A Socialist Politician Wins

Summary

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Episode: "A Socialist Politician Wins"

Date: July 25, 2019
Guest: Lee Carter, Virginia House of Delegates, District 50

Overview: Episode Theme and Purpose

This episode of Economic Update centers on the economic and political realities facing working people in the United States, highlighting how entrenched inequality and corporate interests shape policy and daily life. The main feature is an in-depth interview with Lee Carter, an openly socialist legislator from Virginia, whose recent victory against a primary challenge serves as a case study for the viability and impact of openly socialist politics in America. The discussion explores Carter’s legislative experiences, challenges from both major parties, and the grassroots organizing necessary to enact meaningful change from within the system.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Stark Inequality in Education Funding

• [00:28] Wolff highlights a Harper’s Magazine statistic:
  “The difference is $2,226 per year” between what is spent on white vs. non-white students’ education in U.S. schools.
• Systemic underfunding of schools serving predominantly non-white students is presented as a root cause of persistent socioeconomic inequality.
  • “There is no justification for it.”
  • These disparities produce the very differences in income and opportunity that the U.S. claims to want to solve.

2. Profit Motive in the Food and Health Industries

• [02:55] Wolff discusses a Consumer Reports study on trends in fast food:
  • From 1986 to 2017, calories, sodium, and portion sizes in fast food have sharply risen.
    • Desserts: 392 → 572 calories (+46%)
    • Entrees: 430 → 480 calories (+12%)
    • Sides: 238 → 287 calories (+21%)
• The health rhetoric of government and industry is undermined by profit-driven product changes.
  • “Profit is what drives the definition of a fast food meal, not health.” [03:59]
  • Emergence of a two-class food system: those who can afford organic vs. the rest.

3. Worker Morality vs. Corporate Morality – Wayfair Protest

• [06:02] Wolff commends Wayfair workers protesting the sale of furniture to immigrant detention centers.
  • Workers argue for moral input over the ends of their labor:
    • “They actually want their morality to be part of the decision about what their work life amounts to.” [06:52]
• Raises the notion that workers, not just managers or owners, should decide how products of their labor are used.

4. U.S. Responsibility in Migration Crisis

• [08:03] Wolff critiques Trump Administration rhetoric about immigrant deaths.
  • Rebuts the blame placed on desperate parents, contextualizes ‘push’ factors — U.S. involvement in foreign economies, climate change, and war, driving migration.
    • “The push factor is always bigger than the pull factor…The United States has real responsibility.” [09:52]
  • Highlights the contradiction between U.S. symbolism of the “huddled masses” and current policy.

5. The 2017 Trump Tax Cut: Reality vs. Promise

• [12:08] Wolff debunks the promise that the corporate tax cut would benefit workers:
  • AT&T, the flagship corporation promoting the tax cut, eliminated 23,328 jobs afterward.
    • “The big tax cut reduced the jobs.”
  • Only 4.3% of workers saw any wage increase or one-time bonus; corporations spent far more on stock buybacks benefitting the wealthy.
    • “10% of the shareholders in America own 84% of the shares.” [13:56]

---

Interview with Lee Carter: The Experience of Being a Socialist Legislator

[15:49]

Carter's Unique Position in Virginia’s Legislature

• Carter is the only openly socialist member of the Virginia General Assembly, in a narrowly Republican-controlled chamber (51-49).
  • “Every Republican looks at a bill with Lee Carter's name at the top as an automatic no. And every Democrat...as a maybe so.” [16:51]
• Must devote energy convincing Democrats that more ambitious change is feasible, rather than merely accepting compromise.
  • Sees sporadic but meaningful progress:
    “It's a bit of a tough sell, but it happens in fits and spurts.” [17:28]

Shifting the Overton Window: From Medicaid Expansion to Single-Payer

• Carter’s advocacy for single-payer health care catalyzed movement even among opponents:
  • “At a time when the rest of the Virginia Democratic Party was talking about maybe we can expand Medicaid, I go in there and I start talking about single payer healthcare. And what do you know, the Republicans go, whoa, we should probably expand Medicaid....now there's 300,000 Virginians who have health insurance today that did not have it two years ago.” [18:07–19:03]
  • Keeps the long-term vision alive while pursuing incremental gains.

