interviews
The Compton Pledge
by Nika Soon-Shiong
November 18, 2020
This interview with Nika Soon-Shiong, Co-director of the Compton Pledge, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Nika | My name is Nika Soon-Shiong. I'm the Executive Director of The Fund for Guaranteed Income, as well as Co-director of the Compton Pledge.
frank | And what are both of those things?
The Fund for Guaranteed Income is an organization that I have been working towards for the past five years. My initial plan was to launch it after I finished my PhD on cash transfer implementation systems, but it really feels like now is an unprecedented time for more radical political visions and policies to take root.
The Compton Pledge is the fastest-launched and most robust city-led guaranteed income initiative in the United States. It is implemented by the Compton Community Development Corporation and The Fund for Guaranteed Income, in partnership with the Jain Family Institute. A Community Advisory Board is guiding the design and implementation
In what ways is the city of Compton involved?
Mayor Brown is a founding member of the Mayors for Guaranteed Income led by Stockton’s Mayor Tubbs. Mayor Brown’s leadership and commitment to healing justice is incredibly important to the Compton Pledge.
Aja Brown (Los Angeles News Group)
Our goal is to make the case for new government policies at a municipal, state, and federal level, so the city's involvement is crucial. The Pledge itself, however, is not financed by the city. It is funded philanthropically.
How do you decide who is qualified to be a recipient? How many people are you looking to include and what are you budgeting per person?
We are using a combination of public government and community-based organizations data to select 800 low-income residents to receive the cash transfers. The exact amount received by each participant will vary based on household size. Each participant will receive at least several hundred dollars, and parents with children will receive greater amounts. The frequency of distribution will also vary, but participants will be informed at the outset about the timing of their expected payments so that they can plan accordingly.
And how long does this go on for?
It's a two-year program.
800 people is a large number for a pilot program, but obviously a fraction of the city of Compton itself. How are you choosing who gets to participate?
We have an independent research team that is selecting the participants in order to have an inclusive subset of the city of Compton. So, for example, if there are x percent of formerly incarcerated people in Compton, then there would also be x percentage of the 800 that are formerly incarcerated. The reason for choosing 800 people as the sample number has to do with statistical power. We want to ensure that this is really representative of what a future city policy could and should look like.
Why Compton?
It is a city that is 30% black, and 68% Latinx. In many ways, it's the cultural capital of the world. At the same time, white flight, intentional divestment, and the looming threat of gentrification pose acute financial challenges. Unemployment rates have risen to 22% this year. There is an increasing number of Compton families relying on food pantries regularly for food. More than 23% of its 95,000 residents live below the federal poverty line. Compton is a city where racial and economic injustices intersect.
Other parts of the country or world face these systemic issues, but a motivating factor for The Fund for Guaranteed Income's first initiative being the Compton Pledge is the leadership of Mayor Brown, who has boldly linked the COVID public health crisis to the pervasive PTSD following decades of police brutality and mass incarceration of communities of color. She is standing with movements in the national rallying cry to defund the police and reinvest in communities. We are unapologetically trying new approaches to that second part of the equation: investing in communities.
What is the long-term political vision for The Fund for Guaranteed Income as it relates to the future of cash transfers in America? And do you think you ensure its success?
The long-term vision is to re-imagine social policy through a people-led process that crosses class, industry, and race. The aim is to redistribute wealth at scale and realize individuals’ inherent right to share in the nation's socially produced and inherited wealth.
We need to set a standard that organizers and people with the lived experience of harm from today's existing systems are the experts in the policymaking arena.
What will make or break this ambitious vision for society and its institutions is an ability to coordinate with national movements and organizers, academics, policymakers, and politicians. A coalition of organizations like Black Lives Matter, One Fair Wage, National Council Essie Justice Group, A New Way of Life, Brotherhood Crusade have taken the pledge.
I was talking to Andrea James, the founder of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and she said this incredible phrase that I can't get out of my mind. She said, "Whether we win, lose, or draw, it’s a win for us. It's going to change things."
