INTERVIEW IDA SUSSER [Francesca ] Ida Susser, welcome to Writer's Voice. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. This is such an important book, and I think the book's central question is really how do ordinary people reclaim democratic power in an age of neoliberalism or end-stage capitalism, ecological crisis, and, of course, rising authoritarianism, which we're seeing in so many places, including our own country. Your title promises a book about the yellow vests, and it is about them, but by the end, I think I'd read something much larger. It is a book about the future of democracy itself. So weigh in to this impulse, I think, that underlies the book. [Ida Susser] I've always been absolutely committed to studying possibilities for social transformation. Since I was a kid, I grew up in South Africa, and in my 40s, I saw South Africa, the liberation. So all my life, I've been concerned with how you can change society. So the United States fascinated me when I first started my work. So my first book is about New York City, and it's about the social movements against the – today, we would say austerity – against the fiscal crisis of 1975, which was the first neoliberal turn. You used the word neoliberal, so people probably know what it means. It was exactly under President Ford, he said, drop dead. Ford to New York City, drop dead, because we had had all of this funding from Johnson, the Democratic Party. We had the war on poverty. We had model cities. We had women and infants feeding, WIC. We had Head Start, and that New York City budget was including all of that. And suddenly, as Nixon became president and Ford kind of inherited it, they cut all those projects. So then, they were blamed, New York City, for going into a fiscal crisis. And what I was interested in, how did the neighborhoods of New York City counteract or confront those ideologies that we were to blame for having social services? So my first book is about the takeover of a firehouse by local people with the firefighters. They were all men. And how they said, we're entitled to fire protection. The buildings are burning down because of insurance, because of lack of funding. We're entitled to fire protection. They occupied that building. The local white working class residents and black residents in Bushwick did the same thing, occupied that firehouse for two years until they got something back. So to me, that was the first social movement that I studied as an anthropologist. [Francesca ] But this book is about France and, you know, talk about a history of people's movements. There's the French Revolution, of course, we all know about that. But the Paris Commune has always been what's been so interesting to me. It's so defined for us without spending too much time, because there's so much rich material in this book, and I really want to get to the contemporary. But give us a bit of this historical trajectory. The book has a kind of an image of history as a pendulum that swings between democracy and authoritarianism. That was very interesting to me because I think a lot of us assume that, you know, history is always progressive to greater perfection. And in fact, it's not. There are these swings. So give us this overarching sense of history focusing on France as a place where democracy became, you know, the project of the people. [Ida Susser] Absolutely. Well, the idea of the swing of the pendulum comes from the intellectual battle before World War II in Vienna between people who supported the sort of social roots of Vienna, where they had all this public housing, and people who opposed to it and led to the right-wing anti-Semitic creation of Vienna and the destruction of what they used to call Red Vienna. So it was that battle, and a guy called Karl Polanyi wrote about this. He wrote about it in terms of England, and he showed the swing of the pendulum. So I took that idea, which I thought was really crucial, and since it came out of the embattlement before World War II, I thought it was also crucial now that we're moving in a, seem to be in many places, moving into a fascist direction. So I thought it was important to see what those arguments were. And of course, it was about the opposition to neoliberalism. And if we see neoliberalism as narrowing all of the goals towards money, so that your air gets commodified, your water gets sold to you, things that you used to just have for free become turned, your hospitals that used to be run by doctors are now run by entrepreneurs, your universities that used to be run by professors are now run by presidents whose only job is to get you money and know nothing and don't want to know about what the faculty is teaching or doing. That's neoliberalism. And everything is narrowed down. Now, that is the opposite. The swing of the pendulum, to swing the other way, is to give value to things like people's lives in the world, their need for air and water and housing and education and healthcare. So what the argument is that as people, as neoliberalism becomes more and more stark, even people who are not left-wing, it doesn't have to be people on the far left, but even people on the right begin to recognize that they need clean air. They need to drink water. They need their parks. You know, Elon Musk has this idea, if I go to Mars, I'll avoid all this trouble. But basically, nearly everybody, you know, Warren Buffett, the Gates, most people who are the most wealthiest in the world, understand that you have to have the humanity of life. You have to have access to healthcare, things like that. So it can't, like what happened in paradise in California. Yeah, some rich people could pay for fire protection. Everybody else's house burned down. Well, guess what? The rich people couldn't sell their houses either because every other house had burned down. What are you going to live in a place that's all ashes? So you have to have a sense of the collective. And that's what swings the pendulum the other way. And in France, we had, you know, the French Revolution followed by Napoleon, and then they put the king back. And so for 100 years after the French Revolution, the French were fighting. They were first Napoleon lost, and then they put a king in. And then the French in 1830 had another get rid of the king, but they didn't manage to get rid of him. But they got a kind of nicer king, or they thought it was nicer. Then in 1848, they had the incredible rights that Marx and Engels were in and wrote about. And that Flaubert, Gustave Flaubert, who wrote Madame Bovary and was in. And they all described this. So the thing is that 