Abdul El-Sayed — "It's about beating the system that created Donald Trump in the first place." | Abdul for Senate

Councilman Santiago Romero. >> [applause] >> Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone. It's Friday. It's a beautiful day in Southwest Detroit. Welcome to District 6, everyone. As Todd has been mentioned, my name is Gabriela Santiago Romero. I'm your proud city council member. I don't look like one right now. I biked here. Um but I promise you I serve you proudly on city council on the 13th floor. Um you are in my neighborhood now. Welcome. And we are here to hear from an incredible candidate who I hope to be our next senator, Abdul. >> [cheering] [applause] >> I'm probably endorsing Abdul because quite frankly, I am sick and tired of the same old, same old. I'm tired of establishment Democrats. I'm tired of us not being served. I'm tired of the party that is quite frankly putting corporations first and not serving people. For folks who don't know, I have a background in social work and community organizing, and I'll share a very brief story with you. Um the story of when I found out that I was poor. Um so I was in the third grade. I was doing my homework. My mom was cooking dinner for us. I was asking her for new shoes. She said, "Sorry, mija, but I can't buy you new shoes." And I said, "Why not? I thought adults could do whatever they wanted." But then I remembered some adults were poor. So I was like, "Mommy, are we poor?" She said, "Yeah, you didn't know we were poor?" And no, I had no idea. Cuz growing up, there was always food on my table, the lights were always on, the heat always worked. Then I realized my mom and I would go to a church or to a food pantry to get a box full of food. My mom received WIC so my little brother could be able to to be fed as a baby. As I got older, I realized there are systems and there are people in these systems that either help us or harm us. And quite frankly, we have way too many people at every level of government not helping us enough. >> [applause] >> Here on City Council, when Trump got reelected, what did I get bombarded with? Who's going to help save Medicare? How are we going to make sure that we have our our health insurance covered? And these are questions that I cannot solve unfortunately at the local level. So, I need people from the state to the federal level making sure that we are protecting people, that we are passing the policies that we need. So, today, I'm so excited that you're here to hear from someone that I believe will put us first, someone that I believe we can hold accountable, and someone that I want to build with to continue to build power for a progressive movement that we desperately need in this country. So, thank you all so much for being here. I might ask you to put your hands together. I'm sure you're excited to hear from Abdul, who'll be our next state senator. >> [applause] >> Councilwoman Raquel SANTIAGO ROMERO, EVERYBODY. >> [applause] >> ALL RIGHT. MONEY OUT OF? POLITICS. We can do it louder. Money out of? Politics. Money in your? POCKET. MEDICARE FOR? ALL. There it is. Southwest Detroit, it is an honor and a privilege to be with you. My name is Abdul El-Sayed. I'm clearly running for US Senate because I got a name that is tailor-made for US politics. But y'all just shouldn't be this hard. Shouldn't be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries. Should not be this hard to send your kid to a dentist or to see a doctor. Should not be this hard to know that the job you've worked yesterday and yesterday before is going to be there for you tomorrow, shouldn't be this hard. Now, I was never supposed to run for public office. That is not part of my life's plan. My parents virtually guaranteed as much when they gave me an 11-letter first name that's got sounds that come out of parts of people's throats most people don't know they have. I wanted to be a doctor. And I wanted to be a doctor because I was raised by my father who's an Egyptian immigrant and my stepmom Jackie who's a daughter of the American Revolution. And the place they'd send me every summer was Alexandria, Egypt. Soon as I was old enough, they would ship me abroad to spend time with the wisest, most intelligent person I've ever met in my life and that was my grandmother, my Teta Soad. Never got to go to school. She was the ninth of 14. Raised six of the eight kids to whom she gave birth. Two of them died before their first birthday. Now, when I would go to Egypt, I'd go 15 hours from where I grew up. I would cross a life expectancy difference of 10 years. I didn't have to go 15 hours. I could go 15 minutes from where I grew up. South into the city or north to Pontiac and either way, I'd cross the same 10-year life expectancy gap. I became a doctor cuz