 Welcome to economics and beyond. I'm Rob Johnson president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Elaine Brown She's the former chairman of the Black Panther Party She's an author and activist her books include a taste of power and the condemnation of little B She is also the CEO of Oakland and the World Enterprises Where she creates businesses for former incarcerated people and underserved people and she's working on the building of 79 Hounet housing units in the Oakland area To support these people and their living standards Elaine. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you Rob we've got a world that as I listen to your music as I listen to your speeches That you have understood for a long time, but with this pandemic the social dysfunction The death of George Floyd and many others We're in a place where the unmasking is now becoming What we might call common knowledge and it doesn't mean that there's not resistance to changing This system which people can see is is horrid in many ways, but I'm curious what you see right now that concerns you what you see that you find inspiring and Do you see light at the end of the tunnel not only see the light but how to get there? I'm curious how you're perceiving the challenge that the pandemic is unleashed upon us Well, I'm not sure That the pandemic has unleashed anything other than to simply expose What is there? and what is there is a country that Has created institutions or institutionalized the Oppression of black people as well ultimately of other People of color and including a poor of white people who are poor And so the rage that the one murder of George Floyd has triggered among some people is It's good to see Glad to see people are at least awake if not necessarily conscious of what needs to be done The what need you cannot dismantle a 400 year Institution or empire with some protests in the street. It's good to see some of these young people but we get distracted by all kinds of Members of the establishment putting on kente cloth and kneeling and police chiefs running around kneeling and holding black people's hands And people saying Like the Minneapolis police department. We will dismantle the entire police department And so there will not be a follow-up for that unless there is a follow-up some of these things that the young people are calling for are really very minor reforms and They will not go to the fundamental issue and if we're going to talk about the issue of George Floyd a fundamental issue of policing or not policing So many people have come to me saying well We want to take that money and redirect the police money at least as to the certain parts of the police budgets and redirect it to community to Reducing community violence. What's wrong with that? Question. Well, that presumes there is community violence And so we have to have a correct analysis in order to come to correct conclusions about what needs to be done so since people that generally really Understand that when you quote Martin Luther King I let me just quote one Big statement from Martin Luther King not a long one King in his 1967 speech where do we go from here? Advocates for fundamental change indeed. He uses the word revolution revolutionary change meaning that as he says using a Story from the Bible because he was a Christian minister of Jesus being asked if Nicodemus could be saved because Jesus was in the business of saving people and Jesus said you have been a murderer and You've lied. So the conclusion that King quotes Jesus as saying is that You committed so many sins Nicodemus There's nothing I can do to save you You will have to be born again and then King says to the audience gathered at the SCLC convention in August of 1967 America will have to be born again and he's not speaking of Christianity now. He's speaking of Being born again, everything will have to be uprooted and reorganized This was the launching of the poor people's campaign Where the goal was to use a public protest But an organized one and everyone could go to Washington, DC join in the protest the march and the occupation of DC around the White House and demand that everyone received guaranteed income until and not leave until That had been done now even then of course that demand is being made of the very people That are your oppressors and the way I see it and the way the Black Panther Party did and the way I continue to see it Is that if you're going to ask the person who's got his foot on your neck? To take his foot off well The person has his foot on your neck. So how do you expect to get that foot off your neck the famously? Quote the the viral video of Al Sharpton of all people Saying take your knee off our necks and everybody cheering is What does it mean if you're asking the very guy who's doing it to stop doing it now? For us in the Black Panther Party in the end of the day to quote Huey P. Newton When the oppressor is tired and his knees get weak we will rip his kneecaps off So I would say that at the moment of death of George Floyd It might have been better someone tried to rip off the kneecap of that cop rather than now crying and crying about and asking the very people who employed that guy to Stop doing what they're doing so the question of whether or not you can go to the people who are the The chorus the bureaucratic institutions that are supporting this kind of behavior and ask them to stop doing it is To presume that they have a moral center in the first place Which is something I don't presume and there's not a lot of evidence of that just ask a bankers a big corporations to Redistribute their wealth and to think that's really going to happen By simply marching in the street and annoying people again, you know and having Reports distracting Establishment news reports saying things like oh, well, there's the good marchers the good peaceful protesters and the bad Protesters who are throwing rocks and disturbing everybody To to imagine That that is a pathway To dismantling the system in place that put that cops knee on George Floyd's neck It is to not have a correct analysis but I'm happy to see that the spirit of some sort of opposition is finally reappearing But we certainly saw this Back in the 60s and we've seen it in other periods of time and you know given social media It certainly can You know attract and ignite Action