(upbeat music)
- I welcome all of you
who are in the Zoom room
and to anyone who may be
watching across the internet.
We are African American Studies
and Public Policy C20AC,
Big Ideas, the American election, 2020.
This is the first time a class
at the University of
California at Berkeley
has attempted to address
the presidential or really
any major election in real
time during that election.
So as a result this is both
a class that is gonna look at
the deep roots of what's
at stake in this election,
but also attempt to cover it in real time
in covering recent events,
but also the deep background
and the consequences
that lie behind them.
My name is Michael Mark Cohen.
I am an associate teaching professor
in American Studies and
African American Studies.
I've taught here at the University
of California at Berkeley
since 2004 and it is my
distinct honor and pleasure
to welcome all of you
both in the Zoom room
and in the many Zoom
rooms outside of this one.
And I invite you to
participate in this attempt
at a public political education
in the midst of a global crisis
and a highly consequential
presidential election.
Now, before I formally begin,
I want to offer a couple of
thank you's in particular,
a thank you to this College
of Letters and Science
and the Big Ideas project,
and that has allowed this
class to get off the ground.
I wanna thank the people at
Berkeley who run the semester
in the cloud which
provided technical support
for this class.
I wanna thank the American Culture Center
for their contributions to this class,
to all the folks at
Educational Technology Services
at UC Berkeley and the staff
of African American Studies
in Public Policy who
make this class possible.
I wanna thank the
producers and staff at UCTV
that make our streaming platform possible.
And I also want to make a
rare thank you to the admin
of the University of California Berkeley
for announcing that we
would be going fully remote
back in July and not opening too soon
and deliberately exposing all
of us to a deadly pandemic,
like so many other
colleges and universities
that will here to forego unnamed.
But welcome to all of you.
Now, like I said,
I'm gonna begin here with
a bit of current events
and sort of what's at stake
and then we will pass,
I will pass over to my
co-teacher Saru Jayaraman
who will then proceed to introduce herself
and take up the main topic for today.
So, right.
The week between the end
of August and Labor Day
after the duly major party,
nominating conventions marks the start
of the traditional presidential
campaign in which the voters
of the United States
will collectively decide
which white septuagenarian
will lead us as president.
With Joe Biden and Kamala
Harris officially nominated
and elected as the Democratic contenders
and Donald Trump and Mike
Pence formerly renominated
as the Republican ticket for reelection,
the race is officially on.
For Biden and the Democrats,
the convention's message
is that Trump has failed
the country on the coronavirus response,
the economic crisis and on the
question of racial justice.
Their slickly produced
convention was a festival
of sentiment and the
politics of representation
that offered precious little in the way
of clear and popular plan to
accomplish their lofty goals.
For Trump and the Republicans,
the message focused on insisting
that Trump is not in fact,
a racist while promising
to restore law and order
for white America.
Over four days, the RNC
repeated its message
that Trump was quote the
bodyguard of Western civilization,
that urban protesters are
violent anarchists and looters
who want to quote, abolish the suburbs
and attacked Joe Biden
as quote the destroyer
of American greatness and quote,
a Trojan horse for the left,
determined to bring
about a socialist utopia.
Now, while the DNC work to tie
Trump to the current crisis,
the RNC rewrote the recent past to suggest
that the current crisis,
was not only well in hand,
but it was just a taste of
the horrors that awaited us
in Joe Biden's America.
For all their differences
in policy, tone and agenda,
and the increasingly divergent realities
and information systems the
two parties seem to inhabit,
they both launched campaigns
under dueling slogans
that are dramatically and
metaphorically speaking,
nearly identical.
Build back better versus make
America great again, again.
Within these slogans, America
was once whole and good,
but has now fallen and must be
rebuilt and destroyed by us.
That other guy over there is
going to destroy everything.
Now for Biden, that back
is obviously the Obama era
and this convention was
filled with Obama nostalgia,
including a vintage
performance by the man himself,
the one I like to refer to
as the Michael Jordan of politics.
For Trump, that once
lost now merely partially
restored greatness is harder to locate
in part because it exists
in an explicitly mythic past
of patriarchy, suburban segregation
and militant nationalism
that could exist anywhere
between the 1980s and the 1820s.
So launching their campaign
by looking back in the face
of an uncertain future,
both candidates would typically
have started this week
by campaigning across several
states in a rush to build
what pollsters often
call a convention bounce,
an upward jolt in their polling numbers
and campaign donations.
The internal polling and
political strategists
typically dictate the
roots of these opening
campaign junkets pushing the
candidates from city to city
along a tight circuit
of battleground States.
Let's recall for a moment
here that the United States
presidential election not
unlike the US COVID-19 response
is not a national project.
It is a patchwork of 50
separate state elections,
each governed by a different
set of state rules for voting
and eligibility in which
citizens of each state
vote in a winner take all
system for a set of electors
determined by the total number
of each state's congressional delegation.
That's 100 senators, 435 congresspersons
plus two votes for Washington DC.
And you get 538 delegates who then vote
in what is known as the electoral college.
And it is the majority of
these electors with 270 to win
and a 269-269 tie,
not statistically negligible
in its possibility
that ultimately will determine the winner.
Now, this leaves open the
possibility that a candidate
like George W. Bush in 2000
and Donald Trump in 2016,
could lose the next national
popular election by running up
big wins in States like
California and Illinois
and New York, while still
losing the election.
Don't forget that Hillary
won the national popular vote
by 2.8 million votes or some 2%.
Now, given this system,
the candidates tend to
focus nearly all their time
in a tiny handful of swing
states or battleground states,
where one party or the other feels
they can win electoral
votes from the opponent.
Well, the largest states have
been strictly noncompetitive
throughout the 21st century
with deep blue California's 55 votes
and deep reds Texas with 38.
Other perpetual swing
states like Ohio's 18.
Florida's 29, Missouri's
10, Pennsylvania's 20,
North Carolina's 15 and
Colorado's nine votes
form the traditional block of
contested battleground states.
Now, if you take your campaign
to your enemy's territory
and remake the map as Obama did in 2008,
and as Trump did in 2016, you
can win the presidential race.
So what we're looking at right now
is essentially what this
map, this is 270 to win.
I highly suggest you go to
these websites and click around,
you can sort of play
with the electoral map,
see what the paths of victory are
for the respective candidates.
It's a fun thing to do in your spare time
with all of that nervous
energy we all have.
Now remember that polling
data does not tell us
who is going to win on November 3rd.
It just offers us a snapshot
of the race in that moment,
often with a massive five or
six point margin of error.
Single polls can be highly
unreliable and aggregates
or polling averages serve as
much better guide to the race
where one can look less at
the upper down horse race
of who's winning or losing
and see the trend lines,
which is basically is the
race widening or narrowing.
In this case it is most
definitely narrowing.
Now, as we all learned in 2016,
let's move this here.
As we all learned in 2016,
Hillary versus Trump,
just because Nate Silver's
538.com gave Donald Trump
a 28.6% chance of winning does not mean
that he is not going
to turn up well Trump's
and run the table on the upper Midwest.
This does not make Nate Silver wrong.
It was our expectations that were wrong.
His model actually
worked, a swing of just 2%
ie pretty much the margin
of error and a loader lower
than expected voter turnout
in Democratic strongholds
tilted the race to Trump.
Trump turned Hillary's assumed
strength in the upper Midwest
commonly referred to as the rust belt
into an unexpected battleground
and the former home of
Midwest progressivism,
namely the state of
Wisconsin recently taken over
by a conservative wave,
became the singular tipping point state.
On election day 2016 Hillary's
final polling numbers
had her up by nearly 6% in Wisconsin.
A state she'd never visited to campaign,
never held a rally in,
and yet eventually lost by
a mere 20,000 votes or 0.7%.
So when I tell you here, I
may need to readjust this.
Let's go up.
So when I tell you that Nate
Silver currently has Joe Biden
with a very similar
chance of winning in 2020.
And with Wisconsin currently set out
as the tipping point state,
you will know to hold
your expectations in
check and act accordingly.
At this point, this race is
either old man's to win or lose.
But of course, 2020 is different.
Not only is neither
party particularly clear
on how to campaign in the
midst of a deadly pandemic,
but during this past week,
a series of shocking
events moved far too fast
for the presidential horse race
to control the news cycles.
Well, let me go back here.
There, here.
We're getting better at this.
Bang.
Okay.
And now I just will tell
everyone I am not gonna show
any images, videos or images
of overt violence in this.
I find Twitter feeds in which in the midst
of the Black Lives Matter movement,
terrifying the level of snuff
films that we see on our feeds
is traumatizing and horrifying.
I am not gonna subject, you
know where to find them,
if you wanna see them.
But,
I will not show you these videos.
I will merely describe the
events surrounding them.
So on August 23rd,
during the weekend between
the DNC and the RNC,
an unarmed black motorist
named Jacob Blake was shot
by a white Kenosha police
officer named Rusten SheskEy.
Officer SheskEy shot Blake
seven times in the back
at point blank range in
front of his three children,
ages three, five, and six,
leaving Blake paralyzed
and fighting for his life.
Sheskey has so far not
been charged with a crime.
Video of the shooting sparked
another round of protest
and mass unrest in Kenosha
and across the United States.
Kenosha, excuse me,
is a Lakeside city of some
100,000 residents built between
the Northern suburbs of
Chicago and Milwaukee,
the largest and most
diverse city in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin may be best known
for its American cheese
and being the current home
of Cal grad, Aaron Rodgers.