1848 was crucial in our thinking about what is democracy. And they overthrew the king finally. They never got a king again. And they had a very weak republic in France, which ended up with Napoleon III, an emperor. And they only finally got rid of him at the time of the Paris Commune. And to me, the Paris Commune, although thousands of people died in the streets, I give some quotes about, you know, the dead blood and bodies in the streets. [Francesca ] 70,000, I just read this recently. [Ida Susser] Yes, the French army came in and killed the people who took over the Paris Commune in Paris. They killed the Parisians. So anyway, they were led by men and women and socialists. However, they were the first kind of socialist. Marx said it's the first working class revolution. Other people like me say it's like the first urban revolution. So it shows you people who feel they have a right to the city and they said, we want to get our rents lower. We want to have representation. We want women to have the vote. We want mothers and children to have support. You know, they wanted the rights. They wanted a welfare state. And what I argue of the Paris Commune, which was 1870, 1871, that that was the first kind of vision, utopian vision of a welfare state. And Louise Michel, who was one of the women leaders and many, many other women, that they were all deported or killed in the streets as all the men were. So, you know, it's a very, people in France were really, really upset. And they didn't talk about this terrible experience for many, many years. But it really was to me, the first systematic vision of the welfare state. And 100 years later, they had a welfare state. [Francesca ] Yeah, much more. I mean, coming out of World War II, of course, there was much more of that. I mean, one of the things that's so interesting also, you talk about the Place de la République. So you talk about revolutionary spaces. It's actually very interesting that Baron Haussmann, who renovated Paris, created these wide avenues that he created to suppress popular revolts. Because he wanted to have avenues that were wide enough for military cavalry to come in. And yet, in 1968, and ever since then, those wide avenues have been the places for people taking the streets over for democracy. [Ida Susser] Totally, totally right. They were built to bring the military in by Haussmann under the direction of Napoleon III. And I mean, they also built the sewers and the things that kept Paris healthy. But they divided the rich from the poor. So they left the poor in certain cobbled streets to die, or whatever. And they had these wide boulevards that the military could also, for the rich to live along, so that they wouldn't get the diseases of the poor. So there are many things. But actually gave Paris a sanitary set of underground water and stuff, which is where the resistance operated in World War II. So there's lots of stories like that. [Francesca ] So talk about the spaces. Let's shift to the Yellow Vests now. Well, maybe I should come back to the spaces, because first we should introduce our listeners a little bit more to the Yellow Vests. I remember this movement happened, when was it? November 2018. That's right, 2018. I mean, I'm an environmentalist. I'm a climate activist. I remember at the time thinking, oh no, the working class is going against the climate movement. But you tell a very different story. So tell us, briefly give us, who were the Yellow Vests? And then we'll dig down deeper into them. [Ida Susser] So the thing is that in the early 2018, there were many already people, progressive people hated Macron because he had destroyed the labor laws. And they said, I studied the movement before, the Occupy movement, and they said, it'll come back to bite him. Just wait, he'll have a terrible time as president because he destroyed the labor laws. And within a year, there were all these demonstrations. He was elected in 2017. By 2018, the students were sitting in the Sorbonne against his admissions policies, limiting admission. And then the railroads were also on strike because he was taking away their pension. Everybody was on strike. But in the spring also, he brought in a diesel tax, a tax on diesel. And you say, well, why would people care? Well, in France, the regular gas is, I don't know, three times as expensive as it is here. Much, much more expensive. And it is also taxed. The diesel, which was used by trucks, but also by poor people because it wasn't taxed. And there's these little rinky-dink cars that take diesel that people bought because their buses had been shut down. Their railroads had been shut down to all these provincial areas where there used to be a railroad all the way to Paris. It was cut like 150 miles further on. You couldn't go to these little villages anymore. Even to take your kids to school, they'd shut down the schools. You had to drive your kids. Sometimes they had a bus, but to go to the hospital, you had to drive 50 miles because they'd shut down the maternity care on the way. So people had to have these little diesel-y rinky-dink cars. And they thought that they'd been kind of pushed in that direction because the other gas was taxed. And it was traitorous to now take their little rinky-dink diesel cars and make them taxed. So it started with an email from a woman, a Martiniquese. You know, in France, Martiniquese are citizens, people from Martinique, but they're of color. So she was of color by American standards. She was a civil service worker outside Paris. So she had to drive in. So she sent out an email that, I'm against this, let's petition. And over the summer, truck drivers, who also had a problem, started to put these yellow vests, which are construction vests in this country. And every car in France is required by law as protection. So if you break down, you can wear this yellow vest. You don't get run over. So everyone had a yellow vest. And the truckers started putting it on their windows. And everybody in the provinces started putting it on their windows. So that was the next step. They'd recognize each other because they had these yellow vests on their window screens, on their windscreens. And then they started meeting in the traffic circles. Like here in this country, we have so many highways. We don't have that many traffic circles. In France, it's like millions, hundreds of thousands of traffic circles. Every time two roads cross, they have a traffic circle. It's really amazing. They call them roundabouts. So these roundabouts, people started meeting just outside town. It's not in the towns, it's outside the