Refinery Town Read online

  Previous titles by Steve Early

  Embedded with Organized Labor:

  Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home

  The Civil Wars in US Labor: Birth of a

  New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old?

  Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress

  To Dorothy D. Early,

  a local news gatherer and

  “women’s page” editor

  when there still was

  such a thing

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD To Change U.S. Politics, We Need More Cities Like Richmond, California by Bernie Sanders

  INTRODUCTION From Company Town to Progressive City

  ONE A Refiner’s Fire

  TWO The Greening of City Hall

  THREE Richmond’s Community Policeman

  FOUR Tuesday Night Cage Fights

  FIVE An Election Not for Sale

  SIX Celebrating Our Differences?

  SEVEN Gentrification and Its Discontents

  EPILOGUE Making Local Progress

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  FOREWORD

  TO CHANGE U.S. POLITICS, WE NEED MORE CITIES LIKE RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA

  PRIOR TO THE 2016 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES, I made a series of out-of-state trips to discuss the economic issues facing the United States that were propelling me toward a presidential campaign. Then and later, I met with local progressive leaders, many of whom were running for mayor or city council, the state legislature, or Congress. At “town meetings” throughout the United States, we discussed how we could work together for real change in our country.

  Richmond, California, is one place I visited where such movement building was already underway. In this century-old refinery town, a determined band of municipal reformers was battling America’s second-largest oil company for control over city hall.

  Over the past decade, Chevron has made more than $200 billion in profits, ripping off Americans at the gas pump, even as it has paid hundreds of millions in fines for violating health and safety laws and polluting our air and water. In 2014, the $3 million it spent against progressive candidates in Richmond provides a vivid example of how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has totally corrupted the electoral process in the United States.

  Corporations and wealthy individuals, like the Koch brothers, are free to spend unlimited amounts of money on local, state, and federal elections. The biggest financial players in our 2016 election cycle were the billionaire- and millionaire-funded super PACs unleashed by Citizens United. Fewer than four hundred families have contributed the majority of all the money raised by candidates and super PACs combined. According to media reports, a single family spent more than either the Democratic or Republican Parties.

  Candidates favored by big business no longer have to pass the hat among thousands of individual donors. Nor must they rely on the proceeds of such fund-raising to pay basic campaign expenses. Instead, the “independent expenditures” made by a handful of wealthy individuals will cover these costs for them. In a city the size of Richmond, a single corporate check signer will pick up the tab on behalf of Big Oil, Big Soda, Big Banks, or whatever other corporate interest is threatened.

  The price our country pays for this trend is that super PAC–backed candidates are clearly unaccountable to the rest of us. In office, these politicians will, in bipartisan fashion, shower the wealthy with more tax breaks while cutting programs that help working families. As former president Jimmy Carter points out, this system of “unlimited political bribery” represents “a complete subversion of our political system.”

  Fortunately, as Richmond writer and longtime labor activist Steve Early reveals in this book, there are local success stories in the fight to keep corporate giants like Chevron from just buying elections. The inspiring electoral victories in Richmond would not have been possible without the prior development of a multi-issue, multi-racial progressive organization. Our country obviously needs a great deal of change at the state and federal levels. But laying a solid local foundation, like activists in Richmond have done, is an important first step toward overcoming working-class alienation from politics and resulting low voter-turnout rates.

  Refinery Town is based on one city’s experience, but it reflects the lessons of grassroots organizing elsewhere, including in Vermont. After my four terms as mayor of Burlington, our collective city hall achievements provided a platform for statewide movement building in the decades since. Progressives now have far greater representation in our state legislature than in any other in America. Wherever we have more elected officials responsive to the people, that encourages wider citizen participation and helps thwart our national drift toward oligarchy, a government owned and controlled by a handful of extremely wealthy families.

  We need to start engaging at the local and state levels in an unprecedented way. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers helped make history in our 2016 presidential campaign with their phone calling, door knocking, personal donations, and rally participation. Today, many remain deeply concerned about the future of our nation and their own communities.

  That’s why many are now going to run for school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures, and governorships. State and local governments make enormously important decisions. Without an ongoing political revolution, conservative politicians and corporations like Chevron will continue to wield undue influence in Richmond and in Washington.

  Since June 2016, thousands of progressives have gone to our website—berniesanders.com/win—to learn how they can become candidates themselves or support others running for office. My supporters have launched a new organization, called Our Revolution, to help transform American politics and make our political and economic systems responsive to the needs of working families. Based on the energy and enthusiasm generated in 2016, I have no doubt that this new organization will help win significant numbers of local and state elections, if many more people become involved.

  We know that taking over city hall in Richmond or any other city won’t, by itself, keep big money out of politics. It can’t stop climate change, eliminate economic injustice and racism, or stop law enforcement abuses. Addressing those problems requires broader movement building, national and global in scale. But local progress is still possible wherever we have government that represents all of us, not just the 1 percent. This timely book offers ideas and inspiration for making change where it counts the most—among friends, neighbors, and fellow community members.