But in 2015, Wisconsin had the
highest rate of incarceration
in the country for black Americans.
In 2012, the state spent more
than a half a billion dollars
a day to incarcerate 5,600 black men
from Milwaukee County alone.
Using the racial dot map that
you see here a few years ago,
an ambitious high school
student Wisconsin calculated
the 31 of Wisconsin's 56
recognizable black neighborhoods
were in fact jails and prisons.
These figures make it less of a surprise
that when the people of Kenosha,
rose up in rebellion
on Tuesday, August 25th
against the shooting of
another unarmed black man,
they burned to the ground
the local department
of corrections and probation office.
Black residents of Kenosha
constitute just 7% of the city
yet comprised one third
of the people on probation
and nearly half of those
in Kenosha's jails.
So dramatic was the response,
so dramatic was the
response to this uprising
that by Wednesday, the
Milwaukee Bucks NBA franchise
led by player George Hill
refused to take the court
for their playoff game
in the Orlando bubble,
setting off a wild cat strike
wave unique in the history
of American professional sports.
LeBron James and the Lakers,
along with the LA Clippers
threatened to pull out
of the already delayed season entirely.
The NBA walkout was quickly joined
by the far more militant stand by the WNBA
who has quite frankly shown
the majority of leadership
on this issue in American
professional sports.
At this case led by the
Washington Mystics who appeared
on court wearing t-shirts
with seven bullet holes
drawn on the back in
solidarity with Jacob Blake.
This wild cat strikes spread
across the sports world,
leading Major League Baseball,
easily the most depoliticized of American
sporting franchises.
And in the end as well
as Major League Soccer
to cancel games across the calendar.
Followed shortly thereafter
by the highest paid
woman athlete in the world, Naomi Osaka
who refused to take the
court in a semifinal
at a tournament in New York writing quote,
however, before I am an
athlete, I am a black woman.
And as a black woman
I feel as though there are
much more important matters
at hand that need immediate attention,
rather than watching me play tennis.
I don't expect anything drastic
to happen to me not playing,
but if I can get a conversation
started by the majority
in a majority white sports,
I consider that a step
in the right direction.
Watching the continued genocide
of black people at the hands
of the police is honestly
making me sick to my stomach.
I'm exhausted of having a new
hashtag pop up every few days.
And I am extremely tired of
having the same conversation
over and over again.
When will it ever be enough?
As powerful as that statement
was and as symbolic gestures
made by American professional athletes,
particularly African American
professional athletes,
even this news was quickly
overshadowed by the murder
of two protesters in Kenosha
on the night of August 26th,
by a white 17 year old
named Kyle Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse a self
declared militia member,
an avid supporter of Donald Trump
and the Blue Lives Matter
campaign was arrested at his home
in Illinois and charged with
murder for the shooting deaths
of two Black Lives Matter protesters.
The victims have been named
as 26 year old Anthony Huber
and 36 year old Joseph Rosenbaum.
After shooting one protester,
cellphone video shows
Rittenhouse falling to the ground
before shooting two more people
who attempted to disarm him.
After killing two people
Rittenhouse walked towards
and then through the police lines
where he was allowed by
police to flee the state
despite protestors attempts to
identify him as the shooter.
In a statement, the local
Kenosha police blamed
the protesters for their own deaths
claiming that had they
not been out past curfew,
the same curfew that of
course militia members
were out past, then quote,
perhaps the situation
that unfolded would not have happened.
The statement is further
undercut by video evidence
demonstrating that members
of the Kenosha Police
collaborated with armed militia members,
including Kyle Rittenhouse,
tossing them bottle of water
and telling them, quote
we appreciate you guys.
We really do.
Now all of this happened during
the third night of the RNC,
where Mike Pence heaped
praise upon the widow
of officer David Patrick Underwood,
who the vice president
said was killed during
a Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland.
The vice president did not mention
that officer Steve Underwood was murdered
by an active duty air force staff Sergeant
named Steve Carrillo, who later
killed the Santa Cruz County
Sheriff Damon Gutzwiller on June 6th.
Carrillo has been
connected by his own hand
to the Boogaloo Movement,
a faction of the armed militia
movement that is driven
by internet memes and seeks to bring about
a second civil war.
With the RNC blaming
protesters for violence
and bringing Mark and Patricia McCloskey,
the couple who brandished
firearms at Black Lives Matter
protesters outside their
palatial mansions in St. Louis.
It was only a matter of
time before the nation
split wide open in its
interpretation of the mass shooting
in Kenosha.
By the next day with
Rittenhouse in police custody,
Tucker Carlson told his more
than 4 million prime times
Fox viewers quotes,
how shocked are we that a 17
year old with a rifle decides
they had to maintain order
when no one else would.
The next day a man appeared
wearing a maggot hat
at a Q and on and so-called
straight pride rally in Modesto
with a tee shirt of Kyle Rittenhouse
and the words American hero.
This gentle man insisted that
Kyle had merely in his words,
quote, killed two pedophiles.
Typically we might see this as part of
the right wing culture of
quote, owning the libs,
but it may better be
understood as part of what
the Atlantic writer, Adam Sewer calls
the theater of cruelty.
Adam Sewer writes quote,
only the president and his
allies, his supporters,
and their anointed are
entitled to the rights
and protections of the law
and if necessary immunity from it.
The rest of us are entitled
only to cruelty by their whim.
This is how the powerful have ever kept
the powerless divided and in their place
and enriched themselves in the process
or perhaps more directly in
the words of Harvard historian,
Walter Johnson, whose
magisterial history of the city
of St. Louis appeared this summer quote,
it was an assertion of
white rule over and against
the rule of law.
White power.
Of course as you may know,
someone else was shot on
Saturday night in Portland,
where a caravan of some 600
carloads of Trump supporters
and members of the far
right Patriot prayer group
drove into downtown
Portland to harass and fight
with Black Lives Matter
protesters who have laid siege
to the federal courthouse
for more than 90 days.
Now this story is still unfolding.
And so I don't wanna go into
it because the details about it
are still quite scattered
and need to be collected.
The name of the victim has been released,
no arrests to my knowledge
so far have been made,
but the far right militia
groups are vowing revenge
for one of their own having been killed.
And President Trump has
eulogized the Portland victim
on Twitter, an honor he has not extended
to Huber and Rosenbaum in Kenosha.
Now, while a bomb or a gunshot
may make a lot of noise,
it cannot speak.
No act of violence
makes its own confession
or tells its own story.
Political actors from the
armed men and their victims,
the police who investigate
and the prosecutors
who will charge the shooters
and the politicians,
agitators and civilians
who will seek to insert
their narratives and agendas
into the swirl of events
are the ones who will determine
what these tragic events
come to mean.
It's not just politics or street battles
that are contentious,
the struggle over
representations of meaning itself
is being contested
every hour of every day,
as Americans attempt to govern themselves
through the vehicle of
representative democracy.
And it is this category of representation
that brings together the idea,
of meaning, of beauty, of
aesthetics, of language and art,
and the question of
political representation,
linking aesthetics and power
through a single keyword,
perhaps the most important
keyword in the field,
my field of American studies
and cultural studies.
Now these events will
inevitably come to mean
different things to
different groups of people.
Through stories on CNN
and posts on Facebook
and four Chan, these events will,
I'm afraid become a polarizing
force, driving Americans
further not just into hostile camps,
but into two completely
divergent versions of reality.
This is not to say that there
is some reality out there
that is being distorted through
ideological representations.
What these events show us
is that it is only through
these ideological representations,
that these events become real to us all.
That is only through
representations that we become
part of a shared reality
and that that reality is
rapidly spinning out of control.
Pundits and strategists
have already begun asking
whose campaign message this
chaos and violence best suits.
Trump obviously wants to
tie Biden to the uprisings
in Kenosha and Portland,
just as Biden wants to tie the
vigilante violence to Trump.
While the Biden campaign
has condemned the violence
and challenged Trump to do the same,
Trump has promised instead
to come to Kenosha tomorrow.
Now for the first time in my lifetime,
but by no means for the
first time in US history
has a battleground state like Wisconsin
turned into a literal battleground.
Now I have to tell you
as a way of ending here
that this is not the place
where I wanted to start
our discussion of the 2020 election.
My intention is not to scare anyone
or elevate our anxiety levels.
They're all ready basically
at eyeball or higher level.
But political violence is
among the most difficult topics
to talk about and yet here we are,
at the traditional start to
the presidential election,
talking about the murder of
three Americans in the streets
during street battles between
rival political groups.
All of this just happened
in the past one week
and will continue to shape
the race going forward.
Now it will be our responsibility
to try and keep track
of these events.
And I look forward to
following them with you
to the best of our ability.
So at this point I'd
like to turn things over,
I will stop sharing my screen
and I will turn things over
to my co-teacher, who
will take over from me.
Thank you very much.
- Hi everyone. My name is Saru Jayaraman
and I am teaching this class
along with Professor Cohen.
My name is Saru Jayaraman as I said,
I teach at the Goldman
School of Public Policy.
I'm an associate adjunct there,
I run the Food Labor Research Center
at the Goldman school of Public Policy.
And it's a pleasure to be with you all.
Outside of my work at UC Berkeley,
I lead a national organization
fighting to raise wages
and working conditions in
the restaurant industry
and the service sector more broadly.
