August Conversations: Alex Lawson

Alex Lawson on why he co-founded We Act Radio, Off-Kilter’s Washington, D.C. anchor station; how progressives shifted the Overton Window on Social Security expansion; and why he likes to dress as a corporate pirate.

This week on Off-Kilter, we’re kicking off a series of conversations for August with a handful of “interesting progressives” doing interesting work on poverty, inequality, and the issues they intersect with, whom we got to catch up with on Radio Row at Netroots Nation this year.

To start the series off right, we’re bringing in no less than the co-founder of We Act Radio, Off-Kilter’s Washington, D.C. anchor station… Alex Lawson. He’s also the executive director of Social Security Works, one of the leading activists behind the progressive community’s movement towards Social Security expansion, and, as you’ll hear, can often be found dressed as a corporate pirate.

This week’s guests:

• Alex Lawson, co-founder of We Act Radio and executive director, Social Security Works — @alaw202

This week’s transcript:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

sights to hit the class by the end of the day

hot from downtown into the hood where I stay

the only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t saved

I spend most of my time working, trying to bring in…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off-Kilter, we’re kicking off a series of conversations for August that we had with a handful of interesting progressives doing interesting work on poverty, inequality, and the issues they intersect with. We got to catch up with these folks on Radio Row at Netroots Nation this year. To start the series off right, we are bringing in no less than the co-founder of We Act Radio himself — that’s Off-Kilter’s a Washington D.C. anchor station — Alex Lawson. He’s also the executive director of Social Security Works, one of the leading activists behind the progressive community’s movement towards Social Security expansion. And as you’ll hear, one of my earliest interactions with Alex found him dressed as a corporate pirate. Yes, really. Let’s take a listen.

Alex, thank you for taking the time to do this.

ALEX LAWSON: Always a pleasure!

VALLAS: So, I think one of my earliest memories of you — and this goes back some time but not necessarily all the way back to when we first met — but was you as a corporate pirate, and you were protesting sort of a right-of-center anti-Social Security event. But I actually remember reading about you and going, I know this guy! Because I was reading about you in like a Dave Weigel piece in The Washington Post: Corporate Pirate Disrupts Kick the Can Rally. And I feel like that — and I want you to actually tell the story behind this — that in so many ways sums up who you are and kind of what kind of work you’re willing to do if it moves the ball forward for progressive causes. So, why don’t we open with that story. Why were you a corporate pirate?

LAWSON: So, the headline, I think, was Pirate Disrupts Debt Event: Is Led Away By Giant Can.

VALLAS: I think that’s right! Yeah.

LAWSON: If I do remember correctly. So, you have to know a few of the characters to set the scene. They — the Pete Peterson Foundation and Pete Peterson himself — funded a whole litany of AstroTurf groups to cut Social Security. Pete Peterson is a late billionaire who just dedicated his wealth, his billions of dollars to destroying Social Security. They always did it through the auspices of you know, oh, we care about the children and the debt. And that’s why we’re going to take their money, and we’re literally going to steal their benefits.

VALLAS: Like generational warfare kind of stuff.

LAWSON: Yes. And they fomented it, and the work continues today. But they also, as a billionaire, they actually suffered from this almost hilarious ineptitude because there’s like four people who agree with them, right? They sit around wherever billionaires sit around and are like, “Ha ha ha! The little people. We’ll take their money.” And then they have all these consultants who get paid astronomical amounts of money, who are like, “Let me tell you, Pete. What you need to do is a Twitter town hall,” things that we obviously could just take over because they have four people who agree with them, and we have everyone who agrees with us. So, all of these concocted events actually had one audience, which is the media. And the media really, they have amazing access to the media, the just like stunningly terrible ability of the media to not see that this is an organization that’s dedicated to destroying Social Security, so they’d cover it in this very fair, “fair” way.

So, they created this organization, The Can Kicks Back, which they do it pretty cyclically. It’s like the young people who care passionately about the debt! There are none. There’s just none. They pay people to, and then those people pay as passionately as their paycheck tells them to. This was that organization. So, they had a man dressed as a giant can, and that was their shtick. The can. Now, we’re going to cut young people’s Social Security the most. We’re cutting, everyone’s but mainly young people’s. And we’re not going to kick the can down the road. So, that’s the idea. So, they created that it. It was like a million and a half dollar-PR tour that they did, and it’s all fake. The whole thing is fake, and the media just eats it up though. So, they’re like, there is this huge number of college students who are sitting there and being like, “Ah! The debt, the U.S. debt, is really driving me crazy. I keep seeing Newt,” right? Like that’s just not real, but they concoct it.

So, we were in a place where we were still fighting pretty decently for the headlines. Like the media was not on our side that austerity is terrible, that austerity hurts people. You know, they were still sort of buying some of this stuff.

VALLAS: And give us a year here. We’re talking like mid-2010s.

LAWSON: Yes, like ’13, ’14, somewhere in there.

VALLAS: That sounds right.

LAWSON: So, we’re in the middle of the austerity push. You’re seeing these debt cliffs and things like that. So, they setup their big event, the final event in D.C., and it was all about how we need to cut people’s benefits dah dah dah dah dah. Now they happened to do it on public land, and it was Halloween, which made it super easy. And then I am me, so I already have a pirate costume in my costume closet.

VALLAS: Obviously.

LAWSON: And so, I just got my pirate costume. But I think this is important too: It actually was based on an Institute for Policy Studies’ incredibly well-researched document about the corporate pirates of the Caribbean who made up a lot of the funders of this group, who actually are the reason that there is any problem. Is because these billionaires, these greedy liars on Wall Street, steal all our money, and then they stash it in offshore accounts so that they don’t have to pay any taxes. So, I actually took that report, and I took my pirate costume. And then I put a piece of paper on my chest with tape that said, “Corporate Pirate of the Caribbean.” And I had someone following me, handing out this IPS report, and I heckled them in a pirate patois the whole time.

