CAPITALISM V. SOCIALISM

Is it worth trying, once again, to explain what is going on with Capitalism?  We have a population that simply can not listen nor think.

Yet, just to round it up once and for all, is a chance to see the two discussed.  It is worth pointing out that much of the material referenced does not even give credit to past actions, so it might be worth while to point to them here.

Moves towards de-regulation started with Carter and took off with subsequent Presidents.  The Bushes and Clinton did the most damage lately.  All of the regulations put in place were put there during the Roosevelt administration and were ideas supplied by Eugene Debs and Henry Wallace (FDR's) VP until his final term.  Roosevelt, himself one of what they call the "one percent," said he was running to "save my friends from themselves."  In other words, of of his socialist ideas were implemented to save capitalism.

Later, even things like Social Security are considered Socialist and without Medicare and Medicaid many, perhaps a majority of the population, would have filed bankruptcy.  In fact, the economic damage done by repealing many of the FDR reforms even led to a redefining of many of the bankruptcy laws, especially Chapter 7 which is used by the lowest section of the so-called "middle-class".

On the other hand, the upper one-percent file bankruptcy on a regular basis.  Even more telling is the importance of socialism to that one-percent in the form of bailouts, or "to-big-to-fail" institutions.  It is pointed out below that not one of the countries with free healthcare (socialized medicine) have repealed it, although wealthy interests have done their best to castrate it.

One reason I seldom see Fox News is that very shoert periods go by without some discussion of "Obamacare," a program that is hardly socialist.  There was an early attempt to make it so, then reduced to a "public option," and finally eliminated altogether to make it run exclusively by for-profit (Capitalist) insurance companies.  If the so-called "Public Option" had been insisted upon, it would have defeated the entire program.

A point it that whenever people hear about "Socialism," they are conditioned to think of all sorts of horrible things, they know not what, perhaps Stalin or Kruschev, but certainly not a true democracy which it is.  In other words, Capitalism is an economic system that uses the government and military to further its own ends, in other words Fascism, or not a political system at all.  You may be interested in the role Israel plays in this.

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014

Wall Street’s Land Grab: Firms Amass Rental Empire, Ousting Tenants & Threatening New Housing Crisis

The Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, is now the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the country. In one day alone, Blackstone bought up 1,400 houses in Atlanta. And as private equity firms gobble up huge swaths of the housing market, they are partnering with big banks to bundle the mortgages on these rental homes into a new financial product known as "rental-backed securities," reminiscent of the "mortgage-backed securities" that helped cause the last financial crisis. Could this new private equity rental empire help spark the next housing crisis? We are joined by Laura Gottesdiener, author of "A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home," who calls this wave of purchases "a land grab." Gottesdiener’s latest article focuses on New York City’s rental market, a case study in what critics call "predatory equity." Large firms have used abusive tactics to oust tenants in a bid to hike up rents — and tenants have been resisting. We are also joined by Benjamin Warren, who, along with nearly 1,600 families in 42 buildings, is a victim of one of the largest single foreclosures in the city’s recent history.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You may not have heard of the Blackstone Group, but it’s the largest private equity firm in the world. And now it’s become the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the country. Over the last few years, Blackstone and other Wall Street firms have been quietly grabbing up huge swaths of the rental housing market, purchasing more than 200,000 cheap homes, hoping to turn a profit. At one auction in Atlanta, Blackstone swept up 1,400 houses in a single day. A new report released Wednesday by Right to the City Alliance found like Blackstone tenants in Atlanta had reported a range of issues, from burst pipes and exposed plumbing to bed bugs, which their Wall Street landlord has been slow to fix. In addition, private equity firms are partnering with big banks to bundle the mortgages on these rental homes into a new financial product known as "rental-backed securities," reminiscent of the mortgage-backed securities that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.

