By Jade Brooks
This election cycle, people in 38 US states will have the opportunity to cast their vote for a ticket that includes Cheri Honkala, and organizer who has been deeply involved in the US and World Social Forum process and who founded the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. We talked with Cheri during her campaign, which she has used as an opportunity to increase public awareness of the work being done through the US Social Forum and the People’s Movement Assemblies.
After
being offered the VP spot on the Green Party ticket late this summer,
Honkala deliberated (calling it the “most difficult decision I’ve
ever made in my life”). She decided to accept, citing the “many
people out there in this country who have invested in my leadership,
who have made me who I am.” Honkala feels she has “a
responsibility to a larger movement in this country, to play whatever
role I can in trying to change things because of how devastating
things are now.” During all her years of activism, Honkala admits
she’s never focused much on electoral politics, spending more
energy on resisting government and challenging power. But in
hindsight, she thinks that was a “missing piece” of the work
she’s been engaged in.
“The
majority of the people in our country, whether we like it or not,
when they think about politics they think about the electoral
process,” says Honkala. “So if...we’re really serious about
creating another kind of world than we have to be serious about
engaging in all the different processes and systems that the majority
of people in this country are engaged in and a part of. And one of
those is the electoral process.”
Honkala
wants to “educate the people in this country that there is this
growing independent political motion in this country and it doesn’t
have to be attached to money and it’s putting forward a real
platform of ideas that we can unite around.” By watching her and
Jill Stein’s campaign this year, Honkala argues that their base of
people around the country are getting an important look into
democracy--seeing how difficult it is for third party candidates to
get on a ballot, to get access to money for a campaign, and to
participate in the debates.
“A
lot of times in our social movement work we get really good at
saying, well this is what’s wrong, this is what’s wrong, this is
what’s wrong.” But both during her campaign for sheriff of
Philadelphia in early 2011 (when she ran on a platform promising to
stop evicting people from their homes) and now during her VP
campaign, she has had the opportunity to say “here’s--very
concretely--the changes we’d like to see in this country and this
is how we’re going to pay for it and this is how we’re going to
do it. No, laws don’t have to be like that. Why do they have to be
like that? Because somebody said they have to be like that?”
This
year, the Green Party’s platform reads like a laundry list of the
demands of progressive and Left forces in the US over the past twenty
years--they want a Green New Deal which will create jobs in renewable
energy with equitable worker’s rights; comprehensive public
education from kindergarten through college (thus eliminating student
debt); and an end to the War on Drugs, among many other issues (see
http://www.jillstein.org/issues
for the full platform). In contrast, Honkala hears that many people
are voting for a Democratic candidate whose beliefs they don’t
share. She explains, “people have been trying to figure out who can
have the best seat on the Titanic, instead of working together to
figure out how to get off of it.” As she and Jill have traveled
throughout the country, Honkala jokes that their stump speech is
“political therapy,” letting the people they meet know it’s
okay for them to support a candidate who is aligned with their
“values and puts out ideas about the kind of country and world that
you’d like to live in.” In her view, both the Democrats and the
Republicans represent “corporate America,” whereas in other
countries with strong social movements people can choose between many
political parties. Honkala goes on: “Unless we break with the
Democratic Party, we’re never going to free ourselves as a people.”
For
Honkala, her life work of activism (or, as she puts it, “trying to
help people secure the basic necessities of life”) has been “one
hell of a task.” In contrast to the lawyers and politicians who
typically run for public office in the United States, she has an
intimate view of the struggles poor people are facing in this country
and the injustices and inequality that are its current-day fabric.
Out of a need to connect with other poor people organizing nationally
and internationally, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union began
participating in a national coalition--the Poor People’s Economic
Human Rights Campaign--and this group eventually got a seat on the
World Social Forum, where they were able to connect the struggles of
the poor in the United States to the struggles of the poor around the
world.
“We
tried to do a lot of work in separating [the people in the United
States from the US government],” Honkala remembers of their
participation in the World Social Forum process (where, at times,
PPEHRC members had to use their rent money to afford plane tickets to
the meeting). “Our government didn’t necessarily represent the
people and the media didn’t necessarily represent the reality of
people in our country and what they were facing.” When the US
Social Forum came in Atlanta in 2007, Honkala and the PPEHRC were
concerned about the role of the poor in the process and so they
created a Poverty Tent in front of the convention center where the
USSF was held. At the next US Social Forum (in Detroit in 2010),
Honkala helped to host a People’s
Movement Assembly
and World
Court of Women
(she had previously been invited to speak at various Courts around
the world), because, she remembers, “we thought it was important to
have a space where we, primarily as women, would begin to redefine
what is right from wrong, what are our values, putting forward our
own ideology, and redefining what is good and what we want our
country and society and our world to look like.”
Honkala
sees her activist work and her V.P. nomination as strategically
connected. “The only way that things have changed anything in
history is when a social movement has been attached to the
development of some kind of independent political motion,” she
explains. “I’ve got one foot over here in social movements and
I’ve got another foot over here in building this independent
political motion. While I’m running for Vice President I’m also
making sure that the folks I’m meeting across the country [learn
about all this work], I’m introducing them to the US Social Forum,
I’m introducing them to the World Court of Women.”
Plans are already in the works to bring a World Court of Women to Philadelphia next fall--where Honkala will be participating either as the Vice President of the United States or as Cheri Honkala. Regardless of her title, she’ll be making sure to listen to how “people have suffered under the current system that we have” and working towards a process that’s about “taking back our country and about taking back our planet.”