The conversation of what the government owes people has really shifted. In the 60’s Nixon was talking about wealth transfers. Clinton initiated welfare reform. Now, bills to provide families with relief during the largest pandemic we have ever seen are stuck in the Senate. How do we move forward? How do you sell this idea in such a politicized climate?
What has persisted throughout welfare reforms is the power dynamics that rationalize and perpetuate a system of rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.
75% of Black Americans were excluded from Social Security when it began. There has been this continuous legal exclusion of Black people from the wealth-building apparatuses whether under the New Deal tax laws that relegate fewer resources to communities of color, or white flight and suburbanization under the name of urban renewal.
Pres. Clinton signing Social Security Independent Agency Act
We have this obsession with individualism and the myth of meritocracy. Universal access to education and health was once seen as an unsustainable dream, perhaps, and in America healthcare still might fall into that category. But now, largely, these things are seen as a right. And I think it's time to invest in guaranteed income as a right of all people. It's an investment in humanity.
How do you think politicians should be advocating for UBI? And do you think the CARES Act has made the idea more palatable?
The CARES Act has proved that when politicians believe we need to fund something, we find the money to fund it. On one hand, the CARES Act has strengthened the case for direct cash transfers. Still, it was a one-time transfer of $1,200 for adults and $500 for a child that left out millions of undocumented and formerly incarcerated people.
It exposed the frailty of the social safety net and the racial fault lines along which it cracks. I think that politicians should frame guaranteed income as a universal income floor for all residents of America, regardless of legal citizenship status, regardless of whether or not an individual has been formerly incarcerated.
As an organization, do you have any investment or interest in what people do with the capital they are given?
So much of this space has been focused on how people are spending the money. There have been lots of studies to empirically prove that people don't spend it on temptation goods and drugs and alcohol, and they don’t quit their jobs. And I think that question reifies the welfare stereotypes and racist tropes that have persisted throughout American perspectives on who is and is not deserving. For me, the real question is not how people spend the money, but how a system could justify denying people the breathing room that a guaranteed income would afford. Especially as massive amounts of public dollars fund a criminal legal system that drains government budgets and perpetuates the criminalization of poverty.
We're starting from the basis that the real question isn't: how do people spend the money, or: is this the right policy to pursue?
Our question is not if we should implement guaranteed income, but how.
How can citizens in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas participate?
How can you pledge Compton? There are a number of ways. We have a donation page on our website, since we are raising for the cash disbursements, which will go directly to the individuals. You can show us love or share your story on Instagram and Twitter. But, really, you can reach out to your elected officials and pay attention to our policy agenda. The Compton Pledge plans to be passed as a local resolution of the BREATHE Act.
Right now the model is philanthropically funded. Are you hoping to move away from the philanthropy model as this broadens?
Yes. We have a team of people looking into the long-term financing of guaranteed income for the city of Compton, and they are coming out with a report on our plans to do so. It is a cross-institutional working group and there's a bigger conversation to be had about how it can be financed at the state level at the federal level.
It's interesting. The whole idea of philanthropy as a solution — it’s a starting point but feels like that model is also inherently part of the problem you are trying to address. The idea that redistribution is left up to the interest and will of people or institutions that have a lot of capital.
I completely take your point. I think the Fund for Guaranteed Income is challenging the assumptions of philanthropy itself. Like the notion that wealthy individuals are the natural experts when it comes to designing a more equitable future. It is certainly time for more sore winners in today’s economic system. If an individual decides that they want to redistribute all of their wealth to every single low-income individual in a city, well, we want to build a platform for them to do that and a coalition that will stand behind them.
interviews
Anti-Colonial Science & The Ubiquity of Plastic
by Max Liboiron
January 9, 2019
This interview with Dr. Max Liboiron was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place December 4, 2018.
I'm Dr. Max Liboiron. I often introduce myself in Michif. So, I say, Taanishi. Max Liboiron dishinihkaashoon. Lac la biche, Treaty 6, d’oshchiin. Mtis naasyoon, niiya ni. Which means my name is Max Liboiron. I'm from Northern Alberta, treaty six territory, where I'm part of Mtis Nation, and I now live and work in Newfoundland and Labrador in Northeastern Canada.
