And then beyond that, we went to a general election, which had $10 million behind it, backed by a Republican who then tried to do this whole … I might be getting my my music references mixed up, but trying to do like this whole like “John Mellencamp” vibe, trying to convince people that he’s not actually Republican, that he’s just a working class dude.
That was John Cummings. His campaign literature had hardly any references to his party, let alone to his party's de facto leader, Donald Trump.
"Yeah, in the United States, it was the second most expensive race in the country. And so their strategy was to make quick work of us. And they threw everything that they could, and it didn’t work. And now I think they have a problem on their hands. [LAUGHS]"
She then noted that she had a crushing victory, and she noted the arrival of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in Congress. Also Mondaire Jones and Marie Newman.
She then brought up support for the Hunts Point strike and for getting $2 billion in funeral assistance for COVID-19 victims.
She doesn't think that her strategy has changed from her early days, when she called out corporate lobbyists at Congress freshman orientation and when she joined the Sunrise Movement sit-in at Nancy Pelosi's office. "I do think that the pandemic has complicated those things a little bit, because a lot of stuff really does happen behind closed doors. And it’s funny, but you know, people will say and do things at a cocktail party that they will not do on a Zoom call."
She does say that she has become more sophisticated in her methods, however.
There’s this one moment I’ll never forget. We were going through the appropriations process, I believe in 2019 or so. And basically, this is how we fund the entire government, we go along and we fund each agency after the other. And there are these massive multi-thousand-page packages. And I remember finding … sometimes it’s as simple as hitting Control-F and just trying to find every policy-related keyword, to see what’s getting appropriated, and see what you can dig through. That’s literally how some folks go about this, when you’re given 1,000 pages of legislation 48 hours before it drops. But we found this really bizarre appropriation for fossil fuel facilities, and it was like a multi billion dollar giveaway, I believe, at the time. And we were like, “Where did this come from? Did someone slip this in?” And we were gonna propose an amendment to take it out. So we raised the question about this. And because no one wanted to ‘fess up and actually own that they were the one who put that in, it was withdrawn without actually making it a floor fight. Yeah. I don’t think we ever got to the bottom of who was behind that. Clearly, you know, this is lobbyist driven. This was a lobbyist’s language that someone asked to put in. But because the actual line item was so shameful, no one wanted to actually ‘fess up to the fact that they put this in.
There are so many of these wins, that aren’t necessarily public fights every time. They are wins to the tune of millions and billions of dollars that could then be shifted to other priorities. Some of that work is quiet, but it is just as significant as some of the public fighting and organizing. Not to disparage that either, but they complement one another.
I remember when she recounted this triumph in an Instagram story in late summer or early fall of 2019.
That makes me think about what Isaac Asimov got grotesquely wrong in "The Ancient and the Ultimate", where he proposed that the ultimate document displayer is a physical book, whether dead-tree, dead-reed, dead-leaf, dead-sheep, or dead-mountain. But physical books are not very easily searchable, and they are also very bulky. E-books beat physical books very easily on both counts.
(links)" / Twitter
*
...