Cori Bush's Book Deal

[lpetrich]

US Representative Cori Bush of MO-01 has agreed to a book deal, judging from her financial disclosure forms.

Squad Memeber Cori Bush Gets Book Deal | PEOPLE.com - "The progressive lawmaker received an advance of up to $100,000 to pen Cori's Chronicles"

Bush, 45, became the first black woman to represent Missouri when she was elected to Congress in 2020. She's a nurse and a minister who rose to prominence during the street protests in Ferguson after police shot and killed Michael Brown. Bush lived just six minutes from where Brown was killed.

"At the time … I just felt [like], well I'm a nurse, I can go be a medic on the ground. I'm clergy, so I can go out and pray with people." Bush told PEOPLE last year.

She spent the next five weeks working out of a mobile crisis van alongside therapists and medical doctors to assist those who had been injured and distribute food and toiletries to those in need.

"At night, I would leave the area, go home and make sure my kids had their homework done, go back to the street and protest," Bush told PEOPLE. "Even on Saturday and Sunday when I didn't have to work, that's where I'd be."

She most recently camped out on the steps of the Congress building to protest the end of the eviction moratorium. President Biden made it continue, though the Supreme Court recently ended that continuation.

Noting
Missouri congresswoman reports $100,000 book deal | Politics | stltoday.com
noting
Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives - Financial Disclosure Reports has this financial disclosure: 10043384.pdf

"The Cori Chronicles" published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing [IP]
...
Comments: Advance reviewed and approved by House Committee on Ethics

She is not alone.

This is What America Looks Like by Ilhan Omar – HarperCollins - "My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman"

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Hired Agent and Explored a Book Deal -- 2019 Apr 16 -- but it went nowhere

Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, has a children's-book series called "She Persisted", about notably-achieving women. Children’s Book Series She Persisted Highlights Women In History From Harriet Tubman And Sally Ride To Ruby Bridges And Helen Keller

• Chapter Books | She Persisted Books
• She Persisted Around the World: 13 Women Who Changed History a book by Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger
• She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World a book by Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger
• She Persisted in Sports: American Olympians Who Changed the Game a book by Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger

Meena Harris is Kamala Harris's niece.

• Kamala and Maya's Big Idea – HarperCollins
• Meena Harris | Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

 

[lpetrich]

I found out about this when I saw

Paula Jean Swearengin on Twitter: "I'm sorry y'all. I'm having a hard time with members of #TheSquad negotiating $100,000 book deals when people are being evicted tomorrow." / Twitter

Paula Jean Swearengin on Twitter: "It's not just one member of the squad doing it. Trying to get book deals is a trend for members of Congress. (pic link)" / Twitter
The pic is on AOC's would-be book deal.

Paula Jean Swearengin on Twitter: "@DrDooleyMD I am not okay with any public servant getting a book deal. People in Congress get paid well. Many of us have worked our butts off to get some of these people elected because we are suffering. I think the expectation was electing real public servants not celebrities." / Twitter

She ran for US Senate in West Virginia in 2018 and 2020. The first time, she tried to primary Joe Manchin and failed. The second time, she won the primary but lost against incumbent, Republican Shelley Moore Capito. Her 2018 run was featured in the documentary "Knock Down The House", along with Cori Bush's and AOC's runs that year.

Paula Jean Swearengin on Twitter: "Peace out!
#DemExit #M4M4ALL #EndCorruption
(link)" / Twitter
noting
West Virginia politician drops out of Democratic party | WOWK
noting
Paula Jean Swearengin on Twitter: "Announcement: I am leaving @wvdemocrats! I can't support racism or them ignoring Appalachian children dying & suffering. The @DNC has ignored it too. I won't! I'll be announcing my next steps soon. Our systems are broken. We can't rebuild a two party system with division & hate." / Twitter

"According to her website, Swearengin is a native of Mullens, West Virginia, who grew up in a coal-mining family."

She has joined The People's Party | Free Of Corporate Money

 

[Derec]

Socialism pays well these days.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Socialism pays well these days.

Are these government-run publishing houses? Seems like it is capitalism that is paying off here.

 

[TomC]

Socialism pays well these days.

Socialism?
I remember when Jeb Bush was getting paid $1M/yr for being on the board of a bank that did business in Florida. His duties were
1) Attend the annual board meeting in New York.
2) Put his name on the letterhead.