of this kind, but the question is whether this action has any potential for Change and I think it can have the it has the potential for change only if it comes to be Developed into an organized force that is going to start the long hard march of Dismantling trying to dismantle those institutions that I've kept black people oppressed for Since the beginning of this country in Jamestown well, I I Can't help but cite your famous song sees the time the time is now sees the time and you know how I Want to go a little deeper with you into the question Which I think is the right question is asking people Who are in that bureaucracy to have a moral transformation or asking a System which has proven itself to be systemically Corrupt distorted and oppressive to somehow wake up Seems a little romantic a little too idealistic, but what do you see as the ways in which to seize the time? Is it get what do we have to get at in order to? How we say unlock transformation Well, you know a song is just a song so I wouldn't get too hung up on a song It's just an inspiration. It's like a poem or any piece of art. It's just a song It is not a direction. It is not it is in that case. I was attempting to use a song It's part of the work I was doing but my song comes Second to work as Che Guevara used to say Words of beautiful actions are supreme. There is no one answer. There's no panacea for this This took 400 years to develop. So there's no well How do we seize the time? Well, I have no idea if I had an idea How one big sweep of the hand or somebody's activity would change everything I would certainly have done it by now So there isn't any one answer Objectively speaking and we look at the analysis, you know When the content when the united states government was formed at the end of the revolutionary war in the continental congress met in 1787 in Philadelphia where I was born and I like to say that only because it likes to call itself the City of brotherly love, but it's you know the city where the country put all of its documents and all these smart men wrote all these words about the equality of men and self-governance and what have you um slavery of course had been in existence in the united states slavery of african People brought here as captives for over 150 years by then So the question came up as to the constitution What do we say about these slaves? As to our representation In voting for different offices of our new government Now nobody nobody opposed slavery Slavery was illegal. Nobody opposed it. That is to say nobody in the Continental congress that the people who are forming the government and are you know And and creating the institutions that would support what they were doing Um, nobody had any problem with slavers. The question is the southern Uh Representatives at the Continental Congress wanted to count each slave as equal to one white man Now somebody might think wow Equal no count was the question and the northern whites said no because that's unfair You have all those slaves and we don't Have that many we have them and we were making money from them, but we don't have them So the compromise if you will was to identify the black in the constitution As three-fifths of a person or a man Not value just identify it for representational purposes And this is how thomas jefferson ultimately became the third president because erin barre Would probably have been the president, but jefferson demanded a recount or demanded that the uh, that the, um The body that i've suddenly lost forgotten the name of the electoral college that the electoral college Look at this and and count those slaves In the states that voted for jefferson and he won The election by counting Each slave that they had an account of as three-fifths of a person For the purpose of his election Now this is the origin of the country really not because we know That the country really and we pegged the country's origin to the first english colony Of jamestown in something like 1619, but we know that the english arrived Incredibly on a ship called the white lion In around 1609 this is our record i obviously i can't attest to any more than what records there are and those records could be You know, maybe not as accurate as today What of course we have so many lying records today, so i'm not sure but let's assume Let's put a a peg in the date 1609 as the arrival of the first english so-called settlers and the Native people who were part of the pohattin confederacy led by polka hones's father chief pohattin Gave these people food tried to arrange things with them ultimately the english wanted more and more And they finally started burning down Native homes and everything else because they couldn't find enough food Couldn't grow any food in fact started eating. They're dead um and this kind of thing and then finally The white lion arrives, which was really called a privateer ship Which is really pirates because these people are armed ships and they go having rob slaves from a portuguese slave ship They land in the area now called jamestown virginia Named after king james author of the bible that we generally read and they dump their slaves And sell their slaves to the natives or someone for food and uh, you have the beginnings of african slavery Uh in america or in what is called america north america united states of america eventually And you have all of that history and the pohattin Then have to be wiped out and are wiped out they're removed from their lands and they're killed including pohannis's father that we like to romanticize about John smith and pohannis some fiction that we've invented though. She did go to england and all of that um And we could assess that but rather than go down there just suffice it to say that The english settlers had to completely wipe out the existence of the pohattin murder through murder and burning and violence to create jamestown And then in order to grow and continue to grow the tobacco they had started to grow They needed more labor couldn't find it and so went to the african continent where every other european was trying to Use slaves to settle other areas like the dutch and what would become wall street Which was a dutch word so The english won the day as we know because this was this is in this country arises from an english From english colonies not the french not dutch not german not