I wanted to do something about that. It shouldn't matter the color of your skin. It shouldn't matter what you do for your work for work or what your parents did for work. You deserve access to a long, healthy life in the richest, most powerful country in the world. So, I went off with that goal. Got to go to the University of Michigan. It was the first time anybody told me I should think about running for office and the guy kind of knew something about it. He'd been a former president. His name was Bill Clinton. I was the valedictorian of my class and I got to give the student commencement speech. It was a great honor. Except for nobody actually came to listen to me. They went to go listen to the main speaker who was President Clinton. I give my speech. President gives his speech, calls me out in his speech. My dad, an immigrant, claps for me for the first time in my whole life. And then after the speech, comes up to me. he's like, "Son, why are you going to medical school?" First thing that came to my mind was I'm brown and Muslim, it's what we do. But also, I love people and I love science and this is how I want to serve. And he looks at me for a minute and says, "You know, you got a gift for communicating. Maybe someday you'll run for office." And I literally laughed in his face. I was like, "Mr. President, did you see my name? People like me don't get to run for office." And he kind of chuckled and walked away. That was 2007. 2008, I watched a guy named Barack Hussein Obama run for and win the presidency. It was the first time I ever saw myself at all reflected in politics. His dad immigrated from Africa. My dad immigrated from a different part of Africa. He had mixed parents. I was raised by mixed parents. He had a funny name. I got a funny name. He's tall and skinny. I'm short and thick. But, I put that away. I went off to medical school, did a PhD in public health on the way, and I'm finally doing the work that doctors do, which is about asking and answering two questions. What's wrong and how can I help? And I kept realizing that the answer to what was wrong usually had a lot less to do with all the physiology I spent all this time studying, a lot more to do with pathologies in our politics. The air we breathe. The water we drink. Whether or not we get to walk in our own communities without being the victim of somebody's violence, whether it's a neighbor or the state itself. Whether or not we can even see a doctor when we get sick. And I realized I wanted to do something about that. And so, when all of us graduated medical school, and my classmates did the normal thing and went off to residency, I decided to go a very different direction. I went into public health. I got the opportunity to come back home to Michigan to work alongside Detroiters to rebuild the health department in the state after it had been shut down when the city was going through bankruptcy and state takeover back in the emergency management years. You all remember those doldrums. Yes, boo. They made the decision to shut down a 185-year-old health department in a city with a higher infant mortality rate than my father's native Egypt, and I was hired to rebuild it. Across my work in public health leading Detroit's health department and then Wayne County's Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services, we thought outside the box. We wanted to intervene in those places where health was a means for transmitting intergenerational poverty. We did things like guarantee every child a free pair of glasses delivered at school within 2 weeks of a vision test. That program, since we brought it to the state of Michigan for the first time in Detroit, has delivered 50,000 pairs of glasses statewide. >> [applause] >> We took on some of the biggest polluters in our state. I know we're in Southwest Detroit. I don't have to tell you about Marathon Petroleum. They wanted to raise their emissions of sulfur dioxide despite the fact that the EPA had said that they were already in what's called non-attainment, meaning too much sulfur dioxide in the air. We kept hearing from local community members, and we said, "You know, we could do something about this." So, we stepped in. We organized collectively together, and for the first time, we stood up to them, forced them to invest $10 million of their own money to reduce their emissions when they had wanted initially to increase them. We put air quality monitors in Wayne County all over the county so you could get real-time information about the air you were breathing. >> [clears throat] >> After the Flint water crisis, we had every school, daycare, and Head Start in the whole city tested for lead in the water. In the first 68 schools we tested, 19 of them tested positive for lead. Got to help rewrite the state's