Spirit in Action

People Power Against Big Money, Corrupt Politicians, & Casinos - Strategy & Soul

Daniel Hunter vs The Casinos is a case of David vs Goliath, only more impressive. Daniel co-led that battle retold in Strategy & Soul: A Campaigner's Tale of Fighting Billionaires, Corrupt Officials, and Philadelphia Casinos. Ingenious, creative, & steadfastly principled, this is a tale of inspiration and adventure, and there's an immense amount of info about community organizing that is absorbed effortlessly!

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 03 Aug 2014
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - I read a lot of books of Spirit and Action guests and there are gems and gifts embodied in each of them, but today's activist author has written a book to captivate the reader. By the end of this interview, you'll probably grow annoyed with all the praises that I have for strategy and soul, a campaigners tale of fighting billionaires, corrupt officials, and Philadelphia casinos. Leading the fight to protect Philly from a state imposed monstrosity of gaming casinos were today's guest, Daniel Hunter, and his friend and co-organizer, Jethro Heiko. The book about the experience is not a manual or a simple memoir. It's a drama and an odyssey. The work of Daniel and Jethro and the other compatriots of casino-free Philadelphia is a powerful example of the triumph of people power over greed and corruption. But first, I'll mention that support for this program comes from Eau Claire Wisconsin attorney, Katherine B. Scholz, who believes in honesty, accuracy, and world healing work, and is proud to support Nerd and Spirit Radio. She helps clients get a world healing new start to their finances by guiding them through bankruptcy when needed. Call 715-835-8904 for Katherine B. Scholz attorney. Now, let's go to the phone to talk to Philadelphia activist and strategist, Daniel Hunter. Daniel, I'm absolutely excited to have you here today for spirit in action. - Thank you so much. I'm glad to be on the program. - I wanna just say that this book is a page-turner. I saw George Lakey's comments on the back of the book saying that this was a page-turner and it's absolutely right. I have never learned so much so painlessly as when reading this book. Strategy and soul is a masterpiece. Had you ever wanted to be an author? - No, absolutely not. It didn't, that all occurred to me. I'm an activist. I mean, that really is my calling. But what I did wanna do is I am also a teacher. I wanna teach people how to do activism. And so I didn't wanna boring book. I've read, I mean, there's lots of great handbooks out there on organizing that are here's the 10 things you have to do as an organizer. But I didn't wanna do that. I wanted to bring people into the heart and soul of organizing. And so what I did was write about a campaign. There's a lot of fun. The campaign itself is interesting, but really use the campaign to talk about what is the likes of an organizer really like? What does it look like? What are the challenges that we face? And not just what's the list of 10 things that we do to have a good event. But how do we balance that with all the other challenges? - You know, I've had Saikon on my show before and talking about his organizing. He's got books out there and they're great books. I mean, they're really valuable with all their stories and the methods and everything. But your book just makes it so completely effortless to become, I think it should be a primer for everyone to read this book to get into activism. It's just, it's a model case. - Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, you know, one of the things that I love about, for example, Saikon's book is the use of vignettes and stories and I think stories are just so powerful. One of the things I've noticed is oftentimes as organizers will sort of shy away from telling some of the tough stories in our campaigns. Many of the people who I worked with in the campaign and Philly, this is the first time ever doing any kind of activism. And so we got into a lot of good fights, arguments about decentralized organizing versus more top down that they are more comfortable with. And just got into a lot of good arguments and I wanted to not sort of cover over those kind of moments but actually bring people into how did we fight and how did we resolve and how did we not exactly resolve but continue along the way and just bringing in the tension that really is in the life of organizing and not just sort of talk about the high points of organizing but also really bring you into the real deal of it. - Let me mention a couple of things about the book to get started. The cover of it has you and Jethro. I think something like superheroes. That's in plain clothes, superheroes. That picture on the front is great. Strategy and soul, a campaigners tale of fighting billionaires, corrupt officials and Philadelphia casinos. That only scratches the surface of what an adventure this is. Why did you name it strategy and soul? - When I started writing the book, one of the titles that I experimented for a while was "No More Marches, No More Rally" that came from a particular strategic insight that we picked up in our movement which was we actually made an agreement as an organization that we would not do marches or rallies. And not to say that marches or rallies are never useful but what we noticed was that my experience activists often sort of turned to the lowest common denominator action and so rather than being creative and on our edge, we go with what we've already seen before so we do another march or we do another rally or maybe we do a sit-in but the actions themselves don't really speak to the context of speak necessarily to our hearts who are sold. And so for a while, I've experimented with that and a friend of mine really challenged me about that title and said, look, that's not actually everyone's experience and it's somewhat provocative and maybe they'll speak to some people but others. And so they really pushed me to dig a little bit deeper and certainly the heart of the book is clearly about strategy is how do we organize, how do we develop campaigns that are meaningful? And so that was clearly part of it in my mind. I really got pushed by some of my friends who said, it's not just about the acts of creating strategy but you're really modeling about high ground organizing. I mean, we were outspent by about $60 million. We were up against very corrupt officials and a very corrupted judiciary and so we're just, it was one after another in terms of taking on big corporations and so on. And the temptation was to stoop at many times to lie ourselves or to engage in petty response to what was petty response from our governor and our governor called us names and insults. But we really were committed to a high ground organizing and by that I mean we refused to do that stooping. And that I think is really the heart of what is so crucial in terms of my approach to strategizing. That's what showed