There’s resistance happening all around us, we’re just not seeing it

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us today. We’re talking with a Reverend, Dr. Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back. They co-authored the book, You Only get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. I’ve known Liz Theoharis for a long, long time now. She’s a leading voice and activist in the Fight to End Poverty and for a just society. She’s a theologian pastor, author, executive director of the Kairos Center for Religious Rights and Social Justice and co-chair of The Poor People’s Campaign, a National Call for Moral Revival. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing in poor and low-income communities for 30 years. Noam Sandweiss-Back is an organizer and writer born in Jerusalem and raised in New Jersey. He spent a decade working among the poor, that dispossessed and low-income communities and working with the Kairos Center for Religious Rights and Social Justice and the Poor People’s Campaign. And they both joined us today to talk about their book, their work, and the Future of Our Country. Well Liz, Noam, welcome. Good to have you both with us.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

Really good to be here. Thanks so much for having us.

Marc Steiner:

Good to meet you, Noam, and good to see you again, Liz.

Noam Sandweiss-Back:

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Marc Steiner:

I was thinking about, this is an amazing book by the way. You two did a fantastic job of outlining the history of the struggle we’ve had in this modern era and where we are now because so many people feel so desperate and frightened of this moment. I mean, it’s like, and may take myself back to the early sixties again, it’s like defeating the racists and the clan passing the civil rights bill, really changing the nature of our country to what it should have been meant to be and seeing it all being taken away and pushed back. And so you give us that history, but you also seem to have a light, a belief that something is changing and a movement can be built. Is that fair, Liz?

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

I think that’s exactly fair. I mean, I think where hope comes from isn’t that good things are happening and they’re going to keep on happening. It’s that it shows up in the hardest of places. It shows up when everything feels like it’s lost, but people keep on fighting. And I think what we’re able to talk about from our own experiences and from what people are continuing to do today is to see actually that up raid with so many odds against us being on the verge of both a civil war in this country and World War II on a global level,

But who we can look to for hope and for vision and for a way forward are actually grassroots communities, poor and impacted folks, dispossessed people who have had to be pushing, have had to be making a way out of no way compelled to organize and mobilize and hold out that this is not as good as it gets. It doesn’t have to be this way. I think we have been on this organizing tour connected to putting this book out as an excuse to listen to people share some of these lessons. And I have to say I feel more hopeful than I have in years despite how bad things are because people are doing beautiful, not even small things, big things in communities across the country in northern Mississippi, in Columbus, or in Lillis, Pennsylvania, where actually the new Apostolic Reformation, like one of these branches of Christian nationalism almost has its headquarters.

There’s amazing grassroots organizing led by poor and dispossessed people that’s happening right now, and faith leaders are coming into the ring and people from many walks of life are there. And I think there’s kind of an awakening happening, but I think instead of looking to our political leaders or looking to some of the more established folks out there, for us to be paying attention to what folks are compelled to do in this moment, whether it’s folks coming around immigrant justice issues and making sure to defend against deportations and the harassment, or whether it’s folks figuring out what to do in the face of attacks on healthcare or housing or encampments or the kind of drying up of resources for food, whether it’s around gender affirming healthcare or reproductive justice, people are doing beautiful organizing and resisting and visioning towards a new world and not just staying in this horrible one because it’s not serving anyone

Marc Steiner:

Serving a few.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

That’s right. That’s right. It’s serving and that’s why we have it right. That’s a good point.

Marc Steiner:

Noam?

Noam Sandweiss-Back:

In our work we talk about two conceptions of time and it’s reflecting on the way the ancient Greeks and just time. They talked about Kronos, which was chronological time, and they talked about kairos, which described a particular moment in time when the old ways of ordering society were crumbling and new awakenings, new understandings, new structures were struggling to emerge. And the ancient Greeks talked about in that kind of transitional moment, in that interstitial time, there was a question of opportune action, decisive action who was organized to take decisive action in that intergen, in that transitional time. And it just seems so clear, we’re living in a kairos moment today. It just feels abundantly obvious when we’re facing unprecedented economic inequality, when we’re facing profound political and partisan shifts in this country and the ways the Democratic party, the ways the Republican party have been organized in this last era are really shifting.

