Photo courtesy of Codepink.org
In this episode of Scheer Intelligence, Robert Scheer sits down with activist Jodie Evans to discuss her organization's efforts to move the United States away from military conflict as well as the origins of her activism.
Jodie Evans, along with several other women, started Codepink in 2002 in an effort to prevent the US invasion of Iraq through confrontations with members of government.
Evans also ran California governor Jerry Brown's presidential campaign in 1992. In their conversation, Evans tells Robert Scheer what it was like to run a campaign against Bill Clinton and the similarities she sees with Hilary Clinton's campaign today. She also discusses her ideas about feminism and reconciling them with the possibility of a female president. Finally, Evans tells Scheer how fighting for a living wage as a hotel maid in Las Vegas started her on her path to campaign manager and ultimately Codepink founder.
Adapted from KCRW.com
Read the full transcript below:
Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests, in this case Jodie Evans, who started life in Las Vegas six decades ago or so. And as a young woman working in a hotel, got involved in a labor struggle and thus was born your social conscience, which has now, over the last years, made you prominent as a leader of Code Pink, disturbing republican conventions and Sarah Palin's speech in '08, and others. And really a major force in a peace oriented, social justice oriented feminism, I think, is the best way to describe it. So I'm going to start right with the most controversial issue. What is a peace loving, social justice concerned, feminist think about Hillary Clinton?
Jodie Evans: I don't think much of Hillary Clinton. For us at Code Pink, we've witnessed her being for war, being very much pivotal to what happened in Libya, what happened in Honduras, the coup. She--we always say, she hasn't met a weapon she didn't like. You know, as Secretary of State, your job is to be a diplomat, and we didn't see that out of her. She seems to love war. So I'm not a big fan, and probably for more reasons than just that out of Code Pink: her connections to Wal-Mart; the Clinton Global Initiative takes a lot of money from the Saudi government; she seems to like Kissinger, another war criminal. So her friends seem to be war criminals and pretty awful friends of the United States.
RS: I should point out--I didn't give you a formal introduction. But you're not just some fringe idealist, though that's sort of what you've evolved to be: a serious idealist. But you've been around practical politics. You were a member of Jerry Brown's cabinet at one point; you were the chair or director of his presidential campaign in 1992. And I think when I first met you, I thought of you as a kind of establishment-type person. I was working for the LA Times; my wife was the bureau chief in Sacramento, Narda Zacchino. And we saw you with Jerry, and Jerry was a work in progress then. I'm very impressed with what Jerry is doing now as governor, in the main part; I think the second coming of Jerry is very exciting, and my wife has actually written a book about California coming out this summer in which Jerry looks pretty good. But back then, Jerry was also a politician, but he did make one statement; he was, when you were running that campaign, he was running against Bill Clinton in the democratic primary. And Jerry hit directly an argument that's going to be advanced a lot in this election if it's Hillary versus Trump. And that is, he said, "It's not a question of the lesser of two evils; it's the evil of two lessers." And I've been quoting that a lot; I don't know if you, do you remember him saying that?
JE: Of course. I ran that campaign. [Laughs]
RS: And first of all, where did that statement come from, do you remember?
JE: Well, Jerry is awesome with words. So that came straight out of Jerry. And you have to remember that Jerry's campaign in '74 came out of the McGovern campaign; he was the chair of McGovern California, and that's how we met in '72. And it really was this chance for new ideas. And being part of that administration for eight years, we broke through all the rules. So when you call him a politician, then, I think he wasn't a politician yet; I think that what he was able to achieve in those eight years was because he wasn't a politician, because he was an idealist, because he didn't, wasn't limited by 'things don't happen that way.' Matter of fact, we broke so many rules and people were so mad at us, but to move into a Reagan state capital and just turn it upside down was huge. And bringing all kinds of people who'd never been into government into power; by the time he left, there were, he had more than fifty percent women on his cabinet, more than 50 percent appointments that were representative of the state of California. It was huge. And you know, just what the cabinet was able to do. And then to create a campaign that only took a hundred dollars and no PAC money, because the issue of the campaign was, if you don't take money out of politics, none of the other issues matter. Back in '92. And really witnessing, I think, through that campaign how the Democratic Party establishment gets in the way of real change, and actually, you know, continues to support the status quo, was the place where he really recognized and was able to make a statement like that.