town, on these roundabouts. And they started building cabins on the roundabouts and meeting there like daily. And talking about their problems. People from outside Paris. And they were all wearing yellow vests. And their rule was, if anyone's wearing a yellow vest, they're on our side. So they were able to feel they could share their miseries with these other yellow vests. And they'd talk about how they had no money. They couldn't feed their kids at the end of the month. They were unemployed. They owed money. They were losing their houses. All kinds of things. They talked about disability. There were people in wheelchairs. In these little cabins, which they built. And the police started to knock down the cabins. Because they were on roundabouts. They were public land. Or sometimes they were not able to block because they were built on private land that the people didn't mind. But it was all different things. And they were all outside the villages. And the truckers could come. And everybody could come. And then they would block the traffic to show how angry they were. And they would also open the toll booths. You know, make them free. Like if you're driving down the New York throughway or the New Jersey throughway and somebody opens the toll booths for you, you're very happy. Well, they did things like that in their yellow vests. So the French loved them. Then finally, it was in no newspaper. You never heard about it here. No French newspaper. Until they decided to come into Paris on November 17th. 300,000 people rushed into the cities of France. On November 17th. And they were all wearing yellow vests. [Francesca ] And so this was, you know, one of the aspects of this or symbols of this yellow vest. This is something everybody had. These were people who felt they had not been seen by their government. And now everybody could see them. Talk about how they viewed the government. They were not anti-government. They talked about that the state had been stolen. [Ida Susser] Yeah, they said that Macron, President Macron was stealing the state. They were always saying he's stealing the state. And of course, you know, in the last few years, I think the government somehow had lost $250 billion. Lots of things happened. But their idea was that we pay our tax. They in France, they pay high taxes and they earn much less than we do just in general. Like faculty earn less than me. Nurses earn less than our nurses. They earn much less. However, they have free healthcare. Their children can go to university for free. They have free education all the way up to higher ed, free healthcare. They get pensions when they turn 62. And they regard this as their collective rights. It's not that they object to the taxes at all. They accept the taxes because they think the state is mine. This is me. I am the state. They identify with these benefits, which came after World War II as a popular explosion after the resistance to the fascists and all that. They came in with the goal was this idea that the government is on our side. We pay taxes. They give us security. We never need to worry from birth till death. Birth, we can have our babies in free hospitals. We get actually money for every child that's born to live on. We get subsidies. We get entitlements when we get money, when we lose our jobs. We get Wednesdays off for children. We get so many things, family support that you and I don't get in America. And it all comes from the government that was set up as a welfare state after World War II. People felt they fought for their government and they're very invested in it. So they felt that Macron, in privatizing, he was reducing the healthcare and making private healthcare you had to pay. He was also trying to reduce the government expenditure on universities. So all the things that had given people the sense, well, I don't earn huge amounts, but as long as I can pay my rent and buy my food, my kids will be able to live well. My kids will get an education. We'll all have healthcare. They'll get jobs. If they don't have jobs, they'll have unemployment. So the fact that we're not rich, that we can't, like Americans, buy as much goods as like cameras or TVs or who knows what that we buy in America. I don't know what we spend our money on, but really what it is, is that we're paying for healthcare. You know, we're paying huge sums and people go bankrupt for healthcare. And so they don't go bankrupt in France. They don't even worry about the costs of healthcare. And they don't worry about the costs of putting their children to college, which is a huge misery for Americans. You know, feeling if you can't, how bad you feel. And if you can, how much it costs. People sell their houses for that. My friends sold their houses to put their kids through college. [Francesca ] So they feel that the state has been stolen from them. And I think that, you know, I can't help but make that parallel to our democratic socialists, you know, and someone like Zora Mamdani or the other ones who are saying, we want a life of dignity for working class Americans. And when they say working class Americans, they are talking about really the 99%. Talk about your concept of thresholds, of how solidarity became built between very broad ideological spectrum of people in this yellow vest movement. And then between them and Black Lives Matter, between them and environmentalists, you know, they say, you talk about the end of the world, we're worried about the end of the month. But ultimately, they talked about the end of the world and the end of the month as being really the same issue. We can't afford to have the end of the world and we can't afford to live to the end of the month. [Ida Susser] You have it exactly. That was the slogan. And I made it the title of one of my chapters because it was so crucial. Because immediately they objected to the diesel tax. Macron said they were anti-ecological, they were coming from the right, that they were destroying his program for environment. And so people felt, you know, that wasn't really what they stood for. Many of them were very strong environmentalists, many of the others. But for example, if you work like 50 miles, if you live 50 miles outside Paris, you work in Paris, you have to drive to the station to take the train to work. There's no other way to get to the station. And if you live further out, it's much, much worse. So people felt compelled to object to the diesel tax. But they were certainly not opposing environmental regulation. And so at first, the environmentalists tried to do this thing of calling for convergence. But it didn't