AMY GOODMAN: Now a new article turns the spotlight on New York City, a case study on what critics call "predatory equity." Here in New York, private equity firms have bought up rent-regulated properties, hoping tenants will leave so they can hike up the rent. When tenants fought to stay, the firms resorted to predatory tactics, from sending out fake eviction notices to shutting off heat or water. Right now in New York City, 1,600 families in 42 buildings are falling victim to one of the largest single foreclosures in the city’s recent history, after a conglomerate of private equity firms failed to pay its mortgage.

For more, we’re joined now by two guests. Ben Warren is with us. He’s a housing advocate who has been part of his building’s tenant committee in the South Bronx since the 1980s. He’s a tenant in one of those 42 buildings now being hit by the massive foreclosure, member of Community Action for Safe Apartments, or CASA. And Laura Gottesdiener is with us, the author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home. It was published by Zuccotti Park Press. She’s an editor at Waging Nonviolence. Her most recent piece for TomDispatch is called "When Predatory Equity Hit the Big Apple: How Private Equity Came to New York’s Rental Market—and What That Tells Us About the Future."

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Laura, tell us about this particular case.

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Sure. Thanks for having me. It’s—you know, as we’ve been looking at the growth of this single-family rental empire across the country, what we hear over and over again is that this is an utterly unprecedented phenomenon, that nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the United States. In many ways, that’s true. But in other ways, in New York City, we have this case study of what it’s looked like over the last decade when private equity firms have gone in and seen what they consider to be opportunities in the housing market to make a lot of money really quickly. I know this is something, Juan, that you’ve covered extensively for the Daily News. And what’s important to see, both in this case right now that Benjamin is living through and that 1,600 other families are living through and in a slew of other past very high-profile deals, is that this has been something of a disaster not just for tenants, but also from a financial perspective. These are deals that they were betting big—these private equity firms were betting big that they could turn these buildings around by pushing out hundreds of thousands of families. They weren’t able to push out families, because families organized. And as a result of that organizing, these deals failed, and it made a situation where the broader housing market in New York City got hit and these tenants had to live in completely inhumane conditions.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, what about the rise of this private equity involvement? Because, I mean, most of these private equity firms often depend on pension funds, on labor pension funds to invest in them to create the capital they amass to then do these cash buyouts. Hasn’t there been any reaction on the part of activists to tell—question these pension funds on how they’re investing their money?

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Yeah, I think that’s one of the most important aspects of this story that is very rarely reported. So, for example, one of the most spectacular private equity deals, predatory equity deals, to fail in New York City happened in complexes in Manhattan called Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village. And these were—these are massive properties, you know, in lower Manhattan where a private equity firm, the BlackRock Group, or BlackRock—which is different than Blackstone, but they’re often confused—believed that it could buy up these properties, transition these families out, force these families out—

AMY GOODMAN: Thousands of families.

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Yeah, tens of thousands. We’re talking about tens of thousands of families. We’re talking about one of the largest deals in New York City history, in U.S. history. And it completely failed because the tenants did an incredible job of organizing for the fight to the right to stay. But what’s interesting is BlackRock, at the end of this $5.4 billion deal, lost just over $100 million. However, the California public pension fund lost $500 million. The California teachers’ retirement fund lost $100 million.

AMY GOODMAN: Because?

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Because they had invested in this deal, and because these deals are often rigged, such as that if the private equity firm loses, they don’t lose very much money, and if they win, they win an incredible amount of money. So, again, it’s one of these examples of these perverse incentives where private equity firms, big banks, are able to eliminate risk for themselves through these complex financial products, through these securities, but meanwhile, our own lives, our own communities, are getting significantly less secure.

AMY GOODMAN: Why rental properties? Why are they—turn a profit for these equity companies?

