 Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Today we feature part two of my interview with Elaine Brown, former chairman of the Black Panther Party, a musical artist who had two wonderful records, one with Motown called Elaine Brown and the other called Seized the Time. She is a very, very vibrant activist and author. Her book A Taste of Power and her work in Oakland today, creating housing for the underserved and opportunity is extraordinary. I hope you enjoy our second conversation. Thank you. I remember the energy in some of your music that, how do I say, captured that vitality and I remember it being controversial at the time. And what fascinated me, this is just an aside about some of your music was you had a very sophisticated technical sense in your music and then a very fierce sound in lyrics, lyrical presence. And it almost was like, I think of the old Trojan horse, like your music had this soothing way of diffusing in and then opening onto the challenge. Much more, much more powerfully, much more directly. And I'm curious whether you think the arts can penetrate things now. When like a song like the end of silence, yes, it's time, you know who you really are and not try to whitewash the truth. You're a man you see and a man must be whatever he'll be or he won't be free. That sounds like you were singing that to that person who was trying to please. And I found in many of your songs, which might call it the chorus that the resolution was an intensity. And as you mentioned, Shay Gabbara, having to take action. But like you said, it's only a song and action is supreme. Well, but to the art's play a role, do they help us? Do they help us mount our courage and stop being differential? I would say no. I would say that, but they may inspire someone to think about something. I mean, you know, there was a person that I knew or met that was writing a book about the influence of could have been Bob Dylan's music. And we all like Bob Dylan at the time, I certainly did. And I still like Bob Dylan's music from that era. But Bob Dylan's music didn't move a thing. Now, did the people sing blowing in the wind? Sure, they did in large numbers, just like they sing Beyonce songs and some other stuff. They've got more millions of people now listening to the entertainers of the world. But Bob Dylan was had a lot of messages in his songs. But are they going to be an instrument for change? I'm not so sure. I don't see any evidence of it. So I told this woman and she was telling me as a songwriter that, you know, she she was annoyed that I couldn't see the value in songs, you know, or poetry. You got 80 million black people out here to think they're rappers and some of them in the beginning of rap as it as we've now come to call it rap. But we used to have, you know, rap kind of stuff, you know, oral traditions that go back to the slave era. And this is coming out of that. But going, going using rap, rap Brown was called rap Brown because he could rap. He was very good at, you know, being street rapping, you know, rhyming and all of that. That was pretty common in the black community, especially in urban areas. And so as it evolved in the beginning, you had NWA and you had iced tea iced tea had a song out a piece out called cop killer. And Dan quail said, if we hear this song told Sony or whoever it was, that we better not hear that song again, because he was advocating killing police. This was iced tea iced tea. Right. Right. And, and so Sony told him they reissued the CD and told him he'd been not singing at a concert. His contract was became now iced tea came to play the police on TV. So that's how relevant his message was that Dan quail personally was offended by it and a bunch of other people like John Wayne, I think Wade and somebody like that. It was amazing. It only took one or two prominent white people to shut that music down. Okay. Now, you know, I love writing songs and I love singing songs and I like playing songs on my piano. And so all of that is a personal pleasure that I find even inside of all of the chaos and war that we have been going to for all of my life. And so it has brought me a certain amount of comfort. I express the thoughts that are going through my head as to what I see, because that's what art is. It's, you know, all of it is a reflection of what somebody else, what is going on on the ground. It isn't the action. It's a reflection and report a so forth of the action that something you don't have a painting of nothing, although you do have abstract paintings, but people make paintings of stuff people and events or whatever. Take a photograph of something that is real otherwise what is the photograph. So the action is the driver. Why are we moved by the George Floyd thing because we actually had to witness the murder of a human being. And for nine minutes and people became glued. I couldn't look at it because I didn't see the point. It reached the point of being, you know, voyeuristic and crazy to sit there and want to see and he called for his mother and all that. Those are the things that have moved a lot of people, though. But they wasn't a song and it wasn't the video. It was what happened and they saw what happened. It's the same thing with during the era of Dr. King. You know, up until World War Two, nobody in America had a TV to look at to talk about everything like what was on TV today. Once there was mass production of things like televisions and refrigerators and what have you, which I don't want to get into how that all happened. But anyway, once there was this mass production of things like television and the world, as we used to say the world is watching people saw that black people were being beaten up for trying to go to a restaurant or a restaurant. They saw dogs being put on people who tried to vote. They didn't know that this had been going on. See, so that's what's happening today. This stuff, black people's like coronavirus, what's new? I've been suffering from the highest rate of prostate cancer death since there's been an identification of prostate cancer. I have the highest rate of breast cancer death. I have the highest infant mortality rate. I have the highest maternal mortality rate. This is in terms of just health care. I'm speaking up. Okay. That's not counting asthma rates and all the other things that I could say that black people live at the bottom of life in America. So coronavirus is like, oh, are black people dying in greater percentages and everybody else? What a surprise. It's only a surprise to white people. It's not a surprise to black people. We've been living like this all of our lives. All of us have been fighting to try to expose it and reveal it and that's what's happened. But as far as music, I mean, I've written about, since I've been in the coronavirus lockdown, I've written probably 10 songs reflecting my own feelings about some of these things in terms of why aren't we fighting? That's my basic message. Why are we crying? Why aren't we fighting? So I don't think that anything I could sing, even if I were Beyonce, or my good friend Alicia Keys, who