really, you know, convergence means you're all going the same direction. And there were conferences and some of the Yellow Vests came to. But what really seemed to make the difference, that one time I went, there was an environmental demonstration at the same time. So the Yellow Vests and the environmentalists showed up in front of Opéra in one of the squares. And the environmentalists were on this great big red bus, you know, double-decker English bus. And they were giving speeches about ecology. And the Yellow Vests were standing on board. Where is this going to start? And at the same place, by the way, there was also a group called the Gilets Noirs that were Black Vests, that were people, immigrants. And they had their own bandana. And they, very soon, after about half an hour of listening to these speeches, which they came to the environmental movement, they were marching off in one opposite direction. So they did their thing. And then when the speeches were over, the environmentalists went down one of the main boulevards and the Yellow Vests followed them. But as soon as they got to the first crossroads, the Yellow Vests were running off in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe. And the environmentalists turned right and the Yellow Vests turned left on what they called a wild march. They didn't have permits. And they just ran through the streets past all these wonderful stores and up to the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées, which has all the most expensive stores in France. And so they didn't hang out with the environmentalists. But they had been there in the square together on a Saturday afternoon. And then at 5 p.m., I stayed with the Yellow Vests. We ended up back in La Place de la République that you just mentioned. And the ecologists were giving very, very polemic speeches about the end of the world. And the Yellow Vests were sitting around with flowers in their hair, whatever. No, it was the ecologists had flowers in their hair, but some of the ecologists had Yellow Vests. And so they just hung out together in this polemics from the... They heard. They heard. And very soon, after those kind of events, the slogan changed to what you just said, from the end of the month to the end of the year. And the Yellow Vests adopted that slogan down the road. And they joined. That's what I call thresholding because they didn't go in the same direction. They didn't really converge, but they trusted one another. They met one another. They met in a square and got to know each other, went in different directions, came back again. And I feel that bodies on the line together, that even if they don't stay together all the time, even if they have slightly contradictory or contradictory demands, they trust each other. It's like you're at somebody's front door and you learn you can be in the lobby together. That's why I call it thresholding. You're meeting people at their front door. You may never go into their house and get invited, but you're making the connection and understanding who these other people are and seeing them in person and how they feel and that they're human. And they joined with, they loved, by the way, this other environmental group called the Extinction. Extinction Rebellion. Extinction Rebellion. They got along so well with the others. They all ran through Paris together. But, you know, it was various movements and they began to understand that these are people they can trust and they can incorporate together in their own way. [Francesca ] Extinction Rebellion is very much on, I mean, if you want to talk about right or left, is very much on the left part of the environmental movement. And there were people in the yellow vests who had come from the right. Absolutely. And it kind of reflects some of my own experience in 2016 and 2020 when I went around canvassing for Bernie Sanders in my neighborhood. I mean, I live in a very wealthy community that has the highest poverty rate in our county. So, I mean, huge extremes of wealth here. It's in East Hampton, New York. And in my area in Springs is where a lot of the poverty is concentrated. So when I went canvassing, people were either for Trump or for Bernie, but a lot of the Trump people really liked Bernie. So, you know, it's interesting that James Tallarico and others have said this isn't about left or right. It's about up and down. It's about the 1% versus the 99%. And what you're describing is how these people, without the interruption or mediation of the media that is trying to classify things in certain ways so as to divide people, they understood that they had a common enemy and they had a common project. Exactly. [Ida Susser] I would say that it was a process that they began by thinking about the diesel tax and everybody could join, ref right, whatever. But over time, as they met in these roundabouts and as they met in these cabins, they began to have a much broader critique. And by the end, I would say that what was left of the yellow vest was definitely what they called anti-capitalist. And I would say that over time, people that started out being supporters of the fascist legacy group, which is Marine Le Pen, who believes that immigrants, no matter when they were born, even if they were born in Paris, should never have rights. So they were supporters of Marine Le Pen in the beginning. They had voted for her. I found people who wrote testimonials that after going to these demonstrations and every day talking to people in the roundabouts, they began to understand that it was much more than just the diesel tax, that it was really, well, there's the price of all goods, the poverty, the lack of a future for their children. The students, because of what Macron had done, Macron had done about education, they said, he's stealing our futures. And all of those things actually are things that the government can do collectively for you. And they were losing them. But what was going on in France was that although there were people who wanted to restrict benefits and voted for Marine Le Pen, they came to hear what was happening at these roundabouts, and they actually changed. And I think the process of that shift is really, really important. People wrote for me, I said, so how do you get where you are? And they wrote these testimonials about, well, I went every day to the demonstrations in my town, and finally I drove to Paris and I joined that, and how their ideas changed, how it went from just the diesel tax, to objecting to the cost of food, to understanding that it had to do with government and capital investments and stealing