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: In New York, the bet was that private equity firms could buy up an incredible number of rent-regulated buildings and force the tenants to leave. And by forcing them out, they—based on New York City tenant law, these owners now have the opportunity to raise the rents dramatically. The tenant laws in New York City is that if you’ve been living in an apartment for a long time, there’s a cap on the amount that the rent can go up each year. If a long-term tenant goes out, leaves, then you can raise the rent dramatically. So the bet by these private equity firms was that they could buy up these apartments and just force people out—at a rate that was, I mean, spectacular. In one deal, they bet, essentially—Rockpoint, a private equity firm, bet that in five years they would be able to force 50 percent of the tenants out of their properties. The turnover for rent-regulated properties in New York City is 5 percent. So, the reason we call this a predatory equity deal is because there is no way—and you can testify to this—there is no way that they could hit these financial projections without doing things like cutting off the heat, cutting off the water, cutting off the hot water, allowing vermin infestations to fester—all of these abuses to push people out of their homes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ben Warren, tell us your story and the buildings that you have been helping to organize now for quite some time.

BENJAMIN WARREN: Well, I’m in 1511 Sheridan, 1511-1521 Sheridan Avenue. And that building—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This is in the Bronx.

BENJAMIN WARREN: In the Bronx, correct, the South Bronx. Well, in that building, we have problems with—one is—one time it was a problem with the heat, hot water. They found a way of just shutting off the heat, turning it on at a certain time, shutting it off at a certain time. They have a thing about rent. Tenants will move in those apartments. They say, "OK, you have to pay three rents. You have to pay a month’s rent, a month’s security and a month’s broker’s fee." Now, I make it clear to the tenants that if you didn’t—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, this is for tenants who are already living in the apartments?

BENJAMIN WARREN: No, tenants that’s coming in for the first time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, coming in, OK.

BENJAMIN WARREN: They would charge them a broker’s fee. And I tell them, "Now, wait a minute. Did you see a broker? Did you contract with a broker?" They say, "No, I just came to the building. I saw the super. And, OK, we end up paying a broker’s fee." "Why? Did you know that broker’s fee was illegal, because you did not contract with a broker?" They don’t know this.

But then, we have other problems, like tenants moving into a new apartment. If the previous tenant was there, and he’s only paying $626, the new tenant come in, they’re paying a thousand dollars, which is way above the equity price of that apartment. Yet, if a tenant bring in another relative or another member to live in that apartment with them, they will raise the rent again, to $120, $160 more. And this is going on kind of rapid, you know, just regular with Colonial Management.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve called the city to complain about conditions like not having fire or proper routes to get out?

BENJAMIN WARREN: That’s correct. I—

AMY GOODMAN: What’s the issue?

BENJAMIN WARREN: Well, first of all, as everybody knows, we have—you must have a secondary exit to get out of the building. If you have emergency where you can’t leave the front of the building, you must be able to have a secondary way to get out. In my building, 1511-1521, they blocked off the secondary exits. So, one time, they actually blocked off the secondary exits for 1511, so you couldn’t get out if there was an emergency. They blocked off the CDC and C&D [phon.] side, where if they had to get out of the building through a secondary exit, they can’t get out. They’re blocked. They’re stuck.

AMY GOODMAN: So what is the city doing about it?

BENJAMIN WARREN: Well, first of all, we had the fire department come in. They issued violations that these are illegal gates. As of yet, they’re still there.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us about Ocelot, Laura?

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Sure. Ocelot was a real estate company based in New York that was backed by private equity money from Israeli private equity companies. It—I’m using the past tense because it essentially all but disappeared in the midst of this crisis that it orchestrated. It bought up a number of properties up in the Bronx and immediately started creating unlivable situations, with the goal of forcing tenants out. We’re talking about no heat. We’re talking about no hot water. Sometimes we’re talking about no water at all. We’re talking about ceilings caving in, pipes bursting. One tenant organizer who went up and did a site visit said that she found a family living with no bathroom and three small children.

And, you know, people always ask, "Well, why don’t people just move?" But we have to contextualize this in the midst of a much broader housing crisis that we’re very much still living through. So, you know, when people have this rent regulation or they have a housing voucher and it’s affiliated with a building, it’s attached to a building that they can afford, but even if it’s unlivable, people will stay and fight for the right to live in the city where their job is, where their community is, where their family is. And so, Ocelot really made headlines by highlighting the fact that these private equity firms were creating situations that people can’t conceive families are living through in New York City.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what’s been the response of the regulatory officials on some of these issues? I know when Eliot Spitzer was attorney general, he went after some of the groups, but he actually himself is from a landlord family, and he didn’t go after them too vigorously. And now with attorney general—then Andrew Cuomo came in as attorney general; now you have Eric Schneiderman. What’s been their response to these abuses?