spanish not portuguese i don't know the portuguese was actually here more like brazil so that violence That we talk about here and now we want peaceful protesters About a country that is founded on the gun and violence and murder And set up institutions that by the time the continental congress is meeting these men who are owners of tobacco farms and and now even slave slave trading ships like the brown family Who founded brown university? All of these men and all of them has slaves Just not maybe in the numbers in the south but all benefited from slavery So if all of them benefited from slavery, what reason would they have to abolish slavery by some moral persuasion? Even though some of them like vietnam and franklin made nice statements against slavery and the abolition at some point But they all benefited so they compromised and in the end of the day This country was not only founded with slavery as a legal a legal entity a legal institution But it had spent 150 years building up wealth that created the wealth was so big from cotton sugar Tobacco and rice that they had become richard and the very king they Saw quote independence from That is the origin of the country now until we understand the nexus between all of that 150 years before 1776 and all of the years that followed And that there was no real break in anything. There was a build-up all these wall street Companies and banks and insurance companies were engaged in the slave trade Because there was a lot of money millions of people being captured Insurance companies started writing things about slave ships and so forth These institutions exist and a lot of people Benefit from them now even more people today benefit So we're going to say well one of the biggest parts of the u.s. Budget forget the police budget Let's talk about the united states government Is what? What is it? It's the defense budget, right? We don't know exactly how much it's like at least a quarter could be almost a third of the entire budget Now we want to say take some of that money and put it to social programs to the very people that are profiting from it We have to think about that for a minute And so we have a situation where You're working at Boeing. You're getting paid $50 an hour You're not going to necessarily be inclined To want to give up that job. It's like the police jobs. These guys are basically just poor People they're not, you know Necessarily highly educated. They're not in academe. They're not in business They don't have any money. They're working for a living. They got a good pension This is tied to their to their, uh, money And so when you have a situation like, uh, george floyd The question is whose police are they? Are they the police of the money? Did I pass a A counterfeit bill? Are they the the counterfeit money police? Um, is there a realistically something? Yes, because that is who they are there to protect and serve The police exist to protect and serve the institutions that keep us oppressed And that has been true since the end of so-called end of well say the end of the civil war And the institution of policing, uh, operations as slave catchers and so forth and so on So this is so long standing But as thomas jefferson said in the declaration of independence We don't take it lightly, but we're going to, uh resist these long standing institutions the uh, of england And uh, but we don't have a con we don't have an army to continental army Um, the english had to come to the united states Get on ships and fight on territory. They didn't know Not to count the fact that a few black people with some sense said they would join the english Rather than stay with the the enemy they know Um, and so you have a situation where the conditions were ripe For revolution because that's what we talked about the american revolution american revolutionary war We don't have that army The army of the united states is still prepared to do exactly what donald trump said because they're getting paid to do it So we have to discuss How we could persuade the masses of people To demand and and in fact exact our demand To change the government um, but if we if we think that these demonstrations will cause the uh people of the government and the institutions of finance and corporate, uh institutions To change mark zuckerberg is not going to be giving up any money So they're not going to dismantle Overnight and there is no one answer. The answer is that there's a little spark going on now I'm glad to see it if I had more energy. I'd be out there running up and down, but I can't run very well anymore So i'm not going to be in a crowd that might require me to run Just a practical matter, but i'm happy to see it, but i'm not um emotional Crying this is a new day For some people it is But it's a certainly an indicator that we have The will of some people of a more and more people to see some sort of change It's just a question of what is that change and how do we how do we make it? Well, I know One of my earlier guests on this podcast Gerald horn from houston has written a book called the counter revolution of 1776 where he says the so-called revolutionary war Was in part a counter revolution a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others Which underscores exactly what you're was saying In the modern context i've seen people Both on the left and the right Talking about the prison industrial system One of my guests last week wendy brown was talking about how much money is spent on the prison industrial system In california in relation to the education budget and i was i was astounded but You've written a book uh about a A horrific episode called the condemnation of little b What what how do we repair? A profitable system That's incarcerating People in order to make money. How do we get at that? particular challenge On our current institutional grid Well, again that question calls for some panacea answer panacea and answer and i don't have that and that because it doesn't exist You know the the institutions are there so you can't just say well But even if we got rid of all the prisons and all the police agencies Would we all be living in the land of equality and justice? No, we would not Right, we would not that's right. No, we would not the psychology is too deep and like you said it's 400 years It's not a psychology. These are real things that really happen. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's right But but i would say that's located into the minds of people um, for example, um, i lived in france for seven years And when i tell people in the united states ordinary working people ordinary people that i know that Essentially medical care in france is free is essentially free for the french people and even for people like me That had no uh citizenship standing per se I was a Visitor or i i had some relationship to a french person and therefore i could Be there. There was nobody putting me out. There's no immigration policy. Certainly not on americans If i'd come from north africa that might have been different, but anyway That there was the french had uh made a decision To put money and to keeping their children and human beings uh healthy so for example, um A young woman i know a black woman who was a model a fashion model and met her husband a black man from the united states And he had a job as a designer in france and they met fell love got married and had a baby And she and she had no job no work and she told me that um All of her prenatal care was free or essentially free, you know Things like what would be comparable to 10 and 15 dollars and this is in the 90s and um She said that for the first year everything was paid for children's diapers a bed You know car seat if you had it or you know a Stroller or what have you all of these kinds of basic things, but food also Etc and then they have a thing called the crash cre ch E uh that you can if you're working your children can be months old and you can have Daycare as we would call it for children even that young and none of that stuff costs money So people are like no, how is that possible? They can't even imagine having medical care without having to pay. How is that possible? That's you know, they imagine that if you Get a see a doctor you should have to pay if you want food you should have to pay So you're right. There isn't a mindset that there's not even a way to think about this So as to the people Particularly those who don't have the money to pay It would be interesting if you could change them around by saying why should we pay? Such as the black panther party did when we instituted a free breakfast for children program and people said What I should be getting free food. Well, yeah, you don't have any money Your children are going to school hungry And we're saying this is one little teeny thing that we can talk about That you can glom onto and have changed and instituted Now that was over 50 years ago and people did and they forced the school systems To put in free breakfast and then of course, you know, the backlash was there's no free lunch and all that But that's not the issue. The issue is You cannot isolate the prison system And this abstraction called the prison industrial complex, which was really uh a term that was invented by the wall street journal Wasn't exactly somebody from the left and some people like to claim it Of that did it only because it went to eisenhower's military industrial complex The country is not living off of the prison system The prison system is just one more arm of all the other aspects of Propaturing and so forth that the country lives on um every day a lot of people get up not poor people and ordinary working people and review The uh stock exchange Now, how do you imagine? Which is changing money and and hands all over the world in matters of seconds nanoseconds given uh technology How do you imagine that you're going to take down all that trading in a single swoop? The prison industrial complex as it's called Is nothing in comparison to that now is that a reflection of one of the Aspects of the oppression of black people and other poor people because there's no rich people generally speaking in prison Yes, it is and it does have to be addressed and attacked and that could be one or more arm of things The education system is falling apart. So for someone to say Pardon me. We're spending more on the prison industrial complex than the education budget in california What's the difference black people bled and died to enforce the 1954 brown versus board of education of topeka supreme court decision to desegregate public schools in america Not only has that not happened that is to say desegregation But the schools in the black community public schools remain poorly funded overcrowded So forth and the education is as it was in 1954 now Taking money from the prison industrial complex And putting it into the budget It's just one of these kind of little things that somebody does a little study And they want to talk about how bad things are as if this is news We have been fighting for the right to be educated. Let's just think about that Since the end of the civil war we've been black people You had people like mary mcleod with them who was burning bark to create pencils to educate black children to read and write We have been fighting to just simply create a place to be educated book or tea washington Creating tuskegee institute For educating black children Getting money from white philanthropists like so many others that created the other historically black Colleges fighting toward the end of that century the 19th century to try to find some way to at least have Be conscious in a foreign land that we never We don't have any much much to do with this country So we have fought for education But now you want to say to caliph using that what you said california budget I'm not why are we surprised but what are we doing about it? If you are a guardian of california prison, you're probably making 150 000 a year now What makes you think that the california peace officers association, which was the biggest union almost the biggest union in california Which was the biggest supporter of every single governor that has been around just about especially in and including jerry brown Who the first time around you know was a uh so-called liberal You got a big powerful union like that. Do you honestly think you're going to convince these guards To dismantle the prison system when they're making 150 000 a year most of them can barely read english seriously So the question is do we want to deal with that or not? But we watch this stuff expand and the expansion of the prison system came under bill clinton Now where were these voices