Interview with Keith Ellison 
Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2010
Interview with Keith Ellison
In late November, Tikkun interviewed Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minnesota, vice chair of the Progressive Caucus of the House of Representatives, and sponsor of the Global Marshall Plan in coordination with the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP). Read on to hear his thoughts on President Obama, health care reform, the war in Afghanistan, Blue Dog Democrats, and the Goldstone report.
Michael Lerner: What is your assessment of what the progressive caucus has accomplished in the past year under the presidency of someone who was perceived as a progressive president?
Keith Ellison: I think the progressive caucus can claim credit for maintaining the importance of the public option in the health care bill passed by the House. Without the caucus demanding that there be a public option, I am certain that there are at least three or four times in the past six months when it would have been jettisoned. Now it is not as robust as we would like. But it is there, and it is something to build on. The caucus is also adding clarity to the right position on Afghanistan. It understands that the president is being pulled from multiple sides and that if we want the president to be able to live out his progressive instincts, then we will have to be a force for progressive social change and not simply assume that he is going to take care of everything.
ML: I know the media doesn't necessarily give us any accurate perspective on what is going on in Washington, but from the outside it appears that the Blue Dog Democrats have been far more effective, because they have threatened not to go along with any part of the president's program, unless he compromises with them. It appears as though the progressive caucus and more generally the liberals in congress have given up many of the central parts of their programs for fear that they would be blamed for destroying the possibility of anything getting through. As a result of that dynamic, the Blue Dogs appear to have had a great deal more impact in shaping legislation than the progressives.
KE: I don't think that is an accurate way to look at it. When you look at what the progressives have achieved, well, we have a public option in the health care bill, and we expect to have one all the way through. What did the Blue Dogs achieve? They tried to keep the cost of health care lower than it needed to be. They may well have weakened the bill, actually. But at the end of the day, I think we achieved our goals thus far. It is important to understand that the progressives are swimming against the interests of the health care industry. The Republicans took themselves out of the conversation. Therefore, the industry's voice is the Blue Dogs, and they have a louder megaphone than we do. But the reality is, we have still achieved our goal of maintaining a public option, and putting ample money in to address health disparities regarding people of color. We have been able to make sure that health care reforms regarding nondiscrimination—not dropping people for a pre-existing condition—are still in the bill.
The Blue Dogs, I think, have gotten a lot of help from the media, who seem to want to create sensation and controversy, but I think that the progressives have done a significant and important job moving health care along in an effective way.
ML: The perception that has come out through part of the progressive media is that the variant of the bill that would have been effective would have allowed anyone to sign up for the public option if they so chose and to give up their own private plan if they so chose. Such a public option might have attracted up to 100 million people, and that would then put tremendous economic pressure on the health industry to reduce its prices. The actual public option that has come through, some health care advocates maintain, is not likely to be available to more than two to five million people, and at that size it will be insignificant, because it will not affect the pricing for the rest of the insurance industry. So, by this argument, the bill likely to get passed will be a huge giveaway to the insurance companies since it will require tens of millions of Americans to get health insurance or face penalties, but it will not in any way demand that the insurance companies lower their prices (or prohibit them from raising their prices again and again).
KE: Well, I think that estimate of the number of people eligible for the public option is too low. I think it is significantly higher than two to five million. But I will agree that it is lower than we wanted it to be. But let me also say this. When Social Security first became law, it did not encompass the number of people it does today—the same with Medicare. What I am talking about is to shift the paradigm of health care in our country, so we can add onto and expand rights for people as time goes forward. Now, no one likes incremental politics, I certainly don't. I wish we had single-payer health care. But I do think the public option will be effective at lowering prices, increasing access, and increasing competition with private insurance. That is why [insurance companies] are fighting against it and trying to stop any public option from existing at all. And I think at the end of the day we will have a public option that will be significantly larger than five million people.
