 The framing of this panel is what a campaign to tax the very rich looks like in the field. And I should let you in on a planner's thing. We had a debate within our planning agenda, whether to do this session a lot earlier in the day to sort of ground the whole conversation in how does this show up in the field. And we didn't want to undervalue the role that the campaigners and organizers brought to the work. But in the end, we decided to have it at this point because, you know, we've had this conversation about policy. We've begun to have some conversations about messaging, but now we're going to ground truth this discussion. And we are so fortunate to have four of the most brilliant campaigners in the land who not only work on issues of taxes, but work on multiple issues of economic justice and social justice and think about politics, but also are connected to social movements and kitchen table organizing and the like. And we really wanted them to reflect on this day and to bring us into sort of the reality of what would these campaigns look like? How do we move these things? We've heard a number of compelling conversations about the need to shift power, to build power, to change power relations. These are folks, leaders who understand how that works. So I'm going to introduce them. They'll each speak. And then we will also maybe converse among ourselves and then have a conversation with all of you. So let me introduce our speakers. And this is the order they'll speak. Stephanie Taylor, who is Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Some of you may know her work from Bold Progressives. They have really, for like a decade, really kind of brought digital tools and on-the-ground campaign tools to changing the landscape. And so we're fortunate that Stephanie is with us. Shelly Gupta Barnes is the campaign. She works at Kairos Institute in New York City, but she's also the campaign director for a Poor People's Campaign. And you probably saw last week Poor People's Campaign was everywhere doing hearings and direct, you know, witnesses. And she works closely with Reverend Barber and others in the Poor People's Campaign. And they put forward an incredibly ambitious and bold program that includes many of the components of things we've talked about today. So we're looking forward and fortunate to have Shelly with us. Serita Gupta from Jobs with Justice. Many of you know her. She's co-director. We should also note that this is her last week as co-director. And we want to lift her up. I know. I'm so thankful. And she's been kind of been cloistered writing a book on sort of worker organizing. And later this week we'll be celebrating her tenure publicly as well. But we're very fortunate that Serita could join us to offer reflections on decades of organizing work. And Connie Raza from Center for Popular Democracy. And a number of people have alluded to the work that she was involved with both the Demos and CPD on sort of the Race Plus campaign. Understanding the interaction of race and class and the interactions of those in campaigns on the ground. So we are in for a treat. And let's give a welcome and encouragement to all of our panelists here with Stephanie going first. It might be helpful to start by laying out a few essential tactics in a potential campaign to tax the very rich. Because setting a framework for this discussion and also to make sure that we're all able in this room to operate from a common vocabulary. And as some context my organization, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and our sisters C3 and C4 organizations have employed all of these tactics successfully in different ways on campaigns for Medicare for All and expanding social security and zero debt college. And so I'm really drawing on elements of those campaigns and making sure that they're sort of put on the table for discussion here. The first is polling. I'm a big believer that any campaign has to begin from understanding how we should be speaking about and persuading people. We had a panel that very ably talked about in the ways that successful polling around taxing the rich. But we should also run polls on which messages people find to be most persuasive. Especially when we're operating in a very urgent and reactive environment, which I'll talk a little bit about later. The second would be a communication strategy and that would mean taking the winning persuasive messaging and then looking for opportunities to push it into the media. And this would also mean inserting wealth tax messaging into the preexisting news cycle. My guess is that the coming year of presidential campaigning will have numerous very ripe opportunities for doing that. The third element that we should consider is an inside-outside strategy. And that also means taking and using power. So that means electing key allies and decision makers who support and campaigned on taxing the rich and therefore they were elected with a mandate to take action on taxing the rich. And it also means giving our allies in power the mechanisms for building momentum and support. This could include everything in Congress from signing on letters, resolutions, and also making sure the draft legislation is ready to go when we are in a governing moment. That's something that we had prepared prior to the 2016 election, working with allies in Congress from Schumer to Sanders, preparing debt-free college legislation for a moment when we thought that we would have a governing moment. But it's still a good strategy. And the final is to turn wealth taxes and taxes on the rich into a mainstream issue in the political zeitgeist, which means that this issue, much like Medicare for All or Zero Debt College, is seen as an issue that is