when bill clinton was saying? three strikes you're out Nobody was saying anything now 20 some years later. It was 1994 So I don't know what that is 94 04 14 more than 20 years later 25 years later you want to talk about how there's a prison industrial complex Well, how did it happen because if we don't understand the problem we won't understand the solution Mm-hmm. I remember on election night in 2016 I was in detroit And I stopped by to see a black gentleman who used to work in the medical office building where my father was employed His name was ulysses. I said ulysses. What's going on with this election? And I he said mr. Johnson when you go to a restaurant And there's nothing on the menu you want to order You stay home You don't you don't eat there And he said the clinton family past NAFTA past welfare reform and criminal justice reform And and people just not going to turn out Now obviously the ramifications were that donald trump won michigan's electoral votes and that was not a Wholesome outcome, but he was right He was right that he had he had seen into the legacy Of what the clinton family had represented in that particular dimension But I uh I think one of the things people in the economics Have a last name Uh, I I don't know he's listening I should make note of that but go ahead Yeah, I will I will try to find him I don't care. I was just asking you because yeah You referred to him as ulysses and he referred to you as mr. Johnson. That's true. That's true That's interesting and I got some I got some work to do there Well, I wasn't being personally critical. I was just saying that When we talk about this a slogan that even people like joe biden And cops are black lives matter What it means is really nothing But it means to any From my perspective the only thing it can mean is that it is a cry for white people To give value to black people's lives because we value our lives So who are you telling that black lives matters? You're certainly not telling me because I'm black So who could you be talking to with this slogan? Black lives matter and the only people you could be talking to are the people who are the dominant group And that is white people now not all white people are our oppressors But our oppressors are only white you see so I'm not asking anybody white to like me one way or the other My life matters to me and if you cross the line on my life I'm going to respond in a way that I know I am Valuable I don't have to prove that to you Or when I say you I mean to anyone white or somebody I don't have to explain myself I saw a superintendent Of the public school system of something like palm beach, florida or what some palm something florida Who is the first black and is there always a first black in 2020 no less and the first black superintendent schools of wherever florida Is an interview on msnbc? Talking about everything as everyone is and he says I have lived my whole life. He was 44 years old so I've lived my whole life Afraid to go outside that I might offend someone and get killed or get hurt Now let's just examine that because that's what we have to do if we want to have a correct analysis We have to break it down What do you mean that when you are afraid to go out of your house You don't you might you're afraid that you might offend someone like if I wore a hoodie sweatshirt He said something like this Now who is the someone that he's going to offend let's just think about that. He's not going to offend black people Why would we be offended by this man walking around with a sweatshirt with a hoodie on? So his point is he wants to please white people every day of his life So that they don't kill him And then we have kamala harris Who goes back and forth between being an asian american and a black american whatever that might mean And to those of us in california it means nothing because you were more importantly a prosecutor Who never found a cop that you prosecute and who never found a black man that you that you wouldn't prosecute Without a digress from her record. So You have people saying that I've lost the thread of this. I'm sorry Um Well, who you were talking about who are you trying to please exactly think about the gentlemen Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry. I lost the thread. I went off thinking about the the crimes of kamala harris So when you say you're afraid to go outside and offend someone what you mean is that somebody white Like the little stupid girl and woman in central park that was choking her dog trying to get a black man To stop doing what he was not doing um So you you you're afraid to go out because you're offending white people So you got to find ways to not be offensive to white people now Let's just think about the very idea That that's how you've been thinking all your life according to you and you've been teaching your black son The same thing don't offend don't don't say now back in the day Before the Emmett Till case came out black people in the south especially say don't look a white woman in the eyes Almost everybody black knows that that's just what is true or not. It doesn't matter We know that's how we think don't let don't let master see you don't talk back to master This will get you killed what this is our problem So we want to say our little piece of something at this point is Black lives matter. Please don't kill us hands up. Don't shoot That's the big one coming out of Ferguson that just elected his first black mayor a black city In Missouri that spent two years fighting over the murder protesting over the murder of michael brown And in between that time and this up until the other day when a black woman was elected mayor Ferguson You had a white male republican former cop who was the mayor of Ferguson and who was elected after michael brown was killed so Black people have got to get out of the mindset of being slaves And decide that we will do more than beg white people to value us Ask for the police to take their knees off our neck And decide that if you think that you can do that that's We're going to stand up and do something else and we're going to deliver a consequence that will begin to change your mind This concludes the first part of my interview with elaine brown Please stay tuned for part two and check out more from the institute for new economic thinking at inet economics dot org