up in the book in terms of it's not just about strategy, it's also about our hearts, our souls and how do we do this in a way that becomes meaningful and expressions of not just here's a way to win but here's a way to win on our values. And that's what we really tried to bring into movement. - Well, this is a book about fighting casinos. What's so bad about casinos? What got you motivated to be in there? I take it from some of your comments early on that you weren't 100% opposed to casinos as a general principal. What's so bad about 'em and why did you get involved? - Yeah, I mean, so the context is important. So I got involved because a friend of mine calls me up. This is back in 2006 I guess. A friend of mine, Jeff Rheiko, the guy who's on the cover that you mentioned, he calls me up and he says look, they're trying to build a 5,000 slot parlor right across the street from my house. Just to give you a sense, 5,000 slots is more slots than in any casino, Atlantic City or Las Vegas. And he lives on this tiny one-way street in some Northeast Philly. So I got involved mostly as a local development issue. What I began to understand was how deep sort of it is almost a democracy issue. It's how I understood it, which is look, you should be able to have some input on what is getting built right in your neighborhood. And the way that's built was introduced, I mean, to get casinos is really important. And back in 2004, those two years before, Jeff Rheiko calls me, Governor and Dow, they've been a big supporter of casinos, added a 146 page amendment to what was a 34 line bill, added it in the middle of the night, July 4th weekend, 2004. And this is how we got the largest introduction of casino gambling, 35,000 slots across the state of Pennsylvania. Because it was an amendment to a previously read bill, there was no public input, no public debate. I mean, this thing was just flipped through. It was incredible, and then they stripped out this original 33 line. So this thing was orchestrated from the start. It was set up as a done deal. And so that also moved me because, you know, as an organizer and someone who's been involved in different issues, when I hear people saying, "You can't win something in my heart flutters." I mean, it's just ever since I was little. And, you know, teachers or whatever told me, "You can't do this." I always thought, "Well, maybe you could." So part of it was the challenge of it, part of it was the issue of democracy itself. But I ended up just learning more and more about casinos as an industry. I think I was kind of neutral. I saw it the way I think a lot of people sometimes do initially, which is I just thought of it as, well, some people lose some money. But what I began to understand is how nefarious this particular industry is. And it's been like 90% of its income comes from about 10% of its customer base. So we're talking about an extraordinarily addiction dependent industry. It's not like any other industry that exists that's supported by the state in this way. And we're looking at what's really predatory state gambling. So it's been a really interesting campaign for me to just sort of understand the whole industry and move from just talking about it to the democracy issue. And I don't want casinos right in our neighborhoods to, I don't believe states should be involved in casinos. And I don't believe that casinos should be something that should be allowed to exist in their present form because they're, as they are right now, probably the most efficient mechanisms I know is to move money from poor people to rich people. I mean, the phrase that we've begun to use is predatory gambling. And the language that they talk about in the industry is they say, we want to get people to play to extinction. That's the language they use in the industry. By which they mean, we want every single dollar this person can get their hands on from them to our pockets. That's a very deep way of operating. - It sounds like they're just manipulating on addiction, which is, of course, our society is set up that way. Our advertising is set up that way. Is the main difference, though, in this case, it's the government that's setting up this praying on individuals. - That certainly was one of our contentions. I mean, in this case in Pennsylvania, what we had was a relationship with the casino industry where the state was advocating for its citizens to get addicted. And that's essentially what happens when they're saying let's bring in a casino industry if we're saying, I mean, it really is. The state's job is to look out for the health and well-being of its citizens. That's the social contract. What we have is a breakdown of that social contract where the government is saying, well, we're too scared to just say let's raise taxes in one way or another. So let's find a regressive way, a very backwards way, to raise taxes and to take money from people. And it's targeting, I mean, the people that get targeted by small machines, it targets the poorest. It targets poor people, black people, Asian Americans, I mean, those are the high numbers people who are in, people with mental health problems. Those are the people who are most hit and targeted by the industry. So it really does break a kind of social contract to bring in an industry that way. And the state's benefiting and the state is getting money from it, but of course, the state's also losing money in the form of the people themselves are losing incredible amounts of money. And the amount of money that has been lost, we're talking billions in Pennsylvania. So it's just, it's been really sad to watch the impact of casinos elsewhere in the state. - There's other losses that you talk about in the book. I mean, obviously there's, as the casino grows and they are, you know, they're getting business within, it's often touted that this is going to stimulate the economy locally, but actually the neighboring businesses all lose money to the casinos. I mean, people are eating at the casinos, getting free food or whatever, drinks. And so the neighborhood bars and restaurants, they go down, crime goes up, suicides go up, all of these things. So overall, for the local community, at least as you document in the book, it's a real losing situation for the community. - Everything you mentioned is absolutely right. And I would add something that's important, which is one of the biggest crimes that increases isn't rape or isn't stealing or the other things that get increased around the neighborhood of those all increase. One of the number one crimes that consistently increases is in bezlement. And I mentioned the industry's working on playing the extinction. So people who, some set of people who get addicted become problem gamblers, get so addicted that they then begin stealing money in order to feed their habit. I'm just recently a nun who was arrested because she was stealing from her charity, her church organization in order to feed her gambling addiction. So you have this whole set. It's not just, it's