First though, I will say, if anyone’s wanting to do this, build the dramatic tension as long as possible. So, first, I just stood in front of the stage for a while.

VALLAS: I love that this is becoming a step-by-step guide to how to disrupt a conservative event as a corporate pirate.

LAWSON: As a corporate pirate.

VALLAS: Do continue. Because I’m sure people are taking notes at home.

LAWSON: Everyone was like, “What’s that dude in the pirate costume doing at the front of the stage?” And I didn’t do anything. I just stood there for a while. And it was clear it was a disruption or an activist thing, but they didn’t know what I was going to do until this “economist” got on stage Larry Kotlikoff, who I think he holds the record for the least amount of people who have ever voted for somebody running for president ever. I think it was four. I’m not like, I have some of the numbers wrong, but he ran for president. He really believes this stuff, but his numbers are all garbage, and it’s just like generational warfare.

VALLAS: And he later became a Trump adviser on Social Security.

LAWSON: Of course. Well, that’s the path to that. You have to be super wrong. If you’re the wrongest person around, you actually win the Medal of Freedom like Art Laffer.

VALLAS: I’ve heard that.

LAWSON: Yeah. So, that’s this timeline. So, in an earlier age, I was sitting there. And every time Larry Kotlikoff would start his generational warfare stuff, I would heckle him in a pirate patois: “Arrrr! Keep yer hands off my corporate booty!” [chuckles] And literally the entire press corps only wrote about the pirate disrupting this event. There was not one story about what they were trying to accomplish. The television cameras which were there, which shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That’s my point. This is not a real story. This was a billionaire-crafted PR thing that I disrupted, but they had all the cameras! Now, all the cameras were turned on this weird pirate guy who was heckling Larry Kotlikoff. Every time Larry would speak, I’d heckle him. And then he would stop and be like, I’m waiting. And then I would just stop. And then he’d start talking again, and I’d be like, “Arrrrrrr!” And it just went on.

And they were like, they’d come over to me, and they’re like, “You have to leave!” And I’m like, “I do not have to leave.” And then they’d try to touch me, and I’m like, “But you definitely can’t touch me.” And then they’re like, “We’re gonna call the cops.” And I’m like, “I would love it if you called the police who would tell you the same thing I’m telling you: this is public land. I’m just standing here dressed as a pirate, talking like a pirate. That is clearly legal. And it’s Halloween! So, you don’t even have like — “

VALLAS: It’s so much better because it’s Halloween too.

LAWSON: It’s Halloween!

VALLAS: It’s like they just didn’t even think that through.

LAWSON: And it really worked extremely well. So, I think they spent like a million and a half dollars. I spent you know, the printing costs for the piece of paper that was taped to my chest. I already own the pirate costume. And I stole all of their press. And that’s just the sort of activism that sometimes you need to do. Sometimes you need to dress as a pirate and heckle a fake economist in a pirate patois.

VALLAS: Now, I start with making you tell that story in part because I enjoy it so much, and it’s put a smile on my face to hear it again.

LAWSON: Arrrrrrr!

VALLAS: Yes. And in part because it sort of sums you up incredibly well for anyone who doesn’t know you who’s listening now. But also because it really is, I think, a fantastic entry point into a larger multi-year story that I really want you to shed some light on, kind of the work behind. Because I don’t think it’s a story that gets told often enough. And in some ways, has almost given birth to a fact of the current political moment that a lot of progressives might even have started to take for granted, which is that it is now the mainstream position, the consensus position, of the Democratic Party that we need to not just not cut, but expand Social Security. That was a big part of actually that turning point moment you were describing just now with the corporate pirate and the Can Kicks Back event. That was back when the conversation was still around, how much do we cut Social Security?

LAWSON: Mmhmm.

VALLAS: Should we privatize Social Security? How should we privatize Social Security? And there wasn’t even a diversity of conversation really happening about whether cuts were the imperative that the austerity-driven conversation was making seem as though it was something that just had to happen. So, would you tell a little bit of the story of how, now in 2019, we’re at a point where the debate is over how much and how to expand this program, with even conservatives starting to change their tune in a pretty significant way, when it wasn’t that long ago that this program — Social Security — was really on something of a policy precipice and under threat in a bipartisan way.

LAWSON: Yes. One, it’s just a great story. It’s a long story. So, I have to think of how to get into it. But it was really Social Security Works was formed in 2010. And you have to think back to then or Google it to learn. After the House got taken by the Tea Party — so again, a billionaire-concocted thing, the Koch brothers — but it was all pretending that the American people were demanding austerity. And D.C. sort of fell for that, and there was just this turn towards austerity. And it was bipartisan. The Republicans, obviously, were like, “Burn the whole thing down!” But the Democratic kind of Fightback was like, “Burn down a little bit of it!”

VALLAS: Burn down less. Please, just less.

LAWSON: Yeah. Or it was more the pitch was like, you should let us burn down a little bit. We don’t want to, but if we burn down just a little bit, they’ll stop wanting to burn down the whole thing. And for whatever reason — you can maybe shed some light on this as much as I do — but like why people buy that in any way. But it was widely accepted. And maybe there’s a cocktail party — I know there’s cocktail parties that I don’t get invited to. But luckily, I don’t get invited to those so me and the folks at Social Security Works were like, well, that’s just stupid. No one wants cuts to Social Security. No one. No one.

VALLAS: And that’s something that polling has shown us for a long time, so that hasn’t even been a shift.