widely important to people and that people care about. So there's two challenges that personally, as I think about this and I think about the strategies, these are challenges that I'm personally struggling with. And so I wanted to bring them into the room because I thought more people could help solve them. And the first speaks to the messaging problem in those urgent reactive moments. And I want a show of hands who remembers the single, pithy, short, sticky democratic message during the Trump tax fight. Not you. We did not have rapid response networks built that could swiftly disseminate a single memorable message about the Trump tax bill. The week before that vote, my co-founder and I happened to be in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania running some focus groups. And we threw in some last minute questions about what people had heard about the Trump tax bill just out of curiosity. We hadn't even been planning on polling on this. We heard from them, this would be a fair tax. This would be a flat tax and that they would pay less. There was no kind of counter democratic or progressive message. And everybody in the room, and these were we were polling, Obama, Obama, Trump voters, everybody in the room was very supportive of the Trump tax bill. So the establishment of rapid response networks to very quickly disseminate a message feels to me like a very critical problem to start attacking. And the other problem, and this is important for establishing a public narrative, is how do we make wealth visible? Chuck Collins, our moderator, has an excellent yearly report called Billionaires Bonanza, which is a, it's really good reading. And I was reading it and one fact stuck out to me is that last year the world's billionaires grew their wealth by one trillion dollars. I can't even wrap my mind around that number. I mean, it's like trying to contemplate the origins of the universe. It's so massive and so how do we really try to make visible to the public so that they are galvanized to take political action, the scope of inequality that we are facing here, because it's so hard and these numbers are so big. I have a few ideas, but I would really love to hear your ideas. So I'll leave you with that question and that challenge on how do we make wealth visible. Shelly Gupta-Barns. Hi everybody. First, thank you to EPI and IPS for organizing this conference. As you all know, the discussion about taxation is really about building power and showing people that there is a new way to organize ourselves in this country. This is of course the role of movements and grassroots campaigns. And so I just wanted to both show that a new way is necessary, but also that it's possible. So I want to just spend a few minutes talking about what the Poor People's Campaign is doing and why taxation is such an important part of our agenda. So the Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival, is building organization and power among the 140 million people who are poor or low income in this country, who are facing the brunt of that income inequality and wealth inequality we've been talking about today, and bringing that group together with labor, clergy, and people of conscience. And we're doing that to be able to shift the narrative on poverty and wealth in this country and to impact policies and elections in our favor and in the favor of those 140 million who have been left out of the political and economic discussions in this country. This is a fusion movement. And we've organized around five pillars, systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism, and a distorted moral narrative that is centered around extreme religious nationalism. We are multiracial, multi-gendered, intergenerational, and a cross-issue campaign, and we're grounded in at least 40 states in this country. We are organizing across race and recognizing both disproportionate rates of poverty among black, Latinx, and indigenous people, and also that the largest numerical group of poor and low-income people in the United States is white. And how important it is to build unity across that racial divide and around these issues. So last year we conducted an audit with IPS on the past 50 years, since the 1968 campaign, the Poor People's Campaign, which is Martin Luther King's last campaign before he was assassinated. That shows in many ways that we are in a worse position today than we were in 1968 around these issues. We have fewer voting rights. We have fewer good jobs and government support. We have more homelessness. We have more prisons. We have more wars, and we have more wealth inequality. These findings informed our campaign's moral agenda and demands and 40 days of moral action that took place last summer. And it's also informed our activities of the past year. We've done hearings. We've done demand deliveries. We did a bus tour across 30 states that brought all these issues together and showed the life and context that these demands and agenda are connected to. And we're bridging real difference, building real unity across that. So tax reform is a critical component of our agenda for three reasons. First, as you all know, the current tax structures economically unsound. Progressive taxes can fund critical programs and investment we need. And it is in line with our morals to have a more equitable society. It is simply the right thing to do. And in our assessment, tax reform only works when it comes alongside all the other elements of our agenda. This includes cutting the military budget by $350 billion a year. It includes ending mass incarceration, having meaningful immigration reform, securing robust voting rights, having good jobs, living wages, a strong safety net for times both