We’re seeing enormous transformations to the economy, technological advancements, climate change of course, and the climate crisis. So all of these profound shifts. And so the tectonic traits of our society are just really shifting. And within that, I think we have felt both that our opposition has up until now been better organized than us and has been able to take advantage of these shifts in significant ways. And as Liz was just saying, even though that’s true, we also see that in a kairos moment, the conditions are really ripe for organizing actually perhaps more ripe than they have been in previous years. And just as we’ve been doing this organizing tour, as Liz was narrating, I think what we have been confronted by over and over and over again is just the readiness, the hunger that people from all walks of life have to be a part of, something to be joining in movements that are declaring a better vision, a more just vision, more humane vision for this world. And just how many folks are clear that the way society is organized is not working. Folks are clear about that in their pocketbooks and their bank accounts and their debt statements. People are clear about that in the vitriol and the rhetoric and the political violence that’s sweeping across the country. And so that readiness, that hunger has, I think been really galvanizing for us. And then the question, which is the title of this book is how we Get Organized enough to take the kinds of decisive action that this moment requires.

Marc Steiner:

Lemme pick up on that point because I think that one of the things that you two embody at this moment in our conversation and that what you wrote about is a hope and a vision that it can be stopped and we can win and build a different society. We need that and we need to understand how that’s going to happen because you have this juxtaposition of how the Democrats are really failing in terms of building a strategy and organizing around the country. And as you wrote about the struggles of the past and how during the civil rights movement and labor movements, people stood up to the Klan, they stood up to the right, they built a poor people’s campaign, they changed things in America, you see in that a way out in terms of organizing and fighting for a different world and building this mass movement. I really want to get to that because I think that’s really important. I think many people are just really, they don’t know what to do. They don’t dunno where to turn. They just see this rightwing mania controlling our nation, our future. But you see light in that. So I really want you to talk about where you see it and how we get there. And Liz look like you’re ready to jump in, so please, lead the way…

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

I think for one, I think people do see this right-wing mania as you’re talking about, but people don’t agree with it. There’s this navigator poll that came out.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, that you write about in the book, right?

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

Yeah. There’s ones that we write about the book and they keep on coming out. This is what’s kind of amazing, right? The vast majority, 70 to 75% of people in this country still believe in universal healthcare and decent housing and a fair taxation system that taxes the rich and wealthy corporations folks believe in expanding our democracy and protecting it with voting rights. Folks believe in actually gender affirming care and immigrant justice. I mean, there’s so many things that are happening. All of those pieces that are in Project 2025, for instance, folks wildly push back against it and not just in the big cities. We’ve been spending most of our time and many of the stories from the book are from these smaller towns, these rural areas, these smaller cities, as well as the really major metropolitan areas that folks might already think are for those issues.

And what we’re finding is that across the board, people do not agree with how things are. So then the question becomes, well, how do you amass people and organize people in a way to build power to change things if people are upset and if there’s the vast majority of people, how do you turn that discontent, that kind of anger into a compelling force for change? And that’s where organizing and organization comes in and organization and organizing across these different divides. And again, it’s happening. I mean, part of the reason we try to tell some of these historical examples of people building movements and winning is to also tell the example that it can be done. It has happened, it can happen again, but also it is happening again. It just isn’t necessarily what people have paid attention to. I mean, we travel around and we ask people who were active in the eighties and nineties and still are active today, including around housing justice. Have you heard of the National Union of Homeless? And across the board, people haven’t, right?