And I'll be talking a
lot more about that work
throughout the semester,
but I also am an author.
I've written several books
on the restaurant industry
and on low wage workers
and in the fight against
corporations in the
food space on organizing
and social movements.
I teach social movements,
policy and organizing
at UC Berkeley, have for
the last several years,
about seven or eight years.
Before that I taught at
NYU and Brooklyn College
in New York.
And I speak a lot around
the country in Congress
and in state legislatures
and on television
about issues facing low wage
workers in America today.
So I'm really, really happy
to be with you all today.
Welcome to people who are watching online
and to all the students
in this class as well.
So today what we wanted
to do with today's class
and the time we have remaining
is to actually review
exactly what's at stake
with this election.
This class is about elections 2020,
but we wanted to talk a little bit about
what's really at stake?
What are the big kind of
forces and what's the context
for this particular election?
Why do we keep calling
it the most historic
and important election of our lives?
You've read ana article for today
hopefully by Ashil Membe who
used the metaphor of breath
and said that, everybody
in this world has the right
to breathe and use that
metaphor to say that long before
the pandemic was
constricting people's breath.
And that is as you know, the pandemic,
this particular pandemic,
this COVID-19 Corona virus
is particularly impactful
on your lungs, on your ability to breathe.
So from a health's sense,
there's a real constricting
of people's breath.
But Ashil was using it
as a metaphor to say
long before the pandemic,
there was an inability for
the people of the world
to breathe in terms of very
deep systemic inequalities.
Inequalities in terms of the
economy, in terms of health,
in terms of race, in terms of gender,
in terms of so many other factors
that that breed inequality
and oppression for people in this world
and in particular in this country.
So he used the metaphor of breath.
I'm gonna use another metaphor today.
This is a health situation primarily
that is what has shut us
down, shut down the economy.
It has led to,
it has created the foundations
for a national uprising around race.
I'm gonna use the metaphor
of a preexisting condition.
And I'm gonna say that
the pandemic really,
this pandemic revealed preexisting
conditions that existed
for the world and in particular
for the United States.
Preexisting conditions as Ashil
talked about of inequality,
of oppression, of varying
access to healthcare,
to the ability to prosper
and to succeed to the even
the ability to live and
to not have the police
kill our children.
Very, very different realities for people
in the United States and around the world.
That was a preexisting condition.
And what I wanna talk about
today is the ways in which
the pandemic has revealed
the preexisting conditions
that existed long before this pandemic
really created a crisis.
And that really were
already creating a crisis
for most Americans and for
most people around the world.
That preexisting condition,
I wanna talk about it with
regard to four particular topics,
health and healthcare,
economic inequality,
and the issues of the
economy, racial inequity
and a lot of what professor
Cohen just talked about
in terms of police brutality,
but also how that intersects with some
of the other structural
racial inequities that we see
in our country and the environment.
So if we think of those four
issues and the ways in which
this country in particular
had preexisting conditions
around those four issues,
and I keep using the word
preexisting condition
as you know, they talk
about preexisting conditions
with regard to health,
that basically the pandemic
makes it much worse
and much scarier and much
more riskier for people
with preexisting conditions.
People with preexisting health conditions
are at greater risk of
catching the pandemic,
of getting sick and
dying from the pandemic.
Well, that is true for this country too.
This country had many
preexisting conditions,
especially with regard
to those four things
I just mentioned,
health, the economy, race
and the environment that
really made this country sick
in the same way our body gets
sick, prior to the pandemic
and the pandemic has not created crisis,
the pandemic has revealed crisis.
So that what we see now with
this election is not a question
of right or left, not just
a question of right or left,
not just a question of
Democrats or Republicans,
it is truly a question of,
do we go back or do we go forward?
Because one thing is very, very clear,
we had a preexisting condition,
which means there is no return to normal,
normal never existed for
the majority of Americans
and the majority of
people around the world.
Normal was deaths and severe
poverty and not survival,
not survival for a majority
of people in this country
and around the world.
And so if that is not normal,
that is not normal, death,
and inability to survive,
and inability to thrive, and
inability to feed your children
and inability to cover
your healthcare costs.
That is not normal. It is crisis.
And so what I'm trying to
say is that crisis existed
for a majority of Americans
and for a majority of people
around the world prior to the pandemic.
The pandemic revealed that
preexisting condition.
And so the election of
this election is not,
do we choose this septuagenarian
as Professor Cohen said
over this septuagenarian?
It is a question of, do we
make America great again?
Which means going backward.
Or do we go forward?
And in going forward, do
we allow, somebody to say,
going forward means going back,
going forward means returning to normal?
Or do we push if Biden wins,
do we push for something
that never existed
for an entirely new
situation that never existed
prior to the pandemic?
So in that way, I think
what I'm trying to say
is that this election is again,
not just about returning to normal,
because there was no
normal, stasis didn't exist.
What we are talking about is
the potential to go way back
or the potential after the
election to push for something
that never existed.
Do we have the opportunity
to push for something
that never existed?
That's the question.
And given that that's the question,
I hope that we can see this election,
not as an ending point,
but as a beginning point,
not as an ending point,
but as a pivot point,
not as an ending point, but the chance,
the opportunity to do more.
And that's why as part of this class
we'll be talking about social
movements and other ways
to engage in our democracy beyond voting,
because voting this November
is not going to actually answer
the question about going
back, going forward.
It's not gonna answer the
question about whether
we resolve our preexisting conditions.
So let's talk a little bit about
those preexisting conditions.
I'm gonna share my screen.
Let's talk about the pandemic itself.
We know that if you look at this,
this comes from the European CDC.
And we know that unfortunately,
both in terms of new cases,
on a daily basis and in terms of death,
America is in fact at
the top, it's the worst.
It is really, truly at the very top
in terms of doing very poorly with regard
to both infection and death.
We know that worldwide, there
are about 10 million people
who've caught the coronavirus or COVID-19,
and that there have been
857,000 deaths worldwide.
The US has 4% of the world's population,
but 1/4 of all cases
and a 1/4 of all deaths.
So I'm gonna say that again,
one fourth, I'm sorry,
4% of the world's population,
but 1/4 or 25%, right?
In other words, six times
more than six times,
our share of the world's population.
We have six times that
in terms of our share
of the number of cases of
infection and in terms of deaths.
So this is showing that
compared to countries,
we might typically compare ourselves to,
England, Australia, South Korea, China,
we are doing among the worst
in terms of daily cases.
India is right up there and I
didn't chart Brazil on here.
Brazil is also right up there.
What we know about the US,
India and Brazil is that the
three of them have leaders at this time
that have reacted
similarly to the pandemic
that initially denied its importance
and that have been kind of
reacting to it in different ways
than the countries at
the bottom of the scale,
England, South Korea,
Australia, New Zealand and China
in terms of healthcare and
the provision of testing
and tracing and these kinds of things.
So if you look at us versus
the rest of the world,
this is further mapped
out here with regard to,
if you at countries that
have more than 10 to 50,000
new cases per day.
We are in the top four countries
with that kind of a
level of daily new cases.
And when you look at deaths again,
we right now have the highest
number of recorded deaths.
Now of course we all know that
neither in the United States
nor in the rest of the world,
this is not completely accurate.
Even this European CDC chart says,
we don't know the true number of deaths,
but in terms of recorded deaths,
we are definitely the highest.
Again, we were about a quarter
of all deaths in the world.
And again, we are among the
top four or five countries
in terms of the total number
of deaths in the world.
And when hopefully you read Ed
Young's piece in the Atlantic
which talked about why
this might be the case,
according to Ed he said,
this is chronic underfunding
of our public health system.
It really neutered our ability
to prevent the pathogen spread,
totally inefficient healthcare system
that's controlled by
HMOs and private actors,
totally unprepared for the
ensuing waves of sickness.
Still unprepared, did not go
about it in a systematic way
in terms of testing and tracing.
And therefore we are definitely
among the worst in terms of
both cases and deaths and the
ongoing spread of the virus.
A real lack of social distancing,
a political or cultural fight
over whether to wear masks,
guidelines largely not followed
based on this notion that,
I have a right, it's my freedom
to not follow guidelines,
health guidelines and above
all from our leadership,
a notion that the economy is
more important than our health.
And I want to in particular,
lift up two images.
One of course, from
the RNC this past week,
this is the White House lawn.
When President Trump was speaking,
which in and of itself was
a very questionable move
in terms of having a
convention at the White House,
very much pushing the boundaries
of ethics in this country.
But beyond that,
the vast sea of people that
were on the White House lawn
were neither social distancing
nor largely wearing masks,
totally flouting the
guidelines of the very
White House officials that
they're standing in front of.
And why?
Because we had a lot of
leadership that really,
said the economy comes first.
The economy is most important.
This was a Lieutenant governor
from Texas, Dan Patrick,
who was quoted as saying very
openly and continues to say
to this day, we need
to reopen at all costs,
even if it kills some old people, so what.
In fact old people should volunteer to die
to save the economy and that
there are a lot of grandparents
out there who'd be willing
to sacrifice themselves
for the cause of the economy.
So if we look at kind
of what is different,
just going back to these charts,
what is different about us
versus South Korea, Australia,
New Zealand, even China,
what is different?