What I would say to people who are progressive in the area of health care is, "Don't be cynical, keep on fighting, keep on pushing for greater access and greater availability and eligibility, and I think we will end up there." I remind people that we all celebrate the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and we are right to do so, but we forget the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts, neither of which were good enough to bring forth real democracy in our country. But because people were not cynical and kept on fighting—and expanding and opening up rights for people—we ended up in a country where yes, we have societal racism, but we do have equality before the law. And we do have remedies when people's rights are violated. And we have a much, much more open and fair country than we did in the past, and perhaps much more open and fair than any other country in the world.
So we can't simply throw our hands up because everything is not as we would want it to be right now. I am committed to continuing the fight for greater healthcare access and healthcare reform. I look forward to the day when we'll see universal single-payer healthcare. But I understand that things sometimes go in steps and this is one of the things we just have to bear in mind.
ML: One of the arguments that I heard made by professor John Geyman, who is a professor of medicine at the University of Washington, is that there is reason to think that the country will say to itself, "We achieved what we needed to achieve and therefore we have done the health care thing and we will let the insurance companies continue to raise their prices." And if that happens, the public will be inspired by the counter-ideology of the Republicans that says, "See, each time governments get involved, you don't get very much in the way of benefits, but the prices continue to rise in part because of the intervention of government." So that the net outcome of this will be a reduction in trust in government rather than an increase in trust in government.
KE: The only way that argument holds is if people like the professor you cited—and all the rest of us—just cave in. As long as we continue to fight for fairness and justice in health care, then we won't fall victim to that. Look, what's more persuasive than an increase in your premium every month to tell you that you need a different way forward in terms of health care? What is more persuasive than your paycheck dwindling because of increased prices for drugs and for co-pays and everything else? I don't see this movement dwindling, I see it gaining strength. I think people now can see that within one year of electing a Democratic president we are able to make significant strides in health care. And if we keep the fight up, how much further along can we get? I think we can count on the health care insurance industry to continue to gouge people, and that alone will propel people to greater reform. So I don't agree with the professor's argument.
ML: Got it. So, now let's go to another area of concern for progressives. President Obama won the Democratic nomination in large part by contrasting himself with Hillary Clinton and her attempt to project herself as a representative of the more militarist consciousness. Yet, once elected, the president has not articulated a significant alternative to the worldview of domination. Certainly he has not embraced the themes that you and I both endorse of a path to homeland security based on generosity, of which the Global Marshall Plan is an example. And those concerns have reached new heights with the decision of the president to escalate by tens of thousands the number of troops in Afghanistan. Can you comment on what the president is doing in that regard and what strategy the progressives in congress could pursue in response?
KE: I am extremely concerned about troop escalations in Afghanistan and also very concerned about how it will impact Pakistan. I think the only real way to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan is to help promote strength in civil society and that is not a matter of guns and bombs, it is a matter of partnering with Afghan leaders and citizens to help rebuild the country after thirty years of war. That's classroom instruction, that's court rule of law, that's things that actually increase their quality of life. That's fair elections, things like that. The real concern that I have is that we view the military option as the only option, without really understanding that it actually contributes to greater instability when we try to impose stability at the barrel of a gun.
I think the proper way forward is for us to work in partnership, with the Afghans in the lead, because it is their country, and with the world community to help bolster and strengthen civil society there. Troop escalations—particularly when we have seen the Karzai government participate in mass corruption that has shrunk the confidence of the Afghan people—are a particularly dangerous thing to do. In fact, I was in Afghanistan in November and spoke with many civil society leaders who want confidence in their elections, instruction in schools. They want water, and to be able to sell pomegranates and persimmons to other people around the world as well as to other Afghans. That is what I think we need to put our energy into, and that is what will work.
ML: Yes, but then isn't the president misguided?