Marc Steiner:

You said haven’t have not

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

Have not,

Marc Steiner:

Right? Right.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

But here you have an example of 25, 30,000 people who won the right for unhoused people to vote that built all kinds of new housing programs that developed a power and a force that then was taken down, but not after some significant victories and some significant lessons. Or we travel around and we talk about the National Welfare Rights organization and some of the leaders, especially of poor black women, folks like Johnny Tillman and BEUs Sanders. And we say, how many people in a group of even organizers and activists have heard of these amazing leaders and very few people have. And so if we’re not telling the histories and the lessons from very significant organizing victories and campaigns, we are going into a fight.

And so then fast forward to today, there is beautiful organizing happening in so many places. It needs to be pulled together more. It needs to be, what we talk about is organized and politicized, not politicized in a partisan kind of way, but in a way that it goes away from individual people’s problems. Having individual people solutions to larger societal solutions, to the problems that are facing 140 million poor and low income people, 80 plus million folks without healthcare, with adding tens of millions more that are going to lose their Medicaid. These huge groups of people that actually are right now organized in their own communities, but could be pulled into a compelling force. And I think some of why we’re trying to tell these stories of what’s happening today and what has happened before is because if we don’t pay attention to where actual change is happening, we might miss an opportunity for real transformative change.

Marc Steiner:

Go ahead. Now,

Noam Sandweiss-Back:

Liz mentioned the National Welfare Rights Organization

In its time in the mid to late sixties and the early seventies, probably the largest poor people’s organization in the country, right. And certainly one of the most significant organizations at the lead of the black power struggle and black freedom struggle. And the National Welfare Rights Organization for those who are unfamiliar emerged at this time when the welfare system numbers of folks on welfare were growing and folks were also then really encountering the moral rot that really undergirded the welfare system as a whole. And the way in which the welfare system from the very beginning was organized and structured to compel people back into the economy, to take jobs at any pay and at any level of abuse and discrimination rather than actually undercut the structural causes of poverty. So poor women were starting to self-organize in that time across the country. And there were these kind of spontaneously emerging welfare rights associations and local organizations that are Coalescent and Moms on Welfare were really trying to figure out how to band together to fight for the benefits that they needed to fight for better treatment within the system.

And at a certain point, these mothers decided that it would be strategic decision to band together into a larger formation. And so they formed a national welfare rights organization, which was this federation of local welfare rights organizations. And at its height, it had something like 25 to 30,000 dues paying members. These were women on welfare paying dues. This was a kind of newly emerging mass membership organization. These were women at the very bottom of the economy trying to figure out new models of self-organization amongst workers, unemployed workers, and the like. National Welfare Rights Organization had a really interesting kind of internal debate throughout its lifetime. On one hand, there were some folks in the national welfare rights organization, mostly more middle class to upper income organizers and intellectuals, academics who were supportive of the work. It actually played really important instrumental roles within the organization, but didn’t really believe that mass organization, mass membership organizations were the right way to organize folks on welfare.

And that actually the moms on welfare, they argued would be most effective as spontaneous disruptors sort of argued that there was a need for militant activism and mobilization and that if they could disrupt the welfare system to the greatest extent, they could win some concessions. And on the other hand, there were leaders within the National Welfare Rights Organization, moms and Welfare, including Johnny Toman, who at one point was the executive director of the organization who argued that mass membership organizations were really necessary to weather the storms and the wins and losses. And that within those mass membership organizations, the leaders of the National Welfare Arts organization needed to attend to the spiritual material, emotional and political needs of their members. Now, that kind of internal debate was never really resolved within the National Wealth of Rights organization. But I bring it up because I think that debate actually is still one that still is being debated within movement circles and organizing circles today.

I mean, we came out of the 2000 tens with the greatest mass mobilizations and world history, and so many of those mobilizations within the US and in this moment we’re seeing really significant mobilizations, whether it’s the hands off mobilization or last week the no kings mobilization. And in the moment of rising authoritarianism and extreme political repression and state violence, these kinds of mass mobilizations, Liz and I believe are just vitally necessary. There needs to be a visible and strong and diverse expression of discontent in this moment. And at the same time, I think there’s a question of how we move from mobilization to organization and what it will take to build the kinds of mass organizations we need in this moment that can build a kind of long-term power. And so I think that debate that was carried out in the National Welfare Rights Organization now almost 50 years ago is one that we still need to kind of figure out today, is this question of is the agency of poor and possess people in the leadership of porn just possess people?