I think has wonderful music. I absolutely adore her. She does have a little more meaning in some of her music than a lot of others. And people can sing. You can go to a concert with people like Alicia Keys and what have you. And these people can sing every single word and nuance that she's ever written. I saw some people during this, all these various things about the spirit of coronavirus and these first responders. I really detest that term. Some hospital workers were looking at John Legend over there, like a TV connection just to that hospital and the people that work in intensive care and what have you. And this was like their little entertainment or something. I don't know what John Legend thought he would be. And he came on and got this big screen TV and he started singing his song, All of Me. I couldn't tell you three sentences in that song. Everybody there was softly singing. It was quite beautiful. And they had a little break from watching people die all day long while they all sang All of Me. So what was the value of that? Well, I think it was inspiring and giving them a moment to reflect and think about love and think about something else. But did it matter in terms of the people that were dropping dead on that floor in that Brooklyn hospital? I don't think so. I know Wesley Morris, a black writer for the New York Times, recently had our article about Patty LaBelle's live version of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes song, If You Don't Know Me By Now. People that found solace and emotional power in that. I want to... You can't just throw that out there and not let me comment because... First of all, I saw that person attempting to make some sense out of If You Don't Know Me By Now. The singer was really a Teddy Pandagrat. The song was put out by the group then called If You Don't Know Me By Now by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, which is a Philadelphia group and which Patty LaBelle is from Philadelphia and never lifted her finger that I know of to do anything about the oppression of black people. So let's not get it twisted. Not her, not Harold Melvin and not Teddy Pandagrat, although he put one song out called The More Interesting Song, Wake Up Everybody, was a song that he did that she could have sung that might have been more direct. If you don't know me by now, of course you can flip any song into meaning anything. But I don't even understand the connection between a romantic song that a guy is singing to his woman because she thinks he's cheating and the moment. There was a song that Teddy Pandagrat put out that was very popular called Wake Up Everybody. There was a song like that. Marvin Gaye had what's going on. These songs have been great, but have they moved anybody to do anything? Have these people used their voices, these powerful recording stars, rappers, basketball players? Have they used their platforms, their incredible platforms to do anything? No. Colin Kaepernick did a minor thing, took a knee, the whole world went crazy and the only reason he did that is because he was sitting on the bench during the national anthem, something I've done all my life. And one of the coaches said, you can't just sit on the bench. And he said, well, then I'm going to do something that looks respectful. I'll take a knee like a prayer, but I won't stand for it. Now that was all that Colin Kaepernick did. That's all he did. And everybody went damn crazy. It ain't like he went out there with guns blazing and said, okay, if you killed Trayvon Martin or whoever it was, he was upset about one particular case like this case of George Floyd. All right. Now I'm going out here and find this cop and blow him away. Not like he did something like that or encouraged that or anything else. He just silently, that was less than Martin Luther King did in the little marches. And that became a big drama. I haven't even seen Patty LaBelle do that. So you can't quote Patty LaBelle, not you. To me, as though that's slick stuff that happened. And isn't that great that she reissued that? No, it's nothing. It is a distraction to keep people from thinking about where are we now. So you can, I saw a little girl. There was a moment when these little girls walking around with a placard that says, we're not our ancestors. Excuse the language. We'll fuck you up. Really? You really think, you know, I know 10 cops in Oakland. I could walk down the street with a beat you have to death for carrying that sign. That's how it is. Not to count how disrespectful it is of a 400 year history of resistance. That's just disrespectful. So these kinds of words and slogans, black lives matter. If you don't know me right now, you know what, you think that, I mean, not you want you, you think that's slick. That's hip. That's in that cool. What are we really dealing with this? In a serious way? Well, I've seen people here in Oakland on a caravan of cars blowing their horns, reaching out of their cars, windows and rooftops with placards that say black lives matter and justice for George and whatever other little slogans they've got, driving by homeless camp encampments in their cars. See any contradiction in that? Seeing songs doing the electric slide in front of the Oakland city hall. No, I don't think that this cultural question, but there could be a place where instead of doing a Twitter, Instagram message, these people could be doing something with their tremendous global platforms to really be inspiring. But their music is not it. I spent some years in my life making blues records. And really what I was looking for was Mississippi, Alabama, deep blues. And there was one artist who is no longer alive named Willie King. And he had a song that reminded me of some of the ways you've painted the picture today. It was called terrorized. And it started out, you're talking about terror. You're talking about terror. People I've been terrorized all my days. They hung me from the tallest oak tree. They changed my name. They left me in chains. Willie wrote that song on the night of 9 11. He was watching all of the TV. And he wrote that song. He made a demo of it and he called me and he said, can I can I make a blues album that is about love? And I said, well, I imagine so. But why are you asking? And he said he saw this response to 9 11. And everybody's concerned and everybody's uprising. He said, how come they never think about black people like they think about those people. And then the next day he said, he wanted to put that song out but he wanted to embed it in an album about love because all of those people that were killed in 9 11 were not perpetrators of the feelings he had. Society was the perpetrator. And so he wanted to address that in the record. But I remember those very strong feelings he had about what you might say, all these structural things, all these inhuman things that I remember Bob Dylan wrote in one of his earlier songs, Masters of War. Let me ask you one question. Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think it could? I think you will find when your death takes its toll, all the money you made will never buy back your soul. This predation upon humanity, particularly enormously on black people, is the hideous in humanity. And I don't know if the music can help us get over it. But I think people like you looking it in the eye are helping people with my call come to the awareness. And I guess I want to ask you, you told me that you've been building in Oakland. You've been putting together as the CEO of Oakland and World Enterprises, something to help formerly incarcerated people, something to help the Oakland community, something to help with housing. What inspired you to do that? And how can people join in helping you? Well, you know, it wasn't an inspiration. I mean, it's pretty obvious that housing is a problem. Yeah. That doesn't require too much thought, really. But in particular, the focus mission of Oakland and the world is simply to create businesses for ownership by formerly incarcerated and what I call other extremely socioeconomically marginalized people, meaning poor black people, mostly. Now, the point, though, is in the absence of a real movement, any absence of a movement, despite what my friend Angela Davis likes to say that the reason that people like me don't see a movement because it's being led by queer women of color. I like to know where that is. But anyhow, the question is, what can you do when you've arrived at my age? And there are the same issues facing us, but I have tools of at least a history to begin to think about ways we could create what we called back in the day a survival program, meaning in order for you to begin to even fight or think about fighting, you cannot be hungry. That is why we fed people. We fed them for several reasons. One, because they needed the food, but we certainly couldn't handle the kind of volume of people, of food that people would need across the country. We were the Black Panther Party. We weren't the government. So the breakfast program had several purposes. One was to feed the people that got fed. Another was to organize people around their human right to have food and that money should not stop them from being able to eat or lack of money, which gets them into capitalism, but we're not going to go there yet. We're just going to talk about breakfast, and then we might talk about lunch, and then we might talk about dinner. We might talk about housing. We might talk about healthcare and so forth. And bit by bit, as Lenin suggested, the people will begin to make demands on the government that the government can accommodate, but there will be that one demand that it won't, and that's when the people will be ready for revolution. That's the short overview. So that's our goal. So when I looked out, there were so many things, and I do think music can get people thinking just like speeches, otherwise I wouldn't know. Now, as one person, a guy who's here in the city of Oakland, who is a county supervisor, which is the administrative body that runs the county, everything, healthcare, public health, the sheriff's department, everything else that's here, really it's just an administrative body, but it is elected, and there are only five of them in this county, and this is one of the top big counties in the state of California, which has the largest economy, all the other stuff you know about what California is. And so this guy asked me what did I think we could do, we could do, about recidivism. So that's how stuff gets parsed out. You know, you start saying, what should we do at the prison industrial complex? As though there's some answer, just a minute, let me come up and tell you what it is. What can we do about recidivism? Well, as I said, in order for you to have a solution, you at least have to know what have a correct analysis of the problem. Now what is the reason that people keep going back to prison, who been to prison? Well, it's not really complicated. Usually it's poverty. I don't have anything, and then when I come out of prison, I have even, that's why I went to prison, I robbed somebody, 90%. Everybody's not a child molester, everybody's not an arsonist, everybody's not a mass murderer, a matter of fact you can't find any blacks that you can identify. So what is it that people generally go to prison for, or maybe they go to prison because they beat up somebody who was the lover, there's a love question, but the murder rate, which is really not that high, it's like 9% of the total number of so-called crimes, you have a lot of people that we know in there on, at this time, drug-related charges, are just doing a long time because of the Clinton 3 strikes bill, and certainly the one that Pete Wilson followed up with in California. So you have a situation where I went to prison because I tried to rob somebody and as I'd like to tell all of my brothers and sisters, especially their brothers, I can't believe you went to prison for like $100, $200 or $1,000, whatever it was, you need to go to the Wells Fargo School of how to rob and not go to prison, that's the school you need to be in, because you're not good at it, that's why you're in prison, you're not good at robbing, these people are professionals, this is what they've been doing since the beginning of time in this country now. So you went there because you didn't have any money and all the reasons that and all those things that were happening in your life, you got mad at somebody, you robbed them, you robbed another dope boy, you went downtown and snatched somebody's purse, whatever dumb stuff you did that put you in prison, what have you learned in your years in prison, that would be nothing. You've learned that you shouldn't have made that mistake and when you come out, you might want to get better at it. You have not learned to say to yourself why didn't I have money to buy food in the first place? None of that. So you get out and in California right at this day, if you were to go to prison, and let's say you do a seven-year term, which isn't extremely long like so many of these guys I know done 25, 30, 35 years, you do seven years and you were a little dope boy over on some corner and you get out and your corner is gone, nobody is even recognizing and they don't care. So you're not going to be selling any dope, you're not going back to your business and making it better. Where are you going to live? You don't have any money and your step mother, whoever it is that you used to, auntie grandmother is like, I don't need you in this house boy, you ain't got no money and you ain't got no job. You cannot get a job because you're formerly incarcerated, you cannot get a place of your own if you had any money because you're formerly incarcerated. What are you supposed to do? You're not going back to what you know. And that's any crime. So-called crime. Of course I say that crime is a political question, not a moral question. It's legal, but it's a political question. You know, if Wells Fargo rips off all these people and houses and everything else, is anybody from Wells Fargo going to prison for that? No, they're stolen millions, millions, millions of dollars and nobody's going to prison. But Dante