I think in many cases,
it can come down to this,
the idea that in this country the economy,
at least for some in
leadership is more important
than our health,
in this country is
important to think about
profit over people,
in this country it has
been a case of severe
under investment in care,
in healthcare, in education,
in teaching, in the economy,
in the sense of the most
vulnerable people in our economy.
It has been a severe
underfunding and under investment
in people at the expense of profit.
And I don't think I'm saying
anything that they themselves
wouldn't say, these are quotes by people
on the right themselves.
This is Dan Patrick
Lieutenant Governor of Texas
saying this not us paraphrasing him.
And of course we know
that all of this impacted
people of color much, much more
severely than white people.
We know that if you look at this chart,
Native Americans in particular
have had the highest rates
of both cases and hospitalization,
five times of the rate of
hospitalization of the rest
of the population in
particular white people.
African Americans have had
the highest level of death,
double the level of death
compared to white people
and the overall population.
And that this has been in
large part because of poverty,
because of preexisting conditions,
because of health disparities that existed
prior to the pandemic,
both disparities in
terms of people's health
and in terms of disparity with regard
to their access to healthcare.
And one note I wanna make on
this that we'll be talking
about later in the
semester is incarceration.
We know that in prisons,
there was an inordinately high
level of the pandemic spread
because we know that indoor spaces,
I think what I read
was that outdoor spaces
have something like 15 times
less risk than indoor spaces.
And so when you have a lot
of people indoors together,
not socially distancing
because they're in prison
or in jail, you're gonna have
very, very high levels of cases.
And in this country again,
I wanna point to something
that a future speaker is gonna talk about.
This numerical, the
statistic that I gave a 4%
of the world's population,
25% of the world's cases,
25% of the world's deaths
is strangely a statistic
that gets repeated on a lot of issues.
We have 4% of the world's population,
but 25% or a quarter of the
world's incarcerated people.
We have 4% of the population,
but 25% of the world's carbon emissions,
we have 4% of the world's population,
but 25% of the world's cases
of COVID-19 and deaths.
And all of these things are related.
We have 4% of the world's
population, but 1/4,
a quarter, 25% of all of
these ways in which we have
again, put profit over people.
We have put profit over people
in each of those instances.
There was a prison in Ohio
that was reported to have 2,000
cases of the pandemic with
a capacity of 1,500 beds.
I'm gonna say that again.
There was a prison in
Ohio that had 2,000 cases
of the pandemic with a
capacity of 1,500 beds,
which means that this prison
was already way overcrowded
and resulted in if not 100% of people
getting the pandemic, very near that.
And so what we have is a situation where,
because you have an
over-incarceration of people of color,
a disproportionate amount of
lack of access to healthcare
and health disparities
among people of color,
you end up with this chart
with people of color,
particularly black and
native American populations,
having absurdly high, much higher rates
of catching the pandemic,
being hospitalized
and dying from it as a
result of all of these
preexisting conditions that
existed prior to the pandemic.
Now, each of these areas I want to give us
a little bit of hope.
We're talking about a
context for an election.
So what is possible in terms
of thinking about the future?
In each of these areas,
health, economy, race,
and the environment,
there is the potential to,
because this pandemic has created a reset,
completely reimagine
everything about our world.
And in the case of this,
what I've just spoken
about health, the pandemic,
there is an overwhelming new support,
a much wider support than existed before
for universal access to healthcare.
There is a lot more
conversation about Medicaid
and access to Medicaid and
making Medicaid universal.
There is a lot more talk
also about letting people go,
letting people who are in prison go
who are there for
especially minor offenses,
who've been in jail or prison for decades
and are senior citizens.
And so we're gonna hear from
a speaker in a few weeks
who works on mass incarceration,
that is his area of focus.
He's gonna talk a lot about,
there has been a lot of progress
in many parts of the country,
prisons actually letting go
a lot of folks that maybe should
have never have been there
in the first place.
It is part of re-imagining both healthcare
and our criminal justice system that has
some bipartisan support
and is part of the,
is part of the overall
kind of wave of change
that is possible if we
think in a forward way,
we reimagine and we move past
our preexisting conditions.
So gonna move on to the economy and say,
in terms of the economy now,
I think it's important to
understand that the whole world
did not shut down in the
way that we shut down.
Because of our lack of again,
testing and contact tracing,
and kind of strategic focus,
intentional focus early
on with the pandemic.
We had to shut down in ways
that other countries didn't have to.
And for longer periods of time,
we also went through fits and starts.
We closed down, reopened,
closed down again
because of the spread of the virus in ways
that other countries
didn't necessarily have to.
And so what is so ironic
about that is that we did
all of that because there was a desire,
as we talked about earlier
to put the economy first,
to put the economy above our health,
but that resulted in
frankly the economy tanking
as a result of the ways in
which we prioritized the economy
over our health.
And that resulted in again,
these fits and starts and mass shut down.
So since the pandemic's initial shut down
in middle of March 48 million people
have filed for unemployment insurance.
48 million people have filed
for unemployment insurance
and I and my colleagues at One Fair Wage
and the Food Labor Research
Center did some research
as to whether unemployment insurance
was actually reaching people.
This we published in middle May.
So this was two months after
the shutdown, two months.
And we looked at nationwide per state.
This is data based on what they reported
to the federal government
in terms of the percentage
of people who applied for
unemployment insurance
and actually got it.
Nationwide only 56%.
So only a little bit
more than half of people
who applied for unemployment
insurance by May,
two months in had actually received it.
And you can see some states
that are truly verging
on the ridiculous.
You see states that have
very, very, very low rates
of accessing unemployment insurance,
including for example, Florida.
Florida, only 32% of people who applied
for unemployment insurance
actually received it.
Hawaii, similar numbers,
California, frankly was
not that much better.
41% of people who applied actually got it.
So depending on the state,
we saw varying levels of
people not being able to access
unemployment insurance.
And it's important I will
spend a little bit more time
on this when we get to income inequality,
but it's important to understand
a little bit of why that's the case.
Unemployment insurance was a system set up
during the Great Depression
as part of the new deal
that was intentionally set
up to deny people benefits
so that they would take any low wage job
that came their way.
It's very blatant.
If you read kind of you go
back and you read the history
of how unemployment insurance was set up,
there was a similar debate
as is going on today
with the Republicans, well,
if we provide benefits
people aren't going to be
willing to take any low wage job
that comes their way.
And so the system was
set up to deny people
unemployment insurance if they
didn't take any low wage job
that came their way.
And it was set up underfunded
and under invested in
to make sure that it was hard to access,
very hard to access, slow in
processing people's claims
so that people would be turned
off from getting benefits.
And the worry was and the
worry continues to be,
we wanna make it difficult to get
because if we can turn
people away from it,
that will make them work.
The concern is that if they get benefits,
they're just gonna kind
of live on the hug,
high on the hug, right?
They're just going to sit around
and live on that money forever.
They're not gonna wanna work.
They're lazy.
And so therefore we should make
it very difficult to access.
I worked with people who
counted that they called
their state unemployment insurance offices
over 10,000 times.
I worked with people who sat on the phone
for 72 hours straight waiting for somebody
to respond to them.
I worked with people,
these are people who I work
with in my organization
who shared stories of being
told they were gonna access
unemployment insurance,
but then never getting it.
We on the whole in this country
saw an absurdly difficult
process in terms of people
accessing unemployment insurance.
And of course this was much, much worse
for low wage workers,
who of course are overwhelmingly
people of color and women.
So you can see here that
unemployment did not hit people
of all races equally.
The highest rates of
unemployment were in particular,
women and Latinas in particular,
black women and Asian women just behind,
certainly all women having a
higher unemployment insurance,
I'm sorry, unemployment
rate than white men.
Why is this?
Why would it be that
people of color and women
would have higher unemployment
rates than white men?
And one thing I wanna say
that's particularly devastating
about this is that right
before the pandemic shutdown,
we had reached an important
moment in history for women,
for the first time in world history,
we reached a moment where
women's participation
in the labor force actually
exceeded men's participation
in labor force.
Now that was always
true for women of color.
Women of color always worked
the same or more than men
of color, but for white
women and women on the whole,
we had just finally reached a moment
where women's participation
in the labor force
had just equaled or exceeded men.
And all of those gains were
lost during the pandemic
because the jobs that were
most likely to be shut down,
the jobs that I represent,
the low wage jobs, restaurant,
retail, healthcare,
although healthcare should
have been invested in,
and those jobs should not have been lost,
they were in the largest numbers,
low wage worker jobs were the hardest hit.
You saw the most loss
among low wage worker jobs.
And of course women and people
of color disproportionately
held those jobs.
So that's why you see much
higher levels of unemployment
among women and people of color.
And meanwhile, while this was happening,
we saw several brands just skyrocket.
During this period,
we saw several brands as
you saw low wage workers
in massive dire straits.
I'm gonna talk in a minute
about the restaurant industry
in particular and the
kind of dire situation
that millions of workers in that industry
find themselves in.
But it's important to keep in mind,
not everybody has been
struggling during this pandemic.
The brands that I've
listed here on this slide
have all experienced more
than a 25 or 30% increase
in stock prices during the pandemic.
Regeneron is one of the nation's largest,
the world's largest
pharmaceutical companies.
It's been doing really, really well.
Citrix and Zoom are both,
we're using zoom right now.
Citrix and Zoom are
both doing really well,
are profiting from the pandemic.
Netflix, I'm sure you all know.
And from your own personal
experience has been zooming.