Socialism clearly doesn't pay as well a conservative Christian Capitalism.

I'm kinda surprised that a book from Cori Bush didn't get a bigger advance.
Tom

 

[lpetrich]

The book is now out.
The Forerunner by Cori Bush: 9780593320587 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books - "A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America"

How Cori Bush Conquered Washington, DC - "The Pain and Glory of Cori Bush In less than two years, the congresswoman built a base of power in D.C. by wearing her hardships on her sleeve."

Just three days after Cori Bush arrived in Washington, D.C., as the first Black woman to represent Missouri in Congress, election deniers descended on the Capitol. The January 6 insurrection was convulsive in a way Bush couldn’t fully fathom, yet she felt prepared. “I wasn’t afraid for my life or anything,” she says. “I come from protests; it ain’t no big deal.” She was more concerned for her staff than for herself. “I was like, I may go down, but I’m gonna go down fighting using staplers, printers — whatever was needed was gonna have to fly through the air.” She laughs, but it’s serious.

It’s remembering this welcome to Congress that most animates Bush, draped in a red raglan-sleeved tee with her signature acrylics intermittently punctuating her words, over a video call. In that moment, she says, she remembered her promise to her district: “I told the people of St. Louis, ‘If you elect me, I’ll be ready on day one.’”

While she’s spoken before, and often, about her activism and pastoral and nursing backgrounds, in Forerunner she is even more vulnerable, revealing the bad, ugly, mad parts of her life in hopes her colleagues and others in positions of power take note.

Then mentioning what she's gone through.

What it’s like to live on food stamps. To be uninsured with a medical condition. To work a $9 an hour job in adulthood, narrowly surviving. To know what single motherhood is like, the loneliness of it all. To not know where you’d live tomorrow, sleeping in your car with two babies staring up at you for answers you don’t have. What it’s like to be sexually violated, not once but three times, by men you trusted. Healing from abortions. Navigating trauma.

 

[lpetrich]

Then the killing of Michael Brown by a cop in Ferguson MO in 2014, not far from where she lived at the time. To add insult to injury, a jury decided not to charge the cop with anything. This provoked big demonstrations, and she became involved as a Black Lives Matter activist, using her experience as a nurse and as a pastor. Some people urged her to run for office. "The daughter of a former mayor and alderman, Bush had witnessed the weight politicians carried and vowed it would never be for her."

Cori Bush - Ballotpedia
CB ran for US Senate in 2016, but she didn't make it past the primaries. Jason Kander beat her by 69.9% - 13.3%. She tried again in 2018, running for the US House, an effort documented in Knock Down The House | A Netflix Original Documentary by Rachel Lears. She lost the Democratic primary again, with long-time incumbent Lacy Clay beating her 56.7% - 36.9%. In 2020, she tried yet again, beating him 48.5% - 45.6%, and beating the Republican in the general election 78.8% - 19.0%.

She thus joined AOC, Ayanna Pressley, Jamaal Bowman, and Marie Newman in beating long-time incumbents.

She faced four primary challengers this year, beating them 69.5% - 26.6%, 1.8%, 1.1%, 1.0%.

In Forerunner, Bush points to Bernie Sanders as a key influence. “With his wild gesticulations and unapologetic manner, he’d shown me that I didn’t have to temper what I believed, even in a staid environment,” she writes. “From Bernie, I learned that I could run as myself.” He was the “model” she wanted to follow, she adds, because he “believed that the kind of change I wanted to see in my community was not only possible but also necessary — a moral mandate.”

She also credits her unflinching resolve to growing up in the church. In bible study and Sunday school, she was reminded of “the figure of the forerunner — that person who blazes a clear path where there was none before.” A forerunner, she explains, endures life’s hardships and, with that understanding, strives to improve outcomes for others.

That's why she titled her book "The Forerunner".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Socialism pays well these days.

$100,000 advance? I wouldn't hold my nose to it, but doesn't seem too high. And why is it against the rules to make money? American "socialism" isn't about asceticism.

 

[lpetrich]

On student-loan forgiveness, she called President Biden's partial forgiveness a "start".