LAWSON: Like literally since the birth of the program, it’s been consistent. And this is not hyperbole. I am prone to hyperbole. This is not hyperbole. More people believe in the Loch Ness monster than want to cut Social Security. And that’s across the board. That’s not Democrats. Democrats, it’s 90 percent. It’s above 90 percent.

So, in America no one thought that this was a good idea. It’s literally just if you’re in this little weird place in D.C. where you’re like, “Hmm, that sounds pretty, pretty good.” The media were into it. You know, I don’t want to get too far into it, but it’s true that there are dominant narratives. There are stories that are told, and it’s really hard to change a story. They’re very powerful. So, the story, the dominant narrative at the time, was Social Security is going bankrupt. And once that is the dominant narrative, the solution falls out of that, right? Like so, it’s like, well then, we don’t want to, but it’s going bankrupt. So, we have to cut it. And that was just going around.

To fight against that — And we were very little. I mean we’d just formed. And the Bowles-Simpson Commission was impaneled by President Obama. So, it had a very bipartisan and real sheen, and this B.S. Commission — Should I tell that story? It was actually impaneled as the Simpson-Bowles Commission. And was like one of our first little things we did was to make sure that we always called it the Bowles-Simpson Commission so we could shorthand it the B.S. Commission and their B.S. reports. And it worked really well. It worked so well that Alan Simpson went on TV and said, “Don’t call it the Bowles-Simpson Commission because then they’re just going to! They did that so they could call it the B.S. Commission!” And I was like, thank you, sir, for taking my message to the masses because now everyone knows that.

VALLAS: [chuckling] Sort of the precursor to the Antonin Scalia School of Law.

LAWSON: Yes, exactly. [laughs]

VALLAS: One of my favorites and always will be. They changed it subsequently because they had to.

LAWSON: Yeah. [laughs] That’s a good one. I know war metaphors are not great, but just the way I think of it, we were in a very asymmetrical moment where we didn’t have any power, we didn’t have any access, and the dominant narrative was set. The media were in with it. It was bipartisan. We had the American people, but that actually didn’t matter that much for what was going on in D.C. is very. So, what we had to do was use shtick and creativity and whatever we could to actually try to chip in and break into that dominant narrative and change the story some.

So, let me just do one other like, that’s why dressing up as a pirate, sometimes it’s the only thing that breaks in. And all you’re doing is trying to take that media and give them a reason to tell another story. So, like Alan Simpson actually was a gift in this because he is an idiot. Or I don’t know idiot. He just like had zero break between his brain and his mouth, and he just said really dumb things consistently.

So, I stood outside the closed door of the Bowles-Simpson Commission every single week, and I live streamed it to the front page of some blogs. And the idea was that they weren’t allowing us to see what was happening in there. And I would say, it would be two hours of a closed door, and I would say like, “Inside, they’re talking about cutting our Social Security.” And people would keep asking them, and they’re like, “You don’t know what we’re talking about in there.” So, like, no. They would deny that that’s what they were talking about. I kept doing this. New York Times actually picked it up as a story because all the reporters were standing out there with me. They couldn’t get in either, and they’re like, “What are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m sitting out here live streaming this door.” And they’re like, “Really?” So, then there’s a story where they’re like, “The oddest video series going around D.C. now is a two-hour series of a closed door shot,” right? Because I was the only story they could cover.

Now I got that news. So, the next meeting, Alan Simpson comes out, and he’s pissed at me. And I have a camera. I’m rolling live, and he just gives me this eight-minute interview where he’s swearing — I can’t say what, but he’s just swearing at me — and yelling at me and belittling me. But he’s just owning himself just over and over and over again.

VALLAS: He was swearing even though you had a camera rolling.

LAWSON: Rolling, yeah. And swearing at me.

VALLAS: I love how Will’s agreeing because Will clearly was a witness to this.

LAWSON: It was really, you know, it was perfect because he’s like, Sure we’re talking about cutting Social Security in there! But if we don’t cut Social Security then,” and he’d go on. And I’m like, “So, just to be clear: you are talking about cutting Social Security.” And he’s like, “That’s right! We are talking about cutting!”

VALLAS: [laughs]

LAWSON: And then on and on. And he’s like, “I don’t care about your flash words.” And I’m like, “I don’t even know what that means.” But I just stayed pretty calm and just made him just keep talking. And it blew the doors open on it, right? Because then they could no longer deny that that’s what they were talking about. And then people were like, wait, they’re talking about cutting our Social Security? And that story got out there. So, then the dominant narrative is challenged a bit because the people find out that that’s what the elites in D.C. are doing, and the people are like, No. So, our job at that point was to translate, to take the story out to America and to take their outrage back to D.C.

VALLAS: Now meanwhile, at the same time, there are a lot of progressives and folks who are center-of-left simultaneously basically telling you that you are bonkers, that the idea of expansion is just not a serious idea. And so, maybe the conversation is shifting back a little bit to like, OK, cuts are controversial, are sparking outrage. What actually started to push towards expansion? And if I remember correctly, it all actually started with a Netroots conference.

LAWSON: Yeah. So, the idea of — I will just say Senator Harkin is key in this. So, we were making some progress against cuts. And then there was this like, OK, maybe we could fight between no cuts and cuts. Senator Harkin was like, “I’d be interested in….” He was just the flag that we rallied to. So, then it’s sort of, well, where is the movement? Where’s the Netroots? And I don’t know. I think it was a gestalt thing. Everyone’s like, well, we should fight to expand Social Security. Like the best way to do this is not to fight against cuts, but to fight to expand.

VALLAS: To go on offense.