and them in the hood, you know, they're going to get off some corner store for 20, 30 or 40 dollars, they're going to do four, five, six years or whatever it is. And if it's your third strike, watch out, you might do, you know, 35 years. So Keith Carson asked me what should we do? So the analysis is they need a job on day one, when they're coming out, when they hit the ground, they look $200, they need to- somebody needs to be standing at the door saying here's a job or money that is. And so I said, why don't you go to all these big corporations that are keeping people who are formerly incarcerated from even having a job and asking them will they give you a little pilot program? Now nobody ever did that. In other words, go to Wells Fargo, go to Safeway stores, go to Clorox and all these companies that are based in the Oakland area and ask them would they give you five jobs dedicated to formerly incarcerated because there's a lot of government money going into reentry programs that do absolutely nothing. They don't get people jobs not percentage wise. So just go to these big corporations so they can open up the door maybe to somebody else saying I'd hire you. Well, he didn't do it. Nobody talked about it. So then he called me again and said, well, do you have any other ideas? I said the only way people are going to survive, survive now. Remember this is not helping. I'm not a charity person at all. I don't even believe in it. I do help a lot of people on a day-to-day get past a certain moment but I'm not a big believer in charity and then we just go home and forget about it. Like, oh, you know, I went to Africa and helped them to get water in the village. You know, who cares? So, well, I mean somebody cares. That's nice for those few people that got water in the village but you know, give a man a fishing pole kind of thing. But more importantly there's a question of self-determination. I don't have to beg for a job. I don't have to ask the white men am I offending you by being formally incarcerated? Are my pants sagging because you don't like sagging pants? Do you want to deal with a suited up Negro? You want to deal with someone who's more acceptable, who speaks your language, somebody like Cory Booker even though he might be saying some sort of progressive things. We don't want these dantes in our face in our spaces. We don't even want him doing gig jobs. You know, these little delivery jobs. We don't want him. He's offensive to us. He's offensive. His pants are hanging down. He doesn't even speak good English. He's uneducated. He's a criminal. All of that. So, what are you going to do? The only way you're going to do anything is they got to have their own money and the only way you don't have it is to have their own business. And that goes to a question of seeing themselves as not just being someone who works for or who has to beg for life, but who is in control of some portion of his or her life. He said, could you do it? I said, yeah. I had no idea at all about how I could do it. And so I just drove around West Oakland which is a part of a Keith Carson's district. That was the supervisor who asked me this. And I looked for a lot or some empty space where I figured I could put with his help, of course. I mean, I don't have a county money. They do. The county of Alameda County has almost three billion annual budget. That's a lot of money for a budget for what they do. And not to count reserves of a couple more billions. And so, and they're in the black. They don't owe anybody. So I'm figuring we're going to talk about how you can fund this thing once I figure out what this thing is. And so I eventually rolled around West Oakland because that's where black people used to be in predominance where now when I lived in Oakland black people were 49 to 50% of Oakland were now 22% when I lived here in the black Panther Party that is. And now we're 22% and in West Oakland we were like 70% and we're like 22% in West Oakland and we're like, you know, you know, quote unquote gentrification. So I drove around to look for vacant lots to say maybe I could create a little kind of like a little mall here and put up all these businesses. And that would be a lesson in self-determination. Like you don't have to beg. You can own your own stuff. So that's why I did it. And so I was able to acquire through cajoling through a whole bunch of stuff using my voice as a former leader of all the people in the city government who deserve to have people be mean and ugly with it because they have done nothing. There was no policy in this city, not one to provide any type of affordable housing. In fact, you know, in most cities there's a general plan and then you have a specific plan where people look into where they want to be in 20 years and all these other things and in the West Oakland specific plan was passed in 2012 led by a black woman elected official the one sentence in it or the one section in it that was the most egregious was that no new housing developer would be obligated to build any affordable housing. Now that was actually written in so in case you thought there was an affordable housing program there isn't. There isn't. So the property that was able to get the city to say that it would convey to me if I could develop it was like that. It had been created in bacon was on a corner of a main thoroughfare but led into a neighborhood on one side on the smaller street and it was three quarters of an acre and I just kept going around saying give it to me you're not doing anything with it the law should allow you to do it because you have bacon property or got anything from surplus land to and you know I had to educate myself on all these little details but the bottom line was I was able to get the city to convey the property to my organization under certain conditions and one of the biggest conditions was that I had to build housing I thought no problem until I understood what a big problem it was and how hard it was and how there's really nobody black doing any building because people can't get there's no contractor no black contractors here there's no black developers here and all the affordable housing developers are white organizations and then there's getting the money but in any case I've turned the corner it's a 62 million project we've had all the stuff done that we need to have done we're what is called entitled and so now we're just finishing up architectural drawings going back to get our planning permits got a contractor I have a black architect can't find a black contractor but we have an Iranian guy and we're going to build 79 units of housing now that may not seem is not much to me it's nothing really but each unit in the Bay Area right now do you know what the cost is to build one unit of housing at this point new housing whether it's affordable or not doesn't matter huh I do not well I can tell you that in Boston it's around 200,000 a unit in Chicago and in Oakland and in Bay Area right now we're at 750,000 a unit so in order for me to build 79 units I'm in 62 million dollars budget most of which is going into construction