when we aren't working. And also to recognize the role of caregiving and home care in building this economy, having affordable housing, healthcare education for all, including programs like Head Start that encourage the maximum feasible participation of the poor, having water and sanitation infrastructure, and addressing climate change. And more, we need it all. This is what it means to be a fusion movement. We aren't just bringing different people together. We're bringing all of the issues that they are facing together. And therefore, we need to bring all the solutions together. So drawing on the work of Americans for Tax Fairness, we worked with IPS and EPI on a moral budget. And we're calling for progressive tax measures on the very rich, fair taxes on the wealthy corporations, and on speculative activity, including a financial transaction tax. And these together would raise about $880 billion per year that could go towards meeting the rest of our demands. And this is all very clearly laid out in our Poor People's Moral Budget, which shows that our morals can be consistent with our economy, an economy that works for all of us. This budget was released last week, felt like a year ago, just last week, at our Poor People's Moral Action Congress. We had over 1,000 people from 40 states come together in D.C. for three days, and the budget was at the very center of what we were doing. There were nine presidential candidates there who had to or challenged to take up our budget, this budget and this set of tax reforms. We presented this budget to the House Budget Committee, and it will be central to our organizing over the next year, as we mobilize towards a massive march in Washington in June 2020. So before I end, I just want to say a quick word on our methodology. We're a grassroots movement, and we've drawn out the insights that are coming from the grassroots for all of this policy work, from the poor and dispossessed. We're indicating a way forward, not just for themselves, but for the rest of this country. The poor are not part of any political or economic debate right now, and that's partly because they aren't organized, and also partly because of the stigma of being poor, and people not believing that poor people have meaningful contributions to make other than mobilizing and being agitational. This campaign and this report does not believe that. And instead we brought the economic and political insights of the poor to first reveal what we need and the direction we need to take. And then we found incredible partners in IPS and EPI and others to show how that was possible. So we want to really thank everyone who is part of this report. It is so critical to our work, the work around taxation, and critical to the movement we're building in this country. So I just want to end by saying what we've been saying for a long time is forward together, not one step back. Sarita Gupta. It's great to see so many old friends in this room. I'm really excited to be here. And yes, it's a little bit of an overwhelming week for me, so I'm going to do my best to stay focused on this conversation at hand. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk and share some reflections from our work at the local level as we campaign and the issue of taxing the rich has come up. I'm largely going to draw reflections from our recent campaign in Maine to win home care for all. And it's never easy as an organizer to get up and talk about a campaign that you did not win. But I'm actually going to do that today in the spirit of helping us figure out what we do better, right? So in addition to Jobs of Justice, I'm the co-director of a campaign called Caring Across Generations. And we partnered with Maine People's Alliance to run a ballot measure that would have established universal access to home care supports and services for more than 20,000 seniors and manors with disabilities. It would have been the first in the nation. Passage of the home care for all ballot measure would have allowed families and individuals to have affordable access to care, which is a really big part of what Caring Across Generations is working to do, which is to transform the way we care in this country, both to create more affordable and accessible options of care to support family caregivers and thirdly, to strengthen and grow the care workforce. Our proposal would have created a dedicated funding stream and I'm going to get to the pay for in a second. And we would have established a trust board. Actually, I see friends from Community Change here, but Center for Community Change many years ago created the community housing trust boards as a model. And so in the worker field, we are trying in fact to use that model. So this would have created a trust board for home care. Instead of what that meant, what that would mean is the trust board would be governed by sort of like a tripartite board of home care workers, families who use this benefit as well as industry together to design the programs to figure out the wages and benefits, the training opportunities for the workforce and much more. So we were very excited on the onset of running this campaign. Why did we run it in Maine? Because Maine has the oldest population in the nation. 