KE: I think the president is caught up in the momentum that was already rolling when he came into office. Unfortunately the president, who had the right position on Iraq, in order to prove that he was tough, said Afghanistan was the "right" war for us to participate in. He fell into the trap of having to support that conflict and got caught up in the momentum of it. This is an important time in his presidency for him to pull back and reflect on what will work to stabilize that country and to get foreign troops out of Afghanistan. And when I say get foreign troops out of Afghanistan I don't mean the international community abandoning Afghanistan, I actually mean quite the opposite. To the degree that Afghans want international support—and I think they do—it should be civilian support. It shouldn't be military and at the same time I am not a proponent of precipitous withdrawal, but for expansion of civil and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. So I think the president is caught up in the momentum of the Bush administration and is struggling to find his own footing in this conflict. And I think he would be well advised to listen to Karl Eikenberry, who I think has a much clearer perspective on what is going on in Afghanistan than a lot of his other advisers.
ML: So do you understand those in the progressive world who feel that Obama ran on a ticket of change rather than being "caught up in momentum," and how they now feel deeply discouraged?
KE: I advise people to not be discouraged. Let's be realistic here. The president is being pulled on at multiple angles, including by people from the military who see the solution to every problem as military. The president needs help and guidance in this situation and we should be making the calls for a progressive policy in foreign affairs and specifically in Afghanistan. We should be helping to light the way for the president and offer him an alternative he can follow instead of attacking and berating him because he is following the advice of people in his administration. Let's take responsibility for helping the president find the right answer. That means writing, that means speaking out, that means having rallies, that means making our voice heard and articulating a coherent point of view. And the whole discouraged thing, I don't buy it. Was King discouraged about civil rights because some days were tough? I hope not. Maybe he was, but he never let it get him for long. People have to keep on pushing for the right thing, which is generosity and inclusion.
ML: We at Tikkun have maintained that because Obama failed to project a vision of a clear alternative to the thought-patterns of the Right—on the issue of militarism and of subordination of economic policy to the needs of Wall Street—many people who are described as centrist who had hoped for a significant change have now lost their enthusiasm for the president and are either not going to be voting in 2010 or are going to be open to right-wing arguments in 2010 because they have seen that they were promised a significant change and they didn't get it.
KE: What I say to those people is "eight years of Bush politics and one year of Obama politics. Give me a break here, if you are getting ready to jump off ship this quickly, you really have to look back and ask yourself if you fully grasp the historic magnitude of the task in front of Obama. We have had rapacious economic policy for eight years, tax cuts for the wealthy, runaway abuse of economic policies on the middle class and poor. For the last eight years, militarism was lifted to unknown heights. And after one year, we are jumping off the boat?" And I think that the progressive community needs to take responsibility for guiding the president on these things. You can believe that the people who believe in militaristic solutions to these things are offering their alternatives to the president. The progressive community needs to do the same thing.
ML: Just to be fair to the progressive community, the president was totally free to appoint whoever he wanted to surround him, and he did not appoint any significant progressives to his inner circle, and almost none to the cabinet. So that he is getting a certain kind of advice is his choice, and this was a shock to many progressives. Then when he brings in someone like Van Jones on the periphery of the administration, and Jones gets attacked by the Right, he doesn't do a thing to stand up for Jones and lets Jones get pushed out of the administration.
KE: All fair criticisms. And I actually have to agree with your point there. Let me just be clear, I am not here arguing that Obama has not made mistakes. What I am saying is that I believe in the progressive movement and I believe in the movement that says that generosity, inclusion, peace, environmental sustainability, civil rights, and human rights are going to prevail. That is actually an article of faith for me. And I have felt that Obama is a product of that movement and not a cause of it. So in my opinion, Obama has made those mistakes in terms of appointments, and it is unfortunate. But at the same time we have to remember that we are much better situated to make progressive social change than if McCain had won, so let's take advantage of the moment we have and push the president as far as we can. And do it in a relentless way. The progressive movement made Nixon sign the EPA legislation! With Obama, what could we do? The fact is the sky's the limit, but if we take our eye off the ball and think Obama is the problem, we miss a historic opportunity. The problem is apathy, the problem is that we have not organized the majority of people and convinced them we are right about the politics of generosity. That is what I am saying. The progressive movement made an Obama presidency possible and the progressive movement needs to keep it in mind that the policies we want Obama to promote are still possible: it all depends on our level of unity, cohesion, and focus.