but we do have services and all that little we have all the whistles and bells and we also have the bottom floor we'll have a restaurant we'll have a neighborhood market we'll have a fitness center and we have a garden there now it's been there since I was able to get control of that property we've had a garden operated there called West Oakland West Oakland not Garden West Oakland Farms and we sell our little product all of the workers there are formerly incarcerated being paid $20 an hour I've had to hustle like somebody crazy to get this money together still do but believe it or not I've been able to do it I was taken to the grand jury one time about how did I do this you know it's like go ahead now you don't think I will go down on bad books to you so you know it's a nonprofit for God's sake I have never been paid one penny from it and never would I and so what our goal is is that we create these basic businesses to create a model and to show that we can create housing none of my housing will be all of it is when I say 100% affordable there levels of affordability that are like a joke right now in the city of Oakland what is called area median income is a 99,000 an individual so you can charge rent based on 30% of income and call that affordable today so it's kind of goofy right but I don't have anything over 60% and most of my units will be under 30% affordability which means you ain't making no money so but I have subsidies from the HUD subsidy pot despite the existence of Ben Carson and I have worked like a dog to put this in place to create a model that I think I can replicate in other cities and show people how they can go through a lot of this exercise but this is nothing it's just a program of survival and that's all I could do under the circumstances but in addition I have formed a political group we could say that we want to deal with things that are outside of my non-profit universe so that things that I cannot do with a non-profit that address questions of policing and all the other ills that we see and so we're having a little food giveaway this weekend and we had one just to begin because under the coronavirus thing we haven't been able to really build ourselves the way we'd like to but we will and we operate what I like to say we've resurrected the spirit of the Panther and that's what I'm also doing right now well bless you for that that is amazing it it's so practical it's so tangible and I'm sure it helps break that spiral that you talked about when people come out of prison they got no platform on which to invigorate themselves when they're in prison they're not afforded much support in learning and evolving themselves and then with the housing I it's just it's very inspiring and I want to include on our website related to this the destinations where people who listen to our conversation I appreciate open in the world and you know and I've got another housing that I'm affiliated with that is to say open in the world called Mark Twain senior homes and this is 102 units of senior housing that need that we're going to rehabilitate and people are living there when I went there and I saw they're all my age but for I could be there and matter of fact there's only a matter of this or that that I would have been there well now I wouldn't have been because I couldn't have taken it but and a lot of these people are living in you know spaces that are under 300 square feet and don't have a bathroom and so we had to do a lot of fighting but my co-developer Ali Keshani and I have figured out a way to get these units rehabbed to buy this building and get it rehabbed so that people can have a decent housing in other words why are we figuring out how to change government policy for the next 20 some years somebody got lived somewhere I don't have the answer I'm just saying this is all I can do within the framework and the limitations we don't have a big movement acting on anything what we have is a bunch of people who and I'm not speaking of the people marching in the street but what they have yet to see is how their government will react to all of this I don't care how many needs the Kamala Harris Congressional Black Caucus Karen Bass and all these Negroes took a knee yesterday had the nerve to put kente cloth around them symbolizing their Africanness I guess and talking about they're going to have some kind of police reform bill and have the nerve enough to promote one of the aspects as though that was significant to outlaw the chokehold now can you imagine that in 2020 the chokehold hasn't been outlawed and here these Negroes from the Congressional Black Caucus think that they are coming up with a plan that will pacify let's think through everybody and get everybody back in line now this is how Johnson did with the poverty program Watts was torn up Detroit Detroit was torn up when King was killed every city in America was torn up the rage was there nobody knew what to do Johnson said I know what to do got the little Kerner report to say America was two countries black and white one a separate and unequal and that one line triggered what the poverty program and what did the poverty program do well it broke out it made it turn into called poverty pimps everybody who could figure out how to write two words was applying for some poverty program money to put up absolutely nothing and the big thing was I have an arts program that's Afrocentric or I have a liquor store now if you had a liquor store you could get an SBA loan if you look like you want to be black in the state of California especially I know because I was around at the time they were giving out money to keep the jungle quiet here's your money now please let me wage my war in Vietnam and stay out of our business just let me go on 68 the war is going on in 65 I have given you the voting rights act and the civil rights act the civil rights and voting rights act in 65 I'm invading the Gulf of Tonkin now I want you to stay out of my way now here is some money and everybody except for some of us and including and Martin Luther King if you would allow me I would have said that I said except for some of us especially Dr. King which is why he was killed as far as Elaine is concerned because he continued and focused more on the core issue which was money and so but that money was given out now is a proliferation of these ridiculous police reform things they're all going to do have little details like the police can't use the choke hold like the body camera thing we've got the body camera ain't nothing I think I heard a statistic the other day I'd like to see it where out of all the people that have been all the police that have ever been charged with anything like maybe only 10 have ever been actually charged and only two convicted seriously like the entire United States so you can march all you want to and I like it I don't mind but let's get it straight when it comes down to the nuts and bolts and we get with it like they booed the mayor of Minneapolis well that's fine with me I don't care but they had the city council was so terrified they got up there and