lead policy after the Flint water crisis. In Wayne County, we put Narcan, life-saving anti-overdose medication, in 100 locations in vending machines for free. We built a program to provide health insurance for free for new small businesses. And when we found out that our county ranked number eight for medical debt nationwide, we realized we could do something about it. We set aside $7 million to eliminate upwards of $700 million of medical debt for 300,000 people. It is the biggest medical debt erasure in Michigan state history. >> [applause] >> Now, >> [applause] >> I'm never going to forget that day. Sitting in my office at the Guardian when they froze federal funds. Y'all remember that? Yes. Early on in the administration, feels like 10 years ago, it was really about like a year ago. And I'm sitting in my office looking at all the line items in my budget they just froze. WIC, food on the table for moms and babies, frozen. Federally qualified health centers, the last line of health care for people who can't get it, frozen. Vaccines, frozen. And I get a notification on my phone that after his long career, our current US Senator Gary Peters is not seeking re-election. Now, >> [applause] >> I I got Just then, I get a text message on my phone from your representative, our sister Rashida Tlaib. Yeah. And she looks at me, she she she she writes me a text, "Habibi, this one looks like yours." And the reason she said that is because I ran for governor back in 2018. >> [applause and cheering] >> Now, I was 32 years old. I'd never run for office in my life. I had a bad advice from a former president in my head. Donald Trump had just been elected president. I said, "You know what? I'll go big or go home." I went big, then I went home. >> [laughter] >> But in the process, I earned 340,000 votes. We got outspent seven to one, but we were two to one more efficient than the current governor, three to one more efficient in dollars per vote than the congressman in the in the place next door. God knows how he became a congressman. That's right. But more importantly, I said something at the time that I think folks weren't quite ready for that [clears throat] has never proven more true than it does today. Donald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics. Donald Trump is just the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. >> [applause] >> The disease is the system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interests like AIPAC to buy and sell politicians to do their bidding instead of ours. We pay more for the stuff we got to buy, get paid less for the work that we do, and watch as our tax dollars get misappropriated abroad to drop bombs on other people's kids instead of to invest in our own kids and their schools and their health care. So, IF WE'RE SERIOUS >> [applause] >> ABOUT DEFEATING TRUMP, IT'S NOT just about beating Trump. It's about beating the system that created Donald Trump in the first place. And that's why we're running a campaign to do three simple things. Number one, we want to get money out of politics. Put money in your pockets. Pass Medicare for all. And look, here's the thing about it. I want to talk a little bit about what this means. Just today, we got a notification that AIPAC just put in a $3.8 million ad buy for the next 2 weeks alone. $3.8 million of dollars of the estimated $30 million that they are going to spend specifically to beat me. I happen to believe that that kind of electioneering is anti-democratic and should be illegal. I'm the only candidate in my race who's never taken a dime from a corporation to run a campaign and never will. >> [applause] >> And so, believe you me when I tell you that we are going to make corporate contributions to campaigns illegal and we're going to end the whole system of dark money, the super PACs, the 501c4s, the 527s >> [applause] >> that corrupt our politics in the first place. That's That's it means to get money out of politics. I got to talk about putting money in your pocket. We've watched as big corporations buy each other up, squeeze other ones out. They tell us that we live in capitalism. I happen to study capitalism. And let me tell you what the biggest danger to capitalism has always been. It's not government regulation. The biggest danger to capitalism is monopoly. And we are living functionally under monopolies of all sorts. It's the reason they can just raise our prices. But we have policy on the books. We have a whole agency in the Federal Trade Commission that used to be led by the most effective FTC chair in a century, Lina Khan, where we need to stand up and enforce antitrust regulation. That is one of the most important things we can do. I just heard over the last 2 months since we've been fighting this illegal, unjustifiable, immoral