ML: Of course, that is why we are sponsoring a conference to support Obama to be the Obama we voted for.
KE: I love that—that is exactly what we should be doing. That's what I am trying to say. We need more conferences like that ... and I intend to participate in that NSP/Tikkun conference. And it is exactly what I mean when I say that the movement pushes Obama; Obama doesn't push the movement.
ML: How are we to understand President Obama's decision to prioritize pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the banks and not pouring anything comparable into dealing with unemployment?
KE: We are talking about a major jobs bill at this point. And the stimulus bill was focused on job creation. The problem is that in order to advance this stimulus bill he had to make some concessions to some "liberal" Republicans. That really undermined the effectiveness of the stimulus package—we ended up putting a fix for the alternative minimum tax in there. And it is also very clear that the economic tools that have the greatest cumulative effect are things like investment in infrastructure and even things like investment in food stamps, because these things feed right into the economy. But instead, these things were not placed as highly in the stimulus bill as they should have been or got cut out. So the fact is that the stimulus bill, even as expensive as it was, was not enough and was not targeted enough to stimulate the economy in order to really deal with the issue of jobs. And here we are at 10.2 percent unemployment. If you look at black men between sixteen and thirty, unemployment is above 34 percent, which is incredible.
Obama is being led by people whom he trusts but who are not looking at the well-being of the average working person but are more focused on the needs of the large interests on Wall Street. So we have to continue to push and advocate policies that are going to do something that will actually help working people. I am happy that we are about to pass a bill about a consumer protection agency (an idea by Elizabeth Warren). We passed the bill through the financial services committee of the house, so the idea is moving forward. And I expect something similar from the Senate. So there is a whole series of financial regulations moving forward now that will be in the public interest rather than in the interests of Wall Street.
Let me just say it again, this whole thing from back in September 15, 2008, really caught nearly every member of Congress by surprise. We were told on a Friday that the economy was going to crash unless we passed a bailout bill of $800 billion. It was on the house floor that Monday. It failed, if you recall. The largest drop in the Dow Industrial Average in history took place on that same day, and on the following Friday we ended up passing the bill with a few extras in it, like money for the IMF. So Obama did push this policy, but the truth is that the enormous bailout bill was passed on Bush's watch, not Obama's. And it happened so fast and the scare tactics were so intense and the ability to actually digest what was really going on in the economy was so little, that we ended up passing this enormous bailout bill. That was the reality of that scenario. Obama has been in office for the last ten months, and in that time, we have been moving legislation forward to try to correct that shift, but it is still very much in flux. I am on the financial services committee, and I think we will see real change in the financial regulatory system, but it has yet to be concluded at this point
ML: Do you have any speculation as to why Obama did not make reform a condition to pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the banks?
KE: Well, I can tell you that he wasn't the president at the time the bailout was passed. But I can tell you that ... the bill started out as a four-page bill, and it ended up as a 105-page bill with what we believed were safeguards for the public money. And still we end up with banks that received TARP funds not lending to smaller banks, and small community banks not able to receive TARP funds. Still we end up with massive bonuses for Wall Streeters who helped ruin the economy. It is a difficult set of circumstances. But what I say is we just have to dig in, get our perspective clear, and push forward in the public interest.
ML: The Congress recently passed a bill to oppose the Goldstone report that presented a prima facie case that both Israel and Hamas had engaged in human rights violations in the Operation Cast Lead war in Gaza. That happened after the Obama White House issued a statement saying that the Goldstone report was significantly flawed, even though it did not point out any flaws. You voted on the other side of that issue, and maybe you could tell us why.