Can that actually be a rallying point for society as a whole and can or disposed people really take leadership within organizations, the movement, or are they just going to be relegated to kind of disruptors and agitators and we believe that, or dispossess working class folks in this country are the leaders that we need and that can take leadership in this moment and can build organizations that can become a political, spiritual, and emotional home to folks that can attend to people’s needs for belonging and the connection and community, and also offer folks a vision for the kind of political transformation that we need.

Marc Steiner:

So I want to pick up on what you both just said, and you talk in the book about some people who I know really well, Annie Chambers, who was a dear friend, and we struggled together a lot here in the city. Sherry Hunkle, the Hunkler sisters and Marion Kramer. I mean, these are all people who are all in the movement together for a long time. So I raised that because at this moment, in terms of what we face, how do you see us building a movement? How does that come together? I mean, you had some national organizations that police activists were from different parts of the country together, but they were united in an effort. It was powerful when it existed. It didn’t sustain itself over the long haul for lots of complex reasons. So how do you see that movement being built now? I mean, you’ve traversed the nation, you’re in the midst of the struggle, and you’ve interviewed the people to help put this book together. So where do you see that coming from? How do you see that opposition being built and forming into a movement that really significantly stopped what’s happening to us now and built something different?

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

I think we have a kind of formula that has emerged out of this genealogy of organizing, including my own experiences over the last 30 years with all of these different organizations and leaders and efforts,

Marc Steiner:

And yes, yes, you’ve had them and you’ve done some incredible work. Lemme just add that.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

No, and part of that formula is that transformation and change and movement building comes out of changing conditions and changing consciousness. We can’t have a huge impact on conditions, but the conditions right now are ripe. It didn’t take having to go and start something in Los Angeles for thousands of people, people of faith, people across many different lines to be out there as the National Guard is cracking down on neighbors. We don’t have to stand up the biggest things right now because people are being compelled into that. Whether it was students organizing Gaza, solidarity encampments last spring, but into this fall, into this spring, or whether it’s folks coming out to fight for the life of their labor union and their ability to organize and make a good life. I mean, people right now are under attack and what people do are standing up and fighting back and fighting forward.

But what we can have an on is how people fight and how we know how to fight and fight to win. And I think that’s where this combination of people being compelled to organize in lots of very local areas, it’s really a lot more distributed the way that organizing is happening right now. And there’s amazing local work that is happening that I think has changed in its character. When I look into different communities, I mean the already kind of self-organization there, the connections and the alliances that people are making, the beginnings of an infrastructure or a vehicle in a bunch of these local struggles is emerging because so many people are being thrown into motion. And because there have been amazing leaders and organizing experiences that have happened before and those that have especially developed other leaders and a perspective of the vision of what we could be in versus what we are in, we see having to have those efforts led by those that are most impacted, having to have those on a mass scale all over the place. You need lots of leaders. You need lots of places starting with meeting people’s immediate needs, like Noel was talking about this kind of both this sense of belonging, but also actually addressing whether it’s the healthcare needs or the immigration justice needs or whether it’s the food, all the things, and then helping to hold out a larger vision and the need and ability to build power. And so I think that what we’re seeing is something at a scale on a local level that in all of my 30 years I have not seen before.

And I think it is this combination of shifting conditions, but then also people ready to make change. And I think it takes a different model of organizing, and I think it’s part of the reason we think it’s so important to have put this book out in this moment because I think we haven’t learned so many of the lessons of very grassroots folks that are compelled in the words of Howard Thurman, whose backs are against the wall and can do nothing but push. I think we’ve been looking to the politicians, we’ve been looking to the big national organizations, we’ve been looking to everything other than actually what people are already doing and then helping to bring that to a scale and a reach that has the power to be a transformative movement. Like abolition was, like women’s suffrage was like black freedom was. These are movement times and I think folks are moving in movement ways.