I'm an environmental scientist and we do anti-colonial, feminist science – which means we draw a lot from the insights of the social sciences and also different traditional teachings and law, to inform our scientific practices. So that they are anti-colonial. So they are feminist. So that they do deal with questions of equity, questions of justice, questions of humility, and do work in a good way, as opposed to just an efficient way or a fact-y way.
Science, and research in general, has long played a role in colonial entitlement to land, both in proving that people deserve to be dispossessed in being the reason for research – we need to research tropical diseases so we can better settle in this tropical place, not our environment. Or, how do we patent different botanies? A lot of those legacies have stayed in science and aren't usually noticed anymore.
They used to be fairly contested, especially when science was trying to move into new places or when race was being scientized. But now people seem to have forgotten about that legacy. So our task at CLEAR, my lab, is to first of all recognize how science is already colonial, and then number two, work very hard to do the practices of science in ways that do not reproduce entitlement to land or universalism, which is actually just self portraiture of Europeans usually. The idea of mastery over nature, or that nature is a resource for use.
Courtesy of: Bojan Furst.
Every moment of science has these sort of legacies. There's lots and lots and lots of room for doing anti-colonial science and feminist science. Those are different things, but they're related in that they both find that science isn't neutral. It is deeply political.
Courtesy of: Max Liboiron. Plastics wrapped around a squid beak found in a Northern Fulmar. 2015
The presentation of your research, visually, is patient, subtle, pretty – completely different from the majority of images I see related to plastics research. Can you talk about the work you’re doing right now?
I'll start with the premise of that, which is that we, I think, look at plastic very differently than a lot of the dominant discourses. Like you said, a lot of the dominant discourse about plastic is that plastic is inherently bad, and it's a bastard child of industrialization, and it needs to be eradicated, and illegalized, and banned, and exorcized.
But also plastic is our kin, it's our relation. It's from ancestors – organic ancestors from a long time ago. And if you neglect your relations to that, then you're bad kin. Even when plastic is misbehaving, which means it's being bad kin, you can still do good kinship with bad kin. And you know this. You have an asshole uncle somewhere. He might be bad kin but you still call him on his birthday, or bail him out of jail depending on what kind of bad kin he is. The same thing is true of plastics. I spend a lot of time with plastics. I do a lot of care work for plastics. I make sure that they are cleaned properly and I look at them a long time, and when I look at them, and I look at them in aggregate, I learn things about where they've been, and how they might have got there, and what their journeys might have been like, and where they might be going, because they're going to go for a long time.
We hang out together a lot, and they have a lot to teach us. Trying to ostracize them as the only sort of relation you can get, misses a lot of teachings that they have for us and also a lot of the respect. Because they are made of the earth. They've been pulverized in various ways so that they're not very earthy anymore, but you still have to respect that.
There's a tension with that in that the research that I do is mostly ingestion studies. Animals that have eaten plastics. Mostly what we focus on are animals that people, especially in Newfoundland & Labrador, use for food, depend on for food. For cultural sustenance, for nutritional sustenance, for economic sustenance. So the contamination of that food web is a form of colonialism. It's based on the idea that land is pollutable in the first place, that it is an okay place to put wastes. And magically, not magically, it's through different power structures, those tend to accumulate in rural, Indigenous, northern communities, which are never the places that benefit from plastic production. Almost never, but pretty much never.
At the moment, we’re doing some ducks, cod, seal, some geese. We get them mostly from hunters and fishers. We have a rule in the lab, all of our samples have to be eaten because what we test is food. We don't test oceans or some abstract fish, we work on food sovereignty. That means we sample food.
Are you consuming it?
Often.
Is that difficulte after seeing what's inside of it?
No. It's delicious. In the area we're researching, we do find plastic, but we also find them in smaller numbers than we find them in other places. Up in the north, we're fluent in things like the breast milk debate. In the 90's there were these big debates where scientists found really high PCBs in breast milk, and there was this huge protracted debate as to whether or not mothers could be considered abusive for feeding their kids that breast milk. A lot of stigmatization, ostracization, really screwed up relations within science. It turns out after multiple years, scientists decided, and medical practitioners decided, that actually, it's better to feed your kids contaminated breast milk than it is to feed them formula for their entire lives.
