Organizing for Medicare for All — a partial transcript of Mariame Kaba on “Delete Your Account”
“On this episode, Kumars and Roqayah speak with returning guest Mariame Kaba, though most of you know her as @prisonculture on Twitter. If you’re not familiar with Mariame, she’s a brilliant organizer whose work focuses primarily on dismantling the prison industrial complex. She’s the founder of Project NIA, which is an advocacy group focused on ending youth incarceration. She’s also co-founded a number of other organizations including the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women.”
This excerpt begins at the 34:00 mark of the December 6, 2016 episode of Delete Your Account. Hosts’ questions have been omitted. Audio, as well as the unabridged transcript, can be found at https://deleteyouraccount.libsyn.com/get-your-people.
You know they’re going to come after Medicare. You know that’s one of the first things they’re doing. Paul Ryan wants to privatize it. Immediately! You know that. They’ve not just telegraphed that. They’ve told everybody. That’s their plan. That’s what’s going to happen. If you’re somebody who’s a proponent of single-payer healthcare, that should frighten the hell out of you in this moment. And that’s where your energy then should be going — to thinking, Okay, I’m going to take a step back right now. What needs to happen?
I think you can organize Trump supporters on that. I think that’s something that has direct material impact on a lot of these old white folks. So, where are you at now in this moment, before they’re even in new session, to start educating people about what that privatization will mean? For them, in their pocketbooks, what does a voucher look like? This is where the democratic and the progressive think tanks — why aren’t they starting now on a mass education process of informing people what is going on around that and now that is supposed to work? Get people primed and ready for the fight when the fight is going to happen.
Why not test the ground on the thing that people are animatedly debating and talking about? Is it possible to get people who voted for Trump — who may not even be Trump supporters but voted for him for any number of reasons — can we bring those people to a fight now, a fight that actually, supposedly, has a pocketbook? We talk about economics. All this stuff is being discussed in theory. My question is, why not test the ground on whether or not that’s possible now on this issue? See whether or not that’s possible. Lots of talk about political education. Why not do political education around this particular issue and see what that looks like and what that means? Using some of the existing spaces and the existing think tanks and the existing people who’ve already churned out so much information about Medicare and what it means. Begin with the messaging of Medicare for all. Speak to that.
The fight shouldn’t be, “Oh, you want to cut Medicare and voucherize it. Let’s talk about how to save money on Medicare.” This is what the Democrats are going to offer. And you were talking early on to me about, where are the places to influence the discussion on the local level, in your local democratic party? If that’s where you want to put your energy, then start with that. Start with a messaging campaign that’s a Medicare-for-all messaging campaign in your local democratic parties now. Begin that organizing now.
I’m not in the business of trying to reform or transform bigots. There are too many other people to be pushing to be worried about them. That’s not an issue for me. That’s not a concern. I believe there are less of them, frankly, than there are of other people who maybe just don’t know, didn’t have information, are feeling their own anxieties and stresses that we can actually organize. And I guess as I’ve said from the beginning, I’m giving the program right now, which is that there are already people who say things like, “Don’t touch my Medicaid and my Medicare.” When they’re saying that to you in opposition to “Obamacare,” the fight is to say, “Okay, I hear you. Look at what they’re about to do. Let’s work together to stop that. Who are your people? Who are the folks in your district? Who can you start contacting now to tell them, “Hands off my Medicare.” You have an opening on that. What you need in an organizing sense is you need an issue to be able to appeal to people. You don’t need ideology or to tell them that they need to buy into socialism. Medicare is what we have that is the most close to a kind of socialist policy in place around healthcare.
It’s the one that people understand, that they already have. So it’s actually really a great test to figure out whether all the theoretical things people are talking about right now — which are good and helpful to some degree — whether they’re going to work. I guess, for me, it’s always a situation where I don’t understand why people are always looking for something that seems further away and that doesn’t actually have a material impact on people’s lives to try to organize around. You organize around the things that have material, direct, and urgent impact on people’s lives, and then you push those people through that fight into fighting for other things together.
