Incredibly highly organized, strategic efforts actually can make a difference. There are so many different examples i could use of recent organizing that i could mention which are important. People post on tracking, started organizing about seven years ago. Checking in new york state. They were not supported by the National Democratic party not supported by a lot of the big green organizations which were silent on hydrocracking against so many foundations and groups the funding for the foundations was complicated, people did not know enough. Instead use our groups around the state forming highly local groups forming and then connecting to each other. It is true grassroots. This is really, really crude, but there is organizing work tasks and distributed and organizing were power is distributed. A lot of are organizing i love move on top of a lot of the organizing tasks are distributed. That is all well and good, but power is still concentrated. When you when you have distributed power people come together and local communities with a shared vision and what is the person that we wants to follow around a bird dog. What happened in new york is five years of local groups corrected to the connected doing highly local organizing. Some of it was online. A lot of the online work was to really crude forms like yahoo or google is groups that anyone can understand and they get a lot of offline work. It was important that they were physically present offline, bird dogging. Governor andrew cuomo said that everywhere he went there were people saying dont track new york, dont track new york dont track new york so much so that he felt they had more power than any other group gets he saw them, and that is something i learned from the tea party. I was involved in occupy, and one of the things i saw with the tea party is they understand the power of physical presence. That means that if you are physically present and your face is that a a protest and to register that protest politicians will respond more than if it is just online. I think the combination is really powerful. And we talk about online people often think it means exclusively online, and i think that when i was in ferguson and spent quite a few weeks there in august and september through november of last year one of the ways that we kept ourselves safe was that everybody was online in these yahoo facebook groups and twitter. But what they say is hey theres something going on this side, everybody go and everyone would kind of moving that direction direction, and that is how we knew where we needed to be. I think were saying the exact same thing. The director of online organizing for the campaign command i would joke that he you should not have a director of online organizing anymore than he should have a a director of car organizing or telephone organizing is job of the internet is the way in which we live as well as the road is on the telephone is. The key is organizing the understanding power. The internet is our current current tool and effects things but so many groups like using the internet successfully. I we will hire an online organizer in a separate cabin who will do a a bunch of petitions and not engage in our core work for. And i did not understand. Well the republicans use telephones incredibly effectively in the 80s 80s, ralph reed basically owned the telephone draft mail game and it is one of the reasons were seeing the political calculus that we do today. It is all about the work that they put him in in the 80s coming to fruition. Organizing the 21st century is organizing a 20th century, organizing the 15th century, its century permits are getting people together to go deal with it. And what is the hardest is cross class organizing which up until relatively recently we have not seen a lot of that. I actually think that it is essential. At one time one in every 20 americans was the president of the local voluntary association the 50s. Some were voluntary but you have basically 5 percent of all people have some power with the local club and we also have a lot higher membership. And i membership. And i think that we are feeling the absence of that union membership. Some of the core fights we are having our them i think what you see is hedge funders and a few people with a lot of money and a lot of power taking on Public Education because they actually want to get rid of the last batches of union power. I wonder what you think about the Current Union structure. Twenty years worth of distraction. And i wonder what you think of the Union Organizing we see now where you have these three or four huge groups in dc. The locals i have nearly as much power as they think that they used to. I i am a very uncomplicated person. I like decentralized power. I mean, what you are talking about, different units are different to be clear. Yes. But there is a class dynamic inside the unions themselves where you see unions often separated from their own membership and less responsive to their own membership. In the short term unions have not always realize the cost which is extraordinary because if you are not in there and the fight with your membership you lose some of that trust and cohesion that creates power. I think think the corollary to that is when you lose your own membership in that way they are not being evangelists for the things that they should be doing, collective bargaining, loss of collective bargaining is the thing that made me work at burger king for 15 years. Lets not sure cut this. And so for me the question i confront often is, how do we do this collective bargaining in this Union Landscape where i live in and i we will state. Sure you can unionize if you want to give them your dues, but there is nothing they can really legally do because they are not having contracts. Are obviously some things that we can do in the legal level to make collectivebargaining a lot easier. We have a Supreme Court that makes amazon is a particular interest of mine and it should be of anyone in the book festival festival, real concern of concentrated power in the book industry is actually taking a kind of feudal relationship to our ideas that amazon has the power to set the prices to books, but they should be concerned. Sometimes with real exceptions