Media’s “Socialist” Framing & Coverage Challenges

• Media invariably labels Carter as “the socialist delegate”—coverage is minimal in a large DC media market.
  • “My local newspaper is the Washington Post, Virginia Section, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is not exactly a fan….” [20:08]
  • Difficult to be heard among more conventional politicians.

Modeling What’s Possible: Inspiration Beyond Virginia

• Carter’s electoral victories prove to others that running (and winning) as an open socialist is realistic:
  • “The single biggest hurdle is people that say, oh, I would love to, but it's just not possible. And so by going out there and demonstrating that, yes, it is possible to win on this message, win on this message everywhere, then that's what inspires people to step forward and do it in other places.” [21:09]
• Advocates worker-owned and operated businesses to put economic power in the hands of those affected by decisions.
  • “They're never going to outsource their own jobs to another country because it's cheaper for the investors. They're never going to disregard the environmental consequences of what they do…” [22:14]

Building a Coalition for Real Change

• Carter emphasizes coalition-building: reaching out to organized labor, women’s health advocates, environmentalists to form intersectional campaigns.
  • “A lot of those folks have had the idea, the very concept of thinking big beaten out of them for 40 or 50 years, and it's about … you can win on these things because these are things that are broadly popular.” [23:37–24:47]
• Grassroots door-to-door organizing is the key to re-engaging an alienated electorate:
  • “There’s people by the tens of millions out there who have checked out of the political process entirely because they just don’t feel like anything’s going to change. And you have to be able to deliver that to them. And you have to do it frankly, where they are, on their front doorstep.” [25:15]

Navigating the Reality of Lawmaking: Pushing Against the Status Quo

• Legislative spaces are heavily shielded from constituents’ daily realities, dominated by lobbyists and establishment thinking.
  • “There’s this anti-reality force field…our state legislatures are so far removed from the people that they’re supposed to serve.” [26:26]
  • Carter insists on bringing the perspective of working people into these environments:
    • “More jobs is not gonna solve the problem of housing affordability…You need one job that's gonna pay the bills.” [27:05]
  • Recognizes the slow nature of systemic change, but affirms its possibility:
    • “It’s slow work, it’s painfully slow work, but it’s happening.” [27:31]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Wolff on fast food industry:
  “Profit is what drives the definition of a fast food meal, not health.” [03:59]

• Wolff on workplace morality:
  “They actually want their morality to be part of the decision about what their work life amounts to.” [06:52]

• Carter on legislative obstruction:
  “Every Republican looks at a bill with Lee Carter’s name at the top as an automatic no. And every Democrat…as a maybe so.” [16:51]

• Carter on Medicaid expansion:
  "What do you know, the Republicans go, whoa, we should probably expand Medicaid...now there's 300,000 Virginians who have health insurance today that did not have it two years ago.” [19:03]

• Carter on people’s skepticism:
  “The single biggest hurdle is people that say, oh, I would love to, but it's just not possible. And so by going out there and demonstrating that, yes, it is possible to win on this message...that's what inspires people to step forward and do it in other places.” [21:09]

• Carter on coalition building:
  “It’s piecing together those groups of activists and getting them fired up that enables you to spread the word out to the massive working folks.” [25:09]

• Carter on breaking the legislative bubble:
  “There’s this anti-reality force field…our state legislatures are so far removed from the people that they’re supposed to serve.” [26:26]

---

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:28] – Racial class disparities in education funding
• [02:55] – Profit vs. health in fast food industry
• [06:02] – Wayfair worker protest and labor’s moral voice
• [08:03] – U.S. roots of the border crisis and media narrative
• [12:08] – Misleading promises and effects of 2017 tax cuts
• [15:49] – Lee Carter interview begins
• [16:51] – Navigating the legislative process as an open socialist
• [18:06] – Single-payer advocacy and impact on Medicaid
• [20:08] – Media coverage and socialist framing
• [21:09] – Modeling possibility: inspiring other socialists
• [23:37] – Coalition building, organizing, and strategies for success
• [26:26] – The remoteness of legislatures and breaking the “anti-reality force field”
• [27:31] – Slow but real progress for democratic socialism