KE: The reason I voted on the other side of the issue is because the Goldstone report really is a compilation of information that Goldstone acquired while talking with people in Gaza, and also there are twenty-six pages devoted to the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Hamas. It is not really a judicial document. So obviously any person could probably pick it apart and find that it was not completely accurate. But to me the issue was not whether the Goldstone report was a perfect report, the issue was did it raise issues that any free democratic society should look into? And I thought it did those things.
In my opinion, Justice Richard Goldstone is a highly qualified individual—he is a well-intentioned individual. The mere fact that someone could parse that report, all 574 pages of it, and find something that is inconsistent to argue with is really irrelevant. The real issue is, should the U.S. Congress be in the business of suppressing inquiry? Should we be in the business of even taking a look at what the possible problems could have been with Operation Cast Lead and with the rocketing of innocent civilians in southern Israel? That was my problem.
Unfortunately, the issue around Goldstone has devolved into: "Do you completely agree or disagree with Goldstone? If you completely agree, maybe you aren't a friend of Israel, and if you completely disagree, then maybe you are." And I think that is just a false choice.
In the past Israel was willing to investigate charges of human rights abuses, and doing so didn't harm Israeli society—in fact, it strengthened it. It lent greater credibility to Israel as a military power when it was willing to say that Ariel Sharon was at least indirectly responsible for the Falangist massacre of several hundred civilians in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and that the murder of those Palestinians was foreseeable. It didn't make Israel a weaker country, it made it a stronger country. It is something that the terrorists trying to destroy Israel would never do. You are not going to see any inquiries being done by Hamas, I don't think. The fact is that free democratic societies have the power to look at themselves, and they must and they should. I have enough confidence in Israel to do that, and the people who voted to suppress the Goldstone report may not agree that they lack confidence in Israeli society, but I think that they are, because they are trying to say that Israel can't withstand scrutiny, and I think that Israel can. In my opinion, it didn't make sense to try to pass a resolution suppressing the Goldstone report.
ML: Do you find that you are under special scrutiny or critique from the Jewish world, or the part of the Jewish world that believes that Israel's policies must be supported blindly regardless of their moral values, simply because any criticism of Israel is illegitimate? Do you find yourself under greater scrutiny from that section of the Jewish world because you are a Muslim?
KE: No, I don't see it that way. The Jewish community in my district in Minneapolis and I have an excellent relationship. We talk all the time. We usually agree on everything. Sometimes there are some things with certain individuals that I don't agree on, and we have a frank, open dialogue. I don't feel like I am being picked on or like a victim, or anything like that.
ML: Good. So, you are aware that the Jerusalem Post printed an article by Daniel Pipes identifying you and Tariq Ramadan as intellectual challengers to American values who are even more significant than the physical attack from terrorists. And I wonder if you have any response to that, or what you thought of that?
KE: I think that it is a paranoid and conspiratorial point of view and that it is absolutely devoid of any factual support. And that it should not be considered a serious observation.
Here is the thing: I believe in democracy. I believe conflict in society should be resolved through election. I believe in the rights of women and minorities. I believe in equality in front of the law for all people. These are not the views of an extremist. I believe in religious tolerance. I support interfaith dialogue everywhere. I support Israel. I support the Palestinian people and I support their aspiration for a state. I support Israel's aspiration to live in peace and security but side-by-side with that state. So Daniel Pipes's point of view is simply not accurate. I make no personal ad hominem attacks against Mr. Pipes—I don't know Mr. Pipes—and I am sure he has reasons for thinking what he thinks; I am not suggesting they are legitimate reasons, I am sure they are not. But I am sure he has justification for his thoughts. I wouldn't mind talking to the man one day because anybody so seriously incorrect really needs some time and attention with people who can help him develop a greater level of understanding. That is all I have to say about that.
Source Citation
Lerner, Michael. 2010. Interview with Keith Ellison. Tikkun 25(1): 11.
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