Welcome to left on read, where a Gen X mom and gay millennial do socialism.
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And there's so much news to talk about today like a lot of news. But we're gonna stick to basically one topic for this particular episode one topic that's pretty near and dear to our hearts, which is the passing of the New York state budget, which is also colloquially colloquially called the big ugly because it's an omnibus bill that includes all this crap. We're not in love, are we?
No, I have to well, actually, you by the way. People have historically in New York, referred to not just the budget, but an omnibus package at the end of session as the big ugly, a lot of people say big ugly just for the budget. I think the term big ugly just refers to any Ultra massive bill or bill package that includes like, dozens, hundreds of unrelated pieces of policy that they pass all together to like get everyone to compromise on different things.
Right. And we don't love that. But nonetheless, we there's things about this particular budget that we can definitely point to his victories and the one that we're not really focused on today, because we'll have other guests to talk about other victories later on, is the passing of the build public renewables act. Alright, so tell tell us a little bit about the BP era.
Yes, I'm very excited. So the build public renewables Act, or PPRA, was this enormous victory that we were able to win in a budget that otherwise would actually full of really, really bad policy from the right wing governor? But the PPRA is the spill, actually, I should say this law now in New York. That's right. That requires the New York Power Authority. So it's the largest public power authority. United States, here in New York
already currently provides power to like things like schools, right? Yeah. Most
of the public, mostly public buildings, and most of it is just their hydropower from the 1930s when FDR first created them, and built all of this legacy hydro deal.
Yeah, the old New Deal, oh, gee, neat new deal,
the old deal. Now, the law allows NightBot to expand. So previously, they'd been shackled. The private industry had such a chokehold on our government that we created laws in place to prevent NIDA, the New York Power Authority from building any new energy. And now we've unleashed it, we are now saying, okay, Nika, actually gets to build renewable energy, because it's necessary in order to meet our climate goals in order to prevent climate catastrophe. It does a few different things for that. First, it creates this like strategic planning process through which NIDA along with all of these other stakeholders, basically every single relevant state agency, every single relevant labor union, number of environmental justice groups, businesses and areas that might benefit from new energy, all of these folks get together and get to participate in the strategic planning process every two years for them to say, Where is energy needed? Where are we going to build it? What kind of energy is going to be pumped storage? Is it going to be solar farms? Is it going to be wind? It's going to be battery storage? And then how can we go about doing this? Are we going to go create a new project? Are we going to bid on an existing RFP? How much money do we think we need to spend for it, all of those technical details, that's what we call a mandate. So one of the things that we were fighting for these past few months, is to make sure that the New York Power Authority had a mandate to build new energy so that we didn't just give it the power and then it sat on its hands, but that it was forced to go ahead and do the things we're asking it to. After that. There are democratization provisions. We wanted to expand the board of the Power Authority to allow for labor unions, environmental justice groups, and the legislature to appoint more seats to their Trustee Board. We weren't able to win that. But through the strategic planning process, we were able to win things like public comment periods, public hearings, public input, and like I mentioned earlier, the input of EJ groups and unions in the strategic planning process such that we've won a degree of a accountability, transparency, and small d democratization. We love to hear it. Yeah, we love small d. Democracy. Sorry. So what kind of energy can they build, it's called renewable by the definition of the law in New York state, so usually refers to solar, wind, geothermal, hydro pumped storage, there's opportunity for green hydrogen, even though that technology isn't really there yet, battery storage, and a few other things in that field. The other really, really, really, I would say, most critical pillar of this bill is the labor language that we won. I keep saying, Bill, I should say, law. The labor law, now in place, thanks to the built public renewables act is probably the best just transition example that we have, at least in maybe just the East Coast of the United States. I've heard there are a few bills in other places that have passed that are close. And what we say when we mean just transition is most of the fossil fuel industry right now is unionized. That means a lot of union workers and fossil fuel jobs that we don't want them to continue to have. But we want to protect them from losing their livelihoods in the transition from fossil fuels to green energy, though, so we call it a just transition to make sure that workers are retrained and given opportunities for new jobs and renewable energy. And that when they take those new jobs, they're not moving to lower pay. They're not losing their seniority status. They're not losing their pensions, their benefits, or anything else that they currently have one through their union contracts that their existing jobs. The bill public renewables does all of those things. Labor language in this law, I'm really going to emphasize that is such that if you are moving from a fossil fuel job, if you are displaced from that job, I should say, Buy new construction, new generation or your thing is shut down, then Nika, is required to help you get a new job in renewable energy, to retrain you for it through the office of just transition that they're funding with $25 million dollars a year, and the Department of Labor, and keep all of your position status, salary pay, seniority, pension benefits, everything. And if you can't get a new job, if there's really like absolutely no way the labor language is written such that there's a possibility that they pay out some of your pension benefits and salary. So there's really so many protections to guarantee that every single union worker maintains, keeps protects all of the things that they fought so hard to win, and that they have an opportunity for a new job retraining, getting into the field again.