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, we did see the Attorney General’s Office sue Vantage, which is one of the landlords of Benjamin’s building, for a systemic attempt to force people out by sending illegal eviction notices. We really have to highlight: These are illegal actions. Sending illegal eviction notices, cutting off the heat, cutting off the hot water, all of these are illegal. Why haven’t we seen sort of more, you know, prosecution of these crimes? It’s a question I get all the time. At the same point, I ask back, you know, "Why are we surprised that they’re getting away with these types of abuses?" These are the exact same types of crimes and abuses that we saw rampant during the mortgage crisis. This is part of a too-big-to-fail mentality. I would also say this is part of a process that the Bloomberg administration really made its official housing policy, to gentrify the city, to rezone it, to push low-income and working-class people out of it, people of color, to turn it into a gilded city. And so, you know, I talked to a lot of people, for this article, who work inside city agencies. They say that the city agencies that would sort of prosecute these are underfunded, but there’s also a lack of political will.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, one of the things that you raise in your article is that there’s been—the housing market has rebounded, but homeownership has not increased nationwide.

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Talk about that.

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Sure. I mean, so, with that, that, we’re going to the national level, at which we talk all the time—every single news article is about this housing recovery. And it never asks who is it a recovery for. But, you know, this discrepancy between homeownership and rising prices, I think, really gets to the heart of the matter. We’re seeing home prices rise very rapidly in many cities across the country. That said, the national homeownership rate is still falling. So, who’s buying these homes? Well, it’s these private equity firms like the Blackstone Group, like American Homes for Rent, that are buying up an incredible number of homes, about 200,000 homes across the country, in what, in my opinion, can really only be described as a land grab.

AMY GOODMAN: And bundling them.

LAURA GOTTESDIENER: Bundling them and selling off, you know, a bond as a security to investors all around the world in these rental-backed securities. What’s exciting to me in the New York City case is that even though, you know, it’s created an untenable situation for many tenants, we have an example of everyday, ordinary people organizing and beating these private equity firms.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. Laura Gottesdiener, who is the author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home, we’ll link to your article at TomDispatch, "When Predatory Equity Hit the Big Apple." And thanks so much, Benjamin Warren. We will continue to follow your case, as well as so many others in the city and around the country.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, there is a vast banner that’s been laid out in a field in Pakistan that can be seen from the heavens, or at least from satellites. It’s a picture of a girl. She lost her family in a drone strike. Stay with us.

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FRIDAY, APRIL 11, 2014

"Imagine Living in a Socialist USA": New Book Envisions Greater Democracy, World Without Capitalism

We end today’s show looking at a new book titled "Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA." The book features essays by many prominent people, including Michael Moore, Angela Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Martín Espada, Rick Wolff and Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. The book comes out at a time when polls show Americans aged 18 to 29 have a more favorable reaction to the word "socialism" than "capitalism." The book is co-edited by the legendary book agent Frances Goldin, who has worked in the publishing world for more than six decades and will turn 90 years old in June. In 1951, at age 27, Goldin ran for New York State Senate on an American Labor Party slate headed by W.E.B. Du Bois. Goldin joins us now along with one of her co-editors, Michael Smith. He is a New York City attorney and a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show looking at a new book titled Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. It is co-edited by the legendary book agent Frances Goldin, who has worked in the publishing world for over six decades. Goldin turns 90 years old in May. She has said she has long had two goals left in life. One was to help free Mumia Abu-Jamal. The other was to publish a book about socialism in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: While Frances Goldin is still working to help free Mumia Abu-Jamal, her book on socialism was recently published. The book features essays by Michael Moore and Angela Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Martín Espada, Rick Wolff and our own Juan González. Frances Goldin joins us now, along with one of her co-editors, Michael Smith. He’s a New York City attorney, author, and board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! So, Frances, tell us about why this has been an aspiration of yours to publish a book on socialism.