LAWSON: And then you know, I’m not trying to say it was my idea. I really think it was a whole lot of ideas together. But then I took it and ran with it really hard saying, a — and so did Nancy Altman, the president of Social Security Works — a, this is the right policy. This is actually good policy. But b, strategically, if you’re fighting against cuts, you have to win every single time. And if you lose, the cuts happen, right? Like you lose. If you’re fighting to expand Social Security, you can lose 100 percent of the time, and no cuts happen. And when you win, you get the expansions that you want. And Senator Harkin was the one who was like, I will put this into — This is the inside/outside part of it. You do need both. And he was willing to challenge that dominant narrative on the inside. And as soon as that happens, it opens up the story a lot. Now, the elite media would still try to belittle it and marginalize it and everything.

I’m going to zoom through some years here to get to where the actual when it cracked and the dominant narrative had changed. So, Senator Bernie Sanders was a longtime champion of this. Senator Harkin from Iowa, former Senator from Iowa, championed this. We had some voices, and we were fighting. We would go toe to toe with them. We beat them on multiple occasions. But just as often, they would beat us, right? The austerity would win. We lost, as you know. We lost. On mandatory programs, the big programs, we held our own a lot. But there were cuts, big, draconian, drastic cuts to a lot of discretionary programs and changes to Medicare, like “cost savings,” like limiting the diabetic test strips that people can use to one a day instead of two a day. Which is the most pennywise, pound foolish and cruel, right? These are idiotic ideas. So, I’m not saying — We were losing as well as winning some, but slowly, it was shifting.

And then there was this moment where Elizabeth Warren put a op ed and said we should expand Social Security. She actually did a vote in the Senate, a vote-a-rama vote and — .

VALLAS: I remember that. It was like the middle of the night.

LAWSON: Yes. And it was a big deal. And these votes are, I won’t go into them. They’re like very weird votes. There’s just a whole bunch of votes, and it’s mainly to get people on record. And all of a sudden…. Oh, wait. I want to one before that. Before everyone votes for it —

VALLAS: Come back. OK. We’ll come back to vote-a-rama.

LAWSON: Yes.

VALLAS: So, before vote-a-rama.

LAWSON: She’s talking about it. And the Third Way — I have to put in this one — put a op ed against her —

VALLAS: Oh, that’s right.

LAWSON: — in the Wall Street Journal. This is the access that the austerity people, the billionaires, have is massive, right? They can just do what, they can get as much ink as they want. That op ed, I think, is where you can see the change. Because that would’ve one. Like 100 percent of the time, elite democratic opinion would have been like, yes, Third Way, we’re with you. But elite democratic opinion kind of paused and was like, uh, I don’t actually know which side of this we’re on.

VALLAS: Are we Third Way, or are we with Elizabeth Warren?

LAWSON: And then the activist community, we went and did this huge protest at Third Way, which I highly recommend people Google because we have Matt Bennett on video saying — I was, well, me or Adam Green were saying like, “You don’t represent people. You represent Wall Street. You don’t have any people.” And he just said, “Look. We don’t represent people. We’re not going to have people.” And I was like, “That’s what we’re saying. You don’t actually represent people, so why does your voice matter?” But the dominant, I think the elite consensus actually fell against them at that point. And that, I think, is when you started seeing — it’s not like it goes then 100 percent — but that was when you saw it. They would’ve won every one of those showdowns before then, right? They would’ve put that out. They would’ve said like, fiscally irresponsible. The WaPo, The Washington Post’s favorite thing: the rich have finite resources. I like to add, “Unlike the not-rich who obviously have infinite resources,” but that’s literally, they would’ve said that. The sage people on TV would’ve nodded along, and it would’ve proceeded. But that’s not what happened. And then since then, we’ve just been consistently building support for a variety of ways to expand Social Security.

VALLAS: And you mentioned the vote-a-rama moment, but I don’t want to lose that because that was actually a really, it was sort of procedurally wonky, but it was this really critical moment in terms of seeing where people actually stood and getting people to raise their hands or not when it came to who’s with us.

LAWSON: That’s exactly right.

VALLAS: And so, that vote-a-rama moment, it’s like 3:00 a.m., and the emails are flying from you and Nancy Altman and other people. And it’s like, “The vote’s coming up!” And so, it was —

LAWSON: This is happening!

VALLAS: It was Elizabeth Warren bringing that amendment to the floor.

LAWSON: And very importantly, she was standing next to Joe Manchin, and she had Joe Manchin. And so, that distance in the caucus, right, like the first person that she got onto her resolution to say that expand Social Security is the only way forward was Joe Manchin. So, then it’s like, well, if you’re, who are you if you’re not somewhere in between Elizabeth Warren and Joe Manchin? And that was the first time we saw on record the majority of the Democratic caucus voting to or signing their name on the dotted line that expansion was the way forward.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[hip-hop music break]

So, what’s the takeaway for people who might be listening to what’s been a very long but a really rich and detailed sort of behind the music story of how we got to a place now where it seems like there’s a new Social Security expansion bill being introduced almost every week?

LAWSON: Well, one thing is the one that people don’t want to hear. But just remember that’s nine years. Nine years of struggle on this economic justice issue. But that patience and persistence is key. And to not lose sight of that, that change takes a long time. The build takes a long time. But once the story is changed, it’s almost impossible to change it back. Because our story is the story that is on the side of the American people. The people are with us on this. So, patience, persistence, creativity is key. Don’t go to dinner parties, I would say, in D.C. at least. Probably avoid cocktail hours as well. I don’t know where the dominant dumb narratives come from, but wherever they come from, don’t go to those places.