So this is all really fantastic. And I I learned about it kind of late in the process about what this bill, which is download law was proposing and a lot of people still don't know how radical this bill is how sorry, law, how much is going to change the lives of regular New Yorkers. I think that we should probably think a little bit about how we could talk a little bit about this process, right. You know, this law, which became was started out as a bill, like, where does it come from? Exactly? Like what, you know, why is it that when I'm in a newsroom, the anchors are like, I don't really know very much about the climate provisions. Like these are two things that are kind of puzzling. I think if you're somebody who cares about climate change,
this law that was previously a bill, we're gonna keep, we need the Schoolhouse Rock. I'm just a bill cartoon to play to re educate us on what is the bill, what is law? This law that was previously a bill came about, I want to say it five years ago, four years ago, I think 2018 really, really very originally, we're going to give credit to someone who works at the Sierra Club. I'm not going to say his name because I don't know if he wants to be blasted out here. But Comrade and democratic socialists of America, who also worked with the Sierra Club, had this idea. He was like, you know, there's this New York Power Authority, it's really huge. It's actually really good at what it does as a ton of money. We could probably just use all of its existing revenue, to allow it to make bonds to then just build new green energy. Why aren't we doing that? And it turned into this big package of bills at the time. So the democratic socialists of America here in New York, we have a eco socialist Working Group A group of folks that are committed to environmental issues and the the connections between socialism and the environment, eco socialism. And we started putting together a campaign for what we call public power, basically bringing energy under public control. In that vein, we created a number of different bills, actually. So PPRA was really kind of far off, there were a number of bills that did all of these things. And over time, we started engaging on multiple fronts, we started doing a lot of legislative work, talking to legislators in New York State, trying to understand how these things work, figure out who would be supportive of different elements of the bill, we were talking to other folks think tanks, academics, anybody that you could think of that could kind of give us some insight into how we should be modeling this policy. We started talking to regular people, we were obviously knocking doors for all of our electoral candidates at the time, and trying to get a sense of what do you care about when it comes to climate change? We were knocking people's doors after blackouts. There was this one really, really bad blackout in the summer of 2019. And we'd knock doors before during after it talking to folks, did you lose power? Do you know Con Ed is at fault for this. Con Ed is our local utility here in New York City. And the responses were overwhelming. We found overwhelmingly working class people hated their utility, really hated their utility bills, didn't feel like they were getting good value out of it, and also cared deeply about climate change. Now, obviously, build public renewables is not about utilities, but there are elements in it that will lower your utility bills, if you're a low or moderate income customer in New York. So if you earn less than $75,000 a year in your household, you will get a discount on your energy bill. That's really great because of this law. But through all of those conversations, all of his care and concern around climate change, we realized we had to do something, we had to advance his campaign, we had a people's mandate to move forward. And it was a lot a lot, a lot of learning and strategy and pivoting what we were doing how we were trying to win. The campaign shifted a lot over the last four years,
right? Because the terrain shifted as well. Right. So in 2018, the DSA didn't have any electeds. Like we were trying to get elected, elected right to the State Senate. But we didn't have people from DSA, who are actually in power, what we were doing were was trying to build relationships. But you know, we were new, as an organization as a player in New York state politics and every step of the way, like winning, for example, the Amazon anti Amazon campaign, you know, successful election of Julia Salazar, your AOC really sort of coming out as a major leader, and then our Clean Sweep in 2020, which if you don't know about that, it's 2020. During the pandemic, we had five Yes, five people running for State Senate and state assembly here in New York City. And, you know, I think so Jonas and I actually met probably for the first time it a really cold xuron canvas where we're trying to get him on the ballot. And that's when I picked up this like, sweater at Buffalo Exchange, it didn't take off the security tag, and then the pandemic happened. Right. So the point is that the pandemic happened. And so we had to shift gears from, oh, we know how to do electoral campaigns, you know, from the Tiffany Gabon da race or from AOC to we don't know what we're doing, we're trying