Clorox is the primary
company with disinfectants
and wipes and sanitizers.
They've been doing amazingly well.
Smuckers, there's been an
overwhelmingly increase
with people at home in
peanut butter and jelly
and other such items.
And Amazon.
Amazon, maybe the worst of all,
because they have been
engaged in a lot of very
dubious practices with regard
to their delivery workers
and warehouse workers during the pandemic.
They have also been engaged
in a lot of dubious practices
with regard to monopoly
and antitrust issues
and their profits have
exceeded during this pandemic.
Important to keep in
mind, as we talk about
one sector of workers that I represent
that have really, really been
extraordinarily hard hit.
So I keep talking about
preexisting conditions.
The preexisting condition
in the restaurant industry
was that it was the nation's
largest and fastest growing
private sector employer,
almost 14 million workers.
So nearly one in 10 American workers,
but also the lowest paying.
So I just wanna stop and say,
that's a preexisting condition
not just for that industry,
but frankly for our whole economy.
This is what's important to understand.
We were teetering as a nation
on some kind of economic
crisis or collapse
prior to the pandemic,
because what you had
was the nation's largest
and fastest growing
private sector employers
paying the least.
And you do have to think about
what happens to a country
when the nation's largest
and fastest growing jobs,
the nation's largest and
fastest growing industries
pay the least.
That means all new
entrance into the economy,
whether they're immigrants,
formerly incarcerated
individuals, women, young people,
people entering the economy,
these are largely the
jobs that are available.
Restaurant jobs, retail jobs,
and they are the lowest
paying jobs in our economy
which means we are growing these
low wage jobs in particular
restaurants and retail,
we are growing the low
wage floor of the economy.
Prior to the pandemic we had
gotten to at least one in three
working Americans working full
time and living in poverty.
And we were getting
very close to one in two
working Americans working full
time and living in poverty.
Of course, it depends on
how you measure poverty.
Some people use the federal poverty rate,
which is extremely and
kind of ridiculously low
it's less than $20,000 a year.
I mean, that's not poverty,
that is just destitution,
complete inability to survive.
If you look at poverty in terms of just
the inability to feed, to pay bills,
to feed kids without
assistance from the government.
If you look at poverty in that way,
then we were getting
very close to one in two
working Americans working full
time and living in poverty.
Now, even without a pandemic,
we were very, very close
to that impacting our GDP
and these very same industries themselves.
So in the restaurant industry for example,
we see three tiers of the
industry, fine dining,
so that's like the fancy
fine dining restaurants.
We saw family style or casual restaurants.
That's the IHOPs and the
Denny's and the Applebee's
and Olive Gardens.
And we saw fast food.
And we saw an explosion
in the top in fine dining,
an explosion in growth in fast food
and a stagnation of those family style.
Even if you go to their
quarterly shareholder reports,
you would see stagnation.
Why?
Because who used to eat at the
Olive Gardens and Applebee's
and the IHOPs?
Working people and in
particular restaurant workers.
So by paying people so little
and having their wages
stagnate for still so long
in the case of restaurant workers,
their wages had stagnated for 30 years,
had not gone up for 30
years with inflation
or anything else, they had just stagnated.
If you have stagnating wages,
you're gonna cannibalize your own industry
because the very people
who used to consume
can no longer do so.
It is the epitome of what
Henry Ford used to say as this,
the founder of the Ford Motor Company.
He would say, I want to
make sure that the people
who are working on my assembly
line can afford the cars
that are coming off the assembly line.
If not, my company will fail.
And that is what was happening,
not just with the restaurant industry,
but very large sectors of
our economy, restaurants,
retail, especially home healthcare,
because the workers in those
industries are the largest
and fastest growing
sectors unable to consume.
So what I'm trying to tell you
is that we were on the verge
of crisis, economic crisis
prior to the pandemic.
The pandemic just revealed and exacerbated
the preexisting condition.
So in the case of the restaurant industry,
I mentioned that our wages
had stagnated for 30 years.
That's because of something
called the sub minimum wage
for tipped workers which I'm gonna explain
later in the class but just to be brief,
the sub minimum wage for
tipped workers has been frozen
at $2 and 13 cents an hour for the last 81
I'm sorry, 30 years.
It's gone up from zero to $2 over 81 years
since the minimum wage
was first established
as part of the new deal.
And so you had nearly 14 million workers
with a federal minimum wage
of $2 and 13 cents an hour,
overwhelmingly female population,
70% of tipped workers in America.
These are waitresses and bartenders.
So 70% of workers in the industry
who earn tips were women,
largely waitresses in
very casual restaurants,
struggling to survive on
very low wages and tips.
I used to call it living tip to mouth.
Your wage is so low, $2 and
13 cents it goes to taxes.
You're living completely off your tips.
Now that was the preexisting condition.
Come March, middle March,
about 10 million of these
workers lost their jobs,
10 million.
And I gave you a number prior
that 56% of Americans overall
were able to access
unemployment insurance.
Among tipped workers and
restaurant workers, less than 40%
were able to access unemployment
insurance because of tips
because tips created
this horribly unreported,
under reported messy system
that state and employment
insurance offices rejected.
So we had millions of workers
who were paid two and $3
across the country who
came to us and said,
my state unemployment
insurance office is saying,
you earned too little
to qualify for benefits.
Your sub-minimum wage of $2 plus tips
was too low to meet the
minimum threshold to qualify
for benefits.
So again, you've got to
think about these two systems
that were set up at the new deal,
a sub minimum wage for tipped workers
and an unemployment insurance
system set up to deny people
converging in this moment of
crisis when 10 million people,
not a tiny population, 10 million people
have lost their jobs and
basically denying millions
and millions and millions of
largely women, single mothers
with families trying to feed their kids,
denying them access to benefits.
And the data I showed
you was from mid May.
The number that I'm giving
you 60% is from mid May.
Now, here we are in September
and you're talking about five
or six months of people without income
and what have they done?
How have they managed?
When we started an emergency
relief fund in mid March.
We raised about $23 million
to hand out cash payments
to these workers.
When we started the relief
fund, workers told us,
thank you so much.
This is gonna allow me to
buy groceries for my kids.
Six months later, they are
writing to us and saying,
I am now having to steal
food for my children.
I don't have money for gas
to get to the food bank,
to get food.
When I get to the food bank,
the food is gone or it's spoiled.
I had a mother say, how
long do you expect me
to feed my kids on bread and maple syrup?
And lots of people sharing pictures
of their electricity bills saying,
we just don't know how much
longer we can be in touch.
So it's been a very heartbreaking time.
And I just don't think
people understand the scale
with which this is happening.
I just wanted to share some of the really,
truly heartbreaking notes we got
as we were sending out this cash payment.
This is just 220,000 people
have applied to our fund.
We've given out 35,000 checks to workers.
So $500 each.
We still have a long way to go.
It's a drop in the bucket.
But I'm just gonna read this last one.
So incredibly grateful for the 500.
I've already lost everything
and living with my mother.
I was about to lose my vehicle
and ready to throw in the towel.
It went straight to my vehicle
payments to get me on track.
I have no clue what I'll
do to stay on track,
but it's incredibly nice to
be able to breathe for one day
without freaking out
all day. Thanks so much.
It means more than you will ever know.
And I've been reading these incoming notes
for the last five months, six months.
It's heartbreaking what people are,
these are working people, people
who work two and three jobs
to stay afloat.
People who have children and are trying
to feed their children and just
completely unable to do so.
And in this moment,
many if not have already
lost their homes, are on the
verge of losing their homes.
Certainly not able to pay the bills.
So we are talking about a
very, very dire situation,
but I said for each of these sections,
I want to give us some hope
because what's extraordinary
to me is that these workers
are rising up in a way
that I have not seen in
20 years of organizing.
A lot of workers now are being
asked to go back to work.
I told you the way unemployment
insurance is set up,
the system is set up so
that if you don't take
any low wage job that comes
your way you will lose benefits.
So now as restaurants
are reopening, closing,
reopening, closing, it's such
a crazy chaotic time right now
in the restaurant industry,
because some states are reopening
at partial indoor dining,
some saying no indoor
dining, only outdoor dining.
It's chaotic. It's crazy.
And workers are being called back to work
for a sub minimum wage of two or $3
when tips are down 50 to
75% depending on the state.
And so workers are between
a rock and a hard place.
They're being told either take the job
and lose your benefits
or their other choice
is to refuse the job
because they're saying,
why would I put my life at
risk and my children's life
at risk if I'm living
with elderly parents,
their lives at risk,
why would I put everybody's
life at risk of catching
the coronavirus for two or $3 wage
when tips are down 50 to 75%?
And that choice has become much more dire
as the weather changes.
I know for those of us
living in California,
we don't experience these changes,
but for people in the rest of the country,
it's gonna start to get
cold in about 30 days.
In 30 days and so all
of the outdoor dining
that we've seen in New York
and Massachusetts and Chicago
is going to have to, if at all,
if anything become indoor
dining and indoor dining
has been named one of
the top most risky places
to catch the coronavirus,
to catch COVID-19.
And so you're seeing a
situation in which workers
are making this very real,
horrible choice, life or death,
my life or my livelihood and
they are choosing their lives.
And so this is an image
from about 30 minutes ago,
in Times Square workers in
the organization that I lead
are on strike.
They constructed a 24 foot
Elaina, the essential worker.
This is just half of her.