No, but seriously, you just have to like really be OK with if you know that you’re on the right side of the issue, if you’re sure that you’re there, that the people are standing with you, but they don’t have representation in this town, their voices are not being heard, it can be a very lonely place. And it can be lonely for a while. But if you keep fighting and you stay in the struggle and you build your allies — because this did not happen just because of Social Security Works. We had a huge coalition that we built piece by piece — you just keep raising your voice and building more and more and more. And then all of the sudden, somebody else will come to you, and they’ll be like, they’ll have your idea. They’ll try to sell you on your own idea. And when that happens. So, this is a true part of it. Joe Crowley, at an event, came to me and —

VALLAS: Former New York Congressman.

LAWSON: Yes. Who is replaced by AOC. He’s a very establishment-y guy, so this was a moment when he came to me and was like, “We’re not just going to not cut Social Security. We’re going to expand Social Security!” And when that moment happens, it’s key not to be like, “Yeah, I know. That was me.” To just, I paused, and I was like, “That’s a really great idea. We are with you on it,” because that’s what you want when you’re building a movement. Marion Barry also told me this a long time ago —

VALLAS: Former D.C. mayor.

LAWSON: — the former D.C. mayor. When a person’s walking towards you in activism and organizing, don’t punch him in the face. Which means even if they were on the wrong side of an issue, and you convince them to come over, don’t hold that against them forever. Activism is about building and organizing so that more people are on your side. So, when people move to your side, you have to welcome them and just be like, “Yeah, you were always here.”

VALLAS: And keep the I told you sos in the brain.

LAWSON: And keep them in the brain or for the cocktail hours where the dominant narrative does not exist. But that is this like, you need to have that focus as well and a clarity that what you’re doing is actually going to matter. And so, I would just say like for me, I had very real people, my godparents, who I would go and visit in Delaware who would tell me how they couldn’t get, you know, they didn’t understand why, but now they didn’t get two diabetic test strips a day. They were only paid for one. And they’re on a fixed income, and they both have diabetes. And they used to check their blood sugar twice a day, and now it’s only one dah dah dah dah dah. And you know, all of these changes, and their sort of like fear of losing even a small amount that could throw their whole world off, that’s who I would think of when I was in this fight. I would think of Nick and Nina. And you know, when D.C. people are like, “Well, what’s $6 a month?” And I would be like, “A lot! A lot. That’s the problem. You don’t understand that. Well, go talk to my godparents in Delaware, and you’ll learn that $6 a month is a lot!” If there is nowhere for it to come from other than a heating bill or a mortgage bill, or oh my god. Maybe they should be able to do something fun and send a gift to someone for their birthday, a $5 in a birthday card. Like keeping that in mind of what you’re fighting for and who you’re fighting for and why you’re fighting.

You know, I always do my cliché of we only lose when we forget what we’re fighting for. But it’s important to carve those things into your heart because it is actually pretty easy to do that in a town like D.C. You can actually forget. You know, you’re so busy saving up political capital, not offending different people with power, you have to: What are you going to spend it on? Why did you come here in the first place? So, those are all of the randomnesses there.

VALLAS: Well, I’m going to push you to one more randomness, which is you’ve been doing this work for a long time, and you at points mentioned years, but the scope of the story you just told doesn’t actually even capture the entirety of the time you’ve been doing progressive political work. How do you take care of yourself so that you’re still able to be in this work and still able to have so much energy as I think people are probably not missing hearing you talk? You have a little bit of energy in there that’s what drives you to do so many different things and be involved in so many different capacities. How do you take care of yourself? How are you still in this work?

LAWSON: So, one thing is I have the great benefit of coming out of the public health movement. And I started working in outreach HIV clinics, and it was extremely difficult work and you know, sad, just hard. And but I learned there that burnout is absolutely, it’s not, it’s so real! It’s a physical thing that you can see on medical tests, right? It’s a hormonal, heart rate, it’s just, it’s not a figment. And so, you absolutely have to take care of it first and foremost. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be in the struggle for a year, and then you’re going to drop out. And you know, if you have to, you have to but…. Because you don’t get a medal. I will tell you there is no medal for staying in the struggle. You can have a lot of allyship and friendships and meaningful things that happen, and it’s powerful. But the actual rewards are not super visible, so you have to prioritize taking care of yourself. You have to find the reason why you’re fighting and then take care of yourself. Which means being very honest about how you’re feeling. And then find the things that you love and do those as well.

So, live music helps me a lot. Hot baths help me a lot. Books help me a ton. And running and exercise is key. But therapy, acupuncture, exercise, hot baths, live music, dancing: these are all things that people should be — And a big one is actually also talking about it, being OK with actually talking about how you’re feeling. Being honest with yourself about how you’re feeling about things and understanding that it’s not weak to take care of yourself. It’s actually the biggest thing of strength that you can do is actually take care of yourself. Because the struggle is going to be there, unfortunately. It will. It will be there when you return. Always. You can read books about the struggle 1,000 years ago, and you will find that the many have always been robbing — I’m sorry. The few have always been robbing the many, and the many are slowly but surely fighting back.

In my narrative, you know, I just told one of nine years, but you can look at things that take 100 years or 500 years. I mean the struggle is there because the fight for justice is very long. So, take care of yourself. But find the things that you love, and don’t be afraid. There’s all these dumb things in America like when people get sick, but they still go to work, right? Like that stuff is stupid. From a public health perspective as well, but from a personal, taking care of yourself. Get better and then come back to work, right? But there’s a lot of psychic propaganda that hits Americans all the time, like you you’re weak if you’re not working 90 hours a week. That’s dumb. Do the work that’s necessary to accomplish the goals that you’ve set up and set realistic goals. If you want to have a ton of fun, set realistic plus two, so that you’re always missing by two. But that’s fine because you are aiming high and accomplishing. But don’t buy into this sort of unrealistic B.S. that if you don’t have a social life, you have no time to yourself, then you’re not working hard enough. Make sure that you know that the work that you’re doing is actually accomplishing the goals that you’ve set out. So, that’s a lot. But that’s mainly it.