not only local based, and that's what we began to understand as a city. It's not just about the locality in terms of right around the casino, but it actually becomes a whole fabric. And so you start looking at the whole fabric of society, gets impacted, bankruptcy goes up, divorce rates go up, sexual violence goes up. I mean, it's deep, it's really deep. And I just wanna add, I mean, I think something that happened especially originally, when we first started organizing a casino, we didn't know any of this. We were looking at like a different context in which we were being told, look, this is a done deal. And so one of the things I'm excited about the book to talk about is how is it that we take on issues when we're told it's unwinnable? How is it that we begin organizing under those contacts? - Well, then talk to us about the power pyramid, which is so often how we do not think of how power is distributed in society. Power, it's all in Obama's hands, right? So it's all in the Supreme Court's hands. And talk about that, because I think that people need to hear that over and over. And as the story plays out in strategy and soul, as what actually happened in Philadelphia, it's clear that that is this myth that we're living with, which is limiting our power. - Yeah, so way that we think of it as power actually flows not upwards downwards, but the other direction. That is, I mean, traditionally we think of, as you say, Obama has the most power of the state Supreme Court, if federal Supreme Court has the most power, and then they have to give orders downwards. And our contention was it goes the other direction, which is if we are unwilling to give consent to do those things that people are asking us to do, whatever, we can actually change it one way that an organization and Serbia who's involved in overthrowing Milosevic talked about it. They did a novel overthrow and they said, "Look, on his own, a dictator does not milk cows "and build roads and take out trash "and do all these things, we do them." So he doesn't run the country, we do. So if we decide to stop letting him tell us that he's running the country, he can't run the country without us. I'll give an example from here in Philly. So when we began organizing, one of the first things that we realized was, look, we can't organize this directly on casinos, no casinos, because Sony had just believed, look, casinos would be a good thing. We heard jobs and revenue, and let's bring them in. So we said, well, look, what's a widely shared value that's being violated here, that we can immediately connect people into the movement about. And we said, transparency, 'cause as I mentioned, casinos had come in in such a backwards process. We ran it as a campaign. So he said, look, we need a dramatic storyline to support people to get involved in it. People don't join things just because it's a good issue. We wanna have some drama along with it, and we wanna be able to also move, for example, media who's very hostile to us when we began. So we started with launching an ultimatum to the game control without overseeing the process, and said, look, we want all of the planning documents related to casinos. We want site plans, architecture renderings, environmental plans, traffic plans, impact studies. These kinds of information that Jeff Rowe, for example, couldn't get, even though he lived right across the street from a proposed casino site, that information was being withheld from the public. These updated plans. So regional goal, right? Most people could get behind it. We want these plans. And we said, if you don't release these plans by December 1st at high noon, as our theatrics, all politics and theater. So if you don't release them at the summer first at high noon, then we'll have to go, watch that language. We'll have to go. We forced by you to go to the game control offices and take them ourselves. So it was a very clear if this then that set up. People could see what we're doing. And again, we weren't doing a marcher rally at the end. What we're doing was we'll implement the thing we wanna see. And it's our consent that we've been giving by treating you as if you're a legitimate body with our interest. But in fact, we think you're not that. We think you're something else. So rather than just continue to feed you in the form of treating you as if you're a legitimate, we'll do the right thing. That, I think, is the direct action spirit, which is it's not about let's go get arrested, which I think some activists sometimes get confused about. It's about what's the right thing to be done here. And if you won't do it, we will. So we'll liberate these documents. We'll go up to the game control headquarters and we'll release them ourselves. That's the arc of the campaign. And then every week leading up to that December 1st, we would do some kind of action to sort of get us into the media or something. So, for example, one of the actions that we did was we went down to the headquarters of the game of control board to wash their windows, to help them become more transparent. So we do actions like that, which were fun, enjoyable for us, but we're about building up a timeline. I think one of the things that we really worked on was staying on the defensive is another word for powerlessness. So we needed to get right on the offensive, and so we needed to take it right to them. So that's what we did in terms of the design itself, was to put ourselves in the role of the people in agency, not just petitioners asking, "Please, please give us the documents." "Oh, you won't give us documents to that," but instead acting for a place of power. That's exactly the upside-down triangle, as you mentioned, what we called the upside-down triangle, which is, "Look, power is unstable and needs our consent, and if we don't give it, then it gets exposed." Eventually, we did actually carry out the document search, and I won't ruin it for everyone to tell the whole story, but that we did the document search, and by the end, we're able to get 95% of the documents that we were looking for, and the reason for that was this campaign. - And I'm gonna mention this again. I think it's so important. I'd heard it before. I heard George Blakey say it when he was speaking at the Friends General Conference Gathering. He said it in our interview. It's so important that we get over this mentality of let's have a march or let's have a rally, and that that's our objective, our winning point. You do such a wonderful job in strategy and soul, just with the drama of the whole adventure that you live through, fighting the casinos. You do such a great job of illustrating that, no, the power is here, and it's not accessed just by standing up and raising your hand. It's accessed by living it out in some way that vividly illustrates your point. Operation Transparency is one of the things. Another one that happens in the book that I thought was just wonderful, especially. I mean, you'd been raked over the coals by not only the local officials, but the state