RS: For those who don't live in California here, man was governor for two terms; his father had been governor for two terms. And here he was, and has now come back for a second go-around; he's in his second two-term stint. And he's far more progressive, he's far bolder--I see you frowning--but that's the way I look at it, on certain particular issues. And also other people in the state Democratic Party leadership, Kamala Harris and others. Much more frontal in challenging the banks; certainly in embracing the Latino community, extending to the undocumented community. There's a whole range of issues--
JE: Yeah, but I mean, he was that way in the beginning. I mean, I think we forget how far backwards we've come and how great he looks now, but I think those are--I mean, Jerry was in Latin America a lot before he became governor. He's very connected to Latin America, really understands the immigration issues from, you know, back then. Don't forget, he made marijuana legal, basically, for the eight years of his governorship. We forget that, that it was a traffic ticket.
RS: Yeah.
JE: I think it's a really good way to look at how far backwards, or how far right we've come as a country, and how Jerry's just back to being Jerry.
RS: OK, but I don't want to get this to be just a celebration, or a celebration of Jerry Brown, because he's not so great--certainly not great on fracking, from my point of view--
JE: No, that's a big fight we have.
RS: --and he hasn't been great on prisons, and it really took some battles with people on Pelican Bay and others to confront him on that. One of them [laughs] happens to be an ex-wife of mine, Anne Weills, who's been one of the lawyers leading that fight on the solitary confinement in Pelican Bay and so forth. So Jerry is not always great. But what he's been great at is in California establishing a model of the Democratic Party opposite to the Texas model of the Republican Party, you know, where you can reach out to the vulnerable; you can be supportive; it can be progressive. And I was just thinking, in terms of the Clintons and their triangulation, their constant urge to the center, Jerry now does seem like a progressive figure. You're saying that that's the way he was the first time around. So let's, that's a good place to start with. Let's talk about that, when he ran against Bill Clinton. What was his complaint about the Clintons, Bill Clinton then, but now Hillary Clinton? What was his critique?
JE: They were not progressive. And--on any of the issues that Jerry cared about. I mean, Hillary Clinton was on the board of Tyson Chicken and Wal-Mart. I mean, they did not represent change; they represented the party move to the right. And on all issues that he cared about, that was a problem. And so, yeah. And also, they represented the monied interest, and money in politics was the big issue of our campaign; that if we didn't get the money out, things would continue to go the way they've gone. And we saw that in the Clinton administration, undermining the legislation that kind of kept some semblance of order around Wall Street was demolished.
RS: I'm talking to Jodie Evans, who was the chair of the Jerry Brown campaign where he ran against Bill Clinton back in '92. And it's interesting, you folks knew it then, that Clinton represented a, what, a somewhat right-of-center figure.
JE: Correct. And not only that, I've reached out to a lot of the people from the campaign to see if they've had the same feeling I had as we went into this campaign. And I want to make it clear I'm speaking as an individual, but not as Code Pink, because Code Pink's a 501(c)3 and we're not taking sides. We're, we just bring the message of, we want a president for peace, and to all of the candidates, because none of them are great at it. But on the Hillary piece, to run against them was so diabolically painful. I mean, I felt evil. I mean, I felt it; it was palpable, and in this campaign I've remembered it. And I've remembered the pain, and at some point, I just called Jerry and I said, we're going to quit, because some of the people in the campaign wanted to go, you know, wanted to meet them at the evil. And I said, no, that's not what we're here for. We're here about humanity and about life and about values, and if we get in that process, then we just become them. And so we kind of closed the campaign down before we even got to California, and I said, just want to save the money we have left, and we'll take these issues on at the convention. Because we'd already basically, we weren't going to make the delegates, kind of where Bernie stands right now. And I said, it's not worth fighting out the battle, because they lie constantly; they undermine, you know, they misrepresent. And [they] just said, well, that's, you know, that's what campaigns are; and I'm like, no, this is the third campaign that I had been part of with Jerry, and no it hadn't felt like that before. It really was, in our souls, abusive. And so I've reached out to other people in the campaign, and they remember it that way. They remember how painful it was, how hard it was to go against the lies. Which very much reminds me of what it was like to try to stop the war in the Bush administration, where everything coming out was a dismantling of truth and then a creating of something you couldn't go up against because it's very hard to go up against a lie. It just falls apart in your hands. And you can tell the truth, but the media spins the lie.