“If I had the opportunity to get $20,000 taken off of my student debt, it would have changed so much in my life,” she says. Before paying off her debt, a $500 monthly minimum student-loan repayment was Bush’s reality. She first took classes at Harris-Stowe State University, a local HBCU, but dropped out after one semester. After having two children — a son, Zion, in 2000, and a daughter, Angel, in 2001 — and working in education making $9 an hour, she went back to school. She started and completed a two-year program at Lutheran School of Nursing with a yearly tuition of about $10,000 minus expenses. She took out loans and received a Pell grant.

While commending the White House’s efforts, Bush feels that the more than 45 million Americans with varying-size student loans might not see the Biden administration’s move as a victory. “Did it help everyone? No,” she says. “Did it help enough people? No. But did it help a lot? Yes.”

While Republicans try to litigate it to death, CB says that it doesn't go far enough.

As she worked on her memoir, Bush tells me she was intentional about addressing attempts to shame her for the hurdles she overcame. During her run against Clay, for example, his team sent a mailer that questioned Bush’s reliability. It noted that she had her nursing license suspended: True. She couldn’t afford the renewal payment and writes that his campaign “had no idea what it meant to be low income and resource-poor,” that “these matters were the consequences of living in poverty.” It also pointed to her three evictions; these were the results of an assault by an ex, debilitating nursing-school costs, and a landlord kicking her out because of her activism.

So when the COVID-era federal-eviction moratorium was set to expire before Congress went away for summer recess last year, Bush, now in a position of power, chose to channel those past pains into action. She saw the moment for what it was: Members of Congress “are just disconnected because they can be,” leaving the vulnerable to fend for themselves. She felt uncomfortable going home when many families in her district and across America could lose theirs in hours. “I was trying to show myself that I belong, that I can do this work,” she recalls. “So it was just like push, push, push, push, go, go, go, go go.” Bush stayed behind, organized, and camped out on the steps of the Capitol.

She was soon joined by some friends that she made in Congress, like AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley. She got on the news and she started talking to people from the Biden Admin and various Congressional leaders.

Bush tells me it was important for her to testify from her personal experience to what those 11.4 million renters were up against. “If we don’t tell Biden exactly what’s happening — for somebody like him, who wasn’t a homeless adult, somebody needs to tell him what that’s like,” she says of her conversations with the White House. “Just as a farmer needs to be able to have that conversation with the President to tell him what it’s like to be a farmer over in this part of the country, and what this type of crop with this type of rain, and blah-blah-blah — somebody has to tell him what that’s like. Because otherwise, he won’t know, and he can’t really meet the needs of those folks if he doesn’t know.” (The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story).

President Biden then extended the temporary moratorium on evictions.

 

[lpetrich]

She considers her work in the House an extension of her activism, saying that it “is an extension of the work I do locally.”

Like voting against the bipartisan infrastructure bill because of it lacking a lot of things that she wanted, though she voted for the parts of Build Back Better than was eventually passed as the Inflation Reduction Act.

Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill final House vote - she joined fellow Democrats Jamaal Bowman, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib in voting against it.

Inflation Reduction Act final House vote

She described last September what led to her first abortion.

As a teenager, she had an abortion after being raped at a church youth conference. In Forerunner, she describes her attacker as attractive and a few years older. She prefaces his assault in her assigned room late one night with strokes of adolescent church-girl guilt, writing that during that time, she mostly wore “coochie-cutter booty shorts” and “tight-fitting midriff tops.”

That is, shorts with hardly any leg and midriff-exposing tops.

She was raped by another crush, but she succeeded in fighting him off and escaping. She found out later that he ended up jailed for raping a 15-year-old.

A third attack came at the hands of a pastor during the Ferguson uprising. As Bush did more TV spots, her neighbors feared she’d bring the protests to their door and complained to her property-management company, which evicted her. The pastor told her he had a house for affordable rent. As he gave Bush a tour, once in the bedroom, he flung her on the mattress, pulled down her underwear, and forced his way inside her. Disabled by fear, her face awash in tears, her mind toggled between disbelief and outrage. When consciousness crept back to her body, she ran for help. Once at a hospital, Bush learned the pastor had lawyered up just an hour after the attack, calling people he knew were with her to claim it was just rough sex. She writes that the police didn’t believe her version of events, and months after performing a rape kit, the hospital concluded that it could have been either rough sex or assault.

