Phoenix Witt is challenging Brandon Voas in the House District 57 Democratic Primary
"I'm running a campaign to fight for working families and against corporate greed..."
Phoenix Witt is challenging Representative Brandon Voas for his District 57 House seat in the upcoming Democratic Primary. The interview was at Apothica Cafe in Cumberland. The text has been edited for clarity.
Steve Ahlquist: Why do you want to run and what you're hoping to do if you're elected?
Phoenix Witt: There are a few answers to that. It's clear that the trajectory we're on as a society isn't sustainable. There are corporate elites who are playing Russian roulette with our future on a variety of issues - from climate change to nuclear bombs to how we're handling pandemics and emerging technologies. Playing the same status quo game where we try and win against Republicans but allow corporations to take more and more power within our party is unacceptable. And I see Brandon Voas doing that in a lot of ways that I don't find acceptable.
Steve Ahlquist: Can you talk about that more? In what way? He's a team player at the State House and cozy with leadership. I don't know off the top of my head of a vote he made that was separate from the way leadership wanted him to vote - which isn't an indictment if you agree with leadership. Tell me what you find unacceptable.
Phoenix Witt: One of the areas where the Democratic Party was split was in voting to double the maximum political contribution limit in Rhode Island from $1000 to S2000. The more conservative end of the Democratic party and every Republican voted in favor. Brandon Voas was one of the Democrats who voted in favor. The bill opens a dark money channel so that lenders can contribute to elections without any knowledge of their actions and it expands the process we have. We use our public funding that's demanded in the constitution and instead of giving it to the average person or popular parties, we give it to whoever corporations have already donated to and expanded that process to the primary. On a structural level that shows us where corporations are getting into our politics on a day-to-day policy level.
Despite his “in theory” pro-climate agenda, Voas has sponsored a bill to increase the regulatory burden, including fees for solar companies. He introduced a bill to make it so that energy companies can make background deals with government bureaucracies, removing an already very corporate oversight board. He had to withdraw that bill after progressive pressure from within the party, but it shows that when he's willing to play with the leadership, he's willing to do it for corporate gain.
Steve Ahlquist: Let's pivot away from your opponent and talk about you more. Where do you come from on this? What are your priorities?
Phoenix Witt: Here in Rhode Island, there's a housing cost burden that's affecting a lot of people. It's part of a broader cost of living burden that's affecting a population that has growing productivity without growing spending power. Housing costs are being driven by these corporate developers and landlords who want to have zoning laws in place and gut our current affordable housing laws. They want millions of dollars in subsidies for luxury housing, which takes resources away from housing that would be developed for the average person. The system is rigged in their favor beyond what a free market would allow. Bringing us closer to a free market, on top of allowing for community housing that is built to be affordable and for the community developers and landlords to compete.
Steve Ahlquist: The community housing you're talking about, is that like government-subsidized community housing...?
Phoenix Witt: I'm talking about a social housing corporation that operates at cost, so it only charges what it needs to keep operating and can bring prices down in the same way that a public option for healthcare can bring down costs for healthcare in a market already subsidized and rigged for corporate elites. Similar to healthcare in Rhode Island, creating a public option forces developers and landlords to compete and takes away a lot of the advantages that the government has already given them.
Steve Ahlquist: In Cumberland, are they having the same problems with housing, homelessness, and evictions as everywhere else?
Phoenix Witt: A hundred percent. I talked to constituents at the doors and they're telling me that they're worried about losing their homes. They're worried about being able to afford rent. They're working two and a half jobs and they're still struggling to afford rent. I share my house with three roommates. It's not an easy situation to navigate. In Cumberland, we're having problems with the subsidization of luxury housing. Hope Mill is being turned into - with a very small percentage of affordable housing - luxury housing and restaurants, and it's all being done tax-free thanks to a bill Brand Voas introduced.
So it's not just a broad Rhode Island issue. It's facing us here in Cumberland in very specific and obvious ways.
Steve Ahlquist: Even when there is a very small percentage of affordable housing in these kinds of deals, that's often time-limited for 15 or 20 years, then it no longer has to be affordable.
Phoenix Witt: And in this case, the affordable housing requirement is low enough that we're losing out on federal subsidies. We're spending extra money by not having more affordable housing.
Steve Ahlquist: Leaving federal money on the table is the dumbest thing we can do. We're paying taxes and that money can come back to us, but we turn that money down so we can make rich people happy, who are already playing a lower percentage of their money into taxes anyway.