That being said, we have some of the least contaminated food in the world at this moment. Maybe not going to stay that way, but we consistently find lower ingestion rates in say, cod or ducks, than in other places. Part of that is the water that surrounds the province that I work in comes from the Arctic. There are certainly plastics in the Arctic, and that number is increasing, but it's not like the Gulf Stream which is filthy, where a lot of people get their fish.
Courtesy of: Max Liboiron
What state is the plastic in when you find it in animals?
The vast majority of what we find are microplastics, smaller than five millimeters, that are fragmented from larger things. You can't usually tell what they're from. Most people don't eat the guts of animals, so we don't usually ingest those plastics. There are some exceptions. People here eat seal intestine, and if you eat the fish called capelin or sardines, you eat the entire animal.
The concern that we have is that we know plastics absorb oily chemicals. Like when you have your tupperware that's stained orange from your chile or your curry, that's because plastics is really good at sucking in oily chemicals. If you want to wash that orange color out, which is really hard, you would put it in hot, abrasic, acidic conditions, like a stomach.
My dogs eat plastic everyday and there's no crisis of the dog species. Most dogs eat plastic.
The albatross on Midway Island, Chris Jordan's photographs, drive me crazy because those birds did not die of plastics. In fact, albatross are one of the only marine bird species in the world that is increasing in population and range. They are the healthiest bird species literally in the world. Albatross die a lot because they're what's called an R-species. They live a really long time and have a baby every year, and the vast majority of those babies die. While those babies are dying and starving, they eat a lot of things that aren't food, including plastics. When you find an albatross that's dead with plastics in its belly, the incorrect assumption is that it died because of plastics, not because it was dying and thus ate plastics.
That’s a revelation & also cause for pause about what we’re panicking about.
I think we need to be concerned, but differently than we're currently concerned.
Right.
We're really concerned about objects that are plastics, and that is a concern. But more concerning are all the chemicals that originate in plastics and get absorbed by plastics, many of whom are built by the same industry. The petrochemical industry makes plastics, makes gas, makes plasticizers, makes fragrances, makes flame retardants. Those are the same companies. Those are the same set of products. And the plastic parts are like the vehicles or the vectors, and that's not great, especially because it assumes disposability and therefore access to land, which is a form of colonialism, to dispose of. But the health concern is really these chemicals.
Are you optimistic about the future of plastics? In our ability to innovate, or participate in change?
No, because I don't believe in end of pipe solutions. At all. And that's because I fully understand the scale of plastics. It's like trying to bail out a boat, but you haven't plugged the hole that's sinking the boat.
How about if we stop top of pipe? How about if we stop the production of disposable and ubiquitous plastics? People like GAIA, or Break Free From Plastics, which are these large coalitions that not coincidentally are global coalitions with a lot of people from the global south in them, those are the groups that are like, screw your end of pipe, because they're the end of the pipe. They're where American corporations are building their incinerators. They’re where the people are shipping their recycling to. And they're like no, these solutions clearly don't work. They just defer and shuffle the problem.
What you need to do is stop the pipe. That's what I believe in. This isn't a technological problem, this is a problem rooted in colonialism that assumes you get access to other people's land for your solutions, whether it's storing your pollution or your recycling or whatever. I'm really interested in things like China's recycling ban, which ripped a hole in the world's recycling program because the entire world's recycling programs depended on the idea that things went away, and away was China.
People are looking for other ways. They're like oh, let’s ship our recycling to other places in Southeast Asia. Oh, Vietnam. And you're like, no, no. China taught us something, folks. What it taught you was you're going to run out of aways, and your aways are going to get tired of you, and folks in Malaysia right now are fighting, fighting, fighting not to be the next away. That's colonialism. That's just waste colonialism. That's just the newest frontier in waste colonialism.
If I'm going to put my optimism somewhere and my change making somewhere, it's in that. It's in people being like no, I'm not going to be your away. Go find your own god damn away. Once we run out of that, or once we take ownership of that – when I say we, I mean industrialized nations mostly. I don't believe in most narratives of “we” because they make it sound like consumers can do something. If you live in Newfoundland, even if you live in other places, there's one fucking store. There's no such thing as consumerism or consumer choice. Reuse is already to the nines because there aren't a lot of resources. So all of the...banning straws? There are no straws.