their money, which was being privatized hospitals, etc. I think in this country, you see, the yellow vest came from the grassroots, they never would adopt any political leader, they didn't. Whereas in this country, that rage and energy has kind of been harnessed by Trump, that rage. And so it's coming from the top down. And no matter what he says, he's taking money, he's stealing this money. He doesn't want to pay for healthcare, he doesn't want to pay for rents for poor people, he doesn't want to pay unemployment insurance. So he wants it all to him, you know, all those billions that he's made, and his family. So I think the fact that this energy was captured by a right-wing populist leader is the problem in this country, and racist. He's got a racist whisper. Whereas in France, these movements somehow came from the grassroots. And even though people in them might have been racist, might have been anti-Semitic, might have been anti-environmental, might have been anti-Muslim, but within them, there were many individuals. But as a group, that rage and energy, they never allowed it to be harnessed by a populist leader. There was no politician that could run on the yellow vest ticket. And people said, well, so they're disorganized, what will come of this? Because they were horizontalists, they didn't believe in leadership. But I argue that what comes of it is a much bigger thing that it isn't. It didn't allow a right-wing populist leader to benefit. And it allowed people to rethink where they were in their own ways to come towards a recognition of the collective needs of the society. [Francesca ] And one of your important examples of that, because they not only demanded their rightful goods, let's say, from the state, but they also organized themselves. And now I'm not talking about the yellow vest, but talking about the movements that led up to that. You talk about co-op cycle, your primary example of what you call the creative commons that emerged from another movement, Nuit Debout, which occurred earlier, a few years earlier. So tell us about co-op cycle, and how does it demonstrate the institutions that these kinds of horizontalist democratic movements can create? [Ida Susser] That is so important. I love that you picked that up. So co-op cycle, I put it in the first few chapters because the Occupy movement that they called Nuit Debout, it was very, you think Occupy Wall Street, you think Nuit Debout, it's the same. They're the young people, they're people who are mostly more educated, they come from the cities, very different than the yellow vest who came from the provinces and were less educated. So the Nuit Debout, the Occupy movement, they lasted seven months in the Placido Republic, it was an Occupy, just like Wall Street. And they opposed the destruction of the labor laws, they were opposing, Macron was the finance minister, and he was introducing this destruction, which it was a socialist government that brought in the destruction of the labor laws. And so people said the socialists were treason, they were traitors. And the next election, the reason Macron won is the socialists got only 2% of the vote. Imagine that. Like, it was Democrats and Republicans, and Democrats got 2%. That's how much people hated the destruction of the labor laws. But Macron benefited, even though he was the initiator of it in the Socialist Party. Anyway, so what happened is, it ended after seven months, you know, that was a pretty long time through the winter. But people then who had been in these commissions that were 80 commissions, and they got to know each other, and they made things happen in those commissions, they made things happen by consensus, they knew each other. They showed up every evening, rain or shine, from March through December, so they knew each other. And when it was over, they said, they thought about things. And they came to the idea that, well, yes, it wasn't working, they weren't able to stop things, you know, with Nuit de Boeuf. But they invented, there were people that were really well educated, a guy who was really in the computer world. And he donated his time for two years, along with eight or nine other Nuit de Boeuf people, they got together from that commission, to set up something that was an app opposite to Uber, like Uber is a slavery app, you know, once you join Uber, you do the times, and the finances, and everything they demand. But they decided to make an app, which would be run by cooperative bike riders in a cooperative, that would allow them to determine the time, the routes, the profits from the businesses, and they would run it, it would be their app, so they couldn't be turned into slaves. So they co-op cycle people who came out of Nuit de Boeuf, spent over two years, probably three or four, volunteering their own time after work and stuff like that, to make this app, to get in touch with cooperative bike riders, which there are in Europe, there are these organisations, and there's more and more. And now, this is 10 years later, there's over 150 co-op cycle in all of Europe, and in the United States, in Spain, in France, in Britain, have joined this app. I met the ones in Spain, because I was working in Barcelona, just by chance. They've joined this exact app. And so they organise their own delivery. And what the 10 or so co-op cycle beginners who came out of Nuit de Boeuf, they had it in themselves, they were going to make themselves superfluous. So at the end, after three or four years, they gave over the running of it. It's been going on the last six years, with bike riders who are mostly immigrants, you know, from Senegal and Morocco and whatever, they're running the show, they train them into that. And now it's expanded, there's thousands, and it's expanded in Paris. I went to these, they've set up these community centres for bike riders, where there are computers, access to healthcare, assembly meetings. I went in one, they're there all day long with social workers and stuff like, and the bike riders who used to be out in the street, with nowhere to go, can come into these places and get on the computer and get their birth certificate and their this and their that. So it's like expanded amazingly. And this came out of Nuit de Boeuf. It was the vision of kids, young people, in that political economy commission in 2016, who loved the Paris Commune, because they started March 31st, happened to be the day of Nuit de Boeuf beginning, and they called themselves the Paris Commune and they were counting the days because the Paris Commune lasted 70 days. So they would go March 31, March 32, March 