What else are you hearing when you're at the doors and how are those interactions going?
Phoenix Witt: What I'm hearing door-to-door, more than anything else, is that people are upset and scared with the way things are going. People are not as engaged with local politics as they need to be. People are looking at the national stage and saying, “Donald Trump is the scariest thing I see. And I don't know how to think about politics in any way that isn't stopping that.”
Trump poses a very immediate risk and people realize we need to win this election, but winning this election is not enough to stop Trump. There are structural issues that need to be addressed. We need to get rid of the ability of Elon Musk to give $250 million to a candidate who threatened to be a dictator on day one. The ability for corporate interests to get into these elections and the ability for a candidate who doesn't win the popular vote to get elected, all of these undemocratic systems are what allow somebody like Trump to be where they are right now. [We need to] attack not just Trump, but the system, as it throws the average person under the bus.
Steve Ahlquist: That's the politics of separation and marginalization. What we hear Trump talking about he has talked about, historically, forever. Immigrants and LGBTQ people - he uses those issues to divide and conquer. I was doing this job as a reporter during his first term, and the whole time it felt like we were playing defense against radical deportations of immigrants or attacks on Muslim rights or any number of other things all the time.
Phoenix Witt: I agree. There's this temptation for Democrats to play identity politics in response to that kind of attack and focus not on the broader systems, but on the specific racism - which is real - but the broader structures that incentivize the racism are probably more important. When we look at why there is this desire to divide working people against each other or why there is this need to scapegoat trans people, immigrants, and Muslims, a lot of it is because people are starting to become aware of the power of the billionaire class. Even on the right, we see people talking about the problems with corporations, but if they can get people who are upset with the system to blame it on Jews, immigrants, or trans people, it's easy to keep them away from the issues that matter.
Steve Ahlquist: And the issues that matter are issues of human rights, human flourishing, families, and all the other things that we claim to care about.
Okay, so you're at the door. How do you explain yourself, if you are meeting somebody for the first time? You're saying, “I'm running for this seat,” but what does that interaction typically look like?
Phoenix Witt: I start by letting them know, out the gate, that I'm running a campaign to fight for working families and against corporate greed. That understanding of what side we're on is a political identity that needs more focus and one people are willing to get behind. After that, I'll usually start talking to them about the contrast between Brandon's record and my policies, particularly on my three big issues:
Democracy: Getting corporate money out of politics, and strengthening our institutions by getting rid of corruption;
Climate change: Building a future-friendly green economy, and all of the different technologies and risk areas. Brandon's record on climate change we've discussed, and for me, I want to do things like a carbon tax and dividend. I want to invest in green infrastructure, particularly public transit. I think that the things that focus on economic justice are the things that allow us to have a stable transition and allow us to prevent risks from happening in the future.
Housing: I talk about the tax breaks that Brandon passed and the cuts to affordable housing incentives he passed and contrast it with my platform of social housing, reforming our tax system, getting rid of tax subsidies for luxury housing, and a housing first policy for homelessness.
Steve Ahlquist: I do a lot of work in the homelessness area and honestly, it affects me emotionally. My wife has to pull me back because it gets overwhelming sometimes. I don't know how the people who do it for a living do it. It's amazing to me.
Tell me about your life. What's your schooling? Because you come off as a person who's well-read and thoughtful about these issues.
Phoenix Witt: I'm going to school at CCRI. Right now I'm doing general studies to transfer into an economics program. I've gotten on the honor roll there. A lot of my education comes from that and a lot of my education comes from being in a situation that made me very aware of the political structures that exist. Also, having access to the internet and had the feeling that it was necessary to know what I needed to to make the world a better place, given how awful many of the things in the world are.
Steve Ahlquist: I'm a graduate of CCRI. It's a great school and you can get an education there relatively cheap.
I love economics, or at least I like the kind of economics that interrogates the system of economics we're currently stuck with. I've read critics of modern economics. I love evolutionary economics, where economics is seen as a complex system that evolves.
Phoenix Witt: There are a lot of good critiques of economics. For some reason, we pretended that economics didn't have anything to do with philosophy. Starting around 1900 we took a few economic principles as gospel. One of these, for example, is the idea that self-interest is rational, the idea that people, if they're acting rationally, will only do things that benefit themselves. One, I'm afraid that's not right. It is irrational not to consider other people. And two, it doesn't explain people's behavior. People don't act in totally selfish ways, and when they're doing good for other people, it's not always because they get a benefit from it. There are, at the very least, exceptions to that rule. On top of all of these philosophical biases, there's also a publishing bias - and we know that the way they have been doing their empirics is not caught up to the way that statistics has been done broadly.