Supreme Court, my God, fighting not allowing you to have your vote, and so you did Philly's ballot box. Could you talk a bit about that? Yeah, moving forward a couple of the campaigns forward. I mean, our goals were to increase the size of our group. We'd also, in Operation Transparency, it sort of moved media a little bit because media does have interest in getting documents. So we're able to move like a couple of players towards us, but the group that we were really unable to crack was our local officials who, by and large, were just unwilling to get behind us. So it took a huge effort. We ended up getting 27,000 signatures in the course of about four weeks to put enough pressure onto the council to put on the ballot a referendum. And what this referendum would do, it wouldn't get rid of casinos in the city, but it would create a 1,500-foot buffer between casinos and homes. So today, the casino can't be built right next to people's homes or schools or place of worship, et cetera. So that was the referendum that people would get a chance to vote on on May 15th, that was in 2007. We were running this campaign, super excited. We knew we'd be outspend by, you know, millions of dollars to casinos. We had tons of money on this thing. And three weeks before we're supposed to vote on this, the State Supreme Court suspiciously and without any explanation, stripped this referendum off the ballot. They don't explain anything about it, so we don't know what's happened, but all we know is that the State Supreme Court has been given money by the casino industry and that they're good friends with many of the members of the casino investors. So there's sort of the investor elite class going on. It certainly looks like corruption on us, but we're devastated because here we are without an option. You know, we put all this effort into Bill's referendum. We've gotten city council support to do this. We've just been a major, like four, five months campaign to make this thing happen. And our people were absolutely devastated. I was devastated. I remember I went over to a friend's house that night, just tears in my eyes, I couldn't believe it. The following subsequent days, I knew I needed to figure out what's the way. I mean, you know, this language is, you know, you're just talking about like we need to kind of find a creative response and we need to find something that was powerful and better than that, but I didn't feel that. I didn't feel powerful. I felt hit hard and resentful. I mean, I was angry and frustrated. So I remember calling a friend of mine, Philippe Domel, who's the organizer out of Quebec, just to try to get some advice. And he immediately said, look, don't let the State Supreme Court tell you what you can't do. You want to vote on this thing, figure out a way to vote on it. So, you know, maybe you can write it in as a ballot, maybe you can vote anyway. I mean, he was just trying to think of all these creative options. And I just shot down every single idea, left and right, left and right. I think some of that was the inner pain that I was feeling. I was feeling my inner turmoil and the one way of expressing inner turmoil is to take it out on the people around you and to take it out on the idea that he was offering. So I just shot down everything he did. But I can do work and do my own inner work, and that was really important to follow the inner process. And eventually, Philippe and I talk again with Jeff Rowe and some other people. And we develop a response that I think is brilliant. And what it is, as you say, it's called Philippe Ballibach. What we do is we'll set up an election of our own. So that same day, we'll run our own election system complete with external monitors. We'll have people who will interact with the voter database. We'll have multiple checks to make sure that there's no fraud. We invited the casino industry to be involved in, helping us to run it. It became a real genuine election where we would give people the opportunity to vote on this question that had been removed. I think one of the things I'm remembering about that that was so important was the philanthropy inquirer who, to this point, had been consistently hostile against us. And they had literally said, this is a done deal, give up. And they've written the whole editorial to us. They give up, go home. The editorial that came out around Philippe Ballibach, they said, I can't remember the exact phrase, but they said, look, this group could come out and just do a march, but they're going to go many miles further than just doing that. They're going to actually give people an opportunity to vote that the state Supreme Court took away from them. It was dramatic. This was the first endorsement from the inquirer, which we didn't need their endorsement. I mean, we never felt like we needed media approval. But it was a sign that people were moving towards us. But it was really important, I think, that the action itself, the running the Phillies ballot box, really was our message. I mean, what we were doing, we literally went out there on election day. We set up a four foot ballot box that we called our shining receptacle of liberty and gave people an opportunity to vote on this question, yes or no, on whether or not they wanted casinos with this buffer zone. So we set it up at every problematic district, every state representative district, every senatorial district so that we would have hard data to be able to show each of the elected officials about how do their people believe about casinos. So the action, I think, was so-- I mean, it was fun. We had tons of excitement. It was a major push to pull us off in about three weeks. That in itself is its own organizing story that I bring out in the book. But that what I really wanted to do in the action was be consistent with our action itself and our message. And that, I think, is one of the distinctions from, say, around your margin, which the action is really us saying, we have an opinion. We believe such. That can be really meaningful. And we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington, which is hugely touched on moment. But it really only was a moment because it was built in context of all of the other things that had come before it that helped to build the Birmingham campaign and so forth. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to pull off an action that, again, was in that spirit of, if they won't let us do it, we'll do it anyways. If our opponents don't do the right thing, if this today's Supreme Court doesn't do the right thing, we'll do it irregardless. Whether it's legal or not, whether it's acceptable or not, we're going to do the right thing. And that's high ground organizing. And that works. That's stirring voice and compelling organizer you're listening to is Daniel Hunter, my guest today for Spirit and Action. This is a Northern Spirit radio production, and I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org with eight plus years of programs available free for your listening and download, plus links to our guests and a place to comment on the programs and make our communication two-way. We also appreciate your support. And you can make a donation via the northernspiritradio.org site as well. Besides your donations, support for this program comes from Eau Claire attorney Catherine B. Schulz, a believer in honesty, accuracy, and world healing work and who is proud to support Northern Spirit Radio. She helps clients get a world healing new start on their finances by guiding them through bankruptcy when needed, call 715-835-8904. Also, toss some of your support to your local community radio station, which is carrying this program. It is such a valuable alternative to the mainstream media and the special interests. Unfortunately, we're often deprived of needed information due to special interests controlling the media. So support your community radio staff and let's head back to Daniel Hunter, author of Strategy and Soul, a campaigners guide to fighting billionaires, corrupt officials, and Philadelphia casinos. Daniel co-directed Casino Free Philly with great drama and success, along with Jethro Heiko. And that's something I wanna talk about right now, Daniel. My sense is that you and Jethro really worked yourselves to the bone with Casino Free Philly. And after a year and a half of this work, you were, I think, running on fumes. So my question is, with hindsight, about all the demands this work put on you and realizing that you had a 90% win in the end, would you have done it again if you'd known how much skin you'd lose in the game? - Absolutely, I would have done it differently. (laughing) I mean, my thing, I mean, one of the things, right, like the job of an organizer, I think, is largely about giving away work. And that's what I began to understand better and better, is that our job is, I mean, we can be strategically brilliant and we can be tactically ingenious and all the things are helpful. But I think the primary job of an organizer is to figure out how do we get other people involved in something and how do we delegate, move out, work away from us. I am not great at that. I think Jethro is really good at that. And that was one of the reasons that I think we're a really good matchup. I mean, in fact, actually, I could back away a little bit and say his background was he was trained as a community organizer and I was trained as a movement tactician. And so what I mean by that is, like his experience was working in community development corporations and civic organizations to help build local community infrastructure. My experience was more in, for example, 1999 in Seattle World Trade Organization protests and doing those kinds of large mass mobilizations. And so I was trained much more in nonviolent movement theory, developing tactics. So a lot of the things that I brought to the table in our relationship was teaching Jethro about how to do nonviolent action, how do we design things like Phillies ballot box, how do we design things like Operation Transparency. His big contribution to me was, how do you give away work? He's a joke with me, he's a Daniel, you are selfish. You are just so selfish because there are all these people out there who want to help fight casinos in their neighborhoods and you keep hoarding work towards you. Give it away Daniel, you have to give it away. It was a different way of thinking than I often, I think I grew up with even. I mean, I think I learned self-reliance more than I learned trying to give away to other people. So one of the things that I would have gotten would have done much more of, I think, was figuring out how to effectively give work away. I think that's one of the things that would have helped my stability more and in terms of the long-term well-being, which had been getting better at that skill. And I think it also would have helped if Jethro hadn't gone ahead and had a baby in the course of it. I mean, he's the one who got you involved and then for very important reasons, vital reasons. I mean, he had to redistribute his time a bit. The loss of your leadership partner in this, I mean, where he had to pull back, that was hard. That was brutal, it was a brutal period, yeah. 'Cause he had been so involved in it for so long. And so we had thought ahead, we thought about how do we bring in some other people, but it was a very rough transition early on in one of the first drafts of the book, one of my mentors, Anci Mateus read parts of it and she said, "It's good, but you are not totally present in the book." And I wanted to make sure that that wasn't true. So I worked really hard to make sure that you get to come through on the journey with me, what it was like for me during it, the highs and the lows of it. It's a compelling book, the name is strategy and soul. Let's talk a little bit more about soul in this and what soul means to you. Can you give me a thumbnail of your religious, spiritual history? It's in college you got into organizing and I think organizing is its own kind of spiritual community, but what has that journey been like for you? - You know, when people ask in the course, I often have to struggle figuring out how to make it succinct or clear. I mean, there's some dimensions in terms of like, my dad is a minister, he's a Baptist minister, so I grew up in the Black Baptist Church and that was very important to me in terms of formation. I think like some of the things that just, even as a young kid, like I just, I detested lying, I just, I couldn't stand it. Sometimes extreme, I mean, I was a little bit of, I was a stubborn kid, there's no question about that. And so in some ways I just had, you know, I think as Quaker said, you know, that of God within, it's some part of me that just felt really called sort of what's the right thing to do here. But I think one of the things that I found myself really struggling a lot with, and this may be why I find this question a little bit difficult for me, is I grew up surrounded by a lot of religious language. And then when I began doing organizing, I found the language primarily very secular. So one of the things, the tensions I think I talk about a little bit in the book is there's moments in which I find myself wanting to use morally laden language, and instead I translate it strategically. So for example, one of the, there's some moment, I don't remember particularly what happened, but someone suggested in the campaign, look, we could just, we could just say that we, and so it was essentially some lies. So we could just lie and tell the politicians we have that number of people already prepared. They won't ask, they won't inquire, but we could just say that we've got it, and then look, we can move forward and win. I wouldn't do it. And they were like, look, we can just do it, why not? We'll get away with it. And so I could have said all these reasons about why should we lie. And I call myself translating it into strategic language. And I said, I don't think we should lie because if we lie, we have to keep