The straw thing put me over the edge!
A lot of the common discourses make zero sense in the north. It's a handy barometer when someone's like, this is a solution! And you just sort of look around and you say no, not possible. Moving on. Really helps you scale and prioritize the types of things that might work.
What is the alternative to our dependency on mass produced plastics?
The alternatives would mostly come from industry. The number one product category for plastics is packaging. It's not more than half, but it's the largest chunk. Most of that packaging has been necessary only since the 50's. That's living memory. We could circulate goods in ways we remember from living memory differently than totally packaged in plastic. Yeah. They circulate differently. They don't circulate as far. It just means you have different distribution systems. The problem is that oil has just reinvested in plastics big time. Eight months ago they invested more money than they put in the last few years into new plastic production. So that's their call, right?
Why are they re-upping their investment?
I don't know. There was no discussion of why this, like why plastics? I do know, and I have studied historically the reason that plastics and plastic packaging in particular is so attractive to industry is because it is so cheap and it is so easy to turn a profit off of. Part of that is disposability. The fact that you don't have to be responsible for the end of life of your product. Some other country, someone else's land takes care of that for you. It's a huge cost savings compared to other things that are possible.
That's deeply upsetting.
It is. That's why any conversation about plastic, if it also doesn't talk about power, it's missed the boat. If it talks about individual agency and consumers, and it talks about empowerment but not power, it's actually missed the entire structure of plastic production and pollution.
Do you think large government policy can be effective in altering our use of plastic?
Yeah. If government stops subsidizing oil. I look for these things that are not the expected things, like China saying no. Or someone being like, no more corn. No more subsidizing corn for alternative plastic stocks, which makes plastic just like plastic. These unexpected things, because plastic is so dependent on these really extensive networks. Transportation, extraction, production, disposability.
Are more people understanding the relationship and connectedness between plastic and industry?
I don't know about more people, but I do think that key people do. Some of these international global coalitions, get it. A few key scientists get it. The Story of Stuff pretty much gets it. GAIA gets it. Teen Vogue gets it! These folks who have moved away from the end of pipeline story and the recycling story and the five small steps story, and have considered or deeply know power structures. That's increasing, a lot.
I've been working on plastic pollution since before it was cool, and the story has shifted significantly. The recycling and five small things continues to proliferate on its little treadmill, but there's now a lot more variety than there ever has before, especially as people are like holy shit, car tires. Holy shit, clothes. Holy shit. Those are things where you can’t just make a little shift because of their massive infrastructural ubiquity. People are starting to understand scale. Key people are starting to understand scale. Yeah. So that's nice.
How do you work to eliminate plastics but also acknowledge those who will likely become more disenfranchised by a rising cost of plastic, primarily medical items, that are dependent on plastics?
I work with folks who are at the periphery who aren't getting benefits. People who hunt and fish and need that food for all sorts of reasons. The thing is, if you think about anyone who needs plastic medical equipment – medical waste is different than packaging waste. I don't want a pacemaker that's not plastic. First of all, it's not possible. Second of all, I want my fucking pacemaker. But the thing is, there's ways to do that that is not about mass production, that is not about releasing and patenting and circulating chemicals that haven't been tested properly.
The problem isn't plastics. There are natural plastics. There are polymers that decay.
That's the problem. This idea that you either have to ban it all or take it all, you're like no. Those are not the only two things available. And I know this because I live in the fucking north. Concepts of ubiquity don't really work here. The all or nothing doesn't work in a lot of places, and that's obvious.
What would a local plastic economy look like? Huh. No one’s ever asked that question really. If you had to own the plastics, own the extraction of those plastics, own the chemicals that go in the plastics and the extraction of those chemicals, I bet your plastics would look a lot different. I bet you wouldn't have packaging. I bet you wouldn't have BPA. I bet you'd just move to something else half the time. And I bet you'd have plastic pacemakers.