33, which is the way the Paris Commune counted its days. [Francesca ] When we say bike riders, we're talking about bicycle delivery riders. [Ida Susser] They're mostly in this country too. They're the poorest of the poor, they're the homeless. [Francesca ] So another issue is that of violence, the incredible violence of the state, escalating violence between protesters and police, and marry this violence to increased surveillance everywhere. What does that forebode about the ability of these movements going forward to resist state violence? [Ida Susser] Well, first of all, I don't think that that kind of violence can prevent the underground, the underlying, the streams of understanding that are worked out among people. But I would say that the president, Macron, refused to recognize the Yellow Vests as a legitimate protest movement. They refused to recognize their right. If you're a protest movement, you have a right to march. You have a right to speak out in France. You have a lot of rights. However, Macron never recognized them as protesters. They were called rabble and ignorant and this and that. And so they could use these kind of guns, LBDs, which are non-lethal, but they could shoot out your eyes or shoot out your hand or shoot off your foot. So among the Yellow Vests, they began to have groups of mut-, they called them les mutilés, mutilated, and they felt they had lost their hands or lost their eyes. And so they understood what they had never understood, I think, coming from the provinces, where the police, the gendarmes, are a different group. They help you, you know, they clear traffic or whatever, and they're mostly your neighbor. But in Paris, they're dressed in full armor and with helmets and with shields, and they have these guns, these LBDs, and you get tear gassed and kettled. So they began to understand what police brutality is, and that's one reason they joined the Black Lives Matter. I think that is the reason les mutilés and all the Yellow Vests joined the Black-, they began to understand police brutality in other, other environments. And I think that, myself, I think that it's always a, you know, surveillance versus uses, like you mentioned with the boulevards. I think in every era, there's different kinds of social movements, and that's what I was studying. So in the industrial era, kind of Marxist vision was assembly lines and people get together as workers. Now nobody works together, people are all spread out, but we have different ways. And also, I wrote an article once about New York City, that why did we have Occupy Wall Street? Because the neighborhoods I studied in the 80s, where there were neighborhood movements that could do things together in the neighborhood, occupy buildings, et cetera, they've all been gentrified. So they even, no working class neighborhoods, the same way they used to be, you know, Bushwick, Greenpoint, whatever. So now they met at Wall Street. That's a new tactic. So I think that people generate responses over time in different ways. I agree there's surveillance now. And initially, people would sit there and take, sit in, and the police would take their pictures and they would have identified people. And in France, they'd arrest them like three months later. But now, then people started wearing, you know, covers so that when they're in the sit-in or in a way that they could be arrested, there's no vision that, you know. So people have got ways of dealing with this, whether it'll work or not, I don't know. And the Yellow Vests wrote all their, they had their voice on their backs, right? So they have these Yellow Vests and on the back is all their messages. And that really is, they don't want their faces. I took no photos of faces because all their voice is on their back in black ink. [Francesca ] You actually write with a great deal of hope. Where does the hope come from after witnessing years of police violence in the different places that you've been? Political fragmentation, like we have here, the threats to democracy, in that pendulum between authoritarianism, democracy, where do you think we are? Do you think we're going deeper into fascism or is, you know, the rise of movements like No Kings and what people showed in Minnesota, is that showing that there's a rise of democracy? [Ida Susser] I totally think it's always a struggle. And I think we're seeing it with the immigrant movements in Minnesota, Los Angeles, Chicago, we're seeing it with the shutdowns of the warehouses they tried to open in New Jersey. And we're seeing it over and over in the courts. I think there's a big battle for democracy. And so to me, that's what we can do. But I also, my hope, you know, I was born right five years after World War II. My family was all involved in the anti-fascist movement. And we lived in South Africa. And my father told me, you know, my cousin, like, my cousins had run away from Germany and now they were in South Africa and they were not going to stop fighting fascism. So when the fascist government won in South Africa, they were going to stay. We left. But the thing is that they won, 1994, liberation in South Africa. So I have a long-term sense of hope. I was grown up in it. And I feel I've been in so many, like I was on, people in this country won't know, but there was something called the Aldermaston movements when I was a kid. My parents took me marching from where they built the bombs in Aldermaston to London. It was about 60 miles. You had to sleep overnight. I loved it. But anyway, my parents took me when I was little. Well, you know, they invented all kinds of nuclear agreements. We may be breaking them now. But at the time when I was growing up, there were none. There were none. And people were afraid that Hiroshima would happen over and over again. So I have seen social movements having huge consequences. And I do think that there is no other thing to do for democracy, but fight for your rights every single way and day that you can. And that's what I think Americans are beginning to do. I think that they have to figure out the way. And it's hard. We've been like had shock and awe with the destruction of AID, with the destruction of NIH, with the destruction of our judges, you know, the Supreme Court. But in every society, we're in a moment that we can fight. We're not like Myanmar, where the professors are going out raising armies. You know, we haven't reached that. So I think that we're in a place where we still have free speech. We still have open courts. We still have our newspapers. We still have NPR. We still have people like you. And everybody should