lying. And we might forget who we've lied to. So if we lie to one person, and there's some people who know the truth and some people don't, we have to keep remembering who's on which side. And therefore it actually becomes more confusing to us over time. It just will take too much of our energy. And I find myself doing this often, and I think that reflects something about my, skip the front, because it's way too strong of a word, but there's sort of two parts of me in terms of the way that I work, and I think that's some ways in which the book gets called "Strategy and Soul," because it both brings in the strategy part of my head and the soul part of it. And what I find is when the two are in alignment, I can never go wrong. And so whenever my moral value about it and my strategic value about it, both aligned, then it's like crystal clear. But I just got aware of that in terms of my inner, how I work. And I think that had to do with growing up in a very religious family, and then also working in a secular activist community. - So are you saying, there's two things I wanna ask you at once. I don't wanna forget either one. - Yeah, ask them both, and we'll see where that goes. - One is, I'd like to hear more of, so you grew up Black Baptist family. That's your community, and it's a powerful and compelling for you. Somewhere, it sounds like you transition away. That's not where you hang out these days. Where did you go to hang out? But the other thing that I wanted to ask is, and this is vital for me in terms of why I do this spirit and action program, you have to translate your language, your language of morality. Why don't we lie? Why do we behave with integrity? You have to translate that to something that's non-religious, that's strategic. Is that good, or is that bad? How do you feel about that? Is there a reason that we, particularly on the left, can't have morals, which is, of course, putting it too strongly? - Sure, sure. Well, that's that second question, 'cause it's very juicy to me. How do I feel about it? Sometimes I would feel guilty for not being more clear about it, about sort of what's the moral impetus behind it. And what I noticed was, the people around me that we were working with, I don't think there's a single one of them that one remark how deeply that morality impacted them anyways. I mean, I remember at one point one of, right at that moment where we hit really hard by the state Supreme Court, there's one of our supporters who emails me, and he says, "I just wanna let you know how deeply I appreciate, even though we don't know what we're gonna do next, your absolute refusal to attack and demonize our opponents." It struck me as just such a sweet statement of people get what we're trying to do here, which is, I'm not just interested in winning this casino struggle, come hell or high water. I wanna win in such a way so that it can change the way that our society operates with each other. And then I think, more honesty will do that, more transparency. Another example of that was, Operation Transparency, part of the goal was, if we're asking for transparency, we're super transparent. So that whole campaign where I said, look, December 1st, we'll do this, and then December 10th, we'll do the document search, they didn't release the document. All of that, we made public. We made it transparent. We told them exactly what we're gonna do. And many other organizations I worked with said, "Why would you tell them exactly when you're gonna come? Because then they'll be prepared." And I said, "I want them prepared. I want them to get a chance to do the right thing." And this is what it will take. I wanna model exactly what I want them to do. I wanna teach them by example what good organizing and what transparency is. And when they would push, like some of them would push and say, "But then they'll call the cops on you." And I'll say, "I'll call the cops first." Because I want to show them I don't fear cops, and I don't fear them. And so I wanted to teach them what transparency could be, and that it's not a bad thing, and doesn't have this dangerous thing, because they'll still act stupid. In fact, it turned in our favor, from a strategic perspective, Paul and Pete used to say, "The fear of a thing is often worse than the thing itself." So the threat is often worse than the actual act. And that showed up. They were more worried about us for months, because we had already made this announcement, and they worried that we were going to do it ahead of time, or do they have to do that, and they ended up doing stupid things. And the question, how do I feel about, which is the original question, how do I feel about the choice to sometimes translate it? I think sometimes it felt really good, because it helped people to understand why this can be effective, and why it can be helpful to operate on what I call high ground organizing. I think that's the way in which, even though, yeah, it's true, I've moved away from the church that I grew up in, that's left my social community. It's still, there's the ethic that I developed, and the church is so connected to my work now. And I think that's the thing I continue to carry. And I think part of what I want to bring in the book is I want to bring, well, I'll work another example from the other direction, which is I've been doing some consulting work with earthquake or action team here in Philly, which is a group that works on mount top removal. And so I've been doing some amazing work, and so I've had the opportunity to get to work with them. Part of my take, this is my belief at least, which is many of them are, I think, deeply, deeply morally guided. I've just been really impressed by them. And sometimes they have trouble figuring out how to enact that strategically. And so I think part of what high ground organizing is to me is being able to do both of these things, to not just say we'll never lie, but also to say how is it that we tell the truth in a meaningful way that will impact our opponent. And back and forth and back and forth. So it's, for me, it's just become part of the flow. So I'm appreciative of the question, 'cause I often don't think of it quite with this angle, but it is actually part of the way that I've grown up in terms of changing the way that I do organizing. - Do you go to church? - I don't, not anymore. - Now when you go visit your parents, you don't go to the church of your birth? - I mean, at this point, when I see them, we generally just spend most of our time with each other. But I'm just thinking about this question of what is it about me leaving the church? When I was five years old, I went to vacation Bible study at my church, beautiful plane. And I remember the teacher talking about how everybody needs to know Jesus Christ, and that's the way that you become saved. And so if you don't know Jesus Christ and accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, then you'll go to hell. Five years old, and I raised my NSA, but what about people in, say, the jungle who have