RS: Let's step back. Because this is a really important piece of history. I kind of--I covered this campaign for the Los Angeles Times; I was one of the people covering it. And I remember Jerry got a couple of really big victories, right?
JE: Yes.
RS: Which states did you guys win?
JE: Maine, Colorado, Connecticut, and we were going into New York with those victories. It was like, the surge was happening.
RS: Right, and then Bill Clinton pulled a fast one in New York. That was the Sister Souljah moment, and that was the attack on Jesse Jackson and everything.
JE: Yes, yes.
RS: Do you remember the specifics?
JE: Oh, sure. It was that Jesse Jackson was anti-Semitic, and they pulled together the whole Jewish community to go against Jerry and say he was anti-Semitic. Which was crazy. And--
RS: Right, and then there was the thing with Sister Souljah, who is a songwriter, and she's gone on to be a great novelist and a social critic. And they demonized that woman.
JE: Yeah. They demonized anyone they could. It's just, let's take them on, wrap it around Jerry's neck, and tie it, you know, tie it in a bow, and that anyone is fodder for their, basically any life is fodder for them to get ahead.
RS: I'm talking to Jodie Evans, who not only has had great experience and shown great courage and insight, but actually traveled; and you've been to Afghanistan, you've been to the Gaza strip, you've been to Iraq and done a lot of really gutsy, brave things. So tell me about Iraq and Hillary Clinton.
JE: Well, when we started Code Pink, we called Code Pink because Bush was calling Code Red, Code Orange and Code Yellow to frighten the American people into a war. So we called Code Pink and we did a vigil outside the White House every day, from the day he put the petition in for the war. While we were there, we realized we needed to go to Iraq so we could talk out of experience about what was happening there, so we went to Jordan and drove across the Iraqi border, and went to Iraq for ten days, and continued our vigil there. We came back to say, you can't bomb this country; we've already devastated it with sanctions; there's, they have nothing, we'll roll over them in three days. And the people there say, you can't bomb us into democracy; please let us free our country by ourselves. If you dismantle our country, a country where Sunni and Shia and Christian and Muslims--you know, everybody lives together, you will separate us and you will create hell on earth. We came back with that message. And we talked to the inspectors while we were there, and all the inspectors said, there are no weapons of mass destruction. We begged Hillary for a meeting; she wouldn't meet with us. So a hundred of us, dressed in pink slip--because if you fail to do your job, you get a pink slip, right? You should be fired. And so we gave people, like, awards for bravery to fight war, and then we gave them pink slips for siding with war. A hundred women dressed in pink slips; we started singing in her office so loud, so they couldn't do any work. Finally after half an hour, she says, OK, I agree to meet with you at five o'clock--to shut us up. So at five o'clock she came in, and we spent about 20 minutes telling her what we saw in Iraq. When we finished, she looked at us and she said, I don't care; I'm going to vote for the war because I have to protect the people of New York. Which was such an absurd thing to say, because she knew there was nothing, that the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11, that they had no desire to do anything to the people of New York, and that there were no weapons of mass destruction. And Nancy Pelosi herself told me that she'd seen the intel, and that they knew in Congress and the Senate that there were no weapons of mass destruction. So I took my pink slip off and threw it at her and said, this is disgusting. I mean, you're doing this politically because you want to run for president. And war is the wrong answer. Which proved out, because really why Obama was able to get ahead of Hillary's drive was because he was the anti-war candidate. Also an illusion that was later played out to be not true; the military has grown, with Obama, bigger than under Bush.
RS: The whole question--and it really is very basic to the argument for Hillary--is, there is something Margaret Thatcher-like about Hillary Clinton's position. That it favors a strong, you know, showing women can be strong, it favors--
JE: It favors the elite and American exceptionalism. Which is something that's very disturbing; it's not part of what we're, at Code Pink we're anti-imperialist, and we see the solutions need to be a global connection, that we're all connected. And that we separate ourselves as American exceptionalists--exceptional at terrorism globally, yes. But she really has an elite position. We see that with Bill's legislation; we see that with where she stands, where she takes her money; I mean, she takes her money from war manufacturers, from Wall Street, and then pretends that she's not going to be affected by that. But I think she thinks that way because she's so steeped in 'this is what the world is,' and not--and really tone deaf around seeing the bigger picture and seeing what this does to the world. And how U.S. imperialism affects people all over the globe, and that these policies have continued to create global inequality; those policies that support corporations have continued to create the climate change situation. So her, where she sits, is tone deaf to what really is needed to come to peace, to come to justice, and to create a world that isn't full of war.