to both individual and structures of the Union Leadership democrats find it are too quick to criticize unions were there are Serious Problems and not realize so much red throwing out if we dont also embrace the basic principle of people should be allowed to unionize and the fact that unions are a core part of a truly democratic future. I take this criticism seriously, but i dont want to live in a utopian fantasy where we can have the kind of selfgoverning we want, i want without that kind of countervailing force just nonunionized organizing outside. Does that make sense . I have been thinking about this a lot lately, how we move forward in labor organizing and get that collectivebargaining with the unions the way that they were structured 30 years ago. Where do you see the most exciting stuff in terms of nontraditional union . And those are union affiliated groups, right . But what you find is that they are localized collectivebargaining mechanisms. People sitting down on the job at walmart. I i cannot tell you how brave you have to be to do that. People walking out people walking out of burger king or mcdonalds and saying dont cross my picket line, these are people that cannot afford to lose their job single shift, sure cannot afford to get blackballed against all the franchisees in their city, the bravest people i have seen in my entire life. That is the hope that i see. I we will tell you a personal story. A year ago yesterday someone approached me this may not sound personal. [laughter] a year ago yesterday someone approached me to see if only interested in running for governor for the state of new york. I thought about it for about six weeks till ago was instantly interested, i love politics, have a lot to say. I did not think the governor was doing a good job but i had real anxiety about being attacked personally, being characterized personally being characterized for saying things that i wasnt things that i was not and saw a film at the duke documentary Film Festival last year i was thinking about this, hand that feeds which is a film about undocumented immigrants organizing in manhattan. And these men and women were risking deportation by trying to organize against this interested management. I thought what kind of coward were i be if i i didnt run for governor because im scared about my reputation and these men and women are risking their entire lives to organize with the people they work with. It had a real effect on me, that is where real bravery is happening in this country. I think that is completely valid. How many of you guys have heard of me, google me or anything like that before this . Okay. Like for. So i was home from a shift at work late one night. I had a couple of beers. One of my friends that something wrong and the internet, i internet, i immediately corrected them, and that got me a few million views. A me coverage in New York Times this is when truth is viral is Fact Checking taking a beating and in that peace they failed to fact check. [laughter] i have great faith in our media. You know, so those types of things happen. The kind of abuse and things that people can say is the downside of our new online spaces because anybody can sign up for a twitter account and tell you what a terrible human being you are , anyone can track your email. It is up up and be several different times in the last year all of this because i got drunk one night and says got trouble night and said it kind of sucks to be poor. That was enough to suck me in. My friend jerry is here and fought with me through it. Pretty epic for a few months there. So i think that fear is legitimate. I wonder how much we are not doing because so many people just dont want to put themselves through that kind of ringer. I think a lot. I think the fear is legitimate. If i had a choice i would have stopped, but at that. In for a penny in for a pound. Since i dont see a way out of it i i just want to talk to other people who are obviously you dont need it but there are a lot of young woman i talked to who i really want to run for office of people who want to nobody talks to me. Would you feel like that they dont want to step out. I dont want to lie to them and tell them that there are not reputational risks involved. That is false. The reputational risks are real. Instead i want to have the open conversation that it may still be worth it even with these risks beforehand so people understand what they getting into. It is important that we talk about that. I was sitting on a sun porch i remember, in a wicker chair and had this kind of realization that this is going to happen to my reputation whether or not i actually do good to be there is a hack and do about this. Had i not been painted into that corner i dont think i would have written a book being here right now doing, doing any of the work i have been doing. But it has been fairly interesting to have so many people reach out. I cant tell you how many hundreds of people to have how many hundreds of emails i get were they say i want i want to do something but can you keep my name off of it . I have this image of you now painted into a wicker chair. Was a something freeing about realizing that you cant control your own reputation so you act with truth and integrity regardless . I put my peace of on youtube, are you kidding me . They got to the time work it did not look like it was going to stop. So i had two choices. Mike drop or run. So i might dropped and out i came out of the book and talk to rich people about fashion for a living. You are talking about a narrative that was created about you personally, coming into the spotlight but you are also talking about responding to the narratives or mythologies that have been created around your core issues, i would say poverty and corruption these larger stories that people have been telling for right over wrong that i think both of you have been making an effort to try to shine in some sunlight on and they are not knew problems, not even really abstract concepts. We see the reallife consequences of issues. Why is issues. Why is it so hard to change those narratives . Totally the reverse. Selfgovernment is so rare in human history. Society is so rare. It is impossible and exciting that we have made it