SFist Interviews: Reverend Billy, NYC Mayoral Candidate

Miller: I learned only yesterday that we’d be speaking together, yet last week, it just so happens that I watched a documentary about you. Could that be a sign of divine providence, Rev. Billy?

Reverend Billy: Well…I think it’s convenient?! (laughter) I’m always intrigued by the…design of happenstance…when someone walks up to you and says, “I saw this person in Santa Fe who talked to this person in an airport in Denver and then we had a BBQ and we heard you preaching through the window…” (laughter) We’re all in the curious act of making a neighborhood…finding solutions to the corporatization of relationships such that we’re humanizing the air around us. It always makes me smile to feel that intimacy closing in on me.

M: Jesus went into the temple and cast out the moneychangers, but in 21st century America, it often seems (to me anyway) that the moneychangers own everything, including our government and even the temples. What is your message to folks who might feel like I do?

RB: Believe me I understand the feelings of someone who thinks that we should just give up. I understand that. I don’t call those people cynical and when I feel that way myself, I don’t call myself cynical. The only political solution to the corporatizing of our lives is to change how we live. And increasing numbers of us are changing how we live. For ten years the name of our church was, “The Church Of Stop Shopping” and now we’ve changed it to “The Church of Life After Shopping.” The fact is that lots of people are not shopping. More and more people are pulling out of consumer life or as we call it, “product life” and entering a life of their own.

M: It seems like there are networks now being formed or that have been formed recently that support people who want to make those choices that maybe were not available in the past.

RB: Absolutely! Just the first one that comes to mind, but it could be one of many examples, is the number of farms now increasing -- that’s the fastest increasing part of the food sector. Farmers’ markets are booming. The increase in the number of family farms is young family farmers returning to the land and bringing their local produce to the cities and towns in the farmers’ markets. That’s becoming a significant economy that operates outside of industrial agriculture with it’s toxins, genetic engineering and destitution for the people who are on the ground doing the work.

M: Yes, I think that to some extent this is being driven by a new awareness. In the past we were kind of told that our self-interest dictated one thing and maybe the social interest dictated something in opposition to it, but now the more we learn about genetic engineering and pesticides that are used in large scale agri-business, we see that our self interest is the social interest - there’s a convergence.

RB: I don’t think you can divide the two. When you’re persuaded that you have your little nihilistic dream life or sex life (laughs), but that serious participation in the community must be mediated by the corporations…that division is sort of a tragic updating of the puritan cleaving of play and work.

M: You are running for mayor of New York! Can you tell us about your platform?

RB: “The rise of the fabulous 500 neighborhoods” is our campaign slogan. I’m running against a man who intends to spend $100 Million dollars on his campaign and who is a millionaire who has distorted the democracy of New York City by nullifying two popular referendums in which we forcefully voted that mayors not have a third term. He’s spending at this point in excess of $300,000 a day. He’s spent $37 Million dollars at this point. The televisions are just virtually Mike Bloomberg all the time. People are getting mail from him every day. He’s an Americanized version of Vladimir Putin in his election or Mugabe, or Saddam Hussein…

M: Or Honduras.

RB: He’s a strongman, but he’s a neo-liberal, globalized strongman. Last year at the peak of the hyper-development that he and his city government supported when we had cranes falling on our heads and bulldozers coming over the top of the hill, at that point he was hell-bent on destroying the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods would be colonized by a second foreign economy - Wall Street financed - that would result in gentrification, chain stores, the death of independent shops, and a whole exodus of traditional neighbors. So, in these neighborhoods that were under attack, it was becoming impossible to raise a family, because you couldn’t sustain continuous relationships - for your children with other children, with neighbors, with the corner deli, the grandmother on the stoop, the library...You’re constantly moving, constantly threatened, constantly full of fear.

Mike Bloomberg is the chairman of a company called New York Incorporated. All his policies are of this business model. Scratch the surface a little bit, you’ll always see a way that one of his polices is trying to make money. He’s the neo-liberal ideal which is that all human activity, and in fact all natural activity on the earth, must be valued and placed on the market. Nothing is without it’s exploited value. That is a fundamentalistic marketing approach that is destructive.

Now since the downturn, the cranes and the bulldozers froze in place. We have whole neighborhoods here now where they’re just shuttered. Evictions and foreclosures for miles! Other neighborhoods are just bulldozed. Now he wants to run for mayor and he’s trying to persuade us that, because of the downturn, he’s the person best qualified to manage us out of this crisis, now I feel just the opposite. Now’s the opportunity for us as neighbors to turn to each other and start independent economies. I gave you the example of farmers’ markets, but there’s trading and bartering and people are turning their hobbies into Craigslist moneymakers and going to the storage units and finding things they forgot they had. Of course, green jobs are finding their beginnings now with weatherizing buildings, getting off the grid and finding new approaches to waste and energy and that is really happening independent of the City of New York.

People are radical now in their common sense.