---

Conclusion

This episode compellingly demonstrates that bold, principled challenges to the status quo—from within legislatures and at the grassroots—can yield both symbolic and substantive victories in America’s political landscape. Lee Carter’s experiences illustrate the power of persistent organizing and the importance of broad coalitions. Richard Wolff’s opening analysis reinforces the urgency of systemic economic change and worker empowerment. Ultimately, the episode offers not just critique, but palpable hope and a practical model for those seeking to effect change in their communities.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own and those of our kids. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, and and I try to bring these weekly economic updates to you as a window, different kind of window on what's happening in our economic surroundings. Every now and then I encounter a statistic that tells so much in so few words or numbers that I want to bring it to your attention. And this time I take it from Harper's magazine, the June 2019 edition. And here's a simple statistic. People have compared the average amount spent on a pupil's education per year in white schools across America as compared to non white schools, predominantly in terms of the school population. The difference is $2,226 per year. Now, if you wanted to do something about inequality between white and non white people in this society, you wouldn't possibly be able to justify such a difference. Means that young people are not starting out on an equal playing field. It means that you're systematically disenfranchising the education that might be a way forward towards something a little bit less unequal. There is no justification for it. And the number tells us a lot about why we have the different incomes, the different jobs, the different life situation of these two parts of the American population. The next economic update I want to bring to your attention comes from the Consumer Reports on Health of July 2019. And that issue of that important health newsletter is also making use of an earlier bit of research reported in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics here in the United States. The story, the research is about comparing 1986 and 2017 in terms of the quality of fast food here in the United States. What has happened to it in the last 30, 40 years? This is a period of time during which we have as a nation become, we say, more health conscious, more concerned about epidemics of obesity, more concerned about the general health of our population. So what has happened to the fast food that so many of us spend so much of our lives putting into our bodies? Well, you can guess why I brought it to your attention. The following three qualities of fast food have all gone up. Ready calories, sodium and the size of the portion. Here are the numbers for us to think about. Desserts, whether they're provided at a McDonald's or a burger King or a Pizza Hut or whatever. Desserts on average went from 392 calories per back in the 80s and early 90s, 2 in the last year, 572. It's an increase of 46% in terms of the calories. Entrees, major parts of fast food, lunches and dinners, things like burgers went from an average of 430 to an average of 480 calories, a 12% increase in calories. And finally, side dishes went from an average of 238 to 287, a 21% increase. Comparable numbers are about sodium and portions. To make this haul blunt and clear, profit is what drives the definition of a fast food meal, not health. We may talk about health, we may read about health, doctors may talk to us about health, the government may have sessions and conferences about health. But the business community controls what we actually get. And for them, profits were greater by upping the sodium, upping the calories and upping the portions. So that's what the American people get. And when you let profit govern your food industry, that's the outcome. The parallel is the creation of a two class system in food. Generally, those who can afford it buy organic at a higher price. And those who can't, the vast majority buy the food that those with money go out of their way to avoid putting into their bodies. What kind of a system works like this? Next update, I want to give a shout out. Take my hat off if I were wearing one. To the hundreds of workers at the Wayfair Furniture Company a short time ago, they had a big demonstration in downtown Boston protesting the Wayfair Furniture Company's selling of furniture to detention centers. Housing, housing. I'm being polite. Hereimmigrants at our borders in Texas and the south, the workers said they didn't want the fruit of their labor to be used in so awful and inhumane a way. They didn't want it and they weren't going to continue to produce furniture if it was going to be used for such immoral purposes. The shout out I want to stress is what an interesting idea that workers, not just bosses and managers and owners, should decide what is done with the fruits of the labor of working people. They want a say in it. They actually want their morality to be part of the decision about what their work life amounts to. Of course their bosses didn't want to, didn't like it, said they wouldn't listen. For them, apparently the morality of what you do doesn't count. Or maybe we should put it differently. They want their morality, the morality of a minority, to govern what happens, not the morality of a majority. The protest against that is a recognition by workers that they have power that they have responsibility, that they want to be in on the decisions of the workplace and not have it dictated to them by a small minority whose morality, especially in relationship to immigration, is something that the workers don't agree with and are not going to be shut up about. Remarkable initiative worthy of other people copying and thinking about. Then there was a story about the immigrants themselves so grotesque I felt I had to talk