RS: You know, I didn't mean to get you here for this podcast to--
JE: [Laughs]
RS: --no, really, to use you to attack Hillary Clinton. But I think for people on the progressive side of things, and I certainly put myself in there, this is going to be a tough one. Particularly if it's Hillary Clinton versus Trump. But I could see this as an issue where the lesser-evil argument is going to tear apart this whole progressive movement in the next period.
JE: I look at it a little differently. I think that right now, because of how bad everything's getting, and the scale's tipping so badly, that we're really in my lifetime at a place of 'what side of history do you stand on.' And we've gotten away for a long time about, you know, it kind of being gray. But right now it's not gray. It's very clear; we know where we are in history, that if we don't make choices about people, against the accumulation of wealth, against the violation of the planet, against all the things that we do to the people globally--not just globally, but in our own country, and the marginalizations, et cetera--if we don't take a stand against that, and a stand for the people against corporate welfare, corporate owning of our democracy which doesn't even exist because we have an oligarchy--Hillary is on the wrong side of history. That's clear. It's not murky anymore; it is very, very clear. So you get to decide, which side of history do you stand on? You know, as far as the feminist argument goes, I speak a lot in Wall Street; I've been mentoring a lot of the young women there. And when I speak at some of the groups, I say, can you raise your hand if you're a feminist? And everybody raises their hand, and then I question them: how do you be a feminist and work in Wall Street when feminism is about equality? And I think we get, I think there's some confusion around 'what is it to be a feminist' and then 'what is it to be a woman.' I--
RS: Well, this is glass ceiling feminism. It's the whole thing--
JE: Well, but it's also, do we want to be equal in a man's world, or are we creating a world of equality?
RS: What's interesting about the combination you've represented is you've been very effective. It's always put as, oh yeah, the idealists, they can take these positions but they have no impact. And you've had tremendous impact. I mean, I remember watching that republican convention where you got arrested, and I thought, my goodness; you know, here Jodie has managed to capture the stage. You were able to change the debate for a couple of hours, you know, and remind people that what they were doing was evil and that there was a moral dissent that had to be registered. I just was so proud of you that time, and I just thought, you know, this demolishes the argument, you're either effective but a sellout, or on the other hand you're principled but have no impact.
JE: Well, I mean, Bob, let's just to back to, you know, when we finished bombing, you know, shock and awe on Iraq, the U.S. electorate was like 85 percent for the war. Like, the day after, you know, because everybody's, 'Oh, God, so we have to be there.' It took us, you know, work every day in Congress, dressing up, disrupting, being in the face of--it took us until '06 to really move the country to where it was 50 percent, over 50 percent against the war. On drones--when we started our campaign against drones, 95 percent of the electorate were for drones. We've moved it down to 55 percent and we need to move it below. But our job as activists is really to wake people up to these issues they're being lied to about, and ground them in the truth and the cost, and to get them to make a decision from what's real, not the fantasy story that they're fed. So it's funny, because the idealism, the story that we're fed, is oh, this war's going to be fast and it's going to be cheap and we're going to win--that was the story we were fed while we were in the halls of Congress saying, no it's not going to be fast; no war is fast, cheap or easy. War is devastating, it opens a Pandora's box, and it could disrupt the Middle East for 30 years. So when you say idealism, we actually feel like we're showing up with, like, what's--you know, here's the cost, here's what it's going to look like, we're in the halls trying to wake people up, to break the kind of addiction to some story that is not going to come true for them.
RS: There's going to be two big issues in this election if it is Trump against Hillary, which is looks like at the moment when we're doing the interview. One is going to be this lesser-evil argument. And what you're really suggesting is the need for a grassroots corrective to evil, whether it's lesser or--
JE: Well, that's happening. We've seen it, you know, with Occupy; now we see the effects of Occupy in the Bernie campaign. And as we know, change takes time, and if you track this back, you can see it all the way back to Jerry's campaign in '92. Tim, who was one of the deputies in the campaign--
RS: You can see it back to the McGovern campaign.
JE: Yeah, right. So I think we're just, you know, it kind of got buried a little bit after the McGovern campaign, it rose again. And it's coming back--
RS: You were telling me about Tim. I'm sorry I interrupted you.
JE: Well, Tim Carpenter was a deputy in the campaign in '92.