never heard of Jesus, never seen a Bible? And she said, well, they would go to hell because unless you've accepted Jesus Christ and know him as your personal savior, then you won't go to heaven. And I said, but that's not fair. - Right. - It was really strong inside of me, the sense of fairness. And I said, that's not fair. And she continued to argue, the position that she'd argued, but I said, that's not how God works. Because why would God send people to hell just because of where they were born? So my mom pulls me out of a vacation Bible study because she says, I don't want the teachers who's not able to handle this question. She has her response, her response is, I think, much more nuanced. But that, I think, cemented in many ways, my particular relationship with the church, which was not cemented, but so much as represented, I think, my relationship, which was, it's very hard for me to find a church that speaks to my soul without speaking blasphemy. I mean, to me, that was blasphemy to talk about a God who would subject people to this kind of thing. They'd go to hell just because they were where they were born. So that became, I think, a big piece for me in terms of how I grew up and how I ended up moving away from the church, that particular story, I think, represents the extreme version of my tough relationship with the church. - But a very clear, strong spiritual current still from that root that obviously pervades your life now. And when people read strategy and soul, and if you just need a good read, pick up this book by Daniel Hunter, you will have an adventure as you read it. As you read it, it's very clear that there's something deep and sustaining and motivating to you that carries you on forever and ever. I assume it's in those Baptist roots. - And I assume it's in that taproot of whatever was that I had a clear sense of fairness about. Not only just a sense of, like, I think this is fair, but I wanted to correct the teacher. You know, at the age of five or one, I wanna say this can't be right. And so whatever that was, and I begin at this stage to start walking away from words being really helpful in terms of description and start to believe, look, there really is a spirit that moves us and guides us. And so whatever that thing is, I mean, I think the quicker language again of that of God within each of us begins to really resonate as there's something there that was crystal as a clarion voice to me at that point. And I think that that same voice can be applied politically. And I think that's what I try to do in terms of the high ground organizing that we did in the campaign. - Well, let's talk a little bit more about the campaign. Of the activities that you did that were fighting the casinos, part of Casino Free Philly, what was the one that was the most fun for you? - Oh, wow, that's a tough question. One of the ones that probably the most fun was, at one point, the state Supreme Court, again, fight against this and who they were pretty confused against, I think, got a 14 cases. They fight against this 14 times. So at one point, when they fight against this, they gave Sherath Casino and the casinos. They didn't just give them sort of an authority to begin building. They actually, they literally gave them permits directly. Corporation goes to a bunch of Supreme Court justices who know nothing about plumbing or electricity. And they say, we want our permits. We think the city is being opposite in it. So give it to us. And the Supreme Court justices say, sure. In fact, the Supreme Court justices went so far, and this is like the big FU in terms of what happened. They go so far as to say, we'll even give you some permits that you didn't ask for. So in some of that context, the casino says, look, we're going to begin building by Christmas. And this is two weeks away. And they are just in the news every day. We're ready to go. This is it. It's done. It's over. Metro comes out. It's a done deal. Boba. So we inside to organize what we call practice site occupation. We don't really explain what this is, because we're organizing this in rapid time. So we give them a title, and we'll figure out exactly what it is. Day of the site occupation, we find out that they have surrounded the site with hundreds of cops. Part of this is the context in which we had announced our intentions of doing civil disobedience. We had encouraged other civilians. We had gotten even one of our council members to do civil disobedience. The governor began attacking us in public. I mean, very vociferously saying, these guys are destroying the image of Philadelphia, whatever the images of us, I guess, as rebels involved in the creation of this country, and so forth. But whatever, I guess, it's a bad thing. So anyway, it's under that context that cops are just everywhere. This is the first time that we get this kind of behavior. So we do a rapid planning with our crew to try to find how do we respond to this. Originally, our plan was to go onto the site and do a picnic, where we would do for around beach balls and have a little picnic, and have a little bit of fun, and maybe play by the water side, and basically show them what our vision was for that waterfront rather than developing a terracino. We can't pull this off. We'd look at our team, the people who we've trained, just aren't prepared to try doing any kind of sneaking onto site, and there's cops everywhere, and we just didn't see a way to pull that behavior off that might not get really, really way uglier than we want to go at that stage. So we decide, well, when they go really hard, we go soft. So we march across towards the site, and we walk right up to the fence. And we announce we're going to do a practice side activation. Everybody, the police are braced. There's a bunch of casino investors who are there watching us. And it's all just, you know, very dramatic tension. And then we get right up to the fence. There's a bunch of cops in front of us in the fence, you know, all stern looking. And as soon as we get right up to them, doors smiling this whole way, we get right up to them, we turn around, face back out towards all the cameras, lay down a giant tarp, and we began to do a practice side activation, which looks like the following, we do a training. And we train people in what it would look like to do a side activation. So we literally do what the kind of role plays and stuff that you do in a direct action training. Right in front of the police, we ask the police if they would join. We tell them we're so glad that they're here because we really need their help. And they don't actually join the role play, but we just have a very nice conversation with ourselves. We get to prepare people. Again, a lot of our people are not activists. They were not people who the site of doing something illegal in front of a bunch of cops did not appeal to them. So we were preparing people for doing more kinds of occupation stuff in the future. And we're also showing our intention. And we're being light. And we're