“Even though I wanted more and there should have been more, and I was pushing for more, I didn’t expect much,” Bush tells me. “I didn’t expect to be believed.” When she went before a judge to get a restraining order against the pastor, the judge told her, “Victims and perpetrators have the same rights” and denied the request. That experience, she says, is indicative of how women are treated in society. “Perpetrators get to win,” she says. “They win seats of power because the power structure — the patriarchy — has been in place for such a long time. Until we start having more women and people who identify as women in seats of power, this will continue.”

Then when the Supreme Court revoked Roe vs. Wade.

She was at a local Planned Parenthood roundtable — the same location where she’d had two abortions — when the decision came down. “I cried,” she recalls. “First, I couldn’t believe it, even though we knew that day would come.” Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, whom Bush, after a long pause, described as “not a good person,” immediately enacted the abortion ban statewide. She quickly rallied to make sure her community knew what it meant for them. At a local press conference, she urged patients with scheduled appointments to instead call clinics in Illinois. “We had to do some really quick work to make sure that people were getting taken care of,” she says.

She talked about her second abortion, something she got because she didn't think that she could take care of the would-be child. To afford that abortion, she had to wait a full pay cycle, getting close to the cutoff point for abortions.

17 House Democrats arrested at abortion rights rally - CB was one of them, alongside AOC, RT, and IO.

Working with Sen. Tina Smith, she sponsored H.R.8405 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Protecting Access to Medication Abortion Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress for protecting access to a common abortion medication by telehealth and mail order.

She's also sponsored H.R.8524 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Protect Sexual and Reproductive Health Act of 2022 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress - "This bill requires the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to undertake activities to promote access to sexual and reproductive health and well-being." Like doula care, support for travel and child care, and mental-health services.

“Where is that sperm legislation?” she quips, but with intense conviction. “Like, why aren’t we regulating sperm? You know, because sperm is busy. If I get pregnant right now, I can’t turn around and get pregnant by somebody else three months later — I’m pregnant for the rest of the year. But sperm can get 12 folks pregnant in a day.”

“And I know people feel like, But you’re a pastor; you’re supposed to be against abortion,” she went on, slowly shaking her head no. “What we should be against is making people vulnerable — putting them in positions to become even more vulnerable and putting their lives at risk.”

 

[lpetrich]

The Cut continues with talking about CB having to move her office away from MTG's when MTG harassed her.

The idea that people in Congress can be full of vitriol for their colleagues, and by extension, those they represent, unsettles Bush deeply because it’s those same people in power who appear to be conniving with those trying to destroy American democracy.

Complete with using violence on those that they dislike.

She’s committed to bringing real-life insights to colleagues, those in leadership and in the White House, who can have a tendency to legislate mechanically, with the luxury of not knowing or neglecting the battles of everyday folks. The same ones Bush can never ignore because she bears the same scars. “The people closest to the pain,” she says, echoing an adage from her friend and colleague Ayanna Pressley, “should be closest to the power.”

 

[lpetrich]

Socialism pays well these days.

Define "socialism".

 

[lpetrich]

Cori Bush writes of abuse, activism and transformation in new memoir, ‘The Forerunner’

Rep. Cori Bush knew her memoir could be brutal. Brutal to write, brutal to read.

While working on it, she says, she “cried and cried and cried.”

Yet she didn’t want her troubled years — which, she writes, were marked by rape, abuse and lack of money — to be more than readers could bear.

She had borne them, as many voters knew. They elected the Democrat, the first Black Congresswoman from Missouri, to represent the state’s 1st District. But too many details of assault, abortions, even bullets, might come off as sensational or overwhelming.

“Not everything made it into the book,” she said recently, talking from Washington. “I wanted to tell my story, but I wanted to relate it to policy and why I push as hard as I do in the areas I do.”

Not a very usual sort of memoir from a politician.

Critics may think Bush brought some problems on herself by her choice of men. She admits to a period when she had a bit of a “gold digger mentality” and was a drinker. Later, after turning to God, the registered nurse may raise eyebrows when divulging that she believes in faith healing.

But she understands how difficult it can be for people to extricate themselves from abusive relationships. In her book, she affirms readers who have struggled, whether with money, abuse or housing. She repeats an affirmation like a mantra: “I love you.”

She uses lots of pseudonyms.

Of her ex-husband, Bush says: “I don’t want people going after him. I’m telling my story. He has his own life to live.” Even the man who threatened her life is not identified by his real name. “He has gone to prison and served his time,” Bush says. “He lives a quiet life now, his family told me.”