Marc Steiner:

So the question is, I have from reading the book, and I really do encourage people to read this book. It’s an amazing work that brings the history and the resident struggle right to our doorsteps and for us to wrestle with and think about how we stop what we were facing and build something very different. Having said that, the question is, and I’m picking up on what you just said, Liz, is how, in other words, the abolition movement came together in the 1840s, fifties, and it was diverse all over the country, and it came together as one in many ways, I mean diverse one, but it came together to make the fight, as did the struggles in the South SNCC core, the NAACP all coming together, even though there were tensions between those groups, they came together to fight segregation and end it stand up to the slaughter of black people in the south. And so it takes some kind of cohesiveness to bring things together. How do you see that happening? That’s one thing I did as I finished the book I thought about. You really touched on all that, but how do you see that happening? How do you see that movement being built to both resist and to take power to stop them from destroying our future? No, I’ll let you start since you say something last time. Go right ahead. You

Noam Sandweiss-Back:

Give me, you’ll give me the easy question.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, sure, of course. Why not?

Noam Sandweiss-Back:

I know you read the book, so you know the story now, but I wanted to tell your listeners about a place called Aberdeen Washington.

Marc Steiner:

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yes,

Noam Sandweiss-Back:

Yes. Which was once the timber export capital of the world. It was once a massive site for the flow in and out of capital workers from around the world flocked to Aberdeen, which is on the coast of Washington state in the Pacific Northwest. That economy was decimated in the seventies and eighties, hollowed out the floor of the economy, dropped the timber industry was exported to the global south, and in its wake was a city and a county without a really functioning economy. And the primary then means of making money for many folks in the area was an emerging illegal drug market. And the city and county there over the last few decades as its primary investment has been the expansion of the sprawling web of jails and prisons as both a means of disciplining poor and working class people in the area who have really no legal method of surviving, economically speaking, and also as a means of economic development. The construction of those prisons and jails, that area voted blue for a century. And the first time that county flipped to red was 2016 when Trump ran for the first time.

We have some friends who are from the area had been organizing there for about a decade leading up to 2016. And through the first Trump administration, there are two chaplains, two folks connected originally to the Episcopal church. They were street chaplains and street ministers and street organizers for a number of years in the area. At a certain point in the mid two thousands, the Episcopal Church gave them an old vacant church that was sitting empty in the county in Grace’s harbor where Aberdeen is the capital of. And that church became a site of organizing in an area that up until that point, had very to little progressive organizing infrastructure, had almost no church activity that wasn’t dominated by the far right, the Christian, right, this emergent Christian nationalist movement, which at that point had this network of churches and schools and food banks in the area that had gone largely uncontested.

So there was this kind of way in which that area had gone largely uncontested by organizers, by progressive folks generally. And there was also in way, a way in which that area had gone uncontested politically in so far as a Democrats had ignored it for the better part of a decade, plus had done no campaigning there very little. And so that flip in 2016, which was surprising to some folks from outside the area, was not surprising at all to our friends in the area, they saw it coming for a while. The organization that they founded is called Chaplains on the Harbor, and they were committed to organizing the poorest, most dispossessed, most stigmatized members of that community in a town of 16,000 people. There were about a thousand people living on the streets before the county destroyed, demolished, swept away this homeless encampment. There were a thousand folks living along the banks of the local river and chaplains on the harbor was committed to organizing in that encampment. They were committed to organizing within the jails and prisons where there were just tons of young white folks in particular who were being swept up by the police and jail, they were being incarcerated and while they were being incarcerated, were then being recruited by militia groups, by white power gangs. And so chaplains on the harbor was counter recruiting