about it. An official in charge of the immigration fiasco at the border, at our southern border, was called upon by the press to respond to that remarkable photo. You know, the one you saw, too, of a father and his daughter lying dead at the edges of a river separating Mexico from Texas. They had failed to make it across, and the official in the Trump administration took time out when the press asked about this, to blame the father for the death of both of them. He shouldn't have tried to get across the river, as thousands of people have done. He shouldn't have. It's on him, the trust of his daughter. He killed her, said the Trump official. And it's because we have open borders, you see, he explained, which our good president is closing. But the difficulty the Democrats are putting in the way of closing. Closing the border means the border is open, and people like that endanger their children to get here. This is wrong on so many levels, it kind of takes your breath away. But first, let me explain. People don't become refugees simply because there's an attractive new place to live. If you believe that, you'd have a hard time explaining why the open borders of the United States didn't produce waves of immigrants 20 years ago, 10 years ago, like the ones now. What's really happening is that there are conditions pushing people to leave their countries of origin, their families of origin, their languages of origin, their communities of origin. The push factor is always bigger than the pull factor, because so much is uncertain about the new place you're going, and so much is lost from the place you're leaving. The United States has real responsibility for the climate change, for the warfare, for the economic underdevelopment of the countries being abandoned by these people. We're not pure watchers. The same corporations that make money here are making money there, and under conditions that drive large numbers of people to leave and come here. And to imagine that that father made a bizarre decision shows a level of ignorance. And again, I'm being polite. What should he have done? Tried the legal route that ends up in having your parents separated from the children, or the risk of it? Or encounters nasty vigilantes willing to do all kinds of things at and not interested in the details of your family relationship. He should take the legal road. You've made the legal road very risky, very dangerous and very uncertain, which are the very conditions from which that father and his daughter were trying to flee. Blaming the dead father and his dead daughter. A special moment in the history of of the American society celebrating a fourth of July recently and a Statue of Liberty that says we're the nation that welcomes with open arms the huddled masses yearning to be free. And then my final update for today has to do with the tax cut, the Trump tax cut of the December 2017. You may recall that Mr. Trump and the Republicans gathered the promises of major corporations about how this tax cut, if only they would get it, would lead to job creation and bonuses and wage increases for millions of Americans. Wonderful story of what was in store if only you cut the taxes on of corporations. Leading the charge was the AT&T telephone company which promised that if it got the cut in its profits taxes from 35 to 21%, which is what that tax bill gave them, it would be a windfall and wages would go up. Here's the statistics as of the latest count, keeping track of what actually happened at and T since the tax cut has eliminated 23,328 jobs. That's right, the big tax cut reduced the jobs. They forgot to mention that whether or not a tax cut affects the jobs will be shaped in part by automation, by new technology, by new situation in the market, by all the things that always determine how many people have a job. The they forgot to tell you that they wanted you to believe that if you only cut taxes a miracle will happen and we will all be better off. What percentage of workers have gotten a wage increase, a one time bonus or a wage increase based on the tax cut? 4.3% of the workers. How many? 6.8 million workers out of an American labor force of 157 million. Trivial. Corporations are getting 11 times as much in tax cuts as they are giving to workers in one time bonuses or wage increases. Corporations are spending 154 times as much on buying back their own stock, which is good for people who own shares in the stock as what they are giving to workers. And please remember the basic statistic. 10% of the shareholders in America own 84% of the shares. So when the stock market goes up, it's really good for the top 10%. We've come to the end of the first half of our show. Please stay with us for A remarkable interview coming up. Don't go away. I think you'll find it equally interesting. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Before jumping into our interview for today, I wanted to remind you please to subscribe to our YouTube channel to follow us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and finally, as always, a special thanks to our Patreon community for their support. Well, I'm very pleased today to bring back to our microphones and our cameras Lee Carter. He is the current representative representing Virginia's 50th district in the state's House of Delegates, their legislature. His district includes the city of Manassas and western Prince William County. He was inspired to run for office and. And he is a Democrat and a socialist. When he had an injury and was very badly mistreated by the worker compensation system of Virginia and decided to do something about it. He won his first race in November 2017, served in the legislature. The Democratic Party decided to primary him and regretted having made that decision when he defeated his challenger in June of 2019, so that he will go on to run for reelection in the fall of this year. Welcome back, Lee.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me. It's always good to be here.