70% of Mainers will need care just to meet basic daily needs. $54,000 a year is what it costs on average for home care, home healthcare. It's $117,000 a year on average for nursing home care. And the state is facing a message worker shortage. We know 90% of the population wants to live in home in their communities, but we don't have the workforce to support that. So massive worker shortage, especially in rural parts of the state. So through great organizing that Maine People's Alliance had been doing, this issue became more and more relevant. And therefore, we decided to move forward with the ballot measure. How were we going to pay for it? Well, we were going to pay for it by ensuring that individuals who earn more than $128,400 will be subject to a 1.9% tax on earned income above that amount, which, as you know, represents the current Social Security cap. Employers will also contribute to the 1.9% unearned income above that amount. We also wanted unearned income above the same threshold. So this is income earned from investments to also be subject to a 3.8% tax. And then 100% of that revenue would in fact be deposited directly into the trust fund. So as you can imagine, our opposition came out in full force against this. We lost the ballot measure, but we did learn a lot. And so a few things that I really want to share about what we learned about how people reacted on the ground to the idea of taxing the wealthy. Even if it would create revenue, that would make their lives better. Because let me tell you, on the doors, we heard horrific stories about people struggling to make ends meet and making choices, impossible choices between necessities. Yet they were not ready to say we should be taxing the wealthy. So what did we learn? Being on the doors, we had hundreds of canvassers, volunteers on the doors. One, we were not prepared for this to be a fight about taxes. We went into this fight and this campaign believing it was a campaign about home care. And what we really learned very quickly is that in fact, this was going to be turned into a fight about taxes. And from off the bat, language matters is what we learned. We needed people to understand that the tax is on a household, not on the individual. And in fact, our opposition was really good at confusing people. And some of that, there's a lot of like, could the language and the ballot have been stronger and stuff that we looked at. But at the end of the day, what we learned was that Governor LePage's administration at the time put out a fiscal note that made it seem astronomical, the cost of it. And basically, it turned very quickly into a fight about taxes. Second of all, we had no narrative infrastructure nor strategy to manage that in the moment of a ballot measure. The narrative, the opposition was framed and I quote, the main ballot measure is essentially suggesting that a teacher and a fireman combined salaries was going to pay for Martha Stewart's home care. So they were going after the universality, the idea that this would provide coverage to people with the means to pay their own ways. So it promoted tremendous confusion on the grassroots level. And if anyone has ever run a ballot measure, you know that ballot measures are about who you trust and confusion will kill you in a ballot measure, right? And that's really what happened. So we didn't have the narrative infrastructure to inoculate the grassroots base in the way that we needed to say, we're going to make this very ambitious proposal and this is what we're going to hear back and this is how we need to counter that. The other piece that really became an important narrative that we learned was if we tax the wealthy, they'll leave our state and people really deeply believed that, that meant jobs were going to go, the tax base was going to go and remember, these are the same exact arguments you hear when workers are unionizing, when we fight for minimum wage campaigns or paid sick days and paid leave campaigns, the same exact arguments. The third was that there was a lack of understanding of how little higher incomes are taxed. So we literally on the door heard people say, well, I believe in this, but I don't believe in double taxing wealthy people. So when the discussion, we can get more into that. And finally, we learned that we had no plan on how to talk to wealthy people about this, right? For some wealthy manors, the out of pocket cost of care would have been greater than their annual taxation under the ballot measure, like significant 50,000 to 2000, right? But people weren't willing to even be open to hearing this because all they could hear was that their taxes were going to go up. So those were some really concrete lessons that I hope I'm just throwing into the mix as we get into discussion. All of this for me just reinforces we need better infrastructure. Organizing is critical. And it's not organizing on issues. When I say organizing, I mean power building. How are we actually building power? That it is about a culture shift and learning how to talk about who the wealthy are, who are the individuals who are really shaping the economy in our democracy. And finally, that at the end of the day, I coach my daughter's soccer team. Let me just say that for a second. This is the first year I did it. They're nine-year-olds. And when you teach nine-year-olds how to play soccer, the thing you teach them is to not just look down and dribble the ball. I feel like as a progressive movement, we got to learn to look up, right? So my chant in soccer coaching is like, look up, look up, pass the ball. And so my parting words are as a progressive movement, we need to learn how to look up and figure out how we're passing the ball in the right way to each other. Many people in this room have expertise that we really could have used in the campaign and vice versa. And we have yet to learn how to really make the right connections to ensure that all of us win. Thanks. Thank you, Celica. Connie Rasa. A provocative panel and building power, right? So I think that, you know, we've all talked about it so far. I'm going to just pick up on it. But really, in order to be able to move, tax the very wealthy, tax the wealthy, taxes are good, sort