Connie Gadell-Newton is an attorney who has been active in her community for many years.
She is skeptical about Obama’s recent stimulus proposals, though likely not for the reasons motivating the president’s Republican opponents.
“The Cash-for-Clunkers program was really bad, because instead of trying to stimulate the economy, maybe we should conserve our resources. Why don’t we fix our old cars instead of encouraging people to buy new cars. Junking all of those old cars probably caused a lot of environmental waste.”
Gadell-Newton intentionally drives an old car instead of buying a new one.
“It’s becoming a lot harder to find a used car that’s affordable. The prices of used cars is actually going up, because there are more new cars on the market because of that program.”
She said increasing the amount of wealth for middle, working class, and poor people is a better way to stimulate the economy.
“Instead of giving the banks a lot of money because there was a housing crisis or whatever, he (Obama) could have created a program to give people vouchers to pay their mortgages.”
She said the banks still would have made money , but the difference would have been a lot more people being able to keep their homes.
“A lot of those homes that are now vacant could have had people in them. When houses are vacant, the property values go down. There is nobody maintaining them, so the property value crashes even though the bank owns it.”
Gadell-Newton said there is a lot of criticism of minor parties for various reasons.
“Democrats want people on the left to vote Democrat, which makes sense. There are a lot of arguments about picking the lesser of two evils. And there are probably some people in the Green Party who will spend a lot of time building the Green Party and when they get into the voting booth, they vote for Democrats because they’re falling into the lesser-of-two-evils trap.”
She said having minor party status gives them standing to file lawsuits.
” A lot of running a candidate is to just kind of build a counter-movement and build a dialogue that doesn’t exist in politics. So, we’d be promoting progressive, Green Party ideas on the political platform, getting those ideas out. Hopefully, we’d also win some elections as well, but that’s kind of a second tactic.”
Gadell-Newton said minor parties such as the Greens help build a dialogue on ideas Republicans and Democrats are not talking about.
“Republicans and Democrats are opposite sides of the same coin. They’re tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum. If you get minor parties out there, you get a broader spectrum of ideas and choices. So, I think the idea is offer people choices, not just limited to what they vote for but what they think about politically.”
Gadell-Newton said even when the Green Party doesn’t win, Republicans and Democrats may adopt some of the issues they raised during campaigns.
Her ties to the modern progressive movement in Columbus are strong, but she said she probably would choose a different word to describe that movement.
“I think there is this myth of progress, that you’re always moving forward and building up. We’ve had this mythology of progress in capitalism–always building and exploiting the Earth. So I actually think ‘progressive’ is kind of a misnomer. But that’s personal to me.”
Gadell-Newton said the Green Party has a lot in common with socialist parties in that environmentalism meshes well with movements for social justice.
“Some people perceive there’s tension between workers’ rights and environmentalism. I really think that’s a divide-and-conquer (approach) from the corporate side. Basically, the corporatists are pretty much pitting environmentalists and workers against each other, saying ‘we need to exploit the environment for people to have jobs.'”
Gadell-Newton said with harmony between environmental and workers’ issues progressives can avoid this type of fragmentation.
“There is a lot of potential for green jobs out there. If we exploit the Earth, we’re not going to have access to that wealth or to natural resources. With nature and the environment, if you exploit it to the point where it can’t give anymore, we’re not going to have anything to live off of.”
Gadell-Newton agreed there is opportunity for building a mass movement based on the apparent fact that most, if not all environmental and social justice causes require solving the problem of excessive corporate power over our lives.
But she said a lot of people, if they haven’t thought about it before, might not think corporate power is a problem. Instead they might think big corporations give us many things we ought to appreciate such as food or electricity.
“But if you spread out the power a little bit, you don’t have to go to the corporations to get your resources necessarily, and they don’t have it on lock-down. We can actually do things for ourselves.”
She said building a mass movement depends on, among other things, seeing how a wide variety of issues may be connected.
“At the same time that SB 5 passed, there has also been a lot of anti-choice legislation…If we overturn SB 5 but women can’t have abortions, we’re still going to be in trouble. It’s part of the packaged deal Republicans are trying to push through.”
Gadell-Newton agreed that independent media can be a tool for movement building.
“When we are bombarded with corporate media, we’re not taking control of our lives. We’re not exercising our rights as much or talking to our neighbors or reading books. If you’re only watching television and playing video games, you’re pretty easy to control.”
Getting more control over our lives also involves some separatism, Gadell-Newton said, referring to aspects of this in Black power and feminism.
“The way I think about separatism is that you withdraw your energy and your support from your oppressor. If mass media is oppressing us, we should withdraw our support for it. Turn off the boob tube.”
She agreed there are a variety of tactics for activists to use.
“Every person has within them some ways in which they’re empowered and some ways in which they’re not. There may be people that don’t have access to the same tools as I do. I’m a lawyer. There may be people that don’t have access to the justice system. There are tons of people without access to justice. There are people who are not as literate, but I still think they have the power to resist and to have influence and a positive impact.”
She said civil disobedience is important. The lawyers who defend people who use civil disobedience are important too. There is a place for everybody in movement building.”
Gadell-Newton describes herself as a type of anarchist in the sense of taking a comprehensive approach to fighting oppression. But she said people can misuse anarchism by appealing to popular misconceptions about it.
“You see a lot of people on the (political) right saying how awful government is. They’re almost playing on an anarchist theme. If you would talk to people who actually consider themselves anarchists–instead of Tea Party people—they would probably say corporate power is also oppressive. It’s not just the government that’s oppressive.”
Gadell-Newton said the goal is to avoid oppression, whether it’s governmental, corporate, or in some other form.
“People on the right are taking some of those sentiments and turning it against the government in a way that actually is going to be counter-productive to people who are fighting oppression.
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