In the jails and prisons. The reason I’m sharing the story is there was, I think a number of lessons we learned from following their work and from visiting there, but one was this was a place that for so long had been uncontested and unorganized. And within that vacuum, the Christian right had just swept it and really taken over in a place that had been economically de-industrialized, a place in which public services and public space had been privatized and sold to the highest bidder. And the presence of even just a small group of chaplains organizing on the streets, they made an outsized impact in this place because they were able to attract just like a whole host of poor and unhoused folks who were just so ready to be a part of an organization that was not only answering their questions and speaking to the problems that they had in their life, but actually really offering a deeper understanding of why they were poor, why they were unhoused, and then offering them leadership that wasn’t couched in a kind of toxic theology or wasn’t blaming them for their poverty.

There are thousands of communities like Aberdeen across the country. There are just thousands of communities across the country that are uncontested and unorganized. I mean, we need to be organizing everywhere and certainly in the big cities, but there are just these communities all over that, some of which we visited on this organizing tour. And when we’re there, I was saying earlier, we just experience over and over again the hunger people have and the searching for where do we transform that hunger for change into something politically viable. And so I think one answer to your question of what do we need to do in this moment is we do need to contest those geographies. We need to go to those places, those kind of abandoned and forgotten corners of this country. And as Liz was saying, in so many of those places, there already is kind of nascent activity.

It’s isolated activity, it’s not big enough activity. But almost anywhere we’ve been traveling, there are mutual aid associations. There are churches and other houses of worship that are doing their best to fill the gap of services that have been stripped away from the traditional functions of the government under neoliberalism. So there are folks just doing brave significant work. I mean in small towns like folks gathering around immigrant communities that are being attacked, detained and deported in this moment in small towns, not just in rural counties and in red counties, not just city of and urban areas. And so I think there’s a question for us in this moment of how we give greater organization and consciousness to these already existing activities across the country in these what we call largely uncontested geographies and how we network those struggles into something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

We’ve been talking in this moment about the need for what we’re kind of calling a survival revival, which is how do we actually bring together these various nodes of activity, which we could almost understand as a kind of modern day underground railroad. The Underground Railroad, which was the kind of spine, the backbone of the abolitionist movement was not organized by abolitionists. It was first the activity of enslaved workers who seize their own freedom. It wasn’t like the Underground Railroad was dreamed up at a strategy session by a bunch of northern white abolitionists. These were enslaved workers who were just seizing their freedom with their own hands. And the Underground Railroad in its early days was just this kind of distributed network of safe houses and leaders who were willing to put their bodies on the line and risk something. And over time, the Underground Railroad took on greater organization, took on a political character, and really helped to propel the abolitionist movement into a new face, into a political struggle, which as you were saying, the 1840s and fifties ultimately led to the formation of a new party, the Republican party, and the contesting at the greatest levels of power with the question of the future of slavery.

So I think we are seeing in this moment, there’s this emergent struggle, this survival struggle that’s happening across the country. And again, that question is how do we bring greater organization and coordination to it? And we don’t have the exact answer for how that’s done, but I think those are the questions we’re asking in this moment and we’re hearing other organizers ask as well.

Marc Steiner:

So Liz, as we kind of close out, I want you to jump in here and pick up and also to describe in some senses from when left off about the organization has to be building and that the important part here is in this book is that the power of the involved and radical church in spiritual world in this movement is something that you touch on a lot in this book and it’s your life as well. So let me let you kind of close this out with all of that.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

Yeah, I mean, so I think we have some very concrete suggestions

About how to shift the whole organizing infrastructure in terrain. What kind of both philosophical and practical shifts have to happen for us to be able to really be prepared for the development of a bigger movement. And faith plays a huge role in there. I mean really for decades now, for 50 years, we have completely conceded faith over to a bunch of extremists that actually believe to their core the exact opposite. The teachings and practice of not just Christianity, I’m Christian, so I know this to be true there, but of many of the world’s faith traditions, right? So we can’t continue to concede, we have to contest and then we have to invest real time and real talent in organizing so many places. I think for the same decades that we’ve been conceding faith over to extremists, there’s been a model of organizing that just does not work anymore in a neoliberal and post neoliberal political and economic moment.