said we are disbanding the police department and everybody cheered we know that's not going to happen don't we we know they're not going to suddenly say okay we no longer have a police department so we're going to have to spend the next year or two talking about what we mean by disbanding and what we really mean is we're going to redirect some of the funds of the police to other programs now I've already talked to people that got little nonprofits that can't wait for that money so they can do nothing you know what I'm saying in other words I've got a program of violence prevention because you know black people are violent and so that's a program everyone loves because black people are so violent we need a violence prevention that's the real problem it's the violence in the in the hood like Michelle Obama always talks about the Chicago bringing up one example of one little girl was hit by gunfire and as your man the blues singer said shit we've been getting terrorized right and she's going to act like these people in the Chicago some Chicago gang they're the terrorists so it goes on and on and on but the point is that is what's going to happen you will have a million of these people and then standing in front of all of the white people will be the black people just in case you thought the white people were the problem I'm going to be kneeling with some white people I'm going to be out had Nancy Pelosi on her knees yesterday I just fell out laughing this is a woman who here in the Bay Area is it has attempted through a variety of corrupt machinations to develop a place called the hunter's point shipyard which is a super fun site overwhelmed by toxicity from nuclear experiments and from having been the launching pad for here comes the drum roll a bomb called little boy which took out what a couple hundred thousand people in Hiroshima now that's hunter's point Nancy Pelosi and her relative by marriage Gavin Newsom when he was mayor of San Francisco they put together a plan with a company called LaNar Development to develop all four hundred and some acres of the hunter's point shipyard only problem was it's a super fun site and the other problem was the city had no control over now when did the city start engaging in developing it doesn't it's a government so but the real deal was that Nancy's nephew Pelosi Lawrence Pelosi was a vice president of development of this company called LaNar and they figured out how to get the government the Navy to give the land to the city for development and then the city made a deal with LaNar and then all the city had to do was to get the Navy to clean up the super fun site as if it could be cleaned up like that all around are 40,000 black people dying of every kind of cancer you can think of from being living practically in the super fun site and once you start digging up that kind of dirt you are going to have that stuff in the air you're talking about plutonium that's not going to die for the next couple thousand years now I'm saying that to say all of this dirty work that has been done by some of these people that we think are polite and nice and wear nice clothes and speak in dulcet tones I'm just using the Bay Area I can't speak to a lot of these other because this one I know intimately and had the nerve not to be on her knee with a god damn piece of Kenting cloth around her neck along with Kamala Harris whom we reached out to we beg when she was the attorney general and before that when she was the DA to prosecute the police who had killed two people one was Kenny Harding Harding who was supposed to have jumped off a bus and not paid the two dollar fee and was chased down and was mowed down with with automatic rifles and who died it's on you can look at the film of Kenny Harding dying a half an hour of death while a crowd stood around him and the police held off the crowd with assault rifle rifles and you can see him fighting for life and resisting and his body going into convulsions and he died right there in the streets of San Francisco over a two dollar mini munibus fare and then of course there was the I thought he had a gun part now you were chasing him for the munibus fare but now he has a gun and at one point saying he had killed himself by firing over his shoulder and missing there was a case of Mario Woods in San Francisco none of this would come Kamala Harris touch and Mario Woods was surrounded by about five or six cops up against the wall under the theory he had a knife which we never really saw and even if he had one it was so little we couldn't see it and it was not moving on anyone and he was blown away with like 4050 rounds on like a shooting gallery he was up against a wall and they all shot at him that is also on video taken by another young woman on a bus in San Francisco now this stuff ain't new that's my point so we have a Kamala Harris who has an unmitigated gall to get down on her knee and put some kente cloth around her not quite black shoulders and then had to nerve it up the challenge of Joe Biden about busing which I just thought was beyond bizarre but anyway down on her knees we're going to introduce this legislation and one of the aspects of it we will outlaw the chokehold really really Kamala this is what the young people are not connecting up they're incredible innocence and incredible energy is getting ready to be destroyed unless they organize, organize, organize and get ready for the long haul because you are not taking down 400 years in a minute and it isn't just the corporations it's all of these it's the government that protects and serves the corporations from the president on down to the police that's right what you might call the quality of representation is dreadful seen through the eyes of a human being well for my part I spend a lot of time criticizing the blacks because I don't expect the whites to do any more than what they have been doing listen they founded this country this is not my country this is their country this was an English country that is to say the formation was English it's English speaking it has all of these aspects and it has been white whiteness and the supremacy of whiteness even Lincoln said I like any man believe in the supremacy of the white man I mean Lincoln has said that you can look that up and so the question is I'm not expecting anything different from some people there's a whole group of people like brown people red people yellow people and black people that I can be talking to and poor white people because in the Black Panther Party by the way we formed an organization that made a coalition with the young patriots who were all some hardcore white guys and girls from the south that would have said nigger in a minute but that recognized that we stood on common ground because they was as poor as we were but they didn't have that history so this is their country I don't expect anything different that doesn't mean I'm not going to move on it it just means I don't have any expectations about white people in office I don't see any Hillary Clinton being the friend of black people she spent so much time walking around