During the conference, freelance journalist Sarah Jaffe, writing for the website the Progressive, interviewed Ellison, who recently assumed responsibility for the Medicare for All legislation that was formerly under the guidance of the now-departed John Conyers. In the course of a rather friendly interview, Jaffe questioned Ellison about the Medicare legislation, racism, and income inequality. Some of Ellison’s responses were jaw-dropping.
With “economic justice” being one of the issues addressed at the summit, Jaffe mentioned to Ellison that the congressman had “made a joke about a maximum wage.” Ellison quickly interrupted Jaffe, saying:
“No, I did not make a joke about maximum wage, I made a statement about maximum wage . . . If you were to say, look, if you make more than twenty times more than the people who actually make the products and do the services of your company, then we’re going to tax you more—we’re going to tax you at all. “This idea that you can leave people in poverty as you are stacking up dead presidents like nobody’s business has got to come to an end. I mean the CEO of McDonald’s makes [$9,000] an hour and they’re fighting people getting $15 an hour . . . “Not only are they screwing over workers, they’re screwing over the environment, they’re clear-cutting forests so they can graze more cattle and we all know that like beef production is extremely abusive on the environment. They’re bad actors, you know?”
And then Ellison reiterated that he is dead serious about instituting a “maximum wage”:
“I wasn’t joking about having a maximum wage. Why shouldn’t there be a maximum wage? I remember when Ford, GM, and Chrysler came for $25 billion to rescue the American auto industry. Okay, well how much does the guy who runs Toyota make? $28 million a year. “OK stop right there. Where did you get that greedy? And how did you create a philosophy that says [it’s right] to protect your greed, so that if I say you shouldn’t be that greedy, you get to call me a name? Because they do . . . If we say your incalculable greed is not acceptable, we get called communists. Why not call them what they are, which is avaricious and greedy?”
Though Jaffe elides it from her transcript of the interview, Ellison then waxed scatological about his view of CEOs and their attitudes towards their companies and their workers, saying that CEOs treat them “like toilet tissue, you wipe yourself with it and throw it away when you don’t need it.”
Ellison, who himself has been under fire for ducking and weaving about his relationship and associations with Louis Farrakhan (which I have written about in the Wall Street Journal) also addressed the issue of race, calling President Trump the “chief racist in America”:
“And here’s the other thing—in the popular media, who is the racist? It’s always the poor ignorant white person. In 2018, March, the chief racist in America is Donald Trump, a billionaire who comes out of the chute talking about Mexicans as rapists, Muslims as terrorists, black people are all bad, tweeting stuff about black people committing crime. Why is that? “Because if you do not actively promote racism it doesn’t work as well. You have to promote it, you have to make people suspect each other, because if you don’t, it won’t take. Racism doesn’t self-perpetuate; it has to be promoted.
Ellison then suggested a new framing of the concept of race, one that seems to eschew race:
Most of us talk about racism from a very capitalistic standpoint, that racism is what working class white people do to working class black people. “What if you looked at racism another way? Racism is what the big bosses use to manipulate everybody against each other. It’s the classic pitting of the have-nots against the have-very-littles. “My view is that we’ve got to ask who benefits from all this racism, and who loses. Racism is what the big bosses use to manipulate everybody against each other. It’s the classic pitting of the have-nots against the have-very-littles.
Jaffe’s entire interview with Ellison, which runs about fourteen minutes, can be found here. It’s an enlightening window into where the vanguard of progressivism wants to lead America.