VALLAS: Something people may know about you because of this radio show and podcast is actually that you are not just the founder and executive director of Social Security Works, and you do a whole bunch of work in the economic justice and policy and activism space. But you’re also the founder and executive director — and I should say one of the founders — of We Act Radio, one of the flagship stations that Off-Kilter is very proud to be on. It’s actually based out in Anacostia, and we’re really proud to be part of that We Act family and talk about that on a somewhat regular basis. Were actually just hanging out with you guys on Radio Row at Netroots, just a couple of weeks ago in Philadelphia. Would you tell a little bit of the story behind We Act Radio and how the heck a guy who is doing progressive political work with very specific policy-related goals got into also being in the media business?

LAWSON: Yes. It’s a fun part of the story. You have to remember back to that dominant narrative thing and how powerful that is and how incredibly valuable controlling the story is. If you don’t believe it, look at how much Disney pays to acquire more and more ability to own the story, for example. And so, the dominant narrative is controlled in a large part by the corporate media, and the corporate media are owned by these corporations that have what they do. And what they do is oftentimes at odds with economic justice, for example, but also racial justice, environmental justice, right? They are…. I don’t want to spend too much time bagging on them, but here I go. You asked. So, like Fox News is the worst, right? They’re like the right wing. They are. It’s just this propaganda outlet.

VALLAS: Quite literally.

LAWSON: MSNBC is supposed to be the left, and CNN is supposed to somehow be the center. MSNBC is owned by Comcast, right? So, yeah, they’re as left as Comcast lets them be, right? So, the corporate media is not our friend. And on Social Security, it was incredibly obvious, but also on racial justice aspects, on all things racial justice. They’re just not, they don’t tell the true story on poverty, about inequality. They don’t tell the actual story. There’s like poverty porn or like there’s some perseverance porn-type stories that they’ll put out there. I think that makes sense to people, but like they don’t actually tell the honest truth about certain things. So, you know, and I am a little bit, whatever. I don’t know what it is, but — [chuckles]

VALLAS: Yeah, what is the word Alex? How do you — I mean you’ve sometimes described yourself as a self-styled social, noted, noted social insurance expert. What is it you call yourself?

LAWSON: [laughs] No, that was it. That was at the Third Way, that was at the Third Way protest where I was, yes.

VALLAS: Oh, you were called that?

LAWSON: I called, no, I definitely called myself that.

BOTH: [chuckle]

LAWSON: I was fact checking somebody’s B.S., and they were wrong. [laughs] I am a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.

VALLAS: Oh, that’s right.

LAWSON: I am a noted social insurance expert and something something something, yeah.

VALLAS: I knew that came from something! Sorry. Keep going.

LAWSON: From that protest though.

VALLAS: Of course.

LAWSON: And it was a pretty good moment. That just sometimes things fly out of your mouth, and then you’re like, noted Social Insurance expert?

VALLAS: And then it sticks, and then it gets said on a radio show, and now it’s out there.

LAWSON: Self-noted. But no, I don’t know. I do, I think of it slightly — and this is, again, not the best term — but like policy entrepreneur is a sort of thing. So, you have to be creative, and you have to look for opportunities. And again, I come out of the public health organizing. So, the reason that I have a story with Marion Barry is because I organized in Washington D.C. on HIV policy for years before working on pushing Obamacare through, which is before starting Social Security Works. And in that time, I worked with, who’s now my business partner, Kymone Freeman, and we actually changed policy in Washington D.C. We got free condoms distributed by the Department of Health. We removed a congressional rider that blocked the ability of D.C. to use their own funds for needle exchanges and then founded a needle exchange and a bunch of other things. So, Kymone and I are colleagues, and we’ve been in the struggle together for a while. And he comes to me, and he has this line on a radio station. And he’s like, he’s looking at it from the same way I am: that the media lies about this stuff. You know, a big thing for him with criminal justice reform was marijuana legalization and decriminalization. And at that time, you could get a story on marijuana legalization, if it picked up. But it would always be like, it would be mocking in its tone, right? It wouldn’t talk about the devastating racial consequences of this incredibly racist policy enforcement, which we all now know and even the Koch brothers supposedly care about, right? But at the time, the dominant narrative was that marijuana reform was actually just a bunch of long-haired hippies who smelt of patchouli who wanted to smoke their weed. And Kymone wanted to get some real stories about racial justice, economic justice. And same with me. So, we have our unofficial tagline of, “How hard can it be?” Turns out it’s actually super hard. But again, with perseverance, persistence, we stayed in —

VALLAS: You’re getting distracted because Ryan Collins is dropping by the radio studio. You’re popular here, and you’re getting a little group out there looking at you. But hey, how hard could that make talking?

LAWSON: So, the idea though, is that you tell your own story. That if you want to get your story onto corporate media, you do. You want to get the story in front of as many people as possible. Hence, the using of a pirate costume or whatever. And during the fight for Obamacare, we turned an insurance executive seminar into a musical public option Annie. And it was featured on Rachel Maddow twice, and you’re using shtick and creativity to get your stuff in front of people. But there was a revolution around the ability to talk to our own people. It has to do with building email lists, Facebook pages, but the means of distributing media became much more accessible. The barriers to entry were lower. So, that was the idea, was we’re going to build something that will allow us to tell our own story directly to the people who care about it, to our activists. And we’ll tell them the truth, and they’ll be part of the story. In fact, they’re the heroes of the story. But if we can create this medium that allows us to do that translational thing that I talked about where we take what’s happening in D.C. out to America, and we take their outrage back to D.C., then the corporate media can’t act as much of as a gatekeeper. And it’s just true when you do this, when you build this stuff.

