Swanson: Well, I wonder if you could say from your own point of view what is your background that brings you to this and why you think people outside of Rhode Island might want to be paying a little attention.
Segal: I was a city councilman in Providence first elected as a Green in 2002 and then in the state legislature since 2006 as a Democrat. And if you want to talk about why I decided to make that transition from one party to another I'm happy to in more detail. But my work throughout those eight years has entailed pushing back against powerful, typically wealthy corporatist interests, against leadership within my own party when I was a Democrat, against the powers that be in Providence to try to do right by working families in Providence and Rhode Island, to try to push back against the standard fare corporatist interests that run the country and also run the state and also run the city. And work's happened on basically every issue front that a progressive might care about.
Swanson: I know a couple of areas that you've been involved with. One is proposing to cease funding out wars overseas should you be elected to Congress. I set up a list called A Coalition Against War Spending (http://www.caws.us), and you or your campaign immediately signed you on there with many other candidates. But many of them are Greens, many of them are Libertarians, and many are Democrats. What is your thinking in being willing to say you'll stop voting to fund the wars, because as you know, a great many members of Congress are willing to say they oppose the wars and they are critics of the wars but will not come within many miles of saying, "I won't fund the wars."
Segal: Right. Well, I'll start by saying I'm a vegetarian and wouldn't hurt a fly. I've been against the wars since before they began. I was, my first act on City Council in Providence was to sponsor an antiwar resolution in 2003 through the Cities for Peace program, which was obviously not a, it was going to end the war or prevent the war in its own right, but it was a necessary step between here and there. It had cities assert that the war was clearly going to have negative impacts on cities and their ability to function, fund municipal services and education, and so on. And it has, of course, had all of those effects. So my first act as a councilmember was to oppose the war in Iraq. And I represent the area around Brown and RISD and helped restart antiwar mobilization on campus which was waning during the sort of 2004, 2003-2004 era where there was this full Washington consensus that the war was OK and the war was going kind of well, even. And left activists were demoralized. We restarted a chapter here and I've helped organize and spoken at countless rallies about the war.
At the state level I've been a sponsor of the Bring the Guard Home legislation that has been pushed by Ben Mansky and Liberty Tree which asserts essentially that the mandate under which the guard was federalized has expired. The Guard was federalized in order to neutralize the threat that Saddam Hussein posed and to enforce the existent UN resolution at the time of 2003 and that all of that has been accomplished, or at least is no longer on the table, and that therefore the Guard is improperly federalized and should be brought home. And if the legislation passes it compels the Attorney General of a given state to sue the federal government on those grounds. No such bill has passed yet, but what we're trying, and I have been, as anyone in Rhode Island would know, we have a very right-wing governor, so we're not going to withstand his veto here. And I think that, you know, war is a horror for a thousand different reasons that your listeners and your readers understand through and through.
And the thing that, well the thing that is most striking to me, this is, back in 2003 when were doing opportunity cost calculations about what it would cost to spend, when we thought it was only going to be $100M, sorry $100B to fund the war in Iraq, what does that mean, what is that worth to the world? The most striking stat that I remember from back then was it would provide enough funds to pay for vaccinations relative to every disease for which humanity has developed a vaccination for every child born for the next 75 years. And instead of doing that, and it's a little bit of a false choice since it is not something our government was going to do but I think it's always imperative to talk about the opportunity costs of war, and there are opportunity costs that might more readily have been met, you know, education funding domestically, public infrastructure funding domestically, and so on. But that contrast was just so stark to me -- 75 years worth of children vaccinated relative to every disease for which humans have developed vaccinations versus going into a purposeless war in Iraq in which hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people would be killed.
Swanson: It's a stunning comparison. I want to ask you about some other topics if you have time, but I want to ask one quick follow-up on this one which is, you know, a lot of people run for Congress as opponents of war and then they get in there and the leader of their party tells them, you know, we'll give you a million dollars for television ads in your re-election campaign in two years if you do whatever we tell you, and so then what they tell the public is, "Well, I want to vote NO on this war money, but I need to wait and see what good things are packaged in there with it." And then, of course, the leadership packages lots of good things jobs and schools and civil rights in with the war money. And then the voting goes down based on permission from the leadership to, you know, "You can vote against the war as long as we're sure the war is going to pass." It's not, you know, it sounds to me like you're making a more solid commitment than that.