to run a campaign during COVID, mostly through phone banking. And somehow, you know, because of our hard work, because of the political moment, we won all those seats, so we radically changed like our who our allies were, who was representing us, and also became more of a known entity in New York's New York state politics. And all along those all along the way. Right. I also went to an event with you 2021. After like, really horrible flooding. One summer, it was like maybe August, and all around queens and low lying areas, basement apartments filled and like in the neighborhood next to us, between us and Woodside. And we had a child just outside of Schumer's house. So when Schumer says he let people protest outside of his house, he's actually 100% True. We do it all the time. It's a beautiful home, right next to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. But I remember going there, it was like a hot day. It was a very somber day, because, you know, I'm the mom and, you know, doesn't matter, you know, to be a parent to be affected by children dying because of extreme weather and nobody in power. Right. Nobody was in power was doing anything about this. Oh, and the other thing too, just to back up a little bit was that in 2019, we finally had a democratic Trifecta in New York state. And so with the Democrats finally having them Jordi in the Senate, they passed something called the new the called the climate leadership and community Protection Act, the clcp. A, which was like touted as, like a national leader in climate change law. And it brought all these goals, right to like, be carbon neutral by 2030, I believe. It was, like, fantastic. I was like, Oh, we did so good, right. But nothing happened, right? Like, these laws passed. And now it wasn't actualized. Right. And that's why the
goals and targets but it doesn't take any action to make that happen. It was like,
it's like my goal of, you know, if I have a goal to, you know, become a, like a power lifter, like a competitive power lifter, but I don't actually work out, right. We haven't done muscle in a while. But you know, whatever. A lot of people that do that, right? Or, like, I'm gonna run a marathon, but I don't actually train. Right. So, you know, but I put the marathon date to 2030. You know, when I'm 50 years old, then like, yeah, okay, whatever New York was just like, I'm going to become this, but we're not going to do anything. And so, activists basically made this happen, like, it was the tireless work of regular people. And some people, you know, who are professional policy, people and NGOs, but like, this is going to be a case study for the books, right? For an idea that started out in a very grassroots and humble way that, you know, is now going to set the tone like California, this is your move, man, or person like it's like all the other states should be adopting similar bills.
Yes, the end goal is that the entire United States creates and runs on a fully public electric grid that is also fully renewable. It's, I wish we had like, five hours. So I could regale you all with every single detail of his campaign, if documentary is going to be Yeah, there will be one. Look out for it. I mean, just Google build public renewables, you'll see so many articles coming out. It's really fantastic. But the one thing I really want to stress beyond just how truly grassroots this was, like we were all just a bunch of socialists in our socialist organization, cheating time from our jobs, working basically second or third jobs to make these things happen. From comms work from lobbying work, legislative policy, field, work, electoral work, anything under the sun, you name it, we did it. We were all doing it in basically our very limited spare time. Not only that, I can't stress enough how deeply important, every single piece of work that DSA had done over the last six years was unnecessary to this victory. Like Susan, you're talking about Julia and no, Amazon and Tiffany PPRA would not be a reality, if not for any one of those things. Right now. You know, I guess this will be dated by the time this comes out. We're expecting hopefully fingers crossed that it actually happens. A statement of support from the IBEW the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, for the bill, public renewables Act, a bill they bitterly contested from the very beginning. And it's a testament to the relationships that we built with labor with those folks, how did we build those relationships? In 2019 and 2020, I was part of a failed nascent campaign to do internet for all in New York City, because we worked with striking spectrum workers from IBEW to support this campaign. And it didn't really go anywhere. And fortunately, there were other unions that had problems with it. But because of those relationships with IBEW, I became really friends with one of their political leads, who connected me with a lot of people. A year later, I said, Hey, by the way, I want to talk to you about this climate bill. And we had conversations there. And then someone else talked to somebody else at IBEW and had conversations there, and we were kind of really insistent, and five steps later, we're now potentially getting them to come out and say, Yeah, we like this thing the democratic socialists did.