of platform, we actually need the power. And we need that power through organizing and through campaigning and taking the time, actually, and having the resources to be able to take the time to do political education of the base, but also of wonks, frankly, right? We need to figure out how we talk about the economy in such a way that it is understood to be real experience and not abstractions. And so part of that means that we have to be thinking about how are we agitating around taxes in such a way that it is tied to the real things that people live and how they experience what the outcome of those taxes are. So home health care, right? There's streets, public education, all of the things that we know those taxes will pay for, but not just that, right? I think the Poor People's Campaign is a great example of being very explicit about how budgets are moral documents. Our taxes are also moral. And if what we believe is that we should have an economy that is fair, an economy in which all of us are free to thrive together, an economy in which we're able to do together the things that we are not able to do alone, then our tax code should reflect that and the way that we're talking about it needs to reflect that and the way that our folks are understanding that and understanding what it means for their lives needs to reflect that. And that means we actually have to spend the time on the doors having those conversations with them. And that means we have to have the resources to be able to do that. That means we can't be going for the quick victories, but we actually have to have the resources to build the infrastructure together. So CPD is a network of state-based organizations representing 600,000 members. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of power and it's not enough. And with Jobs with Justice, with the Poor People's Campaign, with People's Action, with Faith in Action, with a number of organizations that are building power in their communities, with labor unions that are building power in the workplace, we've got a lot of power and we don't have enough power yet. And so there needs to be an investment in building that power and in building actually understanding that we're building our sense of the solutions from the experiences of people on the ground in addition to the expertise of people who really have been studying how our economy works, how our policy works. You know, one of the things that I think is so exciting about this conversation has been how we're talking about structural change. And I think that when we think about the economy that we're in, we have to go back to, as Dorian was saying, as Valerie was saying, the way that our economy is grounded in racial capitalism, right? The way that our economy is always already about race. It's always already about those disparities and the decisions that we've made historically and continue to make that put us in a more disparate place. And that, hmm, I feel like it was Dorian who was talking about this, but I might be wrong, so I'm sorry if I'm misciting. But the way that race actually provides an excuse for the wealthy and the powerful to convince working class white folks, poor white folks, that their interests are not aligned with working class and poor folks of color. And so we have to be working to educate folks about that and about how when we're speaking in a color, I don't know where Solynda went, but when we're speaking in a colorblind way, we're not actually even speaking to the ways that that narrative is working. I also think that we have to educate people about who the very rich are. So we have ideas about who they are, but we don't actually know. I don't even know. Like I think of like the real housewives, I'm not even being funny, but like the real housewives, they're kind of rich, right? I mean, like they can go into a store and they can pay $5,000 for a watch and they're kind of rich. But like, actually, the rich have have done what Paul Krugman said this morning, they've insulated themselves. And so we don't actually even know what that lifestyle is. We don't see the rich. When I'm traveling places, I don't see them. And so the work of my colleague, Mike Kink and Charles Kahn and their work with CPD and which the hedge clippers is so important in really exposing what not just those lifestyles are, but what those interests are, what is it that they're protecting? And how is it that our policy, tax policy, certainly, but policy broadly, what is it that the policy that they're supporting and moving is actually about? What is it protecting? And what is it keeping us from? And so like, I think that if we do those things, we lay a groundwork for organizing that gets at not just the structural problem of taxes, but it also starts to help us unravel some of the work that's been done to make self-evident to folks that, well, we need to keep some people from being able to vote, obviously, right? And like, there's structural change on taxes that we can do, but also on democracy. I want to also say I think that it's important for us to unambivalently love taxes. So I think that like, it's great for us to be talking about taxing the very rich, and I think that we have to do that. But my concern is that we do that in order to hedge that we need to be taxed, we all need to be contributing, contributing fairly to the things that we have to do together. I had other stuff I really wanted to say, and I'll say it if you ask me about it. In a moment, we'll open up and maybe we can get our microphone people ready. But I wanted to pick up on a couple themes that each of you said. Stephanie says, how does wealth show up? Who are the wealthy? And I'm curious, and maybe this is, I'll start with