The full body will go up is already up
probably I just haven't gotten,
been texted the images yet.
I'll share it with you on Wednesday,
but workers in New York and
Chicago went on strike today
saying we refuse to go back to work
without a full minimum
wage and tips on top.
We refuse to go back to work
without safety protocols.
And we're seeing low wage workers
not just in the restaurant industry,
but in nursing and
healthcare and education say,
we refuse to go back to work.
And it is a hopeful moment
because what we know
from social movement work
and we'll talk a lot more,
a lot more about this
later in the semester
is that the more people who are engaged
in disruptive activity,
contentious disruptive activity,
the more change happens.
And of course we saw it with racial equity
and the fight over police,
but we're also seeing it in the economy.
And we're also seeing it
among workers who are saying,
we're just not going to do this anymore.
I want us to make two points about this.
One is that there's an opportunity
to think about relief differently.
We gave out these relief
checks that I just talked about
and with the relief checks,
organized workers were coming
to us for relief to vote.
We did this as part of a program
that many UC Berkeley
students have been a part of
called Freedom Summer,
where UC Berkeley students
through the African American
Studies department and my class
were able to talk to workers
in those battleground states
that professor Cohen talked
about, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
and now Wisconsin and Florida,
key states for this election
and talk to low wage workers
about their very dire situation
and how voting could have
an impact on their lives.
And we're actually running the
internship class this fall.
If people want to get credit for learning
how to talk to low wage workers,
like the ones you see on your screen
that are really struggling
with very dire situation
right now about voting, you
can sign up for that class.
And Reid actually is one of our GSIs
is helping to get people
signed up for that class.
So if you want to email him,
maybe Reid, you could put the
class number and your email
so people can contact you.
So that's one thing,
we can do relief differently
in that we can not just provide
immediate relief but
through relief actually,
collectivize people's voices for change.
The second thing I wanna mention
is that there is this moment right now,
besides workers rising up where consumers
are increasingly saying wow,
these workers are essential.
Now these workers were doing their work
prior to the pandemic,
just as they're doing now.
They were restaurant workers
and grocery store workers
and healthcare workers.
There's a new term now for
workers who are working
on the frontline, serving
us during a pandemic,
people are calling them essential.
And it really does one point
to a preexisting condition.
Again, these workers were essential,
but were never paid or treated
for their essentialism,
never valued for their essentialism.
They were paid $2 and 13 cents an hour.
Now there's an increased
awareness among consumers
that these workers are not
only essential in what they do,
but that their health
and safety is essential
because if they get sick
and they're delivering
something to our door,
be it food or something
we bought on Amazon,
if they're sick, we risk
us getting sick as well.
And so our interdependence
with these essential workers
who'd been at the bottom of the economy
has become clearer than ever before.
And I think that is
definitely something hopeful
to think about in the
context of this election.
Again, will we in this election
honor these essential
workers for their centralism,
or will we continue to debase them?
All right.
So we talked about and Professor Cohen
already got into a lot of it,
the third area that I wanna
talk about where America
had a preexisting
condition, racial inequity.
And a lot of what's come up,
obviously over the last
several months is policing,
but we all know or many
of us know from data
and from real life experience
that racial inequity
extends beyond policing.
And that policing is so
interrelated to so many other issues
that people of color in
particular, black people face
in the United States and have faced
for the last many centuries.
So, all of you have seen
and maybe many of you
have been a part of huge mass uprisings
over the last many months since
the murder of George Floyd
that have been ongoing even
if the media has turned away
from them and have been
reignited of course,
by the shooting, the near
assassination of Jacob Blake.
So we know that this is a moment
where we are finally having
to deal with our long history
of racism, of white supremacy,
that stems frankly from the
founding of this country.
But I want to make sure to just
point out that this movement
has been around for decades.
It's not something that erupted right now,
even the latest iteration of it,
which is Black Lives
Matter has been around
as you all know, since 2013,
founded by three women of color,
black women, Alicia Garza,
Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi.
We're hoping that Alicia who
is a friend of mine can join us
in a few weeks to speak about
the moment and the movement.
Certainly we'll have other
leaders in Black Lives Matter
and the Movement for Black
Lives joining us in class.
But it's important to
note that this movement
had been around since 2013,
addressing America's
preexisting condition of racism.
Again, even before the
pandemic and even before
Trump was elected.
Trump's election in 2016,
really revealed the division
and the existence of white
supremacy that the severity
and the scale and the
existence of white supremacy
in the United States
embodied by our president and
our president really very
much uplifting various
white supremacist groups,
supporting them, retweeting them,
honoring them.
And so it's important
to note that this fight
had been around for a very long time.
The latest iteration had
been around since 2013,
that the president really
kind of fomented and agitated
and increased the fervor and
the division and the violence
around this movement.
And then of course George
Floyd was a breaking point
and we could spend a lot
of time asking ourselves
and lots of people have a
lot of different theories
as to why was that moment the moment?
There've been so many police killings,
they're so constant, they're consistent.
They've been around forever.
Since the black, I mean,
it's just been a constant
killing of black people
by the state forever, since
the country's founded.
So what was it about
George Floyd that created
these very large uprisings worldwide?
And we could talk about a
lot of different things,
but right now in the context of this class
and the things we've just talked about,
a pandemic that showed that,
that revealed disparities
for people of color,
both in terms of health and
in terms of incarceration,
and so many other issues, an
economy that was teetering
already on the brink.
And when it shut down,
just devastated millions
of low wage workers
who are disproportionately people of color
and black people in particular,
all of that providing the
foundation and the fodder
for this moment when a man was so brutally
and so blatantly killed by somebody
who looked into the camera
at us while he murdered him.
So it's important to understand
the intersectionality
of these issues, that it is
not just about police killing
and police brutality.
It is about police brutality
as it relates to the general,
disparity that exists for
people of color and black people
in particular on all the other issues
that we just talked about.
You read Miriam Cabo's article
about defunding the police
and that yes, she says, we are
meaning defunding the police,
because for so long, the
police have not functioned
as we imagine them.
They're not out there saving us
from murderers and criminals.
And most of their arrests
are not actually felonies.
For the most part, they are
policing communities of color.
They're mainly dealing
with traffic and loitering.
These are basically ways to
enforce the racial order.
And what's also important to
note is that it's not like
in the period leading up to
this moment, there was cases.
It's not like in the period
leading up to this moment,
funding for the police had been constant.
Funding for the police has
dramatically increased.
And this is data from
the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
The director of the Elle Baker
Center will be joining us
in a few weeks talking about
how this fight has been on
for a long time here in the Bay area even.
But you can see whether
it's Alameda County
or Oakland or California,
you're talking about between
two and 300% increases
in funding for the police
over the last several decades.
So the idea of defunding the
police is not actually just,
it's not a radical idea
about going somewhere
we've never been.
In some ways, it's back
to where we were before
massive increases in
funding for the police
occurred all over this
country and unfortunately,
particularly here in
California and the Bay area.
And what is the alternative to this?
What is the alternative
to funding for the police?
Again, we're talking about
the context of this election
and the choices we have in front of us.
We could go back to this,
to just constant increases
in funding for police and military,
or we could go to a new world
we've never been in before,
not returning to normal
because look at this image,
it is not normal.
It is not normal for over
the last three decades
there to have been a nearly
300% increase in funding
for the police in Alameda County.
That is not normal.
Again, do we go back to
continuing to increase funding
for the police, or do we
go forward to a new world
in which we address the
preexisting condition,
which was again, an over
investment in protecting capital
and some of us, the people
that professor Cohen read about
when he talked about the cruelty article,
protecting some of us at
the expense of most of us
and in particular people of color
and black people in particular.
So as you read in Keeanga
Taylor's articles, she says,
of course, there are protests.
The state has failed black
people on a number of issues.
And I just think it's
important to note that
there is this real intersectionality
that's been incredible about this moment
where the George Floyd
breaking point has to be seen
in the context of a pandemic,
has to be seen in the context
of a massive economic shutdown.
I mean, even for George Floyd himself,
George Floyd worked in a restaurant.
He was a restaurant worker.
The person who killed him
actually worked in the same restaurant.
They knew each other.
They were both security or bouncers
in a Mexican restaurant in Minneapolis.
And they had often disagreed,
George Floyd and his killer
had often disagreed over
treatment of people of color
coming into the Mexican restaurant.
His murderer would want to
be very rough and abrasive
and aggressive with the people of color
coming into the restaurant
and George Floyd disagreed.
So these were two people
who knew each other,
and one of whom murdered the
other with the full power
of the state and his
uniform and the government
and the president behind him.
And so it's important to know
that George Floyd was a restaurant worker.
It's important to know he was unemployed.
It's important to note that
as either Keeanga Taylor
or Miriam Kava talked about
the crime that the police
supposedly showed up for
was a crime of poverty,
of being poor, of being unemployed.
And so again, it's important to note
the intersectionality of these issues.
I had a New York times
reporter call me a few weeks
after uprisings began around
the country and the globe
and said, we're noting something different
about these uprisings.
We're noting that, in the past,
when there were police killings,
often people of color would rise up
in their own neighborhoods
and there would be looting
and arson and unrest in
communities of color.
And they said this time,
we're noting that there's
looting and unrest
in Chicago's toniest
venue and in Manhattan,
that there's graffiti not just
on the local corner store,
but on the Apple store
and on these big box,
very kind of representations,
physical representations
of the 1% and the elite.
