YouSaid · the spoken record

John Bouman

lines on the record
69
first
2018-01-11
most recent
2018-01-11
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Yeah. And yeah, and it was. It was the speech not only announcing the war on poverty but announcing the intent that he made good on to actually pass the Civil Rights Act. So if you count from then it's this linking of the fight against poverty with the fight for racial equity that a big part of the story of poverty in America is about race. And the reason I had occasion to read that over again is because it came back to me when I was reading Peter Ellman's new book. I don't know if you've seen it called Not a Crime to Be Poor. But it's about all this stuff that surfaced after Ferguson, the fines and fees that people get a fine for a minor traffic offense.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think it started in Rig and the pace quickened actually under Clinton with the influence of dealing with a Hard-Wright Congress, but Clinton's own attitude was kind of a conservative view. It sort of was the gradual flipping of the public policy view that was in the war on poverty, which is 50 plus years ago under when Johnson announced that war and his State of the Union speech about seven weeks after the assassination. Interestingly, in that speech, I just had a chance to read it again.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The Shriver Center actually was a reconfiguring of a pre existing organization called the National Clearinghouse for Legal Services. That was actually a part of the National Legal Aid infrastructure. It was the communications hub. It happened to be located in Chicago that was defunded in that same Gingrich budget. So they were going out of business, but they had a board, a nonprofit status, empty offices with computers, a board that understood the work. And so good infrastructure. And so our two goals in starting the Shriver Center was to perpetuate the national communications function for legal aid, public interest lawyers around the country, and to perpetuate the policy advocacy for poor people in Illinois.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That was in 1996. Yeah. And the big ways to affect policy were class action litigation and lobbying and administrative rulemaking and organizing. That collection of activities was forbidden to organizations that took federal funds for legal aid. And that's when I left that organization because it was a pretty good job description of exactly what I was doing.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “No, they were there. We gradually got more and more into policy advocacy lobbying, if you will, relationships with the executive branch and regulations and so on during the 80s. Actually, ironically, it was a reaction in part to the Reagan administration's effort to curb that, to force those of us in federally funded legal aid to not do that.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I suppose you could say that, but it was also political, and it was also just a sense of trying to make it fair. The more I got involved in the policy side and system side of this, in those 50 or 60 cases, I always had five or six or seven that were a bigger project in those days, usually law reform litigation. You saw that in all of these subject matters powerful interest groups were contending for the ear of the policymakers, you know, the bankers, the real estate industry, the quick credit industry, et cetera. And nicer people like hospitals and organized doctors and so on. And for people in poverty not to have a seat at that table, it just wasn't fair. And they were all represented by lawyers. They were all represented by experts. And that...”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, all kinds, you know, certainly an array. I sort of gradually developed a specialty in public benefits, so welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, but also... Debt collection, consumer cases, housing cases, civil rights cases. There were two sets of crises that sort of showed people declining from the middle class into poverty. One was the blossoming of the AIDS epidemic. And I would get a client who'd come in and be completely destitute, living on the train, driving around the city on the train sort of in a state of dementia, but ineligible for Medicaid because he still had a boat, you know, that kind of thing. And then a similar crisis in the early 80s during the Reagan years when there was a recession pretty much as bad as the Great Recession we just had.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah. And it sort of resembles from someone from your upbringing, sort of a Queens type thing with all the different varieties of Hispanic people in addition to Mexican and Puerto Rican. There were a lot of Native Americans there, a lot of the urban Indians. I had clients from Pine Ridge Sioux, Menomines, and Chippewas from up north, people from Oklahoma who was a Creek Indian from Oklahoma whose name was Charles Horse. Charlie Horse. You got it. I get it. Yeah.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Neighborhood. And Uptown was a little bit different then. It's always been the different community, right? Huge melting pot back then.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You know, for the first 10 years, so five years in uptown, then five years in Englewood, pretty much sort of typical high-volume storefront legal aid, you know, 50, 60, 70 files at a time, all kinds of cases, wide variety of cases. I got a really strong exposure to all the different kind of factors of what it means to be poor and why people stay poor.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, well, I came back from law school, took the bar exam, and then about a month after school, I got the job at the Legal Assistance Foundation. And so I started there in September of 75 working on the west side and then in uptown for five years.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, but a very vague version of it. It wasn't that organized of a person when I was an undergrad. And so going to law school had the twin virtues of training me for something, and I really much better at it because it's much more linear than undergrad where you just sort of take courses. But also it delayed for three years what I would do when I grow up, which I still wonder sometimes.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Business and to mean that when I went to law school, I got out of there in 75 and came here to Hyde Park, the career was going to be some sort of public interest law.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, and there was a lot of upheaval, even in Little Valparaiso, the administration building burned in the wake of the Kent State Cambodia thing. There was campus problems. But there was a lot of idealism, a lot of stick it to the manism, you know, kind of punky counterculture type things. sort of wedded with the sort of ingrained family”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “You know, it was, I wanted to do something else, but I also, it never sort of crossed my mind not to do some sort of career of service, right, to use your talents to help people.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, they came. My name spelled funny because they came from a part of Germany that's across a river from Holland. And we were there last April. My wife and I were there visiting our daughter who was in Europe for a year. And we saw the farm, my grandfather grew up on before he came here in 1890. And there's this hill with sheep on it. And you climb that hill and it's the North Sea. So it's not a hill, it's the dike. And the rest of them all came over in the 1840s, I think, but they're all Germans. Lutheran people, lots of clergy. I didn't want to do that, but those were all the role models. Yeah, but why know how to make money?”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, it is. It's the family business, I think you'd call it, because both grandfathers, ten or so uncles, my older brother, they're all Lutheran pastors. Some are seminary professors and others parish preachers. I never actually.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Your dad now? He's 99 until like two years ago he was still writing music. Good music, choir music, some secular, but mostly sacred music. And it's good stuff. And it's fun. I still sing in the choir there. I started that 40 years ago to basically make him happy.”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Chicago. I was born in the West Suburbs in Melrose Park, grew up in Oak Park. My father was a teacher at a Lutheran school out there in River Forest, and he was the musician of the church. So that's...”

    2018-01-11 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 207 - John Bouman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source