We've made lots of breakthroughs in how we could mathematically analyze economics, but people want to study their very specific policies and get the answer that they want out of it.
Steve Ahlquist: It's only recently that economists are asking how the data fits my theory instead of asking how I fit my theories to the data.
Phoenix Witt: Behavioral economics is like brand new...
Steve Ahlquist: On top of that, we have things like minimum wage. Economists claimed forever that if you raise the minimum wage, you raise inflation. Now we've got empirical studies that show, over and over and over again, that this isn’t right. Yet classical economics cannot explain why it's not right. They have no structure to do so. Despite this people still go to school, get degrees in classical economics or business administration, and are fed this stuff as if it's real. And another thing: We still don't know how to marry macro and microeconomics. It's a little bit like particle theory and relativity. We don't know how to unify them.
Phoenix Witt: Behavioral economics is giving us a lot on microeconomics that we don't have a macro system that keeps up with at this point. There's a broad ignorance about economics. There are a lot of terms in classical economics that have loaded meanings that we pretend, for the sake of economics, are not loaded. This was a common thing that was being done in philosophy around the time that we stopped doing philosophy in economics. Understanding that instead of saying, “When the GDP is high, it's good” or “When people can get a lot of value in the capitalist sense, that's good.” Being able to attach an understanding of how ethics works, as in what we should be doing, how we can make the world a better place, and putting the well-being of people as the value that we're trying to produce and building an economic theory around that -as opposed to ignoring it.
Steve Ahlquist: I'm totally into this. I think that's great. I probably could talk about this a lot longer, but can we talk about LGBTQ issues and your personal story?
Phoenix Witt: Absolutely.
Steve Ahlquist: You're a trans woman. What does that mean to you both personally and politically as well?
Phoenix Witt: Personally, obviously, it's impacted a lot of my life. It's the reason I no longer get to live where I was born.
Being trans has made it very clear to me that some people are not taken seriously by the system. There are a lot of people who are ignorant and there are a lot of people with power who are completely ignorant of the way things are for everyday people and what it's like to be trans if you don't have a ton of money or what it's like to get through life if you're not one of the people that the system has already been set up for. That perspective is probably the most important part of being trans to me. There are the impacts of living my life as a woman - in terms of how it makes me who I am. But more importantly, there is the understanding it's given me about the way that the system works.
Steve Ahlquist: Are you talking about women in our society having traditionally less power or less ability to command a situation when they walk into a room the same way a man might?
Phoenix Witt: There's an interesting double layer here in the sense that frankly, I don't pass perfectly. When I walk into a room, I'm usually not seen as a woman right away. There's this double nature between the fact that I want to take command because I want to be confident and I want to have a positive impact on the world. I want the things I do to matter, but I also want people to see me. That's a dynamic that's been very interesting for my life. I want people to see me as what they see as a demure type, but I don't see it as that if that makes sense.
Steve Ahlquist: I think I understand. There's nothing inherently that says being feminine is weak. I don't think anybody would say Diane Feinstein or Kamala Harris are weak. They have both femininity and power and they wield both effectively.
Phoenix Witt: They're being immediately granted that they are seen as women, right? For me, to demand both the respect of leadership and the respect of a demure gender can [result in] a little bit more pressure. If I were a wealthy white trans man who passed well or something along those lines, I don't think that being trans would be a big part of my life. But when being trans affects my ability to get a job or my ability to be comfortable at a job or being trans threatens my housing, when I struggle to get the healthcare services I need to be trans - those show me the way the system's built. It's used against people who don't have corporate and economic power.
Steve Ahlquist: With the Trump campaign and the resurgence of the right wing, we're seeing a lot of pushback against trans rights. I've been covering the work of anti-trans activists in school committees across the state and it's a difficult time. I see the pressure, especially on young people, who might still live in their parent's house or have to navigate certain social systems and don't have the freedom that you or I have to do that.
I worry about that because they are an at-threat community, and the world being what it is, can be overwhelming. Politically speaking, in Rhode Island, we have the appearance of safety, but at the same time, we can have a Supreme Court that isn't necessarily going to protect you. How does that affect your politics and how does it affect your thoughts on becoming a state representative?