And that's an amazing thing, like historically, the red green Alliance, which is, you know, unions and environmentalists, they haven't been, they haven't like worked hand in hand. And that's been like a huge impediment for progress, because these are two important parts of the left. But I think that's changing and I think changing because members care, and members, like regular people we speak to during our canvasses. They care deeply about climate change and political leadership have told us on calls like we've been on these calls together, that this is like a white person issue climate changes for like privileged progressives and like my working class, you know, fill in the blank, real constituents, they don't care about this. And that's, that's such a bad faith argument to make. And I'm, I'm keeping this list like, you know, tattooed on my my frontal lobe like I'm not gonna forget who said these kinds of racist things to us, because it's not true, you know, people, a diversity of people care about climate change, because whether it affects them personally, right, or whether it affects their communities back at home, because the global south is more profoundly going to be hit by climate change than here in North America, there are
polls saying, the people that care the most about climate change are black, or Latino, or Asian, all of those people have higher reported rates of like, I care more about climate change and white people. So it's fat, like patently not true. And it comes from the left sometimes to think people are worried sometimes that climate changes in the working class issue. And I think that's also doubly like, we should investigate where we're coming up with this idea. Because it assumes that we is working class people can only care about an issue that is directly affecting us now, like housing, my rent is too high, right? Obviously, I care about that deeply. And it assumes that only activists and privileged people have the capacity to care about something that affects others, or that happens in the future. But actually, all working class people, we can be altruistic, we can care about events that are happening globally, we can care about something that's going to happen in the future. Sometimes it is personally connected. There was one guy who I talked to on the street was like, Yeah, will you support this text rich package? It didn't seem interested. I mentioned climate change. He goes, really I care a lot about that. I'm from Trinidad, and a lot of my family are like at risk over there. And I was like, Wow, awesome. So yeah, sometimes it has a direct impact to us, for the people that we love. But also, very often, people just know what's going on. They care about the world, they care about the planet, they care about other people. It's really, you know, it's not limited to rich white people, with their capacity to care about others.
And one of the most interesting, like takeaways, I think, and I've been not a leader on this still, Jonas has been a leader, I've been more like a like a soldier, and is looking at the ways in which are members in the DSA and other parts of our coalition, we're able to sort of think about power here in New York State, and not just like, you know, generate a power that runs our appliances, but rather political power. Like who has power like, I've been in the room when still yachters has taken meetings with various people in the governor's office, but also like elected like what moves them. First of all, bullying seems to be great, by the way, like 10 out of 10 people, we don't want to bully our peers. But bullying elected seems to be a fantastic way to get them to take our issue seriously, because in politics, it seems like the more attention you bring to something, the more you directly, you know, shame people with power, the more likely they're going to take you seriously because, you know, the mere moral, I guess correctness of an issue is never enough.
negative attention is far more effective than positive for news for press for pushing someone into action. Highly recommended. They don't like
it. But guess what you think running as an elected doesn't mean you're gonna have some chill life, like you're responsible for the outcome of not just your constituents, but for like all New Yorkers, so like, get used to it, buddy, you don't want to do it. We have DSA members who will step in up to your place.
That's right. And as socialists we have to be agitational, with political leadership all the time, even folks that you think you have a good relationship with and they might do something for you. It's always wrong. Democrats in this country fundamentally do not want to see us succeed. They want to continue pushing the capitalist line, they want to keep pushing us to the center to the right, we have to be agitational We have to force these people to do what we want. Because the rich, the elite, the folks that support them in power and political office, they're not going to just say one day, you know what, we had a good run. Let's give the working class what they're asking for, you know, it sounds about right. No, we are constantly constantly constantly going to have to build our power, become powerful ourselves and take what's ours what needs to be ours.
So Kathy hotel, had a press conference yesterday in upper Manhattan saying oh, we passed bail reform and we finished the budget. She is not talking about historic first in the nation climate bill like shame on you, Kathy Huckle. My one woman bullying campaign against you will continue with with white Hawk fervor and you know that 1000s of people behind us, right, who are here to attack you as well.