Like many women have, she confirms how hard it was to get out of an abusive relationship: “You don’t know that’s what you are walking into until you are too deep in,” she says. She was never strong enough to overpower a male attacker, but says: “There was never a time when I didn’t fight back.” One boyfriend vowed to kill Bush’s father if she wouldn’t return to him.

But cherished family members are identified by their real names in the book, and she seems to have had a happy childhood.

 

[lpetrich]

She had second thoughts about a second abortion, saying “I don’t want to do this,” but the staff nevertheless went ahead. Though she was furious about that, “I couldn’t find my voice.”

In 2005, Bush is accepted into nursing school and becomes a registered nurse. She also becomes active in a spiritual community, finding a faith leader who treats her with respect.

At a revival service, she writes, she’s touched by the Holy Spirit and lies on the floor for three hours as if “a cleansing were taking place inside me.”

As Bush’s life is transformed again, she quits a nursing job and takes to St. Louis streets to pray for healing others. One time, she writes, she sees a woman with visible tumors on her body. Bush puts her hands on one and prays, and “the tumor shrank along with the others on her body.”

Not quite an amputated limb regrowing, I must say.

This is a part of her life, Bush says, that she has mostly discussed in religious venues. “I haven’t talked about it in political circles.”

By 2014, Bush has created her own ministry when she learns of a police shooting in Ferguson. With the death of Michael Brown, she joins protesters and becomes active in the civil rights movement.

Then her running for office. She went up against William Lacy Clay, Jr., a long-time incumbent who succeeded his father in his seat. She lost against Lacy Clay the first time around, in 2018, but tried again in 2020.

Clay’s campaign sends out a flier mentioning that Bush had been evicted from homes three times and once had her nursing license suspended. Bush writes: “These were true but to be used this way illustrated to me just how out of touch Clay’s team was. They had no idea what it meant to be low income and resource poor.”

Clay’s strategy backfired, she writes. It triggered more support for her from people who understood Bush’s travails.

She won.

 

[lpetrich]

The article then got into talking about her experiences in Congress.

Although the memoir ends before she takes office, Bush says in an interview that she’s found being a member of Congress surprising in several ways.

She “expected there to be chaos,” along with long days and very hard votes.

“What I didn’t expect was the welcome I received at Congress.”

She was told nobody wanted an activist in Congress, but she felt very welcome and says that “there have been disagreements, but it’s no different from any other job I’ve worked. It doesn’t mean we can’t talk again. You move on.”

She's not sure how long she will be in Congress, and she's taking it as it goes.

 

[Derec]

$100,000 advance? I wouldn't hold my nose to it, but doesn't seem too high. And why is it against the rules to make money?

When people decry "profit-driven capitalism" then it is quite a bit hypocritical to be "you go girl"-ing Cori Bush for turning a handsome profit on her inane musings.

American "socialism" isn't about asceticism.

No socialism is. Politburo members have always lived high on the hog.

 

[Oleg]

When people decry "profit-driven capitalism" then it is quite a bit hypocritical to be "you go girl"-ing Cori Bush for turning a handsome profit on her inane musings.

She's a "defund the police" yapper who has private armed security.

 

[Patooka]

When people decry "profit-driven capitalism" then it is quite a bit hypocritical to be "you go girl"-ing Cori Bush for turning a handsome profit on her inane musings.

She's a "defund the police" yapper who has private armed security.

This is some low hanging fruit right here.

Wanting the Police to be less militarized and needing protection because the people you idolize and worship literally want Cori Bush dead are not mutually exclusive opinions. Do you need me to explain why?

 

[Oleg]

When people decry "profit-driven capitalism" then it is quite a bit hypocritical to be "you go girl"-ing Cori Bush for turning a handsome profit on her inane musings.

She's a "defund the police" yapper who has private armed security.

This is some low hanging fruit right here.

Wanting the Police to be less militarized and needing protection because the people you idolize and worship literally want Cori Bush dead are not mutually exclusive opinions. Do you need me to explain why?

No. It's hypocracy. I get protection by not you.

 

[Oleg]

She had second thoughts about a second abortion, saying “I don’t want to do this,” but the staff nevertheless went ahead. Though she was furious about that, “I couldn’t find my voice.”

This should be a crime.