Sarita, and this is a conference talking about taxing the very rich. What does that mean, right? And I know in the case of the main initiative, the people who would be paying more, it reached maybe into the top four or five percent of mainers. But here, we're talking about proposals that maybe tax the top one tenth of one percent that's having this disruption. So I'm curious from an organizing point of view, when we talk about tax policy, does, is that matter the distinction when you can say it's it's only a thousand households versus 6,000 households? So I'd be interested in any of your reflections, maybe starting with Sarita there. Yeah, no, I'm glad you raised that. So I don't know if people remember we did, we were part of a broader effort with many movement organizations to do what was called 99 percent spring. And it was meant to be these like porch conversations about the economy and helping people like tell the story of themselves and how they view themselves in the economy at the time. And actually coming off of that, we went into a 99 percent shareholder spring. And in that process with a lot of partners, we recognize the importance of naming who are the individuals that we're talking about in the one tenth of the one percent and actually taking the fight to those individuals in the one tenth of the one percent. And so this became really important with worker campaigns and corporate campaigns. So at the time we were supporting many retail workers at Walmart who are organizing. We were also supporting hotel workers in California who are organizing. And we recognize that there's individuals like Greg Penner, who is in fact in the one tenth of the one percent, who's married into the Walmart family, who owns a bunch of hotels, who actually is on school boards. And why not take the fight to him and have Walmart workers, hotel workers, community members, teachers and parents who want to fight around schools and actually surround him with a set of demands. And that's actually been a strategy in the field that's been developing, is how do we stop hiding or like allowing them to hide and actually name who they are, what, how they actually control important parts of the economy and how their decisions impact millions of working people in this country. And learning to tell that story, I think, is we're seeing a rise of and I think we need more of. I actually think that we need to get pretty specific about wealth. That I think that when we're talking about who are the very rich, a lot of folks think about what their income is and they think about income. But actually if we start thinking about what and talking about wealth explicitly and as many people did today during the day and how wealth functions differently and that you make money from money instead of from work and the legacy of how our decisions together have given wealth to select few primarily white folks who were maybe already wealthy and taken it out of largely communities of color, but not exclusively communities of color, that that also changes the terms of what we can imagine as solutions as well. And so I think like coupling that with very explicitly naming and targeting the folks who are using their wealth, their economic power in order to shift political power in that balance really makes a difference. I would add part of our strategy with the campaign is also to indicate the role of governments and the accountability and hold governments accountable to the people, to more people than who they are currently accountable to. This includes the federal government and includes state governments. And we've been with the help of IPS, we've developed these state fact sheets. So every state that's a part of the campaign can look through these fact sheets and say, oh wow, South Carolina, the richest 1% of South Carolina was expected to receive 30% of the benefits of the new federal tax law. Every state has that information. Every state can see what, you know, this is information that's available to people who know where it is, but a lot of these people don't know where it is from making it available. But the point of it is also to show and to reveal how governments are no longer held accountable to the poor and dispossessed, the poor and low income in this country. And so that's been a really important part to bring back, you know, this discussion of who is responsible for providing for the general welfare? What is the nature of our social contract today? And who is it with and who is it for? Which just by the way is a lot of where we see the teachers campaigns and like Educator Spring. I mean a lot of those fights are in fact about who are cities and state governments beholden to. Anyway, just wanted to throw that in there. And I would just add, I want to introduce a new concept. We've got the pay for, how about the paid buy? I think that Elizabeth Warren does a great job with her wealth tax of always describing it in very sticky ways. One, you know, two or three cents on the dollar, which I think is very memorable and easy for people to understand. But she also uses it to say this is how we pay for these things that are good and important for society that people want. And I think that what we can, what would be great to see, especially from the policy arenas, every time we see policy proposals, they didn't just include, you know, what they cost, but also, you know, one penny on the dollar from billionaires will, you know, provide free childcare to X number of families and really start to build in that paid buy. And then I think the next layer on top of that is let's, you know, name who these billionaires are, who, you know, are going to be paying that penny on the dollar. Can I just add, there's