M: In the last few years, the First Amendment has taken a massive beating. In fact, you were actually arrested back in 2007 for reciting the First Amendment in Time Square, yet here you are expressing your freedom of speech, expressing views that are very unpopular with Bloomberg and other powers that be. How do you get away with it and is the pendulum swinging back to some extent?

RB: Well on the one hand, Commissioner Ray Kelly and his 40,000 person standing army called the New York Police Department are as bad as ever. We’re on pace for 600,000 stop and frisks this year (siren heard in background)... Speak of the devil! (laughter) And 80% of the stop and frisks are Hispanic or African-American people and that’s a First Amendment issue, because it’s usually three or four people standing there talking and the police tell them to move along after they search them. And we have the right to peaceably gather. That’s the fourth of the five freedoms that were promised in the magic 45 words.

So, Ray Kelly…I’ll fire him my first day in office. In other ways, the independence people are showing in their creative local economies -- Locallujah! -- there’s an inherent disengagement from the larger designs of corporations and the government. And as those designs spread, up until some time last year, they were always eroding the Bill of Rights. As the government starved the parks to death by getting skimpier and skimpier on sharing the tax money with the parks, the parks were methodically turned over to the friends of the people in government in the form of development corporation authorities, business improvement districts and these quasi-governmental entities that are the bastard children of Robert Moses.

So, if you’re Hispanic or Black, especially if you’re a young male and you’re in public space, you’re still in danger of being thrown up against a wall and being told you have no rights. But generally in New York, the tide has already turned. Even if Bloomberg wins this election -- he has virtually no opponents…(laughs) he has sacrificial Democratic opponent, whereas, my campaign more closely resembles something that might have been made up by Garcia Marquez. (laughter)

We’re just trying to inspire people to imagine a future where they are disengaged from consumerism and have a local culture and a local economy over which they have more control. And that is a surreal notion to lots of folks. We’re breaking into so-called “normal” culture. Ironically, oftentimes we’re introducing people to the culture that used to exist. We’re saying that a healthy neighborhood might look like a Norman Rockwell painting! But in fact, look at those relationships, look at those ma and pa stores - that’s actually radical!

M: Today it is.

RB: Today it is! The big Wall Street guys, they just consider that a third world to colonize. They don’t like ma and pa stores -- they’re an underexploited market. So we’re saying get off the credit cards, get out of those credit schemes, disengage from the banks, start bartering, start feeling the real values of the services and things that you sell and buy. In a healthy neighborhood, you have the presence of a gift economy, there’s a lot of bidding down:

“No, that’s alright. No, you got eight bucks? That’s good, that’s fine.
You can pay me tomorrow, that’s alright.
Oh, yeah, I’ll wash that for you.
Oh sure, you have to cross the street? Just leave Sammy here, I’ll keep an eye on him.”

A healthy neighborhood is all about complexity and play and trust and buoyancy, you know that glorious improvising that happens in a neighborhood....

…Alright now, I can’t remember the question. (laughter)

M: Anything else you’d like to say to our readers - the people of San Francisco?

RB: It’s nice of you to invite me to address your congregation today. I just want to say that the First Amendment is a song we all should sing. We sang it together forty consecutive Tuesdays. Kurt Vonnegut kicked it off, then the church went down to Ground Zero and the first several weeks we were just ringed by police. But it’s so powerful that, it has a kind of magic. It makes public space free if you just say it:

(Singing)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion
Or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
Or abridging the freedom of speech
Abridging the freedom of press
The right of the people peaceably to assemble
And petition the government for redress of grievances…

Free press, free people. Free press! Free speech! Protest! Just sing it, it has a way of coming up into your body, it makes you stronger.

…I’m sorry. I’m an editing problem. I’m sorry. It’s not a conscious decision, it’s the only way I can be. (laughter) If I could just wrap it up here and maybe help edit a little bit.

M: Sure.

RB: It would seem that being the Green candidate who wants a green vision for the city, and the candidate who wants to save the neighborhood from the landlord development people, and the candidate who accepts only one kind of fundamentalism - that’s the freedom from fundamentalism - which is known as the First Amendment. It would seem that those three positions are not necessarily the same position, but they are. A healthy neighborhood has a natural freedom growing in how people play and work together when left to their own creative soul gathering. Neighborhoods that don’t have the presence of big predatory equity money -- you know the big hedge funds that were fueling the development last year. My own neighborhood -- Winter Terrace Windsor Terrace where I am right now, there’s like several miles between the Exxon-Mobile and Burger King way up on Ft. Hamilton and there’s a T-Mobil shop over near Prospect Avenue…we really survived it. Now, of course, we have a lot of foreclosures. A neighborhood that resists corporatized development somehow, is a more sustainable economy with a smaller carbon footprint per person, per day.

The green vision for the city coming from a corporate planner like Bloomberg is all about policy coming top-down, but the people on the ground are where policy should start from and the perspectives of people who have been running their lives healthfully in our neighborhoods without the intervention of the corporations…that point of view, is I feel radical in its essence.