war, Shell Corporation has made record profits. Because they operate in what is an oligopoly, and together they can collude to raise our prices. We pay what, five bucks a gallon now at the tank? Five bucks? Part of that is the dumbass war we're fighting, but part of that is the way corporations are profiteering off of that exact same war. That ought to be illegal. The FTC can do something about it, and we're going to stand up to enforce antitrust policy in THIS COUNTRY AGAIN. >> [applause] >> I ALSO KNOW THAT WE LIVE IN THE HEART OF UNION COUNTRY. Unions built the middle class. They built the 40-hour work week. They built the fact that our kids go to schools instead of going to work. And it's no coincidence that we live in an era of near all-time low union membership and near all-time high billionaire wealth. We've got to stand up for corporations. That means passing the Pro Act, and that means normalizing unions to form and build in sectors across American life. Guys, you got to clap for unions. I'm so sorry, but hey, most important means to the affordable life >> [applause] >> that we have in front of us. And on the topic of billionaires, I happen to believe that we ought to be charging billionaires and TAXING THEIR WEALTH. >> [applause] >> BECAUSE HERE'S THE THING ABOUT IT, IF YOU'RE A billionaire and I tax you at 8%, you know what you still are? A billionaire. Still a billionaire. Your kids, kids, kids, kids, KIDS GOING TO BE RICH. If you take a billion dollars, you know how much a billion dollars makes in the market? 10%. So, if you tax somebody at 8%, guess what? They're still making 2%. You know what 2% of a billion is? $20 for doing jack Oh my god. So, I think you're GOING TO BE OKAY. All these billionaires getting so, so sad about us taxing wealth. I'm so sorry. You're doing just fine. You already won at capitalism. I think it is high past time for everybody else to be able TO PLAY, TOO. >> [applause] >> AND THEN THERE'S THE MATTER OF WHERE WE SPEND OUR TAX DOLLARS. $3 billion every single year to subsidize a country committing apartheid at minimum, genocide over the past 2 years and counting? Money that should have been spent on our kids and their schools and their health care being used to buy bombs and tanks for foreign countries? I think unconditional foreign military aid should be illegal. We need to stop doing it, and while we're at it, I do not believe we should be selling weapons to a country that is violating HUMAN RIGHTS LAW. >> [applause] >> AND THEN YOU ASK YOURSELF, WHY ARE WE AT WAR? WELL, who benefits from this war? Jared. Prime Minister of a foreign government has been trying to get this war fought for 40 years, and he finally found a dumb dumbass willing to fight a war on them. Who benefits? Why are we fighting this? Well, Raytheon benefits, Northrop Grumman benefits, General Dynamics Systems benefits, Palantir benefits, and the government of Israel benefits. And so, it is high past time for us to recognize that morals ought to mean something. We should not be fighting illegal unjustifiable wars, and that's not just because of procedural issues. It's not just because they didn't get war authorization from Congress, cuz it's an illegal and unjustifiable war, it is because this is a wrong war we never should have fought. It is time for us to keep our money here, rather than spending 25 billion dollars there, we could spend 25 billion dollars here, and invest in our kids here, and our health care here, and our education system here, AND OUR INFRASTRUCTURE HERE. >> [applause] >> AND WHILE WE'RE ON THE TOPIC OF WHERE WE SPEND OUR TAX DOLLARS, 185 billion dollars for ICE. Mhm? Now, maybe it's because I've actually run government agencies before, but have you ever thought through like how would you reform or retrain an agency whose response to shooting somebody in the back of the head or the face is to say, one of ours, all of yours? They want to tell us that ICE is about immigration. They want to tell us that ICE is about the southern border. Now, I went to Minneapolis at the height of Project Metro Search. I wanted to see for myself what it looks like when our government lays a siege to a city in its own country. And what I saw was harrowing. But, I also noticed something. See, I went to public schools, and I learned maps. And I thought to myself, man, it's -2° outside, I must not be on the southern border. What the hell does Minneapolis have to do with the southern border? Absolutely nothing. ICE is not about immigration. ICE is not about the southern border. We can enforce immigration policies without shooting people in the back of the head or the face, without covering your face and using weapons of war to do it. So, THERE IS NO >> [applause] >> THERE IS NO REFORMING THIS AGENCY. There is no