be out there making use of every way that we still have a democracy to fight to keep it that way, or to get it better. That's how I see it. [Francesca ] And I think your book is such a wonderful guide. I mean, wonderful stories, but also a profound political understanding that I think, you know, is so useful to us as we go into this project of protecting and rebuilding democracy, or maybe building it more for the first time. Ida Susser, the book is The Yellow Vest and the Battle for Democracy. And listeners, this book is being offered by Ida Susser for free. We'll have the link on our page, but you can go to Rutledge, which is the publisher, and probably Google within Rutledge to get to the page of the book. That's right. [Ida Susser] Also, if you go to Amazon, people buy books. It's got the download for free, the button for download for free, wherever they're selling the book, wherever. To me, I was studying all these people in the commons who wouldn't have the money to buy the book. And so I felt that I had to do it. And I want people to have access to get however many pages, to look at the pictures, whatever, but there are pictures. [Francesca ] That's so wonderful. Really, really wonderful, because I think the book is such an important book for people who are part of this movement to save our future. Thank you very much. INTERVIEW WITH DR. ABDUL EL SAYED [Francesca] There are some chapters in this book, Medicare for All, a Citizen's Guide, on how we got to this broken system we have today. But I actually want to focus on today and the future. You write that the four key problems facing the U.S. health care system are that it's, one, too expensive, too few people have access to it, it doesn't do enough to improve our health, and it's eroding the experience of giving and receiving care. So let's start with the expensive. We do pay the highest costs in the world for a health care system that is mediocre at best and seriously broken at worst, and we're projected to spend over $12,000 per person on health care in 2021, which is double the average in comparable countries. One of those major costs is administration, $2,500 for every American per year. Could you explain, Abdul, what makes us have the most expensive health care system in the world? And talk about the administrative costs that are part of that. [Abdul El Sayed] Yeah. We pay more in prices than any other country in the world. It's not necessarily that we use more health care. It's that our health care is just simply more expensive. And that's because there's very little incentive for anyone in the system to be watching out for the individual patient. And let me explain why. When you get sick, if you're privileged enough to have private insurance, because, of course, 10% of people just don't have insurance at all. Those who are over 65 are on Medicare, and those who make below an earning threshold are on Medicaid. But if you're privileged enough to have private health insurance, you and your employer are paying every two weeks or every month for that health insurance. When you get sick, you go see a doctor or go to a hospital, and then they bill your insurance. Now, there's a whole negotiation around the prices that they will negotiate through. It's part of the reason why your insurer wants you to go specifically to certain doctors and not to others, because those are the doctors with whom they've negotiated a rate. And the whole purpose of this negotiation isn't necessarily to save you money. You might think that the insurance has an incentive to pay less, but that's not really how it works. Instead, they're really interested in leveraging their economies of scale to out-compete other categories or other people in their category. So if you're a hospital, you want to out-compete other hospitals. If you're an insurer, you want to out-compete other insurers. And in the end, what happens is the insurance industry, they are capped at a certain amount of profit per unit care. So they have an incentive to actually see the profit increase so that their overall slice of the pie is just bigger. If the pie is bigger and you're limited to a certain level of slice as a proportion, you just make a bigger pie. And in that way, your slice of the pie is that much bigger. And so they are negotiating with each other against others in their category. And there's very little incentive to reduce the price because insurance has also done this thing where they figured out how to push whatever the overall cost is back onto the consumer in the form of out-of-pocket costs, in the form of deductibles, co-pays, and co-insurance. And so the insurance industry knows that it makes more money when the cost is higher. And in order to make that acceptable, they've just pushed the cost back onto the consumer. And so there's nobody really bargaining on behalf of the consumer, of we, the people in our system. And it's led our prices not just to be the highest in the world, but also to be growing at the fastest rate in the world. And those two things present really serious challenges for the sustainability of our system, for whatever sustainability it even has right now. [Francesca] In your book, Medicare for All, A Citizen's Guide, you outline in it that the core features are universal coverage, comprehensive coverage, pricing power, administrative efficiency, progressive financing, and public accountability. Yet the devil is in the details. Micah, tell us first about the first two, universal coverage and comprehensive coverage. And what might be some of the different ways that they could or should be approached? [Micah Johnson] So the first is pretty simple. With universal coverage, we should cover everyone in the country. And I think that we know is one of the biggest and most powerful features of Medicare for All. The second is, I think, just as important. It's that Medicare for All would make people's health care coverage more comprehensive. And there are really two things that we mean by that. One is, what services are covered? And the Medicare for All bills in the House and Senate, they would expand benefits compared to either Medicare Today or even what most private insurance covers. For instance, vision, dental, and hearing, not included in Medicare Today, but are included in the Medicare for All bills. And then another important question is long-term services and supports. So for folks who are aging or who have disabilities who require this long-term support, Medicare currently doesn't cover that. And it's very costly to cover and very important to do so. And one of the things that the Medicare