RS: Jerry's campaign.
JE: And he, out of that, created PDA, Progressive Democrats of America, after [the] Boston Democratic Convention in 2004. And then, before he died, he was really the one that pushed Bernie to run, saying 'I was part of Jerry's campaign in '92; I can feel the energy is there for this; you'll be surprised, you know, it's ready to lift you up.' And really counseled him on the same way that Jerry was running; that it's not about you, it's about the movement. The revolution is happening. It's on fire. And enough people, that groundswell of people getting that the curtains in the Wizard of Oz are being pulled back, and people see the lie it is and the devastation it is, and that you know, their emperor has no clothes--that's been pulled back further than I have seen in a really long time. And I think that's, when you're not bought in or made comfortable by the status quo, you see the devastation of it. And I think that's what we see with young people right now.
RS: When I look at how Occupy got crushed, in New York, yes, it was a somewhat liberal republican; in every other city, it was a democrat.
JE: OK, don't use the word 'crushed.' It just found other ways to--
RS: It felt crushed that night. I was down there at four in the morning--
JE: --yeah, it felt crushed, but maybe--
RS: --and I looked at these big concrete barriers and the helicopters--it was like a war zone! Helicopters circling above, and concrete barriers being lowered, and people herded and getting arrested. You just felt the full power--
JE: Yeah, but you've got to remember that, like, what Occupy Wall Street was about was being a mirror for everyone to see what we were up against. And that was a great second moment of a mirror. But it wasn't crushed--
RS: I agree, I agree, I misspoke--
JE: --it has gone out to, like, be a huge piece of what Bernie is. And what it did was profound. To shift the political dialogue as they did, that is profound.
RS: No question, you're absolutely right.
JE: You can't buy that.
RS: You're absolutely right. But the right of the people to peacefully assemble for a redress of grievances, which was in full force with Occupy--peaceful, legal redress of grievances--was temporarily stopped in its tracks by democratic mayors in just about every city. Including our own--
JE: Well, that's the--wait, wait, wait, the CIA--
RS: --including our own, here in Los Angeles.
--no, that was, first of all, that happened in Washington. How to do it was taught from the CIA and from the FBI. Don't think that didn't come straight out of Washington.
RS: Right, it was a strategy--
JE: So it took them a while to figure out what to do, and they finally did it, but they did not crush what that represents; matter of fact, they helped it grow even more. Because then it wasn't about occupying a square; it became about occupying even a bigger space.
RS: My concern is that this--first of all, the idea that Trump, if he's going to be the candidate, is so menacing that it stops all thought and you have to rally around Hillary. The lesser-evil argument, through most of my adult life, has been compelling for most people on the progressive side. I just feel it in conversations I have with people, whether I'm in the store buying something--you know, people say, Bob, what you say is correct; I listen to you on the radio, blah blah blah, but--but--you know, Trump is there, and that's the great menace, and we have to rally around Hillary. And you know you're going to hear that, right?
JE: Sure, but I hear that about everything. I hear that about going to war with Iraq and escalating in Afghanistan, and you know, bombing the hell out of Syria. I hear that all the time, and I don't see it ever solve the problem. So I have no problem with where I stand, and I know a lot of people stand where I do. It's, how do we not live in the bifurcation that fear creates, in the either/or, and start living out of love and care and compassion, and into the world we want to create. This is an opportunity for people to stand where they stand. Let's, you know, let's let this be that opportunity. When you talk to people who say, I want to be afraid of Trump and I'm--don't think I'm not engaging with Trump. Code Pink has disrupted Trump rallies 18 times. Because we do it because to stop hate, because it drives us to war, to wake people up to what Trump is--not against Trump, but the space that we've been locked into. About, you know, a) who are these people that are reacting to Trump and what have we done to help create that, is a little bit of the lesser of two evils, instead of what are real changes and how do we serve the people.
RS: For the first time, third party options are in the air, particularly if Bernie does something like just get up on the stage at the Democratic Convention and embrace Hillary. I think there's a lot of people who have been supporting Bernie who are going to say, wait a minute, that's not, that's not right. You know, everything you said up to now means you shouldn't endorse her, whatever the party convention attitude is. What do you think, looking at these third party alternatives? Because there's nothing in our Constitution that says we're supposed to have two parties.
JE: Well, don't forget that Clinton became president because of the three parties in the '92 campaign.
RS: Ross Perot.