retraining these workers. If you think you can use a kid as bait, you do not deserve a job in the federal government. >> [applause] >> So, ICE can't be reformed. ICE can't be retrained. ICE has TO BE ABOLISHED. >> [applause] >> AND THEN LASTLY, WHEN WE TAKE OUR tax dollars back, we got an opportunity to think beyond the broke healthcare system they tell us is the best we can do. Cuz y'all, we don't have to go very far to a place where they spend half as much money and everybody gets healthcare. I went to Windsor to interview people about what they do with their medical debt. You should have seen the way they looked at me. They're like, "What?" I'm like, "Medical debt." They're like, "What's that?" I was like, "You know, the debt you get because you got healthcare?" They're like, "I'm so sorry. Like, we don't have that here." I was like, "Wait, why?" They're like, "Because we provide healthcare for every single person." I'm like, "But what about your waiting lines?" They're like, "No, no, I'm good. I have never had to wait in line." I was like, "Really? You know what the average wait time for a cardiologist in America is? 2 and 1/2 months." Now, I'm a doctor. I can tell you this. Nobody tells you you need to see a cardiologist in 2 and 1/2 months. When they tell you you need to see a cardiologist, it's like 2 and 1/2 hours, at most 2 and 1/2 days. 2 and 1/2 months in the richest, most powerful country in the world where we spend 20% of our entire GDP on healthcare. So, in the richest, most powerful country in the world, it is high past time for us to abolish medical debt and finally do the work of guaranteeing healthcare through Medicare for all. >> [applause] >> Now, I'M GETTING THE HOOK. >> [applause] >> I KNOW I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO RUN FOR OFFICE. I GET IT. I'm the wrong color. I pray the wrong way. I got a foreign name. I literally told the president as much at my own college graduation. I understand. But, you know what I'm not going to do? I'm not going to stand here and tell you what you cannot have and should not fight for. I'm not going to tell you that the best use of your US Senate seat is to hold on to it to do exactly the same thing that the other guy would have done. >> [applause] >> I'm not going to tell you that we need to keep playing not to lose or that you got to wait 2 more years or 4 more years cuz guess what? Those 2 years and 4 years never come. The question for us is bigger than this seat. It is about what we want out of our democracy in the first place. So, if everything is working just fine for you, I'm not your guy. Do not vote for me. But, if you believe that you deserve health care. If you believe that your tax dollars ought to be spent on you. If you believe that corporations should not have a bigger say in our politics than you do, THEN MAYBE I AM. >> [applause] >> I'M GOING TO FINISH HERE. >> [applause] >> HONESTLY, it's personally all like I I have two little girls at home. They're 8 and 3. Ethnically half Egyptian like me, ethnically half Indian like their mom where they get their looks, thank God. 100% American. And those little girls are growing up with fewer rights in the country of their birth than their grandparents had when they immigrated here 50 years ago. And those grandparents, they took a bet on a set of ideals. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men, should say people, are created equal. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And I know those are lofty ideals and we've never quite gotten there. But, I also know we have not moved backwards as fast. All of us have people to whom we will hand this place off. And we owe them to look them in the eye when we do and to tell them what we did when democracy itself was on the line. Who we were and what we fought for. And so as we work together moving forward, I want you to think about those people and what we owe them. It's not about how much time you have, it's about how much of yourself you put into your time. And we're building a movement that is about the ideals of this place, about honoring them not just for ourselves, but for the people we leave this place behind to. So I'm so deeply grateful to all of you for being here today. So deeply grateful for the work that you've already done, for the work that you will do. I'm asking you to put yourself into your time. We got 3 months left. On August 4th, we vote. On November 3rd, we vote again. And I'm hoping that leaving here today that you will commit to putting yourself into our democracy, to having the conversations with folks about what we can yet fight for, about deciding to go out in your community and knock doors or make phone calls. Help us help us. Because all we love is on the line. Thank you so much. >> [applause] [cheeri