FRANCES GOLDIN: Well, I have been pretty depressed about the route our country is taking. It was shocking to me, after all the years of struggle and the gains that we’ve made, with regard to people voting, with regard to women having rights to abortion if they wanted it, all these hard-won gains being destroyed by the right, which is—they’ve decided that Democrats are not going to vote for them, so they’ve—the way they’re fixing it is to prevent people from voting. And there are many, many states that have laws passed that make it very hard there. They’re stopping early voting. They’re not allowing weekend voting. You have to bring in your right arm and take a quart of blood in order to cast a ballot. This is outrageous. That was one major reason, because we were running to hell in a handbasket. We weren’t moving toward democracy; we were moving toward fascism. And that scared the hell out of me.

And the other reason was the ignorance of the general population as to what socialism really is. They didn’t have a clue. And, of course, the media made sure they didn’t have a clue. And I thought it was important in plain English—not in academese, but in plain English—and for that, I credit our editor, Steve Wishnia, who did a wonderful job of making all of these theories into plain English, so that students, high school students, college students, and the masses of people who read their daily news could understand what we were trying to say about what socialism would be like, not in Russia, not in China, but in our United States. And I think the book succeeds in making clear how people would benefit, not be harmed, by socialism, because it has to be the most democratic form of government ever conceived.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Michael, how did Frances get you involved in this project? And also, to the surprise of many, the book is being published by HarperCollins, the Rupert Murdoch publishing company. How did that happen?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: The demon of the publishing world, as Alex Cockburn said. I knew Frances from Mumia defense work. Incidentally, the profits, if we make any from this book, are all going to Mumia’s defense. Frances said, "I don’t want a small, left-wing publisher. I want a major publisher." So she went to Oxford, and the guy said, "This book isn’t balanced enough." So Frances said, "What the hell do you mean, 'balanced enough'? What do you want? A half a chapter on fascism?" But we lost there.

So then she went to Harper. And Frances has dealings with Harper through her agency. They turned her down. They said, "Well, we don’t think—our marketing people said that we can’t sell enough books." So Frances says, "Let me remind you of something. I gave you Barbara Kingsolver. I gave you the book that sold second most, next to the Bible, in the world, Goodnight Moon. And I want this book published." So they called her back, and they said, "Frances, your passion has won out. Come up and see us."

So Frances and I and my wife, Debby Smith, who is the other co-editor, go up to their office on 53rd Street near Fifth Avenue. We meet with the executive vice president, a British guy. He’s got one of those offices that looks like a living room, you know, with a couch and a chair and tables, a desk, everything. We walk in, and on the couch are two pillows. One’s got a drawing of Queen Elizabeth II, and the other pillow has got a drawing of Karl Marx. So I said, "Mr. Burnham, this is an auspicious beginning." And he laughed. He’s a congenial British guy. And he said, "What’s your definition of socialism?" I said, "Well, it’s not only political democracy, but it’s economic democracy, where people take over and run the resources that affect their lives." And he said, "Will you take $10,000 as an advance?" And I said, "Will you plow it into promoting the book?" And he said, "We’ll try." And I said, "Well, we’ve got a deal." So that’s how we got, of all places, Harper’s.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on that issue, that question, "What is socialism?" Michael, for people who—in this country, the media rarely talks about it, to say the least—if it’s ever mentioned, in a disparaging way.

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: You know, Paul Le Blanc—the book is set up in three sections. The first is an indictment of capitalism. That’s easy. All you’ve got to do is tune into Democracy Now! every morning, and you realize what’s going on. The second part, and the meat of the book—and we can talk about this in a second—but it’s got 20 chapters on everything you can imagine, every institution in this society, and how it would be different if we didn’t have capitalism. And the last part of the book are six essays on how we get from where we are to where we want to be, how to make that transformation. And your essay, Juan, I have to say—it’s a book full of wisdom, not the least of which is your essay on immigrants and the role that they’ll play in that transformation.