getting to talk to the police in a way that showed they're not our enemy. And we're getting to just be really light and funny and enjoy ourselves. And it was great. We had a fantastic time doing it. It was probably one of my favorites. And I think I especially liked it because it, again, it was using the moment, the resources that we had. And we didn't have a lot of big money or whatever to pull off anything like that. But we could pull off something very simple and something very straightforward like that. And it got good media at that particular event because it was so dramatic and it would be great visuals. I mean, that was also part of it. This is fantastic visuals with us doing a training backdrops by the police. So we thank the police for that. We totally really appreciate it giving us such great visuals. [LAUGHTER] It's amazing the power. And again, I want to recommend people-- when you read the book, again, you'll just be having an adventure reading it. But you're going to learn so much. And one of the things that I learned so deeply from this is there's metaphysics involved in doing this well. I think that the way that we think about things, in terms of declare victory, is one of the things that you say in the book. And some people can learn that as a strategy. But in reading the book and reading strategy and soul, I felt it. Oh, this is how it feels. I'm tempted toward the dark side. But here, I'll reach to light. And it's an amazing, amazing book. An amazing experience that you had-- I said at the beginning that you achieved 90% of what you set out to achieve. I don't want to give away the ending of the book, spoiler it. This is an adventure that we're going through here. But you're pretty successful. The good guys are definitely in the right place at the end, or nearly the right place. Because the casinos are not there, as they were originally scripted to be, I think there's a whole number of things that have not happened that were bad. Do you, Daniel, personally feel responsible for the fact that you saved a number of lives who wouldn't commit suicide, or who wouldn't get mugged or killed on the streets? Can you, in any measure, carry as part of your integrity that you helped be the force, part of a whole group of people, who prevented that? There's so much good that's happened or bad that didn't happen because of you. Can you carry that personally? I hear you say the words, and I can agree with you, and I'm not sure I carry it on the inside. I think this is probably another important piece around organizing, which is the losses that I feel I feel more keenly. And so the 10% that we didn't win, or I might even give it a higher number than that. But whatever it is that we didn't win, I think I feel more keenly. And that's, I think, true for how a lot of actors organize are in terms of our makeup. Not everybody I know, but for a lot of people, I know that's true for activists because we want to fix things. So we can sometimes get too obsessed on problems, what's the next problem? We fix that, that's the next problem. And we move right off of it. So I appreciate the reminder, actually, because that might encourage me and my own development to hold on to that a little bit more strongly. So I could hold it, not just as an intellectual statement of, yeah, that's probably true that there's quite a number of people whose lives are not destroyed as a result of some of the work we've done. But maybe I could hold that a little bit more on the inside. And I'd like to actually just say one more thing in terms of clothing because you were just talking about earlier, you're just mentioning the value of a public radio and community radio stations. And I'd just want to give one clear example of how the mainstream media really screwed us. And it came near the end of the campaign. As you said, again, I won't give away what happened. But we won some things and we bought some things. When the newspapers would talk about what we won, they would not mention casino portfolio if they're not one time. When they mentioned what we lost, they would mention us in the newspaper articles over a dozen times. And we could track this numerically. Almost every single time, well, for the telephone choir, every single time that they talk to an article about us winning, they wouldn't mention us by name. They won't even mention only by passing community organization. But when we lost, they would highlight it. They would mention it. They talked about their failed attempts. Container for Philadelphia's failed attempts too. There's a way in which, and you talked earlier about the value of acknowledging our own successes and taking ownership of them. It's hard to take ownership of our successes when they're being taken away from us and public. And that, I think, is part of the role of media. Mainstream media is-- it's one of the control mechanisms that they have is they won't acknowledge people power. And so that's what makes your program and other programs like yours so invaluable, which is it gives people an opportunity to hear people power stories. Because we need those stories. We need to hear-- not just that. But we can win, although that's really important, but the how and the why and what does it take to do it. And so it's so important, and all the work that you do. So I appreciate that. And just wanted to acknowledge that as well. Thank you for pointing that out. We've been speaking with Daniel Hunter. He's author of a book, Strategy and Soul, a campaigner's tale of fighting billionaires, corrupt officials, and Philadelphia casinos. Don't pick this book up to learn community organizing. Pick it up because you love adventures. I grew up reading Doc Savage and Marvel Comics. Those were my mainstay growing up. And this had all of the adventure that I got from those comics and those books when I was young. This is an immense heart soul deep adventure that Daniel and Jethro and others went through in Philadelphia. It's work that continues. I'm so impressed by your work, not only on casino-free Philadelphia and Daniel, but training for change and the fact that you brought us a slice of this truth, this soul force through strategy and soul. It's just a great gift you've given to the world. And thank you so much for doing that and joining me for spirit and action. - Thank you so much. That's to be with you. - My gratitude to all the workers and volunteers of casino-free Philadelphia and also to Eau Claire attorney, Catherine B. Schultz, who provided support for this program. Catherine Schultz is a believer in honesty, accuracy, and world healing work. And she's proud to support Nerd and Spirit Radio. She helps clients get a world healing new start to their finances by guiding them through bankruptcy when needed. Call 715-835-8904. See you next week for Spirit in Action. - The theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. (upbeat music) ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice ♪ ♪ With every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]