Phoenix Witt: When I talk to queer people, the overwhelming response is usually, like you said, an appearance of safety. Here in Rhode Island, we're not going through the motions of trying to burn books. But on another level, we are making it incredibly difficult to access a variety of healthcare services such as facial surgeries for trans people, which are probably the most important treatment for whether somebody passes or doesn't - which are considered elective/cosmetic surgeries.
The protections for trans people who are vastly and disproportionately homeless because of their inability to keep a relationship with their family, who vastly and disproportionately have mental health issues that often go untreated because of the burden that exists on our system, especially Medicaid, are lacking. More often than not, those issues are getting thrown under the bus in favor of just promising not to make things worse.
Steve Ahlquist: Which is where we are in Rhode Island right now. We're saying we're not going to make it worse, although some people want to. I think the politicians in the state, the ones with actual power, are saying, “We're not going to let it go worse but we're not going to push to make it better because we don't know how stable our power is.” This leaves it to people and activists to do the work - and that's not always fair because it's not always safe or possible.
Phoenix Witt: They might not think that their power is stable, but it's a lot more stable than ours.
Steve Ahlquist: You're right. And if you have that kind of power and you're not using it in the service of people who need you, I don't understand what the power is for. If you're there for self-aggrandizement - that's not why I voted for somebody.
Phoenix Witt: It's not why I would be involved in politics.
Steve Ahlquist: How old are you by the way?
Phoenix Witt: I'll be 21 when I take office.
Steve Ahlquist: You talked about climate change a little and I want to talk about that more. I have a lot of respect for Sunrise and the work young people are doing the work to advance this issue. Talk to me about climate change, why it's important, and what we can do about it.
Phoenix Witt: Beyond all of the risks of increasing natural disasters and rising sea levels, there's also the growing, existential risk that climate change might get so bad we can't undo it. Having a future at all, not just for my generation, to live a full life, but also for us to have children that can live a full life, and for the rest of humanity to be able to continue, we must target issues like climate change. I'm glad that we're finally coming around to it. It took us a long time to get here. The first studies that suggested climate change might be a problem were coming out in the late 1800s...
Steve Ahlquist: When they first identified the power of greenhouse gases and CO2 our new industries were generating.
Phoenix Witt: And it took us until the end of the 20th century to start doing anything at all, let alone do enough to make a difference. That worries me. Nuclear risk has gone down a lot since the fall of the Soviet Union, but it's going back up as things get more tense. The risk of pandemics is something that's become obvious to us in the last few years. The way that we handle the animal/agriculture industry and the way that we handle urban density and sanitary issues are also risks. We're engineering bioweapons in unsafe conditions. And the way that we're using artificial intelligence...
If one of those gets out and we don't know exactly how to stop it, that's a very large risk we're not doing a lot to prevent. Artificial intelligence not only risks our jobs, but it also risks making our military more ruthless and cold. As artificial intelligence approaches the intelligence level of a human, it could also surpass a human. Once it's able to surpass a human, it's able to create something smarter than itself. And we have a feedback loop where if that system isn't aligned to the correct goals, which is both a political problem of who controls it and a technical problem of how do we even make it do that?
That poses a very near risk to our future. Looking at these existential risks, climate change is important. There are things we can do there. A carbon tax, dividend investing in green infrastructure, investing in solar, batteries, offshore wind, and public transit are important. Expanding our understanding of the risks that corporate interests are putting us in is also important.
Steve Ahlquist: A lot of my work right now in the environmental sphere is environmental justice in poor, Black and brown communities. And we have people who are very comfortable living in places like Newport putting up lawn signs against wind power. I see those signs and think, “Are you a member of a death cult? If you're worshiping death, I can understand where you're coming from, otherwise, I don't know what you're thinking.”
Phoenix Witt: Honestly, if you have a problem with wind power, I could understand it - but it seems so much better than what we're doing now.
Steve Ahlquist: When that windmill broke apart and the fiberglass parts of the windmill were rolling up on shore, people complained and I said, “There's a gas or oil spill every single day, many times a day, somewhere in the world doing way more environmental damage, wiping out entire farms, businesses, lives, recreational facilities and even species, all gone because something stupid happened.”
I want to touch on homelessness.
Phoenix Witt: Housing first. Not only is it a policy that is morally obvious, it's an economically obvious policy. We save so much money by using that intervention before other interventions when it comes to the cost of healthcare services, law enforcement, and the burden of them not being able to get a job because they're homeless. It's obvious that if we invest in putting people in homes, we would make the lives of everyone in Rhode Island much better.