[A]

Good. Well, the most important thing about you, politically speaking, is that you are who you are and you are what you are and that you have stayed there and now you have fended off a challenger. I think it's a testimony to what's possible in the United States today, what other people like you and me could be thinking about and thinking about realistically, not purely as an imaginary wonderful idea, but something that's practically possible. And in a way, your very presence here testifies to the fact that you've proven that that's true and you've proven it in Virginia. Enough said. All right, so let me ask you, give us the benefit of what you've learned being a legislator who's openly socialist in Virginia. So let's start by saying how has the Republican Party treated you? What comes from them as part of your daily life?

[B]

Well, you know, I am the only socialist elected to the Virginia General Assembly. The chamber I'm in has a Republican majority. It's the narrowest of Republican majorities. It's a 5149 chamber. But what I found is that my name is a party line issue. Every, every Republican looks at a bill with Lee Carter's name at the top as an automatic no. And every Democrat looks at a bill with Lee Carter's name at the top as a Maybe so. So I spend a lot of my time convincing my fellow members of the Democratic caucus, I do caucus with the Democrats, that I spend a lot of time convincing them that they can do more, we can do more to help people. We don't have to accept the things that are presented. The Republican majority, we can fight harder and we can deliver more. We can force concessions out of the Republicans for now while we're in the minority and we can make big campaign issues out of it later so that we can actually have a solid agenda going forward. It's a bit of a tough sell, but it happens in fits and spurts.

[A]

Is there an impact you can sense? I know this is a difficult question, but is there an impact you're having at least on the Democrats by your being there, by them having to deal with a socialist in their midst who doesn't have horns and who has something to say? Yeah.

[B]

Well, I've been trying to get some time in front of the full caucus to explain what it means to have a socialist in the caucus. So far, they just haven't been able to find time for that presentation. But on a day to day basis, yeah. There's a huge impact from just having someone who's willing to go and touch what's seen as the third rail and say, it's not hot, you can touch it. So things like talking about single payer healthcare. I campaigned on a platform of fighting for single payer healthcare at the state level in 2017. And I was upfront with everybody. I said, we're not gonna do this overnight. There's gonna be steps along the way. But at a time when the rest of the Virginia Democratic Party was talking about maybe we can expand Medicaid, I go in there and I start talking about single payer healthcare. And what do you know, the Republicans go, whoa, we should probably expand Medicaid. We should get that out of the way. So now there's 300,000 Virginians who have health insurance today that did not have it two years ago.

[A]

And part of that was by pushing for the single payer option.

[B]

Oh, absolutely. Which I'm still doing. Gotta keep our eyes on the prize. We can't settle for the intermediate steps. We have to say, you know, this is the end goal. The end goal is making the Commonwealth of Virginia the kind of place where everyone can live and work free from worry about how they're gonna put food on the table, how they're gonna make the rent, how they're going to pay a doctor when they need to, how they're going to put their kids through college and free from all forms of discrimination and exploitation. And we can talk about that end goal. We can talk about the grand vision and also execute on the steps along the way to get there. And I feel like that's something that's been really lost in American politics for a long time.

[A]

Yeah. And part of the way you build a trust that you are serious about the long term is being willing to fight for all the steps along the way and use them to argue why the long term goal is necessary. Okay, how about the media? How have the media that you are surrounded by dealt with you as the socialist in the Virginia legislature?

[B]

Well, that's exactly how they've dealt with me. Every single headline about me is Socialist Delegate in Virginia. But, you know, I mean, my local newspaper is the Washington Post, Virginia Section, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is not exactly a fan because you.

[A]

Oppose the headquarters there, although he probably.

[B]

Wasn'T a fan before that. It's hard fighting for any coverage in the D.C. media market when you've got a media market of six and a half million people and I represent 84,000 of them. And so there's literally dozens of other state legislators they want to talk about. There's county boards, there's the D.C. council, so it's hard to get any coverage at all.

[A]

Would you say that your experience running for office, making your socialist commitments clear to people, does that imply, can we infer that other people like you in the state of Virginia could do the same?

[B]

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. The single biggest hurdle is people that say, oh, I would love to, but it's just not possible. And so by going out there and demonstrating that, yes, it is possible to win on this message, win on this message everywhere, then that's what inspires people to step forward and do it in other places. It's also what inspires people to back people who do go out there and talk about these things. And I'm not just talking about social democratic programs like healthcare and free education. I'm talking about, you know, a transition away from our current economic structure to one that's worker owned and operated. Because, you know, when you have worker owned and operated businesses, when you have enterprises where the decisions that are made by the enterprise are made by the people affected by those decisions, there's a lot of things that are never going to happen. They're never going to outsource their own jobs to another country because it's cheaper for the investors. They're never going to disregard the environmental consequences of what they do because it's.