And so I talked to her and
she ended up quoting me about
the fact that there is a
moment now where we've seen
among restaurant workers,
as you saw from the image
and from low wage workers
around the country,
a real kind of awakening or arising
not just around police brutality,
but around the intersection
between police brutality
and economic inequality
that has been again revealed
by the pandemic.
And the hopeful part of this,
we talked about this already,
but in Oakland, we know
that the vast majority
of what the Oakland police
responds to is again,
a form of basically racial
policing or racial control,
enforcing the racial order.
It's very minimal mental
health, medical, welfare checks,
quote unquote, disturbances,
homelessness related issues,
substance abuse, all of
this is related to poverty.
And since poverty and race in America
are so deeply interconnected
also related to maintaining
the racial order.
So for me the hope is the spread
of this around the country
and around the globe.
These are protests all over the country
and all over the globe in
the last couple of months.
And in particular, the
fact that you see this
in even very white areas of the country.
There's a real awakening
among white America as well
about the again, preexisting condition
of historical and structural
racism in the United States
and the fact that it's got to go.
So we can talk a lot more about this.
I wanna move on to the fourth
area, which is climate change.
Again, a preexisting condition
that I'm sure many students
in the class were very
involved in, aware about.
But I think even for those
who want to put profit
above all else, even for
those who lead this country
and are thinking about
again, profit is prime is,
is most important.
That is the priority.
Even if we think about it that way,
what we're experiencing right
now and have experienced
over the last many decades
is costing the country
billions of dollars.
Again, a preexisting condition
prior to the pandemic.
And that these events are
increasing in their rapidity,
in their severity.
You all know this from what's
happening here in California,
and frankly, the entire West
of Western United States,
massive wildfires at a scale and spread
that we have not typically
seen, have not seen.
And at the same moment,
really devastating hurricanes
all over the country.
And of course we know all of
this was already impacting
communities of color, more
than other communities.
And when you combine those
frontline communities
facing this, communities
of color facing this,
when you combine that with
the health disparities,
we've already talked about
the economic disparities,
we've talked about and racial uprisings.
You really have a moment
again, in which we are kind of,
as professor Cohen said we are
not just at a question point
or a crossroads.
We're truly in a battle over
our survival and our future.
We're truly in a battle over
the survival of the country
and the planet.
I will say on the hopeful side
with regard to climate change
and I know you all know this,
but it's worth noting.
There's been such a dramatic
reduction in travel,
such an increase in people's
understanding that remote work
is a possibility and a reality.
There's no need to drive to
work when you can work online.
You read are that these
under Roy's piece in the
Financial Times about India
and the devastation in India,
but also some of these
beautiful things they're seeing
like peacocks in the streets
and the ability to see the Himalayas
for the first time from parts of India
that had never seen them before.
There's real hope because
even as we are not breathing
in the sense of experiencing
the pandemic in our lungs,
not breathing in the sense of
people of color being killed
in the United States,
literally their breath being cut off
by murderous police officers and wildfires
that are restricting our breathing here
in the Western United States.
In that same moment there is
an overall clearing of the air
that is possible if we continue
to think about our world
differently and our work differently
and the way that we travel
differently post pandemic.
So I think what's important
under the Roy's piece is what,
what many of us have been talking about.
With the pandemic I was part
of forming broad coalition
with many other leading
social justice organizations
around the country in
reproductive justice,
in climate justice, in racial
justice, in criminal justice
in environmental justice,
we all came together and
created a website called
there is no going back and a
kind of a hashtag re-imagine.
And we've been putting out
there kind of this idea
that we need to reimagine our world.
We need to reimagine every
aspect of our society.
And the reason we did it was the fear that
even if this election results
in a different president,
that there would be a desire
of the Democrats if they win
to simply return to normal.
And again, for those
of us that are in this
re-imagine coalition,
the thinking is that there was no normal.
Normal did not exist,
especially for people of color,
especially for low wage workers,
especially for the vulnerable among us.
So it is really, truly not an
election between two parties,
not an election between two people,
but rather two versions of our world.
Again, whether we go back
or whether we go forward,
there is no staying stasis.
There is no staying the same.
And the other piece you read
was the piece by John Lewis,
who talked about good
trouble and standing up
for what we believe in.
He talked about voting
as an element of that,
but hopefully you all know
the history of John Lewis.
We can talk about it
more when we talk about
social movements, but John Lewis is that
voting was not the only thing he did.
He was involved in direct
action, social movement,
contentious activity.
And so it's important to know that history
and to know what else will
be needed to put that stake
in the ground to say,
we don't need to go back
because we had a preexisting condition,
we need to go forward.
And I'll just close by
one really interesting,
the quote at the beginning or
at the end of Ed Young's piece
in the Atlantic, that pandemic,
what it truly means when
you look at its Greek roots
is all people.
Pan, all, demic come
from demos, of the people
and that the pandemic has
taught us that all people
are interdependent that what
happens to restaurant workers
affects you.
What happens to a black man in Kenosha
affects us here in Oakland.
What happens to the 99%
actually impacts the 1%.
All of us are interdependent
and interrelated.
And so the question on the
table for this election
is in a demos, in a society
that is supposedly democratic,
who ultimately will decide
whether we go back or forward
on healthcare, the
economy, race, immigration,
climate change, and every
other issue that affects us,
who will decide those questions.
Is it us the people?
Is it the 1% or is it the demos?
That is truly the question of the moment.
So I'll stop there.
- That was outstanding.
Thank you.
Stunning, stunning, absolutely.
Questions. in the moments we have left.
She ended with, professor
Jayaraman ended with a Greek word
the pandemic.
I would also offer the one
of apokalypsis or apocalypse,
which we may feel like we're experiencing,
which in Greek means that an unveiling.
It doesn't mean the end of the world
it means a revealing or an unveiling.
And we might think of this
moment in those terms as well.
The horrors of this current
crises are an unveiling
as was put to you, the
preexisting conditions
under which we find
ourselves under such crisis.
So, brilliant, outstanding.
Questions, folks, can you
raise your, let me actually go
to Karen Vegas, she was
monitoring questions on the chat.
Do you wanna draw any questions
out to the top, please?
- Hi. Yes. Sure.
So we just had a question from earlier.
We had a question from Sharika Shuski.
Sorry if I mispronounced that.
Do you wanna see your question?
- Yeah, it's Sharukazutzki
but that's fine.
So my question was essentially
trying to understand
the requirements that are in place
to get unemployment benefits,
because Professor
Jayaraman mentioned that,
if your hourly wage is too
low, you can be denied it.
Or, I just wanted to understand what
are the gender requirements
and if they're controlled
on a federal or a state level.
- So, great.
So great a question I'm going
to respond to that quickly.
So there's state unemployment insurance
and there's federal
unemployment insurance,
but what's important to note
is that all unemployment
insurance benefits,
whether they come from the state,
whether they come from
the federal government,
they all run through state
unemployment insurance systems,
which have been severely underfunded.
Most state unemployment insurance systems
are using phone and computer
systems that were set up
literally in the 1970s and
never invested in, literally
never invested in to be
improved since the 1970s.
And so whether or not you're
getting money from the state
or the federal government,
you first have to understand
that putting aside
requirements you are gonna
have a hard time accessing
even getting a response
from the unemployment insurance system,
because they have very, very
outdated underfunded systems.
Intentionally again, because
there is this ethos in America.
And at one point with both parties,
not just the Republicans,
there is this ethos and concern
among frankly capitalists,
people who control capital,
that workers will not return to work
if the unemployment insurance
system is too easy to access.
So you wanna make it as
difficult as possible to access
unemployment insurance so
that people are willing
to take any low wage job
that comes their way.
So having said that at the state,
every state has their own
kind of system or set up,
but most states the requirements
are that you've worked
a certain number of hours,
that you've made a
certain level of income,
that you can prove that
through your pay stubs
and what's been reported
to the government.
And also not just what's been
reported to the government
by you, but by your employer.
So here was the problem for
a lot of restaurant workers.
I had a woman call me from
Michigan named Sarah May.
And I'll share your story with
her story with you publicly
'cause she's been on
television talking about this.
We've got her on MSNBC, but she said,
I'm the mother of a sick child.
I've been working at
a dive bar in Michigan
for a very long time,
small town in Michigan,
earning $3 and 62 cents,
which is the sub minimum wage
for tipped workers in Michigan.
She said as a bartender,
I religiously reported my
tips to the state to IRS,
to pay my taxes because I believe in that,
but come time to apply they say,
your boss never reported your tips.
It looks like you earned too
little with $3 and 52 cents
plus tips to access,
you didn't meet the minimum
state threshold to qualify
for benefits and so she
was completely denied
Michigan State Unemployment Insurance.
Then the federal government,
you all may know at one
point passed a $600 per week
universal unemployment
insurance for everybody
in the country who had worked.
And supposedly that $600 was
not based on how many hours
you worked or how much money you earned.
It was supposed to be universal.
But what happened to Sarah?
Sarah May said I applied for
the federal 'cause supposedly
I should have gotten it
regardless of my income,
the federal government
sent me a note saying
I was awarded the $600.
I got it.
But what I went to access it
from the state of Michigan,
I was not able to get ahold
of them to reverse the denial
that the state of Michigan
had already issued for
in my case, was not able to
reverse the denial to access
the federal funds.
So the requirements are,
there's one thing is the requirements.