Steve Ahlquist: We are doing a pretty job of protecting reproductive rights in Rhode Island. Every year we seem to pass something new and effective. What are your thoughts on that and where do you think we should go next?
Phoenix Witt: As a trans woman, I understand what it's like to have your medical access restricted by the government. I think that it's disgusting. We can be doing a lot more than we are doing. Every couple of years we're putting through something basic but for a state where 69 out of a 75-seat legislature are Democrats, what seems to be the case over and over again is they're not willing to risk their power on these issues. They're not risking that much power on the issues that are affecting us every day. We need to show them that they are risking their power from people who are willing to primary them and are fed up with a system that's built on corporate interests.
Steve Ahlquist: A fair number of elected Rhode Island Democrats are old-fashioned, almost like Southern Dixiecrats. Anti-abortion, very Catholic. We had a Democrat in Westerly put in a bill to allow for the banning of books in school libraries.
There's no right to an education in Rhode Island, like they have in Massachusetts. Such a right would allow people to say, “I'm getting a subpar education so I'm suing the state.” We don't do that here because I think our General Assembly is afraid of opening us up to costly lawsuits.
Phoenix Witt: If we were paying enough for education, we wouldn't have to pay that money.
Steve Ahlquist: Right? What are your thoughts on education? Where can we improve?
Phoenix Witt: The way the funding of our education system is working right now is ridiculous. The United Nations put the right to an education in their Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Everybody recognizes that to have a functioning democracy and participate in the economy, you have to be able to know enough to keep up with modern life. Making sure education is part of our healthy democracy, that nobody gets left behind, and that education is a right is important.
In terms of how to make sure that students get the funding they need, a full-scale restructuring of our funding algorithm is needed - that allows us to put money towards the people who need it and make sure that schools are spending that money in ways that are not just going to contractor buddies but to teachers, for school supplies for teachers, and making sure that teachers have the technology to keep up with the new jobs they're going to be using in the rapidly changing technological world.
Another thing is moving from a property tax system to a land value tax system that doesn't tax the renters and incentivizes the development of land. We can also do that in a more progressive way that will allow us to get a lot more funding for our schools.
Steve Ahlquist: Where do you think of yourself religiously?
Phoenix Witt: I call myself a Christian.
Steve Ahlquist: Any particular denomination?
Phoenix Witt: I'm a Protestant. People use the word Christian in a lot of different ways, a lot of which don't apply to me. When it comes to ethics, I think that it's important to love thy neighbor, to give to the poor, and to do as much good as you can. The Sermon on Mount gives us a lot of context as to what it means to be a Christian. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is very specific about what we should do and vet what a person is. “You will know them by their fruits. Good trees will bear good fruits and bad trees will bear bad fruits.” It's what fruits you bring to society that are most important.
Steve Ahlquist: I consider myself an atheist, probably because I grew up Catholic, but I am still moved by all the things you just said about Christ and the things he said. It's still an integral part of the way I think. As a kid who grew up reading Marvel Comics, I think of Jesus as this superhero - I can't see a big difference between Spider-Man and Jesus.
Why should people vote for you?
Phoenix Witt: A vote for me is a vote for control over your lives. Brendon Voas represents corporate power. For Brandon, it's easy to sit with his family that's been in politics for three generations, to have his job at Volkswagen, and to live comfortably no matter what happens. For me, I work as a barista at a Starbucks. I have three roommates, and my future is in the same bag as the average person. If you want somebody willing to fight to make the world a better place and protect what we have, I'm the one who's willing to do it.
Steve Ahlquist: As I was driving here I noticed a lot of Brandon Voas signs, but I didn't see any signs for you. Are you putting up signs?
Phoenix Witt: We have money for signs. This is my first campaign. During my canvassing, I just wasn't asking about signs. But also, I'm pretty sure, given the people I've talked to with signs, a lot of those are from commitments he got two years ago so I don't know how much I trust all those signs.
Steve Ahlquist: I hope whatever happens, you stay in this because you have a needed perspective.
Phoenix Witt: There's a lot we can do here. This is a winnable race. No matter what, the fight has to keep happening. As long as we continue to put the work together and keep getting more grassroots support, we should be able to make sure we have representatives who serve us.
Steve Ahlquist: This was a fantastic discussion. Thank you for being so open.
Phoenix Witt: Thank you for having this conversation.
