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Robert Scheer Interview: Jodie Evans- A Codepink Disrupter
Jodie Evans: A Codepink DisrupterRobert Scheer
Editor, Truthdig.com
Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests, in this case Jodie Evans, who started life in Las Vegas six decades ago or so. And as a young woman working in a hotel, got involved in a labor struggle and thus was born your social conscience, which has now, over the last years, made you prominent as a leader of Code Pink, disturbing republican conventions and Sarah Palin’s speech in ‘08, and others. And really a major force in a peace oriented, social justice oriented feminism, I think, is the best way to describe it. So I’m going to start right with the most controversial issue. What is a peace loving, social justice concerned, feminist think about Hillary Clinton?
Jodie Evans: I don’t think much of Hillary Clinton. For us at Code Pink, we’ve witnessed her being for war, being very much pivotal to what happened in Libya, what happened in Honduras, the coup. She—we always say, she hasn’t met a weapon she didn’t like. You know, as Secretary of State, your job is to be a diplomat, and we didn’t see that out of her. She seems to love war. So I’m not a big fan, and probably for more reasons than just that out of Code Pink: her connections to Wal-Mart; the Clinton Global Initiative takes a lot of money from the Saudi government; she seems to like Kissinger, another war criminal. So her friends seem to be war criminals and pretty awful friends of the United States.
Jodie Evans: They were not progressive. And—on any of the issues that Jerry cared about. I mean, Hillary Clinton was on the board of Tyson Chicken and Wal-Mart. I mean, they did not represent change; they represented the party move to the right. And on all issues that he cared about, that was a problem. And so, yeah. And also, they represented the monied interest, and money in politics was the big issue of our campaign; that if we didn’t get the money out, things would continue to go the way they’ve gone. And we saw that in the Clinton administration, undermining the legislation that kind of kept some semblance of order around Wall Street was demolished.
Jodie Evans: Correct. And not only that, I’ve reached out to a lot of the people from the campaign to see if they’ve had the same feeling I had as we went into this campaign. And I want to make it clear I’m speaking as an individual, but not as Code Pink, because Code Pink’s a 501(c)3 and we’re not taking sides. We’re, we just bring the message of, we want a president for peace, and to all of the candidates, because none of them are great at it. But on the Hillary piece, to run against them was so diabolically painful. I mean, I felt evil. I mean, I felt it; it was palpable, and in this campaign I’ve remembered it. And I’ve remembered the pain, and at some point, I just called Jerry and I said, we’re going to quit, because some of the people in the campaign wanted to go, you know, wanted to meet them at the evil. And I said, no, that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here about humanity and about life and about values, and if we get in that process, then we just become them. And so we kind of closed the campaign down before we even got to California, and I said, just want to save the money we have left, and we’ll take these issues on at the convention. Because we’d already basically, we weren’t going to make the delegates, kind of where Bernie stands right now. And I said, it’s not worth fighting out the battle, because they lie constantly; they undermine, you know, they misrepresent. And [they] just said, well, that’s, you know, that’s what campaigns are; and I’m like, no, this is the third campaign that I had been part of with Jerry, and no it hadn’t felt like that before. It really was, in our souls, abusive. And so I’ve reached out to other people in the campaign, and they remember it that way. They remember how painful it was, how hard it was to go against the lies. Which very much reminds me of what it was like to try to stop the war in the Bush administration, where everything coming out was a dismantling of truth and then a creating of something you couldn’t go up against because it’s very hard to go up against a lie. It just falls apart in your hands. And you can tell the truth, but the media spins the lie.
Jodie Evans: I don’t think much of Hillary Clinton. For us at Code Pink, we’ve witnessed her being for war, being very much pivotal to what happened in Libya, what happened in Honduras, the coup. She—we always say, she hasn’t met a weapon she didn’t like. You know, as Secretary of State, your job is to be a diplomat, and we didn’t see that out of her. She seems to love war. So I’m not a big fan, and probably for more reasons than just that out of Code Pink: her connections to Wal-Mart; the Clinton Global Initiative takes a lot of money from the Saudi government; she seems to like Kissinger, another war criminal. So her friends seem to be war criminals and pretty awful friends of the United States.
Jodie Evans: They were not progressive. And—on any of the issues that Jerry cared about. I mean, Hillary Clinton was on the board of Tyson Chicken and Wal-Mart. I mean, they did not represent change; they represented the party move to the right. And on all issues that he cared about, that was a problem. And so, yeah. And also, they represented the monied interest, and money in politics was the big issue of our campaign; that if we didn’t get the money out, things would continue to go the way they’ve gone. And we saw that in the Clinton administration, undermining the legislation that kind of kept some semblance of order around Wall Street was demolished.
Jodie Evans: Correct. And not only that, I’ve reached out to a lot of the people from the campaign to see if they’ve had the same feeling I had as we went into this campaign. And I want to make it clear I’m speaking as an individual, but not as Code Pink, because Code Pink’s a 501(c)3 and we’re not taking sides. We’re, we just bring the message of, we want a president for peace, and to all of the candidates, because none of them are great at it. But on the Hillary piece, to run against them was so diabolically painful. I mean, I felt evil. I mean, I felt it; it was palpable, and in this campaign I’ve remembered it. And I’ve remembered the pain, and at some point, I just called Jerry and I said, we’re going to quit, because some of the people in the campaign wanted to go, you know, wanted to meet them at the evil. And I said, no, that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here about humanity and about life and about values, and if we get in that process, then we just become them. And so we kind of closed the campaign down before we even got to California, and I said, just want to save the money we have left, and we’ll take these issues on at the convention. Because we’d already basically, we weren’t going to make the delegates, kind of where Bernie stands right now. And I said, it’s not worth fighting out the battle, because they lie constantly; they undermine, you know, they misrepresent. And [they] just said, well, that’s, you know, that’s what campaigns are; and I’m like, no, this is the third campaign that I had been part of with Jerry, and no it hadn’t felt like that before. It really was, in our souls, abusive. And so I’ve reached out to other people in the campaign, and they remember it that way. They remember how painful it was, how hard it was to go against the lies. Which very much reminds me of what it was like to try to stop the war in the Bush administration, where everything coming out was a dismantling of truth and then a creating of something you couldn’t go up against because it’s very hard to go up against a lie. It just falls apart in your hands. And you can tell the truth, but the media spins the lie.
Audio at the link. Fascinating interview for anyone who's been working with or following Code Pink since the Bush 2 days.
