Saturday was a really nice day for me. PDA presented 4 awards and one was to me, a thrill. The event headliners were Jane Fonda (Lifetime Achievement Award for Activism in the Pursuit of Peace and Justice) and Steve Donziger (Tim Carpenter Award for Activism in the Pursuit of Environmental Justice). And then there were me and Susie Shannon. I got a Lila Garrett Award for Activism in the Pursuit of Peace and Justice and Susie got the Tim Carpenter Courage Award for Activism in Pursuit of Economic Justice Inside the Democratic Party. Like I said, Susie is a DNC member, something I think as being akin to cleaning the elephant cage at the Bronx Zoo. She’s also on the California Democratic Party Executive Board, a City of Los Angeles health commissioner and Policy Director of Housing is a Human Right.
Her acceptance speech was not just a delight, but a compelling and powerful inspiration. There were a ton of elected officials there— in fact, she was presented with the award by Ben Allen, one of the brightest lights in the state Senate— and I hope they were all paying close attention when she explained how progressives can work within the Democratic Party, which isn’t always welcoming or accepting to progressive ideas— and, in fact, is often down-right hostile.
After she was elected to the DNC, she immediately began working to create a Poverty Council, not something the powers that be at the DNC took seriously. That didn’t stop her. Something like that never stoops Susie.
“There are many different councils on various issues but not,” she explained, “any dealing with Poverty. So I wrote a resolution to create a poverty council and within a day or two I get a call from the Democratic National Committee staff and they tell me they don’t want a poverty council and they want to change the resolution to express the Democratic Party’s commitment to Poverty issues. So I say, I’ve been here for about a year or a year and a half and I haven’t seen this commitment to poverty you are talking about. Poverty is never mentioned, we’ve never had a speaker at our meetings… So I tell them I don’t agree with the changes and I’m the author of the resolution and I’m saying ‘No.’”
You can probably see already why PDA had singled her out for this award. “The Democratic Party is a brand and for me that brand is about helping people in poverty,” she said. “People in poverty don’t have any money, they can’t contribute to candidate campaigns, they don’t have a union— what they have is the Democratic Party and we must be talking about these issues at every meeting. So after all this, they change the resolution anyway to express the commitment of the Democratic Party to poverty issues and send it out to the entire delegation by the 30 day deadline. So I work with my friend Sue Himmelrich who is an attorney and we send in a strongly worded letter to change the wording back in support of a poverty council and they change it back. So I call all the DNC members I have phone numbers for, line up my votes and go to Chicago where our next DNC meeting was being held.” But that’s not where a happy ending come in.
Instead, she talked to the co-chair of the resolutions committee and he told her they had decided to table her resolution— shit-can it. After all, do corporate donors want to hear about the plight of a bunch of poor people? At that point, Susie walked up to the DNC chair and said, “You told me when you were running that you cared about poverty and homelessness but now you won’t support a poverty council?”
Apparently she scared him and he backed down and said he’d support the poverty council. “5 minutes later the resolutions committee chair tells me they will put it up for a vote. So it passed unanimously at the resolutions committee and then on the floor and we created a DNC Poverty Council.”
Don’t pop the champagne corks yet; this is the DNC after all. Susie was really excited and started preparing for the inaugural meeting of the Poverty Council which and she called members of Congress sincerely interested in the issues around poverty like Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee. But as she kept calling the DNC to find out when the meeting was being scheduled she got nothing but stalls and run-arounds. “So on the last day before they have to schedule the meeting, they call me around 5:30 at night and leave a message on my voicemail saying they won’t be scheduling the poverty council at all. So, they continue messing with us. I decide I’m not going to call them back and instead call the hotel and ask them how much it will be to book a meeting room. And it was a lot of money. But we raised it, and Dorothy gave me money and Derek Devermont and others and we had our meeting and Maxine and Barbara spoke and the room was packed. It was overflowing. And was partly due to Alan Minsky who had heard about this story and wrote an article for the Nation magazine.”
Minsky wrote that Susie “is a warrior for the poor and homeless. An activist from Southern California, Susie recognized something in the early 2000s that millions of progressives are starting to realize now: If she wanted to make a difference and actually improve people’s lives, she not only had to engage with the Democratic Party, she had to enter it.In doing so, Susie didn’t alter her politics one iota; rather, she was instrumental in building the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party, for which she is now a presiding officer. Susie also shepherded a homeless-housing bill all the way through the California State Legislature to the governor’s desk and didn’t relent until she had Jerry Brown’s signature. In 2016 she was a Bernie Sanders delegate; and the following year she became the only elected Bernie delegate from California to become a member of the DNC… [T]he question must be asked, why does the DNC (and, by extension, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party) refuse not only to address poverty but really even to acknowledge its existence? Are they frightened that the Poverty Council will make morally compelling claims that are not a part of their ‘electoral strategy?’ Are they afraid that the council will make proposals, such as a right to housing or a guaranteed income, that would be met with disapproval by Wall Street backers who insist upon balanced budgets? Whatever the reason may be, doesn’t their fear of addressing poverty mean that they are tacitly accepting mass poverty as a constant in American society?”
After Minsky’s article was published Brandon Gassaway ythe most perfect name ever for a DNC spokesman], DNC National Press Secretary, submitted the following quote: “Addressing the scourge of poverty and its impact on health, education, and future economic opportunity is a core Democratic value. We support all of our members who are working to find solutions to address this critical issue and we look forward to working together in implementing those ideas.”
Back to Susie speaking at the awards ceremony on Saturday: “Nina Turner, who also spoke at the poverty council, sent it out to her list before the meeting. So people knew about it and came. And when the DNC saw we had an overflowing crowd and we were not going to let them stop us, they scheduled us at every meeting since. And I don’t tell this story to say the people at the DNC are bad people… the point is that we can’t get discouraged. If we get discouraged and stop, we can change the course of history for the worse. So I see the progressive movement as a lifetime commitment. We can’t stop because people are being hurt… And now I’m working on a rent control initiative and I’m asking all of you to vote for for the Justice for Renters Act in November 2024 which will expand rent control. Thank you and keep on keeping on.”