Meet Egberto.
Board Member at Coffee Party USA
When I asked Egberto Willes about his life outside of political work, he was hard-pressed to make that distinction. For the former software engineer turned full-time activist, involvement in a spread of political work -- rattling off his most recent engagements, he noted that he’s head of the newsroom and a board member at Coffee Party USA, a former Bernie Sander delegate, and active in the Black Lives Matter movement -- leaves him with little down time. When I jokingly asked how he found the time to sleep, he answered, quite seriously, 4 hours a day.
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As an avid political writer and radio host, Egberto’s ethos fits in well with the work of Coffee Party, which works to cultivate a culture of democracy, aspiring, as their tag-line says, to “incite civility and discourse.” The group, which formed in reaction to the rise of the Tea Party and their divisive rhetoric, is committed to bridging the bipartisan divide by engaging everyday Americans in political conversation. They do this through hosting a range of Internet talk shows and blogs, which aim to elevate the insights of everyday americans on relevant political issues, as well as “coffee party conversations,” monthly meetings throughout the country that focus on political topics that transcend partisan lines.
I was able to speak to the seasoned political activist and head of the Coffee Party’s news room from his home in Kingwood, Texas, and heard his thoughts on the intersection of globalization and campaign finance, the role of the Internet in activism today, and his take on the Bernie Sanders revolution.
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This interview has been edited for clarity and succinctness.
-Bridget, Small Planet Intern
I have to say, my political consciousness came at a very young age, when I was living in Panama. I’ll never forget listening to the Watergate trials when I was young; my father recorded the entire Watergate session on empty tapes, and I was nerdy enough to watch the whole darn thing! So that was in the early 70s. I was very, very young, listening to things that I had little idea about, but it really intrigued me.
To start out, can you talk a bit about your background, and how you came into political work?
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Right now you live and breathe politics, but
for most of your life you actually worked as
a software engineer. How did you decide to
make that transition?
Though I worked as a software engineer professionally until recently, I’ve
always been politically inclined. I was involved in politics in high school and
at the University of Texas; even though my major was engineering, my
passion has always been politics.
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I’m still involved with engineering and software development, but after a while your focus changes. The way I see it, the way our society is right now, there will not be a lot of engineering going on in the United States unless we change our politics.
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Right now, if you take a look at what is going on, there is a huge push towards outsourcing work to other parts of the world, and really undermining workers here in America. I can tell you, had I decided to stay at the software company I was working for, the majority of the work would really have been done through outsourcing to foreign companies that then would be doing the work for me. I would be put in the position of doing the same thing I am frustrated about, which is being a plutocrat who goes ahead and simply exploits labor somewhere else to bring the services into this country. I would be the one making a few bucks on it, and that is not a sustainable model, so, sometimes somebody has to bite the bullet and confront that.
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Can you talk about your vision of that kind of empowerment?
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Increasingly the Internet is being seen as a serious venue for political action, what are your thoughts on the role of Internet activism in these movements?
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I think the Internet is the best tool for political action ever. We do, though, have to be careful to see the Internet as just a tool. Remember that in the Civil Rights Movement, it was word of mouth, it was churches, it was other institutions. Now we don’t have the affinity for those same kinds of institutions anymore. Young people won’t go to a pastor as a leader anymore. The leaders are those personalities on Facebook, those personalities on YouTube. So, when you saw Obama engaging those personalities on YouTube that most of the average baby boomers dismissed as being silly, he gets it. That is where the action is taking place.
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So when you ask if the Internet is just a platitude, absolutely not. The Internet is absolutely instrumental -- now you still need people on the ground, but the internet can aid in that. When we went ahead and posted that we needed to have 100 people at a Black Lives Matter rally out here, we had 200 people. So I’d say it is completely underestimated. It is more powerful, in my mind, then even broadcast TV.
Yeah, so we tend to think of our representatives, for example President Obama, as great leaders in the center left movement, but they all seem to coalesce around trade agreements like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, Central American Free Trade Agreement, and Trans-Pacific Partnership. These deals that have been negotiated since the 1990s and continue today don’t support the workers in our country. Look, I’m a cosmopolitan, I believe that every country in the world should have its opportunity to succeed. But first and foremost, you know when you’re on a plane and the oxygen mask falls they tell you to put it on yourself first, so that you can be alive to take care of your kid. I think the same thing applies to America: we have to take care of our home with regards to our workers, with regards to having our own manufacturing.
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I think what we have right now is a society where only a few – sometimes it sounds like hyperbole, sometimes it sounds like cliché – but systemically we are a society where the very few exploit not only domestically, but also abroad through what I call the normalization of wages. If you’re importing goods from places where wages are cheaper, by definition you are normalizing wages here, creating lower standards of living. Overseas it means a somewhat higher standard of living, but one that is not sustainable.