talking about black super predators not counting all the other things that I could talk about but I don't want to talk about Hillary Clinton per se so now I spent my recent years trying to point out the failure of these black people that we fought with blood as I like to say Fannie Lou Hamer lost her eye so we could vote in black people that would serve or at least recognize that we had interest in this social construct no matter how pathetic it is and what we have is black people Hakeem Jeffries Kamala Harris at the top of the list then you got your little local Negroes here you got a black woman mayor of Chicago I don't know what she's supposed to be doing you had a black woman who was the head of the New York City housing authority the biggest in the nation who was so corrupt there was so much going wrong in there there were so many unrepaired houses people were begging and when she was finally exposed to have done nothing for all these black and Puerto Rican and brown people living in these things she left the housing authority and sneaked away and nobody knew what happened to her but guess what she ended up in Oakland as the head the recently appointed head of the housing department now how are we going to deal with that so they put a black woman there so we will be afraid to challenge a black woman you got a black woman named London Reed who is the mayor of San Francisco and you get a guy like Mark Benioff who says, look I'm going to address the question of homelessness by saying that a tax should be placed on people like me who have billion dollar companies that are located and have headquarters in San Francisco tech companies specifically and you tax these companies and that tax money goes specifically to housing now here's an example of how you can take some money London Reed supported that not only did she not support it she opposed it now she actually believes in this modern time the black female mayor of San Francisco opposed taking money from rich white men who were offering the money to put up housing for the homeless now that's the kind of reason I can't talk about what Mark Benioff's money is billionaire that he might be I can't talk about the Fortune 500 when I've got a black woman standing in the way ready to take a bullet form and who would actually oppose a little minor reform measure that may have housed some poor black people I'm on them and I can do that and you can't but I can and I do and I don't play with them and they all know it and so that's how in this city I was able to get that land because I had to call out the head of the housing department also at that time a black woman I had to deal with the black women that were on the city council which ended up in a very ugly moment in my life which is not worthy of discussion here but if you wanted to ask me offline I'd be happy to tell you I had to to confront the blacks in Auckland to get something done in a place where they don't even have housing policy and nobody's enraged by this they're like how can we get it done and how can we do this and what should we do what's the answer the answer is those people sitting right there they're not white they're black they are so busy happy happy to be in masses house that they'll do anything to stay there even if they don't even get paid because most of them don't have to kill them I've got the biggest project that anybody black here has got and I don't make any money from it but there's two other blacks who are calling themselves developers and neither one of them is developing affordable housing now let's just think about that for a minute one of them is developing a big property and gotten some money from somewhere some strange government program and it's all market housing they're building themselves to an affordable housing developer which is an Asian affordable housing developer they're building the affordable housing he's building the market housing let's think about that California is so hard to live in right now I can't begin to tell you of course New York too and so forth but it's so expensive San Francisco has actually surpassed New York in cost of living yep where we have a black mayor so I am criticizing these blacks for having been so opportunistic and so willing to betray black people that they will do and say anything to stay in line with the existing scheme so those are some of the aspects that go to where do we go from here in terms of these marches and protests and one of the things we have to look at is who we have in office yep Elaine when I first learned of you was years ago I was a very how I say attentive student of the work of Horace Tabscott and I read a book called The Dark Tree by a man named Steve Izoardi and it claimed that you wrote a song in honor of Horace Tabscott called I Know Who You Are and the lyric that I excerpted was I know who you are I know of your pain you've seen all your people in shackles and chains but you know what to do you will make them be free just as you made me I at the time I went and got which I believe your second album called Elaine Brown Motown Black Form label put out and I listened to it and I used to listen to that back and forth with the record The Giant is Awakened by Horace and I wondered if that was true did you write that song Horace and how do you see him and all the work that he did in Los Angeles can there be a Horace Tabscott who accompanies you in Oakland and lifts people's spirits well let me say this I wrote that song I wrote that song Horace was my friend and I was extremely close to him and he did a lot for me so I talk about that in my book as an individual that is to say and Steve Oswarty is a wonderful man and he wrote with Horace Horace's biography or autobiography before Horace died you know if Horace wanted to tell Steve that he wrote that song with him or Steve believes that I'm alright with that it's not quite the truth but I loved Horace Horace was a good man before I knew Horace as a musician per se I had joined the Black Panther Party I talk about this in my book and in August in April of 1968 somewhere in about June or so I was absolutely I went into an anxiety anxious an anxiety field moment and said I can't be in the Black Panther Party I even went to a therapist of course I had my own issues but you know that's needed here and there in terms of the action in terms of mental issues and emotional problems of my own that were peculiar to me as an individual but the big thing was I was in the Black Panther Party and I felt that I really wasn't worthy of it I had all kinds of problems and misgivings and I went to this clinic in Los Angeles a free Black clinic and the therapist there gave me Thorazine and said you'll feel better and I did I didn't feel anything after that and so I began to take Thorazine and sort of drifted away from the Black Panther Party at that time we didn't have the kind of requirement and discipline that you have to be there every day all day your whole life is the party which you know evolved not much longer later though and so during that period I got a job at something called the Watts Happening