[A]

They have to live in it. Yeah.

[B]

It's their families that are breathing that air and drinking that water. So you can go out there and you can talk about the grand vision of the better world that is possible. And the biggest hurdle is getting people who would be your allies to believe that it's possible.

[A]

And having you win an election is a step in that direction.

[B]

It's definitely a step, but it's not the be all, end all. My job in Richmond is not to build socialism from the top down. My job is to sort of create a framework where working people can build socialist enterprises on their own at a.

[A]

Mass scale, and to get others like you to be doing that too. Helping from below, everywhere. I know enough about American politics, and many of the people watching and listening to this program do too, to know that it's a game in which usually small numbers of people build a team, build a machine, whatever word you want. To go out there and to do the work during the off season that culminates in the election. Your having won and then now you're having defeated a primary challenge is an indication that you've built such a team. Tell us about it. Because the ability to do that is part of what makes it possible to believe in doing it elsewhere.

[B]

Yeah. The fundamental thing is building that coalition of folks who would be allies and convincing them that it's possible to get everything that they're fighting for. It's talking to organized labor and saying, hey, you know, we can not only have unionized workplaces, we can have union owned workplaces. It's talking to women's healthcare groups and saying, you know, it's not only is it possible to fight against the rights attacks on abortion rights, it's possible to expand them, to codify them into law and, you know, make sure that they are protected in case the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. It's talking about. It's talking to environmentalists and saying, not only can we fight against this one pipeline that you're actively fighting against, we can transition away from the fossil fuel economy entirely. And a lot of those folks have had the idea, the very concept of thinking big beaten out of them for 40 or 50 years, and it's about going out there and putting in the groundwork to demonstrate that, oh, you can win on these things because these are things that are broadly popular.

[A]

Right. I just want to pull out of you a bit. You can assemble a team of people, the kind of people who go door to door who will be the link between these ideas and these programs and the individual mother, father, cousin, uncle, in the house or in the workplace that your team reaches.

[B]

Oh yeah.

[A]

Having that core of people seems crucial, particularly in American politics. Yeah.

[B]

And it's piecing together those groups of activists and getting them fired up that enables you to spread the word out to the massive working folks. Because if you look at the 2016 presidential election, if none of the above was a candidate, he would have won 44 states. So there's overwhelming. There's people by the tens of millions out there who have checked out of the political process entirely because they just don't feel like anything's gonna change. And you have to be able to deliver that to them. And you have to do it frankly, where they are, on their front doorstep.

[A]

And the irony is, having had politics defined in this country as Republican or Democrat and having everyone learn slowly the lesson that there's not that big a difference. There is a difference, but not that big one. For you to come along as a socialist in a way immediately broadcast, yup, this is different. And maybe people will listen because that's different. They know that there's something special about that because it's outside the norm. Isn't the state legislature in America changing? You're trying to change it. Is it changing?

[B]

It's not going to change on its own. I mean, these are, you know, there's around Capitol Square in Richmond and I assume in the other 49 states there's this anti reality force field. You know, corporate lobbyists go in and bad decisions come out because, you know, our state legislatures are so far removed from the people that they're supposed to serve. And so, you know, we need people going in there and talking about the issues that working folks face and saying, hey, you know, more jobs is not gonna solve the problem of housing affordability. Because the problem of housing affordability is you're trying to cram too many jobs into an area. So you've got people with two and three jobs that can't make rent. A fourth one's not gonna help. They need one job that's gonna pay the bills. It's things like that. And by talking about those things in a forceful way and not accepting the conventional framework of these discussions, you're really able to break out of that sort of anti reality bubble. It's slow work, it's painfully slow work, but it's happening.

[A]

Yes. And you're proof that it's doable, it's sustainable, and you can win against even the efforts to undo it. Having shown what's possible, I wish we had more time. As always, Lee, but we will bring you back so that you keep giving us a report of how this is working.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

And to all of you, I hope you will take the kind of inspiration that I do from what Lee has accomplished and what he is accomplishing and the model it presents to all of you around the country, thinking about what's happening in this country, the need for change, and seeing that change is genuinely possible. Thanks again for watching and listening, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week.