something, and this is like my drum that I beat all the time, but there's something to the grammar. And I just want to appreciate Valerie, how you were very specific about how we've made decisions that lead to these disparities rather than taking the current balance as like just nature. It's just what is. And then we're going to go from there. I just think that it's so important for us to name who decided what, that does what, and how when we're speaking. Let's open up. We're looking for a couple of pithy questions in our final 15 minutes there. John and Josh had deployed people there. Sure. I heard in the conversation with the main referendum, the argument that I've heard a lot of times, oh, if we do this or do that, everyone will move out of our city, out of our state, out of our country, move to Mars, whatever. Can we make the argument that like we have to stop appeasing these people? Any comments? How about in the back right there? Yeah. Elephant in the room that has barely been referred to, except thank you very much, but Ms. Gupta Barnes talking about the Poor People's Campaign, I was there, it was wonderful. Militarism, and it crosses over because a lot of the filthy rich are manufacturing murderous machines. We have 800 to a thousand bases all over the world in more than three quarters of the world's countries. I mean, just on and on and on. And we have to address that too, aside from the filthy rich is the filthy rich Pentagon. As Jesse Jackson said back in the 80s, you get the money where the money went, and a lot of it went to the Pentagon. We have to get that back too. Any amens from the choir? I'm just looking at people who haven't had a chance to ask a question yet. Let me come over here. We're looking for a non-repeat offenders. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much. So one question I have is as we're looking at a potential tax on the upper upper echelons, one thought that I had is with the main tax, what extent do you think, because it was 110,000 that people might think, well, geez, that might actually be me. I know Salinda once said like a year and a half ago, when we were working on the tax cups, job debt, is that people think, oh, I might actually make a million. So they see themselves in a higher bracket. I wonder if you feel like, if Maine had been on the upper 1% or upper 110, the 1%, do you think the outcome would be different? Is that enough of a change that could shift it? Yeah, great question. I'd be curious to what my fellow panelists think I'm at. We found on multiple campaigns that this piece that you just said, people aspire to be rich, is a real thing. Even if there's so far, I mean, there were people on the, when we were on the doors, there were people who were very clear, I make less than $50,000 a year. I am never, ever, ever going to make $128,000 a year. But I still might, you know, like there's this like, which, you know, it is, it is, but it speaks to why this is more than just messaging. This is like, it is a cultural, like reality that we have to actually confront, which means that we have to have a deeper strategy, which goes back to the organizing and the power building becomes so critical, the conversations with people and helping them understand what's really at stake. I mean, how our economy really functions, what is our, I mean, most people that we spoke to didn't even realize how little higher incomes are taxed. No idea. And so their assumption is everyone is getting taxed equally, right? It's like, and so we have a lot of work to do, all of that to say. So I'm not sure, actually, that it would have made a huge amount of difference. But I'm curious about my panel, panel panelists. By the way, I love this all women panel. Sorry, and you, Chuck. I'm honored to be here. Yeah. I could say maybe on the, on the other side of it, in terms of, you know, political education and awareness, you know, we've the poor people's campaign has really taken on the word poor. And what that means. And the Washington Post fact checker took us on as well. Well, it took Biden on to be more clearly, you know, kind of taking, we say there are 140 million poor and low income people in this country. But, and that's true. And but, but what it means, like what the meaning of that, how you become poor, if you failed as a, you know, moral failure of you have, you don't pray hard enough, you don't work hard enough, all these things. I think that's part of the, the association of, you know, where people see themselves, right? The aspirational, it's one thing to be aspirational. It's one kind of a shame that's built in in being poor, not being able to meet your needs. And part of part of the responsibility, part of the narrative change that we are trying to do is to move ourselves from, you know, you know, self blame to social claim and saying no, this is not the fault of the poor. Poverty is a process and it is caused by systems and structures that make poor, you know, make people poor differently. That's what racism does, right? And, and sexism and all these other isms. And, and then there there has to be a process to correct that and we can do it. Take organizing, right? It takes like people who people trust building the relationship to be able to have a counter cultural shift, right? And so I just think that there's this great partnership that I sure all our organizations participate in with organizations like EPI and IPS that give us the tools to be able to have those conversations and help people tap back into what they know and to be able to feed sort of some of those the findings that we get from those conversations as well back over. And there's also, and I think you were getting at this with your remarks too, that there's