Coffee House which was one of those pacification programs which had been given to some little group nothing but you know mostly Watts gang bangers and they were just running nothing program and after a while all I was doing was falsifying records I didn't know the difference anyway because I don't know if you know what Thorazine your audience may not know what Thorazine will put you out they give that to elephants when they want to take them down he's a pretty strong drug and I was taking 100 milligrams a day and I was asleep 90% of the time what I was doing anyway so I used to take the bus down to Watts to the Watts Happening Coffee House which had been a big diamond gym furniture store before the Watts uprising and they burned that down so it was flipped into this so-called cultural thing but there was no cultural stuff going on but eventually Otis had to do something so he had these like Sunday jazz things and Horace would be down there he had something he eventually came to call them a Fundy Institute I didn't know whatever was going on I didn't know, I was asleep most of the time I just told you that so I went to the Sunday thing and I sang a few songs or something and but when I was going to work there I would take a bus and I'd fall asleep on somebody's shoulder and ride to the end of the line then I'd take another one and ride to another and eventually I'd work my way down into Watts and when Horace found out he drove me back and forth for me I was just really pathetic I was you can't even believe how pathetic I was and I was just nodding all the time and I knew he had the the orchestra and I knew he had this chick Linda singing but it was all a fog for me until John Hudgens came along who was a party a stalwart and someone I adored who helped me to get off the by simply saying Elaine we need you to get back into the game to get back to the Black Panther Party and around that same time three of the Black members of the Black Panther Party that I knew from the Southern California chapter that I was a part of were killed on the street there in Los Angeles everybody's like to say it Adams and Montclair everybody remembered that from that time and and so that was that I just you know just kind of stop taking Thorazine weaned off of it by John Hudgens and his beautiful spirit and back in the full what I want to say control of my senses as it were completely committed to the Black Panther Party now every day I lived in that big house that John and Erica had where some other people live we lived collectively and in the meantime David Hillier had said that he wanted me to make an album of some of these songs that I sang but that had gone away after John and Bunchy were killed and then we had talked about that that was in January of 1969 so by this time I didn't know I said well I don't know how I can make an album so I went to Horace and I said no anybody who can make an album you know what he said well I mean he had albums and I think he introduced me to a guy named Ed Michelle I can't remember if I met Ed Michelle through Horace but anyway who was with ABC Dunhill who eventually lost that job from being in any way connected to the Black Panther Party he lost his house lost his wife and moved to Hawaii but anyway and Ed Michelle was a good guy too he was very sad and with some kind of way I ended up with a guy named Jack Lure who had a company called Vault Records because of Horace and then Horace says well I can do the orchestrations on this and I was like fine I had no idea I really didn't I was just like moving along we got people dying every month in the Black Panther Party and our chapter was you know well John and Bunchy no that's wrong I have the wrong order that was in 68 so everything was Horace was just my friend 69 when they were killed that's when I talked about the album so I just had the wrong order of things in any case and he took me to Vault Records and then we did what is now called Direct to Disk Recording and he had the greatest band there and these guys lifted me up and Horace just wrote out orchestrations he was such a genius he wrote out orchestrations you know like just listening to what I would be playing in my very simplistic piano playing and he would write out all the parts just like that without he had nothing just sitting there right there and scripted out he was with something called the Script House and he was doing ghost writing for a lot of Motown arrangements but that's how he made money and Horace you know was you know kind of a purist and so he didn't want to make money and I was like you know you're crazy Horace but I loved Horace and so he was a good man but he was an artist Horace Tabskat was nothing but an artist Horace did not believe in any type of violent response he had been in the Korean War and he had seen enough of war he was smoking weed all day long he didn't want to have anything to do with you know like you know the kinds of activities that the Black Panther Party was engaged in so he sort of lived outside of that for me but as an individual and I cared about him and you know I think we so I remember once when I my book came out as a matter of fact and I went to S.O.I.M. Books I had a big book reading there in L.A. and that's like the one of the last Black-owned bookstores and Horace was there and we just ran to each other screaming and we just had so much fun so that's my little individual story but I really don't like to talk about personal stuff too much it distracts people you know going down that path of things but I do tell that story in my book and I do like Steve as Wartie I like the fact that he did a book for Horace and you know that's all I can say about that well well that's lovely thank you we've been talking for quite some time about Horace and you have shed light illuminated gone forward courageously gone inward courageously and I have 11,000 young people in my young scholars initiative who follow this podcast and they they're looking for an example of how to construct themselves like a meaningful life make a difference see and I find this conversation will be a tremendous beacon for them and everyone else who comes across this and listens to this I want to encourage people to look into your work in Oakland and like I said we're going to put that on the website but mostly I want to thank you for your clarity, your intensity for the inner strength that you've cultivated and shared with us today well thank you Rob for having me and for engaging in me in a meaningful conversation and I hope that it does have some meaning for the people who listen to this podcast and so I'm going to close out this is what I say all the time when we talk to people and want to get a message out I always remind people of what our biggest slogan was in the Black Panther Party which is all power to the people yes well thank you and I'm sure for too much time passes as the world evolves I'll be reaching out to you again but this was an outstanding experience in my eyes and in my heart thank you and check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at InetEconomics.org