And we've called for reopening closed hospitals. We've called for the expansion of Medicaid. Medicaid is the healthcare program that is for low income people in the US. And right now there are 1.5 million people in our state being thrown off of their employer-based healthcare. And so they're gonna be signing up for Medicaid. So we've called on our governor to immediately expand Medicaid to all PA residents and to bring private hospitals and healthcare facilities under public control for the duration of the crisis and beyond. So we, you know, calling on these for these measures because this is a very intense time. You know, it's a global recession, depression layered on top of a pandemic. And we feel like these would be the most common sense measures to actually take to keep the working class safe and to get us through this in addition to, you know, broader demands being made by the poor people's campaign for a guaranteed income, first paid sick leave and all of these things that we also have in our COVID demands. And this is what I mean when I say that, you know, what the state has done at the federal level and now at the state level where you can see also austerity budgets being put forward. For example, in the city of Philadelphia is to focus efforts on bailing out corporations, bailing out the ruling class, taking our money, our tax dollars and using it to ensure profitability for ruling class as opposed to providing a guaranteed income to get us through this crisis, providing healthcare for all, you know, on the eve of this crisis and providing what would be necessary to make sure that we don't have to go out and go to work and get sick, but we also don't have to stay home and starve because we don't have wages. And that's the false choice that's being, you know, put forward right now in the US. The healthcare struggle that we're engaged in, you know, we're engaged in it both because it is a basic fundamental human need but also because we see it as a weakness of the global ruling class. We see that healthcare is a strength for the working class in terms of everyone needs it and everyone, you know, has an interest in securing it and an interest in believing that it is actually a human right, which is so much even more clear since the pandemic that, you know, it's all connected and anything that affects any one of us can affect all of us. And if anyone doesn't have access to what they need and have their right healthcare secured, it can affect all of us. And also that the ruling class sees healthcare as a place to kind of dump their capital. They see it as a recession proof place where they can continue to invest. So that makes it a potential point of leverage for us. And it's something that healthcare really is also a global issue. It's a global struggle that unites the working class internationally. And so, you know, I know that we have learned a lot from, you know, looking at what the movements of working class people and the revolutions of working class people around the world have been able to achieve in healthcare, right? It's not just achieved as a policy solution. It was achieved through, you know, revolutionary change. And we've learned a lot from that. And we know that there are a lot of places where folks have achieved things are still in the process of moving, you know, movements forward and are, in some cases, are trying to hold on to things that they've gained that they've made. But healthcare is really a global struggle and it's a point of unity for the global working class. That's all we have time for and thank you for watching People's Dispatch.