JE: And so that separated enough--he didn't get 50 percent of the vote. He got 40-something percent of the vote because there were three candidates. So it's not the first time this has happened. I think this time it's going to be fleshed out a lot more; I think that, you know, the powers that be use things to scare people to get their way. And so they were able to use Nader, instead of the Democratic Party's weakness, as the excuse for what happened; or Gore's walking away from a fight in the Supreme Court. And so they scapegoat in the same way the Clintons use scapegoating in their campaigns. And I think right now it's the space where we need to stand up and name the thing; not be frightened, but name what's happening, and what are the consequences of this act. Too often it's like, oh, let's just be afraid and act this way and not recognizing the consequences. Even just to say we need to grow the economy so there's more jobs--we've been growing the economy for a really long time, and what happens is more and more people fall into poverty; more people get rich. And so how do we look at this? We have a new campaign at Code Pink called Growing a Local Peace Economy, which is a way to be able to--how do we stand with this? How do we recognize that the economy that we all clamor to be a part of is the war economy? It's not just what we invest in war, which is over 50 percent of our tax dollar; but everything this economy is doing is oppressing, it's extracting from the earth, it's destroying life. And there's another economy that exists; it's what I call the local peace economy. The giving, sharing, caring, relational, resilient, thriving economy without which none of us would be alive. But we get attached to this other economy that's really taking us off a cliff. And so at the very core of it, at Code Pink, we're working to divest ourselves from this war economy, which is all of it, into how do we become relational again? How do we come back to our communities and build, you know, the arc that gets us through this flood of devastation that we've been creating as the United States globally?
RS: What this podcast series is all about is interviews with people I call 'American originals,' not that you don't have originals and great people in other cultures. But how did you get to be this way? What would you say were the key--if we wanted to pass it on, if we wanted to bottle it. And not just about you, but you know, the people you've worked with that are so incredibly independent and courageous. What is the key ingredient?
JE: I mean, I think a turning point in my life was, I was a maid making $1.87 an hour in 1970. And we organized and fought and marched and got a living wage. I mean, it meant I lost my job, because I was underage. But it meant that all these women that I'd worked with that were raising kids, single moms, on $1.87 an hour got a living wage. And my [friend] raised 11 kids on a maid's salary in Las Vegas and became head of the union, and led a six-year strike against one of the hotels and won. So I think then I was like, since I was raised working-class and saw the devastation of power both as a young person who saw abuse and the overuse of power and what that felt like. And then also working with Cesar Chavez; you know, Jerry really loved Cesar and he really wanted to get the farm labor bill through. And there was a point at when the farmers were more powerful than Cesar, and we went down to Delano and we marched back to the governor's office. And I had an office inside the governor's office, but I sat outside with Cesar and the farmworkers. And when I was sitting there, I was like, I always belong here. Because I'd seen what happened inside the governor's office, and I said, power's stupid. It just gets blinders on it; it doesn't mean to. You know, I could have compassion for what was happening, but it just gets stupid. And I always want to be outside of power, because it really is deaf. And that, you know, we need to be outside, shaking down the place where everybody just goes deaf, dumb and blind, and waking people up. Not only the people in power, but the people that are outside of power but can't figure out why they're locked in. And when I went to stand outside the White House, when Bush put forth the resolution for a preemptive strike on Iraq, I stood there because everybody was buying into the war, and I wanted to be the person outside that said, no, this is wrong, so the person kind of confused--because they thought it was wrong, but everybody was saying it was right--had a place to hold onto. And that was really Code Pink; it's like, this is wrong, we're going to stand here every day and remind people the cost of war and what's going to happen and what we're going to pay for. And even if the media doesn't want to cover us, we're going to stand out here. And we didn't stop, and we haven't stopped for 14 years. And we've continued to, you know, try to get people out of Guantanamo, to accountability on the war crimes, now drones and now Saudi Arabia--to just stand up and say, you know, what the mainstream is telling you, what the status quo says is right, isn't. And what you feel in your heart, you can continue to feel and fight for.
RS: Just say no to power. Thank you, Jodie Evans. This is Robert Scheer, another edition of Scheer Intelligence. My producers are Joshua Scheer and Rebecca Mooney. Kat Yore and Mario Diaz are our engineers at KCRW, and much thanks to USC's Annenberg School for providing facilities for this broadcast. Check out other editions of our podcast at KCRW and Facebook under Scheer Intelligence.