  —Senator Bernie Sanders

  INTRODUCTION

  FROM COMPANY TOWN TO PROGRESSIVE CITY

  ON THE EVENING OF NOVEMBER 4, 2014, there wasn’t much for liberals and progressives to celebrate anywhere in the United States. Federal election turnout reached its lowest level in seventy years. When the results of midterm congressional races were tallied, Democrats lost the US Senate. Republicans added to their already substantial majority in the House of Representatives. At the state level, Democratic and Republican governors hostile to workers’ rights and strong unions were reelected for another four years. Whether the issue was income inequality, Wall Street greed, workers’ rights, mistreatment of immigrants, misbehavior by police officers, campaign finance reform, or the future of the planet, the outlook was bleak—at the federal level and in many states.

  I had made a well-timed move to Richmond, California, three years before this election debacle. When the polls closed there in 2014, labor and community activists, environmental justice campaigners, police reformers, gay rights advocates, anti-foreclosure fighters, and defenders of the foreign-born were all partying like they lived in another country. In reality they were just fortunate to reside in a city where more than
a decade of local organizing made it possible to defeat candidates funded by one of the richest corporations in the world.

  Refinery Town is a work of narrative journalism about the emergence and success of Richmond’s municipal reform movement. It examines one city’s efforts to confront local manifestations of serious national and global problems. Within these pages is the story of how a largely nonwhite, working-class community of 110,000 spawned a vibrant culture of resistance to corporate power and its many toxic externalities, after more than a century of political dominance by Big Oil and other business interests. As Richmond has transformed itself into a much-applauded progressive city, it has even upstaged such longtime venues for Left Coast activism as Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.

  Unlike its better-known Bay Area neighbors, Richmond was once a prototypical company town. The city was run by public officials installed by global energy giant Chevron, local developers, or their building trades and public safety union allies. Richmond’s landscape was marked and its air fouled by one of the largest refineries in California. On its way to political metamorphosis, the city experienced the full range of late-twentieth-century urban woes. Deindustrialization, joblessness and poverty, substandard schools and housing, drug trafficking, street crime, and gang violence all contributed to one of the highest homicide rates per capita in the country. Cronyism and corruption in city hall led to financial mismanagement and near bankruptcy; big cuts in jobs and services resulted. Relations between police and the community deteriorated due to officer-involved shootings, beatings, and checkpoints set up to detain immigrant drivers without documentation, in a city now 40 percent Latino.

  Fortunately Richmond’s changing demographics produced a new generation of progressive elected officials who were committed to democratizing and revitalizing the city. Over the course of a decade they changed municipal politics and steadily improved city hall administration. Today Richmond activists populate an array of city commissions, departments, and programs dealing with public safety, city planning, job creation, shoreline preservation, urban agriculture, parks and recreation, and the arts. Richmond has undertaken a series of creative municipal initiatives, many of which are now being embraced elsewhere.

  In November 2014, the city council got a bigger left-liberal majority, despite $3.5 million in corporate spending against candidates seeking further progress in Richmond. As recounted in this book, a group known as the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) helped engineer that victory and played a catalytic role throughout Mayor Gayle McLaughlin’s eight years in city hall. The RPA is simultaneously an electoral formation, a membership organization, a coalition of community groups, and a key coordinator of grassroots education and citizen mobilization around multiple issues. Unusual in the fractious and marginalized US left, the group unites liberal Democrats, socialists, independents, and third-party voters affiliated with the California Greens or Peace and Freedom Party.

  RPA candidates have distinguished themselves locally by their refusal to accept business donations, while welcoming the support of progressive unions. The Alliance relies on membership dues, door-to-door canvassing to expand its grassroots base, and, in election years, small individual donors and modest public matching funds for its city council and mayoral candidates. RPA work with labor and community allies has created strong synergy between activist city hall leadership and grassroots organizing. In a fashion worthy of emulation elsewhere, the group has become an effective local counterweight to the previously untrammeled exercise of corporate power.

  Under McLaughlin’s leadership, Richmond was the largest city in the country with a Green mayor, and the scene of high-profile battles with Big Oil, Big Banks, and Big Soda. The city council tackled environmental hazards arising from oil refining and crude-oil rail shipment through the city. Richmond extracted higher taxes from Chevron and sued the giant oil company over damage caused by a major refinery fire in 2012. A community mobilization led by environmental justice groups and the RPA helped the city win $90 million in financial concessions from Chevron in return for approving a refinery modernization project that both critics and proponents hoped would improve safety and reduce pollution.