Segal: Yes, I am. And in Rhode Island I've tried to develop alternative structures for legislators to lean on when the leadership makes such threats. I am the lead organizer for our progressive caucus. I founded a political action committee to support members of our progressive caucus so that if funding from sources dries up at leadership's request because something was done to offend them, that we would have at least some, some degree of money to fall back on to help fund our campaigns nonetheless. We've run ten, twelve races relatively modestly in the last cycle and hopefully we'll be able to do something in the forthcoming cycle.
And I've also helped organize my colleagues to stand up to leadership relative to budgetary issues in particular, and we've stood as a bloc to prevent the de-funding of municipal services during supplemental budget a year ago. It was the progressives negotiating hard with the leadership while the bell calling us into session to come in and take the vote was ringing for two hours and compelled them to restore tens of millions of dollars, well, $25M which in Rhode Island is a big amount of money to municipal services and education funding that if not restored would have compelled progressive property tax increases and cut critical services for our constituents.
So, I'm an organizer at heart and I don't go into this naively and think that as a freshman legislator at the federal level you can just go around and wrangle all of your longer-standing colleagues and get them to do something different than they have done before. But my goal, if I get elected, is to be an organizer to help build solidarities among members and help strengthen the Progressive Caucus so that it can stand stronger up against leadership when it comes to war funding, when it comes to health care, and so on.
Swanson: Well, as you're no doubt painfully aware, it never stands at all, so that would be wonderful and, I agree, you would have a fight as a freshman, but to be there trying to organize the Progressive Caucus to take stands would be phenomenal. The other topic I definitely wanted to ask you about was something else that you've done at the state level that relates to the national and that is, in my understanding you're the only state legislator in any state who has gone in in response to this Citizen's United ruling by the US Supreme Court allowing unlimited corporate money in elections and said not just that our state should formally urge Congress to amend the Constitution, but that the State of Rhode Island should call for a Constitutional convention. And when we get to two-thirds of the states, I believe it is, calling for such a convention, then we'll hold a convention, whether Congress likes it or not. Can you tell me why you took that approach?
Segal: Sure. I've been working closely with Change Congress and Larry Lessig and other reformers on that measure. I think again that your listeners and your readers need no explanation of why it's a travesty now that corporations can expend as much as they care to to affect our elections and their outcomes, and Congress is loathe to act to change this for a variety of reasons that are probably pretty obvious and need not be spelled out. When you're dealing with a structure that is itself, whose own perpetuation is contingent upon particular structures . . . sorry, when you're dealing with an entity like Congress whose voting perpetuates itself is contingent upon these financing structures it necessarily requires an outside force to come in and say, "No. We need to change these structures, " because any organization is going to do what it can to perpetuate its own well-being and the Constitution allows for two-thirds of the states to call for a federal constitutional convention. No such convention has ever actually happened, but just the act of organizing towards one can compel Congress to do the right thing, particularly relative to the seventeenth amendment, the amendment which says that senators must be elected by the people as opposed to state legislatures was only put forth by Congress when two-thirds of the states minus one had called for a constitutional convention to address precisely that issue.
So, even if we don't get to the convention proper, the act of agitating for it is something that can compel Congress to do the right thing. And it's become evident over the course of (unintelligible) that Congress is not going to act on its own in a meaningful way to address the Citizens' United decision. I mean, they are pushing the Disclose Act right now which is, you know, somewhere between here and there, but nobody has got a sense that Congress is actually going to put forth an amendment to the several states for ratification that would fundamentally assert that in fact the First Amendment does not allow for corporations to spend as they care to in our elections. And so a constitutional convention and outside intervention is necessary.
Swanson: That being said, and I enthusiastically agree with all of it, would you be inclined to sign on to Congresswoman Donna Edward's amendment in Congress?
Segal: Oh yes, of course.
Swanson: Because there are a handful of Congress members trying against all odds.
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