Can you talk more about what you mean when you talk about the direction of our trade policy?
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People approach the issue of money in politics from different avenues -- some work is education based, some is strictly work with state and national legislatures, and then there are folks, like you, who really aim to empower fellow americans. How did you choose this work specifically?
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It’s interesting, so I’ll answer that by way of this story: I wrote a blog just yesterday about a guy named Charles Belk. Charles Belk was leaving an area close to a bank that was robbed by a tall bald black man, and he was stopped by the police held in hand-cuffs for 45 minutes, and spent 6 hours, waiting for release in jail after it was made clear that he had nothing to do with it. He found out later that he still had an arrest record that could affect his job aspirations in the future. Charles decided that he was going to do something as one person that helped every single American irrespective of who they are for this kind of thing that could have happened to anyone else. Charles started a 501c3 charity working to make sure that everyone who was arrested and proven they should not have been can immediately have all of that information expunged at the cost of the state. He got the law passed in 4 states, and there are 14 other states set to vote on it. So he is one individual, with one organization that is going state to state to do something to overturn a law that has a very specific impact on people.
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Why did I bring that up? He’s an engineer, like me, who is going to work in politics. Many of us have been left to feel impotent when it comes to laws that affect us all, when it comes to economics that affect us all. We’ve just sat down and taken it. The reason I’ve gotten involved with these organizations, specifically the Coffee Party, is because we have an avenue that empowers people to speak out about their truths, speaking out about what has come to affect them. We’re trying to mobilize people on specific issues by thinking about how can I as an individual engage and get something done. Just like Move to Amend has their 28th amendment, even if it doesn’t get passed for 10 years, they can see that their voices count.
To be honest, success means seeing a hell of a lot more young people engaged. I have something that I’m constantly telling a lot of young folks: you guys need to be mad because my generation screwed you; until you get involved, nothing is going to change, and just sitting back on the sidelines isn’t going to do it The only way that you are going to get it back is if you get involved. It’s going to be about engaging people, that’s what it’s all about. We have to get started somewhere, and my drive is really to get young folks involved now, and become leaders of the work.
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I’ll be honest with you, I am waiting for the day when the 25 year old, the 30 year old tells me, this 50 year old to sit in the back and be an adviser. When the young people get fed up enough, that is when the revolution will be successful.
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I know you attended the DNC as a Bernie delegate and were very engaged with the campaign. It seems to me that there was wave of young people who became involved in progressive politics for the first time this year through the Bernie Sanders campaign who are feeling disenfranchised. What are your thoughts on how to keep up the momentum of energy after the election year?
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I’m going to tell you what I have been saying consistently: I was a Bernie Sanders delegate to the DNC, and I understand even more so than the old Bernie Sanders supporters, why the young Bernie Sanders supporters are feeling that way. I saw some 17 year-olds, 18 year-olds engaging, and to them, their first experience in politics was feeling that something deeply wrong happened in that process. They came away wondering: why do I even engage?
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My first bit of advice to them is: you don’t win a battle overnight.
My second: they win if you are so frustrated that you disengage. You will be doing them a favor if your work ends now.
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What you can do in November, and I am blunt about this, you should not do anything that will give Donald Trump the possibility of being President of the United States. Why am I saying that? Because we need Supreme Court judges that honor women, you need Supreme Court justices that honor the rule of law when it comes to the government’s ability to provide healthcare, etc. Sticking it to Hillary Clinton is not sticking it to Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is worth several million dollars. So whether she wins the presidency or not, it matters more to you than it does to her. People have to remember that.
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Beyond that, remember that the election doesn’t end after November, you have to keep the pressure on. These folks are betting that after this election we’re going to do the same thing that we did after the election of President Obama, and that is fall asleep. You have to remember, it’s not about supporting Hillary in November and leaving it there, it’s about keeping the pressure on to demonstrate that you are watching, and not only watching, but be prepared to start looking for a candidate in the progressive sphere that would potentially challenge a misbehaving Clinton. I have to say, I’m not a politician kind of a guy, I’m a policy kind of a guy, I don’t fall in love with a person, I fall in love with the movement. And that is what I want for young people: to fall in love with the movement. Bernie Saunders could die tomorrow, Bernie sanders could change his mind tomorrow. Forget about personalities – Bernie Sanders is going to be fine. Hillary Clinton is going to be fine. Both of them have permanent pensions; none of them have student loans to worry about. Our kids do. They’ll make a lot of hype, I love Bernie, but again Bernie is just a man. The movement is for us all.