And there’s a lot in here, but like we actually created, at We Act Radio, an enormous amount of the infrastructure which now you see somewhat regularly around live streaming for activism. The first live stream, the first big one, was the Obamacare ruling at the Supreme Court. And for that, I had a red Radio Flyer wagon, and there was a gas generator in it. And the producer sat on the gas generator, and he had a computer on his lap. And there were cords going out to our cameras. We had David Shuster standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, and we were live streaming it out there. And we actually got it right. We got the story right before the networks got it wrong. So, and you wanna know the secret to that? SCOTUS Blog. Thank you. We read SCOTUS blog. We had the ruling, and we started at the back because we at least know that much. But SCOTUS Blog verified what the back said. If you don’t know that, if you start reading a ruling at the front, you won’t actually get the.

So, live streaming. We learned that was news, and it worked. And there are news articles written about it. But what we actually found and sort of invented, and now it’s a core part of what we believe in, is that it doesn’t have to be news or newsy. It can be pure action. It can be activism. That the live streaming allows people who can’t come to something in person to take part in that. So, if you have a rally or a protest or something like that, the people who are watching, they are not watching because it’s like the most amazing content ever, right? Like the time I learned this was this 350.org march where we had a big program with all of these big names and everything. We had 35,000 people watching it live. And then we actually had the same red Radio Flyer wagon. Someone was dragging it so that it rolled. That’s why we had it on a wagon. You couldn’t see it. Like it looked fine on the cameras. And we circled the White House three times, so the footage was literally of people walking, like the backs of them, what you would see in a protest and the ambient noise of a protest.

VALLAS: And it gave people sort of the experience of what it’s like to be on the ground even if they weren’t there.

LAWSON: And I was positive that the falloff would be 100 percent, right? Like who would want to watch that for one hour? No one stopped watching because it wasn’t about being entertained. It was about participating in it. So, that’s when we started creating a lot of this, what we do, and we’re still looking for new ways. But it’s an activist style of media, right? Because we’re actually interested in connecting directly with our audience and building that story with them.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[hip hop music break]

You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas talking with Alex Lawson as part of our interesting progressives series. Alex Lawson is the executive director and founder of Social Security Works, but we were also talking about another hat that he wears, which is as executive director and one of the founders of We Act Radio, based in Anacostia D.C. Alex, what are some of the other shows that are on We Act? What’s the kind of content that you guys are putting out these days? What does it look like? And as I asked that question, a big part of what you also do is to really engage the community. So, it’s not just the programming on the airwaves that you guys are up to every day.

LAWSON: Yeah. You have to just come visit us at 1918 Martin Luther King in Southeast Washington D.C. You can come to our community garden. You can have some of the delicious food that we grow out back. But because there’s a lot that we do. It’s a community organizing space and an event space, a performing space. In the beginning, it actually was a Mama Cole’s soul food joint, which I’d been to previously when I was organizing, and we kept that sign up for a while. But we built the radio studio. It was the first radio studio east of the river. For anyone who doesn’t know, D.C. is an incredibly segregated city, and histories of racial injustice are extremely visible in just how the city is set up. So, east of the river as a neighborhood, Anacostia and the other neighborhoods east of the river, are often completely and utterly forgotten. So, the idea of the radio station, a storefront radio station on MLK, the radical side of MLK as Kymone says, is to literally raise people’s voices up.

So, let me just say: the thing that Kymone and I believe in — we just say it slightly differently — but is that people without a voice have no power, and people without power are oppressed by people with power. So, the thing that we can change or try to change is to give people a voice. Or what Kymone says is, “Until lions have their own historians, the stories of the hunt will always glorify the hunters.” And that belief is why we have a radio station in Anacostia on the streets, so that people can come in, and it’s an organizing place. So, that is our community service, and it’s taken years.

But the mayor of D.C. who, we actually supported her challenger before, so we’re not super friendly, but she —

VALLAS: A little real talk there.

LAWSON: Yeah. She recognizes the importance, and she actually announces the Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment Program from the stage in back, in Bundy’s Secret Garden. Bundy was one of our neighbors in Anacostia who was murdered, and so we named this community garden after him. We also started a library, the Charnice Milton Community Bookstore named after a journalist who was murdered, caught in a crossfire. And was the first library — Did I say library? I meant bookstore. It’s a bookstore, but it’s a used bookstore. It was the first bookstore east of the river. Now, there’s three, so they’re all coequal. We don’t care about the “first” part of it. And so, it does have a lot of this organizing to it. And then there’s a lot of local shows, shows focused on schools and education in D.C., on gentrification and displacement, just on empowerment, personal empowerment and sustainability. Hence our urban garden and things like that.

But I do think the thing that makes us dangerous to the power structure as Kymone likes to point out as well, is the fact that Kymone and I are business partners. So, it’s the marrying of that, that community-based organizing and raising up community voices, but adding these national progressive voices like yours, like Richard RJ Eskow and his show, The Zero Hour, which is actually a TV show because we built a TV studio, the first TV studio east of the river. And we have that on Free Speech TV. Moms Rising has a show, and Breaking Through with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner.