Another thing is actually
accessing the money.
California does not
have a set minimum wage
for tipped workers.
It's one of the seven
states in the United States
that got rid of it many decades ago,
because it is a legacy of slavery,
which I'll talk about
more in later classes.
Of course, you definitely
need a social security number.
Only citizens or documented
people who have the right
to work in the United
States are able to access
unemployment insurance.
- All right. Great.
Karen, any other questions from
the chat that we can go to?
We have 10 minutes to answer questions.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, let me go to Jeffrey Zhao.
He's on top of our list
with his hand raised.
Do you wanna unmute
yourself and ask a question?
- Yes. Professor Jayaraman,
I was hoping to get your opinion as to why
the sub minimum wage was a
thing like the history behind,
why was implemented and
is there like any federal
or state level of movement to
remove it or to move it back
to the correct minimum wage?
- Just ask her what her life's work is.
Go ahead, answer your
life's work in 10 minutes.
- I actually think we have a...
We have a class on income and inequality
later in the semester,
and I'm gonna walk
through the whole history
of the sub minimum wage,
which actually originates in slavery.
I mean, in each of these
four areas, let's be real.
There are legacies of
slavery in our health system
and incarceration, obviously in policing
because it's a direct remnant of basically
policing black people even
during slavery in our economy.
One of the direct remnants
of slavery in our economy
is this $2 wage.
I'll talk about that history
later in the semester.
Even in climate change,
there are direct remnants
of where people live
and how communities of color are subject
our frontline communities to
toxics and to climate change
in a way that other
communities aren't facing.
So to answer your question,
we will get into a lot more
depth Jeffrey, but just in some,
it is a direct legacy of slavery
and there's a huge movement to fight it.
And the image you saw of workers
striking right as we speak
in Times Square and in Chicago right now
is part of that national
movement to change it.
And president Biden, I mean
president Biden, sorry,
vice president Biden's sorry.
Who's a candidate for
president has endorsed
eliminating the sub minimum wage
on three of his policy
platforms, just FYI.
- Great.
So Mason, do you wanna unmute yourself
and ask your question?
- Awesome.
Professor Jayaraman, you
were talking earlier about
how the minimum wage has
stagnated and how low poverty is
and how 20,000 isn't even
enough to pay the bills
and those places I was wondering,
I know there's stagnation
on the minimum wage level.
Has there been stagnation
in basically putting through
new minimums for poverty, et cetera,
for different class structures since then?
- It's such a great question.
Thank you for your question Mason.
There's been stagnation
both in the minimum wage
and in the federal poverty
level or federal poverty line.
That has remained the same for
decades without an increase
or recalculation or a reimagination
of how federal poverty
lines should be calculated.
And that frankly is a bipartisan
issue and something again,
why this can't just be about
let's get somebody else
into office because once
somebody else comes into office
and a new party is there,
it doesn't mean that they
change how people of color
and poor people in this country
are documented, measured,
treated, paid, right?
It has not changed in decades
and decades and decades.
I mean, I told you that the
minimum wage hasn't gone up
for tipped workers in 30 years.
That is under both Democratic
and Republican administrations.
And the same is true for
the federal poverty level
and the federal poverty line
has not changed in decades.
And so these are both things
that we need to work on
to really examine the current
true reality of this country
and the level of economic
inequality that exists.
- Great.
So I'm just seeing a lot
of questions in the chat
that I don't want to about
income equality and what is it
and why is it important
and things like that.
And what I'll say is we are
gonna give a full week's worth
of lectures on this material in some.
So it's a tough question to
be able to answer adequately
in the five minutes we have remaining.
So what it's hard to say,
you put a pin in the single
major economic issue of our time,
but we are gonna get to it eventually.
Let me, I think we have
time for two questions.
So Rokita Coupam, I'm sorry.
I'm of course butchering
everyone's name as well.
It's my turn to do that.
Do you want to unmute
yourself and ask a question?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So it's Ratyqa but I had a
question for Professor Jayaraman.
So just in talking about the
way that unemployment benefits
are just structured in
America, there's just,
it's so astoundingly
ineffective, I just have to ask,
is it all under the jurisdiction of state
and federal governments,
or do corporations perhaps
have some sort of impact
or some sort of say
in how everything operates?
- So do you guys some of you have,
have any of you ever seen the
musical or movie, "Annie"?
If any of you have seen "Annie",
it took place during the depression
and just as the new deal was passing.
And in that story which
was a fictional story,
but based on reality,
there was a corporate,
one percenter daddy Warbucks,
whose name Wars came from
having made money off of war
who had ridiculous amounts of
influence over the president.
And that was true at that time.
What happened in the, and maybe
this is a good place to end,
because it's important
to understand our moment
and the great depression that
we are I believe already in
and going to get much worse,
more deeply into this is not a recession.
We are in a depression.
When 10 million people
cannot feed their families
and are about to be
homeless in one industry.
That's just one industry.
We are in a depression.
So when we look at the
last great depression,
what happened with the
last great depression?
People were starting to rise up.
People started to protest
on the unemployment line.
In fact, if you saw the
image that we created
of the 24 foot Elena,
the essential worker.
We've created a 24 foot
Atlanta central worker,
she stood in Times Square today.
She had a mask that said
fight, don't starve.
That comes from the 1930s.
That was the slogan of people fighting
on the unemployment insurance
lines in the thirties,
fight, don't starve.
So there was this mass uprising
and people think of FDR
as this benign wonderful,
like father of the nation
who gave us the new deal,
the right to a minimum wage,
the right to social security,
the right to unemployment insurance.
But the truth is if you read books like
"Regulating the Poor" by Piven and Cloward
and other great books,
you know that all of that
was then enacted out of
fear that there would be
a socialist revolution in America,
by people, workers rising
up across the country.
I mean keep in mind, this
was right after the 1910s
revolution that happened in Russia, right?
So you got this potential
revolution of workers happening
as part of the depression.
And the new deal was a way to provide
the most sweeping changes we've ever seen,
including minimum wage
and the right to organize
and the right to unemployment insurance,
but done in a way that
would appease people,
but immediately put them back to work,
done in a way that was really go ahead...
- No, no, continue, finish your point.
- Done in a way that was about
keeping them from revolting,
stopping a socialist revolution
but at the same time,
appeasing the daddy Warbucks,
making sure that the daddy
Warbucks got what they needed.
So it's important to understand
that unemployment insurance
was set up by capitalists
like daddy Warbucks,
who wanted to make sure
that yes, we all agree,
we have to set up unemployment insurance
otherwise we'll have a socialist
revolution, we have to.
But we've got to do it in
a way that makes people
immediately return to work
as fast as we could get them.
We don't want them living high on the hog,
living off of unemployment insurance,
which is the exact same
debate we're having right now
over this $600.
$600 has ended.
I don't know if everybody knows,
it's gone and it's not coming back
until Mitch McConnell in
the Senate agrees to a deal
with Nancy Pelosi and
that's not gonna happen
until they get over this concern,
if we continue the $600
people aren't going to take
any low wage job that comes their way.
So has this been shaped by
capitalists, by corporations?
Absolutely.
The Amazons of the world
are worried that if the $600
continues as daddy Warbucks
was worried back in the '30s,
that there will not be a
willingness to earn less than that
in the marketplace.
- So I mean, that point
is extremely important.
We'll find a way to talk
more about the new deal
in the great depression.
In particular, one thing I
would also point to sort of draw
a historical parallel.
It comes from this book in particular,
Ira Katznelson's book, "Fear Itself:
The New Deal and The Origins of Our Time"
in which he argues very distinctly,
the two things that are
relevant about the new deal
for this moment.
First of all, is that Roosevelt
had to win the 1932 election
from the failed state of Herbert Hoover,
the first Californian to become president.
And secondly, that what drove
the Congress in particular
that created the 100 days and
the new deal programs was yes,
on the one hand, the fear
of a left wing revolution,
but that fear of a left wing
revolution really propels
the middle period of the new deal.
That particularly the 1936
election in which the CIO
and unions have really began
to mobilize and are pushing
the country in a very leftward direction
and that the Democrats
needed to get ahold of.
But before that in 1932,
the deep fear was that
the United States like
Germany, like Italy, like Japan
and elsewhere would in fact turn fascist.
That fascism was really
the threat of in 1932
on our world horizon.
And that the United States
needed to demonstrate
that they could actually
govern and address this crisis
without surrendering democracy itself.
Now, the irony of this is
that in order to achieve that,
in order to get the democratically
necessary consensus,
to force the new deal
through the new dealers,
the Rooseveltians and others
had to systematically exclude
black southerners from nearly
every aspect of the new deal.
It had to have an overtly
antiblack, white supremacist
politics in the South in
order to prevent filibusters
and to bring the Democratic
Party Coalition together
to get this passed.
So this is a hugely complex
moment in American history,
particularly that early 1930s,
as I think you saw in
this comprehensive survey
of what's at stake in this present moment.
And yes, we are very much in
that kind of 1932, 1933 moment
in which not only do you
have to win an election
in order for reforms to
even become possible,
but the threat of fascism looms very large
over this particular historical moment.
This has a been a fascinating discussion.
I wanna thank you all.
We are two minutes over, so
I will bid you all adieu.
We will see all on Wednesday
when which we will have
a fabulous guest speaker.
And I look forward to
seeing all of you again,
thank you very much.
(somber music)