We are very eager to attack in metaphorical ways. Governor, I'll
go and if any, any point Kathy heckle tries to use her bag of ineffective tricks to slow this process down like we know where you live. It's Albany. Right? We'll go. This is a people's movement. So that's the thing is somebody said to me, oh, maybe this is just not going to happen. Like, oh, Nika doesn't have a leader right now. Yeah, sure pass. But you know, is it can actually be executed? And that's a great question because it did it. That, you know, the climate leadership and community Protection Act didn't get executed, right. But the difference between PPRA and the CL, CP A, is that there's like a movement of like, 1000s of people, and you know, maybe 10s of 1000s of people now, hundreds of 1000s of people who are going to make sure that people in power, who live comfortable lives, have their feet held to like a, like a non literal, renewable energy fire.
Yeah, all of the things that we are saying are not direct, real violent threats. I like and it's I love that you're talking about the movement all the time, because yes, we're still going to have to fight for implementation, we're still going to have to fight to organize, Nika to build, do all the things that we want. And like you mentioned, there are so many horrific things that Kathy hope will pass in this budget. We didn't tax the rich. We didn't solve funding problems for the MTA. We didn't raise wages for home care and health care workers. We wrote the housing housing, we didn't do shit about the housing
tenants. This is a this is a state and a city of more renters than any other state. It's not just New York City, it's all of New York. Yeah. And rents were renter state, not a rentier state.
And the governor was so viciously opposed to tenant protections in the form of good cause evictions, that she was willing to scrap her entire housing policy, just to stop it from happening. This is not a governor, we can allow to remain in office, she rolled back bail reform, not just to bring it in line with where it used to be or bring it in line with the rest of United States. She was working day in and day out to reverse decades of progress to bring us back to this reactionary state. Where if you are arrested by the police, and you don't have enough money to pay bail, you're going to be imprisoned in what is jail but essentially prison for a lot of people not gonna get trial for a very long time. You might kill yourself, you might get killed. These are real dangers. Kathy Hogle is putting on people just because of some bad news clips about crime. Right? Well, 10 not stop are organizing, we have to keep working. There's so much more to do.
Kathy Hickel really acts like her constituents are the New York Post. And Rupert Murdoch, like the right wing media is what guides Kathy Hogle and not the needs of regular New Yorkers. And so, you know, she's so worried about crime. Evidently, the new crime statistics say that crime is down. Right. And it's not it's not a big issue. The way it wasn't, the more people will claim it is and the police will and Eric Adams will say it will it is as a way to scare us and to make us afraid of our fellow New Yorkers. But I reject this and the biggest issue and the biggest threats facing New York to New Yorkers today is not bail reform. It is affordability. It is like you know underfunding of our public services. It is climate change looming, and then like a complacent political leadership that doesn't do much of anything except for, you know, allow for this right wing leadership to happen and like, I work acuity CUNY got what, you know, Governor Hogan wanted. And even if, you know, the legislators said that they were going to fight for more money, ultimately, they did it. Right. So it's our job. As socialists, it's our job as organizers to to reject this and to keep fighting like, you know, being in politics means that you just get your heart broken all the time, and that you keep going forward anyway. And like, I guess it's probably good for your character, even though it feels bad a lot. But we're gonna keep doing
it. But we got our hearts filled this week with the build public renewables act, I can't tell you enough, how many people are reaching out feeling inspired feeling like we're actually able to do real good, powerful things, all of the things that Susan was just describing right now, we are capable of winning them. Together, we are capable of changing the world. It's really true. We can only do that together. You can only do that collectively. You can't alone, post on Twitter, or Facebook into making change. You can't alone start a one person campaign for any random activity, you must must must organize with other working class people. And together you can achieve the world. How where if you want a second job to change the world if you want to start and pay job stealing time. Yeah, if you want to risk your current job and get an unpaid job stealing time, if you want to organize collectively, how can you do it, Susan?
Well, I think the best way to do it is to join the DSA. Just Google A DSA joined start paying monthly dues are organizing with other socialists in your community. And you know, if you had told me in 2019 that this bill would become law I would have been like no way and here we are amazed at what our movement can do. But also as an individual, feel free to bully your elected to Twitter. So I will never not encourage that.