But in any case, in a word, Paul Le Blanc writes—he’s a historian, and he wrote one of the chapters on how to transform it. He says, socialism involves people taking control of their own lives, shaping their own futures, and together controlling the resources that make such freedom possible. ... Socialism will come to nothing if it is not a movement of the great majority in the interests of the great majority. ... People can only become truly free through their own efforts." That’s a good Passover message, by the way. That’s our definition of socialism. It’s true democracy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Frances, one of the—to me, the most striking essays—there were many in the book—was the one by Mumia and Angela Davis on the prison-industrial complex. First of all, how did you manage to put together that collaboration between the two of them, one incarcerated and one traveling around the world, and also the importance of that particular essay?

FRANCES GOLDIN: Well, it was easy, because Angela Davis was a supporter of Mumia’s freedom. So they were not unknown to each other. Also, she wrote a book about the end of prisons. So it was a natural for us. It was not easy, because he’s in prison, she’s free. They had to collaborate by stuff going back and forth. It was very complicated.

But what they came up with was an entirely different approach to how we deal with so-called crime. And it’s more like what was done by Native Americans when they had people which broke laws—who broke laws. And they were tried, so to speak, by their peers—by their mothers and fathers and doctors and chiefs, etc.—who embarrassed them in front of the community and made them feel bad about what they had done and what they could do to overcome their crime. So it was done—it was called "the commons." It was done by the community, in the community, for the community. And that’s why she says, get rid of prisons; just have local tribunals, where the people who know this person, man or woman, can put them on the right track.

It’s revolutionary, but makes a lot of sense, because our prison system locks up millions of people who have never committed a crime in their life, the prime one being Mumia Abu-Jamal, who never killed anybody. And the woman who is grieving her departed husband, she grieved for the person who really killed the guy, and not for Mumia, who had nothing to do with that murder, and who has, incidentally, become one of the leading intellectuals in the United States. And I am now working on his seventh book. And all of his books have been in print for 30 years, and every one of them remains in print and continues to sell.

AMY GOODMAN: In January, we interviewed Kshama Sawant, one of the few Socialists to hold elected office in the country. She is an economics teacher and former Occupy Wall Street activist who was elected to Seattle’s City Council after she ran on a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. We asked Sawant why she decided to run as a Socialist.

KSHAMA SAWANT: The important thing about running as a Socialist is, you know, for one, to show that there is a definite openness for clear alternatives, not only to the big business parties, but the system that they represent, the capitalist system. And if you look at recent polls, they show that people, especially young people, are much more open to socialism than you would find out from the corporate media. People are also fed up with the political dysfunction.

AMY GOODMAN: That is the new Socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant. Michael Smith? And also, as we wrap up, because we have less than a minute right now, when people say, "You choose democracy, or you choose capitalism," the contradiction in that?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Capitalism is incompatible with democracy. Fascism is compatible with capitalism, but not—democracy and capitalism don’t go. And we can see that trend. We did a book—Michael Ratner wrote the introduction—on Bill Kunstler’s writings, one of the founders of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and we called it The Emerging Police State. And people said, "Well, it’s a little over the top, you know?" But it’s exactly what’s happening. And as Juan points out in his chapter, we either develop some socialist leadership and build a left-wing alternative here, or we’re going to have fascism. That’s the direction things are going in. So, Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA will help people get from where we are to where we want to be.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. Frances Goldin, literary agent, she was the literary agent for Adrienne Rich, she was for Barbara Kingsolver, Mumia Abu-Jamal, housing activist for over 60 years, and she will be turning 90—I understand that we were making you a little older than you were—in June. And so we wish you a happy pre-birthday. Michael Smith, thanks so much for being with us, as well, co-editors of Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. That does it for the broadcast. Yes?

MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH: Brooklyn Folk Festival, the weekend after next in Brooklyn.

AMY GOODMAN: We’ll let people know.

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The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.