And especially as this rise of authoritarianism really hits the scene. And so instead of just organizing at points of production, we have to be organizing at points of distribution, whether it’s where people are getting their housing, whether it’s where people are getting their food. And I think we’re seeing this especially around many of these what we call projects of survival, what many folks are talking about in terms of survival strategies or mutual aid or places where people are getting their needs met and what does it look like to not just organize one of ’em, but to actually see and seed leaders at so many places that then can be nationalizing these local struggles that they’re waging. So much of organizing right now is about localizing a national vision. But the way a movement is built, and this is true in history, is when you nationalize local struggles and there are beautiful local struggles happening right now that can be rallying points and can inspire other people, but also can build a compelling power in those areas.

And so we have to contest for a theological and moral vision. We have to invest in actual organizing from the ground up. We have to shift the way we organize and who we’re organizing. I mean, again, some of the most powerful stuff we’ve been seeing is in places that have been as no was just talking about completely uncontested, completely forgotten and left out, that has led again, not just to this political moment, but is about the complicity of both parties in this society. And then we have to know that as we focus on leadership development and organizing, as we try to politicize and organize these very grassroots efforts, we have to know that bigger crises are on the horizon and we have to be prepared for those and be prepared for those in a way that we can actually build real power. Again, our opponents have been planting the seeds of all the things that are coming into fruition for a very long time.

I’m not sure it’s going to have to take as long for us, and we surely do not have as much time as they had just in terms of all of the democratic decline, but also just the lives and livelihoods of people that are at stake. And so I think we can indeed actually do some fast organizing in this moment. We can turn some of the massive that people are doing into building real local compelling power that pushes these politicians, not because they want to go in this direction, but because they have no choice. But, and I think that that means using the role of faith, it means going to places that people aren’t going, and it means really seeding lots and lots and lots of leaders who can indeed nationalize then these local struggles that are breaking out. And we have to pay real attention to what’s happening. And when we do, we can see actually that we’re in a lot better shape and that these are the pains of a system that actually is dying and the signs of something that is to come.

Marc Steiner:

I think that’s a good way to close this out for this moment. But I also think that what the book has done for me, and I’m encouraged folks to really kind of grab a hold of this book and wrestle with it with your friends and have your little groups coming together and read it, you only get what you organized to take by Lizio Harris and Adam Sandis Buck Back, excuse me, lessons from the Movement to end poverty. I think that what it could also mean here is that the voices you talk about and you met and are in the struggle around the country to come together here at The Real News and on the Steiner Show to talk about the struggles together around this country to show the world what is happening, and we have to build the movement to take back the future and not let it be lost. So I won’t go around preaching, I just want to say that,

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

And that taking back the future is going to be taken back by those who have no choice but to push and to fight and to then bring a whole lot of others into the struggle. Absolutely.

Marc Steiner:

Yes. So this is the beginning of our conversation. Bring other voices into this and talk about how this can be built and for the people you’ve met and contacted and more. And I want to thank you both for the work you do and for taking your time here and for writing this book. As we said back in the sixties, a Luta ua, it’s not over. We’re going to keep rolling and thank you both for the work you do and for the book you just put out.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis :

Well, thank you, mark, for having us, but also for the work you do and for the ideas and work you put out.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you. Thanks, mark. Give for the pleasure. Thank you both.

Once again, thank you to Dr. Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back for joining us today. And for this book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty is well worth a read, is inspirational and full of what we need to know of fighting what we face today. And we’ll be linking to the work and bringing their stories and voices of those organizing and working for a justice society here to the Marc Steiner show as we fight for a better future together. The Marc Steiner Show is produced by Rosette Sewali, engineered by David Hebden. Our audio editor is Stephen Frank. Please let me know what you’ve thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to MSS at therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back for joining us and for the work that you do. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.