happen for the few brief moments that we have. I dont think of it as i we will step back for a 2nd. I turned 18 when the wall came down. The berlin wall. And i think there was this sense in my generation that we had solve the great problem of democracy. We beat off the soviets, and it was just a matter of every other country catching up at the arc of history tended in one positive direction and that because of that our jobs were sort of minor jobs. Lets clean up the little bribery here the extra racism here these are cleanup jobs with structural problems that we can fundamentally solved. I do not see the world that way. I think it is a constant fight to fight against racism. I think it is a constant fight to fight for a kind of genuine Mutual Respect and selfgovernment and i think it is extraordinary the moments that we have achieved. I am with her. Look people frequently see the treason of the forest. So forest. So when were talking about what is left to do we talk about these issues separately, racism classism, sexism well you know i we will worked as a bartender. Tell me how to separate my wage for my sexual harassment. I work on Poverty Issues command we know that the more melanin you have in your skin the more work you have to do to get to the exact same place that i did and i was barely surviving so tell me how we separate race and class when i 1st wrote the thing i used a phrase that my neighbors is lot. It was baby daddy. That is a black coated word. We expect black folks to use that word. I came in for so much hell because it turns out i am white come and everyone had coated in their brain from that word, oh, you must be black. You must be from here, you must be from here. I here. I kept having to tell people, you do realize theyre are poor white folks, more of us taking the welfare resources because numbers and statistics are a thing. Black folks are 12 or 13 of the of the entire population, sure not 100 percent of snap users. So a lot of my work is just telling people, hey, these things intersect you and you are not paying attention to one and cannot follow one without a holistic look at the others. So the bulk of my work is reminding people i dont care how much your life sucks, you still have it better than someone else and worse than someone else in the question is and how do we make my life for your life better but how do we make it so that no one has an awful life in this country and the wealthiest country in the world. Why is it half of our workers dont know how much money they will make next week . What does that say about us as a society and why in the hell is that my problem . I barely have enough power to change the temperature of your french fry without getting yelled at. I think at. I think a lot of the stuff that we have to do is really. Out the forests. I love what you said about the separation because what i see, the fight that we are up against right now is a a deliberate fight to separate these issues and treat them as distinct. This is embodied in the Chicago School which you might have heard a group of academics trying to tell us that they are often associated with freemarket fundamentalism are trying to tell us that we can see economics and politics in splendid isolation each from the other and can have an examination of Economic Issues here political issues here. And the roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century 20th century organizing but it is serious, it is about what we are taught taught to read the business pages. We are taught to see these separately. I think we should be talking about race and economics and politics altogether alltime and you said it more eloquently than i could have because that is the way that life is lived. So my real passion now is Public Financing of elections and antitrust. In the reason i care so much about antitrust is because you see 1st of all antitrust falls apart in 1981 right after a successful civil rights movement. We stop enforcing laws to break a big companies. I dont know where there is a response, but in the reagan era partial response to a successful civil rights movement. And then and then you see this incredible concentration of wealth and power in very few corporations that have lost the political language to deal with it the antimonopolist, the down with monopoly people of the 19th century were also interested in real problems with race in our country. Charles sumner who was flogged on the house of the senate was also a big anti monopoly organizer. So we have forgotten this incredible part of our history that, i think, is powerful because it connects race, economic power political power in a serious way. But we have forgotten it on purpose because the Chicago School as been so well funded to tell us that we can think of each of these things separately. A at the teller Margaret Thatcher joke at the London School of economics, and it was highly inappropriate. I have to tell that story. I i think the problem is largely sold by the internet when we get together in our own separate communities we have people talking about gender issues, talking about class, talking about race and race command what you find is the conversation start to overlap where we see each other. Im a class to class activist. Great. I see folks, friend of mine runs million hoodies, an organization set up after trip on martin. There are women on sir benning, mushy talks about gender a lot and will say the same thing i do about class and not even realize it. And so and so we start to see that basically all of our fights them our own personal take on being disenfranchised. Our own personal take an impression, our own personal take on having a power. Me i am a woman. I until very recently had no hope of being in the middle class. I was a workingclass girl. For me for me my issues are generally gender, sexuality, and class. But that does not mean that everything that i am saying i am saying does not apply to any other issue that you could find. All comes together and the beautiful thing about this new organizing is that we can all see that so clearly that it is inescapable. And that silo owing is going to naturally go away. The new generation of axis i am seeing come up people in their 20s and 30s are very interconnected in