a difference between being a rich person and a wealthy person. And I feel like so often our conceptions of rich people are, you know, come from Real Housewives and Million Dollar Listing and, and are really divorced from, you know, what we're actually talking about when we're actually talking about, you know, this wealth that, you know, this kind of just, just voraciously moving through the world with very little human touch to it. And, and so I think that gets back to the challenge that I keep posing, which is how do we make that visible and how do we make that concrete? It's funny, Frank, Robert Frank wrote this book called Richistan and he, he broke the rich into several villages. You know, there's Billionaireville, which is, you know, and then there's Upper Richistan, Middle, you know, he sort of had this, and who's in what tier and where do their money come from? And so anyway, might be fun to do a popular education version of who's living in rich, when we say rich, what do we mean, you know, and then see if it can be helpful in a campaign context. Did, did we have a question right here? Yalani? Thank you. Former mayor of Berkeley, California. Having worked in movements for many, many years, I've seen citizen organizing. I'm assuming you mean some kind of door knocking, but I don't know. I've seen it come and go and we have not taken power yet in spite of the promise. So my questions are, for all of you, how do you deal with registering people to vote or talking about that? How do you inform and involve the people that become members by donating? And how do you work together nationally? Do you carve up the territory or do you compete for funding and supporters? How does this actually work to build a movement? Anybody want to tackle that? You don't all have to answer that. As what had been into action, what had been an ongoing conversation among many of us, that we need to collaborate more and move big funders especially toward helping us do that instead of being in a competition mindset. I think that one of the challenges for progressive organizations is that progressive funders look for quick wins and conservative funders have a 40-year plan. And so it's a different dynamic and an ecosystem. And so I think that those are challenges. I think that probably all of us are experimenting with traditional organizing, online organizing, and a range of other kinds of ways of engaging folks and moving people to action in the real world. And so I think that those experiments are really exciting and require patient money, frankly. And I think that I'm actually so hopeful and optimistic in this moment about how the progressive infrastructure is coming together and really thinking about creative ways for us to work together to honor the work that we've all done already, but also to really maximize our impact in this moment and beyond. Others have things? Well, I would ditto everything Connie just said. And it is true that I think we're in a moment of incredible transformation, like economy, planet, everything, in addition to like how we as movements can meet the moment. And so the experimentation is real. People are really trying new things and ways. And I think we do need patient money. So I loved how you just said that. And I want to acknowledge, and partially I'm in it because I'm transitioning out, but there are real generational shifts happening in our movement. And young leaders and leaders of color and more women of color who are running organizations who deserve the support and the long term support for the work that's happening. And I'm saying that because I think a big problem we have is that often donor bases and funders are not as comfortable when the person they've seen for 20 years, 30 years run an organization transitions. And that's real that we have to actually contend with, because the money question gets harder and harder. And if we are really a movement about equity, and we believe we want more people, more diversity and leadership, then we actually need to support leaders who are stepping up in this incredibly difficult moment in our history. So one of the ways that these will be our final comments, we're going to close out with this particular question. One of the ways we've been kind of encouraging that new leadership is the poor people's campaign is a state based movement. So we have committees in 40 different states. And that's where we actually drive all of our online donors, anybody who's giving, we encourage them to go to the state committees, because that's where they're going to be doing the cultural events and the door knocking and the organizing. That's where they need a place to to jump in when and if they can. And on the other hand, we know and we are going to be registering people for a movement that votes. We also know that one election is not going to change everything. So we have to build, as we've been saying, the long term infrastructure and capacity among ourselves, but with everybody in this room and everybody's not in this room to to to build something out for the long haul. We very much believe in not reinventing the wheel and also trying to do more with less as we all have to do in the progressive movement. You know, we supported 1100 candidates last cycle across the country and that required very intense on the ground work with local partners everywhere across the country. But I do think that investment in long term infrastructure, if there's sort of one one thing that I think you would hear from most progressive organizers, it's sort of a plea for an investment in long term infrastructure when we are we're the other side is dramatically dramatically outspending us. Please join me in thanking our panel here. Thank you all.