So, these are national, you know, I’m sitting here in the Center for American Progress, and these are big-name national organizations. And that marrying of those two — And there are others. But like your show’s focus on poverty is a story that needs to be told. The story that the corporate media not only doesn’t tell, they won’t tell it. It is against their bottom line interest to tell the story of how poverty actually exists in this country because poverty is profitable. And if they tell that story, then people will be like, you all are parasitic leeches who are, or the propagandists for them. But in fact, it’s the same companies, right? Like those stories, we raise up the voices and stories that are excluded from the media. That’s the idea. And that has worked. It’s been painful at times, but it does work. We can tell the actual story of Social Security, and the corporate media kind of has to follow. They can ignore you as long as your story’s not getting told. But as soon as your story starts getting told, they have to at least acknowledge that story. And then they start telling your story as well.

The blogs showed that. Now podcasts are showing that. You know, podcasts are the new blogs. Just the more stories that are out there, they’re bubbling up, and we can create these narratives, and we can challenge these dominant narratives, remembering that we are in this. We’re these very little, scrappy people or voices, so we can get squashed pretty easily when we’re on our own. Which is why the most radical act you can take is self-care. Also, because I love superlatives, the most radical act you can take is also to get organized and to find your allies, your neighbors, your comrades, your brethren, the people who believe like you, and stand with them shoulder to shoulder. Because alone, our voices can be ignored or shouted down, but together, we cannot be ignored. Together, you see people’s voices raised together like what just happened in Puerto Rico, and there’s no way to ignore us. And in fact, it comes resounding, resounding truth that all power comes from the people. There’s not a drop of power in existence that doesn’t come from the people.

Which is why they spend billions of dollars to try to convince people that they aren’t powerful, that they’re powerless, that it’s hopeless. Don’t even fight. What’s the use? It’s all worthless anyways. That is the biggest lie, and it’s because they’re terrified of the people remembering the truth, remembering that it is all because of the people.

VALLAS: Well, and a big part of that story that also comes in on Off-Kilter, and is actually, we started as a show called TalkPoverty Radio, as folks may remember. And this was about five years ago as an outgrowth of TalkPoverty.org, which is sort of the progressive hub and conversation place for discussion around poverty and inequality on the left. And we started on Sirius XM, and so we were actually sort of part of that corporate media infrastructure as you’re describing. And ultimately, the reason that we left — And we left on great terms with a lot of love for the folks who over, at Sirius, thought that there needed to be a show about poverty. That was a big deal about five years ago since there wasn’t another one like it. But we weren’t comfortable putting that programming up behind a paywall because so many of the voices that we were putting on air and so many of the people who were listening to the show were themselves low-income folks who weren’t in a position to spend whatever it was going to take to listen to Sirius XM content. That was a big part of why we actually came to you guys because we found so appealing and so in-line with what we were trying to do with this show your model of trying to effect change by creating platforms where they don’t exist for public consumption, to try to change that conversation. So, I want to say thank you for believing in us and for wanting there to be a show out there that was for free about poverty and inequality every week.

LAWSON: Yeah. Well, thank you for being part of the We Act Radio family. Because it’s a very great partnership.

VALLAS: So, Alex, in the last few minutes — and I feel like this hour’s flying by — I have probably 30 more questions I’ve always wanted to ask you but haven’t had time!

LAWSON: It’s because I talk a lot. It’s because I talk a lot.

VALLAS: You notice that too? That wasn’t just me.

LAWSON: [chuckles] I am self-aware.

VALLAS: Well, you know. But the things you say, I let you keep on saying because you tell a good story. In the last few minutes that I have with you, what is the next issue that you see as an opportunity or a conversation that may be —

LAWSON: Crushing the pharmaceutical industry.

VALLAS: Didn’t even let me get the question out, but you already knew what you wanted to say. And I had a feeling it might be that. Talk about big pharma. What are you doing there?

LAWSON: Crushing the pharmaceutical industry as it exists and building something based on justice in its place. And once we crack the dominant narrative on this one, when people see just how hard they’re being ripped off. People understand how high their drug prices are, that they’re being ripped off when they go to fill a prescription, and they can’t fill it. People understand that the pharmaceutical corporations are so greedy that people are dying because they can’t afford insulin, a drug that’s over 100 years old. But what people still haven’t fully been able to see yet, because the corporate media doesn’t want them to, is that we pay for the innovation. The actual like why isn’t there a new cure for this or whatever? Oh, if we don’t pay the high drug prices, it’s going to hurt. That’s wrong. The system as it is right now, dominated by these private equity Wall Street front groups that are calling themselves drug companies, they’re not scientists. They’re hedge funders!

And that system is why we don’t have the next cure. That system is why we haven’t eliminated diseases. That system is why we haven’t stopped the HIV epidemic. We have a drug preexposure prophylaxis, PrEP. The patent is owned by the CDC, and yet they charge, Gilead charges, $2,000. And everywhere else in the world it costs $20! We could end the HIV epidemic. We could end Hepatitis C. We could cure 90 percent of the people with hepatitis C. We can obviously treat every diabetic in this country with insulin as long as we get people to understand that the pharmaceutical corporations are a racket. That they are lying to us about how it works. That they are not innovating anything. It’s the taxpayers’ dollars that fund the research that create the new developments. All the drug companies do is charge astronomical prices that restrict access to these drugs. That is the next story to tell.

VALLAS: And it’s what we’ll have to have you back on to talk about at some point soon. Alex, thank you for taking so much time to just sort of sit down and not just talk about the issues, but talk about you and so much of your work over the years. It’s a lot of fun to know you, as I think people are probably not surprised now, after hearing a lot of those stories, to hear me say. And it’s a lot of fun to work with you. And I’m honored to call you a friend and a colleague.

LAWSON: Let’s get dressed up as pirates together and go heckle some economists.

VALLAS: Arrrr!

And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart and David Ballard. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow, and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back

I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