for All bills do is add more coverage for long-term services and supports. The second thing is, how much does the patient need to pay out of pocket for care? And it's one of the biggest pain points in the current system. Even when you have health insurance, you can still end up in financial ruin, right? Two in five patients who are diagnosed with cancer deplete their life savings within two years. That's in a country where most people have health insurance. So what Medicare for All seeks to do is decrease those out-of-pocket costs as much as possible. And there's debate about, should there be zero out-of-pocket costs? Should there be small out-of-pocket costs for some services? And in the book, we go through in detail some of the strengths and weaknesses of the different kinds of approaches and highlight this as one of the questions that will be debated in Congress when this gets to a serious level of discussion. But the big picture here is the out-of-pocket costs in the current system are far, far, far too high. And what Medicare for All does is it gets the power to bring those down enormously. [Speaker 2] Right. And another issue about the cost is also the cost of prescription drugs and in general pricing power. Abdul, talk about the pricing power of Medicare for All and include in that, please, the approach to drug prices, which isn't as simple as it sounds. [Abdul El Sayed] One of the problems that we have right now is that we have 900 plus different health insurers in this country. And because there are 900 plus, none of them really has the power to set prices. And as we talked about earlier, they don't really have an incentive to reduce the overall price because they get paid as a fraction of what the overall price is. And if they're boxed into a particular fraction, the best single thing they can do is just maximize the absolute number there. And so that the fraction becomes a bigger number overall. And what Medicare for All would do, and one of the names that we call this a single-payer health care, is that rather than 100 plus different insurers, you end up having one. And that's the federal government. The federal government has no incentive to make money off of you. And so they don't really quite care that the pie gets bigger. In fact, they want the pie to be smaller because their responsibility is to be the taxpayer. And so their interest, then, is to be able to reduce the overall price. And because there is one buyer, the federal government becomes what's called a monopsony. And a monopsony is like a mirror image of a monopoly. We all know in a monopoly, there is one seller of a good. In a monopsony, there's one buyer of a good. And that buyer also gets to set the price. And so Medicare for All, in making the government a monopsony, would reduce the overall cost of health care. Now, prescription drugs is a really critical cost that people are exposed to in our health care system in ways that force them to ration their prescription drugs, which can be deadly. And in theory, Medicare could negotiate the prices of prescription drugs today, except for that the prescription drug industry is the single biggest lobbyist of government in the country. They've lobbied to the tune of $4.4 billion over the past 20 years to make sure, in part, that the federal government cannot legally negotiate with them. And that leaves our seniors rationing their prescription drugs. It leaves all of us paying way too much for these services. And so one of the goals of Medicare for All would be to strip out that provision for the pharmaceutical industry and force them to come to the negotiating table with the government on our behalf to bring down the cost of prescription drugs and to bring down the cost of health care generally. [Speaker 2] And Abdul, the big question, as always said, how to pay for Medicare for All? And you know, what's interesting is that this book, Medicare for All, A Citizen's Guide, poses it as an ethical question. So talk about how to pay for it and what are the ethical issues at stake? [Abdul El Sayed] Yeah, I want to step back for a second because the most important thing to remember is that every single dollar, every single one that goes into our health care system comes out of somebody's pocket. We already pay for the bloated, overly expensive, inefficient, and highly ineffective system that we have today. And the real question I think we should be asking is, why do we pay for this system as we pay for it? You know, when people talk about the cost of Medicare for All, they often pose it as if government budgets are the most important thing. And I just don't believe that. I believe that people's personal and their kitchen table budgets are the most important thing. And right now, we know that it is extremely expensive. It's being paid for by employers and, more importantly, by individuals. And then there's this huge out-of-pocket component that could fall on you like an axe of Sophocles at any time. And that poses a profound level of insecurity in our system. In the same way that we pay for health insurance now, which is that it comes out of our paycheck, bi-weekly or monthly, Medicare for All would do the same. But instead of charging in a very regressive way where we don't ask corporations to pay enough for the costs, and we ask individuals, particularly low-income individuals, particularly uninsured individuals, to shoulder too much of the burden, so much so especially for uninsured people that they just can't afford it, we would be financing this in a far more progressive way. And here's the thing. Because of the overall savings that we talked about earlier in terms of the overhead costs and the reduced pricing, the costs that even corporations and the rich would pay might decline. In fact, unless you're in the top 1% or 2% of earning percentiles, you're liable to pay far less for your health care under a Medicare for All scenario. I ran for governor in Michigan. And when we costed out the cost of Medicare for All, even for large corporations who were asking to shoulder a large proportion of the cost, they were still paying less than they pay now. And that's because of the savings that the system and its efficiencies would create. And so right now, our health care system is paid for regressively, and it's far too expensive because we have no controls on overhead costs and pricing. And under Medicare for All, we would pay for the system far more progressively to cover everyone. And in the end, because of the reductions in pricing and the improved efficiency of the system, it would be far less expensive.