  Richmond residents joined coalitions fighting global warming, and cross-border alliances formed in response to Big Oil’s worldwide misbehavior. As mayor, McLaughlin traveled to Ecuador, as guest of President Rafael Correa, to forge relationships of solidarity with peasant farmers suing Chevron for environmental damage. Tom Butt, her more moderate successor, met with mayors from around the world during the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. While national leaders negotiated carbon emissions curbs, municipal officials compared notes on renewable energy projects, stricter pollution standards, and sustainable public transit. When Butt returned from Paris, he sought ways to further reduce Richmond’s reliance on Pacific Gas and Electric by promoting cleaner energy alternatives.

  Richmond also made national headlines by threatening to use the power of eminent domain to block home foreclosures. This creative but soon-thwarted effort to secure debt relief for underwater mortgage holders was an emergency response to Richmond’s high foreclosure rate. These lender decisions led to abandoned homes and neighborhood blight. Now, just several years later, as the local housing market rebounds and gentrification creeps in, low-income tenants face higher rents and possible displacement. So RPA members and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) are fighting to make Richmond the first California municipality in thirty years to regulate rents and evictions.

  Richmond voters and city council members have also raised the minimum wage and defeated a major development scheme based on casino gambling. They have opposed raids by federal immigration officials and created a municipal ID card to aid undocumented residents. They enacted a “ban the box” ordinance to ease the reentry of former prisoners into the community by curbing discrimination against job applicants with a criminal record. At a time when many cities have been wracked by violent crime and out-of-control police officers, progressive leaders in Richmond hired a visionary gay police chief, who increased public safety through real community policing.

  All of this activity is part of a larger municipal reform trend, which emerged during a period of political deadlock at the state and federal level. The revival of local progressive politics is not unrelated to the dashed hopes and lowered expectations of the Obama era. During Obama’s presidency, Congress has displayed near terminal gridlock—except when the president was engineering bipartisan victories in the form of free trade or federal budget deals opposed by his own labor, environmental, and minority community base. The track record of his successor, even if a fellow Democrat, may not differ all that much.

  • • •

  FORTUNATELY, BETTER THINGS ARE happening in the municipalities of the land. Innovative elected leaders have deployed the limited resources of local government to fight poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation at a moment when government at higher levels has failed to address such problems or made them worse. “The more local jurisdictions that tackle these issues, the more momentum there is for statewide and eventually national action,” argues one former city councilor, a proponent of paid parental leave in San Francisco.1

  This public policy creativity is now much celebrated across the political spectrum. After visiting “smaller town America” for the Atlantic, author and journalist James Fallows agreed that “strong mayors” can succeed, while presidents and legislators seem ever more pathetically hamstrung. As Fallows observed: “The more you see of national politics in this era, the worse you’re likely to feel. The more we see of small cities, the better.”2 In their Brookings Institution study, The Metropolitan Revolution, Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley confirmed that a wide range of US “cities and metros are fixing our broken politics and fragile economy.”3

  CityLab, a widely read blog by city theorist Richard Florida, now bubbles over with online “conversation and debate among the leading voices o
n urbanism . . . people who are creating the cities of the future.” In his book celebrating “rising cities,” Yale professor Benjamin Barber argues that city hall leaders, at home and abroad, are doing such a good job that our governance would be better “if mayors ruled the world.”4 According to Barber, municipal leaders from Bogota to Delhi are “responding to transnational problems more effectively than nation states mired in ideological infighting and sovereign rivalries.” Since Barber’s book appeared, one country falling into his category of “dysfunctional nations,” Spain, has spawned a new city-based formation called Podemos. Its supporters forged movement-driven coalitions that elected new female mayors and more city council members committed to direct citizen participation in Barcelona and Madrid.

  Because of their catalytic role, mayors are lionized above all, generating better press than US politicians with far higher national profiles. As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, “With polls showing that three-quarters of American voters have little confidence in Congress and two-thirds worry about the country’s direction, experts say it may be the roll-up-your-sleeves mayors, tackling issues like climate change, education and police brutality, who are in the best position to shake up the national agenda.”5 When the US Conference of Mayors gathered in San Francisco in 2015, President Obama himself applauded the hands-on, results-oriented approach of its members. “Mayors get the job done,” he told their annual meeting. “It’s not sufficient to blather on—you actually have to do something.”6

  LIE FACTORY FOES

  Doing something that encroaches on powerful private interests is unpopular with those adversely affected. So city hall progressives, whether in Richmond, Seattle, or New York City, face well-financed resistance to many of their initiatives. Mirroring national trends, direct business spending on Richmond politics—combined with far larger independent expenditures by corporate PACs—gives favored candidates a fund-raising advantage of 30 to 1 in our local “nonpartisan” races. Elsewhere in the country, the energy industry alone spent more than $721 million on advertising, lobbying, and midterm election campaigning in 2014. Defying this national trend, voters in Richmond handed Big Oil its biggest election defeat in municipal history on November 4 of that year. The Richmond story is therefore a timely and compelling case study of what it takes to overcome big money in politics in our post–Citizens United era.7